Tuesday’s election is over, but the results are not yet clear. Many news programs and newspapers have, however, announced the provisional results as being final. It’s not professional to announce an election result before all the ballots are counted, which is the case of many votes. Some of the votes in California, for example, were mailed in, and they have to be sorted by hand. Also, approximately 730,000 of the Californian ballots were provisional, and were used by those who were not on the registration list. These ballots must also be hand-sorted, but also inspected individually, to establish if the people who voted had that right. Also, a great number of ballots could not be read by the optical scanner used to count votes. A series of different reasons can cause a ballot to be unreadable, yet still valid. Again, these votes must also be counted and inspected by hand.
Given that these ballots are quite numerous, they may have a drastic effect on the provisional result, no matter how slim the chances are for something to happen in some cases. For instance, in the case of the controversial Proposition 8, there are so far reported 5,661,583 votes in favor and 5,154,457 opposed. Basically, the Proposition was passed at first glance. However, there are still a high number of uncounted ballots. For the Proposition to refused, the number of opposing votes – from the uncounted ballots – has to exceed 59%.
Proposition 11, however, has a better chance to have its result overturned, because there is a difference of only 133,952 votes between the two sides, in favor of passing. In this case, the opponents only need 52% of the remaining ballots. There is still a chance for the provisional result to change, so an official statement regarding the outcome of the vote on Proposition 11 was not released. Early results are declared as final, unofficially, only when the odds are in favor of said result.