I believe ballots in CA must be postmarked by election day to be counted. Whereas OR's rule is received by election day. So the Santa Clara number will be updated as more ballots arrive. But there is a count on election day.

FWIW, IIRC, my jurisdiction's elections are certified, the final count with all the bookkeeping, two weeks after election day. Santa Clara will do something similar.

"My county uses the same system for in-person and mail-in votes."

That can't possibly be true. The ballot may look the same. But the handling, administration, bookkeeping, and tabulation is completely different.

For a long while, jurisdictions did try to use the same mark sense devices at both poll sites and central count. But they way too slow to be practical for mail ballot processing. I'd be very surprised indeed if a county your size didn't use the newer high speed imaging scanners.

"You state many other things in your comment that are incorrect."

Each jurisdiction has it's own chaotic mutant rules. And it keeps changing. So no one person can know everything about all election administration in the USA.

But your first "refutation" wasn't. Your last wasn't even wrong.

And I don't have the heart to correct the rest.

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Update: I was curious what gear Santa Clara is using, when I spotted this:

"Returned Vote by Mail Ballot Processing

In accordance with California Elections Code, the ROV will begin to open, process and count returned Vote by Mail Ballot Envelopes approximately 11 days before Election Day. Vote by Mail processing will continue after Election Day until all ballots received prior to 8:00 pm on Election Day are processed."

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/observers/Pages/defa...

So I was wrong about the postmarks.

I strongly encourage you to observe your elections. And attend the certification (canvas report) meetings. Seeing how the sausage is made will illuminate you.

Santa Clara County's publicly available information is actually quite good. I spent years clawing information out of my county and didn't get anything nearly as detailed: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/VotingNovember2016/D...

Oops. Santa Clara is still doing "ballot enhancement" and "ballot duplication". So now I believe it's likely they're still using the mark sense (opscan) devices for mail ballots. My county switched to image scanners over a decade ago, so I assumed everyone would have switched by now. My bad.

But wait, then why does it take so long to get the final mail ballot tallies? I'd bet it's because "duplication" and "enhancement" are manual tasks, and they're manually feeding the mail ballots into the mark sense devices, which takes days.

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For the record, per your own county's documentation, the only thing I was wrong about is the lack of a paper trail (enhancement, duplication). Because your county hasn't upgraded to the ballot image scanners. Yet.