Tipsheet

Is This Why It's Taking California So Long to Count Its Ballots?

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 06, 2026 6:55 AM

As of writing this post, California’s return rates for its gubernatorial and LA mayoral races are 68% and 71%, respectively—Election Day was on Tuesday. This is ridiculous, and it’s now reaching a point where even non-conservative reporters are noting that something is very wrong and broken with how ballots are tallied here. In Los Angeles, the election nerve center has rows of empty seats and plenty of space, despite having a $330+ million budget (via NY Post):

As the vote-count totals crawl across Los Angeles and California, The California Post visited the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing facility Thursday, which showed dozens of empty work stations.

The scene at the warehouse appeared at odds with the mounting pressure to process hundreds of thousands of remaining ballots. County officials announced Wednesday night that just 77,521 additional ballots had been processed since June 2 election night, but an estimated 713,180 ballots are still outstanding.

Yet during The Post’s visit, large sections of the facility appeared lightly staffed. Rows of workstations sat empty.

Multiple sections of chairs were unoccupied.

In one area, where ballots that cannot be automatically read by scanners are reviewed by election workers, roughly 25 bins of ballots appeared ready for processing while no employees were seated at nearby desks.

In another section where workers open envelopes and prepare ballots for counting, The Post observed about 75 employees working, despite the area being capable of accommodating more than twice that number.

The scrutiny comes as Los Angeles County spends nearly $336 million annually on the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

I mean, this is absurd. 

Also, this could get interesting: