California Senators Express Concern Over Potential Shasta County Elections Hire

Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, August 21, 2026

• California Senators are expressing grave concern over a plan by Shasta County’s top elections official to hire former Colorado clerk Tina Peters who was convicted in an election interference case in 2024.
• Hayward State Senator Aisha Wahab is the Bay Area’s newest member of Congress after winning a special election for the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell.
• Health Net, one of the largest Medi-Cal insurers, is planning to cancel assisted living benefits for members by the end of this year. The benefit currently covers most of the costs for these care facilities which can run up to seven thousand dollars a month.

Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison, after prosecutors said she granted unauthorized access to voting equipment, in support of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. She was released early in June.

In a letter to California’s Secretary of State Wednesday, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff called for maximum oversight if Peters is hired.

KQED Spoke to Jefferson Public Radio’s Roman Battaglia, who has been covering this. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Who is Tina Peters?

Battaglia: Peters is the former county clerk for Mesa County, Colorado. She was first elected to the position there back in 2018, and she actually faced a lot of controversy throughout her time in office, but she is most famous for her criminal conviction around election interference after the 2020 election. She had allowed an election denial activist access to the county’s voting machines to copy information from them to try and prove that the 2020 elections was stolen from Donald Trump. She was eventually arrested and convicted of seven charges, including four felonies related to that and sentenced to that nine years in prison. But earlier this year, the Colorado governor commuted her sentence and released her on parole because of pressure from the Trump administration. And since her release, she’s become a really big star in the election denial circuit, showing up on all sorts of media shows and events, and she’s met with the president and still believes the 2020 election was stolen and wants to prove it.

Why does Shasta County’s top election official Clint Curtis want to hire Peters?

Battaglia: The two of them share some similar ideals around the election system. So Curtis is this computer programmer and lawyer from Florida who has a really deep distrust of electronic voting machines. He basically has told me that machines can’t be trusted at all. Ideally, he would like to conduct elections completely without any electronics. He didn’t have any experience running elections before this job. After the previous County Clerk stepped down because of health issues, the board appointed Curtis to the position despite his lack of experience, because he wanted to reform the election system there and make it more secure. He’s made some changes, like trying to film all the ballots as they’re being counted, but he still has to follow the state law. Alongside that, there’s been some issues with the elections he’s run. He has faced complaints from election staff. The county supervisors, including some who appointed him, actually censured him this month for making violent threats towards his staff. And he lost his election to fill the seat permanently in the June primary. So he’s actually only got one more election this November before he’s replaced by the former assistant county clerk who has a lot more experience. So he says he’s one to hire Peters because she has experienced elections and cares that they’re fair. He’s claimed that his election staff has been sabotaging his efforts to reform the election system, but really hasn’t shown enough proof. So potentially wants her to help prove that fraud.

Could Peters even accept a formal job offer to work in Shasta County if she wanted to?

Battaglia: As a parolee, she’s really limited from leaving Colorado without permission from her parole officer. And if she wanted to move to California permanently, that would require an application process and approval from California beforehand. There also doesn’t appear to be any policies against hiring felons in the county, including people who are currently incarcerated. She’d have to go through like a criminal background check, but there didn’t seem to be anything that would automatically disqualify her from being hired. In the meantime, I mean, the California senators in their letter had said that they want the Secretary of State to provide maximum oversight if she is hired to ensure she doesn’t have access to these voting systems because that was why she was convicted of these felonies was doing that. So we’ll see what happens. I mean this wouldn’t be the first time that the Secretary of States offices sent observers to watch Shasta County elections.

Wahab defeated BART board director Melissa Hernandez in a contentious special election, becoming the first Afghan American ever elected to Congress.

In a statement, Wahab says her victory “shows the possibility of the American Dream.”

Wahab overcame an avalanche of outside spending, much of it from the pro-Israel group AIPAC. The lobby’s political spending has become a flashpoint in Democrat vs. Democrat races across the country. 

“I believe that AIPAC has been nothing but racist and prejudiced in this effort,” Wahab told KQED on election night. “I support our Jewish constituents and really want to serve everybody — human rights is not a zero-sum game.” 

The win allows Wahab to run as an incumbent in November, when she will again face Hernandez on the ballot for a full two-year term. Hernandez says she’s looking forward to winning that election. Wahab can count on a higher turnout that could allow her to activate younger voters and progressives.

Both Wahab and Hernandez were already running for a full term in the 14th District when Swalwell resigned from the seat in April, in the face of multiple allegations of sexual assault that arose during his campaign for governor. 

The November election will take place with slightly different district lines, under changes approved by California voters last year in Proposition 50. 

Health Net, one of the largest Medi-Cal insurers, is planning to cancel assisted living benefits for members by the end of this year.

The assisted living support is an optional Medi-Cal benefit, meaning plans can opt-into offering it to members and decide annually whether the program will continue. The benefit currently covers most of the costs for care facilities, which can run up to seven thousand dollars a month.

Around 35-hundred low income Californians rely on this benefit to pay for memory and board-and-care facilities. The average nursing home, which offers a higher level of medical care, costs upwards of $10,000 per month, while an assisted living facility costs between $5,000 to $7,000 monthly. 

Families say they’re scrambling to find alternatives for their loved ones.

Matt Johnstone’s dad is one of them, and now he’s facing possible eviction from the North Hollywood facility where he’s lived for a year and a half.

That’s because Johnstone and his family can’t afford to pay six-thousand dollars a month to keep him there.

“As a family we don’t have the resources… and we’re really scared and we are worried and we don t know what to do,” said Johnstone. “And and we don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

Johnstone’s dad has dementia and mobility issues…and needs professional around-the-clock care his family isn’t equipped to give him at home.

Health Net says affected members will be transitioned to other care options like nursing homes if they can’t return home, but Johnstone and other families say they haven’t gotten any outreach from Health Net about what comes next.