Supervisors want the Justice Department to look into two election system contractors the county uses: Runbeck for printing ballots, and Hart InterCivic for voting equipment. Supervisor Patrick Jones brought forward the proposals in mid-November. , he said there were a number of times when the clocks on Hart machines were randomly changed in the middle of the night during the March primary election.
鈥淭his is a concern, because what it does to the audit log is it corrupts the audit log," Jones said. "You can't reproduce what occurred.鈥�
There have also been for November's election, forcing county staff to spend many hours fixing ballots.
鈥淚t's my understanding that the Secretary of State has essentially demanded of them that they are both on the hook for testing and writing white papers to explain what happened, and that's because this didn't just happen in Shasta County," said Shasta County Elections Official Tom Toller at the November meeting.
A printing issue with some of the ballots meant they couldn't be scanned by the county's machines. Staff had to manually duplicate the votes onto a new ballot, with multiple people checking to make sure the ballots were identical. That process stretched the time and resources of county elections staff thin, according to Toller.
The elections contractors had been invited to explain what happened but declined. Toller said that both companies said they needed more time to prepare to answer the supervisor's questions.
The letters ask the DOJ to look into both issues, and see if the same problems are happening elsewhere with these companies.
