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Shasta County Registrar of Voters retiring less than year after appointment
Shasta County Registrar of Voters retiring less than year after appointment

Yahoo

time25-03-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

Shasta County Registrar of Voters retiring less than year after appointment

Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Tom Toller announced Tuesday he'll retire in five weeks, less than 10 months into his tenure at the elections office. Toller announced he'll step down on April 29 after delivering his letter of resignation to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Monday, according to a press release issued by the county. 'I regret to inform you that I have been struggling with a serious illness for some months now. Based on the advice of my doctors, it has become clear to me that I cannot both focus on my health and continue to serve the citizens of Shasta County with vigor and undivided attention. I, therefore, resign my office as County Clerk and Registrar of Voters…My goal in providing five weeks of notice is to assist in an orderly transition well in advance of the Gubernatorial Primary of June 2026,' Toller said in the announcement. When he leaves, Toller will be the second person to retire from the position over the past year. Toller was appointed to the position in June after then longtime clerk, Cathy Darling Allen, vacated the position in May. Darling Allen also cited medical reasons. At the time of his appointment last June, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors anticipated Toller would serve out the rest of Darling Allen's term, which ends in January 2027. '…Toller has served Shasta County with dedication and integrity, overseeing local elections and vital record services with professionalism and a deep commitment to public service, said the county's spokesperson David Maung the announcement. County officials will start vetting possible successors soon, Maung reported. Note to readers: If you appreciate the work we do here at the Redding Record Searchlight, please consider subscribing yourself or giving the gift of a subscription to someone you know. Toller faced controversy even before he took office in July 2024. The Shasta County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to appoint Toller to the elections clerk position on June 19, 2024. The semi-retired former prosecutor had no experience in managing an elections office when he applied, according to the county. At the time, Shasta Supervisors Kevin Crye, Patrick Jones and Chris Kelstrom voted to hire Toller over three other finalists for the job. Then Supervisors Tim Garman and Mary Rickert voted against hiring Toller, preferring instead Joanna Francescut --- a candidate with 16 years of elections work experience and who managed the elections office after Darling Allen became ill. "…my greatest hope is that I can bring some transparency to the office and increase people's confidence in how we process votes here in Shasta County,' Toller said at the time of his appointment. Toller inherited a tempest when he took office. While Darling Allen was popular with many voters — having won 68.4 % of the vote in the 2022 election, she and her staff faced criticism from supervisors, advocates of hand counting ballots and election deniers who supported President Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020. Elections office workers reported angry calls and shouting observers, some accusing them of tampering with ballots and other crimes, none of which were substantiated, according to Darling Allen. Seemingly tasked with cleaning up the elections office by the board's hard right conservative majority, Toller faced pressure from local election skeptics and activists before and after the presidential election. At the same time, he was at the center of heated board and community discussions about replacing voting machines with hand counting ballots in spite of state election law. In late October, a few weeks after November presidential election ballots went out in the mail to registered voters, Toller announced the elections office was having tallying troubles due to a printing error on some ballots. An 'ink overspray' that wasn't 'visible to the naked eye and did not come up in our pre-election testing' caused the problem, he said on Oct. 30. By then, the elections office had already received approximately 32,500 ballots. In early November, Toller announced he was addressing complaints from election staff about Supervisor Kevin Crye's behavior toward them, although he didn't specify what those complaints included. 'I recognize (supervisors) stand in a special relationship, but as an independent holder of an elected office, they have to respect my responsibilities as well. And if they wanted to descend to the level of punishing my doing my job by, say, pruning my budget, that would be a really disappointing thing and I think that would be something that the voters of Shasta County would take very seriously,' Toller said at the time. Toller and his staff faced criticism from members of the county elections commission as well, including from ballot hand-counting advocate Patty Plumb. Supervisors voted 3-2 to in January to re-appoint Plumb to the commission. Before the vote, Plumb said Toller needed to step down because he refused 'to reform our elections.' Jessica Skropanic is a features reporter for the Record Searchlight/USA Today Network. She covers science, arts, social issues and news stories. Follow her on Twitter @RS_JSkropanic and on Facebook. Join Jessica in the Get Out! Nor Cal recreation Facebook group. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today. Thank you. This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Shasta registrar of voters Tom Toller retiring 10 months into job

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