Elections by the Numbers: Orange County, California

Return to Election Data Dispatches.

We have highlighted several counties in the past that do an excellent job of sharing up-to-date elections data. The Orange County, California Registrar of Voters has taken this a step further and now provides an interactive feature on its website to share and visualize its election data.

Called Election Data Central, the site contains voter registration totals, information about Election Day operations, vote totals, and analyses of how many ballots were issued and cast by mail. The registrar provided additional information for the 2012 election via a weekly online newsletter.

These data offer a detailed snapshot of the November presidential election including:

• For the first time ever in the county, more voters cast ballots by mail—565,422— than in person at the polls—460,000.
• More than 110,000 of the vote-by-mail ballots were dropped off at polling places.
• More than 8,400 ballots were sent to military and overseas voters, and just over 3,000 were returned.
• Nearly 80,000 provisional ballots were issued.
• More than 6,300 poll workers worked at more than 1,100 polling places.