When polls close this evening in the June 7 primary, it won’t take long for the first results to roll out, but after that, it could be days or even weeks before definitive data is reported by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/Clerk’s Office.
Polls will close at 8 p.m. (people in line will still get to vote), and the first batch of mail-in ballots will be released around 8:15 p.m., according to Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for the Registrar-Recorder’s Office.
That initial batch will include all the vote-by-mail ballots, which every registered voter in the county had mailed to them this year. About 15 minutes later will come the counts for any votes that were cast in person at early voting centers ahead of Election Day.
After that, it could be a long waiting game of hourly updates as ballots are turned into the county’s ballot processing center in Downey. The county stretches from Lancaster to Long Beach and from Westlake Village to Claremont and getting the ballots to Downey to be counted takes time.
“It is a process,” Sanchez said. “We’re a big county with a lot of space to cover and it’s really hard to predict when all the ballots will be in.”
If races are tight, it could take several days or weeks to get clarity on winners.
After sending out a Wednesday morning press release to update the public on preliminary counts, the next update from the Registrar-Recorder’s Office won’t come until Friday, June 10. After that, the county will release two updates per week on Mondays and Fridays with the final update coming on Tuesday, July 5 (Monday is a holiday). The election results could be certified by July 7.
Sanchez said there haven’t been any significant changes to the counting process that could significantly speed up the release of finalized results, but he did note that the office is fully staffed and working in a much different environment than the last full county-run election in March 2020 when COVID-19 first hit the region.
“Do we have more resources? Yes, we’re fully staffed, but we’re still taking precautions related to COVID,” Sanchez said. “It’s really just a matter of time.”
You can watch the tallies as they roll in at lbpost.com/elections.