Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis stands in his new election observer area at the Market Street elections office on Feb. 25 in Redding.
Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A California election official who threatened to have an employee dragged out by her hair and “throat-punch” others is making final preparations for Tuesday’s primary election, in which his name appears as a candidate on the ballot.
The Shasta County Board of Supervisors allowed Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis to stay on the job despite back-to-back personnel investigations finding that he routinely mistreats staff, casually threatens physical violence, has asked them to do things they consider illegal and has campaigned on his own behalf while on the job — in violation of election law — according to hundreds of pages of personnel records obtained by the Chronicle.
“Mr. Curtis has demonstrated a clear pattern of unprofessional and abusive conduct toward staff,” Monica Fugitt, Shasta County’s director of support services, wrote in the report, which determined Curtis engaged in “pervasive” abuse based on “a significant volume of witness accounts.”
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Stopping short of calling for Curtis to be placed on administrative leave, Fugitt recommended that he be publicly censured and kept separate from his employees unless chaperoned. Writing that Curtis “created a hostile and abusive working environment,” Fugitt added that “it may be necessary for the county to pursue a workplace restraining order to protect employees from continued harassment.”
On April 28, supervisors declined to take any disciplinary actions against Curtis, who makes more than $150,000 a year and claimed to be the victim of a plot to discredit him by former deputy registrar Joanna Francescut, whom he fired and who is challenging him in Tuesday’s election.
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“The old staff, there has been constant contact with Francescut,” Curtis said, waving a printout with blue dots to support his claim. “She even manages to get … into my internal messaging service.”
The personnel investigations into Curtis, a controversial election skeptic who had never run an election prior to his May 2025 appointment, mark another chapter in the raucous political transformation of Shasta County, a traditionally conservative enclave that veered to the far right five years ago, as deep economic and social wounds coincided with militia-supported gripes about elections and the pandemic.
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The 67-year-old Curtis has driven most of the local drama in the past year, feuding with reporters, platforming secessionists, stirring election fraud claims in Riverside County and, in one viral video, parading around his office shirtless. On Tuesday, he will be among the first to learn whether his constituents approve of that record or have tired of it.
“Anything could happen,” said assistant registrar Brent Turner, an open-source voting proponent from San Francisco who found common ground with Curtis on election security issues.
Known quantity
It isn’t as if Shasta leaders didn’t know whom they were getting when they hired Curtis to run elections in their rural mountain community 200 miles north of San Francisco.
Curtis, a former Democrat who has denounced electronic voting machines since leveling baseless claims that they cost him a congressional race in 2006, had been gadflying in right-wing media circles when supervisors selected him over assistant registrar Francescut and elections officials from Nevada, Michigan and Virginia.
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A former attorney and programmer, Curtis has been telling virtually the same story for a quarter-century, that he discovered voting machines’ susceptibility to hacking while working for a Florida technology company in the late 1990s.
In Shasta County, he inherited an office riven by election denial conspiracies boosted by populist supervisors on the right and said he would restore faith in the process. He clashed quickly with staff, firing the well-liked Francescut, hiring election skeptics and deniers, and reducing the number of ballot drop boxes in a county whose rural population relies on them. He also advertised an unofficial election by a secessionist group, campaigned in support of the voter ID initiative by Assembly Member Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, and beefed with county leaders over a potentially illegal ballot measure that would greatly restrict the right to vote.
Despite those stances, voter registration in Shasta County has slightly increased since Curtis became registrar, from 115,735 in February 2025 to 116,345 as of May 20, with more than half of voters registered Republican and less than a quarter Democrat.
In March, an external probe by Oppenheimer Investigations Group LLP, prompted by a series of staff complaints, determined that Curtis made campaign-related calls during work hours and verbally harassed staff, including one employee he improperly admonished during a June 2025 open house event and then prevented from attending a conference.
According to Fugitt’s report, she met with Curtis on March 26 to deliver Oppenheimer’s findings, tell him he would undergo additional training and explicitly forbade him from retaliating against the employee from the open house matter.
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The very next day, Fugitt found, Curtis asked that employee to pull the mailing addresses for every Shasta County resident who voted in person — a request that employees said would violate the election code and culminated with Curtis knocking loudly on a female staffer’s door and making the remark about having human resources “drag you out by the hair.”
Curtis admitted to Fugitt that he asked staff to pull in-person voters’ addresses so he could send them a mailer that they would bring the next time they voted. But he chose not to proceed because “everyone else voiced the concern” that he was excluding mail-in voters, hadn’t designed the mailer and didn’t know who would mail it out or how much it would cost.
Curtis initially didn’t respond when Fugitt asked him whether he threatened the employee, she wrote in her report. She asked again and he denied it.
Based on the nine other witness accounts as well as internal emails and Teams messages, Fugitt concluded it was likelier than not that Curtis made the threat.
In his interview with Fugitt, Curtis portrayed himself as beleaguered, telling the investigator that he was used to employees pretending to misunderstand him. “No one knows how to do anything when you ask them,” he said.
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Witnesses alternately described Curtis as someone who makes off-putting jokes or unwanted gestures — like repeatedly sticking out his tongue at one employee — and an unstable manager who disguises his temper behind chuckles.
One employee said Curtis was “all bark, no bite” and that he routinely makes “generic assault remarks,” including one where Curtis reportedly said “you could kill and get rid of homeless people if they made staff uncomfortable.” Multiple employees said he regularly utters casual threats to kill, punch, slap and spank people who frustrate him.
An employee who claimed a good working relationship with Curtis said he makes disparaging or condescending remarks to staff on a daily basis, and about once a month goes further.
The employee said Curtis reserves most of his displeasure for two employees well-versed in the election code. The employee also said they have pulled Curtis aside to tell him not to berate staff and that the employee “has to speak to him as if he is a child and then he will listen.”
“When asked how it affects staff, (the witness) expressed that staff are working hard to achieve new processes but are facing badgering and being excluded which affects their ability to accomplish anything,” Fugitt wrote.
Turner, who has a reputation for being the Curtis whisperer around the office, characterized the claims against his boss as overblown and gave credence to Curtis’ belief that he has never been given a chance by employees loyal to Francescut.
Joanna Francescut, a candidate for Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, in Redding on Oct. 24.
Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
But Turner, who said he disagrees with Curtis about voter ID and on many other issues, also acknowledged his penchant for stoking controversy, like when Curtis traveled 600 miles to advise an inland California group whose unproven fraud claims became the basis of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s polarizing investigation into the November 2025 election.
“He comes maybe from an area in the Midwest where that joking style is part of how he grew up,” he said. “Also, he’s deaf. He can’t understand what’s being said unless he lip reads. I speak unusually loud so he likes me.”
Fugitt’s report included multiple accounts of Curtis saying he would throat-punch someone. The references led to a colorful exchange on April 28, when Shasta County Supervisor Allen Young asked Fugitt about them.
“What I would say is that the investigation found that he made statements that he would slap or punch other county employees when frustrated,” Fugitt said.
“Slap or punch,” Young said. “And was that a throat punch?”
“Correct,” Fugitt said.
Curtis roundly denied the allegations and called for transferring his detractors to another department, saying he would refuse any attempt to have him work remotely.
“I can’t leave that place with the people that are there and expect that the election be held correctly,” he told supervisors. “They’re trying to sabotage it.”
Curtis’ supporters on the board cited the proximity of the election in declining to censure him. But they also told their chosen registrar to cool it with the jokes.
“I’m not going to vote for a censure because it’s right before an election,” said Supervisor Corkey Harmon. “But please stop the jokes.”
“Knock it off with those off-handed comments,” added Supervisor Kevin W. Crye. “They’re not funny. They’re not funny.”
Supervisor Chris Kellstrom joined Harmon and Crye in rejecting disciplinary action, with Young and Supervisor Matt Plummer dissenting. The decision drew sharp rebuke from numerous residents, including at the May 5 meeting, when a number of residents castigated the board.
Crye, who galvanized local election conspiracists following his 2022 election and voted to hire Curtis, made an analogy comparing the credibility of Curtis’ accusers to that of his wife.
“You know, my wife (and I have been) married 26 years. I’ll believe most of the stuff she says,” he said. “But I’m not saying those reports did or didn’t happen.”
Crye and Kellstrom are also on Tuesday’s ballot and also face challenges to their reelection, making for an unofficial referendum on Shasta County’s MAGA tilt.
“What happens if it gets really gritty and it’s a contested race?” asked Turner, who said he’s requested Election Day monitoring assistance from the attorney general and secretary of state. “This thing could get pretty wild.”
As for Curtis, he is going into Tuesday’s election at a fundraising disadvantage. Francescut had raised more than $95,000 through May 16, her campaign filings show; Curtis had raised less than $46,000 and spent more than $56,000.