There are around 180,000 registered voters in San Luis Obispo County and by early Wednesday morning, votes from more than 82,000 of them had been counted.
SLO County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano says they will not be counting on Wednesday but will instead focus on organizing all of the unprocessed ballots.
“So that we can report out to the Secretary of State’s Office on Thursday how many ballots we have left because that will be the big question. For some of these tight races, people want to know how many ballots we have remaining,” said Elaina Cano, SLO County Clerk-Recorder.
As far as how the counting is done, Cano’s office is using a new scanner for the first time this election.
“The Hipro is the same type of ballot tabulator that the other two scanners are. It's just much bigger and goes a lot faster, so it works three times as fast as our other ICC scanners,” Cano said.
She says the new scanner can count between 18,000 and 22,000 ballots every five hours.
The Chief Deputy Assessor and Registrar of Voters in Santa Barbara County told KSBY News that election workers are also putting together their unprocessed ballot estimate on Wednesday and continuing to process vote-by-mail ballots.
