I guess it is a sign of the extent to which we have some dedicated readers, or just maybe there are a lot of other election geeks out there, but I’ve been getting email today about why we’ve been so silent here at Election Updates in the past few days. Well, that is because we were “out in the field” on Tuesday (studying the election process in our respective locations), and then recovering from all that hard work on Wednesday.

Some logistical details will help set the stage for what we were up to in Southern California. I personally covered 185 miles on Tuesday, starting at 7:30am and ending near midnight, driving through three counties, and observing the special election process in detail in two counties (Riverside and Los Angeles). I examined a total of eleven poll sites extensively, 6 in Riverside County and 5 in Los Angeles County. Some of my polling observations were done with some of my undergraduate students from Caltech, in Los Angeles County; we ended the evening watching the ballots arrive at the Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder office in Norwalk, California, where we also saw them being processed and tabulated. We also had veteran observers (graduate students at Caltech) who observed polling place practices in approximately a dozen other poll sites, in both Orange and Los Angeles Counties. So we covered a lot of territory on Tuesday, and we have a lot to report in coming days and weeks.

So I promise shortly to start to provide some observations from the field, both mine and those of our various observers. We took a lot of pictures, collected a lot of data, and of course saw a lot of very interesting things on election day in California.