Heavy Traffic At Riverside County Voting Headquarters

Cars were parked around the block and people waited patiently to cast their votes in this 2012 presidential election Tuesday at the main voting place in the county.

At the Riverside County Registrar's Office in Riverside, nearly 900 people had already voted in person by 3 p.m., according to Nikki Wyrick, assistant to the registrar. 

Patch stopped by the location to see how things were going Tuesday, and found a room full of people waiting patiently for their turn to vote.  At any given time we were there, there were about 50 people in the waiting area, as a steady stream of voters came and went.

Of the 944,000 registered voters in the county, a record number is expected to vote.  Last presidential election 657,005 people voted, or 78.33% of the 838,716 who were registered that year.

If roughly the same percentage votes this year, that will give the registrar's office  about 736,000 votes to tally.  As of Monday, 254,267 vote by mail ballots had been returned, according to the registrar's office.

Wyrick told Patch that those vote-by-mail votes will be in the first wave of results released, right after the polls close at 8 p.m.  Next, the early voting ballots will be added in, when the second wave is released, she said.  

Results will continue to be updated through the night as staff gets ballots brought in from across the county, opens them, and sends them through the electronic scanning machines, pictured in the photo gallery above.