Shasta County election chief plans to hire Tina Peters as consultant

California is suing to block Shasta’s June voting overhaul

The top election official in Shasta County, California, plans to hire Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk convicted for allowing a breach of her county’s voting equipment, as an elections consultant, The Guardian reported Monday. Clint Curtis, appointed last year by the Shasta County board of supervisors to serve as county clerk and registrar of voters, told the outlet he plans to hire Peters to replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who has been on medical leave. Curtis said Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system.

The 182,000-person northern California county has emerged in recent years as a center of what The Guardian describes as “the US election denialism movement.” In 2023, the county’s governing body unsuccessfully sought to cut ties with voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems and implement a hand-count system that experts warned would be costly and far less accurate. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive — whom The Guardian describes as “one of the leading promoters of falsehoods about election fraud in the US” — said at the time he would support the county’s effort. California ultimately blocked the plans.

Last year, the board appointed Curtis, a Florida-based attorney who had not previously overseen an elections office, to serve as county clerk. Curtis had opposed the use of voting machines and argued that US elections were being manipulated, and he vowed to overhaul elections and set an example for other jurisdictions. His tenure has been controversial: investigative reports this year concluded he had created a hostile work environment and made violent threats against workers, claims Curtis denies. In a statement to The Guardian, Curtis accused staff of “sabotaging elections” and said he planned to sue the county: “Everything the old staff accused me of is a lie, and we will be able to prove it in court.”

Last week, the board that appointed Curtis censured him, citing what it described as his “ongoing and flagrant violations” of county personnel rules. The board pointed to policies preventing elected officials from “making unfounded allegations that have not been investigated.”

Peters was the elected clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, before her 2024 conviction on four felonies and three misdemeanors. The convictions stemmed from her decision to allow an activist affiliated with Lindell to impersonate a county employee and attend an upgrade of the county’s Dominion voting software. The Gateway Pundit — a website The Guardian calls “the far-right news website” — subsequently published screenshots of sensitive county information following that breach.

President Donald Trump, who pardoned those involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and the 2020 fake-elector scheme, could not issue Peters a pardon because her convictions were state crimes. Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted her nine-year sentence in May after facing pressure from the federal government, saying it was unfairly harsh. The Colorado Democratic party rebuked Polis. Since being released from prison in June, Peters has continued to publicly dispute the outcome of the 2020 presidential election; The Guardian reported that she has continued to falsely assert that votes were flipped in 2020.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, said in a statement: “Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to breaching her own voting equipment while county clerk. It is troubling that she would be in a position to have direct influence on election administration.”

Curtis’ planned hire of Peters comes in the final months of his time in office. In June, voters ousted him in favor of Francescut, a longtime elections-office employee Curtis had fired as assistant registrar after taking over. In the same election, Shasta County voters backed a ballot measure requiring in-person voting on a single day, effectively ending vote-by-mail, mandating photo ID, and requiring hand counts of ballots. California sued the county, and a judge has temporarily blocked the measure’s implementation.