. they got rid of our plan to hand count paper ballotts but were still terrified i guess so they installed bars.
. they got rid of our plan to hand count paper ballotts but were still terrified i guess so they installed bars.
which came first ?
the chicken or the egg ?
The election office
The California county where far-right officials tried to upend voting
Fears of election night unrest arose amid dispute with ultra-conservatives who insisted county use hand-count system for ‘election integrity’
The fight for democracy is supported by
guardian.org
The Shasta county elections office was prepared for a night unlike any other. On the evening of this November’s special election, sheriff’s deputies stood inside as workers processed ballots that would decide a school board race and the fate of a proposed fire department.
Security guards were stationed outside the building in Redding, the county seat, while across Shasta, observers from the California secretary of state’s office had come to ensure the election ran smoothly.
Before 2020, a special election in the small northern California county of 180,000 would never have attracted this level of attention – or concern. But this rural region has risen to national prominence for its far-right politics, particularly after local officials, driven by lies about election fraud, opted to throw out Dominion voting machines and order the creation of a hand-count system.
State lawmakers, a majority of whom are Democrats, thwarted those plans with the passage of a bill in October preventing counties from using manual tallies in most elections.
But in the days leading up to the election,
the chair of the Shasta board of supervisors
insisted
the county would use that system anyway.
The tensions around the election fueled fears of political unrest, and confusion about how 7 November would unfold. Cathy Darling Allen, the county’s registrar of voters who had said repeatedly that her office would follow the law, didn’t know what the day would bring. One of the only Democratic officials in the area, she was starkly opposed to a hand count and had been at odds with the board for months.
“Given the political rhetoric in our community over the last six months, I just didn’t know what to expect. We tried to prepare for as many contingencies as we could,” Allen said. “Ten years ago I never thought I’d have to strategize how to protect my staff.”
•••
Allen has been subjected to harassment, she said, and routinely maligned by the board of supervisors as the far-right movement cemented its power in local politics. In recent years, politically moderate public officials have faced bullying, intimidation and threats.
Her department had been readying itself for the election all year, since the ultra-conservative majority upended the county voting system without a replacement and instructed Allen to create an entirely new hand-count method.
Hand counts are favored by election deniers as a “fix” to enhance “election integrity” based on the lie that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump. But research has shown that hand-counting is time-consuming and less accurate than machine tabulation in the US. (Some other countries also count ballots by hand for elections with no major problems.)