What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

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.

California’s electorate leans heavily Democratic. But one reason it’s still possible for Newsom to lose is that not all Californians will vote in this recall election. It’s a political cliche but usually true (and absolutely true in this case): The result will likely come down to turnout — who’s motivated to vote.

Earlier this year, the GOP looked like it decidedly had the motivation edge. But recently, overall engagement in the recall — and Democratic enthusiasm in particular — has increased. That’s a big reason Newsom’s prospects look brighter than they did in August,

• Two PPIC surveys from the spring showed only about 20 percent of California voters were following recall news “very closely”;
• A Berkeley/IGS poll from July showed that nearly 90 percent of Republicans were highly interested in the recall election, compared to only 58 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of voters with no party preference;
• The latest PPIC poll showed a change who held in the enthusiasm edge, with 75 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Republicans saying the recall election results were “very important” to them;
• The same poll showed 81 percent of likely voters following the race at least “fairly closely,” compared to only 62 percent in the May poll;
• That poll also showed 47 percent of likely voters reported they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in this election, compared to 30 percent who said they were less enthusiastic.

So what once seemed likely to be a very-very-low-turnout election now looks a bit livelier. Of course, it’s still an off-year election,meaning that it’s not being held in the same year as races for the U.S. Senate and House and/or presidency. Studies have shown that timing matters in state and local races, too. In Los Angeles, for example, voter turnout increased around twofold in city council and school board elections last year after voters overwhelmingly chose to change those elections to even years. But so far, voters are turning out in this odd-year race at a high rate relative to past special elections.

All that being said, a lack of participation in local elections is not specific to California: It’s part of a broader trend of an increasingly nationalized media and less attention on local news. (More Californians have digital subscriptions to The New York Times than the San Francisco Chronicle or the Los Angeles Times.) It’s no wonder that Newsom’s anti-recall strategy has involved nationalizing the race in an effort to energize his liberal base.

So we’ll be keeping a close eye on how many people vote (in addition to how they vote, of course).