The Alleyway Circus: How Arne List and True the Vote Turned Shasta County Into a Grifting Stage
Behind the breathless promotional trailers, camera-in-face hallway confrontations, and a $25,000 GiveSendGo campaign lies a manufactured scandal designed to exploit rural election fears for national online fundraising.
REDDING, California — There is a world of difference between principled, constitutional election integrity and self-aggrandizing political theater. One demands disciplined legal rigor, respect for the rule of law, and a tireless commitment to cleaning voter rolls through established statutory processes. The other requires nothing more than an iPhone, an overinflated ego, a knack for harassing clerical workers, and a direct link to a GiveSendGo campaign.
Unfortunately for the residents of Shasta County, Southern California activist Arne List and national outrage-peddlers True the Vote have chosen our community as the backdrop for their latest theatrical production.
In their heavily hyped promotional teaser for an upcoming documentary titled The Shred—blasted across social media and destined for the grifter swamps of Rumble—List and True the Vote attempt to frame the routine, statutorily mandated destruction of expired November 2024 general election ballots as a Watergate-level government coverup.
Watching the five-minute trailer isn't just frustrating; for any serious conservative who actually cares about election administration, it is downright embarrassing.
The Hollywood Audition in a Redding Hallway
The video plays out less like an investigative documentary and more like a rejected audition tape for a bad B-movie. Viewers are treated to shaky selfie-cam footage of Arne List strutting through the second floor of our Market Street county building in Redding, whispering into his lens with breathless, faux-grave melodrama: “This is how democracy dies, frankly... We are witnessing the willful and deliberate destruction of election materials.”
From there, the video devolves into a masterclass in performative harassment. List roams the halls and restricted office spaces, sticking his smartphone camera directly into the faces of administrative employees, county legal personnel, and local workers who are simply trying to do their jobs.
This is not oversight. This is not citizen journalism. It is the behavior of an online provocateur deliberately provoking civil servants until he gets an irritated reaction to feed into an editing timeline. Anyone who has ever run a business, worked in an office, or respected public decorum can see right through it.
The Ideology of Dumb: Conflating Lawful Compliance with Conspiracy
What makes List’s crusade so thoroughly absurd is that his entire premise is built on absolute statutory illiteracy.
List and True the Vote want their donors to believe that Shasta County engaged in an illegal, rogue document purge on October 3. But here is the hard, cold reality that these activists deliberately hide from their viewers: the county was legally mandated to destroy those ballots.
Under federal law—specifically Title 52, U.S. Code § 20701—election officials are required to retain records relating to federal elections for exactly 22 months. Under California Elections Code § 17301, once that 22-month retention clock expires, the local elections official has an affirmative statutory duty to securely destroy or recycle those materials.
For the November 5, 2024 general election, that 22-month retention window legally expired on September 5, 2026.
Every single day those ballots sat in the elections office after September 5, Shasta County was in direct violation of state and federal law. The California Secretary of State’s Office dispatched observers to ensure the county complied. As detailed in a September 30 press release issued by Shasta County Deputy CEO Stewart Buettell, the only legal mechanism that allows a county to ignore this destruction mandate is an active court contest or a formal court injunction.
Neither existed.
Arne List tried to invent one. In early September, List filed a frantic, pro se petition in Shasta County Superior Court (List v. Clint Curtis, Case No. 211712), begging for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order to freeze the shredder trucks. But on September 17, Judge Benjamin L. Hanna flatly denied the petition. Why? Because List admitted in open court that he had zero evidence of fraud or irregularities in the 2024 election. Instead, List attempted to argue that unproven fraud claims surrounding the June 2026 primary somehow retroactively justified preserving ballots from 2024.
Judge Hanna recognized this argument for the legal nonsense it was. When an emergency injunction is denied for a total failure of evidence, the county’s statutory obligation to destroy the documents immediately snaps back into place.
Yet True the Vote splashes the words "Despite the law" across their teaser. No, Catherine Engelbrecht. It wasn't despite the law. It was because of the law.
Clint Curtis's Lame-Duck Clown Show
To understand how our county became vulnerable to this circus, one must look at the disastrous tenure of outgoing Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis.
Appointed in 2025 by a board majority seeking aggressive election reform, Curtis possessed zero prior background in municipal election administration. Instead of methodically building a professional, secure department, his tenure fractured it. On his fifth day on the job, he fired widely respected Assistant County Clerk Joanna Francescut—who then turned around and soundly defeated Curtis by 16 points (58% to 42%) in the June 2026 primary election.
Rendered a lame duck, Curtis's management completely unraveled:
An independent workplace investigation by Van Dermyden Makus substantiated ten separate counts of abusive conduct, violent statements (including threatening to have a female staffer dragged out of an office by her hair), and unlawful retaliation, leading our conservative Board of Supervisors to formally censure him in a 3-1 vote.
He attempted to unilaterally hire convicted Colorado felon Tina Peters on a sub-$80,000 contract to evade board oversight, sparking an intervention by state parole authorities.
Following his June defeat, Curtis claimed stacks of mail-in ballots "smelled wrong" and felt "too thick," padlocked a storage room, and threw away the key—forcing FBI agents to enter the county elections office with bolt cutters in mid-September to inspect the ballots and replace his padlock with a federal green evidence cable lock.
When the September statutory deadline arrived to destroy the separate 2024 ballots, Curtis simply refused to do his job, leaving the county legally exposed and actively coordinating behind the scenes with Arne List via text message to facilitate List's lawsuit against him.
County administrators were forced to step in, isolate an insubordinate department head, and contract Hemsted Record Management to ensure state statutes were fulfilled on October 3.
The Alleyway Mob: Nuremberg Trials for Paper Shredders?
What unfolded on October 3 was not a heroic stand for liberty; it was an unruly, embarrassing mob scene.
As Hemsted’s commercial document trucks pulled into the alley behind Market Street, several dozen activists—waving "Appeal to Heaven" flags—swarmed the contractors. Minimum-wage shredding workers were physically intimidated and forced to sit locked inside their cabs until two Shasta County Sheriff’s deputies arrived to establish a security escort.
Local activist Ron Plumb took to a megaphone, openly comparing the commercial shredding of expired paper to the Nuremberg trials and likening the contractors to bank robbery getaway drivers. An activist wielding a wooden flagpole chased a county employee through the building, screaming that he was a "scumbag." Activist Elisa Ballard pursued another county employee down hallways, barking baseless legal theories.
Is this conservatism? Is screaming profanities at local attorneys, comparing paper shredders to Nazi war criminals, and terrifying clerical staff what "law and order" looks like in the North State?
Follow the Money: The Grievance Grift
If you want to know what truly motivated this spectacle, look no further than the closing cards of True the Vote's promotional video. There, plastered prominently on the screen, is the punchline: a link to Arne List's GiveSendGo campaign, begging supporters for $25,000.
This is the modern grievance playbook laid bare:
Identify a routine, mundane administrative event (the lawful 22-month destruction of old ballots).
Frame it publicly as a nefarious, covert conspiracy.
File a procedurally defective, evidence-free lawsuit that is guaranteed to get laughed out of court.
When the judge inevitably rules against you, claim the "deep state" is engaged in a massive cover-up.
Produce a high-drama, over-edited documentary teaser to stoke public fury.
Pass around the digital donation hat and harvest thousands of dollars from well-meaning conservative seniors.
It is a profitable business model for itinerant influencers and national fundraising operations, but it leaves Shasta County taxpayers footing the bill for legal counsel, law enforcement escorts, and shredded institutional trust.
Real Election Integrity vs. Performative Activism
Conservatives have legitimate, pressing concerns about California’s election laws. We believe in strict voter ID. We oppose universal, unverified mail-in ballot schemes. We demand transparent chain-of-custody protocols and clean voter rolls.
But as respected conservative legal scholars like Hans von Spakovsky at The Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) have consistently argued, real election integrity is won through disciplined, professional execution. It is won by:
Enforcing Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to systematically compel counties to scrub dead and ineligible voters from registration lists.
Litigating proof-of-citizenship requirements before federal appellate courts.
Training disciplined, professional poll observers who follow established codes of conduct—remaining quiet, respectful, and observant without disrupting operations or violating voter privacy.
When activists like Arne List ambush shredder trucks, shove phone cameras in workers' faces, and file garbage lawsuits that collapse on day one, they do catastrophic damage to the conservative movement. They alienate fair-minded judges who might otherwise entertain serious constitutional arguments. They give left-wing state legislators the exact pretense they need to pass draconian laws—like Senate Bill 1418—that further restrict legitimate poll watchers. And worst of all, they convince everyday voters that the conservative movement is run by unhinged conspiracists rather than serious, governing adults.
Shasta County is not an amusement park for Southern California content creators. We are a proud, hardworking conservative community that believes in the Constitution and the rule of law. Arne List and True the Vote can take their melodramatic teasers, their GiveSendGo links, and their alleyway circus elsewhere. We aren't buying it.
