A California county ditched its vote counting machines. Now a supporter faces a recall election

REDDING, Calif. (AP) — Voters in Northern California’s rural Shasta County have twice voted for Donald Trump by wide margins while electing staunch conservatives to the local county board. They’ve even booted out some who weren’t deemed conservative enough.

But that string of victories at the ballot box has not been enough to instill 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 strongly Republican area.

A county known mostly for Lassen Volcanic National Park and views of the snow-capped peak of Mount Shasta abruptly got rid of its ballot-counting 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 directed 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 countywide elections that include dozens of races.

A mountain of criticism followed. In 2023, the Democratic-dominated Legislature passed a law that strictly limited ballot hand counts, short-circuiting any attempt to do that in Shasta’s municipal elections last fall. On Tuesday, voters get to have their say on the county’s direction since a slate of far-right conservatives who question the validity of elections 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 that voted to get rid of the voting machines.

The recall election has become a