California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 969 on Oct. 4 to limit the ability of local governments to manually count ballots, according to an Oct. 5 article from ABC 7 KRCR.
The bill will prohibit any election officials from performing a manual vote 154 days in advance of an election if there are more than 1,000 registered voters eligible to participate, according to the California Legislative Information.
The bill also prohibits a county’s board of supervisors from terminating an existing voting system contract without a transition plan and a replacement contract in place, according to Legiscan.
Gail Pellerin, State Assembly Member in the 28th Assembly District, wrote the bill and said every state in California has gone through the process of purchasing a state-qualified federally certified voting system that adheres to voting system standards.
“It’s a lot more secure, accurate, transparent, accessible and complies with the Help America Vote Act,” Pellerin said. “There’s a lot more things we vote on now compared to 50 years back, and to do a hand count of a county the size of Shasta is time-consuming, costly and inaccurate.”
The Help America Vote Act, signed on October 29, 2002, by President Bush, helped in creating a new federal agency to improve election administration and replace outdated voting systems.
Pellerin also said AB 969 will keep the status quo and democracy safe, and will ensure that voters in California are using a system that has gone through testing.
“We’re in the 20th century today where we have technology that we use in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “I think it’s critically important to be continuing to use it and the delivery of a voting system.”
The bill comes less than a year after Shasta County's governing board left its contract with Dominion Voting Systems to tally up results by hand, according to the same ABC 7 KRCR article.
Brazil and India stand at number five and seven for the largest countries in the world according to World Atlas. Brazil shifted to electronic ballot technology in 2022 and India switched in 2019 according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
In the 2018 presidential election, Brazil announced the winner two hours and 16 minutes after the polls were closed, according to the same site.
Shasta County's Board of Supervisors, which is controlled by a conservative majority, voted in January to get rid of the voting machines it used to tabulate hand-marked ballots for its nearly 111,000 registered voters, according to a Sept. 8 article from ABC News.
County supervisors said there was a loss of public confidence in the machines from Dominion Voting Systems, a company at the center of discredited conspiracy theories since the 2020 presidential election, according to the same site.
Sarab Multani, public health and business junior and Associated Students president, said there might be drawbacks from certain representatives throughout the bipartisan system because of the bill being passed.
“I can imagine this being of conflict to Shasta County representatives specifically since this assembly bill was made in response to the decisions of their supervisor,” Multani said.
The fight over voting machines has divided Shasta County, a largely rural area whose most populated city is Redding with 93,000 people, according to the same article by ABC News.
Multani also said Shasta County’s new plan lacked an approved vendor to accommodate voters with disabilities and also created uncertainty on whether the county would conduct future elections in compliance with election laws.
“This may be a way to reassure California voters that the election process is legitimate and consistent,” he said.
Estevan Guzman, political science sophomore and Associated Students Director of Legislative Affairs, said he thinks the reason for initially canceling the voter machine contract was because of rumors during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Guzman said the bill will ensure that elections progress in a timely manner without wasting resources, and said counting thousands of votes can be labor-intensive and time-consuming.
“We’re entering the electronic era, so this bill will speed up the voting process by simply scanning your document and uploading your vote,” he said.
Guzman also said rather than waiting overnight, the election process will now be sped up, and will be called within a few hours rather than the day after.
Since this bill will not take human labor, Guzman said the vote-tallying process will not be as time intensive and will instead ensure that elections will be as accurate as possible.
“While machines do make mistakes, sometimes it is not at the level that humans make mistakes,” he said.
