By SAM MORGEN, Bakersfield.com
The Kern County Board of Supervisors will consider extending the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems during a meeting on Tuesday.
Dominion has been the subject of fierce speculation since the 2020 presidential election.
Various groups have posited that the vote-counting machines built by Dominion somehow transferred votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Others suggested Dominion machines could have been compromised by foreign governments.
However, several analyses — both by the government and independent agencies — have shown no evidence of misconduct.
Kern County has used Dominion machines to electronically count votes since 2016. The company also provides machines to the county that allow people with disabilities to cast votes.
The Auditor-Controller-County Clerk’s Office, which oversees elections in Kern County, says the $224,316 one-year contract is necessary to conduct the 2022 primary and general elections.
“There really has never been anything found to these claims that people have made about Dominion,” said Auditor-Controller-County Clerk Mary Bedard. “It’s standard technology. It’s used throughout the country.”
The contract extension comes as Kern County election procedures have come under scrutiny.
“We’re advocating a simple system that’s easy to manage,” said Tom Pavich, Kern County coordinator for the Election Integrity Project. “This is how it used to be done. Elections were determined by the end of the night. There’s no reason why we can’t do that.”
While Pavich said the Dominion Voting System was not his area of expertise, other conservatives in Kern County brought up concerns when asked about the contract extension.
Don Musser, president of the Greater Ridgecrest Republican Assembly, said he has studied complaints about Dominion and “did not trust the electronics.”
“Anytime you ask the question of somebody in charge. They say, ‘Well, it’s not a big enough error to affect the results.’ And OK, maybe it isn’t, but what is the error?” he said. “Everybody trusted the hand count of paper ballots for years here … why did we ever switch to Dominion?”
Bedard said she has tried to address concerns raised by the public, adding that Dominion results were reviewed by a manual review of all ballots cast in 1 percent of precincts. No discrepancies between the manual and machine counts have been found, she said.
Aside from returning to a hand-count system and splitting off the registrar of voters into its own department, conservative groups in Kern County are pushing the county to clean up the official list of registered voters, which they say contains discrepancies that could influence the outcome of elections.
The pressure campaign may be making some headway, as some supervisors have appeared receptive to the ideas since they were first brought up at the beginning of the year.
“If Kern County is doing it correctly, maybe other counties will follow in line,” said Vince Maiocco, president of the Taft Republican Assembly. “If you’re talking about a school board race that may be within triple digits or within a hundred votes, if the voting system isn’t accurate, that could disenfranchise one of the candidates.”
Source http://www.capoliticalreview.com
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