Prop. 8 final vote count
The California Secretary of State's office has released the final official Statement of Vote for the 2008 general election, which of course includes the final official vote count for Prop. 8, in the ballot measures document (PDF).
The final vote:
Yes: 7.0M votes, 52.2%
No: 6.4M votes, 47.8%
The final margin was almost exactly 600,000 votes; about 4.5%.
That's quite close to the original report, the day after election day, when Yes was leading by 5.0%, which at the time amounted to 500,000 votes. So counting the additional 3.4M (or so) absentee and provisional ballots didn't end up making much difference.
They stopped updating the map over two weeks ago, but the county colors (showing which counties went Yes and which went No) are still accurate--I compared the map to the list in the PDF, and none of the counties switched sides in the final 400,000 votes counted.
Items of particular note, from the final count:
- San Francisco voted 75.2% No, the highest No percentage in the state.
- In LA County, the final vote was 50.1% Yes; Yes won in that county by 2,385 votes. I mention this because for some reason, various people have said that Prop 8 failed in LA. But the map has shown Yes with a slight lead in LA from the start, so I'm not sure why people think it failed there. (They might mean the city of LA, but I'm not sure where they would be getting city-specific numbers.)
- In Nevada County, the vote was even closer: Yes won by three votes. Not three percent; three votes, out of a total of over 55,000 votes. Wouldn't have made a difference to the statewide results, of course, but would've been nice to see one more spot of yellow among the inland counties on the map. (For those who don't know, Nevada county is on the east side of the state, a little north of the sharp elbow bend where CA meets NV.)
(Side note: The PDF ballot-measures document does some weird things with rounding percentages. For example, Nevada County is listed as having 50.1% Yes votes; it was really more like 50.003%, unless I'm misunderstanding something. And the totals are oddly rounded too; I used my calculated percentages above for the totals rather than their slightly different ones. Maybe the percentages includes ballots that marked neither Yes nor No? I'm not sure.)
Anyway. We've known since the election that the final results would be something like this, but I had been hoping the extra ballots would narrow the gap a little.