The counting problems that plagued Shasta County on Election Night this week weren’t the result of some elaborate conspiracy. They were, by most accounts, the predictable outcome of mismanagement by the county’s own election chief — a man who has spent the better part of two years casting doubt on the integrity of California’s voting system.
Clint Curtis, Shasta County’s outgoing registrar of voters, oversaw an election night marked by overflowing ballot boxes, staffing shortages, misdirected ballots, computer malfunctions, and confused voters who showed up to polling places only to find signs announcing last-minute location changes. Shasta Scout, a nonprofit newsroom that partners with CalMatters, documented many of the breakdowns as they unfolded.
While most California counties had posted initial results shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m., Shasta County didn’t release any numbers until roughly 10 p.m. — and by Wednesday morning, it remained the only county in the state that had failed to finish tallying in-person ballots. Election officials, it turned out, had not properly configured the county’s vote-counting software.
A Shasta Scout reporter pressed Curtis on Election Night about why the extra staff he said he’d hired in recent months hadn’t been dispatched to collect ballots from drop boxes — a task Curtis himself left the elections office to handle personally, even as results were supposed to be coming together under his watch.
“Because I’m stupid,” Curtis told Shasta Scout. “So when I see that it needs to be done, I just do it myself.”
Curtis did not immediately respond to CalMatters’ request for comment Wednesday.
The chaos in Shasta County stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the state. None of California’s other 57 counties reported significant problems, despite fears heading into the election that the Trump administration might attempt to interfere with vote counting after federal officials issued what were described as unprecedented threats against California election workers.
Curtis draws FBI scrutiny to rural county
Curtis’s tenure had already thrust rural, conservative-leaning Shasta County into the national spotlight this fall, as it appeared poised to become a flashpoint in President Donald Trump’s broader campaign against election administration in Democratic-led states — a campaign rooted in Trump’s long-standing, unsubstantiated claims that Democrats rig elections against him.
Curtis, who has questioned the legitimacy of U.S. elections for years, made unfounded allegations that bad actors had stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes during the June primary — an election in which he lost his own bid for a full term as registrar.
Last year, Curtis cut the number of ballot drop boxes in Shasta County from 13 to four. After the June primary, he claimed a ballot-stuffing scheme was underway, pointing to ballots that he and his staff said had paper that looked, felt, and smelled unusual.
Those claims caught the attention of top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration. In September, federal agents descended on the county elections office with bolt cutters, breaking into a storage room containing old ballots that Curtis had locked and reportedly discarded the key to. Curtis has said the FBI agents did not seize any ballots.
The status of that federal investigation remains unclear, and the U.S. Department of Justice has not even confirmed that one exists.
Successor takes office in January
Curtis, a relatively minor figure within the broader MAGA-aligned election-denial movement, had no prior experience running elections before far-right members of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors appointed him to the post in 2025.
A lawyer and former Democratic congressional candidate in both Florida and California, Curtis lost June’s primary to Joanna Francescut, a former Shasta County elections official who helped run the department before Curtis fired her.
Francescut is set to take over as registrar of voters in January.
Original source: CalMatters
