This California county has decided to hand-count election ballots. How 19th century | Opinion

Other California counties have toyed with the idea of hand-counting election ballots, especially when denialism was at its peak following the 2020 election.

But now one California county has actually decided to make the switch — turning back the clock in a stunning show of bullheadedness.

The Board of Supervisors in Shasta County, a pocket of right-wing extremism in northern California, voted 3-2 to hand-count all ballots going forward — a process described as “exceptionally complex and error-prone” by the county’s top election official.

It’s the first county in California to take that misbegotten step, which plays right into the hands of conspiracy theorists who will never concede that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Let’s hope it’s the last county to do so.

Cancels Dominion Voting contract

Shasta County supervisors also terminated a contract with Dominion Voting Systems — the much-maligned company that’s been falsely accused of manipulating election results. It then agreed to spend $950,000 to enter into a contract for a different electronic voting system, according to the Redding Record Searchlight.

Because both state and federal law require that an electronic voting system be available to voters with disabilities, the county won’t be able to ditch machines altogether.

So, it will layer additional costs on top of paying for machines.

For a big election, hand-counting ballots will require hiring 1,300 temporary employees and will cost an estimated $1.6 million, according to a report prepared by Shasta County Clerk Cathy Darling Allen. That doesn’t include the cost of adding space to count as many as 95,000 ballots, which is the expected turnout in a presidential election.

Allen has been upfront in her opposition to the board’s decision.

“That path puts each future election at risk of failure,” she wrote in her report, “inviting litigation, threatening election results and undermining confidence in the county’s elections.”

Modern-day Luddites?

Hand-counting is used in some counties in the U.S., but they are much smaller and their ballots are shorter than California’s, which can include a multitude of candidates and ballot measures.

So why do it?

We aren’t talking about a bunch of modern-day Luddites. There have been no reports of Shasta County residents demanding that schools stop using scanning machines to score tests or that banks dismantle all ATMs and go back to counting out cash for customers.

This is specifically directed at voting machines — especially at Dominion machines. That’s absurd, especially given information that’s come to light in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Attorneys uncovered documents showing that not even Fox hosts believed the lies that Dominion voting machines had “stolen” the election from Donald Trump.

And now, on account of a debunked conspiracy theory, Shasta County officials want to saddle taxpayers with millions of dollars in unnecessary expenditures.

And for what? A system that will not be nearly as fail-safe as the one it already had?

There’s a reason machines were invented to take on the monotonous tasks that we humans often flub up because we’re in a hurry, we’re distracted, maybe we were up too late the night before.

“Hand-counting is a very tedious and detail-oriented process,” Allen wrote. “As workers become fatigued, more mistakes will be made, so it is important to limit the time a manual tally team works and require breaks.”

Machines are just better at that type of work, yet Shasta County’s board majority stubbornly clings to the discredited idea that they are somehow rigged. (Though not, conveniently, when it comes to counting votes that put them in office.)

It’s not their only misstep. The board majority recently decided to offer the job of county executive officer to Chriss Street, only to rescind it when it learned he was a leader of a group called New California, which wants to secede from “old California” and form a 51st state.

So why should those of us who vote in Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Fresno or Modesto care how Shasta County runs its elections?

For one thing, this is an attempt to give truth to the lie that California’s elections are corrupt. That has to be called out wherever it happens.

Also, our system of voting should be based on best practices — not changed on a whim because a few elected officials want to cater to their political cronies. Voters should be protected from that no matter where they live.

Besides, what guarantee is there that disgruntled voters are going to trust a manual tally any more than a machine count?

Shasta County is trying to fix something that wasn’t broken as it gins up mistrust in the very democratic institutions it was tasked to uphold.

That’s spectacularly foolish — and something California’s 57 other counties should never repeat.