The 2021 Elections of the Neighborhood Council of Westchester/Playa – Counting the Ballots

A quick article on my experience observing the City Clerk’s office counting the ballots. Given what is involved in hand counting ballots, I not only have a new appreciation for the American election process and the dedication that these clerks have to getting the job right, but also the cost that efforts like recalling well-established politicians impose on the communities they represent. Even such a relatively unknown and underrepresented election such as for the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, takes days of planning and execution per neighborhood council and there are 99 of these in LA.

I learned that the vote tallies were being streamed on the City’s Zoom channel so I thought I would watch a few minutes here and there to learn about the process. Here are some screen shots i grabbed and notes on what I understood to be going on at each stage.

A step I missed and maybe happens off camera is the opening of the ballot envelopes. They must have some sort of envelope opener that makes that process efficient as they are opening thousands of envelopes per day in some Council Districts.

We start in the morning with a table of ballots with a stack for each of the neighborhood councils in the council district.

The first step is to scan all the ballots into the system. As I understood it from watching, the clerk to the right of the machine stacks a pack of ballots, making sure they are all facing the right way. I would estimate there were 100 ballots in a stack, but I am not certain. She then fed the ballots into the machine that scanned the ballots one-by-one. Our NC ballots have bar codes so that they can be associated with the stakeholder submitting their votes.

With the ballots scanned into the system, another clerk begins the visual confirmation of each ballot.

The clerk flips through each scanned ballot and checks each it against the results that were recorded by the scanner to ensure they matched what was on the ballot. I am not sure what that photographer was doing, but maybe providing additional election auditing documentation, or maybe video for a fascinating documentary on the NC election process.

With the ballots collated, scanned and verified, they are combined in a packet and brought for safe storage in case there are challenges or other concerns with the outcome.