Ballot Shredding Put on Hold as Missing Election-Related Documents are Found inside the November 2024 Ballot Boxes
September 30, 2026
Redding, CA
REDDING — A shred truck was already parked behind the Shasta County Elections Office on Market Street on Wednesday morning when Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis stopped the destruction of November 2024 election materials.
Curtis, in front of staff and local reporters, began opening sealed boxes so the vendor could start feeding them into the truck. Curtis opened 10 boxes and found log sheets that citizen observer Kari Chilson has been seeking under a pending Public Records Act request in seven of the 10 boxes. He then asked County Counsel Joseph Larmour to come to the office, see the boxes himself, and say whether the county would take responsibility for shredding PRA records with the ballots. Please click on the video at the end of this article that will give you key moments from today's events.
Larmour allegedly told Marjorie Andrews, Election Office Executive Assistant, that he would not come. Curtis then sent the truck away and said he wanted the Secretary of State to decide what happens next.
The confrontation played out in front of reporters. Shasta Unfiltered was present and recorded the exchange.
Two elections, one locked room
The boxes scheduled for Wednesday’s shredding were from the Nov. 5, 2024, presidential general election, not the June 2, 2026, primary that has drawn FBI agents and a federal grand jury subpoena.
Those two sets of materials have been stored together. Curtis padlocked a second-floor room holding both the 2024 general-election packages and the June 2026 ballots he has called “suspect,” discarded the keys, and posted “KEEP OUT PER ROV CLINT CURTIS” signs. Federal agents later entered that room, inspected June 2026 boxes, and left a green evidence lock, as Shasta Unfiltered previously reported.
The problems that put those 2024 boxes in the spotlight did not start this week. On Dec. 10, 2024, the Board of Supervisors voted to send two letters to the U.S. Department of Justice. One letter, approved 4-1 with Supervisor Tim Garman opposed, asked the DOJ to explain repeated time-stamp changes on Hart InterCivic audit logs from the March 5, 2024, presidential primary — changes supervisors were told had occurred about two dozen times and that Supervisor Patrick Jones said corrupted the ability to reconstruct what the machines had done. The second letter, approved 3-2 with Garman and Supervisor Mary Rickert opposed, asked for a formal investigation of the Runbeck Election Services ink-overspray defect in the Nov. 5, 2024, general election, which forced the elections office to duplicate thousands of ballots so Hart scanners could read them. The board directed that the overspray letter go to the outgoing administration and again after the new president took office. Then-Registrar Tom Toller warned supervisors that writing Washington skipped the Secretary of State, which he said was already looking at the printing failure. No public DOJ finding on either letter has been released. Those are the same 2024 materials that were heading to the shred truck Wednesday when the log sheets Chilson had requested under the Public Records Act turned up inside the boxes.
Southern California activist Arne List, who has been posting about the June 2026 claims and the Sacramento grand-jury demand, sued in September to block destruction of the 2024 packages. Superior Court Judge Benjamin Hanna denied an emergency restraining order. County Counsel told supervisors the 22-month clock had already run and that the 2024 ballots should be destroyed.
The Secretary of State’s April advisory to counties put the 22-month retention deadline for the Nov. 5, 2024, election at Sept. 5, 2026. Shasta first scheduled shredding for Sept. 11, the shredding company's first availability, then Sept. 30 after what Curtis called a scheduling miss.
What Chilson asked for — and why it stopped the truck
Chilson observed ballot processing on Dec. 3, 2024. In a January 2025 declaration and later correspondence, she described short notice to observers, processing that she said had started before observers were let in, log entries that did not match what she saw on a tabulator screen, logs covered when she tried to record them, and tabulation that continued after the noticed 5 p.m. close.
On Sept. 4 she filed PRA Request No. 26-1766 for the December 3 administrative file: ballot, batch, tabulator, and scanner logs and reports, including after 5 p.m.; observer sign-in sheets; staffing and chain-of-custody records; related correspondence; any video of that day’s tabulation rooms; and the November 2024 rosters, voter lists, tally sheets, challenge lists, and assisted-voters lists.
Those items are not the sealed voted-ballot packages listed in Elections Code section 17301(b). Rosters and voter lists must be kept until five years after the election. Tally sheets, challenge lists, and assisted-voters lists must be kept 22 months; after that the official “may” destroy them, but the code does not require it. Ordinary December 3, 2024, administrative files are not two years old until December 2026 and do not follow the ballot-shred calendar. A pending Public Records Act request and counsel’s preservation letters add a separate duty to hold those records while the request remains open.
Lex Rex Institute attorney Alexander Haberbush, writing for Chilson, told the county on Sept. 10, 28, and 29 to keep those non-ballot records out of the shred. In emails Sept. 22–25, Chilson asked whether the December 3 file would go out with the ballots. Curtis wrote that the scheduled destruction “covers both,” then added that he had “no idea what is in the boxes.” Election Manager Jenae Wheaton said staff would “check and see what, if anything, we can find.”
Wednesday morning answered part of that question: the logs were inside ballot boxes. Those logs should have been kept in a separate file in the Elections Office, according to Curtis, and there is no digital record of those logs.
Counsel’s email, Curtis’s reply
After the truck left, Larmour emailed Curtis that sending it away violated 52 U.S.C. § 20701 and that the “unilateral decision” continued an existing violation of law.
That federal statute is a preservation rule, not a destruction requirement. It requires election officers to keep, for 22 months after a federal election, records relating to registration and other acts “requisite to voting.” Willful failure to retain them is a misdemeanor. A companion section, § 20702, makes it a crime to steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter records that § 20701 requires to be kept.
California Elections Code section 17301 is the statute that orders destruction of the sealed ballot packages after 22 months if no election contest or specified criminal case was started in that window. The packages are also supposed to remain unopened until they are destroyed or recycled.
Curtis answered Larmour that the violation claim was “a complete lie.” He said staff called counsel’s office at 8:19 a.m., asked for Larmour or someone from his staff to come assess whether the county would accept responsibility for destroying PRA log files with the ballots, and that Larmour told Marjorie Andrews he would not come and would not send anyone else. Curtis said he stopped the shred because counsel would not direct the office to continue and destroy records already under a PRA request.
Larmour had previously told supervisors Curtis was already out of compliance with state law for not destroying the 2024 ballots after Sept. 5. The Board of Supervisors has also asked state and federal agencies to review Curtis’s June 2026 counterfeit-ballot claims and how the office has been run. No public finding has closed those files.
What remains unresolved
Wednesday did not settle custody of the June 2026 ballots, the federal grand-jury demand, or Chilson’s open records request.
Curtis said he wants written direction from the Secretary of State on how to proceed when the records requested under the PRA have been placed in the sealed ballot boxes from the November 2024 election. Haberbush has asked for written confirmation that non-ballot records will be pulled, inventoried, and held — without opening remaining sealed packages — while Request No. 26-1766 is pending.
Until that direction arrives, the shred truck is gone, the logs that were found are no longer headed into the hopper, and the rest of the 2024 packages remain in county custody.
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