Shasta is the only California county still struggling to finish counting precinct ballots
Delays in the vote count started shortly after the polls closed. Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis blamed the first of extended delays in ballot tabulation on short staffing. A mistake in how votes were tagged in the computer system over recent weeks was the cause of the second prolonged delay.
Update Nov. 4, 2026 8:25 a.m.: Election staff released final results from the precincts shortly before 8 a.m. this morning. They’ll resume counting additional ballots around 2 p.m. today. Find the latest results here.
Across California, dozens of counties have already finished counting their precinct votes, or those cast at the ballots in person. As of the early morning of Nov. 4, only one county remains to finish that count: Shasta.
By law, election staffers are required to continue counting precinct ballots at the elections office until all votes cast in person on Election Day are counted. That’s when they can take a break, regroup and decide when to begin counting ballots cast by mail or placed in the county’s drop boxes on Election Day.
About two-thirds of precinct votes had been counted by early this morning, putting a time estimate for completion of the count of Election Day votes at around 8 a.m.
Delays in ballot tabulation began around 8:15 p.m. last night when the polls closed at the Market Street elections office with no Shasta County registrar on site. That’s when staff first began to hear reports from the press that there was no website landing page where election results could be released for the public to view.
As staff scrambled to find a fix for the landing site where election results would load, Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis arrived from where he had been helping with ballot drop box pickups in town. For the next hour, he struggled to tabulate votes at the computer’s main frame before seeming to realize that preliminary steps had not yet been taken to prepare for vote counts to be released.
Around 9:15 p.m., about an hour after the first batch of pre-Election Day votes have usually been released, Curtis acknowledged that his team had failed to take critical first steps to prepare to release results, including backing up the results that had been collected in the system over the last weeks of ballot processing. He said the mistake had been caused by a staffing shortfall that left the computer unmanned, although in the days leading up to the election he had repeatedly reassured Shasta Scout that there was no staffing shortage.
Over the next hour, Curtis worked with a representative of Hart InterCivic, the voting machine company that produces Shasta’s voting system, to back up the system and take other preliminary steps needed to release initial votes counts. Those counts came out at around 10 p.m.
With pre-Election Day votes processed, observers who filled the elections office expected precinct votes to begin being counted and released quickly, but another prolonged delay followed. Shasta elections staffer Anna Rodriguez eventually explained to the press that the newest delay had been caused by a mistake made in the computer system during ballot processing over recent weeks, when at least one set of votes was inaccurately tagged as precinct votes. The result of that mistake could be seen on early election results, which inaccurately showed results as coming partially from the precincts even though no precinct votes had been processed.
The mistake, she said, necessitated running the computer system back to before when the mistake was made, resaving all results from that point in the hard drive and then running the rest of the results tabulated so far through the computer’s internal system a second time for a correctly labeled count. Doing so took still more hours.
At 12:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, election staffers finally started processing ballots cast at the polls on Election Day. They’re still processing precinct ballots as of 7 a.m. and are expected to finish precinct votes around 8 a.m.
This is a developing story.
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Elections official Clint Curtis says inadequate staffing is what caused him to fall several hours behind. He’s predicting that he’ll have preliminary results around 10:30 p.m.
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Thank you, Shasta Scout, for the excellent election coverage.
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Of course, nationally, the election was an earthquake. The people spoke, and the court-adjudicated rapist and what’s left of his congressional MAGA are now sitting lame ducks. I hope the new supervisors will reach out to our new congressperson, J. Hoffman, and ask for help reversing the MAGA Republican HR 1 damage that Shasta County and the rest of the nation will have to deal with.
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Locally, what a low turnout! Man, it looks like a lot of MAGA, after realizing the United States of America is tired of their lies and foolishness, just stayed home; and that’s good news for Shasta County!
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Poor Corky will be lost, floundering around, having lost his puppet masters, Crye and Kelstrom. Maybe he should just resign so we can have a special election?
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And what can we say about Clint… Good-bye, thanks for the mess, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Clint Curtis, ROV, has displayed pure incompetence! I don’t just blame Clint Curtis. Who hired him? The Shasta County Board, specifically Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom. More incompetence! My opinion!
Did anyone actually think this election wouldn’t be undermined and thrown under the bus by our election fraud king who has pretty much set himself up for running a fraudulent election by anyone with a close vote. Well at least he can’t put this on his resume if he tries to get another job. This has even wiped him out as a proponent of election fraud.
Very exciting to see Texas gerrymandering failed but ours won. Maybe a learning lesson for future republicans attempts. We only did it because they did.
At least it seems Kelstrom didn’t get any more votes than in the primary resulting in more of a blow out than Crye, I think. Die hards are die hards I guess.
How difficult is it going to be for Joanna to clean house? I’m hoping these incompetent MAGA buffoons are at-will employees and can be terminated without cause. It seems like Curtis fired Joanna without having to justify it.
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Turnabout is fair play. Adios, losers.
KCRA ran a poll. Do you trust your vote to be counted correctly? NO, Curtis spent too much time thinking about his next law suit to bring.
We really need to take back Shasta from the Hobbs weirdos.
This is not only an embarrassment to Shasta County, but also to me. We are the last county in California to present some election facts. I was a teacher in Shasta County, I helped raise our kids in the schools in Shasta County. I have voted in every election in Shasta County. My family loves living in Redding and Shasta County. My relatives all over the U.S. come to our home during Thanksgiving, expensive flights for some, to enjoy the cool fall weather, and be thankful; however, they ask why does Shasta County have so much trouble with county budgets and community divisions?
I don’t think it is just voting technology that needs better engineering.
We’re paying him how much to be a complete idiot?
Curtis going out like Wile E. Coyote. This is my surprised face.
Selah
This level of dysfunction is exactly what Curtis was hired to create. It didn’t work.
Everyone and everything is too blame except the man in charge and the people who put him there? We’re getting exactly what we all knew was going to happen… another calamity.
Considering the morons put in office by out local morons…shocked!
“At 12:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, election staffers finally started processing ballots cast at the polls on Election Day. They’re still processing precinct ballots as of 7 a.m. and are expected to finish precinct votes around 8 a.m. ”
SO WHAT—BFD–What did it hurt?–NAFT
I really hope the supervisors understand what a terrible error it was to hire a man with no experience to do this job.
Corkie: not in touch with anything going on so he won’t take any “blame”.
Kevin: too many other things to deal with so he won’t take any “blame”.
Chris: will be licking his wounds so he won’t take any “blame”.
No experience, but a plentitude of self assurance. A real “confidence man”, if you will.