A California election worker was arrested after being caught breaking into a locked ballot container and making unauthorized copies of election records.
Investigators say the same office is suspected of illegally mailing extra ballots to voters before Election Day.
The thing you’re told never happens just happened. Yet again.
The Democrat-run California Secretary of State’s office has opened a formal investigation into what they described as “discrepancies” discovered during a post-election reconciliation after the state’s controversial June 2 primary.
According to reports, election workers conducting an audit of early voting records found evidence that numerous additional ballots seem to have been distributed to voters before Election Day by an election worker.
That report set off a second investigation, which exposed the breach into the locked ballot container.
While workers were in the process of conducting their internal audit, the documents and election materials being investigated were secured in a locked cabinet inside California’s Shasta County Elections Department building. According to the report, a second employee broke into the locked cabinet, removed the documents, made photocopies of the material that had been gathered, and gave it to Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis. Curtis then had the copied materials moved to a separate office.
County officials said no original ballots physically left the building. But the copies made during the breach likely contained highly sensitive voter information, including names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, voter signatures, and their reasons for requesting replacement ballots.
“During a reconciliation of the early vote, which is a standard process following an election, discrepancies were found, suggesting that a small number of additional ballots may have been handed out to voters prior to Election Day by one employee,” county officials said in a public statement. “At no time did original ballots or election materials leave the Elections Department.”
The California Secretary of State’s office said they are withholding a public summary on the incident to protect the privacy of those involved. Because election investigations fall under the Democrat-run Secretary of State’s authority, Shasta County said it will not pursue an additional investigation.
An election integrity analyst inside the department, Laura Hobbs, has since filed a whistleblower complaint with county supervisors, claiming she discovered the discrepancies and was subsequently harassed and threatened with arrest for raising alarms.
Hobbs, who was hired in early 2026 and was a key advocate for recent bills requiring voter ID and hand-counting of ballots that passed on June 2, signed sworn declarations under penalty of perjury detailing her account.
“At a time when voters across Shasta County and California are demanding greater transparency and security in elections,” she wrote to supervisors, “what I witnessed represents a direct threat to that goal.”
Republicans across the country, including President Donald Trump, have spent the past week publicly questioning the integrity of California’s elections following the suspicious ballot counting in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, where Republican candidate Spencer Pratt’s lead evaporated over days of continued mail-in ballot tabulation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said California’s election system “stinks to high heaven.” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters this week disclosed that hundreds of noncitizens had been found on voter rolls in New Jersey through a process nearly identical to California’s automatic DMV registration.
Despite this, the Shasta County election results is set to be certified June 26.