Election Day eve offers a timely opportunity for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office to pull back the curtain for a video walk-through of its five mobile vote centers. The trailers house the technology enabling voters to cast ballots virtually anywhere in the county, particularly in underserved areas.
The video, posted last week, is the latest episode in the county’s “Meet the Fleet” series, described as “the show that brings you inside the cab and under the hood of some of the biggest and baddest vehicles of the Los Angeles County fleet.” Previous installations have featured “fire dozers,” heavy rescue gear and a mobile vaccine van.
For this walk-through, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan and video host Ryan ZumMallen discuss the purpose of the mobile vote centers, each of which is pulled by a full-size pickup. The trailers are 8 feet wide, 11 feet tall, and 29 feet long and weigh 3 ½ tons.
The intent is to accommodate voters and “bring the in-person voting experience straight to them,” ZumMallen says.
Logan said the voting trailers are an outgrowth of the county’s Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) initiative, a modernization project that was rolled out in 2009. The county’s assistant registrar-recorder/county clerk, Aman Bhullar, who is also the department’s chief information officer, explained VSAP in an interview with Industry Insider — California in July 2022.
Logan says in the video that Los Angeles County had seen the success of some other communities that had employed the voting trailers, and he decided to give it a try. He noted that the visibility of the mobile voting units might have drawn some county residents to vote when they might not have otherwise. The centers have gone to rural areas, homeless encampments, assisted-living facilities and other locations where voters might not have ready access to a nearby polling place.
Each of the five trailers can hold 10 ballot-marking devices, which function in the same way as voting machines at fixed polling places, ZumMallen explains in the video. Those staffing the trailers have access to electronic poll books, and each trailer has Internet connectivity with an independent router “so processing is done fast,” he said. The units also have onboard generators and air conditioning.
“They’re ready to go, with their crew,” Logan says. “We just put ’em on the road to wherever they’re most needed.”
L.A. County Voting Trailers Aim to Ensure Election Access Without a Hitch
The county has deployed five mobile voting centers, easing access for those who might have geographic or physical challenges making their way to a traditional polling place.
