Last week, Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta County, California, publicly accused members of his own staff of bypassing security, which he later claimed was an attempt “to sabotage a federal election.”
Days later, Curtis announced plans to hire a new deputy: Tina Peters, the election denial superstar who was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024 and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, has yet to publicly comment on the offer, but her lawyer Peter Ticktin tells WIRED she “is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County, as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled.”
Peters was convicted after she allowed Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer who later worked for pillow salesman turned election denier Mike Lindell, unauthorized access to election equipment in Mesa County as part of a scheme to prove that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. (Hayes was never charged for his role in the scheme). Colorado governor Jared Polis commuted Peters’ sentence in May after months of pressure from President Trump, who purported to have issued his own pardon even though Peters was convicted on state charges. Recently released court papers show how Trump and his advisers coordinated with federal agencies to cut federal funding and grants to Colorado as part of a pressure campaign to free Peters.
Curtis told The Guardian that Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system but refused to specify what her duties would include. Curtis did not respond to a request for comment.
Should Peters accept the role, she would likely feel right at home in Shasta County, a deep-red enclave in Northern California that has become ground zero for many of the election denial conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his supporters over the past six years. And in Curtis, she would be working alongside a man who has a decades-long history of promoting many of the same election-related conspiracy theories she herself has championed.
“This should be stopped immediately: Shasta County Registrar Clint Curtis is trying to hire election-denier Tina Peters to collude with the Trump administration’s election mischief,” US senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, wrote on Facebook.
Curtis first came to national prominence more than two decades ago, when he claimed to have created a software program that could rig elections without election officials being able to notice anything amiss. Curtis, who testified before Congress about his program, said he did this at the behest of Florida state lawmaker Tom Feeney, who denied the claim.
In 2025, when the previous Registrar of Voters in Shasta County, Thomas Toller. retired midterm, Curtis put his name forward for the position, despite having no experience in running elections and spending most of his career working as a lawyer and a computer developer. He also lived in Florida at the time and had no ties to the area.
During the 2025 interview process for his current role, Curtis touted his associations with prominent figures in the election denial community, including Lindell, disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Since his appointment, Curtis has faced a string of accusations about his behavior from members of his staff. An internal investigation concluded that he had physically threatened, verbally abused, and retaliated against staff at the Shasta County Elections Office, while an external investigation found he had retaliated against them. Among the specific allegations made by his colleagues were that Curtis threatened to have one employee dragged out by her hair and to “throat-punch” another. Curtis has consistently denied the allegations.
In June, Curtis lost his bid to keep his job past this year when Joanna Francescut, who worked in elections in Shasta County for 18 years, easily defeated him. Curtis had fired Francescut days after he took up his role.
The Board of Supervisors in Shasta County, having initially voted against censuring Curtis, last week voted 3-1 to censure him. However, Curtis responded to the public rebuke by making further allegations against his staff, including claims that they were bypassing security to tamper with elections. He subsequently invited the media back to his office to show them CCTV footage of one staff member opening a door without using a keycard.
When asked if he had asked the employee in question what he was doing, Curtis said he hadn’t.
"Shasta County has gone through a lot of controversy, division, and animosity related to elections, and based on the initial response from the public I’ve received already, recruiting Tina Peters would increase this and reduce trust in our elections," Matt Plummer, a member of the Shasta Board of Supervisors, tells WIRED, while acknowledging Curtis has the authority to make his own hiring decisions. The other members did not respond to a request for comment.
Plummer isn’t the only authority raising questions about the proposal. Stewart Buettell, the deputy CEO of the County of Shasta, tells WIRED, “There has been no formal process or application submitted to replace the current assistant registrar of voters,” adding that “any prospective employee would go through the same hiring process as anyone else seeking employment with the county.”
Brent Turner, the current assistant registrar of voters, told Shasta Scout on Tuesday that he was surprised to hear he may be replaced. “I believe I’m the assistant registrar. And if anything changes I will certainly let you know,” said Turner.
Curtis told the Redding Record Searchlight that he would be hiring Peters as a consultant as a way of circumventing what he predicted would be the county’s efforts to block the appointment. He said that as a consultant, she would be able to continue to work in Colorado and Washington, DC while also at times supervising onsite in Shasta County.
Buettell said that if Peters was hired as a consultant that would “typically require a contract for services, consistent with Shasta County policy, which has not been initiated.”
While there has been strong criticism of the effort to employ Peters, some election experts believe mechanisms are in place to prevent it from actually happening.
"This announcement seems to be nothing more than performance art by the current and outgoing clerk, who was rejected by voters in the primary,” David Becker, the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department lawyer, tells WIRED. “It’s highly questionable that county officials could spend any taxpayer dollars on this or give any authority to a convicted and unrepentant felon like Ms. Peters.”
