The final local results of Tuesday’s election may be a long time coming due to what newly appointed Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Tom Toller calls “a printing anomaly”. Ink overspray on many mail-in ballots is preventing scanning equipment from reading them, although the problem is not visible to the naked eye. Fixing them is a painstaking process, but Toller says it’s worth it to gain the public’s trust in the election results. So far about half of the mail-in and drop-off ballots have proven to be faulty and in need of the extra attention.
County Elections Chief Toller says that before he took the job and started working in the trenches, he shared the suspicions of some people who accused the department of wrongdoing, but his opinion has since made an about-face. On Monday he made an appeal to the public to please be nice to poll workers and elections office staff. Toller says it’s a mostly thankless job with not enough compensation and workers at the polling stations and the elections office deserve gratitude, not misdirected bad attitudes.
A number of elections workers have quit, including a man who was aggressively berated by members of the public and said the last straw was a confrontation with County Supervisor Kevin Crye. Elections Chief Tom Toller said he was aware of some complaints about Crye’s behavior, but said he had not warned or admonished him about it.
-Steve Gibson