Shasta County Sheriff’s Office Investigation Finds Evidence of Voter Fraud as Dirty Voter Rolls Persist in California

April 23, 2026, Shasta County, CA

“Throughout this investigation, I have learned that there is voter fraud happening in Shasta County, but I am unable to identify a true source or person to file criminal charges against.”

That stark conclusion came from Shasta County Sheriff’s Deputy Casey L. Barnhart in his final report dated August 30, 2023, for Case #22SO35986. After reviewing evidence submitted by local citizens, the deputy determined that violations of California Elections Code sections 18100(a), 18100(b), and 18560(b) had occurred—but pinning down exactly who was responsible proved impossible.

In plain English, here’s what those laws actually forbid:

• Elections Code 18100(a) makes it a crime to deliberately register yourself or anyone else as a voter when you know they’re not eligible—whether because they aren’t a U.S. citizen, don’t live at the listed address, or otherwise don’t qualify.

• Elections Code 18100(b) specifically outlaws registering nonexistent people—dead individuals, animals, fictional characters, or anything else that isn’t a real, living, eligible voter—by submitting false registration forms.

• Elections Code 18560(b) prohibits an eligible voter from voting more than once, attempting to vote more than once, or knowingly handing in multiple ballots folded together at the same election.

In short, these statutes are California’s legal guardrails against fraudulent registrations and double voting. The deputy found evidence that those guardrails had been breached.

The story actually began months earlier, on February 27, 2023, when a group of roughly 25 concerned Shasta County residents—many connected to the New California state-split movement—decided to do what officials hadn’t: they went door-to-door themselves.

Armed with 2020 Presidential Election voter registration records, they identified 625 “nonstandard” addresses. They physically visited and documented 475 of them. What they uncovered was a shocking pattern of bogus and impossible voter addresses that had somehow remained on the official rolls.

Here’s what the citizen journalists discovered and later handed over to the Sheriff’s Office:

• 63 addresses listed as residences did not exist:

  • 2 were empty lots

  • 9 listed the house number as “0”

  • 16 had no house number, only a street name

  • 36 had house numbers that did not exist on the street

• 22 used a commercial mailbox center as a residence address (prohibited)

• 3 used a Post Office address as a residence

• 155 used a business address as a residence (prohibited)

• 82 used a U.S. Post Office box as a residential address (prohibited)

• 9 individuals had moved from the listed residence but remained on the rolls

• 136 listings included only a city name with no street address

• 53 voters used the Good News Rescue Mission as their residence; mission staff reported receiving thousands of ballots that were returned to the post office    

Additional red flags emerged directly from the voters themselves:

• Two people whose records showed they had voted insisted they had not cast a ballot.

• Five people whose records showed they had not voted confirmed they actually had.

Even the voter registration database itself showed strange inconsistencies. Multiple entries contained the same mysterious “Julian” date—44138, which translates to September 21, 1979—repeatedly appearing in the registration-date field.

The canvassers also flagged unusually high turnout among the county’s oldest residents:

• 25 out of 33 people aged 100 or older had voted.

• 907 out of 1,111 people aged 90–99 had voted.

• At least one deceased person was recorded as having cast a ballot.

Voter history data (the record of who voted in which elections) also proved inconsistent and appeared to change between reports.

This mountain of evidence—photographs, affidavits, door-knocking logs, and interviews—was turned over to the Sheriff’s Office. Deputy Barnhart’s investigation confirmed the problems were real. Yet because the California Secretary of State’s office ultimately controls the master voter file, and because county elections officials face steep hurdles removing voters who appear to have “voted,” the deputy could not identify a specific individual to charge.

The citizen journalists’ boots-on-the-ground work exposed what many had long suspected: serious, systemic weaknesses in how voter rolls are created, maintained, and cleaned in Shasta County—and across California. Whether the solution lies in stricter voter-ID requirements, mandatory citizenship verification, or simply better address validation, the evidence from that 2023 canvass makes one thing crystal clear: the problem isn’t imaginary. It’s documented, it’s widespread, and it demands attention.

Editorial Note 04/24/2026: One of our readers pointed out that the weblink to the case number cited in the article was not working. Unfortunately, we were not able to release a copy of the actual report due to the large amount of personal contact information it contained.