Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin (Photo: https://a28.asmdc.org/biography)
Bill to Ban Ballot Hand Counts Signed By Governor Newsom
Shasta County Board of Supervisors Chairman Patrick Jones said they will be suing to block the bill if signed into law
By Evan Symon, October 4, 2023 6:35 pm
A bill to end the manual hand count of ballots in elections with more than 1,000 voters was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, going into effect immediately after signing.
Assembly Bill 969, authored by Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), will specifically prohibit an elections official from performing a manual vote count in a semifinal official canvass held on an established election date where there are more than 1,000 registered voters eligible to participate in that election, or in any contest held on a date other than an established election date, where there are more than 5,000 registered voters eligible to participate in that election. The bill will also now only allow an elections official to conduct a manual vote count for a semifinal official canvass in a precinct if the count is approved by the Secretary of State, with state approved machines being utilized to do all county in elections above the minimum voter threshold.
In addition, AB 969 is an emergency statute, meaning that it went into effect immediately upon being signed into law.
Assemblywoman Pellerin’s bill is in response to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors voting earlier this year to do away with machine counting and instead move back to hand ballots. The decision was divisive, passing 3-2 in March. Supporters cited cyber threats as the major reason for wanting to return to hand counting, to avoid any possible electronic miscounts or cheating. However opponents fought back that hand counting would be even more prone to error and at risk of possible cheating, as well as being more expensive. The fight in Shasta County has been ongoing for months, all the while with AB 969 advancing through the legislature and threatening to make a state law on it.
AB 969 largely passed on party lines throughout the year. In April, the bill managed to pass in the Assembly 62-9 with 9 abstaining; the Senate vote in early September came in with a similar with a 31-6 with 3 abstentions vote. Due to multiple amendments since May, the bill was then sent back to the Assembly last month for a final Assembly vote, where it passed 62-14 with 4 abstentions.
“The bill, if it becomes law, would make it very clear in our elections code that counties are to use state-certified, federally qualified voting systems for tabulating their voting results,” said Pellerin following the final Assembly vote. “We are definitely going to be reaching out to our supporters, getting letters to him, that we experienced a rogue board of supervisors that attempted to derail elections and that is something we can’t tolerate and accept in the state of California.”
With Newsom not indicating which way he would go, many Shasta County officials attempted to dissuade Governor Newsom from signing AB 969. Some, such as Shasta County Board of Supervisors Chairman Patrick Jones, went so far as to say that they will be suing to block the bill if signed into law. Despite this, Newsom signed the bill it into law Wednesday.
Following the signing, Jones added that Shasta County would continue on with hand counted ballots until at least the 2024 primary election.
“I’ve asked legal counsel to weigh in on this. And I believe that it does not affect Shasta County,” said Jones. “We already made that decision to get away from machines in January and February. We have been waiting this entire time for the Secretary of State, which she said she would approve a hand tabulation plan. She has yet to do so. So she’s simply dragging her feet on this. But we have already made our decision. And a majority of the board has already spoken.”
“Filing a lawsuit may not even be necessary anymore. As far as I’m concerned, we push forward. The state may want to sue us.”
Experts told the Globe on Wednesday that a lawsuit blocking the now-law could be expected soon.
“The hand count bill just leaves too much open to the ether so to speak,” said Ronnie Schaefer, an elections setup consultant. “We’re going to see a challenge soon, likely with some sort of add-on saying that they want the bill blocked as the suit goes through the legal system. If that does happen, we’ll likely see hand counts continue until at least the 2024 primary in March. But, in the short term, we can expect at, the very least, some sort of suit pop up, or the state sue those counties that are counting by hand in violation. This is the kind of people people won’t take quietly.”
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Let’s go to court folks and expose the “proprietary nature” of their “trusted build”….
ALL electronic voting machine software should be open source and fully protected from outside connections and transmitted by the county Sheriff’s, NOT the County Clerks who are partisan…
If electronic voting systems are so efficient, why does it still take WEEKS to tabulate the vote???
I realize there’s all sorts of exceptions, but I make the general point…
And every ballot should be batch numbered and treated like currency, not confetti that’s just thrown about carelessly…
Yes, CD9. They’ve thrown out vitally important ballot chains of custody, and so much more, of course. This latest insanity coupled with the recent AG Bonta pounce on Huntington Beach (again, the target of the Bonta-Gruesome tag team!) for wanting to require voter I.D. shows us —- as if we needed any more evidence —– how much these criminals want to keep their election-cheating in place, how BADLY they would lose if they didn’t maintain their cheating ways, and how much they are not even trying to hide it anymore. The ABSURD thinking and destruction coming out of Sacramento is obviously not ending, folks. As you know…
Glad nonetheless to know this absolute nonsense will be challenged. With determination for what is sane and reasonable by the Shasta County people. It’s noteworthy that the County essentially plans to ignore the law. Seems we will be seeing this more and more —– lunatic laws cause civil disobedience.
““The bill, if it becomes law, would make it very clear in our elections code that counties are to use state-certified, federally qualified voting systems for tabulating their voting results,” said Pellerin”. So, her message is that all Californians must trust the state and electronic voting devices above all and any hardcopy, paper ballots! The most basic form of ballot verification is not secure, we must trust the computers, the firmware, the connected nodes and the networks they use above a physical ballot and verifiable ID! Sounds like she’s defending corruptibility, not security to me.
If the state did not mail ballots to every “last known address” there would not be so many phony ballot harvested votes to count.
If you add “Voter ID” then I might believe this is not another vote rigging gimmick.
“Elections are about who counts the votes”.
Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.
Joseph Stalin
Yep and it is alive and doing well.
Gee, are those real pearls on Gail’s neck?
Elitists continue to work hard to control the plebeians.
Constitution? ” we don’t need no stinkin constitution” said the judge in the CaDem’s back pocket.
Wishing the Shastonians all the luck.
Yeah look at Democrat Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin smiling smugly for the camera wearing her powder blue power suit accentuated with expensive pearls. She’s been a parasite on taxpayers for years having previously served as Santa Cruz County Clerk from 1993 until her resignation in 2020 before being installed into the 28th Assembly District–probably with Democrat voter fraud and rigged voting machines? It’s expensive living in Santa Cruz and no doubt Gail Pellerin’s deep-state Democrat masters will reward her handsomely for pushing Bill 969 so that they can continue to steal elections with rigged voting machines? She probably had little integrity and no ethics to begin with, so it was probably easy for her to sell her soul to her deep-state Democrat masters?
LOL TJ (again). And thanks for Pellerin’s reign of terror, er, biographical info.
The thugs in the Democrat criminal gang have banned the hand counting of ballots because they know they can’t win elections without using their rigged voting machines. Meanwhile, California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan Patterson and the rest of the RINOs in California’s feckless GOP go along with it.
This bill does not conform to the recommendations (listed below) of the Carter-Baker Commssion on Federal Election Reform (https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/carter-baker-commission-16-years-later). Specifically, the use of auditable paper ballots is eliminated by this California law, if hand-counting is banned:
-A national system to connect state and local voter registration lists
-Voter identification based on a universally available REAL ID card
-Policies to improve voter access for all communities, as well as innovations like vote centers and voter information lookup sites
-Stronger efforts to combat fraud, especially in absentee voting
-Auditable paper backups for all voting technology
P.S. Furthermore, automated systems like Dominion and others, can be programmed to fool audits. The best example of this was the Volkswagen emissions-fraud scheme where Volkswagen engineers programmed their system installed in diesel-engine automobiles to “fool” the smog monitoring software used in smog control centers. It made their polluting cars look non-polluting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal)
indeed – any electronic tabulation system can be programmed algorithmically to count however the programmer wishes to count…
That the “trusted build” is closed source is prima facie evidence that it should NOT be allowed…
Those that control the counting control the election. A well known fact.
Who has more to lose, the citizens or the politicians, if citizens at the county level are removed from key election administration decisions?
Giving control of vote-counting to machines (with the help of well-paid programmers) lets machines do the voting for us.
We have government control by the highest bidder. When will politicians stand up against this thinly-veiled authoritarianism? When will citizens demand transparency for the whole election process?
California ….voter fraud central.
Your votes will go into a Black Box and the results will be spit out and it will be against the law to verify that count?
In other words, no matter what the input the output will be predetermined to be the choice of the Democrat party.
THIS IS TREASON.