At 3:35 a.m. after the November 2022 election, Los Angeles County posted its last count of election night, and it had Rick Caruso ahead of Karen Bass for mayor, 51.2% to 48.8%. Bass took the lead in the county’s update that Friday afternoon, 289,782 votes to 285,398, and went on to win by 9.7 points, 54.8% to 45.2%.
In each of the city’s last three mayoral elections, the standings have changed after election night. Caruso led Bass 42.1% to 37.0% when election night ended in the June 2022 primary, and Bass finished first, 43.1% to 36.0%. In this June’s primary, Spencer Pratt was in second place at the end of election night with 30.4%, well ahead of Nithya Raman’s 22.3%. Raman passed him in the county’s count five days after the election and finished second with 29.0% to his 25.5%, which is how she ended up on today’s ballot against Bass.
Raman’s council races have moved the same way. In the March 2020 primary for the 4th District, she had 38.3% in the count LAist reported the morning after the election, behind Councilmember David Ryu’s 46.8%. By the final count she had 41.1% to his 44.7%, and she beat him in the November runoff. In March 2024, she had 45.4% in the county’s 8:35 p.m. count on election night and 45.7% in its update the next afternoon, short of the 50% she needed to win the seat without a runoff. She passed 50% in the county’s update a week after the election and finished with 50.7%.
Only the final counts are on the county’s results site now, but the Internet Archive saved copies of it as the updates came in. I used those copies to follow each candidate from the last count of election night to the final result.
How LA County counts ballots
On election night, the county’s first numbers after polls close are mail ballots that arrived before Election Day and ballots cast early at vote centers. Ballots cast at vote centers on Election Day are added as they come in through the night, ending with what the county calls its semi-final count, which was posted between 2 and 4 a.m. in all three elections. After that come the rest of the mail ballots, including those dropped off on Election Day or delivered in the week after, which the county counts if they were cast by Election Day and arrive within seven days, along with same-day registrations and provisional ballots once they’re verified. In June, the county posted a new count every afternoon for eight days after the election.
The ballots counted after election night
Between 42% and 51% of the final vote for mayor in each of the three elections was counted after election night, including 357,286 votes for mayor in June. Those ballots haven’t split the way the earlier ones did. Bass won 61.7% of the votes counted after election night in the 2022 runoff. In June, the later votes went 38.3% to Raman, 33.6% to Bass and 18.7% to Pratt, and Raman’s share of the running total rose in every update after election night that the Internet Archive saved.
Older voters have sent in an outsized share of this year’s early ballots, which are the first ones the county reports. As of Monday, voters 65 and older had cast 40.5% of the 492,017 ballots returned in the city, though they were sent 22.3% of the ballots mailed, according to the county’s ballot files as compiled by the California Republican Party’s data portal. Voters 18 to 34 were sent 30.3% and had cast 15.8%. In June, Raman took 16.0% among the tenth of voters in the precincts with the oldest electorates and 41.4% among the tenth in the precincts with the youngest, according to the Statewide Database at UC Berkeley.
Bass and Raman head to head
A two-way runoff may not break the way a 14-candidate primary did. Pratt, who won 38.3% of the votes cast in person in June, isn’t on the ballot, and his voters are now choosing between Bass and Raman. With two candidates, though, any shift after election night shows up directly in the margin between them. When election night ended in June, Bass led Raman by 12.5 points. By the final count on June 26, her lead was 5.2 points.