Is Super Tuesday over? You, a normal American voter, probably think so. After all, the elections were eight days ago. Since then, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race, the Republican National Committee has reorganized its management around Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Trump have both clinched their nominations, Greg Abbott has taken a victory lap after crushing school-choice opponents in Texas house races, Democrats have begun unloading general-election opposition research on Mark Robinson in the North Carolina governor’s race, and Katie Porter has declared the California Senate race “rigged” because she lost.
But there’s one place where Super Tuesday isn’t over: the California secretary of state’s office, where returns are still being tallied from that Senate primary. Technically, it’s two Senate primaries featuring all the same candidates: one to serve out the end of Dianne Feinstein’s term between Election Day and the January swearing-in, and one for another term. As of this writing, California is still only up to 85 percent counted, per the Associated Press estimate at our elections page. That’s up from 38 percent when I wrote just after 9 p.m. Pacific time last Tuesday night about Steve Garvey and Adam Schiff making the November ballot, and 53 percent when I checked in two days later. Garvey and Schiff have each picked up about 14,oo0 to 15,000 votes since four hours ago. The map currently shows pockets of uncounted votes in Sacramento, just outside Los Angeles, and all around the Bay Area:
None of this affects the final outcome, with third-place finisher Porter over a million votes behind Garvey and Schiff. But with the top two finishers separated by just 4,218 votes out of more than 5 million cast and some of the state’s bluest precincts still not through reporting, just imagine the chaos and tension if this was actually a close election between the two parties.
It wouldn’t be the first time: In 1916, the presidential election was held on Tuesday, November 7, and it came down to California, where the Republican Charles Evans Hughes appeared to be leading when people went to bed on the East Coast; Hughes even carried Los Angeles County. Some newspapers declared Hughes the winner. The incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, wasn’t widely proclaimed the winner until Friday, and even then, Hughes — who had quit the Supreme Court to run — wasn’t ready to concede until 14 days after Election Day (although he did then tamp down Republican mutterings about fraud). But America is a lot more technologically advanced than we were in 1916. It shouldn’t take the state that is home to Silicon Valley more than a week to perform a simple ballot-counting task that we’ve been doing since the 18th century and that nearly every other state is able to do overnight.