On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation into law that limits local governments’ ability to manually count ballots during elections.
The law went into effect immediately, according to ABC News. The legislation was created in response to Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors’ decision to end its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and tabulate election results by hand.
In response, California state lawmakers passed A.B. 969, which only allows hand-counting in specific scenarios (via ABC News):
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.
“It's not just impractical to hand-count, but it harms the election process. It will cost more and slow down our election results significantly,” Erin Mellon, Newsom’s communications director, told the outlet. “Unfounded conspiracy theories have undermined our elections. California is focused on ensuring free and fair elections.”
Shasta County Clerk Cathy Darling told ABC that the county is now barred from conducting a hand-count. The county’s plan to do so had reportedly cost over a million dollars since the contact with Dominion ended.
“Hand counting is a great tool for auditing. But, through this process of developing a hand-count system, we have only become more convinced that hand-counting at a large scale can be very expensive and very time-consuming, which brings into question whether or not we can meet deadlines that we need to meet in the certification process and the vote counting processes,” Allen said.
Allen said the county spent “a couple thousand” dollars to cancel the contract with Dominion. Now, the county will spend almost a million dollars to make a deal with Hart InterCivic for voting software and machines.
Shasta County Board of Supervisors President Patrick Jones said that the board was “still committed to implementing a hand count” regardless of the new law on the books.
“We made this decision before the legislature acted,” Jones said, and added 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.”