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Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is taking to texts to get her message out in her bid for re-election in June.

Schubert for two months has sought the support of potential voters via messages that pop up on cellphones. Text messaging, said Schubert campaign manager David Gilliard, is just “another tool in the tool box” of a political campaign. Real Justice, which supports Schubert's challenger Noah Phillips, also targets potential voters via texts, said Vince Duffy, Phillips' campaign manager. 

The Voter's Choice Act is a new California election law that counties can implement if they choose to do so. Five counties - Madera, Napa, Nevada, Sacramento and San Mateo - are piloting this new approach to voting starting with the upcoming June 2018 statewide primary.

Participating counties will mail every registered voter a vote-by-mail ballot and provide secure ballot drop-off locations and vote centers where voters can return their ballots in person, or they can return voted ballots by mail. 

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Improving voter confidence in the elections process is part of Kim Alexander's mission at the nonprofit California Voter Foundation.

"When they say the Russians are going to come back, I don't think they're kidding about that," Alexander said.

Despite the threat of hacking in the 2018 election, Alexander said California is much better protected than other states because of paper ballots.

"The combination of a paper-based voting system and routine auditing of election results means that if something happened to our vote count and someone tried to intervene with the election, we would likely detect it," Alexander said. "And we would be able to recover from it."

In a major departure from his previous budgets, California Governor Jerry Brown's new state budget includes $134.3 million to fund new voting equipment. 

"This is a welcome development and will help build California voters' confidence in the integrity and security of our voting systems," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, which has consistently supported increased state funding to help pay for California's election costs since 2013.