Meet Dean Logan, the dean of LA County election snafus

The silver lining in the chaos and confusion around the Los Angeles mayor’s race is that California’s system of counting votes has been exposed 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 even though the one-party Democratic machine that set up this system won’t repeal it, some relief is about to appear.  

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court may rule that states will not be able to count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. That would negate California’s insane practice of counting such ballots up to seven days after the election, in some cases without a postmark or even a proper voter signature.

A voter ID ballot initiative has finally qualified for the November ballot. It would require voters to show a government-issued ID at the polls, while mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an official ID.  Election officials would be required to take steps verifying the citizenship status of voters.

Lawsuits will also put pressure on cleaning up the state’s bloated and inaccurate voter registration rolls. Bill Essayli, the federal prosecutor for Los Angeles,  who has announced his office has “multiple election fraud investigations underway” is also suing California to allow an audit of its rolls and that case will soon reach the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court. “If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed,” Essayli said on X. “What are they afraid of?” 

Another lawsuit filed last month by the public interest group Judicial Watch claims there are 873,000 “ghost” voters on the rolls who are felons, have moved, died, or don’t have a real address but are still getting mail-in ballots.

Finally, the bungled Los Angeles mayoral election has finally provided a face that personifies the election incompetence, endless vote counting and bureaucratic bungling endemic in California elections.  

That would 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 almost no oversight or accountability.

Before coming to LA, Logan was infamously known for his role in discovering previously unknown ballots several times 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 won by 133 votes out of 2.9 million cast after several suspicious recounts. 

Logan came under special scrutiny because, unlike most career election officials, 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 is now the state’s Democratic governor, called it “public and embarrassing.”  

The decision to count those ballots “was the first step in creating Washington’s one party rule in Olympia,” former KVI Radio talk show host John Carlson told me.

In LA, it took Logan less than a year to slam into his first scandal, and others have followed.

His office presided over a disaster that saw nearly 50,000 ballots initially uncounted in 2008; a controversial 2010 recount in which Kamala Harris won her squeaker race for Attorney General on the basis of — surprise! — 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 ballot boxes an independent audit found could be opened without detection.

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 suit survived a motion to dismiss, but 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 office did anything wrong.) Ultimately, Gascon was thrown out of office in 2024, receiving only 39% of the vote.

After nearly 25 years of being at the center of one disaster after another,  even Logan appears tired. He told The Atlantic magazine this month that a “political narrative” by people who want to “to take shots at the process” is behind the criticism of his office. 

He, of course, bears no responsibility.

The issue isn’t whether there was blatant fraud in Los Angeles this month.  The issue is that absolutely no one overseeing the election has any incentive to find out. 

Right now, the voting systems in both LA and California are purposefully designed to be so sloppy that no one can tell where the incompetence ends and the fraud might begin. 

John Fund is national affairs reporter for National Review magazine.