The Unprocessed Ballot Page of the California Secretary of State is our site of the day

Here’s a page for all you election junkies to bookmark and check periodically, the California Secretary of State’s “Update on vote-by-mail and provisional ballots remaining to be processed/counted” site.

This may not be a best seller item, but we mention it just to underscore that we are just beginning to get an idea of the magnitude of the million or two million ballots in this state that have not been counted and can vary the delegates awarded on a Congressional District basis and at large and also the percentages of the vote that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama received in yesterday’s primary. These numbers will probably not affect the Republican race all that much, given the winner take all by Congressional District allocation method used by the GOP, but it probably will affect the Democratic distribution.

Daily, counties will add their best estimate of how many of these ballots they have. As they discover new ones or get a better assessment, the numbers will change and can actually increase if the November 2006 gubernatorial election is any indicator. It will decrease overall over a number of days as these votes are actually counted.

So while the headlines today and tomorrow fade—and all that most people remember are some of the factoids from the February 6 vote totals and patterns, you can impress your friends by visiting this page and regaling them with tales as to how some of these are changing. Or you can simply tell folks to hold on and wait for their final analyses. By then, of course, we will have moved on to election battles in other states and other headlines.