With more costs to come, Shasta County will spend $950,000 on new voting system [View all]

Shasta County officials on Thursday approved spending $950,000 to hire a company to provide the equipment needed to hand-count ballots, something that hasn't been done in California in decades, at least not on the scale proposed in the county.

The Board of Supervisors' action comes even as elections officials try to develop a process that does away with machine counting and instead manually tallies ballots. County officials are also trying to figure out all of the costs associated with converting from machine counting.

The board's vote was driven by the majority of supervisors' distrust of the vote counting machines it was using, Dominion Voting Systems. But over the past few months a large number of people also urged the board to stick with Dominion, rather than hand counting.

Public comment before Thursday's board vote reflected the divide in the community over hand-counting versus machine tabulation.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-costs-come-shasta-county-120059511.html