Something strange is happening inside a 144,000-square-foot warehouse in the City of Industry, California. Hundreds of thousands of ballots sit waiting. Workstations stand empty. Staff members dodge questions. Los Angeles County runs the largest election operation in the country, backed by a $336 million annual budget and over 1,100 employees, and it still can't seem to get the job done. So why aren't they trying harder?
Reporters visited the facility on Thursday and got a look behind the curtain. In the section where unreadable ballots go for manual review, roughly 25 bins of ballots sat ready for processing, with no employees at the nearby desks. In the area for envelope opening and ballot prep, about 75 workers occupied a space designed to handle more than twice that number. The operation ran at half capacity while over 713,000 ballots sat outstanding.
Four days after the June 2 election, officials had processed only 77,521 additional ballots. In fact, states that voted the same day were already finishing up. New Jersey had counted 93% of its ballots. New Mexico and Montana each approached 98%. California, home to Silicon Valley and the self-proclaimed capital of global technology, was crawling through fewer than 10 million ballots like next week worked just fine.
It’s a joke.
Republican candidates Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt both held solid positions on election night. Pratt sat in second place in the Los Angeles mayoral race while Mayor Karen Bass held a lead. But the Democrat establishment doesn’t want either advancing to their runoffs, and now they have to make sure it doesn’t happen. And as far as Democrats are concerned, we’re supposed to sit down, shut up, and trust that everything is above board. Well, that’s not going to happen.
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Steve Hilton is calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom to launch an "Emergency Election Count Accelerator Corps" to deploy state personnel and rapid-response teams to counties drowning in ballots. "California is the laughing stock of the nation when it comes to election reporting. We are the fourth-largest economy in the world, home to Silicon Valley and some of the most advanced technology on earth. Yet government bureaucrats need a month to count fewer than 10 million ballots," Hilton said.
Hard to argue with any of that.
When reporters pressed a staffer about the rows of empty workstations despite the backlog, the employee told them not to be "fooled by what you see," then refused to elaborate and walked away. That's the transparency voters get from a $336 million operation run by Registrar Dean Logan, who earns $448,179 a year.
Nico Ruderman, a Venice Neighborhood Council member who spent more than three hours touring the processing center, came away deeply skeptical. "Based on what I saw, I don't buy Dean Logan's explanation for why it takes so long to produce election results. The facility was largely empty, with most workstations sitting unused. It appears to be a staffing issue. This is probably one of the most advanced ballot-processing centers in the world, yet it isn't being utilized anywhere near its full capacity," Ruderman said. Then he asked the question every California voter deserves an answer to. "The question is: why?"
I think we all know why.
"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.
California spends plenty of money on elections, yet it still takes weeks to count ballots, with Republican leads hanging in the balance. That not only destroys public confidence, but it also gives credence to the theory that they’re just trying to find enough Democrat votes to shut Hilton and Spencer Pratt out of their respective races.
