“She may continue making claims about elections that I believe are false,” Governor Jared Polis wrote in a May Substack post defending his decision to commute Tina Peters’s sentence. “She may continue promoting ideas that I strongly disagree with. I hope she doesn’t. But in America, people are not sent to prison for expressing political views, however misguided those views may be.”
Clint Curtis says he will hire Tina Peters as assistant registrar
Clint Curtis, Shasta County’s registrar for voters, told local news outlets he plans to hire Tina Peters next month as an assistant registrar, according to text exchanges cited by those outlets. CyberScoop has reached out to Shasta County’s elections office for comment. The story framed the move as “a marriage between a conspiracy-minded election official from another state and an equally distrusting electorate,” noting that Donald Trump won Shasta County by roughly two-thirds of voters in each presidential election since 2016 and that many local residents have adopted concerns about election fraud, voting machine hacks, and noncitizen voting.
The local political climate has previously driven election administrators from the job: Cathy Darling Allen, Shasta County’s former registrar of voters, told CyberScoop in 2024 that she retired after decades of administering elections due to persistent attacks and harassment from voters who embraced baseless election-fraud conspiracy theories.
Tina Peters’s convictions, sentence, and commutation
Tina Peters, a former Mesa County, Colo. election official, had been serving a nine-year sentence for seven felonies, the source reports, including identity theft, breaking into an election office, disabling surveillance cameras, and stealing voting system software. Prosecutors, Colorado’s state clemency advisory board, and Mesa County officials defended the sentence and described Peters as “entirely unrepentant” for her crimes.
Election experts called Peters’s theft of voting system software “one of the most serious breaches of election systems in history.” Peters shared the stolen code with conservative activists, and the code eventually surfaced online. Governor Polis commuted Peters’s sentence earlier this year, citing pressure from the Trump administration and arguing that her punishment violated her First Amendment rights; Polis defended the decision in the May Substack post quoted above. CyberScoop has reached out to Polis for comment.
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End the scrambleShasta County investigations, a public censure, and allegations against Curtis
The Shasta County board of supervisors formally censured Curtis earlier this month after investigations by the county and outside consultant The Oppenheimer Group found he had been verbally abusive or physically threatening toward staff. At an Aug. 11 public meeting, Supervisor Matt Plummer cited more than 700 pages of evidence and “more than half a dozen eyewitnesses.”
The investigations included allegations that Curtis at times threatened to “punch,” “slap in the face,” “kill” or “execute” his subordinates, and a separate claim that he once threatened to remove a door where an employee was allegedly hiding and have the person pulled out “by their hair.” Plummer prefaced his remarks by saying the board’s action was “not about election integrity” and noting that Curtis “retains all of his authority to carry out budgeted election administration for the county.” He added: “This is about determining when a department head allegedly and through two investigations, has substantiated allegations of violating personnel codes, the codes that guide how we as a county intend to interact with our employees, what do we do about it?”
Senators Padilla and Schiff urge the California secretary of state to provide oversight
U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to express their “grave concern” about the possibility Peters would have access to state election systems. “If Shasta County puts Ms. Peters in a position to again violate election laws following her convictions, county taxpayers could be burdened with unwelcomed and potentially hefty expenses,” Padilla and Schiff wrote. They requested that the secretary of state “provide the maximum oversight possible to ensure that Ms. Peters does not improperly access ballots, voting systems, or sensitive information that could impact the rights and privacy of the over 100,000 registered voters in Shasta County in violation of…state or federal election law.”
What this means for the California secretary of state, Shasta County voters, and election security experts
- California Secretary of State Shirley Weber: Padilla and Schiff’s letter asks for “maximum oversight” to prevent improper access to ballots, voting systems, or sensitive voter information; the office has been placed on formal notice by two senators.
- Shasta County voters: More than 100,000 registered voters in the county were named in the senators’ letter as potentially affected if Peters were given access to ballots, voting systems, or sensitive information, a concern intensified by local political distrust and previous harassment of election officials.
- Election security experts and local officials: Experts have described Peters’s prior actions as among the most serious breaches of election systems; prosecutors and local officials who handled her case portrayed her as unrepentant, while the governor cited First Amendment concerns in commuting her sentence.
Curtis says he plans to hire Peters next month; the Shasta County board has censured Curtis while leaving him authority to run “budgeted election administration”; senators have asked the secretary of state for maximum oversight; and CyberScoop has sought comment from both the county elections office and Governor Polis. Whether Peters will be placed in a role that permits access to ballots, voting systems, or sensitive voter data remains the central question left by the actions and warnings documented so far.
