Shasta County Election Denier Likely Ousted, But Voters Back Hand-Counting Ballots

Shasta County voters appear to have ousted a controversial elections chief who promotes conspiracy theories about voter fraud, even as they approved a ballot measure that would require hand-counting ballots and voter ID, conflicting with California election law. If the results hold, Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis, who has advocated for the initiative, will remain in office until the end of the year.

On Wednesday, former elections office worker Joanna Francescut was leading Curtis with about 56% of the vote. She’s on track to win the race outright because they were the only candidates on the primary election ballot.

His loss would set the stage for a tense November election. The conspiracy-minded elections chief will remain in charge of the office after a bitter defeat — with nothing to lose in a county that is already a national hotspot for election deniers.

Tuesday’s election also was marked by lengthy vote-reporting delays, and a local journalist raised concerns about the threat of future violence at elections offices after the editor of the nonprofit Shasta Scout newspaper reported that she saw an election worker activate what appeared to be a stun gun. The county’s Measure B, requiring hand-counting of ballots, in-person voting and voters to show ID, was leading by 2,464 votes.

An activist group called Shasta Election Reform is behind the initiative. Curtis, a self-proclaimed “elections integrity advocate,” lived in Florida and had no experience administering elections before the county board of supervisors appointed him in 2025 over Francescut, who also sought the job.

Curtis has accused his predecessors of stuffing ballots to sabotage Republicans, an allegation they say is ridiculous, considering the county reliably votes Republican. Donald Trump won two-thirds of the vote in Shasta County in 2024.

Curtis fired Francescut soon after taking over the elections office. She sued recently alleging wrongful termination.

Curtis associated with conspiracy theorists. Two county-instigated investigations found troubling examples of Curtis acting inappropriately on the clock.

The investigations found that he routinely mistreats his employees, casually threatens physical violence and urges his workers to perform illegal acts, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The investigations found Curtis also violated election law by campaigning for himself while on county business.

Curtis has aligned himself with 2020 election deniers, publicly expressed skepticism about voting machines and significantly reduced the number of ballot drop boxes in the county. That’s a concern after Riverside County Sheriff and Republican candidate for governor Chad Bianco took the unprecedented step of seizing ballots in that county this year.

Curtis served as an adviser to the activist group that made dubious claims of voting irregularities in Riverside County, and he broke the news at a Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting that Bianco planned to seize the ballots. Curtis’ spokesperson, Brent Turner, said that should Francescut ultimately get more votes than him, voters don’t need to worry about Curtis trying to stay in power like Trump did in 2020 after Trump lost that election.

“Clint is a law-and-order investigator of corrupted systems,” Turner said. “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.” Francescut’s campaign spokesperson didn’t return an interview request sent through the campaign’s social media account.

Measure B’s apparent passage sets the stage for a conflict in state courts that Shasta County is likely to lose. Courts found that a similar measure Huntington Beach passed in 2024 requiring voters to show ID violated state law.

Turner declined to address the legal uncertainties and referred inquiries to the California Attorney General’s Office. The agency didn’t immediately answer CalMatters’ questions.

Did an election worker ignite a stun gun? The AG’s office also didn’t immediately respond to CalMatters’ questions about whether it was investigating one of Curtis’ employees for allegedly touching off a stun gun with a journalist watching.

Annelise Pierce, the Shasta Scout editor, said she was standing outside the elections office watching workers Curtis hired as temporary employees. As they waited by the street for a car to drop off ballots from an outlying precinct, one of the men pulled out a stun gun and set it off, making a loud zapping sound, Pierce said.

Turner disputes that it was a stun gun. The worker appeared to be only showing the weapon to the other men and didn’t try to hurt anyone, but it alarmed Pierce.

She alerted those inside, including poll observers from the attorney general’s office who were monitoring the election, she said. Curtis came out and took the stun gun from the man, she said.

The Shasta County elections office on Market Street in Redding on June 2, 2026. Photo by Madison Holcomb for Shasta Scout.

Pierce said Turner downplayed the incident. She said that troubled her, given the tensions over voting in the county and the threat of violence at polling places.

“I think the thing most upsetting was no one took it seriously when this seemed like a safety issue,” she told CalMatters. Turner said the device was just a flashlight that made a buzzing noise.

“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 device, but she didn’t get a photo of it.

It’s illegal for a member of the public to carry a firearm in a polling place in California, brandish a weapon or to intimidate polling workers or voters, but the law doesn’t appear to explicitly address possession of non-lethal weapons such as stun guns. California Assembly Elections Committee Chairperson Gail Pellerin said the incident may lead to a new law to explicitly ban such weapons in elections offices.

“I’m certain that it’s something we’d be looking at to remedy in another election cycle, you know, because we just keep having to pass laws dealing with creative new unacceptable behaviors (during elections),” said Pellerin, a Democrat and former elections chief in Santa Cruz County. Shasta County vote tallies delayed.

When Curtis took the job, he promised more efficient vote counting, but election night returns were much slower than in most other California counties. By midnight, several other counties, including neighboring Siskiyou and Lassen, had posted almost all of their preliminary precinct counts online, while Shasta County’s website showed less than 2% reported.

Turner said the delay was due to the power in the dilapidated Shasta County elections building going out, delaying the process by about two hours, which also happened last year. ‘We really should desire accuracy and precision in the processing of the ballot.’ Shasta County elections spokesperson Brent Turner.

As he discussed the delays, Turner, a Democrat who advocates for open-source voting systems, sounded a lot like other California elections officials who urge patience with the state’s notoriously slow elections. The time it takes to process mail-in ballots causes results to shift, sometimes dramatically, from early returns that typically favor Republicans, a phenomenon that has given rise to many of the conspiracy theories activists use to cast doubt on election results.

“The procedures that we’re implementing and have implemented, results in good precision (with vote counts), but there can be timing elements involved,” Turner said. “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.