In late September, FBI agents used bolt cutters to enter a padlocked storage room at the Shasta County, California elections office, inspecting boxes of ballots from the June primary that the county’s own elections chief, Clint Curtis, had sealed off and declared evidence of fraud. The episode, confirmed by the California Secretary of State’s office, which had representatives present, marks one of the more unusual election administration disputes of the cycle — one in which the local official entrusted with running elections is himself now the subject of state and federal scrutiny.
A Registrar With No Prior Elections Experience
Curtis, a Florida attorney with no previous background in election administration, was appointed Shasta County’s Clerk and Registrar of Voters in 2025 by a Board of Supervisors majority aligned with the far right. He ran for the office himself in the June 2026 primary and lost, meaning voters effectively ousted him even as his term continues through early 2027, when a successor — a former Shasta County elections official — is set to take over.
“Counterfeit Ballots” and a Padlocked Room
After the June primary, Curtis said mail ballots being counted “looked, felt and smelled wrong,” describing what he called a “counterfeit ballot” problem and claiming some ballots were noticeably thicker than others — signs, he argued, of ballot stuffing through drop boxes. In August, he padlocked the room where the disputed ballots were stored, posted “Keep Out” signs, and said he discarded the key to preserve the material as evidence, effectively taking the ballots out of normal chain-of-custody procedures.
A Grand Jury Subpoena and an FBI Visit
A federal grand jury in Sacramento subsequently subpoenaed Curtis, ordering him to appear and bring the boxes of disputed ballots to court on September 24. Days earlier, FBI agents arrived at the Redding elections office, cut the padlock Curtis had installed, inspected the ballot boxes, removed nothing, and left behind an evidence seal marked “secured.” Curtis maintained he did not need to comply with the subpoena because, in his telling, “the FBI is already on the case,” and said agents never told him what they were investigating.
The County Asks for Its Own Clerk to Be Investigated
In a striking twist, Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors issued a statement last summer condemning Curtis’s conduct and inviting the California Secretary of State, the state Department of Justice, the FBI and other agencies to examine both his unsubstantiated fraud claims and his own handling of the elections office. The board separately found, in an internal probe, evidence of threats and retaliation by Curtis against elections staff.
Experts Reject the Fraud Claims
Election administration experts have pushed back hard on Curtis’s theory. Sonni Waknin of the UCLA Voting Rights Project noted that California’s signature-verification and ballot-scanning safeguards make large-scale ballot forgery extremely difficult to carry out undetected, saying attempts tend to get caught well before results are certified. Asked who he believed might be behind the alleged ballot stuffing, Curtis himself said, “Who knows? Who cares? I don’t try to get into who did or why they did, only if they did” — a response critics say underscores the thinness of the evidence behind his claims.
What’s Next
Curtis remains in office and insists he will “accurately tally every vote” in Shasta County’s November general election before handing the role to his successor in January. The status of the federal grand jury matter remains unresolved; Curtis said he was told the subpoena requiring him to produce the ballots had been lifted but had not received written confirmation. With state and federal investigators now scrutinizing the registrar’s own conduct rather than the election he claims was compromised, Shasta County — a reliably pro-Trump jurisdiction that has separately moved to restrict mail voting and tighten voter ID rules — heads into November under unusually close watch.
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