The hard-right chairman of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, who questioned whether voting machines fostered election fraud, has narrowly survived a recall.

Supervisor Kevin Crye, a gym owner who took office last year, defeated the recall by just 50 votes out of 9,382 ballots cast, according to final results released by the county registrar Thursday afternoon. In 2023, he enlisted Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and pro-Trump election denier, in the county’s successful push to ditch Dominion voting machines.

Informed of the results by a Los Angeles Times reporter, Crye joked: “Landslide.”

The skinny margin of his political survival, he said, was to be expected, given that he was elected to office in November 2022 by a similarly slim margin of just 90 votes. “It’s an example of our country: It’s split,” he said of the results.

He also called the recall attempt — which was launched after the Dominion vote, less than four months after he took office — “completely unnecessary” and noted that it had “cost the taxpayers a lot of money.”

Many in Shasta County had framed the election — in which three of the five seats on the Board of Supervisors were up for grabs along with Crye’s fate — as a referendum on the board’s hard-right turn in the last few years.

Since a Republican supervisor was recalled in 2022 on the grounds that he was not conservative enough, hard-right forces have transformed this largely rural Northern California county into a national symbol of ultraconservative governance and election denialism.

The board’s hard-right majority dumped Dominion voting systems based on unfounded claims of voter fraud pushed by former President Trump and tried to return the county to hand-counting ballots before being thwarted by a new state law that forbade them from doing so.

They passed a measure to allow concealed weapons in local government buildings, in defiance of state law. And they explored hiring a California secessionist leader as the county’s chief executive.

The March 5 election results left that majority weakened, but not totally defeated.

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