Officials and experts advise patience with California’s election results

Election Day is Tuesday, but it could take time before we have the full set of state and national results back. 

Most Californians vote by mail, and those ballots take more time to process and verify. 

“That's a good thing,” said Mindy Romero with USC’s Center for Inclusive Democracy. “But it does require patience and understanding so that people – they're not fearful that there's some sort of fraud.”

She said anything that looks tight in polling now is more likely to take time. That includes the state’s seven highly competitive congressional races. 

“We think at least a good number of those are probably going to be closed down to the wire and may take quite a while for us to have a declared winner,” Romero said. 

The first Sacramento County results are slated to come out at about 8:15 p.m., just after polls close. A spokesperson for the county said those will mostly vote-by-mail ballots that arrived before election day. 

Here's when and how California General Election results will roll in

Two more rounds that include voting center votes will come out at 10 p.m. and midnight. 

After that, results are set to come out on Tuesdays and Fridays until every ballot is counted. Counties in the state have to certify final results in early December. 

Romero said as election officials count the votes, it’s important that the general public is careful about what information they take in and share, such as election disinformation. 

“It's often really targeted, and it's about disruption,” she said. “It's not necessarily about swaying people on a particular candidate or issue.”

She said the most effective disinformation doesn’t necessarily have a far reach. It can also be hard to discern – like AI-generated deep fake videos. 

She recommended that people go directly to trusted news sources and take what they see on social media with an extra degree of caution.