Politics
He’s telling Californians they can’t trust elections — and it’s catching on with the GOP
REDDING — At a Board of Supervisors meeting in rural Shasta County last month, Clint Curtis dropped a bombshell: A sheriff way down in Riverside was going to confiscate all the ballots from a recent election.
Curtis, the county registrar of voters, was the first to announce the planned ballot seizure. Even the sheriff himself, Chad Bianco, had not publicly revealed his intentions.
Later, as Bianco’s move grabbed headlines — he is a leading Republican candidate for governor — Curtis’ behind-the-scenes maneuvering remained largely unknown. The registrar had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations had sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.
Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis poses last month in the new election observation room at the elections office in Redding.
In his short time in Shasta County, Curtis, whose claims about rigged voting machines stretch back to the early 2000s, has solidified his position as a torchbearer of the election denialism movement, vowing to take his message about untrustworthy machines and potential fraud across California and beyond.
Critics here say he has steadily disenfranchised voters. He has eliminated nine of the vast county’s 13 ballot drop boxes, telling The Times he did not trust ballots in the hands of “little old ladies running all over” to collect them. And he has advocated for a local ballot initiative that would limit elections to one day, eliminate most voting by mail and require voter ID as well as a hand count of ballots.
Curtis also has accused his predecessors in the registrar’s office, without evidence, of election fraud and has called for federal authorities to raid the office he now runs.
“Do I think ballots were stuffed? Yes. Have I contacted the DOJ? Yes,” Curtis said at the Feb. 24 Shasta County supervisors’ meeting just before announcing Bianco’s planned ballot seizure.
Curtis, a 67-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County supervisors last April. He lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area and had never run an election.
He got the job based largely on two stated qualifications: He wanted to hand-count votes. And he had worked with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.
In his public job interview, Curtis promised to grill local elections staffers to “find out what they know.”
Now Curtis is running for election himself, trying to keep his job in this Northern California county where a majority of the supervisors were so swept up in President Trump’s discredited election fraud claims that they ditched their Dominion voting machines in 2023 and opted to hand-count ballots (quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so).
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Curtis says he is running to make elections more transparent by questioning the status quo and hanging cameras everywhere to capture election workers’ every move.
“Republicans love me,” Curtis told The Times. “The Democrats are pretty good. And then I have these crazy socialist people that just hate me.”
Beliefs aside, Curtis has quickly become a colorful local character.
He took a lie detector test to attest that he didn’t rig the November election. He chose as his number two a heavy metal guitarist from San Francisco — stage name “Turmoil” — who is a progressive Democrat.
And last September, surveillance cameras captured him pushing an antique metal safe through the Shasta County elections office on a Saturday while his wife assisted with a pulling harness. Curtis wore blue jeans — and no shirt.
He said he moved the safe, which contained odds and ends, on a hot day to make more room for election observers.
Curtis first gained national attention for election skepticism in December 2004, in testimony before Congress.
He had been working as a computer programmer in Florida and was brought in as an expert witness by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who were reeling over President George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry a few weeks earlier and furious about an error with an electronic voting machine that gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.
Curtis claimed that he had written “a prototype” of software that would allow cheaters to alter votes using “invisible buttons” on touch-screen balloting machines. His claims were largely dismissed. But he continues to tout his congressional testimony to cast himself as an expert on election malfeasance.
A woman passes by a “Greetings From Redding” mural on Feb. 25.
After testifying, he unsuccessfully ran for office multiple times in Florida. He refused to concede after one loss, alleging the machines were rigged.
In Shasta County, he saw a chance for redemption.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board of Supervisors gained a hard-right majority supported by anti-vaxxers, secessionists, members of a local militia and pro-Trump election deniers.
In 2022, someone hung a trail camera — the kind hunters use to track wildlife — behind the elections office to monitor the staff. Some observers yelled at staffers and got in the face of Cathy Darling Allen, the longtime registrar, who installed a 7-foot metal fence to keep them at bay.
Joanna Francescut, who worked in the elections office for 17 years, is running to be county registrar.
Darling Allen clashed with the supervisors as they pushed to hand-count votes, a process she argued would be slow, expensive and prone to error. She retired in 2024, citing health reasons.
Her successor resigned after less than a year. The supervisors appointed Curtis in a 3-2 vote, passing over Joanna Francescut, who had worked in the elections office since 2008 and was Darling Allen’s number two.
Days later, Curtis fired Francescut. She is now running against him in the June 2 election.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called Curtis a “nationally known conspiracy theorist.”
“I can’t imagine bringing in someone who is neither an election administrator nor a Californian for a job like that and basically chasing out experienced election officials whose work had withstood scrutiny for decades,” Becker said. “The voters of Shasta County, unfortunately, are paying the price.”
Curtis has accused Francescut and other elections staffers of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans.
“I want to laugh because it’s that ridiculous,” Francescut, 43, said of the allegations.
“People that work in this field, they’re doing this work because they care about elections,” she said. “They want the community to be better. They want what both sides want — transparent and accurate elections.”
During her 17-year tenure, the elections office got little public attention. But “once 2020 hit, people went from completely trusting us to, the day after election day, calling and yelling at our staff so much that we couldn’t get the work done to count ballots,” she said.
Curtis was a favorite of then-board chairman Kevin Crye, a hard-right supervisor who enlisted Lindell to support the county’s crusade against Dominion. Crye had survived a 2024 recall effort by just 50 votes.
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1. Carl Bott, co-owner of KCNR 96.5 FM, interviews Joanna Francescut last month. 2. Joanna Francescut’s campaign manager, Mary Williams, wears an orange button as Francescut waits in the offices of talk radio station KCNR. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Citing that close margin, Curtis said he believed recent elections were rigged because Republicans were not winning by large enough margins in a county where registered Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats.
In a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, Curtis said he had learned of lax security and potential ballot stuffing in 2024, the year of the attempted recall against Crye. Curtis sent a copy of the letter to Trump and requested a federal investigation because “the destruction of these ballots is nearing.”
In 2019 and 2024, a Shasta County grand jury investigated local election procedures and found no wrongdoing.
“How does it make me feel? Really angry,” Darling Allen, who is advising Francescut’s campaign, said of Curtis’ allegations. “It calls into question the integrity and character of every single person who worked in the elections department.”
To replace Francescut, Curtis hired Brent Turner, the guitarist from San Francisco. He is a longtime election reform activist who has pushed for nonproprietary open-source voting systems with software code that can be examined by anyone.
Turner described their partnership as: “Republican and Democrat team up to fight outdated software for elections. Oh, my!”
“We have to have the adult conversation in the United States that if the systems are loose enough to allow people — in this case, we’re talking about even people internal to the system — to cheat, they might cheat,” Turner said.
Last October, Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to Curtis, asking him to detail planned changes to voting procedures. He responded with a 15-page letter.
Election observers, he wrote, were “treated like invaders … corralled behind spiked fences.” And drivers who picked up ballots from drop boxes sometimes left them in their vehicles. Under his watch, he wrote, “no detours or even bathroom breaks are allowed.”
A woman exits the Cottonwood Post Office in Shasta County.
Curtis told Weber that someone had carved death threats on his vehicle and left “antifa” business cards on his windshield wipers.
Weber’s communications team said in an email that her office “continues to monitor new election processes proposed by Shasta (or any county) County to ensure they do not violate state law.”
In his letter to Weber, Curtis promised to take a lie detector test after each election. Answering pre-written questions he had submitted, Curtis said in a January polygraph test that he did not change the results of the November election and believed a predecessor had rigged previous contests, according to a summary obtained by The Times.
The examiner wrote that he “was likely telling the truth.”
Inside the elections office, Curtis created a large room, decked out with American flags, for citizens to observe the vote-counting process.
More than a dozen large TV monitors display close-up video, also streamed online, of election workers’ hands inserting ballots into machines. On June 2, those workers will sit beneath iPhones hung overhead to record them while observers are positioned on barstools a few inches behind them.
The new public observation room at the Shasta County elections office is decorated with American flags.
Curtis has been traveling across California to tout his methods. He told The Times he has spoken about his video setup in Kern and San Joaquin counties and discussed it with candidates for state office.
And he advised the Riverside County citizens group that claimed to have found an overcount of 45,896 ballots in the November election for Proposition 50, which redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats.
Art Tinoco, the Riverside County registrar of voters, has refuted that number — saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
After Bianco last week announced that his office had seized more than 650,000 ballots, Curtis appeared on the social media broadcast of a right-wing election integrity advocate who called him “the stealth behind the scenes in making that happen.”
Curtis smiled and repeated what he has been espousing since the early 2000s: “You can’t really trust a computer.”
Doug Burgum highlights American innovation at Great American State Fair
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joins ‘Fox & Friends’ live from the Great American State Fair in Washington. He emphasizes America’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, discussing the impact of AI and free markets. Burgum also addresses recent vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22 and the upcoming July 4th opening of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending President Donald Trump’s many initiatives to address infrastructure in Washington, D.C., calling it a visible reminder that the country needs to actively press back against decline.
“Nations don’t crumble by fate — they decline by choice,” Burgum told Fox News Digital.
“From rehabilitating and installing historic memorials, statues, and fountains to removing hundreds of instances of graffiti and cleaning up crime on our streets, this administration is proving that American greatness is built through action,” he continued.
Burgum’s reasoning, which came ahead of the United States’ 250th Independence Day anniversary, addresses criticisms of the administration that have surfaced in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether Trump’s many renovation and construction initiatives in Washington, D.C. have been worth their price tag.
WHITE HOUSE SEIZES ON DELAYED OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER OPENING TO CROWN TRUMP ‘BUILDER-IN-CHIEF’
Split of sample tests in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)
As part of the 250th celebration, Trump has spent $14.7 million to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, allocated $250 million to restore the Kennedy Center and is on track to spend over $400 million on the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Trump, in a Truth Social update about the reflecting pool, framed the efforts as part of a larger effort.
“We’ve cleaned, renovated and beautified over 45 monuments and memorials, 28 statues and 22 fountains in Washington, D.C. Things are really looking good in our nation’s capital. Add to that the fact that when I became president, crime was rampant. And now Washington, D.C. is one of the safest cities anywhere in the United States,” Trump wrote.
REPUBLICANS QUESTION TRUMP’S ‘PRIVATELY FUNDED’ BALLROOM AFTER REPORT POINTS TO TAXPAYER BURDEN
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reacted during a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez at the Miraflores Presidential Palace on March 4, 2026, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
The Department of the Interior, which has overseen many of the improvements, further updated its accomplishments ahead of July 4.
The city has removed 510 instances of graffiti, removed 154 homeless encampments, applied 212 tons of repair materials to roads and parkways, restored 280,000 square feet of roadway paving, rehabilitated 1,301 benches and fixed 1,913 lights.
Burgum said the repairs were emblematic of the administration’s aggressive posture towards addressing problems that had gone ignored in the past. In addition to these major improvements, DOI has restored and cleaned dozens of monuments and statues around DC.
DOI also recently helped transform Meridian Hill Park, which got high praise on social media by DC residents, into a desirable place to visit with a restored fountain that had been under construction for years with very little movement. They also cleaned and restored some of the statues in the park, including the Joan of Arc statue and the James Buchanan Memorial.
FIRST ON FOX: TRUMP ADMIN TRANSFORMS DC HOTSPOT ONCE ROCKED BY GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN SYMBOLIC REVERSAL
Washington DC city workers dismantle tents and remove personal belongings during a sweep of a homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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“While others accept decline, President Trump and the Department of the Interior are restoring the heart of our nation’s capital,” Burgum said. “The Golden Age of America isn’t just a slogan, it’s being rebuilt, one landmark, one street and one victory at a time.”
Politics
Commentary: Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning about erasing history
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
President Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Signs sit available for protesters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court as President Trump arrives to attend oral arguments on April 1 in Washington, DC.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.
“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
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President Donald Trump marked the eve of America’s 250th anniversary with a sweeping patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, declaring the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowing that it would “never be a Communist country.”
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of four of his predecessors — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — Trump touted American exceptionalism as festivities marking the nation’s 250th anniversary ramped up across the country.
“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump told the crowd.
TRUMP KICKS OFF FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WITH SYMBOLIC SALUTE TO AMERICA’S LEGACY
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth,” he continued. “We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth. And by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”
Trump praised the nation’s history and argued that no other country had achieved as much as the United States.
“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever,” he said. “No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Fireworks explode after President Donald Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Before Trump took the stage, the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore as spectators cheered. After his remarks, the president stayed to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills.
Trump argued the country was facing what he described as a growing communist movement that sought to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and “alienate us from our history.”
The president said the movement had raised the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
MAMDANI BLASTS ICE AGENTS, ELON MUSK AND ‘SUPREMACY’ IN AMERICA 250 SPEECH AHEAD OF JULY 4 WEEKEND
President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he continued.
“But we will not let them win,” he added. “They have no chance against us.”
Trump issued a clear directive: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
President Donald Trump speaks beneath Mount Rushmore during a celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As Americans face those choices, Trump pointed to the nation’s past sacrifices as a guide for its future.
“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.
Trump also highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain behind him, saying they represented America’s founding ideals.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” he said. “Above all, they were great men of history. Tonight, on the threshold of our 250th year, we stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants.”
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Trump is scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump said. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
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