(playful music)
- Los Angeles County is doing a complete overhaul
of its voting experience.
That's anything from when you vote,
how you vote, the machines you vote on,
and how they're counted.
And depending on how well it works
for the County's 5.4 million voters
during its 2020 election debut,
voting overhauls like this may be coming across the country.
- From the voter perspective,
the most significant change will be more options
about when and where to cast their ballot
and the fact that this facility
here at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
is gonna be one of our vote centers.
- [Emily] Any LA County resident, pre-registered or not,
will able to cast their 2020 Primary vote
at any of the County's strategically-located vote centers,
like this downtown music hall.
About 250 will be up and running 10 days
before California's Presidential Primary election day,
giving residents a new 11-day voting window,
including two weekends.
The extended voting period
and larger, more accessible vote centers
are just two of the ways many California counties,
including LA County,
are trying to revolutionize the way we vote.
- So you can toggle back and forth.
- [Emily] Residents can also expect new ballot marking
and vote tallying systems.
- And let it know you're ready to print the ballot
and it's gonna come back out here.
- [Emily] LA County Registrar Dean Logan
has been working on this upgrade for more than a decade.
- Until we implement this new model in 2020,
at the core of it,
the equipment that the voter actually interacts with
at the polling place is exactly the same
as what was introduced in 1968.
It's those vote recorder devices
that were used for punch-card voting.
It's been retrofitted and there've been changes
and certainly on the backend of the tabulation system
and the scanners that we use to scan those ballots
have been updated.
But even those are at the end of their lifecycle.
- So you've got this equipment
that isn't even manufactured anymore,
that only one vendor is even servicing.
What are some of the ways that the county looked at
trying to deal with this huge overhaul
in a way that made sense?
- We decided early on
that we wanted to have a publicly-owned system.
We wanted to do this in a way that whatever we invested in,
that components of that could be transferrable
to other jurisdictions as well.
- [Emily] This is the country's first
publicly-owned voting system.
Unlike a private one,
LA County owns all of the intellectual property
used to develop and run this new system.
- Because it's a publicly-owned system,
we're in a position where we can share the research,
we can share the design,
and we can actually share the code.
- Can you tell us a little bit
about whether you've heard from other states
or other counties that they may be seeing this as a model
that they might be able to replicate for the future?
- There's a great deal of interest from other jurisdictions,
both here in California,
as well as outside of California
and even outside of the United States.
- While no other county has immediate plans
to use this exact system,
all 58 had to upgrade their systems
and vote accounting processes earlier this year
to plan for the 2020 election.
On top of updating voting machines,
the mandatory California changes
also aim to make voting safer and tallying more transparent.
All of the Golden State's systems
are required to use a paper ballot,
instead of an electronic one.
Aside from eliminating any potential electronic errors
or hacking issues,
paper ballots also simplify audits and recounts.
- That's particularly important
in a time when we're still talking about
how people felt about the accuracy of the 2018 election.
We need to able to demonstrate to the public
not just a good voting experience in the act of voting,
but to be able to show that the outcome of that
has integrity and is accurate.
- [Emily] After using a tablet to mark your paper ballot,
LA County's system prints it for you to review
before formally submitting it.
- Then it comes back to our headquarters
and is centrally tabulated
in a physically-secure environment
on a system that's entirely independent of that.
The electronic interface is simply to mark the ballot,
so they're not counting votes
and they're not retaining any of the vote cast data.
It's not a redundancy.
It allows us to eliminate things like over-voting
and ambiguous marks
that in close elections become the controversies
and end up in court.
- Especially for next year's primaries,
speeding up the tallying process
is a priority for every California registrar.
As the most populous state and the most delegate-rich,
all eyes will be on California this Super Tuesday
to see how the results pan out
and what that might mean for the rest of the country.
But even with newer and more nimble technology available,
fast, final election results are not always possible,
especially when it's a close race.
- It takes patience.
It's frustrating but at the end of the day,
if that's what's validating
that every eligible vote gets counted,
then that's really the way the process is supposed to work.
- [Emily] Ballots will be available in 12 languages
at every voting station in LA County.
Each is equipped with hearing and visual aids,
meaning fewer people will need to self-identify as disabled
and rely on assistance to cast their vote.
But these types of enhancements come at a price.
- Over the life of the development of the system
and now the manufacturing of it,
this is approaching $300,000,000.
- [Emily] Some of that
went towards research and development costs
to build the code.
And adopting the full end-to-end system
isn't the only option for other counties
interested in mimicking LA County's new setup.
- Some jurisdictions may only interested
in the tally portion of the system.
Others may be interested in the user interface
and attaching that to a different set up of hardware.
We've got to get it up and running in LA County first
and smooth out all the wrinkles here,
but I think that it is something
that we're gonna be able to leverage out
in the electoral environment beyond LA County and--
- Perhaps beyond the country. - Perhaps.
- [Emily] These changes to the voting system
could cause confusion or be inconvenient for some,
like those no longer able to walk
to their neighborhood poling place.
It's unclear how others will respond to the overhaul,
since it hasn't rolled out yet.
(quiet inquistive music)