As vote counting continues at a slow pace across Los Angeles County and much of California, reporters visiting the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing center on Thursday found numerous workstations sitting empty despite a massive backlog of ballots still awaiting review.
The scene raised questions about the pace of ballot processing as election officials work through hundreds of thousands of outstanding votes more than a week after Election Day.
According to figures released by county officials Wednesday night, only 77,521 additional ballots had been processed since the June 2 election.
Yet officials estimated that approximately 713,180 ballots remained outstanding and still needed to be counted, the California Post reported following its investigation of the facility.
However, during The Post’s visit, large portions of the facility’s work stations were empty, while boxes of ballots could be seen everywhere.
“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,” the outlet reported.
