Far-right county throws out voting machines – with nothing to replace them

In Shasta county, a conservative stronghold of 180,000 in the far north of blue California, a new vision for elections is taking shape: paper ballots, no machines and results tallied entirely by hand.

It’s a vision predicated on the false belief that voting machines helped to steal the presidency from Donald Trump, and that the systems by which millions of Americans vote are unsafe. But in Shasta, they just might make that vision reality.

Shasta became a hotbed for far-right politics in the pandemic years, and election deniers have found allies on the...