California
How an ultra-right majority in California’s far north picked a novice to run its elections
This is the first of three stories about the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election-denial movement and a hotbed for far-right politics.
When Shasta county had to search for a new official to oversee its elections earlier this year, there was an obvious candidate.
Her name was Joanna Francescut, and she had been the assistant elections clerk and registrar of voters in this remote region in California’s far north. Francescut had worked in elections for more than 16 years, oversaw the office of the county clerk and registrar of voters for months after her boss went on leave, and was endorsed by elections officials and prominent area Republicans alike.
Instead, the ultra-conservative majority on Shasta county’s board of supervisors in June selected Tom Toller, a former prosecutor who had never worked in elections and vowed to change the office culture, improve public confidence, and “clean up” voter rolls.
Were it any other California county, the decision would have been shocking. But Shasta county in recent years has made a name for itself as a center for far-right politics and the election-denial movement, which maintains that Donald Trump, and not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. In the past year, the majority on the board of supervisors, the county’s governing body, has cast doubt on the integrity of the local elections office and sought to rid the county of voting machines.
The move fueled anxiety among some of the county’s residents. Before one of the most turbulent and consequential races in recent history, Toller will be in charge of administering the election to 114,000 voters with just a few months’ experience under his belt.
Already, challenges have been thrown his way. In September, a county advisory board, which makes recommendations to Shasta’s governing body, proposed limiting absentee ballots and returning to one-day voting. Toller rejected the proposal, pointing out the plan would violate state law.
“People are worried about it,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county conservative who supported Francescut and has been frustrated by conspiracy theories about the elections office. “If there was any hint of scandal [at the office], I’d be the first one down there. But there’s never been anything.”
Toller declined the Guardian’s request for an interview, citing his office’s focus on preparations for early voting.
The controversy in Shasta over the elections office is a more extreme version of an issue that experts have been sounding the alarm about for years. US elections officials are leaving at increasingly high rates after facing intense harassment and threats in the aftermath of the 2020 election and are being replaced by administrators with less experience and institutional knowledge.
For 20 years, Shasta’s elections had been managed by Cathy Darling Allen, one of the only Democrats elected to office in this region where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one.
Allen’s job, a non-partisan administrative role, radically changed after the 2020 election, when Trump refused to acknowledge his defeat. As an election-denial movement flourished locally and the county’s governing body veered radically to the right, her office came under growing scrutiny and dealt with harassment and bullying. The evening of a local election in June 2022, someone placed a camera outside her office.
Allen was re-elected with almost 70% of the vote that year. But she was frequently villainized by the far-right majority on the board of supervisors, which had set out to dramatically change how elections are conducted in Shasta county.
In early 2023, the county board of supervisors cancelled its contract with Dominion Voting Systems, the company maligned by Trump and his supporters, without a replacement, and attempted to implement a costly and error-prone hand-counting method. Soon after, the state thwarted those efforts with the passage of a bill preventing counties from using manual tallies in most elections.
Far-right county officials insisted they would use their hand-counting method in November 2023 regardless, and falsely claimed elections were being manipulated; Allen made clear she would follow state law, and the election ultimately unfolded without issue.
Many voters heralded Allen’s commitment to upholding election law in the face of unprecedented attacks. People routinely stopped her in public to express their appreciation, she previously told the Guardian, and often sent cards and notes of gratitude. But Allen’s position also made her the No 1 enemy of Shasta county’s far right, one local journalist wrote.
In February, Allen shocked the county when she announced plans to retire with two years left in her term. She had been diagnosed with heart failure, she said. “An essential part of recovering from this diagnosis is stress reduction. As many election officials could probably tell you right now, that’s a tough ask to balance with election administration in the current environment,” she wrote in a letter to the community.
Francescut, Allen’s deputy, seemed an obvious choice for her replacement, given her more than 16 years’ experience assisting with more than 30 elections in the county. She had been training for the role for years and took on Allen’s job – in addition to her own – and oversaw the March election.
She had the support of her ex-boss, elections clerks in two other counties, as well as a conservative former county supervisor.
The board of supervisors held public interviews with eight candidates, including Francescut, Toller, and Clint Curtis, an attorney and former congressional candidate who has long claimed he was once hired by a lawmaker to create a software that could rig elections.
During public comment after the first day of interviews, an air of cynicism hung over the room. Several speakers urged the board to hire Francescut while acknowledging the supervisors had likely already made their decision. “The fix is in,” one woman shouted from the audience.
Board members took a combative approach with Francescut. One supervisor, Kevin Crye, attempted to coax her into criticizing her former boss, while another, Patrick Jones, accused her of “mal-conduct”. Their tone was hostile, said Sid, who characterized the public interviews as a “dog and pony show”.
Francescut, who described the process as “humbling”, tried to focus on her values as a leader and on her work ethic, she said in an interview with the Guardian in June. “I prepared myself the best I could to get the job I’ve been striving to get for the last 16 years. Even if right now isn’t the right time. I have community support behind me.”
In his interview with the panel, Toller said he would bring what he described as necessary change to the elections office, and suggested he would not mind pushing back against state law.
“I’m a firm believer that just because the secretary of state of California tells us a statute or regulation must be interpreted in a certain way, that’s not the end of the story,” he said.
And then there was Curtis, who has advocated hand-counting and noted in his application he was a speaker at election events hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who has spent millions of dollars promoting lies about elections in the US.
During the public hearing in June, a group of residents who have frequently spoken publicly on their concerns about vote tampering and their beliefs that elections are being rigged expressed their support for Curtis. None of the speakers who offered public comment spoke in favor of Toller.
Still, Toller’s appointment was a win for critics of the elections office in a year with relatively few victories for them. Patrick Jones, the official who has most aggressively condemned voting machines and spread misinformation, in March lost his bid for re-election by a landslide. In June, a county judge dismissed a lawsuit from a failed supervisor candidate who sued the elections office, claiming that an error in the placement of her name on the ballot cost her the election. She had sought to change the outcome of the election.
“The lack of evidence was profound,” the judge said of the case. A state court denied her attempt to appeal the ruling.
Those who buy into conspiracy theories about voter fraud and stolen elections are not giving up on their efforts to remake the voting process in the region. The local elections commission recently recommended the county limit absentee ballots and return to one-day voting. Toller, in a move that may have surprised some of his supporters, rejected that idea and said doing so would not comply with state law. Those items will come before the board of supervisors for consideration.
With a new elections official, a deeply divided county and an intense presidential contest, the office faces busy and daunting months ahead.
Between November 2023 and June more than a third of the elections office’s 21 staffers left. But Francescut has said that she plans to stay put – at least through November – to help maintain stability in the office and support Toller as he learns the ropes.
“In the long run, ensuring that the November election is where it needs to be and the voters are able to vote, that’s the biggest priority right now in my mind,” she said. “It’s way more important than me as an individual.”
By Dan Walters, CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Two decades ago, when California got serious about reducing or even eliminating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, its political leaders weighed two potential tactics about industrial emissions.
The state could impose direct facility-by-facility limits, generally favored by climate change advocates. Or it could set overall emission reduction goals that would gradually decrease and auction off emission allowances, assuming their costs would encourage reductions.
The latter, known as cap-and-trade, was favored by corporate interests as being less onerous and was adopted, finally taking effect in 2012.
Since then, the California Air Resources Board has conducted quarterly auctions of emission allowances, collecting a total of $35 billion dollars so far, which, in theory, is being spent on projects that would reduce emissions.
The revenues have varied from year to year, but they have generally increased as the emission caps have declined. Since reaching a peak of $8.1 billion in the 2023-24 fiscal year, however, auction proceeds have been declining.
Roughly half of the money has been given to utilities to minimize cap-and-trade’s impact on consumer costs. However, the program has been widely criticized as a de facto tax on gasoline and other fuels, which were already among the most expensive of any state.
The remaining revenues have been deposited into a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that governors and legislators have tapped for various purposes, not all of them connected to emission reductions. In a sense, it’s been a slush fund.
Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature overhauled the program in two bills, Senate Bill 840 and Assembly Bill 1207. The program was extended, it was renamed as cap-and-invest and new priorities for spending auction proceeds were set.
Notably, the state’s cash-strapped and long-stalled bullet train project would get a flat $1 billion a year, rather than the 25% share it had been getting. Project managers hope that lenders will advance enough money to complete its first leg in the San Joacim Valley; the plan is to repay the loans from the $1 billion annual cap-and-invest allocation.
Early this year, the Air Resources Board released new regulations to implement the legislative changes but faced criticism that they would increase consumer costs. That led to a revision in April that softens the rules’ impact — most obviously on refiners who have been threatening to leave California — but environmental groups are very critical.
The April version would also sharply reduce net revenues from emission auctions, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, providing barely enough for the $1 billion allocation to the bullet train and another $1 billion for the governor and Legislature to spend. Other programs that have been receiving cap-and-invest support, such as wildfire protection and housing, would probably get nothing.
The program has been tapped in recent years to backfill programs that a deficit-ridden state budget could not cover, so the projected revenue drop would exacerbate efforts by Newsom and legislators to close the state budget’s yawning gap.
“The (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) is a relatively small portion of the overall state budget, but it has been a noteworthy source of funding for environmental and other programs in recent years,” the state Assembly’s budget advisor, Jason Sisney, says in an email. “Collapse of its revenues would change the state budget process noticeably. The state’s cost-pressured general fund seemingly would be unable to make up much, if any, of a significant (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) revenue decline at this time.”
When Newsom presents his revised budget this week, he may reveal how he intends to cover the cap-and-invest program’s shortfall, particularly whether he will maintain the $1 billion bullet train commitment that project leaders say is vital to continuing construction of its Merced-to-Bakersfield segment.
It could boil down to bullet train vs. wildfire protection.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Vance says Trump cares about Americans finances amid Iran debate
Vance pushes back on claims about Trump and says Americans finances matter as the administration weighs Iran and nuclear diplomacy.
Vice President JD Vance announced on Wednesday, May 13 that the Trump administration will be deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California, as part of a new initiative to root out fraud in federal health programs.
The topic of California’s hospice care fraud has been a major focus of scrutiny by state leadership, members of President Donald Trump’s administration, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s critics. In his announcement, Vance claimed that the administration was set on deferring these funds “because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously.”
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously,” Vance said during a press conference.
Notably, this decision was part of Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force’s plan to implement a six-month nationwide, data-driven moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, is set to use this six-month moratorium to conduct investigations and review data on Medicare programs, with the hopes of removing hospice and home health agencies that are suspected of committing fraud.
“Today we’re shutting the door on fraud — preventing new bad actors from entering Medicare while we aggressively identify, investigate, and remove those already exploiting them,” Oz said. “This is about protecting patients, restoring integrity, and safeguarding taxpayer dollars.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the administration’s action “unlawful” and noted that his office would be “carefully reviewing all available information” and may challenge the administration’s decision to threaten “Californians’ rights or access to critical services.”
“Once again, California appears to be targeted solely for political reasons,” Bonta said on X.
“The Trump Administration is planning to defer over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for vital programs that help seniors and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.”
Bonta and his office have attempted to counteract criticism that the state does not take action against hospice fraud.
In April, Bonta announced that the California Department of Justice had arrested five people in connection with a major health care scheme in Southern California that defrauded taxpayers of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
“For years, California has led the charge to protect public programs from fraud and abuse,” Newsom said in the press release on April 10. “We hold accountable to the fullest extent of the law anyone who tries to rip off taxpayers and take advantage of public programs, particularly those as sensitive as hospice care.”
Newsom has yet to publicly respond to the administration’s decision to defer California’s Medicaid reimbursement.
However, shortly after Vance made the announcement, Newsom’s press office blasted the decision on X.
“We hate fraud. But that’s NOT what this is,” Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Vance and Oz are attacking programs that keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes. Pretty sick.”
Noe Padilla is a Northern California Reporter for USA Today. Contact him at npadilla@usatodayco.com, follow him on X @1NoePadilla or on Bluesky @noepadilla.bsky.social. Sign up for the TODAY Californian newsletter or follow us on Facebook at TODAY Californian.
California
California girls’ track and field stars speak out as Gavin Newsom’s Title IX crisis grows
Reese Hogan would have a very different set of medals if the rules were different in California.
It’s her third straight year competing against a trans athlete in the California girls’ track and field state tournament. She would have taken first place in the high jump all to herself in the sectional preliminaries last Saturday, if only biological females were allowed to compete.
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Now she’ll compete against a trans athlete in the sectional finals this weekend, representing her Christian high school, Crean Lutheran. It will mark one year since she went viral on social media for stepping up from the second-place spot on a medal podium up to first place, after a trans athlete who took first place stepped off.
“This is my third year competing against a transgender athlete, and last year I was stripped away of a CIF Title, and I basically worked my whole career to get to that point,” Hogan said on “Fox News at Night” on Tuesday. “It’s just really dissapointing to go into a competition knowing you already lost.”
CALIFORNIA TRACK ATHLETE BRIEFLY POSES ON 1ST-PLACE PODIUM AFTER LOSING TO TRANS ATHLETE, RECEIVES PRAISE
Her Crean Lutheran teammate, Olivia Viola, has been right there with Hogan throughout the three years of competition against trans athletes.
“I haven’t heard nearly enough adults come out and say anything. A lot of them like to say that they agree with you, that they’re proud of you for speaking up now, but they won’t do it themselves,” Viola said. “Just because it doesn’t affect every adult out there doesn’t mean it’s not worth standing up for.”
California has legally allowed biological males to compete in girls’ sports since a state law was enacted in 2013. The state’s education agencies are engaged in a federal Title IX lawsuit with President Donald Trump’s administration for commitment to upholding that state law.
A source at Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to Fox News Digital in response to news that a “Save Girls Sports” rally, which the two girls attended, would be held at last Saturday’s meet.
“The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. He rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids. The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies,” the statement read.
“California is one of 22 states that have laws requiring students be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school sports consistent with their gender identity. California passed this law in 2013 (AB 1266) and it was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.”
At the rally, Hogan spoke and fired back at Newsom’s office for the statement.
“The recent statements coming from Governor Gavin Newsom’s office have made it clear that there is no intention of creating a safe, fair, and equitable environment for female high school athletes. Him and his office have gone as far as calling young girls bullies for speaking up for what we believe in,” Hogan said.
“The governor himself has admitted that males competing in women’s sports is unfair, yet nothing is being done to protect girls who train every day to compete on a level playing field.”
CALIFORNIA ATHLETE SAYS SHE CHANGES CLOTHES IN HER CAR TO AVOID SHARING A LOCKER ROOM WITH TRANS ATHLETE
California high school girls wear “Protect Girls Sports” shirts at a postseason track meet at Yorba Linda High School on May 10, 2025. (Reese Hogan/Courtesy of Reese Hogan)
Viola also rejected the “bully” assertion in Tuesday’s interview.
“I think his statement is manipulative, and it’s just completely untrue,” Viola said. “He’s saying stand up for all kids, yet he’s essentially trying to silence us… these girls are not bullies. They make a point, we all make an point to say we are not against any individual athlete, we are against California’s policies,” Viola said.
“We believe athletes deserve dignity and respect, and that’s why we believe women deserve the dignity of having their own category.”
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Crean Lutheran High School senior track and field star Reese Hogan speaks at a ‘Save Girls Sports’ rally. (Courtesy of Alyssa Cruz)
Both Viola and Hogan will compete at the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Final on Saturday in Moorpark, California.
And just like last year, there will be a podium ceremony after the competitions.
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