Benicia City Council, Benicia elections

Benicia City Council: About that big number of outstanding ballots

Benicia City Council race has around 4,000 ballots yet to count, nearly double that number of votes for candidates

By Roger Straw, November 10, 2022

A number of readers have asked where I got the huge number of outstanding ballots yet to be counted. And some have rightly pointed out that the number I’ve reported is larger than the number of voters in Benicia!

Sorry I wasn’t clear – the large number of outstanding ballots is countywide. Additional Benicia votes in the coming days will account for around 10-12% of the remaining 37,500 countywide ballots still to be counted.

For the daily update of remaining countywide outstanding ballots, see Solano County Election Results.

Precise most recent numbers: As of Wednesday at 5:21pm, the Solano County Registrar of Voters reported 35,821 outstanding vote by mail ballots and another 1,671 outstanding provisional ballots. Total of 37,492. My estimate of Benicia’s total remaining to be counted is around 3,750 to 4,000 ballots. With each voter able to cast up to two votes for Council candidates, that means nearly 7,500 to 8,000 votes have yet to be split between the 5 candidates.

Benicia City Council – Two-day trend favors Birdseye, Scott

Here is a fascinating 2-day comparison, which I developed using data from the Solano County Registrar of Voters website.

Click image to enlarge. Note total figures at right in green.

On the day after election day, the County added nearly 2,000 new BENICIA ballots. With voters casting up to 2 votes for Council candidates, that translated to an increase of 3,382 additional votes counted on November 9 for our Council election.  Of those 3,382 Day-After Votes:

    • Kari Birdseye received the most votes, 861 or 25.5%;
    • Terry Scott received 853 votes, 25.2%;
    • Lionel Largaespada received 762 votes, 22.5%; and
    • Christina Strawbridge received 692 votes, 20.5%.

Still close, but leaning towards Kari and Terry.

As might be expected, these percentages resemble closely the vote-by-mail numbers reported on election day, numbers that favor Scott and Birdseye. It may be too close and too early to call the race, but I am feeling good about our likely two new councilmembers, our friends Terry and Kari.

Stay tuned for daily updates – I’ll keep you posted here.

Roger

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