California lawmakers voted Friday to limit when local governments can count election ballots by hand, a move aimed at a rural Northern California county that canceled its contract with Dominion Voting Systems amid unsubstantiated allegations of fraud by authorities.

former

Republican

former

President

Donald

Trump and his allies.

The Shasta County Board of Supervisors, which is controlled by a conservative majority, voted in January to abolish voting machines used to produce hand-marked ballots for its approximately 111,000 registered voters. County supervisors said there had been a loss of public confidence in the machines of Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been at the center of discredited conspiracy theories since the 2020 presidential election.

At the time, leaders had no plan for how the district would conduct future elections, including the March 2024 Republican presidential primary in delegate-rich California, which could be key in deciding who wins the Republican nomination. The province had prepared to manually count ballots for the next election on November 7

2023,

to fill seats on the school board and fire district, and to determine the fate of two ballot measures.

On Friday, the California Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, essentially voted to prevent Shasta County officials from using hand counting to count votes. The bill, which was approved by two-thirds of lawmakers in both chambers, would allow hand counts by local election officials only under limited circumstances. The exceptions apply to regularly scheduled elections with fewer than 1,000 eligible registered voters and special elections with fewer than 5,000 eligible voters.

Hand counts are complex, inaccurate, expensive and labor-intensive, said Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat who authored the bill and is a former local elections official. Research has consistently shown that people are poor at performing repetitive tasks.

The bill now goes to the Democratic Administration. Gavin Newsom.

The battle for voting machines is divided

the

Shasta County, a largely rural area where Redding is the largest city with 93,000 residents

people

.

Should Newsom sign the bill, County Clerk Cathy Darling Allen said the county will have the equipment it needs to count votes in the upcoming election. Even though the county got rid of Dominion voting machines, local leaders authorized it to purchase equipment needed to comply with federal laws for voters with disabilities. The purchased system, made by Hart InterCivic, includes scanners that can display votes electronically.

Darling Allen said in an email that she hopes Newsom signs it, calling it a common-sense protection for all California voters.

Patrick Henry Jones, chairman of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, said Friday that the county would take action to block the bill if Newsom were to sign it. He said government officials cannot guarantee that these machines have not been tampered with.

“The state is now trying to prevent us from holding free and fair elections without any outside influence,” he said.

Pellerin said the argument that voting systems can be easily hacked is a fallacy.

It is illegal for any part of a voting system to be connected to the Internet at any time, and no part of the voting system shall receive or transmit any wireless communications or wireless data transmissions,” she said, adding that California election standards are in effect are. some of the strictest voting system standards in the country.

Trump and his allies have pushed county officials across the country to embrace hand counts amid conspiracy theories surrounding voting equipment, particularly those manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. But few provinces have agreed to do this. Last month, Mohave County in northwestern Arizona rejected a plan to manually count ballots, saying it would have cost $1.1 million.

Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News after the 2020 presidential election, claiming the news agency damaged its reputation by amplifying conspiracy theories that the company’s voting machines had rigged the election in favor of the Democratic President.

Joe

Biden. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to settle the lawsuit. The judge in the case found that it was CRYSTAL clear that none of the allegations about Dominion’s machines were true.

Although manual counting of ballots occurs in some parts of the United States, this typically occurs in small jurisdictions with a small number of registered voters. However, manual counting is often used as part of post-election testing to check that machines are counting ballots correctly, but only a small proportion of ballots are counted manually.

Election experts argue that it is unrealistic to think that officials in large jurisdictions, with tens or hundreds of thousands of voters, could count all their ballots by hand and quickly report the results, since ballots often span dozens of races.

For example, Cobb County, Georgia, conducted a state-mandated hand count after the 2020 election. According to local election officials, it took hundreds of people five days to count votes for president alone on about 397,000 ballots. To count every race on every ballot using the same procedures, officially estimated,

It

would have lasted 100 days.

Conducting something like a full hand count in a large jurisdiction is not the way to put those conspiracy theories aside,” said Gowri Ramachandran, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. ‘It’s a way to do that. wasting a lot of money and possibly causing chaos.

Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News after the 2020 presidential election, claiming the news agency damaged its reputation by amplifying conspiracy theories that the company’s voting machines had rigged the election in favor of Democratic President Joe Biden. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million

settle the lawsuit

.