In Shasta county, a conservative stronghold of 180,000 in the far north of blue California, a new vision for elections is taking shape: paper ballots, no machines and results tallied entirely by hand.

It’s a vision predicated on the false belief that voting machines helped to steal the presidency from Donald Trump, and that the systems by which millions of Americans vote are unsafe. But in Shasta, they just might make that vision reality.

Shasta became a hotbed for far-right politics in the pandemic years, and election deniers have found allies on the county’s governing body, the board of supervisors. In March the board’s hard-right majority cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud.

Last week the supervisors took steps to replace it with a hand-count system. The county ended its contract with Dominion before establishing a replacement and now, with a potential special election months away and the presidential primary a year out, it has no voting system in place as it embarks on a plan to create an entirely new system from scratch.

The registrar of voters, the elected official who oversees voting in the county, warned it would be a challenging and time-consuming effort – requiring more than 1,200 new workers at a cost of at least $1.6m – and still far less accurate than the machines the county has used for years.

The very supervisors who claim Dominion machines are not to be trusted were elected by voters using those same machines, several people pointed out.

Cathy Darling Allen, the registrar of voters, reminded the board that state law requires anyone handling ballots be a county employee who has undergone fingerprinting and a background check, meaning volunteers are not an option. The county, which currently employs more than 2,000 people, would need at least 1,200 additional temporary employees, the funding for their pay, and a space large enough to accommodate them.

Her office laid out its concerns in an analysis provided to the board, which warned that a manual tally is “exceptionally complex and error prone” and would “introduce very serious risk” that the county would miss state deadlines, and could ultimately disenfranchise voters.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/04/far-right-county-throws-out-voting-machines-with-nothing-to-replace-them?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other