Kern to retain voting system
BAKERSFIELD — Despite protests by some residents, the Kern County Board of Supervisors, on Tuesday, unanimously approved a contract amendment to continue use of Dominion Voting Systems election equipment for 2022.
The Dominion equipment has been cited, and repeatedly refuted, in Republican allegations regarding the validity of the 2020 election.
Kern County has used Dominion Voting Systems equipment in conducting its elections since 2016, when it first purchased tabulating machines and prepaid five years’ licensing for their use, according to the staff report.
The county later added ballot-marking equipment for polling sites and vote-by-mail software.
The Board approved an amendment to the contract to extend the license to use the equipment for another year, for $224,316, retroactive to Jan. 1.
The amendment is necessary to conduct the 2022 elections, Auditor-Controller Mary Bedard said.
The department believed the original contract was effective on a year-by-year basis, after the initial prepaid fiveyear period. However, County counsel recommended an amendment to the contract to formalize that condition, she said.
Dominion is one of three election equipment companies certified by the state to conduct elections in California. While the county could switch to one of the others in the future, it is too late to do so in time for the June primary.
Many of those who spoke during the meeting, said they had lost confidence in the election process and repeated claims that have been previously refuted about the Dominion machines and the 2020 elections.
Several of those arguing against the Dominion contract
cited concerns regarding security with those, or other, electronic election equipment.
“In my opinion, and that of many experts, our election system is corrupt and these machines can not be trusted,” Debbie Muell said.
Tom Pavich, Kern County coordinator of the Election Integrity Project, said the county should, instead of paying for the Dominion licenses, pay for temporary employees to hand-count all the ballots.
Bedard said electronic tabulating equipment is necessary, as it is not possible to correctly count the huge number of ballots received in time to certify a typical election.
“We have hundreds of thousands of ballots,” she said. “We would not be able to certify in time.”
Additionally, machines of different types have been used to tabulate votes going back some 50 years. Even the old paper punch-ballots were counted by machines.
In answer to one allegation by critics, Bedard said the Dominion machines are not connected to the Internet, providing a pathway for hacking. They may, at times, be connected to an internal network, but not to anything outside the elections department.
Although some Supervisors acknowledged concerns regarding election integrity, they said they believed the system is working.
It’s undeniable that many people have concerns about the accuracy and the credibility of the results (with Dominion machines),” Supervisor Mike Maggard said. “Every way I know to ask, I have asked and it has been confirmed to me that we have accurate results in Kern County. I’m sorry that a confluence of events has caused people to not trust the system.”