Live footage of Los Angeles County’s vote-counting facility Friday morning appeared to show more people and activity as hundreds and thousands of votes remain uncounted.
The bustle comes a day after The California Post visited the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing facility and reported that there were dozens of empty work stations.
Now, footage shows at dozens of workers going through a number of late-arriving mail ballots at a steady pace. Another camera showed a number of workers receiving and preparing ballots to be counted. At a canvass operating room, workers sit in front of a multitude of computers flipping over ballots.
According to the most recent update from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, 638,694 ballots remain outstanding, including approximately 627,000 vote-by-mail ballots, 9,888 conditional voter registration ballots and 1,806 provisional ballots.
That number left to be counted may be even higher, however. It doesn’t include does additional mail ballots that may be received after the estimate is prepared, including ballots postmarked by Election Day and received through Tuesday, June 9.
The facility yesterday came under scrutiny for its lightly staffed operations that day, as the public eagerly awaits the result in too-close-to-call contests for Los Angeles mayor and California governor.
A big reason California is notorious for taking days and even weeks to finish counting is that state law accepts ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked on time — and those last-minute mail voting numbers can be huge given every registered voter is mailed a ballot.
“California law prioritizes counting every valid ballot, not just the fastest ballots,” a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Registrar told The California Post.
Still, that has not stopped Republicans for blasting the sluggish vote counting as a sign of the brokenness of California’s election system.
“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,” Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said.
President Donald Trump also expressed his ire this week, and on Friday, a federal prosecutor was on scene at the Los Angeles County ballot processing facility. Trump had claimed the election was “under investigation” by the US Attorney’s Office.
Bill Essayli, LA’s top federal prosecutor, announced Friday morning that his office is pursuing several election fraud investigations in coordination with the FBI and Department of Justice as questions swirl over California’s sluggish vote count.
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