Shasta County runs into roadblocks reporting outstanding ballots

Shasta County got in trouble with the California Secretary of State’s Office Friday for not sending a report about how many ballots it still had to count in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election.

The county’s Registrar of Voters, Clint Curtis, said it’s because no one in the office had done it before.

“The people that were here didn’t actually know how to do that,” Curtis told The Sacramento Bee in a phone interview on Friday. He added that he doesn’t have the log-ins to the system because he has “a reputation as a programmer and a hacker.”

Curtis was narrowly chosen by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors to be the county’s Registrar of Voters earlier this year and has a reputation as an election skeptic.

He said the previous Registrar of Voters had submitted reports in the past. The county’s previous official, Cathy Darling Allen, resigned in 2024 due to health issues after 18 years on the job.

The Secretary of State’s Office said in an email that the county was not in compliance with California Elections Code Section 15305, which requires elections officials to send the number of yet-to-be-processed ballots on the second day after the election.

Curtis said he was sending the numbers Friday afternoon, and that the county had about 32,000 ballots yet to be counted, and 514 provisional ballots. He didn’t say how many had been counted so far.

About 115,000 people are registered to vote in Shasta County, with 52% Republican, 21% Democrat, 18% No Party Preference, and 9% unclassified.

This story was originally published November 7, 2025 at 1:31 PM.