Shasta County District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon can stop complaining about being the swing vote on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors.
After joining District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye and District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom in anointing underqualified Florida election denier Clint Curtis as the next Shasta County Registrar of Voters/County Clerk at Tuesday’s special board meeting, it’s official.
Harmon’s no swing voter. He’s a MAGA man, and like Crye and Kelstrom, he’s infected with a virulent strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome that works the opposite of the TDS that manifests in liberals. This strain is messianic; Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon believe Emperor God Trump will bring back same-day hand-counted paper ballots with a wave of his magic executive wand, and when he does, Shasta County will be perfectly poised to take advantage with Curtis installed at the ROV helm.
Chair Crye and Los Tres Payasos will go down in fascist history!
That’s literally the argument Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon made for hiring Curtis, the sketchiest of the four candidates interviewed for the ROV position at Tuesday’s special board meeting. They had no choice but to resort to magical thinking, since his three female opponents, Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut and out-of-state candidates Robin Underwood and Ellie Leigh Sharp, were all clearly more qualified for the position than Curtis, who has never worked for an elections office.
Once again the BOS meeting was held in the Shasta Lake City Council chambers, capacity 90, which Tuesday meant showing up at least an hour early to get a front-row seat. Visually, the audience appeared to be two-thirds Francescut supporters and one-third Curtis supporters. Francescut’s supporters came prepared to discuss Curtis’s lack of qualifications for the ROV position.
Knives Out for Curtis in Public Comment
Jeff Gorder.
“With all due respect to Mr. Curtis, he’s never run an election,” said Jeff Gorder, a retired Shasta County public defender who helped lead the unsuccessful (by 50 votes) effort to recall Crye last year. “As far as his election experiences is concerned, he’s a complete unknown to me, except for the fact that he’s gained recent notoriety as an associate of Mike Lindell, who is obviously one of the most pathetic figures in modern history.”
Curtis, who claims to be a Democrat, has also hobnobbed with other figures in the MAGAverse, including Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon.
Gorder pointed out that the only person who can validate Curtis’s claimed “exploits” on his job application is Curtis himself.
“There are no dates given as to his work history, no references to anybody that he supposedly worked with overseas in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Italy, no references from anyone that he worked with in these other states,” Gorder said.
Like many local citizens, frequent board speaker David Hallagan appealed to supposed swing-vote Harmon’s business sense.
“I have a couple quotes I would like to share today from a current supervisor,” Hallagan began. “Quote: ‘My family, faith, and community are everything to me. My affiliation is to no group. I am not part of any super PAC or special interest group. I have no hidden agenda other than to serve every citizen in our county, and to be your voice with the Board of Supervisors.’”
“Another quote: ‘It is imperative that we enhance the work environment and uplift the spirits and productivity of our county operations.’”
David Hallagan .
Then Hallagan’s big reveal.
“These words, ladies and gentlemen, are right out of Mr. Corky Harmon’s District 3 Supervisor webpage, and they’re still up there today. Mr. Harmon, don’t be concerned today about your personal preference. Don’t be concerned with Chair Crye’s.
“Don’t be concerned with your friend of 35-plus years, Patty Plumb. Be concerned with what you committed to, sir. The vast majority of citizens support Ms. Francescut. Mr. Harmon, align your decisions today with your quotes. Uphold your moral principles, regardless, regardless of personal consequences. Mr. Harmon, be the voice of our citizens today and appoint Ms. Francescut.”
Alas, Hallagan’s plea fell upon deaf ears.
Three Strong Female Candidates Dominate the Proceedings
ROV candidate Robin Underwood.
Candidate DeNay Harris was no show, narrowing the field to four.
The first candidate to be interviewed, Robin Underwood, Deputy City Clerk for Eastpointe Michigan, had 10 years of experience working in city clerk positions that included elections duties. As she explained, she comes from a family of over-achievers, African Americans who had to be the best in order to be considered for any position.
“I’m a former, well, I’ll say the class president from high school, from the eighth, twelfth grade, class president in my graduate class,” she said. “I’ve been an advocate in the community all of my life, and I get this from, I guess I’m an inheritor with my dad, chief of detectives. He was school board president.”
Underwood has a simple philosophy for staying within the “jaws of the law” in the elections office.
“So when you step away from protocol, you step away and you minimize integrity,” Underwood said. “So I can come here from Michigan with the state of Michigan election laws. You have the state of California election laws. That’s my manifesto. That’s what I follow. And that’s what I have to follow.”
Informed that if she accepted the ROV position, she’d face an election in June 2026, a little more than a year away, Underwood quipped, “I’m campaigning right now!” drawing the biggest laugh in what was otherwise a tense and somber affair.
Harmon asked few questions of any of the candidates and seemed unprepared and awkward, such as this exchange with Underwood.
“But one thing that sticks out, not to pick on you, but the only thing that sticks out to me is, so, and I’ll ask you, I think it’s, are you currently employed?” Harmon said.
“Yes, I am,” Underwood said. “I’m deputy city clerk in Macomb County.
“It says, ‘were you ever discharged or forced to resign from a position?’” Harmon said, referring to a questionnaire the county gave to all the candidates. Underwood answered “yes” to question 13 and indicated she had been “Unappointed as Deputy Clerk City of Detroit politics” in question 14.
“I was,” Underwood said. “City of Detroit. And what I found out is that politically, because of my impressive resume, my background, I was told that I was being let go because I had too many letters behind my name. MCD, Masters of Community Development. CMC, Certified Municipal Clerk. CMC, Certified Michigan Municipal Clerk.”
She’s added another acronym since then, MIPMC, Michigan Professional Municipal Clerk.
Underwood was the only candidate who said she’d been discharged from a previous position. As A News Café reported last week, Clint Curtis did not list his dismissal from the Florida Department of Transportation in 2002 on his questionnaire. The subject came up again when the board interviewed Curtis, who followed Underwood.
Turns out Curtis was fired from the FDOT back then, but today, technically, he wasn’t fired because he was a consultant, not an employee.
Standby for lawyering.
Clint Curtis Was Fired from FDOT, Until He Wasn’t
Clint Curtis.
It’s not likely that Curtis forgot he got fired from the FDOT in 2002 since it’s part of his origin story, his transformation from computer programming consultant to anti-computer election integrity attorney. This 2006 profile of Curtis in Orlando Weekly captures his metamorphosis and points out the holes in Curtis’s story.
In 2004, Curtis claimed in a sworn affidavit that he wrote a computer program at the behest of then-Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney in late 2000 that allowed users to flip votes via touchscreen. Feeney was an attorney and lobbyist for Yang Enterprises Inc., where Curtis worked at the time. Curtis took a consulting job with FDOT in 2001, which had a major contract with YEI. Conflicts with his former employer and FDOT arose after Curtis claimed YEI was overbilling the state agency for its services and YEI accused Curtis of stealing its software. Curtis and his supervisor were fired on April 1, 2002.
Curtis continued to investigate Feeney and YEI and self-published a book in September 2004 alleging one of YEI’s employees was an illegal immigrant selling secrets to the Chinese. After false allegations that the November 2004 presidential election had been hacked went viral on what was then called the blogosphere, Curtis inserted a new last chapter into his book alleging Feeney had ordered the vote-rigging software and released his sworn affidavit through BradBlog.
Thus an internet election integrity expert — AKA election denier — was born. It doesn’t matter that no device has ever been programmed with Curtis’ alleged code to see if it actually works via a touchscreen. It doesn’t matter that Florida didn’t have touchscreen voting in 2000. It doesn’t matter that Feeney and YEI have been cleared of most of Curtis’s allegations. It doesn’t matter that Curtis waited four years before reporting his deadly-if-true vote-rigging allegations.
Curtis has surfed this wave of unaccountable expertise right into the Trump era and the Shasta County ROV’s seat.
New California State secessionists Ron and Patty Plumb are chummy with ROV candidate Clint Curtis.
“Essentially, I was a computer programmer and I wrote the first code for the electronic voting machines back in 2000,” Curtis told the supervisors on Tuesday. “And in the very first code that came out was the hack to allow it to choose whoever you wanted to choose. So I report to Congress, report to DOT, report everybody and testified in 2004 to the United States Congress on this very issue. So that’s where my interest came from. It’s almost like a guilt interest, like I broke it, I better fix it.”
Curtis played all of his greatest hits for the board, how he’s allegedly been at the center of the movement to hand count paper ballots in Germany, Netherlands and Italy, how he challenged and lost Trump’s 2016 victory in Florida and how being an elections lawyer means he knows all the positions in the elections office, so it doesn’t matter he has no actual experience running elections.
Exactly how many election law clients Curtis has and who they are is murky. He admitted that he doesn’t get paid for election law cases and has lost all of them but one, which he declined to name.
“You know, most of the cases for election law are losers simply because the law is written not did we do something wrong, but did we do something wrong and in no time frame at all, can you show enough votes to flip an election? And if you can’t show that, and usually you can’t because you’re blocked out on discovery, then the case goes away. So essentially, you know, I’ve been doing this a long time,” Curtis said.
What’s that he’s been doing a long time, for 23 years in fact? Losing!
Noting Curtis’s advocacy for hand counting ballots, District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer pointed out the practice is illegal in California and Curtis had vowed to follow state law.
District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer.
“So to make sure I’m understanding correctly, that statement on your application is pending a change in state law that would allow for hand counting?” Plummer asked.
“Yes, I would prefer hand counting,” Curtis said. “It’s really a way to make sure it’s done right and a way that the people can trust it.”
Asked what changes he can predict for the elections office between now and next year’s elections, Curtis chirped, “That is easy, we’re going to put everything so it’s transparent, there’s going to be cameras everywhere” as if the elections office didn’t already have as many cameras as legally permissible.
Harmon asked why would Curtis move to here from Florida.
“Really, why would you want to move to here,” Harmon said. “I mean, we think we’re special and we are to us. But Florida is pretty nice. And looking at your resume and your background. I mean, it’s got to be about like election integrity and nothing else, right?”
“Yes, it’s about election opportunity. It’s about to finish what I’ve been working on for a quarter of a century, which is a long time. So I’ve been working on this, this board and this group of people can actually achieve an area where we can show the world exactly how this can be done. So everybody’s happy with it.”
“I’m not questioning Shasta County about it,” Harmon pondered. “But it’s frustrating to me to think that Shasta County, of all the counties in this country, is the county that’s in the hot seat, so to speak.”
There’s one way to stay out of the frying pan Mr. Harmon: Stop jumping into it.
Los Tres Payasos, AKA The Three Clowns, Strike Again
District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom.
Asked by Kelstrom, who has no doubt watched Dinesh D’Souza’s discredited 2022 film “2000 Mules” multiple times, how he felt about drop boxes, Curtis snapped, “In California, drop boxes are stupid, okay? You’ve got 25 mailboxes or 25 post offices.”
In fact, drop boxes are required by state law and are especially valuable in rural areas like Shasta County, where mail service can be erratic during election season.
District 2 Supervisor Allen Long questioned Curtis’s lack of elections experience.
“Have you ever worked in a formal capacity as a clerk, registrar, or voters anywhere?”
“No, I’ve worked as a lawyer monitoring the elections or picking them apart afterwards, depending on what procedures were followed, all that sort of thing. And apparently, I’m good enough at it. I was just asked by the American team that’s going to go down to watch Venezuela’s election to come down there and watch theirs.”
As usual, Curtis offered nothing to back up his claim other than his own word.
District 2 Supervisor Allen Long.
Long, a former RPD detective, zeroed in on the affidavit Curtis filed in 2004, alleging he had written a vote-rigging computer program for Rep. Feeney in 2000. It’s the document that made Curtis’s career in election denial. Unfortunately Long’s line of questioning got bogged down because because Curtis couldn’t recall the exact dates of his employment .
“You signed an affidavit, 12-6 of 2004, documenting your employment with Yang Enterprises, Inc. and the Florida Department of Transportation. What were your exact dates? Because I didn’t see that on your application.”
Long appeared to be on the verge of asking Curtis if he’d ever been dismissed or discharged from a position, but got diverted when Curtis couldn’t recall specific dates.
“If selected as Shasta County’s ROV, how would you handle working with California election laws as they relate to machine tabulation, no hand counting, vote by mail, no voter ID requirements?” Long asked.
“Well, I would follow those. But you have to remember that there’s a lot of other things at play right now. There’s the Huntington Beach cases that are going on, which could change things, good or bad. There’s also an executive order that is out there, which changes all of that, changes all the ID requirements and everything else.”
In fact, Trump’s executive order on voting has been paused by a federal judge and already faces numerous lawsuits.
Crye Covers for Curtis
District 1 Supervisor and Board Chair Kevin Crye.
It was left up to Crye to address Curtis’s failure to report he’d been terminated by FDOT in 2022 on his job application. Claiming he was asking for a constituent, Crye asked, “On your application, you had stated that you had never been fired or terminated from a job. And then, I don’t know, this constituent had said something about you were fired in, I believe it was 2000, 2000, was it two, 2001?”
“Well, I viewed it as fired, but that wasn’t the legally correct definition,” Curtis claimed. “If it was, I would have made $2 million off with the other person that worked for the department that did get fired, because then it would have been unlawful termination. But for me, I was a contractor.”
In fact, Curtis’s supervisor ultimately won $750,000 from her whistleblower lawsuit against FDOT. Curtis told the Orlando Weekly that he was fired but didn’t meet the deadline for filing his own whistleblower lawsuit.
Now Curtis claims, for the first time, that FDOT simply failed to renew his contract.
“So you were 1099?” Crye asked, referring to the IRS tax form used by consultants to report income.
“1099,” Curtis agreed.
“You can’t fire 1099?” Crye said.
“Can’t fire 1099, but you can get rid of their contract.”
“Correct,” Crye said, accepting Curtis’s readymade excuse for lying on his job application.
Crye and Curtis are playing semantics, and frankly seemed rehearsed. The question asks whether the job applicant has been dismissed or discharged from a previous position. Curtis was dismissed from FDOT in 2002 and still admits he felt like he had been fired back then. His firing was highly publicized in numerous newspapers and blogs, so he had to suspect it would be easily discoverable by Shasta County. Morally and ethically, he was obligated to report this dismissal to his future employers. He failed to do so, despite swearing he was telling the complete truth about his work history.
This sort of behavior by a job applicant would get you booted from any legitimate business in Shasta County, including Harmon’s two outlifts, Mountain Gate Quarry and Stimpel-Wiebelhaus Associates. Harmon asked Curtis how he’d treat elections staff should he be selected.
“Well, first, I will find out what they know,” he said. “So I’ll just have them, you know, I’ll have them run elections. So I’ll find out what they know. Then I’ll go through it and find out what’s wrong. And it may be nothing wrong, but, you know, probably will be. And then I’ll go through it and find out what it is.”
“And then I’ll know what to teach them directly. We’ll have to handle each individual on an individual level to find out what their knowledge is. And, you know, to work them up to it, you know, we’ll have to convince them that, you know, you can’t hide behind an office anymore because everything is going to be transparent.”
Everything but Curtis’s work history.
Asked if could cite any elections law case he’d won, Curtis failed to come up with a coherent answer.
“No, we didn’t win any,” Curtis said. “Actually, we did. It didn’t amount to anything, though. But it was an election down in … where was that? I think it was … I don’t know. It’s been a while, so I don’t know exactly where he was. But, you know, they messed up the way they were doing the order of the candidates.”
The Most Qualified Candidate Holds Her Own
Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut.
Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut, the 16-year veteran of the ROV, broke out of the gate strongly, pointing out she’s the only applicant who’s actually helped develop a hand-count voting system.
“In 2023, I was a key force in ensuring the manual tally plan was finalized and submitted and in place,” Francesca said. “In 2022, I implemented an observer program and created a program to educate and certify observers on the process, which my County Clerk decided after my first attempt at that to stop that program. However, it was taken over by other counties and it’s now a nationwide program throughout many counties in the United States.”
Practiced from fielding questions from the election deniers that have harassed the ROV for the past five years, Francescut explained the importance of the voter file, the “foundational piece of election administration.” She has two and a half staff dedicated to updating the Shasta County voter file daily. Because of state law, Shasta County voters who move away have to notify the elections office that they’ve moved before they can be removed from Shasta County’s voter file. That’s why residents will occasionally get ballots mailed to a person who know longer lives at that address.
“I can’t do anything with that until the voter either sends us something and says, hey, I re-registered to vote in that new state or the person that lived there returns that ballot back to us and then we can make it inactive,” Francescut. “There’s many people that talk to the Board of Supervisors and say, hey, this happened and I’m getting three or four ballots. I will look up and find that voter and research that if I have the information.”
Francescut also addressed the current state of observation cameras in the elections office.
“So sometimes the close-up view isn’t directly over the shoulders of the workers or touching the ballots because only elections officials are allowed to really look and view at the ballots, according to state law,” Francescut said. “But it gives them access to screens and monitors where they can see the close-up of the work that we are doing and have a visual of it that’s a little bit closer without impeding on the process of our staff. So since 2021, we’ve implemented numerous cameras where staff can have a close-up view. We’ve added windows to every single door in our office.”
Harmon asked Francescut the question that was on many people’s minds. If she’s not selected to be the next ROV, will she run for the position in 2026?
“My goal is to become the next county clerk and register of voters,” she said. “I’m committed to serving in this county and providing the best service possible. I have many people supporting me, not just people in this room, but many people have reached out to me to provide their support.”
“And I do have the intention to run for office, whether or not you appoint me or not, it’s going to be there,” Francescut continued. “That’s why I stuck around when I didn’t get appointed last time. I want to ensure my staff feel respected and I’m there for them because they are a key reason of why our elections are successful. All the staff below me, I have a great team below me and I’m protective of them.”
“So yeah, I intend to run and I will stick around until I either don’t win an election or other consequences may happen,” she finished.
Notorious for his vindictiveness, Chair Crye made it clear he wasn’t voting for Francescut from his opening question. After getting her to agree that working with the board is important, Crye slammed Francescut for opposing the board’s vote to move to hand counting in 2023.
“Okay, 100 percent important,” Crye said. “So walk me through when you testified on April 19th in 2023 at the state Legislature advocating for AB 969 when the board voted to move to a hand count and you 100 percent worked against it. How is that collaborating with the board?”
AB 969 was a direct response to Shasta County’s rogue attempt to switch to hand counting local elections. It was passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibiting hand counting in the state for all but the smallest jurisdictions.
“I am committed to listening to your concerns and taking action to arrive at solutions together,” Francescut read from a prepared statement. “Part of making an effective working relationship means that you also listen to me too or when I bring stuff to the board and say, hey, this process isn’t going to work. I have a great information and knowledge about the day-to-day impacts of decisions that need to happen and need to be made to make elections run effectively and smoothly.”
Francescut said she traveled to Sacramento at former ROV Cathy Darling Allen’s request “to make sure policy makers account for the real impacts on elections office.
“Whether or not I agree with the policy or not doesn’t matter, but I want you to make sure you understand what the real impacts are when decisions are made,” she said.
“And unpack that for me when you say it doesn’t matter,” Crye sniped. “I think it matters a lot!”
“Okay, so my job as an election administrator is to follow the law,” she said. “And sometimes I don’t always get to agree with that law. And my knowledge of how that law will impact the situation, for example, when we’re being told that checking proof of citizenship may become a federal law and that it’s going to take away our online voter registration.”
Again, the provision requiring proof of citizenship for online voting registration in Trump’s voter bill has been placed on hold by a federal judge.
“Okay, so what are the real impacts that that’s going to happen to our office is I’m going to have to train staff on how to check for citizenship,” Francescut said. “They’re going to have to know every single birth certificate in the United States. They’re going to have to know what a real passport looks like because we can’t use the California Real ID to verify proof of citizenship because people that are not citizens get a Real ID.”
That’s the real goal of election deniers like Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon: denying as many people as possible access to voting. Demonstrating that he too has seen “2000 Mules,” Crye next attempted to cajole Francescut into agreeing on the spot to reduce the number of drop boxes in Shasta County, currently at 13 boxes, to just 4, the minimum allowable by the state.
“We have to have four, which I agree with because it’s state law,” Crye said. “OK, would you eliminate nine drop boxes if appointed?”
“As the county clerk and registrar voters, working with the Board of Supervisors, my role will be to be a driving force in implementing procedures and policy that your team agrees with,” Francescut said.
“Is that a yes or a no? Because I know you’re reading that,” Crye sniped again.
“Yeah, I am reading it because I wrote this down because I wanted to make sure … “ she began.
“Just give me a yes or no!” Crye interrupted.
“Yeah, I would be willing to work with you to …
“Be willing to work with me or cut nine boxes out and get us down to four?” Crye badgered.
“Before we have this full conversation and I say yes, I’m going to cut nine boxes out, I need to know what is a higher priority for you,” Francescut said, never losing her composure despite Crye’s rude onslaught. “I want to know whether counting ballots faster and getting the count done 10 days post-election is a higher priority for you or cutting drop boxes because, I can’t do both.
“The reason why we have so many drop boxes because we have 3,800 square miles in Shasta County and we have a rural population,” she continued. “So if you want to reduce the number of drop boxes, I will work with you to reduce the number of drop boxes. But I also want you to understand the impact that that’s going to have by reducing the access to the voters that are rural.”
As promised, Francescut officially announced her intention to run for Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters in the June 2026 shortly after Tuesday’s meeting ended.
Stay tuned Shasta Part 2: County Supervisors Kevin Crye, Corkey Harmon and Chris Kelstrom Choose Florida Fabulist Clint Curtis for Next County ROV.
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