Shasta County voters appear poised to remove a controversial elections chief who has promoted claims of widespread voter fraud, even as they backed a local measure requiring hand-counted ballots and voter identification — provisions likely to clash with California election law.
As of Wednesday, former Shasta County elections office employee Joanna Francescut was leading Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis with about 56% of the vote. Because Francescut and Curtis were the only candidates on the primary ballot, Francescut is on track to win the office outright if the results hold.
Curtis, who has supported the local election measure, would remain in charge of the elections office through the end of the year. That could leave Shasta County heading into the November election with an incumbent elections chief who has just lost his own race in a county that has become a national focal point for election denialism.
Tuesday’s election in Shasta County was also marked by slow vote reporting and a safety concern raised by a local journalist, who said she witnessed a temporary elections worker activate what appeared to be a stun gun outside the elections office. A spokesperson for Curtis disputed that account, saying the device was a flashlight that made a buzzing sound.
Measure B, the Shasta County initiative requiring hand-counting of ballots, in-person voting and voter ID, was ahead by 2,464 votes. The measure was promoted by Shasta Election Reform, an activist group focused on election procedures.
Curtis, who describes himself as an “elections integrity” advocate, was appointed by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors in 2025. He had lived in Florida and had no prior experience running elections before his appointment. Francescut also sought the job at the time.
Since taking office, Curtis has made unproven claims that prior elections officials manipulated ballots to harm Republican candidates. His predecessors have rejected those allegations, noting that Shasta County is one of California’s most reliably Republican counties. Donald Trump received about two-thirds of the county’s vote in 2024.
Curtis fired Francescut shortly after becoming registrar. She has since sued the county, alleging wrongful termination.
County-initiated investigations later found examples of misconduct by Curtis while on the job, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle. The investigations found that he mistreated employees, made casual threats of physical violence, encouraged staff to take unlawful actions and violated election law by campaigning for himself while conducting county business.
Curtis has also associated with figures who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, questioned voting machines and reduced the number of ballot drop boxes available in Shasta County.
His office has drawn attention beyond Northern California because of connections to election controversies in Riverside County. Curtis served as an adviser to an activist group that made disputed claims of voting irregularities there. He also announced at a Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor, planned to seize ballots. Bianco’s investigators relied on the group’s claims when they sought court approval for the seizure, according to CalMatters.
The Riverside County episode helped prompt a new California law barring law enforcement officers from seizing ballots. Curtis has declined to tell local journalists whether he would cooperate with federal law enforcement agencies under President Trump if such agencies sought access to ballots despite the state law.
Brent Turner, a spokesperson for Curtis, said voters should not expect Curtis to try to hold onto power if Francescut’s lead persists.
“Clint is a law-and-order investigator of corrupted systems,” Turner told CalMatters. “That’s more, I think, a Trumpian kind of a play that you’re alluding to, and I have seen no sign of anything like that.”
A spokesperson for Francescut’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment sent through the campaign’s social media account.
If Measure B passes, Shasta County is likely to face a legal challenge. California courts have already found that a similar Huntington Beach voter ID measure approved in 2024 violated state law. Turner declined to discuss the legal questions surrounding Measure B and referred inquiries to the California Attorney General’s Office, which did not immediately respond to questions from CalMatters.
The Attorney General’s Office also did not immediately respond to questions about whether it is investigating the alleged stun gun incident at the Shasta County elections office.
Annelise Pierce, editor of the nonprofit Shasta Scout, said she was outside the elections office watching temporary workers hired by Curtis as they waited near the street for a vehicle carrying ballots from an outlying precinct.
Pierce said one of the men pulled out a device that appeared to be a stun gun and activated it, producing a loud zapping sound. She said the worker appeared to be showing the device to other men and did not try to hurt anyone, but the incident alarmed her. Pierce said she notified people inside the office, including observers from the Attorney General’s Office who were monitoring the election.
Curtis came outside and took the device from the worker, Pierce said.
Pierce said she was troubled that the incident did not appear to be treated seriously, given the heightened tensions around elections in Shasta County and broader concerns about threats to election workers and voters.
“I think the thing most upsetting was no one took it seriously when this seemed like a safety issue,” Pierce told CalMatters.
Turner said the device was not a stun gun.
“It unfortunately makes a noise that is not an appropriate noise, and that was, you know, addressed, but it was not a Taser,” he said.
Pierce said she believes the device was a flashlight-stun gun combination, though she did not photograph it.
California law prohibits members of the public from carrying firearms in polling places, brandishing weapons or intimidating voters and election workers. The law does not appear to clearly address nonlethal weapons such as stun guns in election offices.
Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, a Democrat who chairs the Assembly Elections Committee and previously served as Santa Cruz County’s elections chief, said the incident could prompt lawmakers to consider a more explicit ban on such devices in election settings.
“I’m certain that it’s something we’d be looking at to remedy in another election cycle,” Pellerin said, “because we just keep having to pass laws dealing with creative new unacceptable behaviors” during elections.
Shasta County also experienced significant delays in reporting results Tuesday night. Curtis had promised more efficient vote counting when he took over the office, but Shasta’s returns came in more slowly than in many other California counties.
By midnight, several counties, including neighboring Siskiyou and Lassen, had posted nearly all of their preliminary precinct results online. Shasta County’s website showed less than 2% of precincts reporting.
Turner said the delay was caused by a power outage at the aging Shasta County elections building, which he said slowed the process by about two hours. He said a similar outage occurred last year.
Turner, a Democrat who has advocated for open-source voting systems, urged patience and emphasized accuracy over speed — a message often delivered by California elections officials in a state where vote counting can take days or weeks because of the large number of mail ballots.
“The procedures that we’re implementing and have implemented result in good precision,” Turner said, “but there can be timing elements involved. I appreciate everybody wants the fastest count possible, but we really should desire accuracy and precision in the processing of the ballot over the desire to have a quick answer on election night.”
Original source: CalMatters
