As Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis stubbornly resists his detractors, he doesn’t seem to have very many supporters in his corner at the county level. Two unions representing elections office employees have both voted “no confidence” in Curtis’s ability to effectively perform his job. Last week, it was four workers represented by the Teamsters and this week it was a dozen employees represented by UPEC. When confronted with the discord among his staff Curtis flatly says that he simply doesn’t care. He characterizes the veteran employees who were there before he was appointed as a “mean girls club”, and says they refuse to cooperate with him. The county has released a statement that disavows and denounces Curtis’s violations of personnel rules, saying he has shown a complete disregard for employees’ rights. The unions plan to ask the Board of Supervisors to request his resignation, but there’s little else they can do. Only the California Secretary of State has the power to take over elections and remove him from his position before Joanna Francescut starts her term at the beginning of the year. In the meantime, there’s a very important midterm election in November.
-Steve Gibson