More than one-third of The City’s ballots are left to be counted

Casting their ballots: San Francisco voters turned out in record numbers on Tuesday, but officials now say more than a third of those ballots remained uncounted as of Wednesday. (Special to The Examiner)

SAN FRANCISCO — More than one-third of The City’s ballots had not been counted as of Wednesday, although the vast majority of votes cast at polling precincts throughout San Francisco were counted as of early Wednesday morning.

There are approximately 120,000 vote-by-mail ballots that have not been counted, according to John Arntz, The City’s elections chief.

Additionally, there are as many as 16,000 provisional ballots — provided to voters who show up at a polling location where their name is not listed — to be tallied.

Added to the 241,090 ballots already counted, the approximately 136,000 yet-to-be-processed ballots account for 36 percent of this election’s total.

Although the “final” results won’t be ready for several weeks, Arntz said he expected the bulk of the ballots to be counted by the end of next week. As a result of having only one person available to process ballots Wednesday, according to Arntz, an update from Election Day only included about 4,000 additional ballots.

“The Department of Elections had too many absentee ballots to deal with and [was] not able to count any new absentee ballots after Saturday,” said Nate Ballard, spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom. — Staff report