Election Trainwreck in Sacramento

A week after the election and they still don't have results. Counting seems to have been slowed at least partly because of this:

A new state law that went into effect for this election called for this micro-sorting. It allows political campaigns to see distilled results and more easily target mailers to particular voters in the future, LaVine said. An interesting byproduct is that information may be sorted in new ways. A report last week in The Bee, for instance, showed how each neighborhood voted for mayor.

I can see how this new law benefits political campaigns, and (perhaps even more so) the media, but how exactly does it benefit the public?