Shasta county’s decision to move to a hand-count system has drawn support from the election denial movement
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...
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