California county’s election drama worsens as official locks up ballots
Days after the top elections official in Shasta County announced that he planned to hire an election denier who served prison time for tampering with voting machines, county leaders there made an extraordinary plea to state and federal authorities: Please come investigate.
A statement released by the county Tuesday afternoon said Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters, had made “frivolous” claims and “unproven statements” about the June primary election, which he administered and certified.
“The County condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” read the statement released by Stewart Buettell, the county’s deputy chief executive officer.
Curtis — whose name was on the ballot, in a race he lost — has sequestered primary ballots in a room in the elections office in Redding, sealing the doors with locks, duct tape and red-lettered signs that read: “KEEP OUT PER ROV CLINT CURTIS.”
Curtis has told reporters that the ballots did not look, feel or smell right and that he had directed facilities workers to put a lock on the room and destroy the keys so that if anyone tries to gain access, they will need a warrant and bolt cutter.
Curtis said he, too, had asked the FBI to investigate.
The county fired back, saying in its statement that it wanted the FBI — as well as the California secretary of state and the attorney general — to investigate Curtis, whose short tenure as registrar has been fraught with controversy.
“Mr. Curtis was appointed to enhance transparency, strengthen election integrity, and restore trust in the democratic process,” the county wrote. “While some progress has been achieved, including the promotion of meaningful observation within the Elections Office, Mr. Curtis has failed significantly in other core responsibilities, undermining the very principles he was appointed to uphold.”
Curtis could not immediately be reached for comment. The FBI field office in Sacramento said it was unable to comment.
The new observation area at the Shasta County elections office.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson, in a statement Tuesday, said he was “aware of the controversy involving the ROV and ballots,” including claims on social media that he had been requested “to sequester alleged illegal or illegitimate ballots locked in the ROV’s office [and] addressing threats made to burn down the facility.”
Johnson said Curtis had agreed to provide a statement regarding a person who allegedly threatened the facility and that it was “an active investigation.”
“It is the Sheriff’s understanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is investigating the matter; therefore, Sheriff Johnson is urging members of the public to be patient and await the results of that investigation,” Johnson wrote. “At this point, launching a second investigation could complicate a process already in place.”
In an interview on Lindell TV, created by MAGA conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, Curtis said that the ballots “are being held at my office, which is kind of problematic because it’s a really old building and we have a lot of Antifa people,” including one who “once commented how easy it would be to burn that building down.”
The showdown in Shasta comes as Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — who in February used armed deputies to confiscate more than half a million ballots from last year’s special election for Proposition 50 to determine if they were fraudulently counted — is defending that seizure before the California Supreme Court this week.
The Supreme Court justices hammered Bianco, a Republican who came in fourth in this spring’s crowded California gubernatorial primary, in back-to-back hearings Monday. They appeared poised to order the ballots returned and to sharply limit the sheriff’s power to snatch election materials in the future.
In February, Curtis was the first person to publicly announce Bianco planned to confiscate the ballots.
Curtis had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.
Potential hiring of election denier sets off alarm bells
Last week, Curtis drew national headlines by saying he wanted to hire election denier Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was released early from prison this summer amid a pressure campaign from President Trump.
Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, told The Times in an email that he wanted to hire Peters as a consultant to “to assist with supervision of the November election.”
Tina Peters speaks at the Colorado State Capitol in downtown Denver on April 5, 2022.
(David Zalubowski / Associated Press)
“None of our consultants have access to the voting systems, so she would be insulated from false claims,” he wrote.
Peters 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 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.
Shasta County officials told The Times that any prospective employee or consultant would have to go through the same hiring process as anyone else seeking employment with the county.
Talk of hiring Peters drew swift condemnation from California lawmakers, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it was looking into whether a contract with Peters violated state law.
And on Aug. 19, Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, wrote in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that they had “grave concern” about Curtis’ plan to hire Peters.
“We are concerned that this hiring decision in Shasta County has less to do with Ms. Peters’ qualifications, and more to do with the President’s obsession with interfering in the midterm elections,” they wrote.
The senators said that if the county hires her, Weber should “provide the maximum oversight possible to ensure that Ms. Peters does not improperly access ballots, voting systems, or sensitive information that could impact the rights and privacy of the over 100,000 registered voters in Shasta County.”
Controversy and censure
Curtis, a 68-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors in the spring of 2025 to fill the position vacated by two previous registrars who resigned for health reasons.
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 Lindell.
He promptly eliminated nine of the vast, mostly rural county’s 13 ballot drop boxes. He accused his predecessors, without evidence, of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans, and repeatedly called on federal authorities to raid the office and seize ballots from previous elections.
The Board of Supervisors censured Curtis on Aug. 11 for his treatment of staff.
A ballot drop box at the Shasta Lake Visitor Center in February.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He responded by inviting reporters to the elections office in downtown Redding, where he shared security footage that, he said, showed employees breaking into a room in the building. He allowed reporters to take video of the footage.
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.”
Earlier 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 inquiry 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, who wrote that he had “demonstrated a clear pattern of unprofessional and abusive conduct toward staff.”
Curtis has denied the findings.
In its statement Tuesday, the county said he “has made and continues to make unsubstantiated accusations of illegal activities against employees without due process or an investigation.”
Buettell, the deputy chief executive, told The Times that the county does 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.
