As ballots were being processed in Los Angeles County’s new, centralized Ballot Processing Center, the county estimated that June 2 primary voter turnout will be around 34%, Dean Logan, L.A. County’s Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said at a press conference Tuesday.
“Voting activity in these last few days has picked up significantly,” Logan said. “That compares to if you look back to the last gubernatorial primary, which was in June of 2022, we are trending about two to three percentage points ahead of where we were at that same election four years ago.”
The Ballot Processing Center is where every single L.A. County voter’s ballot is taken by sheriff patrol car, or by helicopter. The around 15,000-square-feet facility in the City of Industry has hundreds of workers and volunteers processing and counting every submitted ballot in the county from Santa Clarita to Catalina Island.
Logan said the center was created for security and transparency. After ballots are sealed and sent to the processing center, they are checked by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Canine Unit to check if there are any harmful substances, and if needed, the county would quarantine the dangerous piece of mail.
“Fortunately, that hasn’t happened,” Logan said in an interview. “But we’re prepared for it in the event it does.”
Then, every mail-in ballot goes through signature verification to validate the vote to take it through to tally. If signatures don’t match, the county reaches out to a voter to correct the signature.
After signature verification, every ballot is taken into the tally room which is surrounded by four glass walls in the center of the facility and live streamed for public viewing. In the tally room, 20 or so machines flick through each ballot with blinking green lights to count each and every ballot submitted in L.A. County. Once counted, ballots are stored in sealed containers.
L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said at the press conference that the county invested millions of dollars in the facility. She also said that visitors have come to the facility internationally to see the county’s validity process and learn how it is “free, fair, accessible and transparent.”
Although tallying every ballot is a long process that can take up to two weeks to complete, Logan said that every ballot needs to be counted.
“In 2010, we had an election here in a very close contest for Attorney General, where L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley and then San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris were competing,” Logan said. “It was a very close race. That race was not decided until Nov. 24 after the election.”
California election law lets voters vote at the last minute, Logan said, which can slow the process. He also said taking the same care, security and accuracy for each ballot is the part that takes time. If officials changed the law, Logan said it would make vote counting faster, but it would also reduce voter participation, the opposite of the intent of an election.
The first results of the election were scheduled to be released at 8:15-8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, which will represent all the vote-by-mail ballots submitted by Election Day. About 15 minutes after, the county expected to add votes from vote centers 10 days prior to election day. Logan said these results would be a “healthy representative sample of the entire county.”