California's two U.S. senators are pressing Secretary of State Shirley Weber to intervene before Shasta County's registrar of voters can install Tina Peters — the Colorado clerk convicted of breaching her own election system — in a county elections job weeks before the November vote.

The plan by Shasta County Registrar Clint Curtis to bring on Peters next month has drawn a rare direct warning from Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, who told Weber the move risks handing a convicted election denier access to ballots and voting systems. But the letter lands on a hire that faces steep obstacles on its own: Peters is a Colorado parolee barred from leaving the state without approval, and Curtis is a lame-duck official who lost his primary and was censured by his own board this month.

California's senators rarely weigh in on a single county's personnel decision. This week they did.

In their Aug. 19 letter (external source, opens in a new tab) to Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Padilla and Schiff said they had "grave concern" over Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis's plan to hire Peters ahead of the November election. They asked Weber for "the maximum oversight possible" so Peters cannot improperly reach ballots, voting systems or the private data of the county's more than 100,000 registered voters.

Peters is not an ordinary job candidate. As the elected clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, she let an election-denial activist copy data from the county's voting machines in a bid to prove the 2020 election was stolen. The senators' letter says that scheme led to her conviction on seven counts, four of them felonies; she drew a nine-year sentence, and the copied voting-system software eventually surfaced online, CyberScoop reported (external source, opens in a new tab). Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentence this year, saying the Trump administration had pressed him to act, and she was released in June. Since then she has become a fixture on the election-denial circuit.

19 letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Padilla and Schiff said they had "grave concern" over Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis's plan to hire Peters ahead of the November election.

The senators' sharpest objection is about who Curtis says the hire would serve. According to their letter, Curtis wants Peters to help the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security "test the ballots" — though, the senators counter, neither agency has any role in running elections. Padilla and Schiff argue the arrangement could violate state and federal law, and warned that county "taxpayers could be burdened with unwelcomed and potentially hefty expenses" if Peters is again placed where she could break election law.

Curtis's own standing complicates the picture. He is a computer programmer and lawyer from Florida who distrusts electronic voting machines and had no experience running elections before this job, Jefferson Public Radio's Roman Battaglia told KQED (external source, opens in a new tab); the county board appointed him after the previous clerk stepped down, and he has clashed repeatedly with staff. This month the board of supervisors formally censured Curtis, after investigations by the county and an outside firm concluded he had verbally abused subordinates and at times threatened them with violence, CyberScoop reported (external source, opens in a new tab). At an Aug. 11 meeting, Supervisor Matt Plummer cited a case file running past 700 pages and more than a half-dozen eyewitnesses. Plummer stressed the censure was "not about election integrity" and that Curtis keeps his authority to run the county's elections. Curtis lost the June primary and is set to be replaced in November by a former assistant clerk with more experience. Battaglia told KQED that Curtis has blamed his staff for sabotaging his reforms without offering proof.

Then there is the question of whether Peters could take the job at all. A Colorado Department of Corrections spokesperson told CyberScoop that Peters must live in Colorado and hold a job or enroll full-time in school as conditions of parole, and that no interstate transfer request has been filed. Any move to California would need sign-off from both states under the interstate parole-transfer rules governing where a parolee may live. Battaglia told KQED (external source, opens in a new tab) that Shasta County appears to have no policy barring the hiring of felons and no automatic disqualifier for Peters.

The backdrop is a county that has become a national laboratory for election distrust. Curtis's predecessor, Cathy Darling Allen, stepped down in 2024 after more than two decades running Shasta County elections, telling CyberScoop that relentless harassment from residents steeped in fraud conspiracy theories had driven her out. The county earlier tried to hand-count its ballots until state law forced a reversal. Weber's office had not announced a response to the senators' letter as of Friday.