Measure to require voter ID and eliminate most mail voting leads in Northern California's Shasta County

Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times on Jun 3, 2026

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A controversial citizens’ initiative in Shasta County, California, that would dramatically reshape local elections — by requiring ballots to be hand-counted, in apparent violation of state law, among other changes — was on track to be approved, according to early results from Tuesday night’s election.

Ballots were still being tallied, but results released early Wednesday by the Shasta County registrar’s office showed that Measure B was leading.

Measure B would amend the county’s charter to require elections to be held in-person on a single day, limit voting by mail only to “the infirm, military, and U.S. citizens living overseas,” and require voters to show identification at polling places (as would a statewide ballot measure that voters will decide upon in November).

If the measure passes, both opponents and supporters expect the county to be sued over it.

Cathy Darling Allen, the former longtime Shasta County registrar and current board chair of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said Measure B violates multiple state and federal election laws.

In 2023, Darling Allen clashed with the Shasta Board of Supervisors, which voted to ditch the county’s Dominion voting machines based on unfounded fraud claims and opted to hand-count ballots (quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so).

Because of California’s long, complex ballots, she reported then, a full manual tally during a presidential election year would have required the hiring of at least 1,255 temporary employees, at a cost of more than $1.6 million, to meet reporting deadlines.

The ACLU of Northern California and the League of Women Voters said in a joint statement that Measure B “plainly violates state law” and that its elimination of most voting-by-mail will disenfranchise Shasta County voters.

Richard Gallardo, a leader of the citizens’ group Save Shasta Elections, which wrote the measure and collected thousands of signatures to get it on the ballot, said in an interview that Measure B is meant to protect the local election process from fraud.

“We don’t like the state laws,” said Gallardo, who is running for election to the Board of Supervisors. “We want to enact our own local election reform. … There’s a lot in there, so, yes, we do expect the state to sue us.”

The California secretary of state’s office declined in an email to comment on whether state elections officials would challenge the measure in court.