Two Riverside County supervisors sought to ease election doubts. They didn’t – Press Enterprise
Doubts about Riverside County elections scuttled an effort to address those doubts Tuesday, Feb. 6.
Supervisors Kevin Jeffries and Karen Spiegel withdrew a plan intended to bolster faith in the county’s vote-counting process. Their proposal, which would have cost an estimated $360,000, would have increased the percentage of ballots randomly pulled for manual inspection for accuracy from the state-mandated threshold of 1% to 2%.
The proposal also would have ordered a special audit of a future special election in which elections staff would randomly choose ballots for manual counting and stopped when it became implausible for a full recount to show a different result.
During Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Jeffries said he came up with the plan after meeting with a group of people who are skeptical of the county’s election procedures, most if not all of which are required by California law.
Jeffries said the group “was supportive when we first drafted this concept.” But five people who spoke to supervisors Tuesday about the idea questioned whether it would make elections more secure.
“While I am encouraged that you are finally putting some attention on our unconstitutional and corrupt election system, I am beyond frustrated that you believe increasing the manual tally to 2% and implementing a risk-limiting audit is a remedy …,” said Shelby Bunch, who often calls in to board meetings to complain about the integrity of elections.
Bunch added: “It clearly shows that after three years, this board chooses to ignore how broken our elections are with all of the evidence right in front of you … A 2% tally or risk-limiting audit is not going to identify these fraudulent voters. All you’ll be doing is counting bad ballots.”
Given the opposition, “I’m OK with withdrawing this and pulling it back,” Jeffries said. “We don’t need to do an extra count so we can pull this back and save the money.”
He added: “It’s a shame because we all need to have residents and voters trusting our election system. And if we can only fix that by doing 100% of everything in one swoop, we’ll never get there. And if we’re not allowed to take bites out of the elephant to fix this, then I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”
Locally and nationwide, there’s no evidence to suggest that widespread voter fraud corrupted an election’s outcome. A civil grand jury probe of the 2020 election found no evidence of fraud in Riverside County.
Nonetheless, doubts persist, especially among conservatives, about whether elections are secure and the results trustworthy.
A December poll by The Associated Press – NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just a third of Republicans have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that votes in GOP primaries will be accurately counted, with 32% having little to no confidence.
By contrast, 72% of Democrats had high confidence in their primary votes being tallied correctly. About 1 in 4 Republicans reported having “quite a bit” of confidence in 2024 presidential election votes being accurately counted, “significantly lower than Democrats,” the AP reported.
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