Local “election integrity” activists Rich Gallardo, Lori Bridgeford and Laura Hobbs behind bars.
It’s 7 p.m. election night, and CBS News is reporting former president Donald Trump is alleging widespread cheating in Pennsylvania. It’s not clear who’s winning the presidential contest, Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. All the battleground states are toss-ups at this hour.
I feel sick, and it’s not because I got vaxxed for the flu and COVID early this morning.
By the time I got to the Shasta County Registrar of Voters Market Street office in downtown Redding at 10:30 a.m., a long line of voters was already beginning to form. District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye walked briskly into the office and cast his voter early. By 1:30 pm, the line went down the block as County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Thomas Toller held the first of what will be many press conferences in the coming days.
A News Café found itself inside the cage that separates the press from the nearby elections workers going full bore as the ballots pour in. Shasta Scout and two TV stations were there, as well as self-proclaimed “citizen journalists” Rich Gallardo and Lori Bridgeford and Shasta County’s leading “election integrity expert” Laura Hobbs.
Those descriptors are in quotes because Gallardo and Bridgeford aren’t trained journalists, they’re rightwing propagandists. Hobbs has based her entire career as an election integrity expert hawking the fictitious Mesa Pattern of Election Fraud. As A News Café reported last summer, the fraudulent theory was based on elections records stolen from Mesa County, Co. by former elections head Tina Peters, recently sentenced to nine years in prison for the crime.
Gallardo is running for a Shasta County Board of Education seat; one of his competitors, Jessica French, was also in the cage, all of us with officially issued press passes.
Shasta County Registrar of Voters Thomas Toller.
Toller was looking chipper compared to recent press accounts of stress and turmoil at the elections office; his more experienced No. 2 Joanne Francescut waited patiently to the side in case the newly-minted registrar got stumped by a question. Toller began with the election results as of noon today.
“So far we have 52,000 ballots received here at Market Street,” he said. “36,001 of them are ballots that were cast just today here at Market Street. The lines that you see out to the street have been steady all morning since the polls opened at 7.”
With the official registration figure of 115,626 voters, Toller estimated the current turnout at 45 percent, an amount he expected to grow because they hadn’t begun collecting the precinct ballots. He expected to announce early results at 9 p.m. and “11-ish.”
Toller said elections staff were making steady headway duplicating ballots flawed during the Hart InterCivic Verity Voting System’s printing process.
“In terms of the ballot duplication process which we put in place for the printing anomaly that we’ve been trying to address, we have printed 5,367 duplicated ballots as of noon today,” Toller said. “So those are ballots that are successfully created to match the exact vote of the voters’ ballot that we could not scan through the scanner bar on the side of the ballot. That process will continue apace. It will be halted tonight as we process precinct ballots, but it will resume again tomorrow in earnest.”
Asked if the printing anomaly affected precinct ballots, Toller said a large test run indicated it hasn’t. However, he speculated that if such an anomaly was found, he’d have to call for even more reinforcements from other county departments to get the extra work done.
A News Café publisher Doni Chamberlain asked Toller how many county workers he was bringing in and whether they were volunteers or assigned to work. Toller answered the question in universal management code: they’re being voluntold.
“In some cases, I’ve been told they’re being voluntold in by their supervisors or department heads,” he said. “But for the most part, they’ve all come here, and after they’ve started to work, they don’t seem to mind. They’re very helpful. We’ve had as many as up to 12 to 15 employees in at one time.”
The helps in an elections department that has lost 10 employees during the past year.
Early in the press conference Hobbs asked Toller why he had contacted the U.S. Department of Justice, who have agents here in Shasta County and other “election integrity” hotspots across the country, on the lookout for potential violence.
“The DOJ is here because of my concern that my staff feels that the observership program has gotten aggressive,” Toller said. “In some cases, they feel threatened, insecure, and I want to assure their safety, and I want to assure that we have a tone of civility, that we’re treating our observers respectfully and following the regs in terms of their rights and responsibilities, but also that my staff feels protected.”
“I’m going to have sheriff’s deputies here after the polls close,” Toller said. “I’ve been assured that Redding PD are going to patrol this neighborhood vigilantly, and they’re on call, and now I also have DOJ available to me as another resource.”
Toller said there’s been no violence, so far.
“I’ve had no reports other than one instance where one of our ballot box retrieval team was followed by a driver,” he said. “She exited her car when they stopped here at Market and was shouting quite angrily at them, alleging that they had been violating laws.”
No laws were violated and the potential incident was deescalated.
Shasta County District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye on his way to vote Tuesday morning.
Bridgeford, who infamously stalked people lined up for COVID vaccinations during the pandemic, asked Toller what the elections department was doing to protect election observers like her.
“What protections, if any, exist for the observant, like what I experienced yesterday, as far as being foul-languaged, threatening, loud, and then I didn’t know what to do with that? What happens to us when we lose our safety protection?”
“Well, as you recall, I tried to deescalate that situation,” Toller said. “I wasn’t successful. And I would say that was on both parties’ sides,” he added diplomatically.
I asked Toller what qualified as aggressive observer behavior in his three-strikes-you’re-out system for removing observers who cross the line one too many times.
“It’s behavior that is loud, aggressive, and basically causes one of my employees to feel like they can’t do their job. So they have to ask for an opportunity to step away. We honor [the staff] request. At that point, the behavior has disrupted the process. Given the situation we have now, a half-hour interruption is critical because we’re duplicating ballots in numbers that we’ve never had to do before.”
Toller noted that representatives from Hart were on the scene. I asked him how staff were holding up at 2 p.m. on day 1 of what will be many days.
“Things have been calm but busy. Obviously, the tone is going to change,” he said. “At 8.01, when we kick into high gear, and actually have to start processing quite a few ballots. But I’m confident that everyone is up to the task. We all know Election Day is a long day. We’re probably not going to be done until about 3.30 in the morning.”
“Hopefully, we get to start an hour later tomorrow, give them a little bit of an opportunity to catch some shut-eye tonight,” he concluded. “But so far, so good.”
So that’s what happened at the election office this afternoon.
Good lord, I just looked at the presidential election results.
Hang on, it’s going to get heated.
