politics

He said he prefers hand-counting ballots because “one person can affect a handful of votes. One person with a machine can affect thousands.”

Honestly... the idea of installing shouty far-right extremists who only want to see the world one way into positions where they can influence the day-to-day business of counting votes scares the hell out of me.

But at the same time, this made me kind of made me like his overall direction of thinking. Like yeah, you're right. We should have a transparent process where people from both parties can always observe all the machinery of all elections, and if it's less convenient and you don't get to do your automation the way you want, oh well. He's wrong that the 2020 election was stolen, but he's 100% right about people needing to know what's going on and it not being locked behind proprietary software. Let's outlaw machinery with no paper backup ballot. Let's invite every Republican who has concerns to get involved in the process in a productive way. Security specialists have been squawking about how bad an idea paperless voting is since at least 2000 and pointing out discrepancies in key elections that never seem to really get looked into. If we can find some common ground with the GOP crazy people on the ground then fuckin fantastic.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Those machines were made by Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of debunked conspiracy theories about how Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

The recall election has become a referendum not just for Crye, who won his seat by 90 votes in 2022, but also for the push for hand-counting ballots, which has been gaining popularity across rural America in response to baseless claims of widespread fraud tied to ballot-counting machines.

In June 2022, with many of the far-right candidates losing in local primary races, a group of people walked in the back door of the elections office and started yelling at the clerk, said Joanna Francescut, the assistant registrar of voters.

A staff report cited a claim that the United States and Shasta County have been “the victims of a coordinated multi-state conspiracy to defraud the 2020 General Election using voting machines.”

They point to his decision last year to meet with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and Trump ally who has traveled the country spreading voting machine conspiracy theories.

“They’ve found that path that they’re following and it is Trump’s playbook, just disrupt the hell out of everything,” said Charlie Menoher, a retired school district superintendent who is helping organize the recall effort and served three terms on the board of supervisors in the early 1990s.

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