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“Are you here to vote?” Arianna asked two men and a woman approaching the basement entrance to the Hollywood Hotel’s ballroom in Los Angeles. “Just go in and make a right. Tell them if you’re dropping off your ballot so you don’t have to wait.” In less than 15 minutes, the three voters strode back out of the doorway and up the steps to the street, “I Voted” stickers on display. 

“There really are so many ways to safely vote here in LA County,” Arianna, a 30-year-old poll volunteer, told WhoWhatWhy. “In my opinion, there really is no good excuse to not get out there and exercise your right to vote.” 

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In Los Angeles, election officials have already received 2.1 million ballots. In Orange County, the figure is nearing 750,000. And across the United States, more than 80 million ballots have been cast. 

Do the sky-high early voting numbers mean we'll see record turnout in 2020?

They're certainly a good sign, experts say. But thanks to California's voter-friendly laws, it takes weeks to tally every ballot, and that means we may not know the precise turnout figures until after Thanksgiving.

Millions of ballots have already arrived at counting centers, but election officials still have to process them. That involves checking signatures, tallying write-in votes and inspecting damaged ballots.

Other votes will arrive on election night. In Los Angeles, some are transported to counting centers by sheriff's deputies in helicopters and on boats.

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More than a third of California voters have returned their ballots with less than a week before the election deadline. 

The latest numbers from Political Data Inc show 36% of California ballots have been returned as of Tuesday. 

“It’s going to really help process those ballots more rapidly and get us to final election results sooner than later,” Kim Alexander with the California Voting Foundation said. 

Results from those ballots aren’t being tallied up, they won’t be until Nov. 3.

County elections officials across the state are processing the incoming ballots to make sure they have verified signatures and are able to be scanned.

“Once the polls close, those ballots that are in house that have already been processed are the very first ballots that get counted,” Alexander said. 

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In the dramatic midterm elections of 2018, when the fate of the House and Senate hung in the balance and a new governor was about to be enthroned, two of every three votes tallied in California were cast via mail-in ballots rather than by in-person voting —even in the absence of a deadly pandemic.

By-mail voting has long played a dominant role in Golden State democracy, so the ballot-in-every-mailbox experiment currently underway is not so much revolution as evolution. But understanding the particulars of what happened to mail ballots in California’s 2018 election — how many were sent to voters, how many were never returned, how many were rejected and why? — can help prepare for an unprecedented Nov. 3, when counting commences on what may well be the weirdest Election Day in American history.