Election-Campaign Law

LA County update: longer lines for early voting, possible mail ballot problems

By Michael Alvarez

See the story in this morning’s LA Times, “Mail ballot backlog poses problems for L.A. County voters.” First, the story says that the early voting line is now 90 minutes long in LA County. But second, here’s some about the potential mail ballot problems:

Thousands of Los Angeles County voters may not receive their mail-in ballots in time to actually mail them in, county officials said Wednesday.

Clerks were racing to process about 13,000 last-minute vote-by-mail applications while also handling 55,000 remaining voter registrations, said Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan.

…

The deadline crunch comes as an unprecedented number of voters in Los Angeles County and California have applied to vote by mail. About 23% of the county’s 4.3 million registered voters, or 977,000, had requested mail ballots, Logan said.

Statewide, more than half of registered voters are expected to mail in their ballots, marking a fundamental shift in favor of the mailbox over the election day ballot box.

Here’s the bottom line. If you want to vote absentee here in California, and you have your ballot, unless you can get it to the post office tomorrow, plan to drop it off at a polling place on Tuesday.

Full post as published by Election Updates on October 30, 2008 (boomark / email).