What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

This recall election has been almost 19 months in the making. For those who haven’t been reading our continuing coverage of the recall, here’s how we got here:

• Feb. 21, 2020: Conservative activists filed the fifth recall attempt against Newsom.
• June 10, 2020: The California secretary of state approved petitions for them to circulate, kicking off the signature-collection process.
• Nov. 6, 2020: A judge issued a preliminary ruling extending the deadline for collecting signatures from Nov. 17 to March 17. (The ruling was finalized on Nov. 17.) At the time, the recall campaign had collected fewer than 750,000 signatures.
• March 8, 2021: Recall organizers announced they had collected 1.95 million signatures — easily surpassing the 1,495,709 needed to trigger a recall election.
• April 26, 2021: State election officials officially determined that recall supporters had collected enough signatures — but the recall wasn’t official yet, since people had until June 8 to remove their signatures from recall petitions if they wished.
• June 23, 2021: The secretary of state reported that not enough people had removed their names to avert an election. The final number of valid signatures was 1,719,900.
• July 1, 2021: The California Department of Finance announced the estimated cost of the recall election, the final step before a recall election becomes official. Later that day, the secretary of state officially certified it and the lieutenant governor set the election date for Sept. 14.
• July 16, 2021: The deadline for candidates to file to run to replace Newsom. The secretary of state announced the final list of candidates on July 21.
• Aug. 16, 2021: Recall ballots were mailed to every registered voter in California.
• Sept. 14, 2021: Election day! However, ballots can arrive as late as Sept. 21 and still count as long as they are postmarked by Sept. 14.

On Monday, Elder’s campaign pushed false claims that it had detected voter fraud — even though no results have been released yet and many voters haven’t even voted yet. These unfounded fraud claims are just the latest example of Republican efforts to cast doubt on election results before they happen, following in the footsteps of Trump’s lies before and after the 2020 election. Among the supposed proofs of voter fraud, Elder’s campaign claimed Benford’s Law showed evidence of rigged results.

“Benford’s Law” sounds sophisticated and impressive, right? As we’ll get to in a moment, it doesn’t really work with election results. But first: What is it?

At its core, the law finds that when looking at a large series of records, the first digit in each number — like the 1 in 12 — is not equally likely to be between 1 and 9. Instead, 1 is the most likely number to be observed, followed by 2, 3, and so on until 9, which is the least likely. This mathematical pattern is often used to look for potential fraud in accounting data, as juked stats might fall far from the typical pattern of first-digit distribution, shown below from Wikipedia.

We saw Republicans make fraud claims based on Benford’s Law after the 2020 election, too, but applying Benford’s Law to election results is hazardous because election data often doesn’t conform to the law’s assumptions. For the law to hold, the numbers in the data set need to be independent of one another — that is, not directly influenced by another data point — and must range across many orders of magnitude, which means having many small numbers like 10, but also many larger numbers like 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, etc.

But when looking at precinct-level results from an election, we can see how the tallies often violate those assumptions. For one thing, the usual range of vote totals is constrained because precincts are designed by election officials to not have dramatically different numbers of voters in them. And secondly, one candidate’s vote totals are mostly dependent on another candidate’s tally, especially in our two-party system. So if most precincts have, say, around 1,000 votes, and about 30 percent of Candidate A’s vote totals begin with a 1 as the law suggests, that means about 30 percent of Candidate B’s vote totals will begin with 8s or 9s, a seeming violation of the law. That is, in our example, Candidate A getting 125 votes means Candidate B got about 875 — those totals are largely dependent upon one another.

So long story short: Benford’s Law, by itself, is not a good tool for detecting election fraud.

Hispanic voters are typically thought of as a political powerhouse in the state of California — and for good reason. They are the largest ethnic group in the state, at about 39 percent of the population, and are a growing share of the state’s electorate.

Accordingly, Hispanic voters could make or break Newsom’s political future. But that’s not because they’ll vote as a unified bloc. Hispanic voters in the state may lean Democratic overall, but 2020 showed that there’s nothing guaranteed about that. Indeed, there’s no such thing as the “Hispanic vote.” And recent polls suggest that Hispanic voters in California are split on whether Newsom should keep his job. In an early August CBS News/YouGov poll, Hispanic voters, who comprise roughly 30 percent of California’s electorate, were split 50-50 on whether to recall Newsom. And in a July UC Berkeley/IGS survey, 40 percent of Latino likely voters said they’d vote to recall Newsom, compared with 56 percent who would not.

Hispanic voters who tell pollsters they are likely to vote in the recall election — just like likely voters in general in California — lean more toward recalling Newsom than the broader pool of Hispanic registered voters. For example, that Berkeley/IGS survey found that among all Latino registered voters, only 28 percent said they’d vote to recall, 52 percent said they would not and 20 percent were undecided.

Democrats have rushed to reach out to the state’s Hispanic voters in an attempt to encourage more to turn out. Part of the last-minute scramble is because Hispanic voters in the state were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, and Republicans have been trying to paint Newsom as out of touch with working-class voters who were affected by the state’s lockdown orders.

Of course, it’s possible Newsom’s potential troubles with Hispanic voters might be overstated. In that CBS News/YouGov survey, 55 percent of Hispanic voters said they approve of how Newsom is handling his job as governor. But in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s modest gains among Hispanic voters in 2020, it’ll be especially interesting to see if even a small chunk of the state’s Hispanic population embraces the GOP — or if the support Newsom receives from California’s Hispanic voters will be enough to put him over the top.