REDDING, Calif. — Voters in Northern California’s rural Shasta County voted twice for Donald Trump by large margins, electing staunch conservatives to local county government. They even kicked out some who were not considered conservative enough.
But that string of victories at the ballot box hasn’t been enough to inspire confidence in the county’s election system — not when Trump and his allies have repeatedly spread false claims about rigged elections and voter fraud, even in the heavily Republican area.
A county best known for Lassen Volcanic National Park and views of the snow-capped peak of Mount Shasta abruptly got rid of its voting machines last year. Those machines were made by Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of debunked conspiracy theories about how Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
The conservative majority on the Board of Supervisors ordered the county’s small election staff to count ballots by hand. Experts say that’s an unrealistic task given the tens of thousands of ballots returned in provincial elections involving dozens of races.
A mountain of criticism followed. In 2023, the Democratic-dominated Legislature passed a law that strictly limited the number of ballots, short-circuiting any attempt to do so in Shasta’s municipal elections last fall. Voters will have their say on Tuesday on the province’s direction since a series of far-right conservatives questioning the validity of the election took control of local government two years ago.
They will decide whether to recall Kevin Crye, a member of the conservative majority on the Board of Supervisors who voted to abolish the voting machines.
The recall election has become a referendum not only for Crye, who won his seat in 2022 by 90 votes, but also for the push for hand-counting of ballots, which is gaining popularity in rural America in response to unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud. to ballot counting machines.
Voters are divided voters.
Mark Oliver stood on a busy street corner in the rain on a recent cold afternoon, holding a sign urging people to vote “yes” on the recall. He has lived in the province for thirty years and has never been involved in local politics before.
“I feel like if we’re not engaged, you’re going to have these types of extremists running around here,” he said.
The trouble started after Trump disputed the 2020 results, raising suspicion among his followers. Because elections are held primarily at the local level, that outrage ended up at the Shasta County Voter Registrar’s Office, where dozens of skeptical election observers showed up to question staff members as they were counting ballots.
In June 2022, when many of the far-right candidates were losing in local primaries, a group of people walked into the back door of the elections office and started yelling at the clerk, said Joanna Francescut, the assistant registrar of voters.
“I felt like they were trying to intimidate us because we were doing our job,” Francescut said.
The unrest has left other residents questioning their once firm belief in the way elections are conducted in the province.
Ann Brassfield, a retired border agent, said she previously helped with the county elections office and “can’t really say I’ve seen anything illegal happen.”
Now Brassfield, who said she supports Crye because he is a Christian and has always treated her fairly, says she doesn’t know what to believe.
“I feel like no one knows at this point except God,” she said.
The recall election could provide a clue to rural America’s response to the false election claims Trump and his allies have peddled since he lost his reelection bid. That drumbeat has had a deep impact on conservative voters. Polls consistently show that a solid majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected.
The effects have also played out in other conservative regions.
In Gillespie County, Texas, where the entire election staff resigned just months before the 2022 midterm elections, volunteers plan to hand-count ballots from Tuesday’s primary. In New Hampshire, at least a dozen communities will debate hand counts at their annual town meetings in March. A group of Republicans in North Dakota are collecting signatures for a November ballot measure that would, among other things, require manual counting of ballots statewide.
In Shasta County, a local commission charged with investigating election issues recently recommended that the county defy state law and require that ballots be counted by hand at each precinct. A staff report alleged that the United States and Shasta County “have been victims of a coordinated multi-state conspiracy to cheat the 2020 general election using voting machines.”
As in other places, mistrust of government in the county increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, as schools and most businesses closed and the state’s Democratic-dominated government mandated mask-wearing and vaccines in certain situations. A group calling itself a militia began turning up the temperature at public gatherings. During a meeting, a man told the supervisors: “You have made bullets expensive. But luckily for you, ropes are reusable.”
“When these guys learned about COVID and mandates and masks and closing schools and closing businesses, everything changed. And it just turned us upside down,” said Dana Silberstein, who grew up in Redding and is helping organize the recall.
Voters elected three far-right members to the five-member Board of Supervisors: Patrick Jones, Chris Kelstrom and Crye, forming a new majority. Recall organizers said they are targeting Crye because the other two majority members are up for re-election in November, while Crye has two years left in his term.
Crye, a Trump supporter, is cautious about his statements about the former president’s election and denies claims. When asked if he believes the 2020 White House election was stolen, he said, “I don’t have the expertise or knowledge to say one way or the other.”
He said he prefers counting ballots by hand because “one person can influence a handful of votes. One person with a machine can influence thousands.”
He said his biggest concern is about election fraud on the county’s voter registration lists, including ballots printed for people who recently died. He said his opponents have wrongly portrayed him as an extremist.
“I feel like if I raise these concerns, they want to put a tinfoil hat on me and say I’m an anarchist or an insurrectionist,” Crye said.
Election officials across the country routinely compare voter registration systems to death certificates. In some cases, voters die after casting an early ballot. In rare cases of fraud, a voter will vote for a deceased person – perhaps if he or she wants to honor the wishes of a loved one who has recently passed away. The Shasta County district attorney said it could find no voter fraud cases filed in the county in the past decade.
A native of the province and owner of several local businesses, Crye has endeared himself to the community in part by freely giving out his cellphone number. When Jason Miller posted a lengthy rant on Facebook complaining about crime near his restaurant in Redding, he said Crye contacted him and raised the issue with police.
‘Kevin answers the phone. It’s like he’s responsible for what he does,” Miller said. “If you take that away from us… things won’t go well in Shasta County.”
Critics see Crye differently. They point to his decision last year to meet with Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and Trump ally who has traveled the country spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines. The meeting infuriated some voters, who took it as evidence that Crye was a dyed-in-the-wool election denier.
“They found that path that they’re on and it’s the Trump playbook: Just disrupt everything,” said Charlie Menoher, a retired school district superintendent who helped organize the recall and served three terms on the board. of regulators in the early 1990s.
Crye said he met with Lindell because he was researching ballot counting and insists Lindell did not persuade him to get rid of the Dominion voting machines.
“All I wanted in this whole process was transparency and truth,” Crye said.
He criticized the recall as a political power play by Democrats. The committee that organized it is made up of experienced Democratic political operatives: Silberstein was the spokesperson for former Washington state Gov. Gary Locke, and Judy Salter was a former staffer for the late U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. Silberstein and Salter live in Shasta County.
Organizers note that more than half of the people who signed the recall petition were either registered Republicans or not registered with a political party, with about 23% of the signatures coming from Republican voters.
“Shifting the balance of power within that governance is critical to returning us to stable, stable, rational and fiscally responsible governance,” Silberstein said.
No matter what happens Tuesday, Crye said he can still hold his wife’s hand as they take a walk across Redding’s Sundial Bridge. Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, it is known for its spire that marks the time on sunny summer days with a shadow creeping along the banks of the Sacramento River.
“I will be able to hold my head very high knowing that I served what I believed until the very end,” he said.
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