'People are worried': California county voters fearful after MAGA extremists' takeover

Residents of a California county are growing increasingly concerned as the election draws near — and a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist has been left to run voting administration, according to a report.

Shasta County, a community in the far north of California that includes the city of Redding, has been inundated with extremists and conspiracy theorists vying for local control of the government for years. Their ability to actually govern is about to be put to the test in a big way, reported the Guardian.

For years, the elections office in Shasta County had been run by Cathy Darling Allen, the only Democrat in county office. But since 2020, despite having majority support from the county, she has been stalked and harassed by Trump supporters who believed the election was stolen, according to the report.

Some accused her of witchcraft in public meetings, tailed her to her car and bugged her office, the Guardian wrote. She resigned this year following a medical diagnosis of heart failure.

The obvious candidate to replace Darling Allen as election registrar ought to have been Joanna Francescut, noted the report. The assistant elections clerk in the county, Francescut "had worked in elections for more than 16 years, oversaw the office of the county clerk and registrar of voters for months after her boss went on leave, and was endorsed by elections officials and prominent area Republicans alike."

But the far-right county supervisor board "selected Tom Toller, a former prosecutor who had never worked in elections and vowed to change the office culture, improve public confidence, and 'clean up' voter rolls."

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Even conservatives in the county are raising alarms that this could lead to disruptions within the voting process. Robert Sid, a supporter of Francescut, said, “People are worried about it. If there was any hint of scandal [at the elections office], I’d be the first one down there. But there’s never been anything.”

This is the latest in a long string of far-right takeovers in Shasta County.

In 2022, Reverge Anselmo, a Connecticut film industry millionaire frustrated by Shasta County approving developments on a winery he owned there, bankrolled the successful recall of a moderate Republican county supervisor, tipping the majority of the county board toward extremists tied to local militias.

This new board proceeded to hire unqualified radicals to a number of key offices, the Guardian reported. In 2023, to run the local mosquito control district, they selected Jon Knight, a man present at the January 6 Capitol insurrection who has proclaimed that Japanese scientists bankrolled by Microsoft founder Bill Gates engineered mosquitoes into "flying syringes that will mass-vaccinate the populations."

Some voters in Shasta County, fed up with the chaos, have started to fight back. Earlier this year, voters ousted Supervisor Patrick Jones, a local gun store owner who has tried to abolish Dominion Voting Systems equipment based on 2020 election conspiracy theories.