Trump has spent years claiming Democrats rig elections in places like California. Then the votes came in, and only one of the state's 58 counties had a real problem counting them.
It was Shasta County, the one run by an election denier.
On Wednesday morning, Shasta was the only county in California that hadn't finished counting the ballots people cast in person. Reporters there described overflowing ballot boxes, staffing shortages, ballots put in the wrong bins, computer problems and voters who showed up to find signs saying their polling place had moved.
Most counties posted results soon after polls closed at 8 p.m. Shasta didn't post any until about 10, because its computer system hadn't been set up right.
The elections chief, Clint Curtis, left the office to go pick up ballots himself when he should have been running the count. A Shasta Scout reporter asked him why the extra staff he said he'd hired weren't doing that.
"Because I'm stupid," Curtis said. "So when I see it needs to be done, I just do it myself."
How he got the job
Curtis had never held an official role in running elections. He got this one in 2025, when the far-right members who controlled the county Board of Supervisors appointed him. CalMatters calls him a minor celebrity among election deniers in Trump's movement. He's a lawyer who once ran for Congress as a Democrat, in Florida and California, but the people who handed him this job were the far right.
The woman who actually knew the work, Joanna Francescut, helped run the elections office. Curtis fired her. She then beat him in the June primary, and she takes over in January.
What he did with the job
He made it harder to vote. Curtis cut the county's ballot drop boxes from 13 to four last year.
Then, after losing in June, he claimed a plot was afoot to stuff boxes with fake ballots. His evidence was that he and his team had found ballots with paper they said looked, felt and smelled funny.
That kind of claim should have ended at the county line. Instead it caught the attention of top law enforcement officials in Trump's administration.
In September, officials sent a team of FBI agents to the county elections office with bolt cutters. They needed them to get into a room of old ballots that Curtis had padlocked, after he'd thrown away the key. Curtis said the agents didn't take any ballots. The Justice Department hasn't acknowledged that there is an investigation at all.
CalMatters says it looked this fall like Shasta could become ground zero in Trump's war on blue state elections, as his prosecutors tried to prove his claims that Democrats rig them.
What it proved
It proved the opposite. No major problems were reported in California's other 57 counties, even with the federal threats aimed at election workers there.
The one serious mess was in the office run by a man who says the system is rigged. As CalMatters put it, what disrupted the night wasn't shady bogeymen stuffing boxes or federal agents. It was his own seeming incompetence.
We've seen this play before. Republicans built a fraud crisis out of bad numbers. Shasta County shows what you get when the people who believe that story are put in charge.
The facts, in short
The far-right majority on Shasta County's Board of Supervisors appointed election denier Clint Curtis in 2025. He cut drop boxes from 13 to four, claimed ballots felt and smelled wrong, and drew FBI agents with bolt cutters to the county. The morning after the election, his was the only county of California's 58 still struggling to finish counting in-person ballots. Voters had already rejected him in June, and his replacement starts in January.
