Meet Dean Logan, the dean of LA County election – Latest News
The silver lining in the chaos and confusion round the Los Angeles mayor’s race is that California’s system of counting votes has been uncovered as the nation’s worst.
Nate Silver, the former election analyst for ABC News, calls it “kind of insane and not common in other electoral systems around the world.”
But despite the fact that the one-party Democratic machine that set up this system received’t repeal it, some reduction is about to seem.
Election staff tabulating ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center. AFP through Getty Images
By the finish of June, the U.S. Supreme Court could rule that states will be unable to rely mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. That would negate California’s insane observe of counting such ballots up to seven days after the election, in some circumstances with out a postmark and even a correct voter signature.
A voter ID poll initiative has lastly certified for the November poll. It would require voters to show a government-issued ID at the polls, whereas mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an official ID. Election officers can be required to take steps verifying the citizenship standing of voters.
Lawsuits will even put strain on cleansing up the state’s bloated and inaccurate voter registration rolls. Bill Essayli, the federal prosecutor for Los Angeles, who has introduced his workplace has “multiple election fraud investigations underway” can be suing California to permit an audit of its rolls and that case will quickly attain the Ninth Circuit federal appeals courtroom. “If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed,” Essayli stated on X. “What are they afraid of?”
An election employee processes mail-in ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state main election in the City of Industry on June 2, 2026. AFP through Getty Images
Another lawsuit filed final month by the public curiosity group Judicial Watch claims there are 873,000 “ghost” voters on the rolls who’re felons, have moved, died, or don’t have a actual tackle however are nonetheless getting mail-in ballots.
Finally, the bungled Los Angeles mayoral election has lastly supplied a face that personifies the election incompetence, countless vote counting and bureaucratic bungling endemic in California elections.
That can be Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan, who has overseen elections since 2008 in the county of 10 million people — a quarter of California’s population — with nearly no oversight or accountability.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan speaks during a press convention at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state main election. AFP through Getty Images
Before coming to LA, Logan was infamously recognized for his function in discovering beforehand unknown ballots a number of occasions when he was Registrar of Voters in King County, Washington during the 2004 race for governor between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dina Rossi. Gregoire received by 133 votes out of 2.9 million solid after a number of suspicious recounts.
Logan got here beneath particular scrutiny as a result of, in contrast to most profession election officers, he’d been a longtime Democratic activist and partisan election official in Kitsap County.
His work in Seattle was so tarnished that Bob Ferguson, a Seattle City Council member who’s now the state’s Democratic governor, referred to as it “public and embarrassing.”
An election employee processes a poll during the California main election at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center. REUTERS
The determination to rely these ballots “was the first step in creating Washington’s one party rule in Olympia,” former KVI Radio discuss show host John Carlson instructed me.
In LA, it took Logan much less than a yr to slam into his first scandal, and others have adopted.
His workplace presided over a catastrophe that noticed practically 50,000 ballots initially uncounted in 2008; a controversial 2010 recount wherein Kamala Harris received her squeaker race for Attorney General on the foundation of — shock! — controversial provisional ballots in LA County; a printing error that erased 118,000 voters in 2018; and the procurement of a $282 million voting system whose poll containers an unbiased audit discovered could possibly be opened with out detection.
Sign up for the California Morning Report publication
California’s high information, sports activities and leisure delivered to your inbox day-after-day.
Thanks for signing up!
In 2022, he was sued by supporters of the recall of George Soros-backed prosecutor George Gascón over claims he improperly ruled 200,000 collected signatures invalid. The go well with survived a movement to dismiss, however no trial date was ever set, so with Gascon’s November 2024 re-election race nearing, recall backers voluntarily dismissed the case. (Logan denied that his workplace did something flawed.) Ultimately, Gascon was thrown out of workplace in 2024, receiving solely 39% of the vote.
After practically 25 years of being at the middle of one catastrophe after one other, even Logan seems drained. He instructed The Atlantic magazine this month that a “political narrative” by people who need to “to take shots at the process” is behind the criticism of his workplace.
He, of course, bears no accountability.
The problem isn’t whether or not there was blatant fraud in Los Angeles this month. The problem is that completely no one overseeing the election has any incentive to seek out out.
Right now, the voting systems in each LA and California are purposefully designed to be so sloppy that no one can inform the place the incompetence ends and the fraud would possibly start.
John Fund is national affairs reporter for National Review magazine.
