Bill limiting ballot hand counting in California becomes law; one county pledges to defy statute
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation into law on Wednesday that will limit the ability of local governments to manually count ballots. 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 reg...