Shasta County has become the lone trouble spot in California’s 2026 general election, where a chaotic ballot count exposed the shortcomings of an elections chief better known for promoting conspiracy theories than running a smooth operation.
While the state’s 57 other counties reported results without major incident — despite earlier fears that federal officials might try to interfere with California’s vote count — Shasta County stood alone on Wednesday morning as the only county still working to finish tallying in-person ballots from Election Day.
The breakdown has been well documented by local outlet Shasta Scout, a CalMatters reporting partner, which chronicled a string of missteps: overflowing ballot boxes, understaffed polling sites, ballots sorted into the wrong bins, technical glitches with vote-counting software, and voters showing up to find their polling locations had changed without adequate notice.
Most California counties began releasing results shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Shasta County’s first numbers didn’t come in until nearly 10 p.m., the delay traced to elections staff failing to properly configure their counting system.
At the center of the dysfunction is Clint Curtis, the county’s elections chief, who is set to leave office in January after losing his bid for a full term in June’s primary. Curtis, a well-known figure in the national election-denial movement, was appointed to the post in 2025 by the then-far-right majority on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors — despite having no prior professional experience running elections.
On election night, a Shasta Scout reporter asked Curtis why the additional staff he said he had hired in recent months weren’t available to collect ballots from drop boxes, forcing Curtis himself to leave the elections office to retrieve them instead of overseeing the count.
“Because I’m stupid,” Curtis told the outlet. “So when I see it needs to be done, I just do it myself.”
Curtis did not respond to a request for comment from CalMatters on Wednesday.
The disarray is a stark contrast to the high-stakes political drama that swirled around Curtis and his office earlier this year. After losing the June primary, Curtis alleged — without evidence — that unknown actors had stuffed ballot drop boxes with fraudulent votes, claiming some ballots felt, looked and even smelled suspicious. The accusations echoed President Donald Trump’s long-running, unsubstantiated claims that Democrats manipulate elections against him, and they drew the attention of federal law enforcement.
In September, FBI agents arrived at the Shasta County elections office equipped with bolt cutters to access a storage room containing old ballots that Curtis had padlocked, reportedly after misplacing the key. Curtis maintained at the time that agents did not remove any ballots from the premises. The U.S. Department of Justice has never publicly confirmed whether an investigation into the county is underway, and its status remains unclear.
Before taking the elections post, Curtis — an attorney — had unsuccessfully run for Congress as a Democrat in both Florida and California. His tenure in Shasta County was marked by sweeping changes, including cutting the number of ballot drop boxes from 13 to just four last year, as well as the firing of Joanna Francescut, a longtime elections staffer.
Francescut went on to challenge Curtis in the June primary and defeated him. She is scheduled to take over as Shasta County’s elections chief when Curtis’ term ends in January, a transition many hope will restore stability to an office that has spent the better part of a year in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Original source: CalMatters
