Survey: Should Shasta County film the ballot-counting process?

6.24.25 11:35 am: We have updated the article to include the date the survey will close.

Clint Curtis, Shasta County’s newly appointed chief elections official, came to the position with no direct management experience in elections and no local roots. He’s licensed as an attorney in New York and says he’s taken cases in election law but only won one of them. Four days into his appointed tenure, Curtis announced his campaign for the June 2026 election to permanently fill the Registrar of Voters (ROV) office. He has since fired a veteran elections staffer who’s his opponent in that race.

During his interview for the role in Shasta, Curtis pitched his big idea for elections: using cameras to film ballot processing. Curtis hasn’t offered many details yet, claiming broadly that he’ll “film everything” that happens during vote counting, beginning after ballots are pulled from their envelopes.

There are complexities. The Secretary of State’s Office provided a preliminary response to Shasta Scout‘s questions about Curtis’ planned approach, indicating that there are a number of legal concerns with the idea, all of which center around the privacy of ballots.

“While ballots can be shown separate from envelopes,” Secretary of State (SoS) spokesperson Jim Patrick wrote, “there needs to be no identifying information on the ballots. Sometimes people initial their ballots, for instance, so a married couple can tell ballots apart. Showing those initials would be a problem. And showing signatures would be a problem.”

Ultimately, SoS spokesperson Patrick emphasized, “transparency must be balanced with protecting voter identities and preventing any possible voter intimidation.”

We’re launching this survey to help understand whether Curtis’ idea to “film everything” during ballot processing increases or decreases your sense of security in the election process. We hope you’ll take this anonymous survey and pass it along to your friends and social networks, especially people in your life that you don’t always agree with politically. The results will be shared publicly and help inform reporting and community discourse.

The survey will close at 5 pm on July 5, 2025.

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