In Los Angeles County, the process of counting election ballots begins with the dogs.
Returned paper ballots are brought by the truckload to the ballot processing warehouse about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Right after the bins of ballots are unloaded, specially trained dogs from the Sheriff’s Department sniff them for any harmful substances.
Once the ballots pass the sniff test, workers in bright yellow vests arrange them into tidy stacks on tables near the loading dock. Then they shuffle the ballots over to the next station.
The choreographed process, which began Tuesday night, includes checking the envelopes for proper signatures, examining the ballots for damage and scanning the votes.
For the next several days, throngs of county workers, working at tidy stations arranged across vast concrete floors and under bright pendant lights, will be the stewards and tabulators of democracy.
Counting votes in California takes time — sometimes weeks — because of the state’s dependence on mail-in ballots, which require more labor to count, and the painstaking verification process for those ballots.
On Wednesday evening, Los Angeles County said that it had processed nearly 1.4 million ballots and still had about 713,000 left to count.
Across the state, getting final results in this election might take longer than usual. Many voters waited until late to vote, and San Francisco and Fresno Counties said on Wednesday that they had received significantly more ballots in this election than in the 2022 and 2024 primaries.
At the Los Angeles processing center, after the initial collation, workers feed the ballots into machines that resemble the refrigerator-size computers of the mid-20th century. The machines scan the ballots — about 60,000 per minute — to verify the voter signatures on the envelopes. If a signature doesn’t match what’s on file, the machine spits out the ballot and sends it for human verification.
Any member of the public is allowed to go to the facility, which is in City of Industry, Calif., to observe the count. On Wednesday, an election worker explained to visitors that every single mail-in ballot postmarked on or before Tuesday must be counted, even if it arrives up to seven days after the election.
The ballot extraction station, where workers remove ballots from their envelopes and check for damage, was the busiest on Wednesday morning. Damaged ballots were bounced to another station, where a worker transferred the voter’s choices onto a clean ballot.
The workers inside the processing center were a cross section of the county’s residents. Many sat in desk chairs, handling ballots with disposable gloves and speaking only when necessary.
In one corner, two women spoke to each other in Spanglish, their conversation barely audible over the constant whir of the machines. They sorted acceptable ballots into one bin, damaged ballots into another, and envelopes and miscellaneous items (sometimes voters misplace random items in the envelopes) into yet another. The work culminates inside the glass room at the center of the facility where, as one county official described it, the voter’s “voice is heard.” Inside, workers load vetted ballots into hulking scanners that look like airport X-ray machines. The scanners read the ballots and record the votes.
No phones or internet-enabled devices are allowed inside the room to prevent interference with the machines. The process is livestreamed.
Votes are processed and scanned during a set four-hour period every day. Then the results for that period are posted online.
But the ballot receiving, signature verification, extraction and other steps leading up to the scan period happen around the clock until the counting is done.
Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.
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