On Wednesday, as the workers of the Shasta County Registrar of Voters office busily sifted through the ballots that have already been cast, they had company.

A group of nine people, holding clipboards and taking notes, stood in a hallway peering through wired glass as workers took ballots out of envelopes. Across the hallway another group of observers hovered over computer screens, watching a live video feed of workers in a room verifying signatures. These self-appointed election observers spent their day looking for proof of tomfoolery.

One woman wasn’t satisfied with watching the election administration through the buttressed window. She wanted to be in the room while they sifted through ballots.

“It isn’t transparent,” said a woman named Elizabeth who wouldn’t give her last name. “To be transparent we have to be able to hear them.”

So far, while these observers don’t appear to have unearthed any evidence of fraud, they are having an impact. The assistant clerk put up a rope to stop the observers from following workers into their breakroom to ask questions. They’ve also had to put locks on the offices, after observers tried to open doors and see what was happening inside each office. This comes as election officials across the nation received death threats following the 2020 and 2022 elections, fomented by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

Workers in Shasta are quitting. Tanner Johnson signed up to be an account clerk because he wanted to help protect democracy. “I felt called to do this job,” he said. But, after a little more than a year in the registrar’s office, he quit on Wednesday.

Voters are legally allowed to enter the office and observe the election process. Johnson said a lot of them, however, are on edge and “very angry.” “They want to catch us in a lie, so they’ll try to trick you into saying something,” he said. “A lot of times they’ll be secretly videotaping you or recording you.”

Ten of the registrar’s 21 employees have left, he said. Many of the people who remain are working their first election. “A lot of people who have left just because it’s not worth it,” he said. “I make $19.64 an hour. I’m not going to be a martyr for $19.60 an hour.”

While the most high-profile election conspiracies emanate from swing states like Michigan and Georgia, the battle over democracy continues to rage across California. Most California Republicans in Congress won’t commit to certifying the results of the presidential election. And in Shasta County, the epicenter of the state’s election denial movement since 2020, a fight over what was once a mundane bureaucracy – the registrar of voters office – threatens to tear the community apart.

With tensions mounting, the longtime registrar of voters, Cathy Darling Allen, retired early in May after being diagnosed with heart failure. To replace her, the county Board of Supervisors passed over Darling Allen’s longtime No. 2, Joanna Francescut, and hired a prosecutor with no election administration experience in June, with just months to go before the presidential election.

The new registrar, Tom Toller, impressed Republicans on the board with his stated willingness to stand up to the California Secretary of State’s Office. But just three months into his tenure, one of those supervisors, Patrick Jones, has already turned on him, according to the Redding Record Searchlight.

Jones said at a recent supervisors meeting that he met with Toller to see tests of the voting system, and alleged seeing election law violations and mistakes.

Toller originally agreed to meet with CalMatters on Tuesday, but when a reporter arrived, he was out sick.

Johnson said Francescut, who stayed on as deputy, handles much of the day-to-day work at the office. “He’s really busy dealing with the political aspect of it,” Johnson said. “People aren’t happy with him. County supervisors show up all the time.”

Francescut said the staff departures just compound the pressure. “This is a high stress job when things are going well, when things are going smooth, when we have staff trained,” she said.

“Nobody goes to school and says, ‘Hey, I wanna be an elections official.’ There isn’t official training on that. It’s a lot of on-the-job training, on-the-job experience,” Francescut said.

The departures worried Darling Allen. “I’m just very distressed that we have people at this time in the calendar so upset and so concerned about their own safety that they’re going to walk out,” she said. “But it’s not worth anyone’s life. And you know, no election official was hired as a first responder, and they certainly aren’t trained as first responders, nor are they paid as first responders.”

Darling Allen said they had to begin keeping narcan – a medication that reverses drug overdoses – in the office after other election offices, including Yuba County, received mail containing fentanyl.

She called Shasta a microcosm of what’s happening nationally. “You know, this is happening all over the place,” she said.

Sergio Olmos is a reporter with CalMatters.