Benicia City Council race REALLY IS too close to call – over 53,000 votes yet to count.

By Roger Straw, November 09, 2022
[See Nov. 10 update: Benicia City Council: About that big number of outstanding ballots – R.S.]

As it stands, only 57 votes separate third place Kari Birdseye from second place in Benicia’s City Council election, a 5-way contest where the top two vote-getters win a seat on Council.

Solano County Registrar of Voters office reports that there are 51,757 outstanding vote by mail ballots and another 1,671 provisional ballots yet to be counted.

Note that these are not Benicia ballots, but countywide. I’m working on a method of estimating the percentage of the 53,000 outstanding ballots that are Benicia voters.

It does seem to me completely possible to gain 57 votes out of over 53,000 county-wide.

Solano County Registrar John Gardner stated in an email that the County “will update totals at end of business day each day until complete, and will update these outstanding ballot numbers” daily at https://www.solanocounty.com/depts/rov/November_8_2022_Election_Results/election_results.asp. “The County is scheduled to certify our results on November 30th,” Gardner said.

In an earlier post, I was too quick to presume the outcome of the election, bemoaning that we would likely have an all-male Council when the vote was finalized.

Stay tuned – I’ll keep you posted here.