A Shasta County Superior Court judge blocked Measure B on August 7, granting a preliminary injunction that keeps the county's current election rules in place for the November contest [1]. The order stops a voter-approved overhaul before it could reach a single ballot.
Measure B was not a small change. It would have required photo identification to register and to vote, eliminated vote-by-mail, ended most early voting, mandated that ballots be counted by hand, and stood up a separate county voter-registration system apart from the state's [1]. Taken together, those provisions would have carved out one county's elections from the way the rest of California runs them.
That carve-out is the heart of the case. Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber went to court arguing that Shasta, a charter county, does not hold home-rule authority over elections, and that Measure B conflicts with state law [1]. Home rule lets a charter county govern its own municipal affairs. The state's position is that how federal and state elections are conducted is not a municipal affair a county gets to rewrite on its own.
The practical effect of the injunction is a freeze. The county's 116,000-plus registered voters will vote in November under the same rules as before, with vote-by-mail and early voting intact and no new photo ID requirement at the polls [1]. Nothing in the order settles the underlying dispute. A preliminary injunction only holds the line while the litigation continues, which means the question of whether Measure B can ever take effect is still open.
What is decided, for now, is who writes the rules. Backers of Measure B wanted Shasta to run its elections its own way. The court has told them that authority sits with the state until a judge rules otherwise on the merits.
