By Ryan Sabalow
FBI agents paid a visit to Shasta County last week after Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis claimed ballots looked, felt and smelled funny as workers were counting them in the June primary, an election he happened to lose.
They visited the room in the Shasta County elections office where Curtis had locked away ballots from the June election in anticipation of the FBI’s eventual arrival. The agents, Curtis said, inspected the boxes holding them as part of what he claims is an election-fraud investigation. Curtis said a federal grand jury subpoena ordered him to bring the ballots to court in Sacramento this week.
The FBI’s inspection came after other Shasta County officials also urged the federal and state government to investigate, but for a different reason: To prove Curtis’ claims about widespread election fraud wrong.
“The county condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” officials said in a statement last month.
The extraordinary level of federal involvement in the heavily conservative county a two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Sacramento comes as Trump and his MAGA movement hunt for evidence of widespread election fraud that experts say doesn’t exist. It follows a handful of cases this year of federal and MAGA-aligned local authorities seizing ballots from past elections in California and in other states.
After he lost the June election, Curtis, a longtime conspiracy theorist and election denier whose final official act will be to oversee November’s election in Shasta, began claiming some of the mail-in ballots that arrived at the elections office seemed off.
“We had a lot of weird ballots coming in, so we have the whole counterfeit ballot thing, which is what the feds are looking at, which is essentially the fact that the paper is wrong,” Curtis said in an hourlong interview with CalMatters in the Redding elections office. “And it smelled wrong before, but now it doesn’t smell anymore. Two months have gone by, but when we did our first initial — you know, I had a dozen people say ‘Something’s wrong with this.’ When you’re flipping through ballots, you kind of get used to the thickness and the size, and suddenly you hit one that’s, you know, considerably thicker.”
Curtis claims the wrong paper issue is possible proof of something he and other MAGA conspiracy theorists have long claimed happens regularly in California and other states with mail-in voting: Nefarious actors are fixing elections by stuffing fake ballots into drop-off boxes.
Election experts have a word for such claims: Nonsense.
They say there are so many safeguards in place to verify signatures and scan ballots that it would be nearly impossible to forge huge numbers of ballots and not get immediately caught.
Sonni Waknin, an attorney at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, used her own experience to highlight how well California’s safeguards work.
She said one of her ballots in a past election was flagged at a California elections office because the signature she used to register to vote didn’t appear to match the one she signed on her ballot. Elections officials reached out to her to verify it was her signature, and she was required to fill out a form to declare it was indeed Waknin who filled out her ballot.
“You get caught when it’s not even forged,” she said. “When people try to commit fraud, they get caught.”
State officials aren’t talking
Curtis said FBI agents showed up last week at the election office to inspect the room where he’d stored ballots. Curtis had a padlock installed and had hung “Keep Out” signs on the door in anticipation of an investigation. The FBI agents brought bolt cutters to get in the room. Curtis said representatives from the California secretary of state’s office were also there observing.
He said the federal authorities didn’t take any ballots with them. They left a green evidence cable lock marked with the word “SECURED” where Curtis’ padlock once hung.
Curtis said the FBI didn’t tell him what they were looking for. “I just showed them what we had,” he said. “The FBI never says anything to you, by the way … it’s information in and nothing out.”
Curtis says a federal grand jury in Sacramento ordered him to bring boxes containing the ballots but on Monday he said he was told he no longer needs to, though he’s not yet received a written notice that his subpoena is canceled.
He said that while he’s “thrilled” the FBI is investigating his claims and he’d relish the chance to talk to a grand jury, he’s relieved not to have to go. “I don’t want to tow down 100 boxes of ballots,” he said.
U.S. Justice Department spokesperson Lauren Horwood said in an email that the agency would “not comment on subpoenas that might or might not exist.”
The California Legislature passed laws this year that seek to criminalize removing election materials from county offices after MAGA-affiliated Sheriff Chad Bianco seized ballots in March from the Riverside County elections office.
CalMatters made repeated requests to interview Secretary of State Shirley Weber and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, both Democrats. Their press offices would only say via email they were monitoring what’s going on in Shasta County. No one else was made available for an interview.
CalMatters was unable to obtain a copy of the grand jury’s subpoena. Curtis said he gave it to Shasta County’s attorneys. They have yet to respond to CalMatters’ request for it under the California Public Records Act. County Counsel Joseph Larmour didn’t return an interview request.
How Curtis got Trump involved
Curtis said he started making calls to the Trump administration after the June election, in which he was also on the ballot and lost.
He wouldn’t tell CalMatters who he talked to, but an Instagram post from MAGA journalist Corinne Cliford says Curtis wrote to Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary.
“I believe that many of the vote by mail ballots are counterfeit and have been inserted in order to alter the election results,” Curtis wrote, according to a screen shot of the message on Cliford’s Instagram feed. “This is a federal election and may establish a pattern that has been used in other jurisdictions as well.”
It’s an especially bizarre claim to make in the rural and ultra-conservative Shasta County, whose electorate regularly votes for Trump and MAGA’s favorite causes.
Nearly two-thirds of Shasta County voters have picked Trump in every election he’s been on the ballot. In the same June election that Curtis lost, Shasta County’s voters passed a local referendum that sought to ban mail-in ballots and require voter ID, major MAGA goals.
Courts have since blocked Shasta County’s measure from taking effect for now. Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court last week blocked Trump’s plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to disrupt mail-in voting.
Asked who might be responsible for stuffing ballot boxes in Shasta County, Curtis shrugged it off. “Who knows? Who cares?” he said. “I don’t try to get into who did or why (they) did, only if they did.”
Stephen Richer, a former Republican Arizona elections official who received death threats after Trump accused him, without evidence, of rigging his county’s 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden, said vague claims about who’s supposedly behind voting conspiracies go hand-in-hand with MAGA election fraud hunters such as Curtis.
Richer said it’s telling that Trump has spent six years as president and has mobilized much of the federal law enforcement apparatus to hunt down fraud, yet federal agents have only arrested a few dozen people across the country for voting illegally.
Most of those suspects allegedly acted on their own and were not part of some vast, election-swaying conspiracy, he said. Some were Republicans.
“You would be the golden boy,” Richer said of any person who could find evidence of a voter fraud conspiracy. “You found the Holy Grail. Trump … would probably name you vice president — JD’s out — if you found, like, actual, material voter fraud.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation has an interactive election-fraud tracker. It lists 557 convictions in all states since 2016. For comparison, 154.6 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election.
At least one California county Republican Party official now regrets making election fraud claims. Marin County’s Republican Party chair apologized to local officials earlier this month after claiming dead people voted for California’s congressional redistricting measure last year.
“I’m here today to retract that statement that I made a few months ago as far as those voters being on the roll. I did not find them,” John Turnacliff told county leaders at a public meeting. “I apologize to the Board of Supervisors and to the registrar’s office and to the registrar for any angst and consternation that could have (been) put on you since then.”
How he became elections chief
Curtis, an attorney from Florida and a former Democratic congressional candidate in Florida and California, has for years been a relatively small-time player in the MAGAsphere cast of characters who have built political brands claiming to have found evidence of election fraud.
Curtis says he’s a former software engineer and claims to have built a program that could hack voting machines in 2000 at the request of a Florida Republican congressmember, who said he never asked Curtis to do anything of the sort. His former employer also told reporters the meeting Curtis described never occurred.
With the upheaval following the close 2000 Bush vs. Gore presidential election still fresh, Curtis in 2004 was questioned by the FBI and spoke to members of Congress. No charges were filed and nothing official ever came of Curtis’ allegations.
Still, that made him a minor celebrity among the voter-fraud hunters in the MAGA movement, including Mike Lindell, the Trump acolyte conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder who Curtis said he worked with. He has been a guest on Lindell’s show, where he claimed that antifa activists in Redding might burn down the elections office.
Leftists are few and far between in Redding, though local militia groups have in recent years spread bogus rumors that antifa, an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups, would show up at Shasta County liberal groups’ protests.
Although he had never officially worked in elections, the far-right members who in 2025 controlled the Shasta County Board of Supervisors appointed Curtis to run the elections office, and he moved to California.
They needed a permanent replacement after Cathy Darling Allen, the longtime registrar of voters and the county’s lone Democratic official, stepped down after she endured years of false accusations from far-right members of the board and MAGA activists.
Curtis started accusing his predecessors of stuffing ballots to illegally sway elections. He also served as an adviser to the activist group that made unproven claims of voting irregularities in Riverside County.
He broke the news at a Shasta County supervisors meeting that Riverside Sheriff Bianco, then a Republican gubernatorial candidate, planned to seize ballots.
Bianco’s investigators relied almost entirely on the group’s questionable claims when they asked a judge to approve their seizure, CalMatters reported.
The California Supreme Court later blocked the seizure and the justices appeared skeptical during a hearing last month that Bianco had the legal authority to remove the ballots. It could be months before the court issues a ruling.
Meanwhile in Shasta County, two county-instigated investigations found troubling examples of Curtis acting inappropriately.
The investigations found that he mistreated employees, threatened physical violence and told his workers to do things that some employees considered illegal, such as asking an employee to pull the mailing addresses for every Shasta County resident who voted in person, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Shasta supervisors later voted to formally censure him.
Curtis said the allegations he harassed his staff aren’t true and that he’ll be proven right when he gets to testify about them before a judge.
“They claim I did things that’s impossible,” he told CalMatters. “You know, like, ‘Oh, he flirted with me.’ Well, we’re on camera constantly. Show it to me. They can’t. There’s nothing there.”
In June, a little more than a year after his appointment, Shasta County voters had had enough of Curtis.
Fifty-eight percent chose Joanna Francescut, a former Shasta County elections official who helped run its elections office after Darling Allen stepped down. Curtis fired Francescut, who’s since sued, alleging wrongful termination. Francescut won’t take over until January. She didn’t return an emailed interview request from CalMatters, but she told the Redding Record Searchlight last week that Curtis’ claims that forged ballots went undetected through the county’s voting machines make no sense.
“Creating a counterfeit ballot and having that pass (through a machine tabulator) is something that would be really hard to have happen, and we have staff claiming that’s what was happening,” she told the paper. “And that, to me, is irresponsible leadership.”
Recruiting an election denier
Late last month, Curtis announced he had put a padlock on the door where he’d stored the 2024 and 2026 ballots and threw away the key. He told reporters it was to preserve them as evidence for a pending voter fraud investigation.
Around the same time, he announced he wanted to hire MAGA celebrity Tina Peters as a consultant to help him run the November election.
Peters, a former Colorado voting official, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to state prison for giving an election-denying activist affiliated with Lindell access to her county’s voting machines.
“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” the judge told her when he handed down the sentence. “You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen. You are no hero. You abused your position, and you’re a charlatan.” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ sentence in May after Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state.
Curtis’ plan fell through after he said Peters backed out.
“She would have been a great fit here,” Curtis told CalMatters. “She knew elections, which is very hard to find people that know anything about elections, especially the inner workings.”
On Sept. 9, the UCLA Voting Rights Project wrote to Shasta County’s civil grand jury, urging it to begin the process of removing Curtis from office, which Curtis called a political hit since Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra is an adviser to the project.
The grand jury has not publicly responded and did not return a request for comment.
In the meantime, Curtis insists the November election will proceed as required under California law, and he promises to tally every vote in Shasta County accurately.
There won’t be voter ID checks, nor will he ban mail-in voting in the county, he said.
“We’re doing the same thing we do all the time,” he said.
Curtis believes he will be vindicated and his election fraud claims proven true, despite courts and experts repeatedly shooting down similar allegations.
“I’d like them to get rid of all of the flaws that just allow this to happen,” he said.
Trouble for November?
Earlier this year, FBI agents seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, one of the places where Trump has long alleged, without evidence, that voter fraud cost him that year’s election to Joe Biden.
FBI agents also seized 2020 election records this year in Maricopa County, Arizona, another Trump target in his quest to prove the 2020 election was stolen from him.
As Trump and his allies sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, they filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results in state and federal court. None of the cases succeeded in changing the election results, including in courts overseen by judges that Trump and other Republican presidents appointed.
Taken together, are the ballot seizures a sign of trouble for California voters in November? Will Trump and his followers, who for years have spread lies and misinformation about voting irregularities, try to disrupt California’s elections, seize ballots in the middle of a vote count or try to disenfranchise voters?
Waknin, the voting-rights attorney, said California voters shouldn’t be overly alarmed.
“People should feel, I would say, extremely confident that their vote is going to count,” she said.
Recent legal defeats of Trump and his allies in their efforts to disrupt mail-in voting or seize ballots show that there are still plenty of checks on Trump’s and his acolytes’ power. Waknin said California is well positioned to aggressively fight election interference and win.
Richer, the former Maricopa County, Arizona recorder, said he’s also not overly worried.
He said the Department of Justice’s ballot seizures are likely to end the same way dozens of Trump’s other voter-fraud hunts have: With no evidence of widespread fraud found.
“Is it right? No. Is it alarming? Yes, to an extent,” Richer said. “I would say we’ve gotten good at defending past elections.”
