LA County opens early voting locations as Calif GOP pushes mail-in

LOS ANGELES – LA County’s chief elections official Dean Logan announced that his office has opened 108 in-person early voting locations county wide Saturday morning. Logan says that coronavirus safety protocols are in effect including mandatory mask requirements and social distancing.

This as statewide officials prepare for the September 14 recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom.

Speaking to KABC7 Los Angeles, Logan said that for voters who need to find the location closest to them, that process has been made easier.

“We have a lookup feature on our website at lavote.net,” Logan said in an interview with ABC7. “If you’re on your smartphone, you can even navigate to wherever the closest location is.

“And we’ve also mailed postcards to every registered voter, with a list of the locations that are closest to where they live,” Logan added. “But, again, they’re not limited to those locations. They can go anywhere in the county.”

As LA County gears up the in-person voting effort, California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson announced that party officials have launched a campaign to get the Republican voters in the Golden State to return their mail-in ballots. The California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber‘s office has mailed out approximately 22 million ballots last month to registered voters for the September 14 recall election.

The Republican party push comes as a recent Public Policy Institute of California Poll showed that Governor Gavin Newsom is likely to survive the recall efforts. Fifty-three percent of adults and likely voters approve of Gavin Newsom’s job performance as governor, similar to levels throughout 2021 so far.

Three in four Democrats approve of Governor Newsom, while more than eight in ten Republicans disapprove. Women are much more likely than men to approve, and residents in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are much more likely than those elsewhere to approve of his performance. 

Reuters reported Friday that Republicans will roll out videos on its digital platforms showing Republican Party officials mailing their ballots and urging supporters to vote early in the Sept. 14 election, according to footage seen exclusively by Reuters and interviews with party leaders.

Reuters also noted that speaking on background privately, California's Republicans' leadership acknowledged that false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election by former President Donald Trump and others in large part created the reticence about mail-in voting.

"It's a trust but verify strategy," Party Chairwoman Patterson told Reuters. "We want to make sure that they have confidence in the election process, and we want to make sure that they know there are different ways that they can vote."

Patterson said she planned to mail her ballot.