The Humboldt County Elections Office just released a new post-election tally update (see it here) and in every single race of local interest, there is nothing new to report. Measure A still loses big. Supervisors Mike Wilson, Michelle Bushnell and Rex Bohn each still retains their seats, easily, and avoid a fall runoff. April Van Dyke will still be the next judge to serve on the Humboldt County Superior Court. The percentages haven’t even changed that much.

What has changed is that there are still scads more ballots left to be counted — many more than Clerk-Recorder/Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes had thought there would be at this time last week. At that time, Cervantes estimated that there were about 13,000 ballots left to be processed, and even though almost 7,000 of those are done, the number of ballots left unprocessed is still about the same.

Cervantes explains:

We’ve counted 27,297 ballots and estimate there are about 12,750 left to process. This includes 355 conditional or provisional ballots, and around 360 ballots with signature issues we’re working to fix by contacting the voters.

On election night, we received a surprising total of 17,434 vote-by-mail ballots, mostly from drop boxes. Approximately 11,000 were ballots dropped off in drop boxes on Election Day alone. Which is why our numbers of unprocessed ballots reported on 3/7 didn’t change much even though we added 6,801 ballots to our count.

Our reports on unprocessed ballots give us a rough idea of what’s left, but these numbers will keep getting clearer as we get closer to certifying. Given that the deadline for vote-by-mail ballots received by March 12th, but postmarked by March 5th, has passed, 12,750 ballots is a very accurate representation of what’s left to process.

That 17,434 vote-by-mail ballots received election day is one part of why it takes us as long as it does to certify an election. All those still need to go through the full process of signature verification by two verifiers, opening, and scanning. All with checksums, logs, and other chain of custody protocols along the way.

So if Cervantes’ figure of 12,750 ballots still to be tallied holds, it turns out turnout wasn’t so terrible after all. That adds up to around 40,000 voters out of 82,926 registered, for a turnout rate of around 48.2 percent — maybe a miserable figure elsewhere, but not so bad for a March election in the United States of America.