. they got rid of our plan to hand count paper ballotts but were still terrified i guess so they installed bars.
Posted on 01/30/2024 8:07:41 AM PST by cuz1961
Assistant Registrar of Voters Joanna Francescut says new elections security measures were funded largely to prepare for the county’s previous plan to hand count the vote. A new state law now makes a manual tally of Shasta County’s votes illegal.
Since the last general election, the Shasta County Elections Office has implemented new security measures, including a tall wrought-iron fence at the Elections Office. Assistant County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Joanna Francescut explains what new security measures are in place, how they were funded, and why they were needed. Her responses have been shortened and paraphrased.
Scout: There are new gates up at the Elections Office? Can you explain why? That fencing isn’t actually new. We just extended it from a half gate to a full gate after county supervisors voted to institute a manual tally in Shasta County. We needed a secure and observable space for hand counting those votes to comply with the supervisors’ directive.
We already had a half gate up in that space and when we looked at options to create a more secure and observable space during the hand count, our options were to either put up a wall with windows or extend the gate upward. Since we only lease this space, we try to invest as little county funds into it as possible and putting in a wall with windows would have required moving the sprinkler system. So we went with the quickest, least expensive route, which was to change the fence from a half fence to a full fence.
(Excerpt) Read more at shastascout.org ...
. 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.)
Beat me to it.
“ultra conservative” lol.
The mass media never discovers “ultra liberals”—they are rarer than Unicorns.
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