Election denier Tina Peters to be hired as elections consultant in conservative California county

Shasta county, hotbed of US election denialism movement, set to appoint ex-Colorado clerk who served prison term

A northern California county that has become a hotbed of activism for those who sow doubts about the reliability of voting machines plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections.

Clint Curtis , the top election official in Shasta county, told the Guardian he plans to hire Peters as a consultant to replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who has been on medical leave. He said Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system and did not directly respond when asked what her responsibilities would be. Plans to hire Peters, who is still on parole and must receive permission to travel outside of Colorado, were first reported by Action News Now .

Shasta county, a conservative region home to 182,000 people, has emerged as a center of the US election denialism movement in recent years. In 2023 , the county’s governing body unsuccessfully sought to remake the voting process by cutting ties with the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems and implementing a hand-count system that experts warned would be costly and far less accurate. The MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the leading promoters of falsehoods about election fraud in the US, said he would support the county’s effort. The state ultimately blocked Shasta’s plans. In addition, several candidates who lost their race for local office have embraced baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud and sued to overturn results.

Last year, the Shasta county board of supervisors appointed Curtis, a Florida-based attorney who had never before overseen an elections office, to serve as the county clerk and registrar of voters. Curtis, who opposes the use of voting machines and has long argued US elections are being manipulated, vowed to overhaul the elections and set an example for the rest of the US.

But his tenure has been controversial. Earlier this year investigative reports conducted by the county and an outside body concluded that he had created a hostile work environment and made violent threats against workers. Curtis has denied those claims. Last week, the same board that appointed Curtis censured him, and denounced what it described as his “ongoing and flagrant violations” of county personnel rules, pointing to policies preventing elected officials from “making unfounded allegations that have not been investigated”.

Curtis accused staff of “sabotaging elections” and said he planned to sue the county, telling the Guardian: “Everything the old staff accused me of is a lie, and we will be able to prove it in court.”

Peters, the former top election official in Mesa county, Colorado, was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors in 2024 after she allowed an activist affiliated with Lindell to impersonate a county employee and attend an upgrade of the county’s Dominion voting software. The Gateway Pundit, the far-right news website, subsequently published screenshots of sensitive county information after that breach.