Photo: Nichols Melburg & Rossetto
While you were at the office on Tuesday three members of your government were busy in their office dismantling your Elections Department. While you picked up the kids from school you were being robbed of your ability to vote safely and with confidence.
A majority of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors ducked in out of the rain to empty the Elections Department of its Dominion Voting machines and while they were at it they got rid of everything else in the office; ballots, a smooth system and common sense. They cleaned house.
Our county Registrar of Voters, Cathy Darling Allen, now has to start from scratch and try to rebuild a voting system that meets all the laws of the state, something she says may or may not be possible but that didn’t phase the three supervisors, Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom.
Their actions removed one of finest, most honored voting systems in not only the State of California but the nation. Shasta County’s medium-sized elections operation was considered by groups all over the country as a model to follow. Now, it doesn’t exist. And it was the very system that elected the three supervisors who then took it apart.
As a result of the board’s vote this week the county will now slide into a morass of new ballots, all hand counting and specific new equipment that meets state law for the needs of the disabled. We will now be required to recruit an estimated 1,300 people who must have background checks, be fingerprinted and trained to properly count what could range from 65-100 thousand ballots some of which include multiple races, initiatives and other measures. It will cost a fortune, take far longer than it ever did before and be far less accurate than the precision of machines. Human error is found to be the most common cause of voting and tabulating errors.
A small loud group of people somehow brainwashed into thinking Dominion tallying machines were the soul of evil, beliefs not backed by any effective evidence, have taken us right off a cliff. Good luck the next time you want to vote in Shasta County. It will be some time before you again have dominion over your ballot.
Dana Kennedy Silberstein lives in Redding
Kennedy moved to Trinity County when she was 6-months old. She came to Redding when she was 10. She attended Manzanita Elementary School Sequoia Middle School, Nova and Shasta High Schools. After 40-years away in a career in broadcasting and politics she moved back to be near her son and care for her father, the late Shasta County Presiding Superior Court Judge, Donald Kennedy. She finds the current state of affairs in her home county a bitter-sweet homecoming.
