Hundreds of thousands of ballots still need to be counted before any election results can be certified after Tuesday night’s statewide primary election, according to a release from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office Wednesday evening.
The office estimates that just over 500,000 ballots are left to be counted, which includes provisional ballots (141,000), vote-by-mail ballots (358,700) and miscellaneous ballots (3,970) including damaged, ballots with write-ins and others that may “require further review”.
The statement also accounted for the possibility of that total growing by some margin as the totals listed by the clerk’s office do not include vote-by-mail ballots that were sent in on election night but have yet to be received by the county.
Early Tuesday morning the county clerk’s office became aware of a printing error that led to nearly 120,000 county residents being inadvertently left off voting rolls which may have contributed to the large provisional ballot totals as those affected voters were asked to vote using a provisional ballot.
Over 100,000 Voters Forced to Cast Ballots Provisionally Due to County Printing Error
There are about 5.1 million registered voters in the county according to the county clerk’s website which means about 10 percent of the county’s potential voters have yet to have their votes counted. The percentage represented by the outstanding votes figures to be a significantly higher portion as Tuesday’s primary saw another lackluster turnout from registered voters in the county.
Through Wednesday a total of about 950,000 votes have been counted for the governor’s race compared to 824,000 voters that participated in 2014, the last non-presidential primary held in the county. Registered voters in the county in 2014 totaled just over 4.8 million.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan was grilled Wednesday morning by the county’s board of supervisors who called for an immediate and comprehensive investigation into how such an error could have occurred and how it could be prevented in future elections.
The first update of counts is expected to be released Friday with future updates coming every Tuesday and Friday until June 22. The county has also tentatively scheduled release dates for June 25, 27 and 29 if it needs more time to sort through and verify the roughly half of a million ballots it has to count.