Inside empty $336M LA County election vote-counting facility

As the vote-count totals crawl across Los Angeles and California, The California Post visited the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing facility Thursday, which showed dozens of empty work stations.

The scene at the warehouse appeared at odds with the mounting pressure to process hundreds of thousands of remaining ballots. County officials announced Wednesday night that just 77,521 additional ballots had been processed since June 2 election night, but an estimated 713,180 ballots are still outstanding.

Yet during The Post’s visit, large sections of the facility appeared lightly staffed. Rows of workstations sat empty.

Multiple sections of chairs were unoccupied.

In one area, where ballots that cannot be automatically read by scanners are reviewed by election workers, roughly 25 bins of ballots appeared ready for processing while no employees were seated at nearby desks.

In another section where workers open envelopes and prepare ballots for counting, The Post observed about 75 employees working, despite the area being capable of accommodating more than twice that number.

The scrutiny comes as Los Angeles County spends nearly $336 million annually on the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

County budget records show the department has more than 1,100 budgeted positions.

The department is led by Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, who oversees the elections and earns an annual salary of $448,179, according to county records.

Los Angeles County’s election operation is enormous by any measure.

Los Angeles County’s voter rolls exceed 5.8 million people, more registered voters than the populations of most US states.

The Post asked the Registrar’s Office how many employees are currently assigned to ballot processing, whether staffing vacancies exist, why numerous workstations appeared empty despite the large backlog, and whether additional staffing could accelerate the count.

Nico Ruderman, a Venice Neighborhood Council member and former California State Senate candidate, said that prolonged vote counts risk eroding public confidence in elections.

“The system that has been put in place with mail-in ballots and the amount of time it takes to count them gives people room to question our elections, and rightfully so,” Ruderman said.

“All eyes are on our elections right now, especially with such a close election,” he said. “Ours is taking forever because of incompetency and a poorly designed system. This is unnecessarily long, and it’s a design flaw. It’s not long because it needs to be. It’s long because that’s how the system was designed.”

Ruderman said he supports voting by mail but believes California should tighten its election rules.

“We need to make sure we have systems in place where all ballots are received by Election Day,” he said.

“Mail-in ballots should be requested, not automatically sent to everyone on the voter rolls. I believe in mail-in ballots. I used to travel frequently, and absentee ballots serve an important purpose. But there’s a difference between absentee voting and automatically mailing ballots to everyone.”

He added: “We should make it easy to vote, but we shouldn’t make it easy for ballot harvesting or election fraud to occur.”

Several other states that also held elections Tuesday are nearly finished counting.

New Jersey has reported roughly 93% of ballots counted, while New Mexico and Montana are approaching 98%.

The next Los Angeles County ballot count update is expected Thursday evening, but with more than 700,000 ballots still outstanding, experts say it could be weeks before voters know which candidates will advance to the November ballot.

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