In Shasta county, California, voters will decide this week on a school board race, the formation of a new fire department and a local tax. What observers in California and across the US are watching most is not what they will choose – but how their votes will be counted.
In the past months, Shasta has come to play an outsize role nationally as officials in this rural region of northern California have taken center stage in the election denial movement, which proposes “fixes” like the sole use of manual tallies to enhance “election integrity” based on the lie that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump.
For much of the year, the far-right majority of the Shasta board of supervisors, the county’s five-person governing body, has focused its governing efforts on throwing out voting machines and instituting a hand-count system.
The board pushed ahead with the project despite strong concerns from the county registrar of voters.
A new state law, written in response to the developments in Shasta, barred elections offices from using manual tallies on an established election date in contests with more than 1,000 voters and, in the event of a special election, in contests with more than 5,000 voters.
With the election just a few days away, Shasta’s far-right supervisors have fostered confusion about how votes will be tallied, insisting they can use the hand-count system regardless of the new law. The board chair, Patrick Jones, has said the county will sue if the state interferes.
A non-partisan group of voting-rights organizations has expressed “grave concerns” about the county’s plans and requested in a letter to California’s top voting official that her office conduct in-person monitoring of elections in November and the presidential primary in 2024. The letter prompted a warning from the secretary of state, Shirley Weber, to the county’s board of supervisors.
“I expect that you will uphold your obligation to comply with the law,” Weber wrote in a letter to the county. “Failing that, my office stands ready to take any actions necessary to ensure that Shasta county conducts all elections in accordance with state law.”
Cathy Darling Allen, the county’s elected registrar of voters, has said repeatedly that her office will follow the law. She cautioned the board several times in recent months that the creation of a hand-counting system was expensive and would result in a time-consuming process that is “exceptionally complex and error prone”.
In previous elections, the county’s 112,000 voters’ ballots were tabulated using voting machines from Dominion, the company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, and the county would afterward conduct an audit in which 1% of ballots were counted by hand.
Allen says her office has worked nonstop in recent months to create the new voting system desired by the board. But the passage of AB969, which effectively bans manual tallies in most cases, will prevent her office from using that system.
The county board of supervisors’ far-right majority – Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom – have continued to express opposition to the regulation. Jones has argued – incorrectly, according to the state – that it does not apply to Shasta because it was signed into law after the county’s move toward hand-counting, and that he expects the registrar of voters to use that system.
“If [Allen] changes her mind and feels that the state, with the passing of AB969, allows her for electronic tabulation, then, obviously, we’re going to have a conflict with the majority of the Shasta county supervisors that set a different policy with that,” he said. “So, it’ll get interesting very quickly.”
The Shasta Scout, a local news outlet, reported last week that Jones “balked” when asked if he would follow state election laws. “We’ll see what happens … That remains to be decided, and hopefully in a court of law,” he said.
Allen has pledged to move forward with electronic tabulation, she said, as required by law. But her office has faced hostility from residents who believe there is widespread voter fraud, and from the far-right supervisors themselves.
In a tense meeting this week, Jones accused Allen of lying to the board about the purchase of machines earlier this year that are capable of electronically tallying ballots.
Allen pushed back against Jones’s accusations. “I have been clear and transparent in all of my communications. At no point in my career as a public servant and elected official can I recall being treated as poorly and unprofessionally as I have been over the last year. It must stop,” she said.
Last month, Allen said her priority was ensuring the “voices of Shasta county are heard and their votes are counted the way they were cast and the rest is a lot of noise”.
“[What I’m] focusing on is doing the job I was elected to do – and all my staff took oaths to serve the community – transparently,” she said. “We’re continuing to do that work and it feels like the board is going to continue to try to attack and damage and destroy the election process in our county.”
