The first county in California to abolish the use of voting machines was Shasta County.
Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday night to end the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems.
Let’s hope the winners of that vote start talking to other sane members of other California county boards about how they did it.
Don’t make light of this. These people had a lot of guts to do what they did because Dominion allegedly sues anybody that goes against them.
From Redding.com:
Jones joined Supervisors Chris Kelstrom and Kevin Crye to terminate the agreement, bucking the advice of acting CEO Patrick Minturn, who said it would cost the county at least $1 million to bring in a new electronic voting system and train employees.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELThe board’s majority agreed with those who spoke in favor of ending the contract and argued you can’t put a price tag on voter trust.
Tuesday’s Dominion vote came after a long public debate on the machines, including a tense exchange between Darling Allen and Supervisor Patrick Jones, who led the charge to end the county’s contract with Dominion.
A split Shasta County Board of Supervisors voted to terminate the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems after next month’s special election in the city of Shasta Lake.
“Shasta will be the first of 40 California counties that used Dominion in the November 2022 election to drop the voting system,” Shasta County Clerk/Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen told the Record Searchlight after Tuesday’s meeting.
Also on Tuesday, supervisors reaffirmed the county’s support of the Redding Rancheria’s plan to relocate Win-River Casino to freeway frontage property just south of Redding and voted to appoint Mary Williams as acting county executive officer effective Feb. 1.
Tuesday’s Dominion vote came after a long public debate on the machines, including a tense exchange between Darling Allen and Supervisor Patrick Jones, who led the charge to end the county’s contract with Dominion.
After a close vote, sanity won out.
In voting 3-2, supervisors directed staff to cancel the agreement. The contract states that only the CEO “and his/her designee,” or the county clerk and registrar of voters can terminate the agreement.
Many who spoke in support of terminating the contract called for an audit of past elections, specifically pointing to last June’s primary, when four far right, “non-establishment” candidates that they supported all lost convincingly to incumbents.
Jones, Crye and Kelstrom also suggested that the primary deserved a closer look. They didn’t mention last November’s election, which put Crye and Kelstrom on the board.
“Just because we’re all sitting up here and elected does not mean we had free and fair election every single time. And for me, watching that very closely, the 2022 primary election here in Shasta County, I saw lots of concerns,” Jones said without being specific.
In response to the issues raised in the Halderman study, the government agency CISA issued a report. CISA remarked on a number of severe concerns with the Dominion Voting Systems utilized in that state in this report.
The conclusion is that these technologies should never be employed in US elections due to severe system security and performance problems. In another life, I am a senior programmer, and I can tell you with complete confidence that I would write a program that would give whatever results the client wants, so long as their check doesn’t bounce. This is why I have always been against turning your paper ballot vote into a digital product, because once it becomes digital, there is no way to track your vote. The people running the IT system can do whatever they want with it.
