FBI Agents Assessing Alleged Fraudulent Ballots and Suspicious Activity at Shasta County Elections Office

AENN

• Elisa Ballard

  
  

Redding, CA - August 13, 2026

Clint Curtis, Shasta County Registrar of Voters, has called in the FBI to assess suspicious ballots that about a dozen people observed while processing ballots for the June 2 primary election, along with video evidence of suspicious employee activity. Citizens have filed affidavits detailing what they saw regarding the ballots. Four FBI agents—two from Los Angeles and two from Sacramento—have been interviewing them this week.

Some of the citizens stated that the ballot paper had a different texture, thickness, or weight. Others indicated that the color of the ink on the ballots was slightly off. There are shades of pink and purple at the top of the ballot and black for the rest. Others expressed concern about how perfectly the boxes were filled in, as if a computer had printed them. One citizen tried to replicate the precision of the filled-in boxes using three different pen brands and types but could not achieve that level of precision. In another instance, someone saw approximately 10 ballots in sequential order that were all filled out exactly alike. When the 1% manual vote count was conducted, the fraudulent-looking ballots became more evident.

The ballots for the June primary are currently stored in a locked room with an extra padlock. The padlock keys have been destroyed to prevent tampering with the ballots. The FBI would need to obtain a warrant to remove the ballots from the Elections Office. Curtis told Shasta Unfiltered that if some of the ballots are fraudulent, the FBI would have methods to test the paper they are printed on to determine its origin, as well as to check the ink. Curtis is also expecting the Department of Homeland Security from Washington, D.C., to look into the matter because it was a federal election.

Thanks to the video cameras Curtis installed in the Elections Office, footage exists showing highly suspicious activity by several of its employees.

• Some employees allegedly used a credit card instead of their badge to access certain rooms in the Elections Office, including the ballot storage room and the room where election balancing was being conducted. While one employee entered the ballot room, another stood outside the door as a lookout. When someone unexpectedly came out of the elevator, the two employees began other activities to divert attention away from the ballot room. When employees use their badge to enter a room, a log of the entry is created, linking the person to the entry. If a credit card is used, there is no record of who entered the room—only a log that someone entered.

• One employee has allegedly been falsifying numbers on the over-the-counter ballot report multiple times. For example, the employee would indicate that six ballots were issued when, in fact, a dozen ballots went out. Also, 9 or 10 ballots were sent out on a Saturday when no one was in the office.

• An employee entered a room and concealed needed information from the balancing team.

  
  

On Tuesday, Clint Curtis was censured by a 3-1 vote of the Board of Supervisors following allegations that he made verbal threats against some entrenched employees in the Elections Office who were loyal to Joanna Francescut, the former Assistant Registrar of Voters. The allegations were found to be substantiated by internal and external investigations; however, not all employees in the office were interviewed, and an eyewitness account, submitted in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that refuted the allegations, was ignored by the investigators. Curtis has repeatedly stated that certain entrenched employees have created a hostile work environment for him and some of the newer employees. He plans to file a whistleblower suit and says he will sue the county as well as the individual people who created a hostile work environment. From the beginning, the employees threatened to quit if Curtis was appointed to the position. Instead of quitting, the employees stayed on to sabotage him, according to Curtis.

Curtis told Shasta Unfiltered that he has “worked and been all over the country and overseas and I have never seen such crazy, rabid people as we have here in Shasta County. It is hard to believe people could live with themselves doing that.”

On the subject of County Counsel Joseph Larmour, Curtis stated that Larmour asked him to perjure himself in the Measure B court case about the ability to implement Measure B for the election. Curtis said that it would be possible to do so and that he had been working to expand the number of precincts and election workers needed. Curtis has notified the court of Larmour's unethical behavior and filed another California Bar Association complaint against Larmour, stating, “In New York, if you tried to pull that, you’d be gone.”

Recently, Curtis applied for a position in Kern County but was not interviewed, possibly due to poor reviews from the Board of Supervisors. Curtis questions whether ballots were inserted in the 2024 election to select Supervisors Matt Plummer and Allen Long, who have both opposed appointing Curtis to the position from day one. Curtis hopes that the FBI or Department of Homeland Security will seize the 2024 ballots before they are destroyed in September.

When asked to estimate the number of fraudulent ballots, Curtis says there are probably thousands. The problem with California's voter rolls is that the Secretary of State controls them, and suspicious registrations remain on the rolls. For example, people who moved away decades ago are somehow still on the rolls. Using P.O. boxes as residential addresses is illegal; however, the state will not remove them even when Curtis’ staff requests it. These problems are not unique to Shasta County. This problem is occurring across the country but is especially severe in California. Georgia is another state with a terrible system, using voting machines that don’t produce a hard-copy paper ballot, so the voter has no way to verify that their vote was recorded correctly by the machine.

Curtis says the system he created for the Shasta County Elections Office would prevent the machine from vote flipping because anyone can access the camera footage to count the votes themselves. If the machine count were found to be off, the company that made the tabulating machine would go out of business.

Shasta Unfiltered will continue following this developing story, bringing updates as events unfold.