On Election Night, the San Bernardino County Elections Office releases unofficial results of voted ballots received from polling places throughout the County and voted mail ballots received prior to and on Election Day.

These results are cumulative and updates are released throughout the night. The first results posting takes place at 8:05 p.m. This posting includes results for mail ballots that were received from the U.S.P.S. and mail ballot drop-off locations prior to Election Day. The second results posting takes place at 10 p.m. and includes results from the 8:05 p.m. posting as well as results for mail ballots received from the U.S.P.S. on Election Morning, and ballots cast at nearby polling places on Election Day.

Results for ballots cast at polling places on Election Day are added every two hours, on the hour thereafter, until the final Election Night count has been completed. Though ballot counting may be completed for the night, the Elections Office will continue to process and count additional ballots in the weeks following the election. The estimated number of ballots remaining to be counted is provided to the public at the final posting of the unofficial Election Night results.

After the election, the Elections Office works diligently to process the remaining ballots to be counted from Election Night. These results include mail ballots received at polling places on Election Day and damaged ballots which require duplication before counting. Upon Certification of the Final Official Election Results, various types of other ballots including provisional ballots, mail ballots that require further signature review, and votes cast on electronic voting machines are added to the results.

On Election Night, the public often wants to know how the counting of ballots is progressing and when the counting will be completed. On the Elections Results page, there are some statistics that provide the public with a very rough estimate of how ballot counting is progressing.

Underneath the title of a contest and above the list of candidates in each contest, you will find two numbers separated with a slash followed by a percentage, as shown below:

State Senator District 23
60 / 240    25%

These numbers represent the number of precincts reporting results (60), the total number of precincts located in the jurisdiction of the particular contest (240), and the percentage of precincts reporting results (25%).

As the vote count is updated throughout Election Night, the number of precincts reporting and the percentage of precincts reporting will increase, as shown below:

State Senator District 23

120 / 240   50%

When all the Election Day ballots from all the precincts located in the jurisdiction are counted, the numbers will read, as shown below:

State Senator District 23

240 / 240   100%

The precincts reporting number only provides a very rough estimate of the progress of counting of total ballots for a couple of reasons.

First, it only reports on ballots cast at polling places on Election Day. It does not take into account any Vote-by-Mail ballot totals.

Second, it is simply a snapshot of how many precincts have had their Election Day ballots run through the ballot scanners. It does not take into account the number of ballots in a precinct. Some precincts have hundreds of ballots and other precincts have no ballots at all! So, there is not always a direct correlation between the number of precincts reporting and the number of ballots counted.

In the above example, there were 1,000 votes counted in the first 25 percent of precincts reporting.

In the next 25% of precincts reporting 1,000 votes were added to the results for a total of 2,000 votes.

You might expect to find an additional 2,000 votes in the last 50 percent of precincts reporting, but only an additional 500 votes were counted for a total of 2,500.

The reason is that there are many precincts that have zero voters. In our software program, precincts with zero voters aren’t reported until all other precincts have reported their results. So, in the final update on Election Night, the percentage of precincts reporting will suddenly rise to 100 percent but there may not be a drastic change in the vote count.

In 2014, there were 1,737 precincts in San Bernardino County. Of those, many precincts are located in remote areas of the County and have very few registered voters residing in them. In fact, 617 of the county’s 1,737 precincts had no registered voters in them at all.