The Shasta County Board is Still Discussing a Nearly Three-Year-Old Elections Grant. Here’s What Happened.

In December 2022, the Shasta County Elections Office received good news: a national funding organization known as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) had offered a $1.5 million grant to Shasta County. Conditions for using the grant required that it support election administration and that it not be used to replace normal budgeted expenses. 

The source of the funding was controversial. CTCL has come under fire because much of the money distributed before the 2020 election came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While concerns have been raised about whether CTCL funds might have been used to  influence the 2020 election, the six-member Federal Election Commission, which includes an equal mix of Republicans and Democrats, has unanimously concluded that no evidence of such interference exists.

Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters (ROV) Cathy Darling Allen knew about the controversy related to CTCL when she brought forward a proposal to accept the grant funds a few months later, in February 2023. In a presentation to the Board, Darling Allen said she thought if the Board wished to accept the funds it would be extremely important to use them only for a purchase that could not possibly be connected to partisan purposes.

She suggested that the Board direct the funds to be used to purchase a building so that vote-counting processes could be moved out of the current tight, difficult-to-secure downtown elections facility, saving the county $15,000 a month in rent and improving staff security and both voter and observer experience.

The Board debated. Supervisors Patrick Jones and Chris Kelstrom wanted to refuse the funds altogether because they disapproved of their source, the CTCL. But Supervisor Kevin Crye had another idea: he suggested that the funds could be accepted, but only if the grant agreement was changed to ensure the funds could only be used for a building, nothing else. 

The County’s attorney and acting CEO at the time, both of whom have since resigned, pointed out that the grant funds could already only be used for whatever the Board approved them for. Rather than sending the grant agreement back to CTCL, Counsel Counsel suggested, the Board could simply specify a budget for the funds that required them to be used only for a building.

But Crye said he wanted the grant agreement to go back to the funding organization anyway. He, Kelstrom, Jones and Supervisor Tim Garman voted to approve sending the grant agreement back to CTCL, with the language of the grant updated to include the specific wording that funds could only be spent on a building. 

The grant funds decision was made amidst a flurry of other changes to local elections processes. In January, the Board had voted to cancel the County’s contract with Dominion Voting Machine Systems. Darling Allen navigated that change, returning voting machines early after paying a financial penalty and researching which of the two other California-certified voting machine systems she would suggest to the Board for approval. 

In April the Board approved the purchase of Hart Intercivic machines to satisfy federal legal requirements, but only after a decision in March that Shasta County’s votes would be hand-counted. In response, Darling Allen began training her staff on Hart machine use while also designing a hand-counting process intended to comply with state law at the time. She worked up a budget for the process, which would be much more staff-intensive than current machine-counting processes and presented that budget to the Board, which voted to hire more staff. 

The change in vote-counting procedure brought up questions about what size building the Elections Office might need. Hand counting would require much more space both for staff and observers, raising the cost of a building potentially above the $1.5 million granted by CTCL.

Then in September 2023, a new state law, AB 969, made hand counting across Shasta County illegal. The state’s decision required Darling Allen to pivot again, this time returning to the machine-counting procedure, but with a brand new system never used before in Shasta County. 

But the process of the last six months, and the years of election suspicion and scrutiny since 2019, had taken a toll on Darling Allen’s health. In November 2023, as Hart Intercivic voting machines were deployed for the first time during a special election in Shasta County, Darling Allen was hospitalized. 

Her diagnosis, stress-induced cardiac failure, required her to go on medical leave. Assistant Registrar of Voters Joanna Francescut went to the hospital, as she told the Board during a June interview, picked up Darling Allen’s supplies and took over the day-to-day work of the ROV’s Office.

A few months later, in February 2024, Darling Allen, who had been Shasta County’s elected Registrar of Voters for twenty years, announced she would retire in May, citing her ongoing health issues and the need to reduce her stress. By then it had been more than a year since the Board had agreed that CTCL funds could be used, but only for a building.

In April 2024, at Jones’ request, the CTCL grant came back for discussion by the Board. Francescut presented the item. The grant funds were still available through January 2025, Francescut explained, but using them still required a spending plan to be approved by the Board. 

Using the funds for a building, she said, wasn’t going to happen. Elections staff hadn’t found an appropriate building at the right price and weren’t likely to do so in time to use the funds by January 2025. In case the Board wanted to use the funds for a different purpose, she had suggested some alternatives, all designed to be nonpartisan in nature. 

The Board couldn’t agree on what to do next, tossing around ideas for how to spend the money and deferring the issue another week. 

On April 9, the Board finally voted to make a spending plan, approving the grant agreement and voting to spend the money on infrastructure costs, including costs related to implementing the new Hart Intercivic voting machine system, as well as security cameras, digital updates, office furniture and more. The Board specifically voted to exclude spending money on two items suggested by Francescut: voter education outreach mailings and staff stress and resiliency training. Any remaining money, supervisors said, would help subsidize the cost of the Election Office’s share of the County’s administrative building.

Finally, fourteen months after former ROV Darling Allen had first brought forward the CTCL grant for discussion, the County had a plan. But the story wasn’t over. 

In May, Darling Allen retired and the Board chose a new ROV, Tom Toller. Toller, who had no prior election experience, began the work of preparing for the November general election with the help of Francescut, whom he chose to keep on staff. That election occurred last week, November 5. Votes are still being counted and the election is due to be certified on December 3.

Two days after the election, on November 7, as Toller and Francescut navigated ballot ink overspray issues and concerns about observers, supervisors brought up the CTCL grant again — this time because Jones wanted to discuss his concerns that the authority of the Board was somehow circumvented in the process of receiving the CTCL grant funds.

Jones brought up a series of emails between Darling Allen, Francescut and former county staff. A report included in the Board’s agenda packet for November 7, written by CEO David Rickert, indicates that there are nineteen separate emails that relate to the issue of whether the CTCL grant agreement was handled properly. Shasta Scout requested those emails prior to the Board’s meeting but has not yet received them.

CEO Rickert’s summary appears to indicate that after changes were made to the CTCL grant specifics, a County attorney advised elections officials on how to alter the agreement to avoid the need to present it to the Board a second time.

During last week’s Board discussion, Crye said the emails, which again, have not been provided to the public, prove that “staff and County Counsel usurped our authority to do what they wanted.”

“It’s obvious they broke policy,” Crye asserted. The meeting was paused soon after his statement in response to a sit-in by a protestor who told Shasta Scout they think the Board’s conversation was intended to target Assistant ROV Francescut.

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Neither Jones nor Crye provided any evidence to back their claims that supervisors had somehow been circumvented or usurped in the process of deciding whether to accept the funds and what to do with them. It’s still unclear why a series of email communications sent in mid-2023 would matter, given that the Board ultimately decided whether the money would be accepted at all and also specified exactly how the funds would be spent. 

Nevertheless, the Board voted three to two, with Supervisors Mary Rickert and Garman dissenting, to bring the matter back. A discussion of whether attorney-client privilege can be waived in order to release all the CTCL-related emails will be discussed by the Board again this week, on November 14. No additional information has been shared in this week’s staff report for the discussion.

Meanwhile, Shasta County Elections staff continue to process the vote from November 5 amidst scrutiny from local observers, including Supervisor Patrick Jones, who said recently that he believes Shasta County processes for observers, may not comply with state law.

Jones and Crye, along with Kelstrom, led the series of decisions to change Shasta County’s election processes, including dumping the Dominion voting system and trying to hand count votes, County-wide.

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