California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation into law on Wednesday that will limit the ability of local governments to manually count ballots less than a year after one northern county’s governing board ditched its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and decided to tabulate results by hand.
Set to go into effect immediately, the law deals a blow to Shasta County’s conservative-majority Board of Supervisors, which voted 3-2 in January to cancel its contract with Dominion amid a flurry of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the company in the wake of the 2020 election, leaving it without a way to conduct elections for a time.
In response, state legislators introduced and overwhelmingly passed AB 969 in September, which allows hand-counting under narrow circumstances: during regularly scheduled elections in places with under 1,000 registered voters and special elections with fewer than 5,000 voters. It will also block counties from canceling contracts for voting systems in the future without a transition plan and a finalized agreement for a new state-approved system….
But speaking with ABC News on Wednesday night, Shasta County Board of Supervisors President Patrick Jones said that the supervisors were still committed to implementing a hand count regardless of what the law says.
“We made this decision before the legislature acted,” Jones said, adding that the board believes passing the law under an urgency statute that allows it to go into effect immediately violated the state’s constitution.
“If they want to allow us to have local control, the way that we should, over our elections, that would be fine, and no lawsuits would be necessary,” Jones said. “But if they try to stop us from hand counting, then there will be litigation.”