Supervisors Expected To Approve Hiring Of More Staff To Conduct Hand Counted Elections

Another seven full-time employees will likely be approved Tuesday to work in the Shasta County Elections Department in the daunting upcoming task of conducting an election with a full hand count of ballots. The Shasta County Board of Supervisors decided to conduct full manual tally elections, which is not done in any county in the United States with nearly as many voters as Shasta County has. The board already had to approve an increase of more than $800,000 to the Elections Department to purchase new voting equipment to serve the disabled after dumping the contract with Dominion. Whatever voting system put together by the county will still need the approval of the California Secretary of State’s Office, which is in the process of crafting new regulations just for this unprecedented experiment of primitive voting in modern times. The next election is in November.