Ric Tapia via AP
Downtown Los Angeles cityscape with Mount Baldy in the background, February 2020
Election officials’ decision-making will come under greater public scrutiny after the Iowa caucus debacle—especially in Los Angeles County, home to ten million residents and five million registered voters, the largest voting jurisdiction in the country.
On March 3—Super Tuesday—some Angelenos will surely go to their neighborhood polling place where they’ve been casting their votes for decades, only to find no signs of life. What to do—call City Hall? The police? Give up and head to work?
Beginning with the March 3 election, California is instituting an epochal shift in the way its residents vote, debuting in 15 of the state’s 58 counties, of which L.A. is the big one. For this crucial presidential primary, voters in Los Angeles can use approximately 1,000 centralized vote centers rather than the roughly 5,000 precinct polling places where Angelenos have been accustomed to voting.
Unlike those precinct polling places, however, which were open only on Election Day, the new voting centers will be open for voting for many days: Most of them will be in operation not just on Election Day but also on the ten days preceding it, while the rest will be open on Election Day and the four days before. What’s more, L.A. County voters can drop in and vote at any one of the centers. (Besides, this year as in many past elections, more than half of California voters will cast their votes by mail.)
Richard Vogel/AP Photo
‘I Voted’ stickers wait for voters at a polling station inside the Robert F. Kennedy Elementary School in Los Angeles, June 2018.
The changeover to voting centers has taken years of preparation, and has been publicized by a barrage of articles, billboards, websites, emails, and radio and television ads in multiple languages (the county’s official notifications are online in 13 languages). They all instruct Angelenos that casting a ballot in the 2020 presidential primary will be a radically new experience—unless they’re voting by mail.
But in a world of information overload, in a county where dozens of languages are spoken, some locals may have tuned out or otherwise missed the media blitz.
Moreover, after decades of simmering in its own irrelevance in the national primary process, California has moved its primary from early June to Super Tuesday (and in L.A., the ten days preceding). In past years, though the state has long been by far the biggest prize in the race for delegates, each party’s field of candidates had usually been winnowed down to one by the time Californians got to vote. This year, California matters.
Los Angeles County has been working to upgrade its voting systems at least since 2009, as it became clear that people with disabilities, limited English fluency, or demanding job and school schedules were not well served by aging voting systems and a single day of voting. Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, political science professor, notes that the new changes will particularly help voters with disabilities and non-native English speakers, but questions the timing. “It’s unfortunate that it’s happening in a presidential election,” he says. “It would be nicer to start in an off year when there is less at stake.”
California’s 2016 Voter’s Choice Act reforms replicate the first-in-the-nation vote center model that Colorado implemented more than 15 years ago. In L.A. County, switching from precinct-based neighborhood polling places to vote centers means an individual can vote anywhere in the county—near work, school, child care, or Mom’s house. People who want the in-person experience can use electronic tablets to vote or drop off vote-by-mail ballots. Same-day registration is another first. Counties also have the option of keeping their current election arrangements or adopting a range of options.
In 2018, the Northern California counties of Madera, Napa, Nevada, Sacramento, and San Mateo switched to vote centers. According to the 2019 New Electorate Study of those counties by the Public Policy Institute of California, USC’s California Civic Engagement Project, and UC San Diego, turnout increased roughly three percentage points in that year’s general election and nearly four in the primary. Turnout increases were greater among young voters, Latinos, and Asian Americans than in the jurisdictions that did not adopt the changes.
Metrics like population densities, transportation options, and demographics were used to site L.A.’s new centers. Officials will send out lists of vote centers to every person who has any kind of county mailing address.
Iowa put California election officials and voting advocates on high alert, but officials stress that the Golden State’s controls are more rigorous than the caucus state’s.
Since most people in L.A. County have been voting by dropping off their mail-in ballot at their polling places (about 55 percent did so in the 2018 primary and general elections), vote centers are one way to make elections cost-effective by serving the same number of voters with fewer locations, poll workers, and volunteers.
Voter education and outreach has been the major hurdle the new system must clear. Mindy Romero, the California Civic Engagement Project director, notes that in the Northern California counties that implemented the changes in 2018 budget-constrained registrars and community groups concluded that there was insufficient education and outreach to certain non-English-speaking groups and people in more remote locales.
Person-to-person interactions remain the most effective way to get people to vote. Canvassers for Bernie Sanders will distribute information about the nearest vote centers as they go door-to-door. Enthusiastic about the new flexibility for voters, the campaign expects a huge turnout of the working-class people and voters of color where Sanders is making inroads. (The Bloomberg campaign declined to comment on the changes. The Biden, Buttigieg, Steyer, and Warren campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.)
Not everyone is sold on the reforms, however, including the governor who signed the legislation. Asked about the move on a recent visit to Washington, former Governor Jerry Brown said he’s still “somewhat dubious” about its impact on turnout.
Pastor J. Edgar Boyd of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, long a center of African American politics in L.A., agrees that the changes will still catch some people by surprise. Members of his 20,000-strong congregation can attend Saturday civic-responsibility forums to learn about the new voting devices. The devices have even been previewed at regional AME conferences. Although he and other church leaders are “pretty comfortable” with the systems, Boyd says AME conference attendees are only a small share of the African American electorate that the county needs to reach.
Boyd is less worried, however, about reaching middle-aged and older residents who moved to L.A. from the South. Anyone who has had the right to vote threatened, he said, keeps up with voting changes and won’t be flummoxed by a vote center a bit further away or dealing with a tablet. Some people who have not endured voting hardships, he fears, may opt out. Public-transportation challenges, relying on someone for a ride, or skepticism about the electronic ballot-counting process may deter others, Boyd says.
Attitudes may shift by November. “Right now, there’s a larger and broader intent to vote than I’ve probably seen in the last 16 to 20 years,” he says.
Lydia Camarillo, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), the country’s largest and oldest nonpartisan Latino voting participation group, notes that anytime there are change in voting procedures, there are people who get tripped up. “We will never know how many voters were lost because they might have only had that moment to vote,” she says. That said, Los Angeles County has a good process of putting signage up at former polling places like garages and private homes, according to Common Cause National Redistricting Director Kathay Feng, who has served as a poll observer in L.A. There are also polling locations in community spaces like libraries and schools that haven’t changed.
In 2018, SVREP reached out to one million voters through social media, and will target close to that number of voters over the next few weeks to remind them about the election, registration opportunities, and new voting systems. Camarillo says the process “will be confusing,” and that “money is tight” for voter education and outreach. “Most groups, including ours, are not going to spend that much money in the primary,” she says.
A statewide poll by the Latino Community Foundation and Latino Decisions found that 74 percent of registered Latino voters plan to cast a ballot in the presidential primary.
Boyd is less worried, however, about reaching middle-aged and older residents who moved to L.A. from the South. Anyone who has had the right to vote threatened, he said, keeps up with voting changes and won’t be flummoxed by a vote center a bit further away or dealing with a tablet.
L.A. County’s introduction of new electronic ballot-marking devices (featuring touch-screen technology, a simple user interface, both audio and visual elements, and the ability for voters to print out, check, and scan in their ballot into a built-in ballot box) also poses challenges. Election officials, civic groups, and voting-rights advocates are already anticipating long lines due to high turnout, an ingrained habit of voting on Election Day (regardless of early-voting opportunities), and people needing assistance using the new devices.
Smartphones may be ubiquitous and touch screens in use everywhere from train stations to movie theaters to ATMs. Nonetheless, Boyd points out that people uncomfortable with technology and even some familiar with it “may be skeptical of a process” that relies on electronic devices. “Even with a receipt, that’s one thing, but where the vote went, that’s another thing,” he says.
For this and other reasons, the county will be offering voters a low-tech way of voting, too. The state required the county to also provide ballots that voters can mark by hand. And to survey the effect of the systems in real time, state election observers will be deployed to Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions.
Sheila Kuehl, the Los Angeles County Supervisor for the county’s west side, notes that the tablets provide a paper ballot that voters can double-check. Tablets are not connected to the internet, so they cannot be hacked. Nor are they used to count votes or store information. Election officials tabulate the votes by counting the paper ballots, which voters have electronically inked. “It is simply a different way of marking the ballot, so it is clearer what you are doing,” she says.
Kuehl adds that since the county itself developed and controls the system’s code, election officials can make any necessary future changes at any time. (The county wanted maximum flexibility, so it did not purchase the systems from any of the three private companies that manufacture voting systems.) The county customized its system for L.A.’s diverse population, producing ballots and audio instructions in different languages. The devices also allow voters to scroll through voting information, changing fonts and font sizes if they need to.
In a literal reversal of past practice, the Super Tuesday ballots display local races and candidates first and the national races nearer the bottom of the ballot. Candidates have long complained about where their names appear on ballots, and some jurisdictions are already dissatisfied that the devices do not display all the candidates for a given office on a single screen. Voters must tap a pulsating “more” button for the remaining candidates.
Beverly Hills recently lost an attempt to enter an injunction on the use of the new technology in the primary, citing violations of voters’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and objections to this “severe ballot design flaw.” (There will be a hearing in the case on May 1, after the primary but before the general election.) Yet Kuehl notes that when the city of Long Beach deployed Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP), as the new system is known, for a municipal election, one candidate won on the vote-by-mail ballots and the electronic ballots by exactly the same percentage.
“Voters are never as stupid as candidates think they are,” says Kuehl.
No election is flawless, however, and while small glitches happen there is worry about the cumulative effect of all the logistical and technology changes causing bigger problems. Iowa put California election officials and voting advocates on high alert, but officials stress that the Golden State’s controls are more rigorous than the caucus state’s. “Iowa was a caucus and run by a political party with an app being used to report the vote in contrast to our election,” says Sam Mahood, spokesman for California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. “While the equipment is new, Los Angeles County is still following the same election procedures that have been on the books in California.”
Feng of Common Cause runs through some of the new system’s fail-safes with me: electronic marking devices but paper ballots, randomized audits of every race (not just close ones), state certification and testing of the new voting system.
She wonders why the Iowa app did not undergo similar tryouts. “It boggled my mind that you could go into an election without having run a lot of tests,” Feng says of the Iowa debacle. “L.A. has the scale and California has testing and certification regimes to ensure that we don’t do this in a half-assed way.”
UPDATE: An earlier version of the article stated that the L.A. County voting system is open source. According to several individuals involved in voting security, the system is not open source, because nobody can use the source code or even view it.
