LOS ANGELES — With 1.7 million vote-by-mail ballots already in, L.A. County election officials are expecting to break voting records in the November general election. In comparison, the county usually receives about 1.3 million mail-in ballots in total in past general elections, said county spokesman Phillip Verbera in an interview with Spectrum News 1. 

What You Need To Know

  • This is the first election in which L.A. County has sent a ballot to every registered voter

  • About 1.7 million ballots have already been sent back, not including the ones dropped off at vote centers

  • A computer scans the envelope of each ballot, verifying the signature

  • Up to three employees check any signature rejected by the computer

This is the first time the county has mailed a ballot to every single registered voter.

At the county’s processing center at the Pomona Fairplex, computers scan the ballot envelopes, comparing each signature with the one on the voter’s registration. Within fractions of a second, the computer flags ballots with mismatched signatures.

Verbera says the humans take over from there.

“Currently we’re just short of 200 (employees) and we’re still looking to hire more folks to potentially start a night shift,” Verbera said.

County workers are trained to check suspicious mail-in ballot signatures, on what promises to be an avalanche of mailed in ballots in a historic election year. Up to three employees check any signature flagged by the computer.

“We don’t take the machine’s word on any negative result,” Verbera said.

Signatures that don’t pass a visual test end up in a stack. The registrar’s office notifies the voters, who then have a chance to submit a new signature to update the one on file. The voter has up to 28 days after Nov. 3 to respond and have their ballot processed.

In Los Angeles County, Verbera says the process is open and transparent. Anyone can visit the Fairplex and see it for themselves.

“Seeing is believing,” Verbera said.

Related Stories

Once the signature is approved, a machine slices open the envelop – and a human separates the ballot from the envelope with the voter’s name and signatures.

The ballots, now anonymous, are piled up in boxes and sealed. Ready to be tallied the moment polls close on election night.

Registrar Dean Logan says the prevalence of vote-by-mail, means faster and more accurate results after the polls close. By 8:15, he says his office will have early results that are a representative sample of the entire county.

“We’re going to have well over a million ballots that are scanned-in and ready to go,” Logan said.