Today, first-time Shasta County Registrar of Voters Thomas Toller said although he understands that the public is hungry for election results, it could be weeks more before there’s a clearer idea of the election outcome.
“I’m leery of making any promises, but I did some back-of-the-envelope math last night,” Toller said.
“My feeling is that we should be pretty well poised before the weekend before Thanksgiving … We’ve got about a week buffer that we’ve built into the system. So I’m hoping that around the 21st or 22nd, we’ll have much better numbers, much more solid numbers.”
UPDATE – 5 p.m.: Click here for the most recent election results update released by the Shasta County Elections Department.
Toller made these statements and others at a post-election press conference this afternoon inside the Elections Department, the first since Toller’s Election Day afternoon conference. Wednesday’s previously scheduled press conference was cancelled a few hours after midnight Wednesday, and rescheduled for today.
Toller began by thanking his staff, county staff from other departments who agreed to help out, poll workers and volunteers for their hard work and patience. He also thanked election observers for being “professional and courteous”.
Shasta County Registrar of Voters/County Clerk Thomas Toller.
Additional Toller statements
• On an “extraordinarily busy” Election Day, starting at 7 a.m. Tuesday, the line of voters was steady, from 7 o’clock at the Market Street Elections Department until polls closed at 8 p.m. Anyone still in line could vote. A few voters arrived past 8 p.m., and were unable to vote.
• By midnight the Elections Department had received all the precinct ballots. It took until approximately 6:30 a.m. to process those ballots, which represented only about 23,000 ballots.
• Many, many thousands of ballot remain uncounted. “I caution people from making snap judgements, or early judgements about how things are going or what the results are,” Toller said. “We still have many, many ballots to count. It’s still very early.”
• Ballots in the vote-by-mail processing area are organized in precinct order, with staff working from the edges of the blue bins toward the middle. Because of that system, todays results will not represent every county precinct. “Unfortunately, District 3 is right in the middle, so they’re not boing to be very revelatory of the District 3 Supervisor race,” Toller said.
• On Wednesday, elections staff processed 33,000 vote-by-mail Election Day ballots, and 10,000 precinct ballots that were deposited in black boxes at precincts.
• Of Shasta County’s 115,626 registered voters, so far, based upon the ballots processed thus far, at a minimum the Nov. 5 voter turnout is at 75 percent of the registered voters. Toller said that because “many thousands of ballots” remain uncounted, that voter turnout percentage is sure to grow, and could exceed 80 percent.
• The problematic “failure to scan” issues continue to vex approximately 50 percent of the ballots.
Toller said his staff would release an election-results statement sometime this evening. We will post that information later this evening, following the Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Meanwhile, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors received a letter marked urgent from “Constitutional Advocate” attorney Alex Haberbush, of the Lex Rex Institute. Haberbush is a nationally renowned election-denier who’s been invited to Shasta County by far-right conservatives and has appeared at various Shasta County events and meetings. He represented Laura Hobbs, who lost her District 2 Supervisor race, and who lost her attempt to sue Shasta County over various election-fraud claims.
Attorney Alex Haberbush of the Lex Rex Institute represents Laura Hobbs.
The letter says in light of the scanning issues, to ensure public trust in the election outcome, Shasta County should perform a “100% manual verification audit of the election results to
ensure that every ballot cast is accurately counted.”
This request would basically entail the total hand-count that far-right election deniers like Hobbs and others have demanded since even before the board majority did away with Shasta County’s tried-and-true Dominion election machine system.
An excerpt of Haberbush’s letter is as follows:
“Urgent Recommendation for a 100% Manual Verification Audit in Light of Ballot Misscans
Dear Members of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors: I am writing on behalf of the Lex Rex Institute to express concern regarding reports we have received indicating a significant number of ballots are experiencing misscans or non-scans in certain races. Based on these reports, this issue appears to be related to a printing error or a similarly related problem impacting the accuracy of machine tabulation. The integrity of Shasta County’s election process—and public trust in the outcome—requires prompt and decisive action to address this issue.Therefore, I urge the Board to perform a 100% manual verification audit of the election results to ensure that every ballot cast is accurately counted …
Click this link for election results updates.
