Prior to being counted on election night, mail ballots in L.A. County go through six steps of validation.
Photographer: Peter Adams for Bloomberg BusinessweekLos Angeles Goes All Out to Process Millions of Mail-In Ballots
A look inside the massive election operations center.
Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the U.S., has more registered voters—5.6 million—than the entire populations of Vermont, Wyoming, Mississippi, and Rhode Island combined. Because of the pandemic, the county sent mail ballots to all registered voters for the 2020 election, a first.
When ballots were returned, they ended up inside a vast warehouse on the Fairplex fairgrounds in Pomona, Calif. There, more than 200 workers, in day and night shifts, put them through a multistep process (see photos) before they’re sent off to be counted on election night. Officials chose Fairplex—which hosts the L.A. County Fair in nonpandemic years—as a temporary site to accommodate the mail-in ballots and to give workers space for social distancing.