Official faces recall over vote counting
Shasta County nixed Dominion machines
REDDING, Calif. — Voters in Northern California’s rural Shasta County have twice voted for Donald Trump by wide margins while electing staunch conservatives to the local county board. They’ve even booted out some who weren’t deemed conservative enough.
But that string of victories at the ballot box has not been enough to instill confidence in the county’s election system — not when Trump and his allies have repeatedly spread false claims about rigged elections and voter fraud, even in the strongly Republican area.
A county known mostly for Lassen Volcanic National Park and views of the snow-capped peak of Mount Shasta abruptly got rid of its ballot-counting machines last year. Those machines were made by Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of debunked conspiracy theories about how Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
The conservative majority on the board of supervisors directed the county’s small election staff to count ballots by hand.
Experts say that’s an unrealistic task, given the tens of thousands of ballots returned in countywide elections that include dozens of races.
In 2023, the Democratic-dominated Legislature passed a law that strictly limited ballot hand counts, short-circuiting any attempt to do that in Shasta’s municipal elections last fall.
On Tuesday, voters get their say on the county’s direction since a slate of far-right conservatives who question the validity of elections took control of local government two years ago.
They will decide whether to recall Kevin Crye, a member of the conservative majority on the board of supervisors that voted to get rid of the voting machines. The election also has become a referendum on the push for hand-counting ballots. Voters are divided.
The trouble started after Trump disputed the 2020 results, prompting suspicion among his followers. That outrage wound up at the doorstep of the Shasta County registrar of voters, where dozens of skeptical election watchers would show up to question staff members as they were counting ballots.
The turmoil has made other residents question their once steady belief in how the county’s elections are run.
In Shasta County, a local commission charged with investigating election issues recently recommended the county defy state law and require hand-count ballots at each precinct.
Voters elected three far-right members to the five-member board of supervisors: Crye, Patrick Jones and Chris Kelstrom, and they formed a new majority.
Crye said his opponents have unfairly portrayed him as an extremist. Critics point to his decision last year to meet with Mike Lindell, the Mypillow CEO and Trump ally. Some voters took it as proof that Crye was a dyed-in-the-wool election denier. Crye said he met with Lindell because he was researching ballot hand counts.