The California Secretary of State has issued new rules for hand counting elections, in response to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors’ decision to dump Dominion Voting Systems and conduct hand tally elections. The process will be costly, and those costs are just beginning to make themselves known as there are an unknown number of as-yet-unseen expenditures. According to the new rules, counters must surrender their cell phones, cameras and other electronics, as well as pencils, pens and any other kind of marking device. They also must wear surgical gloves. Counting groups can only process 25 ballots at a time and each stack needs to be certified before they can move on to the next stack. The Secretary of State says manual tallies are “historically inaccurate”, so all ballots must be tabulated by a machine to verify the accuracy of the human counters.