Shasta County May Be Forced to Overturn Election Due to Voter Integrity Lawsuit

Written by Chriss W Street

After first-time Shasta County conservative candidate Dr. Laura Hobbs came within 14 votes of defeating the establishment’s 2nd District Supervisorial candidate on March 2024, she filed a lawsuit for violations of voter integrity laws. The election results may now be overturned after Registrar of Voters staff admitted in trial testimony to violations of election law that appear to have steered about 179 votes to Hobbs’ opponent.

Shasta County’s March 5th primary election was expected to be laser-focused on a nationally-funded recall effort against successful first-time Supervisor candidate. Kevin Crye on a 2022 shoe-string campaign budget literally walked every house in District 1 to pull off a 91-vote November victory over a very well-healed establishment candidate.

The blow-back was ferocious after Crye became the deciding vote to terminate the county’s Dominion voting machines contract, and the two other conservative Supervisors voted for Crye to be Chairman of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors.

Over 800 establishment contributors, including out-of-state corporate interests and Betty Yee, former California state controller and the leading Democrat to replace California Governor Newsom in 2026, launched a mean-spirited effort to recall Crye.

The recall proponents consistently led in pre-election polls by spending $80 per vote, and spreading anonymous rumors and buying front page ads in the local newspaper. But Crye again out-hustled the establishment machine to defeat the recall by 50 votes.

The pre-election polls for 2 nd Supervisor District primary indicated former Redding Police Lieutenant and local school board member Allan Long, with the current incumbent supervisor’s endorsement and the campaign war chest, would easily get the over-50% primary vote required to win the seat and avoid a November run-off election.

The Registrar of Voters denied Hobbs the right to use her brainiac title of “Ph.D Micro-biologist,” so she entered the race as: “Stay-At-Home-Mom” and pro-MAGA Republican. The left couldn’t help themselves, and drove Dr. Hobbs’ name identification up by smearing her as an affront to the Democrats’ demand for technological modernity.

The initial March 5th election count demonstrated Hobbs was on the verge of stopping Long’s effort to get at least 50% plus one vote to avoid an automatic November run-off general election, where the much larger voter turn-out will favor Dr. Hobbs.

As the nail-bitter vote count stretched out over three weeks, scores of conservative and liberal election observers started watching and categorized every action by the Registrar of Voters’ staff. The ROV on March 28th awarded Long 50.13% of the vote.

Dr. Hobbs filed a lawsuit against Long, former ROV Cathy Darling Allen, and the County of Shasta in the Shasta County District Court. Hobbs then retained the nationally recognized election expert attorney Alexander Haberbush to allege mal-administration of the election, including discriminating against her title, ballot design errors, faulty voting machines, and improper mail-in ballot count for ROV to declare Long’s success.

Specifically, Plaintiff Dr. Hobbs is arguing violations of established Election Procedures Code § 13113(b), that under case law [Gould v. Grubb, 14 Cal. 3d 661, 664, 536 P.2d (1975)] would blame the ROV for illegally giving Long at least 179 extra votes:

“Shasta County Registrar of Voters failed to properly implement the Randomized Alphabet Drawing in the preparation of the ballots for the Election. Specifically, pursuant to the Secretary of State’s Memorandum #23149 dated December 14, 2023, which conducted the drawing of the letters of the alphabet to determine their randomized order for the ballots, the letter “H” was placed in the second position, and the letter “L” was placed in the seventh position. Because no candidate for County Supervisor, District 2 had a name beginning with G, the letter in first position, Laura Hobbs should have appeared in the first position. Despite this, the Defendant’s name appeared in the first position on the ballot, above the Contestant’s name, which appeared in the third position.”

Conservative members Crye, Jones and Kelstrom of the Shasta County Board of Supervisor in a June 6th closed session, voted 3-2 to release a statement admitting the county’s Registrar of Voters “made an error” because the order in which the candidate’s names were listed on the ballots were not correct under California law.

Superior Court Judge Stephen Baker has scheduled one more day of testimony for June 25th . Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen that is retiring after the election results are finally determined, made no comment about the error affecting the election.