A northern California county that has become a hotbed of activism for those who sow doubts about the reliability of voting machines plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections.

Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta county, told the Guardian he plans to hire Peters as a consultant to replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who has been on medical leave. He said Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system and did not directly respond when asked what her responsibilities would be. Plans to hire Peters, who is still on parole and must receive permission to travel outside of Colorado, were first reported by Action News Now.

Shasta county, a conservative region home to 182,000 people, has emerged as a center of the US election denialism movement in recent years. In 2023, the county’s governing body unsuccessfully sought to remake the voting process by cutting ties with the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems and implementing a hand-count system that experts warned would be costly and far less accurate. The MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the leading promoters of falsehoods about election fraud in the US, said he would support the county’s effort. The state ultimately blocked Shasta’s plans. In addition, several candidates who lost their race for local office have embraced baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud and sued to overturn results.

Last year, the Shasta county board of supervisors appointed Curtis, a Florida-based attorney who had never before overseen an elections office, to serve as the county clerk and registrar of voters. Curtis, who opposes the use of voting machines and has long argued US elections are being manipulated, vowed to overhaul the elections and set an example for the rest of the US.

But his tenure has been controversial. Earlier this year investigative reports conducted by the county and an outside body concluded that he had created a hostile work environment and made violent threats against workers. Curtis has denied those claims. Last week, the same board that appointed Curtis censured him, and denounced what it described as his “ongoing and flagrant violations” of county personnel rules, pointing to policies preventing elected officials from “making unfounded allegations that have not been investigated”.

Curtis accused staff of “sabotaging elections” and said he planned to sue the county, telling the Guardian: “Everything the old staff accused me of is a lie, and we will be able to prove it in court.”

Peters, the former top election official in Mesa county, Colorado, was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors in 2024 after she allowed an activist affiliated with Lindell to impersonate a county employee and attend an upgrade of the county’s Dominion voting software. The Gateway Pundit, the far-right news website, subsequently published screenshots of sensitive county information after that breach. Peters was released from prison in June after Colorado governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted her nine-year prison sentence.

The hiring of Peters is alarming, said Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado county clerk’s association.

“Tina Peters and others in the election-denial movement appear to have found another weak link in the chain in California,” he said. “The idea that anyone would bring Tina Peters in as an election expert is almost beyond parody. Maybe she’s an expert on leaving ballots sitting in a ballot box for months after an election. Maybe she’s an expert on committing crimes in the process of trying, and completely failing, to prove election fraud.”

“When it comes to actually administering secure, lawful elections, Tina Peters is the last person anyone should be looking to for expertise,” he added.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, said in a statement: “Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to breaching her own voting equipment while county clerk. It is troubling that she would be in a position to have direct influence on election administration.”

Securing the release of Peters from prison was a celebrated cause on the right. Even as Donald Trump pardoned those involved with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and the fake elector scheme in 2020, he could not help Peters because she was only convicted of a state crime. Polis, facing mounting pressure from the federal government to free Peters, eventually commuted her sentence in May, saying it was unfairly harsh. Polis overrode recommendations from his own clemency board in doing so, according to the New York Times, and has been rebuked by the Colorado Democratic party.

California senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, also criticized the plan to hire Peters.

“This should be stopped immediately: Shasta County Registrar Clint Curtis is trying to hire election-denier Tina Peters to collude with the Trump Administration’s election mischief,” he posted on X.

“Americans – and Californians – deserve nothing but safe, secure, and free elections – without political interference and partisan loyalists beholden to Trump.”

Since being released from prison, Peters has hit the Maga media circuit and continued to try and undermine faith in American elections. She continues to assert, falsely, that votes were flipped in 2020, and has urged Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the 2026 midterms, according to the Atlantic. A copy of Peters’s clemency petition, obtained by the Atlantic, said she would not have the ability to commit similar crimes to the ones she was convicted of because she is no longer a clerk.

Curtis’s move to hire Peters comes in the final months of his time in office. In June, voters ousted Curtis in favor of Joanna Francescut, a longtime employee of the Shasta county elections office who was serving as the assistant registrar when Curtis fired her after taking over the office.

In the same election, Shasta voters backed a measure to require elections to be held in person on a single day and effectively ending vote by mail while also mandating photo ID and a hand-count. The state quickly sued the county and a judge has temporarily blocked the implementation of the measure.