For the second year in a row, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors is set to appoint someone with no elections oversight experience to be the county registrar of voters. The top candidate also says he wrote a computer program that allows votes to be secretly altered.
Clint Curtis, who was passed over for the job last year, is set to be appointed by the board on Tuesday.
Curtis, 66, of Titusville, Florida, would be the county’s third registrar of voters in two years. On a 3-2 vote in June 2024, the board chose Tom Toller, a semi-retired former prosecutor with no elections management experience. He retired in April, citing health concerns.
After interviewing five candidates April 30, the board voted 3-2 to hire Curtis, pending a background check. On Tuesday, the board will vote on a resolution to hire the attorney and former computer programmer to be the next registrar of voters.
According to a report submitted to the board last week, Curtis passed his background check.
While County Executive Officer David Rickert and Director of Support Services Monica Fugitt did not find in Curtis’ background a reason to disqualify him, several other people have raised concerns about his experience and qualifications.
On his job application and presentation before the supervisors, Curtis touted his experience as an election lawyer and work writing voting software for a company in Florida.
But in voting against hiring Curtis, Supervisor Matt Plummer used his experience as an election lawyer and champion for voting reform against him.
“He’s had 25 years to travel the world, travel the country, getting people to overturn election related issues that he alleges, and to incorporate his system and not one community, we heard him earlier today, not one community in the whole country has done it. Now, I’m for trying new things, but why would we try something that everyone else has soundly rejected?” Plummer said.
Curtis wrote computer program to alter votes
Curtis has advocated counting votes by hand, while acknowledging that it is illegal in California. Counties throughout California have used machines to tabulate votes for decades.
While the county is prohibited from counting votes by hand, Curtis said he will focus on transparency by increasing the number of cameras set up in the elections office so observers can better watch the ballot tabulation.
Curtis’ travels down the road to being an election skeptic began in the early 2000s.
Thomas Toller, left, a semi-retired lawyer from Redding, was appointed Wednesday, June 19, 2024 by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors as the county clerk and registrar of voters. Others interviewed for the job were, from left, Clint Curtis, Jennifer Waltman, Joanna Francescut and John Gaglione.
He said he was approached by Tom Feeney, an official with a Florida company he worked for in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
At one point Feeney asked him to develop software that could be manipulated so votes could be changed without being detected, Curtis has said. He has based part of his claim on the danger of election fraud on his own experience of creating a program that could carry out vote tampering.
Curtis said he wrote an affidavit in 2006 that describes how a secret vote-altering application would work.
“In the vote fraud prototype that I created, things were not what they seemed. Hidden on the screen were invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons could then use them to alter the votes of any candidate listed,” Curtis wrote in his statement.
In California, people vote use a paper ballot to vote. They don’t push buttons on a machine. Voting machines used in counties like Shasta tabulate the paper ballots.
Curtis did not know if the prototype was ever used, and said when he wrote the program he was unaware the company he worked for actually wanted to implement the program.
Democrat Curtis ran and lost in congressional elections
Curtis, a Democrat, in 2006 unsuccessfully ran against Republican Feeney in an election to represent Florida’s 47th District in Congress. In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, Feeney denied any involvement with a vote-changing scheme.
Curtis also ran for Congress in Florida’s 47th District in 2016 and lost in the Democratic primary. In 2020, Curtis also ran and lost against to Mike Waltz to represent Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
In a 2020 survey conducted by Ballotpedia, Curtis was asked what type of legacy he would like to leave.
“I started the process that reversed climate change. I helped America to adopt a voting system that every American could verify and trust. That I made people’s lives better,” he said.
While Curtis lost the election, Waltz won and this year was appointed by President Donald Trump as National Security Advisor. Waltz recently resigned, but Trump said he plans to nominate Waltz as ambassador to the United Nations.
Safeguards to protect elections from fraud
Election deniers and others who claim election fraud have gained no traction under scrutiny of evidence, including in the courts in Shasta County and across the country.
Election officials at the federal, state, and local levels say they have safeguards in place at three stages ― before, during, and after Election Day — to prevent hacking from taking place.
Clint Curtis answers questions during his interview on Wednesday, April 30, 2025 with the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. A board majority selected Curtis as the next registrar of voters.
Among those safeguards, according to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency: States routinely test and certify their voting machines and conduct checks to make sure ballots are properly counted before election results are finalized. And the overwhelming majority of people who vote do so on paper. That creates a document trail that may be checked for accuracy.
“We audit those paper votes after the election to make sure that they match what the machine is telling us the vote total is,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice.
To further limit the possibility of cyber interference, many states, including California, do not allow voting machines to connect to the internet or even be equipped with modems.
Concerns about hacking sparked false claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted votes for President Trump and changed them to President Joe Biden in 2020. That led to lawsuits from voting technology companies such as Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation and ultimately settled the case for $787.5 million.
‘I can’t think of anybody better’
Curtis did not respond to messages left on his personal phone and at his law office. He was also contacted by email, but he did not reply.
In voting for Curtis, Supervisors Kevin Crye, Chris Kelstrom and Corkey Harmon said it was time for a change in the elections office ― which will have its third top manager in two years. Supervisors Allen Long and Plummer wanted Shasta County Assistant Registrar of Voters Joanna Francescut for the job.
“I can’t think of anybody better, well personally, maybe a Republican, but I can’t think of anybody better … to right what I think is wrong with elections,” Crye said of Curtis.
He did not go into detail about what was wrong with the county elections office.
Kelstrom said he wanted to give Curtis a chance to install a system that would make Shasta County elections more secure, even though he did not provide evidence that voting in the county was not safe.
“Mr. Curtis, I mean, he’s moving all the way across the country here. This is obviously extremely important to him. He’s giving up a lot to do this. And I think his plan is to install this system so that the other 57 counties in California can hopefully jump on board and copy it, and it may go across the whole United States,” Kelstrom said.
Read more: Shasta elections chief pick spurs controversy, protests; background check on job finalist done
Does not meet minimum qualifications
Long, however, said Curtis did not meet the minimum qualifications to be the county’s registrar of voters. He said Curtis has no experience managing an elections office and he does not live in California.
On his job application, Curtis cited 20-plus years of experience consulting for 15 different private companies and public agencies as a computer system developer/analyst, but he did not include specific dates when he worked for those firms. He also did not name his supervisors at those firms.
Some of the companies and agencies he listed included NASA, the Florida Nutrition Association, Ryder, Florida Department of Transportation, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Florida State Technology Office, Exxon-Mobil and Corn Belt Collection.
He also cited election advocacy work in several countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. But when asked if he could provide the names of anyone who could verify his overseas work, he did not.
Retired Shasta County Public Defender Jeff Gorder of Redding, who has been critical of the board’s decision to hire Curtis, said Curtis should provide verifying information about his previous work.
“He claims to be an elections attorney and to have studied elections and whatnot, but his background is very sketchy. He doesn’t really give any evidence of these cases that he’s handled. He doesn’t give any contact information about people that he worked with overseas in the Netherlands and Germany and France or whatnot, supposedly as a consultant on their election processes. I mean, he doesn’t provide any information whatsoever onthat,” Gorder said.
Worked against Trump in 2016 election
During his public job interview, Curtis told the supervisors he was hired as an attorney during the 2016 presidential election to write letters to Florida electors urging them not to certify the election for Trump.
In response to a question asked by Plummer, Curtis initially said he had not won any election-related lawsuits, but then added that he won a case involving the order of appearance of candidates’ names on ballots, but he did not say where the lawsuit was filed, the name of the case or which election was affected.
Plummer also cited what he said were inconsistencies in Curtis’ resume, among them, the District 4 supervisor said Curtis stated he worked with Germany to transition away from the use of voting machines in 2004.
But in “2005, they still used electronic voting machines. It wasn’t until 2009 that they changed the constitution,” Plummer said.
Also not on Curtis’ resume is an individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 2002 when he lived in Woodville, Florida, according to a LexisNexis background report. The report did not say why Curtis filed for bankruptcy.
Curtis received his license to practice law in New York, but his actual law practice was in Florida. He told supervisors he has retired. Long and Plummer both voted to hire Francescut because she had the necessary experience for the job.
She has been passed over for the position twice. She has said she plans to seek election to the position in 2026.
Long said hiring Francescut would bring stability to the elections office and quiet allegations of voter impropriety that haven’t been substantiated.
“Our local elections have been shown to be accurate and lawful. So we have had a grand jury investigate this. We have had a court case where the Registrar of Voters was sued in Shasta County, and the judge said there was a profound lack of any evidence,” Long said.
Reporter Damon Arthur welcomes story tips at 530-338-8834, by email at damon.arthur@redding.com. Help local journalism thrive by subscribing today!
This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Shasta’s newly appointed elections chief’s work history questioned
