With two weeks to go until the November election, nearly 200,000 ballots have been returned across the Central Valley.
Voters have until election day, Nov. 5, to return their ballots through the mail if they do not vote in person.
The big picture: Most of the eight counties in the Central Valley – Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Tulare – are hovering around the 10% mark in ballots returned, in line with the 9.5% rate for statewide turnout, according to the latest data available Tuesday afternoon.
- San Joaquin County leads the Valley at 12.3% turnout, which amounts to 46,616 votes. Kings County is right behind at 11.9% turnout, although the total number of votes cast is much smaller at 7,579.
- Fresno, Kern, Tulare and Madera Counties are all in the 9-10% range of turnout so far, with Merced County lagging behind at 8.3%.
- Stanislaus County is the outlier of the Central Valley with only 3.1% turnout so far, totaling 8,914 votes.
Zoom out: So far over 2.1 million ballots have been returned in California, with 20.2 million outstanding.
- Democrats hold a voter registration edge over Republicans at 46% to 24.8%. So far 48.5% of the ballots that have been returned belong to Democrats, while 30.9% come from Republicans.
- Independent voters are trailing their registration share (21.9%) with 14.9% of the returned ballots belonging to them. The remaining 5.7% of returned ballots belong to voters of other parties.
Go deeper: Californians who have voted by mail already largely skew older, with 51.6% of the returned ballots belonging to voters aged 65 and older.
- Voters aged 18-29 are on the other end of the spectrum, making up only 6.5% of returned ballots.
- The 30-45 demographic has returned 13.7% of the ballots, and the 46-64 demographic has returned 28.2%.
- White voters have returned 67.2% of the ballots, with Hispanic voters the next highest group at 17.7%, followed by Asian voters at 11.7% and Black voters at 3.4%.
