Shasta County supervisors formally canceled the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems last week amid baseless claims surrounding the 2020 presidential election. The move leaves Shasta without any voting system at all a year before the next election. 

The Board of Supervisors’ far-right majority is now poised to make an even more drastic change. The board will pilot a hand-voting system with the help of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell (yes, you read that right). The conspiratorial pillow magnate has offered to help the county make the switch and has even offered financial and legal assistance in the event the county gets sued.

Supervisor Kevin Crye announced Lindell’s involvement at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting last Tuesday. 

Supervisor Mary Rickert, the board’s only moderate Republican, described the meeting as “insane” in an interview with L.A. Times columnist Anita Chabria.  

“We are going to lose this county. It is going to collapse,” she said. “I am in a state of grief.”

Shasta has always been a Republican stronghold, but its foray into political extremism and election denial is more recent. Last year, voters ousted longtime supervisor Leonard Moty in a recall backed by a far-right militia. Two more hardliners were elected to the board in November, leaving Rickert as the only remaining traditional conservative. 

Most of the sitting supervisors believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, possibly with the help of foreign nationals. Hence Tuesday’s decision to scrap the county’s voting machines and potentially entrust Shasta’s elections to a pillow salesman who’s under investigation by the FBI. Experts, however, agree that hand-counting is a far less accurate method, more prone to error and fraud.

Kern County is a Republican bastion too, but it’s not willing to go that far. After a heated meeting last week, Kern supervisors voted 3-2 to renew the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems.