When will we know who made it to the Sacramento mayoral runoff?

Sacramentans could know Tuesday at least one of the names that will be on their November ballot for mayor.

Sacramento County will post a new batch of results to its website on Tuesday afternoon. In its Friday update, Richard Pan is still in the lead, but all four candidates have equal chances of making it to the November runoff, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of bipartisan voting data firm Political Data Inc.

But there was one notable piece of information learned Friday — younger voters waited longer to vote. Seniors made up 54% of the pre-Election Day ballots, but only 31% of the more recently processed ballots, said Mitchell, citing new data his firm obtained. Friday’s new results included roughly 10% more voters that were 18 to 34 years old compared to the results released Tuesday.

“It’s skewing dramatically in terms of age,” said Mitchell.

That could be good news for Flojaune Cofer, the most progressive candidate, who in general attracted younger voters. Cofer was in fourth place on Election Night, but rose to second place in Friday’s update, with 23.3% of the vote. She’s just behind Pan, who has 23.9% of the vote. Steve Hansen has 22.9% and Kevin McCarty has 22.6%.

“We always knew our base tends to vote later, so our amazing team of volunteers put in countless hours of last minute get-out-the-vote efforts throughout the city, including tabling at university and community college campuses,” Cofer said Monday. “I’m heartened to see the surge in later votes that we worked hard for. And, I also urge patience as votes continue to be counted.”

While one of the candidate names could be known Tuesday, the second will likely not be known until the end of the month, Mitchell said.

“It’s going to get to the point where someone’s lead is greater than the number of outstanding ballots and that may take awhile,” Mitchell said.

The problem is that with mail in voting, county officials actually do not know how many city ballots are left to count.

The county potentially has about 144,000 votes left to count, Mitchell said. But it’s unknown how many were cast by city residents — the only ones able to vote in the mayor’s race. Hansen’s camp on Friday estimated the number of outstanding ballots at 40,000. If that’s true, that would mean just over half of the ballots are counted so far.

“We believe there are more than 40,000 votes left to be counted and we are thankful for everyone’s patience as we await the final outcome,” Hansen posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, Friday. “My heartfelt gratitude goes out to our community for the outpouring of support, to our volunteers for their extraordinary dedication throughout this campaign, and to the voters who made their voices heard at the ballot box. I encourage everyone to stay patient while the votes are counted and focused on our shared vision.”

Hansen’s campaign has been the only one to make a public statement following the release of the results Friday.

Pan said on Monday, “I am happy with the results so far and grateful for the support of many voters. I have remained in first place throughout and seen my lead grow. I appreciate the hard work to ensure a secure and accurate vote count, and I look forward to the next update.”

McCarty said that he was waiting for the results and felt “cautiously optimistic.” He said that he keeps hearing from his supporters that they voted for him on Election Day.

“And I know those are usually the last ballots counted,” McCarty said.

“I cant believe how close this is,” Mitchell said. “It’s nuts.”