F

or years, only a couple of people would show up to observe staff at the Shasta County Elections office on election night.

However, after November 2020, the office saw a dramatic increase in observers.

On the night of the June 2022 primary, then-registrar of voters Cathy Darling Allen and her staff experienced bullying and interference from a group of residents who claimed they wanted to protect against election fraud, according to prepared testimony she submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The committee held a hearing entitled Protecting Our Democracy’s Frontline Workers, which featured testimony from elections officials across the country who had experienced threats and harassment.

Darling Allen wrote that some poll workers had canceled or simply not shown up for work, possibly due to the behavior of observers who had attended a recent training. At one point in the night, someone attached a trail camera in the alley behind the elections office to surveil the back entrance.

“Election observation in Shasta County has become weaponized,” Darling Allen wrote.

Since then, Shasta County has been a hotbed of election denialism, with a vocal minority of residents and the board of supervisors’ far-right majority encouraging distrust in California’s voting systems.

Darling Allen retired earlier this year due to a heart failure diagnosis, citing a need to avoid work-related stress. To take her place, the board appointed Tom Toller, a former county prosecutor with no experience running elections.

Toller, who came into the office with his own concerns about election integrity, said his perspective has changed after several months of working inside the office. Now, as he prepares for one of the most fraught elections in recent history, he finds himself pushing back on a tide of skepticism.

“I’m constantly sent emails from people suggesting that I need to stop using this technology or I need to start implementing this other procedure,” Toller said. “My universal response has been, I don’t see any evidence of this. But if you can give me credible evidence that it’s happening here in Shasta County, I will definitely look into it. And if there’s a problem, I will resolve it.”

To accommodate the increase in observers, the county elections office in downtown Redding has been remodeled.

A black metal gate accessible only via key card separates the front entrance from an area where elections staff have been preparing to tabulate votes on Tuesday.

Upstairs, observers can watch staff on four wall-mounted TV monitors. The county’s vote counting machines, set up in a room nicknamed “the bat cave,” are also visible through a window in the wall.

On election night, the office will be completely full with observers, assistant registrar Joanna Francescut said. But being here isn’t always enough to allay their fears.

“The majority of those people have been sitting here with us for multiple elections,” said Francescut, who worked for 16 years under Darling Allen and was passed over for the registrar job. “But they’re also not listening to what we have to say about what we’re actually doing. They’re trusting other things, other media that is going after them that has their attention in a different way. They’re trusting what’s being said on YouTube or Truth Social or whatever website they’re looking at.”

As ballots come in, observers will be allowed to view ballot tabulation and results reporting. Certain activities, like challenging signatures on vote-by-mail ballots, won’t be permitted, according to the elections office website (PDF).

Toller is facing pushback for not making more changes, with some of the strongest criticisms coming from Supervisor Patrick Jones, one of three members of the board who voted to appoint him.

“There’s been some people that are being placed at six feet apart, six feet from meaningful observation. It needs to be three. If that was his decision, then that is a bad decision,” Jones said. “The further you push people back, the further you’re trying to cover something up.”

‘A black box’

Shasta County has been in conflict with the state of California over how to conduct its elections since at least 2023. That’s when the board of supervisors voted to end the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were the target of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged. Supervisors voted to hand count ballots instead but were thwarted when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 969, urgent legislation that banned hand counting except in narrow circumstances.

Despite the law, calls for the county to use hand counting persist. At a board meeting in late September, security guards wearing tactical vests flanked the dais as people approached the podium during public comment. Several insisted that the county use hand counting in this year’s election.

One speaker detailed amateur sleuthing, which she said had uncovered voter registration tied to nonexistent addresses. Another read a letter calling on the county sheriff to launch a criminal investigation of Francescut for alleged perjury.

A day earlier, some of the same speakers had attended a meeting of the Shasta County Elections Commission, a panel Jones pushed to create last year to advise the board on elections.

Critics, including a commissioner who resigned in March, have called the panel a waste of time and money.

The commission has recommended that the county not only hand count ballots but also return to limited absentee voting and one-day elections — all of which would violate California law.

“I think their attitude is that even if something is futile legally, it has some type of symbolic value,” Toller said about the commission. “And I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. I just don’t think it’s going to bear much fruit. And it may have unintended consequences that would not necessarily be positive for our county.”

So far, the board has not acted on the recommendations.

At an October board meeting, commissioner Patty Plumb, a Jones appointee, expressed disappointment in Toller’s leadership of the elections office so far.

“Nothing has really taken place to change our system of voting even though we did get a new [registrar of voters],” Plumb said. “We had our hopes that things would be changed. Nothing has really changed to make our voting system and our process transparent.”

Distrust in Shasta County’s elections office had already begun to simmer in 2022, when a campaign backed by a local militia successfully recalled Supervisor Leonard Moty, a moderate Republican and former Redding police chief who they felt hadn’t pushed back hard enough on COVID-19 mandates, among other complaints.

Two years later, after the county canceled its contract with Dominion, it signed a new contract to use voting machines from Texas-based Hart InterCivic.

Still, skepticism about the trustworthiness of Dominion’s software and that of other voting machines lingers today.

“They have a black box,” Kari Chilson, a Shasta County property manager, told KQED in reference to Dominion’s machines after a recent meeting of the elections commission. “They’re proprietary software. And so the public is not even allowed to audit their machines, which is a huge red flag for anybody.”

“They’re run by WiFi or internet,” said Antonia Palacio, who works in home care, about the machines. “It’s been proven that they can be hacked. If you don’t have an audit, hand counting, they can put in as many extra votes or whatever in there, and we would never know it.”

Researchers and hackers have identified vulnerabilities in voting machines, but officials with the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency say that because of the decentralized nature of the United States’ elections system, it would be impossible for hackers to have a material impact on the outcome of a presidential election without being detected.

Spokespeople for Hart InterCivic, Dominion and ES&S, the three companies that supply voting machines to most California counties, told KQED that their machines do not connect to the internet.

When asked when they first became skeptical of the county’s voting processes, Chilson and Palacio described reports of “abnormalities” in the 2020 election and signed affidavits alleging voter fraud.

Statements alleging irregularities or misconduct were a common element of the 64 legal cases brought by former President Donald Trump and his allies challenging the 2020 election. Plaintiffs prevailed in only one of those cases, which involved too few votes to overturn the results, according to a 2022 study.

Chilson also shared articles that had raised her suspicions from sites like The Epoch Times, One America News and The Gateway Pundit, all of which have promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Two Georgia election workers settled defamation lawsuits with The Gateway Pundit and OAN after each published stories falsely accusing them of ballot fraud.

Toller said he spends a lot of time trying to reassure people that Shasta County’s voting machines don’t connect to the internet.

He’s compared the machines that count ballots to the ones that count money in casinos: they sort quicker than any human could, but they’re not connected to the internet, and they don’t misreport the number of $100 bills.

“I think ultimately, probably the 80% of folks that are sort of the silent majority get that,” Toller said. “But there’s always going to be people sort of on the fringe who no amount of explanation is going to satisfy them. They simply want to return to the way it was years ago.”

He also evaluated the county’s drop boxes and removed the ones that were underutilized. The elections office will replace the remaining 13 with a heavier version and a video camera that can monitor the ballot slot.

“This is a situation where some people understand what I’m trying to do, and they recognize that it’s a more secure situation,” Toller said. “But other people are adamant that the only solution is to eliminate the boxes entirely. And you simply can’t do that in a county like ours that’s so large geographically.”

Shasta isn’t the only California county that’s responded to drop box concerns. San Benito County created a ride-along program in 2021 for members of the public to observe elections staff collect vote-by-mail ballots from drop boxes. Last year, Kern County installed surveillance cameras at its drop boxes and allowed members of the public to view the footage at the elections office during business hours.

Darling Allen said she is concerned that making concessions to quell skeptics could legitimize distrust in the process.

“We spent all of 2023 trying to beat back policy changes that were based on junk science and junk statistics and lies told around the nation about elections administration,” Darling Allen said. “We were somewhat successful, but at a pretty high cost.”

Baptism by fire

When Toller interviewed for the job, he appeared willing to join in a potential fight over hand counting.

He pointed out that AB 969 hadn’t been challenged in court and should the county decide to act, he would participate in any way the board wanted.

“I would in no way be beholden to the Secretary of State in Sacramento as if her interpretation was chapter and verse of Holy Writ,” read a cover letter submitted as part of Toller’s job application.

Asked about voting machines, Toller said he wasn’t a big fan and would consider hand counting if the law allowed it. The county has over 115,000 registered voters.

“It was good enough for years and years,” Toller said. “I think it’s a system that’s capable of being implemented and observed for transparency and fairness — and accurate. I don’t see any reason why it can’t go forward.”

Toller was hired despite his lack of experience. He later told KQED that he considered himself the “compromise choice,” having beat out Francescut and Clint Curtis, a Florida attorney who appeared to be the choice of election skeptics.

Now, after four months on the job, Toller said some of his perspectives have changed.

“I’ve had my baptism by fire, so to speak,” Toller said. “I’ve actually rolled up my sleeves and gotten my hands underneath the hood, into the engine, and figured out how things work,” Toller said. “And in the process of doing that, I have learned an incredible amount.”

Among the things he said he has learned: hand counting is slow and expensive, and voting machines are fast — and accurate — when used properly by trained staff.

While Toller said he personally never bought into theories of mass election rigging, he did have concerns about election integrity.

In 2022, while working on a campaign to unseat Shasta County’s district attorney, Toller said the official results from election night and in the days following, compared with early tabulation data posted at the individual precincts, raised questions.

He now believes problems that cropped up in past elections were almost entirely due to the kind of mistakes that happen in a high-stress environment.

“I think the biggest switch I’ve made is rather than try to assume that there was any malfeasance or intentional activity with respect to election results, that most of the problems are a result of human error,” he said.

Toller told KQED he will make no major changes to how elections are administered in Shasta County prior to Tuesday, and so far, he hasn’t.

That’s not pleasing his critics, including Jones.

“If we wanted to do things the same, we would have picked Joanna,” Jones said. “He knows the vast majority of us are looking for more transparency, meaningful observation, chain of custody. Will he deliver? That’s up to him. There will be a lot of criticism if he doesn’t live up to what he knows the public wants.”

A gut feeling

While Toller and his office face pressure to successfully pull off the November election, the future of the board’s conservative majority, which has steered many of Shasta County’s recent decisions on elections, is unclear.

In January, Jones will be replaced by Matt Plummer, a young moderate who ran on a platform of reducing homelessness, cutting crime and fixing Shasta County’s roads. Plummer said he knocked on over 9,000 doors while campaigning and those were the issues people brought up over and over again.

“The other thing was, like, just stop the chaos and stop the craziness, which has kind of characterized our county board over the last three to four years,” Plummer said at a Redding ice cream shop one evening in September.

Shasta County election data show Jones lost his bid for reelection to Plummer in the primary by nearly 20%.

But Jones alleged he won the election and will be stepping down because there was cheating.

“What we’re seeing is the effort does not match the result,” Jones said. “And your gut feeling is something’s not right when you outdo your opponent, and yet you did not prevail. And that’s just a gut feeling from the candidate that only the candidate would know.”

A November runoff between Supervisor Mary Rickert, a moderate incumbent, and Corkey Harmon, a political newcomer, could also shift the board’s makeup.

“The MAGA movement here is fading away faster than they ever thought it would be,” said Supervisor Tim Garman, who is stepping down at the end of his term because of redistricting. “Not as fast as I think some of us would like it to go, but it is fading away.”

In the meantime, Jones is already casting doubt on the results of Tuesday’s election.

“No matter what happens this November, there will be no trust,” Jones said. “And what the public will do, I don’t know. Hopefully, all goes well, but we have not fixed our elections, and people are getting mad. They’re getting upset. Because we’re selecting people, we’re not voting them incorrectly.”

Darling Allen said she believes Shasta County elections staff will be criticized, regardless of the outcome of any of the races.

“[Jones] is going to say the election was a failure,” Darling Allen predicted. “Especially if he actually comes to believe that Mr. Toller is not going to carry the water for him.”

“I hope Mr. Toller continues to stand strong and continues to defend the process and follow the law,” she said. “And maybe Shasta County can become less well known for election problems or the attention on elections.”