Citizens of Springfield, Missouri showed up to a city council meeting to discuss the city’s Flock contract. The mayor shut them down and arrested two people for ‘disruption of meetings of city council.’
Page A3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 26 September 2026
Residents asking about data centers or surveillance cameras get dragged from government meetings, twice in three days.
As it ran on the front
A deputy dragged a woman out of a Central California county meeting this week, in a fight over data centers. Three days earlier, in Springfield, Missouri, a woman was arrested for quietly speaking about the city's Flock camera contract at a council meeting; she was one of two people who went out in handcuffs that night, on a charge of "disruption of meetings of city council."
Shasta County offered her its open registrar job. She turned it down. The county's sitting registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, gave the reason on the record: "she's running around the country right now trying to secure the elections." Not this county's elections. The country's — on her own schedule, while a California county needed someone who could show up and count ballots.…
…(cont) Line the three items up by date and the shape is on the wire, not in anyone's head. September 1st: a California county can't get the nation's most famous election-fraud theorist to take a desk job counting votes, because she's too busy touring the country insisting votes can't be trusted. September 23rd: a Missouri council decides the right answer to a citizen asking about a camera contract is arrest. September 26th: a California deputy decides the right answer to a citizen asking about a data center is the same grip on the same arm.
Three rooms, three gavels; the gavel went unused three times. What ran short wasn't authority — each of the three officials had plenty of it. What ran short was an official willing to answer the question instead of ending the meeting. The servers keep running, the cameras keep logging plates, the ballots still need someone competent to count them, and the job that went undone three times in twenty-five days was the easiest one on the agenda: answering the person who stood up and asked how any of it works.
“You ask about a data center, you get a deputy. You ask about a camera contract three days earlier in a different state, you get cuffs. That's not two unlucky meetings, that's the same instruction sheet running through two different police departments, and whoever's holding it decides who keeps their seat and who gets carried out of it.”
“Look, these were disruptive individuals who wouldn't yield the floor — a meeting has rules, order has to be maintained, you can't just let people talk over the agenda. Was one of them quietly speaking? I didn't say that. That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
A woman was booted out of a county meeting in Central California when a fiery debate over data centers erupted.
· Tina Peters turns down job with California county's registrar of voters from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.