Working The California Election
My experience as part of the process of collecting ballots.
Over the past week, I was temporarily employed by the County of Los Angeles as an Election Associate II. I was responsible for moving thousands of ballots in a well-orchestrated process. I learned a lot, I worked hard, I made friends. I’m impressed with the people and the process. I didn’t go with something to prove, but I looked at everything I could see.
Blather Class Abstract
Everybody who works there has a passport.
Everybody takes the civil service oath.
The process has overkill built in.
The leadership is thick and deep.
The process is scrupulous.
The facility is impressive
The irregularities and exceptions are obvious and miniscule.
If you have no interest in my storytelling and on the ground details etc, you can skip to the contrarian election corruption summary in this document. Previous to this job, I was made aware of two particular elements of corruption. The first was that operatives of one party were busted for registering homeless folks on LA’s Skid Row. The second was registration of residential voters from addresses in non-residential areas of Phoenix.
If there is corruption in the world of voting it has everything to do with the kinds of shenanigans that happened in Phoenix - and that has to do with what kind of information the state has about residential zoning and how such matters are administered. I’m not particularly interested in that because I am confident that these are less statistically significant than the effects of redistricting. But here’s the bottom line.
There is no investigative journalist in America who is getting the data and getting to the bottom of this. When I hear from Cremeiux and DataRepublican and the data is put into GitHub, then I will be able to see with my own eyes. Outside of that, the conspiracy jargon is thick. Again, I know this because I personally talked to the chair of the Arizona Republican Party two years ago face to face and he told me the Phoenix story, and he didn’t know any data scientists (or what they were) to put on the case.
BTW, what is the factual case against DOGE? It’s smear language. Then again, voter turnout here in LA County was 33%
How It Happened
I already have a profile on GovernmentJobs.com and I have about seven or eight applications in limbo for various IT positions with the County of Los Angeles. Since I have been trolling with some agentic, programmatic assistance for several months, I have become familiar with the nature of spam, blackholes and unsolicited calls from headhunters out of ‘New Jersey, New Delhi’. I get an average of 7 calls and 50 emails per day, but one interview per month. Ask any out of work programmer, the employment market is a dumpster fire of epic AI hyped proportions.
For the Election Assistant, I applied on May 25. I was placed on the Civil Service eligible register on the next day. At 3:45 that same day I was given details of the job and asked if I was still interested. I replied yes and within the hour I was given instructions to get something called a LiveScan on the 27th and to report to paid orientation on Thursday the 28th of May. The LiveScan was conducted at one of the large brutalist government buildings in Norwalk, CA.
I have been a Teamster before. Now, within 90 minutes of my arriving on scene to the Ballot Processing Center, I was now hired, and a member of the SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. Which, come to think about it, could eventually become the most powerful union in America if AI becomes what most people fear about AI and white collar work.
The Mighty BPC
Orientation started at 8AM sharp on Thursday morning and I had a class of 15 to go through all of the onboarding procedures. So I arrive on site in La Puente and I am met with something 180 degrees different than the headquarters in Norwalk. It looks state of the art, like something Tom Cruise would try to infiltrate. The mission would not be impossible, but nearly. That’s because the place is thick with people. You couldn’t get to know what’s going on without knowing the people; you couldn’t poke around and insert a significant number of ballots without an actual conspiracy of insiders.
The People
If you are my kind of IT professional serving Fortune 100 clients, you are accustomed to dealing with a class of bright, successful folks with a surfeit of intellect, a particularly natty attire and a manner of performative behavior that the Brits call high fliers. These would be me, slightly older versions of these AI generated dudes and chicks.
Since I have been working from home with only periodic excursions into the real world over the past 15 years, it was actually something of an adventure to get outside of my bubble. A lot of the folks I started working with are within a different strata, and while it took a minute for me to make friends (which I always inevitably do) there was something of an internal battle.
My first reaction was Costco. The crowd of election workers who were my new associates reminded me of the people I see shopping at Costco, which is interesting because in my first union job back in the late 70s, I was introduced to the same class of workers. Fresh out of catholic prep school and dropping out of electrical engineering at USC, I had to adjust socially in terms of conversational topics, manner of dress and speech. Here I was all over again.
At the staging area, there are about 120 drivers who pair up and head out in half that number of Sprinter-sized vans. We sit at round picnic tables until our truck number is called and head out to one of the collection sites. Of course on day one I’m in alien observation mode and looking around for people in my orientation group of 15. I see Darren, Todd and Jay. Jay is reading the Hail Mary Project, so we have that to talk about. He’s at the part where Rocky first builds the airtight bridge.
It’s not reasonable for me to say that there were cliques among us union workers, but after two days of being a newbie, I decided which tables I wanted to sit at. I was sitting mostly with my orientation classmates and getting my bearings when I heard someone say ‘Glacier National Park’ just behind me. I swung around and figured a way to nudge my way into that conversation of people swapping pictures of waterfalls. It turned out to be Sabina and Garson. Garson, who is in the auto industry, has an electric mountain bike and he can tell you all of the trails between St. George and Glen Canyon in Utah. I always appreciate people who have found their inner peace. It gives one a kind of indifference to trivia.
Janna, Sabina and Mars
Everywhere else in the crowd people are wearing their badges and yellow vests and having conversations. It turns out that Janna and Sabina are paired drivers. Janna has brought a wheeled plastic crate full of goodies. In her sun hat she’s munching on grapes and offers me a few, then a handful, then the rest. I mentioned that I’ve worked at home for 15 years and it’s just exciting to be here among so many people. Same, she says. Meanwhile Sabina is offering to bring butter chicken on the next day. Hands go up. I move my seat over to where a couple young guys are sitting. Their truck just got called. One of them is Mars. He has met a girl in the BPC who is making him dizzy and explaining his approach and how nervous it made him.
The intimacy is strange and almost immediate. We all share this mission. Some have been doing it for many years. I’m about as new as it’s possible to be, but both my parents worked for the County. There’s a distant familiarity with that kind of assured sense that they know that they work for the people — that their everyday work, unquestionably helps somebody. You’re in a crowd of 100 and there’s basically only one boss and a small handful of assistants and the old heads. Everybody knows everybody’s job and the human dynamic takes over. Nobody is going to flunk out, everyone understands the material.
Yet in fact people do just drop out. My truckmate Donnie’s old partner just quit. That’s how my class got hired and oriented 5 days before the election. It’s a decent paying job and easy. “All you need to do is show up and do the work and the work ain’t hard. I still hear some of you eighth graders complaining.” I hear a veteran say. Laughs all around.
Dispatch
In the orientation, besides safety and union talk, there was much talk about the timekeeper. Where? What? Ah. It becomes obvious. You walk over to the popup canopy and sign into one of the five clipboards. I’m on ‘A - C’. Well, not until the third day. You see I thought my Global Entry card would be sufficient to identify me as a US Citizen. Oops. I had to go back and bring my passport just like everybody else. All the boxes are checked on the union job. Sign in. Sit at the picnic tables. Wait for your truck to be called.
The boss calls my truck, CIC 753. We are assigned by the timekeeper, I’m handed the key fob and Donnie gets the bank bag with the map and the smartphone. He handles the paperwork and I’m behind the wheel. We check all the lights, fold out the big mirrors on the Sprinter sized van, drive past one checkpoint and head out to our check-in center just behind Jesse Owens Park in South LA.
VBM vs CIC
As a driver, we work in two functions. There’s the VBM shift and the CIC shift. There are large lockboxes outside of voting centers. So that’s vote by mail. There are about 445 of those all over the county. So the 7am to 4pm shift drivers go in pairs to a route of averaging about 11-15 lockboxes and then return to the BPC. They will fill one or two numbered, locked & sealed canvas duffle bags per lockbox. These weigh about 15-20 pounds each and are generally filled with the green striped ballot envelopes.
The VBM vans are a bit smaller and the job requires more lifting. Even as we leave the parking lot around 1:15pm they are back from their morning routes running a bucket brigade line into the dock. The black canvas bags are dropped into pallet sized containers that are rolled in through the south door of the BPC for debagging.
The CIC van I’m driving with Donnie handling the logistics is relatively new. It’s a white Ram on lease from Enterprise. We have the County seal on both sides magnetically affixed like a 1 foot square fridge magnet. The CIC number is masking taped to the back door. I sync my iPhone in, set the destination and leave La Puente and head through the traffic of the 605 freeway.
A Day in the Life of CIC 753
Our check-in center is in a neighborhood called Gramercy Park. At least that’s what Apple Maps calls it. It’s directly under the southern flight path of jets landing at LAX and about a three miles away from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. We’re at the top of a hill on Century Boulevard and it’s windy and the traffic is loud with mini-bikes and amplified Harleys. The occasional tuner and Challenger adds to the cacophony, and there’s at least two ambulances charging up the hill every day. Jesse Owens Park used to be called Sportsman’s Park in the 70s when I played flag football there.
We get there around 2:30 and we get some lunch down the street near SoFi, or eat the packed lunch. By the third day I have figured out all of the gear I am bringing. There’s something comfortably blue collar about having my lunch and backpack, ID lanyard and yellow vest. I’m in tac pants and Keen low tops with long sleeve American Giant light shirt, with my LA Dodger cap and fake Ray-Bans. The first day we ate lunch at Panda Express in our County regalia I remember 2003 when I was unemployed and totally envious of a pick-up truck crew of tradesmen talking with their mouths full at a Carl’s Jr somewhere near Cerritos. This time it was me and Donnie watching how other people were watching us.
Just before the Chief gets there at 5:30 pm, we make a bathroom run to Target in the same big box destination mall. I get a package of trail mix and some Reese’s. I know I have some Red Bulls back in my cooler lunchbox, so I’m set for the evening. Our Chief, Cherise gets there. She’s one of those non-nonsense single moms with three semi-adult daughters and an Altima with no dents. She’s a 12 year veteran at County and makes sure everything is in order. Time to setup.
We pull the folding table out of the van, unfold and place the four chairs around it. Donnie climbs up the pink cinderblock wall and ties up the County banner high up on the chainlink fence, just below the rusty barbwire. The eastbound wind coming off the Pacific pastes it in place. It’s too windy for a pop-up we learned the hard way. I move the five cones and sawhorse barricades to make a lane in the parking lot. We’re going to have a bunch of cars with ballots coming through after the polls close.
As the sun goes down and the 20th jet flies overhead, we talk about this and that. Cherise will have a counterpart as Chief because everything is done in pairs for accountability purposes. Interestingly enough her two alternatives Brenda and Bobby are both Dorsey Dons. Dorsey is the highschool for the neighborhood where I grew up in West Adams in the 70s. Cherise will generally talk about her daughters, two of whom are at the Boy Band phase of life and one who is at the Girls Trip to Vegas phase of life. Of course I cannot keep any of that straight, but I’m fascinated by my reminiscing with Bobby and Brenda.
Bobby is one of those hilarious guys with no filter whatsoever. He has a remarkable ability to walk right up to the edge and then graciously pull back. The moment you get comfortable he zings you right back. His silver Cadillac CTS has a personalized plate. He remembers Dorsey. Brenda is one of those dignified women who enjoys her trips to wine country and jazz violin. I could have sworn she went to Catholic School. She’s everybody’s favorite auntie and manages to be strict without being stuffy. She remembers Dorsey. We talk about the old days and I hookup Bobby’s boom box with bluetooth and play my Quiet Storm playlist.
The Polls Close
Every night but election night, the polling places close at 7pm. In California you have 29 days to drop off your ballot in the proper envelope at one of the 445 ballot drop boxes. On election night they are open an extra hour. The Monday night before, the system goes down and the green bags are extra full.
At our check-in center, we are responsible for 9 polling places, including the one at Jesse Owens. In fact in years past the CIC was at Jesse Owens, but when roughnecks and hooligans started showing up they couldn’t spare the police protection, so 753 was moved to this parking lot around the corner at the Girls Club on Century Blvd. So within the hour of closing time we expect pairs of folks who worked at the polling places to deliver materials to our spot. Once again, people have to be doubled up.
On an ordinary night for each polling place one or two cars will pull up, but always with two people, a primary and an assistant. We expect two things. A sealed white box of ballots, and a sealed bag of supplementary materials. I take them from the car and set them in front of the Chief and she scans the box(es) and bag(s). The bag is a kind of a fluorescent olive green. Donnie will fill out receipts for the box & bag and have the primary and secondary sign. We keep a copy. The assistant to the Chief will copy down the barcode registration numbers. Once that’s done and I move the materials to the truck and shut the door, I come back and initial the paperwork for each polling place. Once all nine are signed in, we pack up the joint and head back to the LaPuente BPC.
On election night there were several modifications since like in everything else, most people pay attention at the last minute. The polls stay open an hour later so we don’t expect to see anyone until about 9pm. This time, on June 2, there will be lots more people at each CIC.
The first change is that for four of the polling places, there will be ballot lockboxes as well. The Chief distributes extra name tags and vests and each of these folks is given a key to lock the box. Their assignment is to show up at 8pm and lock the box. Simple. If there are people in line dropping them off then they get to the back of that line and then lock the box. If anyone comes in behind them, tough luck. You had 30 days.
About those 30 days, and here’s where you can poke me. I can’t remember when I got my ballot in the mail, but I do know that I threw it away. I don’t vote. That’s mostly because I don’t believe that I can vote my way into prosperity or ease. I don’t get a kick out of seeing my candidate win. Either way. I’m still registered Republican, I think. But I’m not interested in the horse race. Over here in Carson we had a referendum on fireworks. People from Carson go nuts with big fireworks. I can’t even figure out the wording on the proposition. Either way, I don’t have a literal or figurative dog in that one. Still, the ballot comes in April or May and you have 29 days before voting day to fill it out and drop it off. So what happens? Most people wait for the last minute.
Anyway, the second change is that there are now three sets of materials per polling station that get dropped off from to our CIC. One of them is called a green stripe bag and it’s a transparent plastic envelope about 30x16 inches with a green stripe. They’re mostly flat. Then there are the normal green bags and the normal ballot boxes which are sealed, of course. On election night we got one extra ballot box and about double the number of green bags.
But the biggest change is that we didn’t take the ballot boxes. We had three sheriff deputies to take the boxes back to the BPC. One was in an official vehicle, two were in their own vehicles. All three were in uniform.
The last of the polling place folks didn’t show up until 10:30PM that evening. We had a contradicting message about if they were dropping off at another CIC, which according to our Chief does occasionally happen. So she called into central and they said that happened so we started packing up. Two minutes later they showed up. By this time, I haven’t had a pee break since 4pm. It was getting kind of dicey.
Back to the BPC
Every night at the BPC, we do a well-choreographed dance with the trucks. We get off at Crossroads and then pull up to the front gate. We show our badges and move to the second row in the parking lot where somebody waves us to the left which is north. Then we go along the back, turn right and then stop to tell the checkpoint how much gas we have. I’m sure Donnie logs the moment we get there. Next we turn south and drive around the backside of the BPC building. By the time we get to the southwest corner we’ll have queued up behind 3 or 4 trucks. We swing another right and now are ready to unload our packages. There will be a swarm of folks with flashlights and clipboards. I open the sliding door and somebody pulls the ballots, calls off the numbers and validates the seal. One for the set of boxes, one for the set of bags.
I release the brake, turn on the flashers and go for the second lap. This time at the northeast checkpoint I will be guided to my appropriate parking space. That’s the ordinary two lap loop.
On election night, its a zoo. Half the parking lot is empty because all of the deputies are there. The overflow parking is across the way at a business park. Is that a helicopter I hear? Sure enough just as we turn south in the lot, there’s an extra checkpoint and this time the guy, who is certainly one of the deputies, gives us alternate instructions.
We don’t have the ballots, so now we are dumping off our materials on the east side of the building rather than the west side. Either way the trucks are backed up to about 12 deep. I really have to pee. It’s not quite as step by step as before and by the time we get back to the front gate, there have been three helicopter takeoffs and landings in the northeast corner of the parking lot. Oh by the way, the press is here. There are one or two moments when I may have been on camera. Even so, the very first day of orientation I was told that the public is welcome any day to observe the processes inside the BPC. I didn’t see that happening much.
Debagging
By far the most interesting job for me is debagging. This is where I get my hands on the actual ballots. Now you know there are the canvas bags taken by the VBM truck routes, that are checked into the BPC on wheeled pallet sized soft-sided containers. You could get about 15 ballot bags into one rolling pallet. As they come into the north side, timekeepers check drivers in by route and then the paperwork is filled out.
Debagging works like this. You have the back wall filled with say 12 pallets of ballot bags. You have five or six lines of people. Each line will have at least eight folks including two people up front who are keeping track of the paperwork. They have a clipboard that indicates the route, the number of ballot bags from the route, the four digit number for each bag and the eight digit number for the zipper seal on each bag.
The ballot bag is thick dark grey canvas with four digits embroidered in red and two handles. It’s about the size of a short, tall duffle bag. There’s an industrial zipper that’s locked with a plastic seal that is about 4cm long with eight numbers embossed about 18picas high. There’s a double velcro strap that covers the zipper. Let’s call the table boss the table boss. It turns out that Janna was the table boss on June 3rd when we were still debagging. So I got in at 12PM like normal and there was still debagging to do. What I do know is which neighborhoods we were debagging. What I don’t know is whether these were picked up from post offices. Either way all of the ballot bags look the same and I never got the impression that there was any other vector that VBM ballots came into the BPC.
So I’m at Janna’s table, which is actually three picnic sized tables where we had 8 people on each side. Plus some of the more beefy VBM guys minding the pallets.
I’m in the back with Garson across from me, then we had some people in the middle whom I believe were speaking Armenian. Mars and his buddy were up front with Janna.
I come up with a brilliant idea, old for me, new for the debagging. Since there are about 4000 ballot bags, pretty much all of them start with 0,1,2 or 3. I say, why don’t we presort the bags onto four pallets so when Janna the table boss calls them out we don’t have to rummage around. You see there’s nothing to keep track of which route’s bags are on which pallet and they are only rarely the way you want them to be. that means somebody has to dig bags out from the bottom of any number of pallets. So we do the presort and it works like a charm.
So in this illustration you can see eight pallets against the north wall, but usually its more like 50, with some empties. This is a simplified debagging line and the ballots go from north to south inside of the BPC. At the south end of the tables is the table boss with labels for the routes. At the very end is a rack with USPS letter trays. These are standard letter trays in two sizes. The normal size goes right across the width of the picnic table and the small one is half that size. I would estimate that you can get 150 ballots into each normal sized tray. They are shallow, only one ballot envelope high.
The letter trays look like this except ours were way neater. So Garson gets a post-it note from Janna with the numbers of the bags on the route. Me and two other guys go through the pre-sorted pallets and pull the bags up onto the northmost table. We slide them down to Janna when she calls the number. Somebody reads the serial number on the zipper tag. That’s confirmed and they snap off the tag and put it in a box. Then they send the bags back. Once all the bag tags are off for the route, say 8 bags for the route, we send all but three back. We can only open three bags at a time. We’re on camera. No hats. No sunglasses.
Take off the strap. Unzip the bag. Turn it sideways, not upside down. Pull out the envelopes don’t pour them out because they splatter onto the floor and they land and bend the corners. People can’t resist pouring, but everybody knows not to let them hit the floor. Here’s where the old saying come out “Many hands make light work”. You grab some, flip them stack them evenly and put the signature side on the label side of the letter tray. The label has the route name and the polling place. I recognized the North Redondo Beach Library and a couple other places.
Oddballs
Out of a typical route of typically 7 bags, we’ll get maybe 2 or 3 envelopes that are not the current LA County green stripe VBM envelope. You get very good recognizing the ballot envelopes after your second bag, really. Then you get very fast in flipping them into the same order and position. Then you get good in sharing your pile with the person next to or across from you. Oddball envelopes stand out like a counterfeit nickel. Generally they are from another county. They go into a different pile at the end of the table.
The End
I worked half a day on the day after the election. Straight debagging for four hours non-stop. We were so good at it that we wanted to drag out the time. I worked six days straight for an average of 10 hours a day. It was my birthday and I decided to check out once our line finished (early). I wasn’t interested in going to another line.
All in all I will probably write something else about how some motivated people might collaborate to cheat the process as well as I know it, but it would have to be very sophisticated and incredibly tightly secured. I don’t doubt the motivation, these are not stupid prizes. But everything I know about, let’s call it the hallucinations of social intelligence, tell me that suspicion may be well founded, but the actual smoking guns are only in politicized minds. I have no doubt about malicious intent, but it’s certainly more outside of the BPC than inside.
Tell me your theory.
Great write-up. Thanks.