Thursday evening’s 7:08pm update reported 137,948 new votes. Of those, 16.1% were blank on Prop 11. Of the remainder, 51.2% were Yes on 11 and 48.8% were No on 11. The Yes on 11 margin increased to 138,556, though the split remained 50.7% Yes and 49.3% No.
Here is the key news: all 137,948 new votes in the 7pm update were from Los Angeles County. In total, LA County is only 47.6% Yes and 52.4% No. As a “No” county, LA’s 400,000 uncounted votes represent the heart of the No on 11 campaign’s hopes to defeat the initiative. Unfortunately for the No campaign, about one-third of those 400,000 remaining ballots have been counted and the results helped – not hurt – the Yes on 11Â campaign’s position.
In part because there were no official updates to the uncounted ballot reports today, it remains hard to call this one. But it moved significantly closer to certainty today. The Yes side needs only 46.7% of the remaining ballots at the current count of 2.1 million outstanding ballots, and even less if there are fewer remaining ballots (which there almost certainly are at this point). If the remaining ballots in LA County are also over 50% Yes, this race is over.
Side note: additional Rose Institute analysis shows that the votes earlier today (Tuesday) came from San Francisco County (which remained heavily negative, at 38.2% No); San Bernardino County (54.4% Yes) and Santa Barbara County (54.8% Yes). In all three cases, the late counts are very close to the early counts in those counties. This is bad news for the No campaign, since 2/3 of the remaining ballots are from counties that went Yes on 11.
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