Los Angeles County - Registrar Recorder's Operations Center, 2006

Client: Los Angeles County

The Registrar Recorder – County Clerk Service Center is a 110,000-square-foot office and warehouse facility that handles all of the voting material for Los Angeles County. For every election the Service Center organizes and sends out voting booths and ballots to Los Angeles’ 5000 voting precincts.

This project is about housing and honoring the infrastructure of democracy. The people who work at the Los Angeles County Clerk/ Registrar Recorder are, in many ways, the enablers of democracy.

They handle, prepare, and maintain the specific tools of democracy. Those tools include all of the balloting equipment, all materials used in every voting station and ballot booth throughout the County of Los Angeles. All ballots are counted in this facility.

The number of staff at the facility varies greatly from the 40 full-time employees to up-to-600 part time (voting) seasonal staff. The space is capable of extreme fluctuation in staff, extreme activity in very compressed time periods, and many varied work configurations.

The build out includes 18,000 sq ft of office space for the Registrar Recorder staff, the storage capacity for over 1,200 pallets containing voting material, the storage capacity for 5,000 newly implemented digital vote recording machines, and facilities to count and process all of the votes associated with an election. The facility also houses birth, marriage, property, and death records for the County of Los Angeles.