Shasta County ROV Office – A Model for the Nation
- Elisa Ballard
- Jan 17
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 18
A special tour was conducted on Thursday, January 15, 2026, by Shasta County Registrar of Voters (ROV) Clint Curtis of the Elections Office at 1643 Market St. in downtown Redding. The press was invited to attend along with a group of California gubernatorial candidates, and others who were in town for a candidate forum that would be taking place that evening. “Take Your Power Back Show” host Kim Yeater and election integrity advocate Dr. Douglas G. Frank were present as they were going to be moderating the candidate forum. Some members of the general public were also in attendance.
As Curtis was explaining how ballots are handled and processed, attendees were commenting and asking questions to understand the systems involved for both mail-in ballots and precinct ballots. Key takeaways from the tour are:
After the appointment as Shasta County’s ROV, Curtis has implemented an election transparency camera and ballot processing system that is unparalleled throughout the country and can be used as a model in all counties to ensure transparency in the vote-counting process of elections.
The cost of implementation of this system is nominal in relation to the transparency and trust it provides.
The public is now encouraged to become observers of the ballot processing during elections rather than being treated as the enemy as was done in the past.
Chain-of-custody of the ballots, either mail-in or precinct ballots, has been greatly improved.
There are still vulnerabilities in vote-by-mail and voter registration rolls that cannot be addressed by the ROV until election laws are changed.
Republican and Independent gubernatorial candidates in attendance were Lewis Herms, Scott Shields, David Collenberg, Leo Zacky and Coby Marcum. Other candidates were invited but could not participate due to scheduling conflicts. Dr. Frank has been in contact with election administrators (County Clerks, Registrars of Voters) throughout 48 states in the U.S. and he has indicated that he will be championing the Shasta County system as he continues to be engaged in election integrity issues.
Curtis first wanted to describe the vulnerabilities in the current system that is based on electronic voting machines. He then demonstrated how his new ballot processing methods alleviate the problems.
The California Secretary of State has access to and controls the voter registration rolls. These voter rolls have noncitizens, deceased citizens, and citizens who have moved out of the area on them. In 2024, Judicial Watch sued California over inflated voter rolls, and California settled the case, removing 1.2 million names. The U.S. Department of Justice is currently suing California and five other states for refusing to turn over their current voter rolls. When residents move out of the state, California law requires that the voter must send a written form to the county recorder or registrar of voters for removal. If they don’t do that, their ballots will still get mailed to them.
Kim Yeater spoke about her and her husband’s attempt to vote at her precinct during the last election. She, her husband, and the couple in front of them were told by the election worker that they had already voted. In other words, someone else fraudulently used their voter registration to vote in the election, and the rule is that the first vote in counts. Even though she was given a provisional ballot, the provisional ballot will not be counted. This system is flawed because California does not use voter identification for any of the ballots cast, whether mailed in or cast in person.
California State Assembly Member Carl DeMaio is currently spearheading the Voter ID petition in California to get it on the ballot in June. This initiative would amend the election laws and require that the voter have an identification number in order to have their mail-in-ballot counted and that in-person voters will also be required to present identification at their precinct before being allowed to vote. Learn more at www.reformcalifornia.org
Shasta County citizens have also qualified an election integrity initiative (charter amendment) to be put on the ballot in June which would require the Shasta County voters to show ID, vote on election day in person unless an absentee ballot is requested, and require hand counting of the ballots at the precinct. To learn more about this, you can go to www.SaveShastaElections.org
Another vulnerability discussed during the ROV office tour was that modern technology allows a device as small as a grain of rice to be hidden inside tabulating machines, enabling communication or hacking even when the machine is not connected to the internet. The hardware is made in China and the software being used is proprietary and closed, so it cannot be inspected freely. Therefore, the machines can be programmed to switch votes and there would be no way to really know if that was done unless the ballots are also counted by hand.
Under the prior ROV and Assistant ROV, there was a large discrepancy in the number of ballots cast and tabulated by the machines and the number of people who voted in Shasta County. There were 2,783 more ballots counted than voters who voted in the 2024 November general election.
With the current system being used by the ROV, the special election conducted in November 2025 resulted in zero errors with regard to the one percent hand-count audit matching the machine count. The precincts to be audited were randomly selected using a ping pong ball method. The selection method that was used under the prior ROV was allowing the machine to select the precincts to be audited. Those audits were off by dozens of votes.
The current system allows live-streamed ballot images to be viewed by observers either at the ROV office or remotely, which, in effect, allows for citizens to verify the results of the machine counts.
Curtis has deep technical knowledge of the electronic vote tabulation process. As a computer programmer, he was the first to write a program to flip machine-tallied votes in an election in Florida 25 years ago. Because of his expertise in this area, he told the attendees that he subjected himself to a lie detector test after the November 2025 special election so that the citizens could be assured that no cheating was involved. Curtis became a whistleblower in December 2004 when he signed a sworn affidavit and provided testimony at a U.S. House Judiciary Committee forum in Ohio. During his testimony, he alleged that in October 2000 he had been asked by then-Florida politician Tom Feeney to create prototype software capable of undetected electronic vote rigging. His disclosures, which highlighted vulnerabilities in voting systems, sparked significant media attention and a documentary. Later, Curtis earned a Juris Doctor degree, became a licensed attorney specializing in areas such as disability benefits, immigration, and veterans' law, and continued advocating for election integrity. For the last two decades, he has opposed electronic voting machines and has been pushing for greater transparency to prevent potential fraud.
Curtis was appointed by the Board of Supervisors to fill the vacancy created when prior ROV Thomas Toller decided to retire after less than a year as the ROV. Curtis was selected from a pool of applicants for the position on April 30, 2025. Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut was also applying for the ROV position, having worked in the ROV office for 16 years. Within a week of his tenure as ROV, Curtis fired Francescut without cause. Francescut had indicated that she was planning to run for the ROV position.
During the tour, Curtis mentioned that he has contacted the Department of Justice over some of the questionable practices he has uncovered in the office under Francescut and former ROVs Cathy Darling Allen and Thomas Toller’s tenures. One of the allegations he shared with the group on Thursday was that the ballots were being kept in a locked room, in stacks without any seals or chain-of-custody. People were entering the room using badges but the log of who entered the room did not record a name. Therefore, there was no real control over the locked room and anyone with an electronic key could have added or subtracted ballots from the room during the election.
The new system created and implemented by Curtis with video cameras on all areas of the office where the ballots are being handled gives more assurance and transparency to the process. The ballots are now counted into stacks of 50, placed in bags with tamper-proof seals, and the public is welcomed to view all aspects of this process. Ballots that need to be adjudicated are handled by teams of employees of different political parties to avoid bias in decision-making about how the voter intended to cast their vote. The adjudicated ballots are not filmed by the cameras to protect voter privacy. The California Secretary of State sent representatives to the ROV Office to make sure that the new system is in compliance with State law and Curtis said that it was found to be legal. Dr. Frank said he would be touting Curtis' new system to other counties across the country.
