jefferson state

Tina Peters was recently released early from prison amid a pressure campaign from President Trump after the former Colorado elections official was convicted of tampering with voting machines.

Now, the top elections official in a conservative California county with a long history of voting controversies is seeking to hire her to help run elections there.

Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters in Shasta County, said on a local radio show Sunday that he planned to hire Peters as the assistant registrar next month, just weeks ahead of the November election.

“Tina Peters, she’s now available, so we’re going to pull her in. She has experience, and she’s able to take the rocks and arrows,” Curtis told the hosts of “Jefferson State of Mine,” a show hosted by leaders of the State of Jefferson secession movement.

When asked about her health, which her attorneys said declined in prison, Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, quipped: “Getting out of prison really helps your ability.”

In response to questions from The Times about the hiring process, Curtis said in an email Tuesday afternoon that “counties are very slow” in bringing in new staffers and that Peters would be brought on “as a consultant.”

“Her duties would be to assist with supervision of the November election,” Curtis wrote. “None of our consultants have access to the voting systems, so she would be insulated from false claims.”

A bank of surveillance screens hangs in the public observation room at the Shasta County elections office in Redding, Calif., in February.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nine years behind bars for breaching her county’s voting machines as part of a scheme to show that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

She was found guilty of helping an outside computer expert — an associate of pro-Trump conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell — gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s Dominion election equipment in 2021 and make copies of its hard drive before and after a software upgrade.

Peters was released from prison in June. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted her sentence after months of haranguing from the president. Trump issued a pardon for Peters in December, but since her conviction was for state, not federal, crimes, it fell outside his purview.

‘Monkey business’ and a not-so-open job

In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, said she was “giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled.”

Ticktin, who cited his client’s “effort to get the invasive machines out of our election process,” did not elaborate on which election had alleged problems or what kind of role she had been offered.

The terms of Peters’ parole forbid her from leaving the state without permission from her parole officer, although, after her release, she visited Trump at the White House.

Talk about hiring Peters in Shasta County set off alarm bells across California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office tweeted Monday that Peters “should still be in prison” and that “the state is investigating this.”

“Tina Peters, she’s now available, so we’re going to pull her in,” says Clint Curtis, Shasta County registrar of voters. “She has experience, and she’s able to take the rocks and arrows.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

And Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat, wrote on Facebook that talk of her hiring “should be stopped immediately. “

Brent Turner, the Shasta County assistant registrar whom Curtis suggested he would replace, said there’s one glaring problem with that plan: He hasn’t quit.

“I am the assistant registrar, last I checked, and until further notice I’m planning on continuing to serve the public in that role,” Turner said in an interview Tuesday.

Turner said he had not spoken to Curtis for days and that he learned his boss was floating Peters’ name as a replacement from a local reporter who called him Sunday for comment.

On the “Jefferson State of Mine” broadcast, Curtis said of Turner: ”He got sick on me. I was hoping he’d just, like, retire on June 2 and go away and let me fill [the position], but he didn’t.”

Turner said it was “inappropriate” for Curtis to speak publicly about his health and that he had not given him permission to do so.

Miranda Angel, a Shasta County spokeswoman, said in an email Monday that “there is no formal proposal or application” to replace Turner and that “any prospective employee or consultant would go through the same hiring process as anyone else seeking employment with the county.”

An elections office embroiled in controversy

Shasta County made national headlines in 2023 when its Board of Supervisors ditched Dominion voting machines based on unfounded claims of fraud and opted to hand-count ballots for more than 110,000 registered voters — quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so.

Curtis, a 68-year-old attorney whose claims about rigged voting machines stretch to the early 2000s, took over the elections office last spring.

He was appointed by the county Board of Supervisors to fill the position vacated by two previous registrars who resigned for health reasons that they said were exacerbated by the stress of the job.

Curtis stands in the election counting area on Feb. 25 in Redding, Calif. Curtis installed a controversial election observer area filled with cameras trained on election workers’ hands as they feed ballots into machines.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Curtis lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area, and had never run an election. He got the position after advocating for hand-counting ballots and bragging in a public job interview that he had worked with Mike Lindell.

In Shasta County, he promptly eliminated nine of the vast, mostly-rural county’s 13 ballot dropboxes. He accused his predecessors in the elections office, without evidence, of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans, and he called on federal authorities to raid his office and seize ballots.

Curtis also publicly advocated for Measure B, a voter-approved measure that would eliminate most voting by mail and require ballots to be hand-counted, among other sweeping changes.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state’s top elections official, sued Shasta County over the citizens’ initiative in mid-June, arguing that it violated numerous state election laws and must be struck down before the November election.

Shasta County Superior Court Judge Benjamin L. Hanna this month issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocks implementation of Measure B, which voters approved in the June primary.

In that same election, Curtis was voted out of office. He will be replaced in January by Joanna Francescut, the former longtime assistant registrar, whom he fired.

A censure — and another reprimand

When Curtis spoke on the radio broadcast Sunday about hiring Peters — with whom, he said, he has regular phone conversations — he was under formal censure by the Board of Supervisors for his treatment of staff.

This spring, the county released the findings of two personnel investigations into Curtis’ conduct that were spurred by concerns raised by elections employees and their union representatives.

An internal investigation and an external probe by Oppenheimer Investigations Group found that Curtis made phone calls related to his own campaign during county work hours and casually threatened to kill, spank, slap or “throat punch” staffers.

He threatened to have one employee dragged out of the office by their hair, according to an internal investigation report by Monica Fugitt, the county’s director of support services.

“Mr. Curtis has demonstrated a clear pattern of unprofessional and abusive conduct toward staff,” wrote Fugitt, who recommended Curtis be physically separated from the elections staff, working at a different physical location or remotely because of his “pervasive abusive conduct.”

Curtis has denied the findings.

The Board of Supervisors censured Curtis on Aug. 11.

He responded by inviting reporters to the elections office in downtown Redding, where he showed them security footage that, he said, showed employees breaking into a room in the building, the news outlet Shasta Scout reported.

A woman walks past a ballot drop box in the Shasta County city of Anderson on Feb. 25.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Curtis allowed reporters to take video of the footage and said he had not discussed the matter with the staffers, Shasta Scout reported.

The county condemned those actions in an Aug. 14 news release, saying he “has repeatedly been advised of appropriate procedures for addressing and investigating personnel matters and advised of the importance of maintaining confidentiality of such matters.”

Curtis, the county wrote, showed “complete disregard for those procedures as well as employees’ due process rights.”

In an email Tuesday, Shasta County deputy chief executive officer Stewart Buettell said the county and its Board of Supervisors do not have the power to terminate Curtis’ employment because he was appointed to fill a vacancy in an elected position.

“As soon as they assume that office, it’s as if they were elected,” Buettell said. To be removed from the office, he said, Curtis would have to be recalled by voters.

A photo published last week by Shasta Scout shows a pair of doors to a room in the elections office containing ballots from the June election. Curtis sealed the doors with locks, duct tape and red-lettered signs that read: “KEEP OUT PER ROV CLINT CURTIS.”

“I had facilities put this lock on and destroy the keys,” Curtis told the news outlet. “So if someone comes … they have to bring a warrant and a bolt cutter. That’s the only way to get in that room.”

Turner, the assistant registrar, told The Times that “Clint seems to be taking issue with some of the ballots in his own race” that he lost.