March 26, 2026
That's the question I was asked by a Riverside County resident whose group had met with Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis.
Clint Curtis tells a great story of being asked to write a program for a touch screen voting machine that would make it possible to change the results of an election undetectably. Here is a link to his testimony before Congress.
His testimony is full of holes. Here are just a few;
He explains that he could write code that would be undetectable. However, at one point he confirms that the fraud could be detected by hand counting the votes and comparing it to the machine totals. The problem with this testimony is that hand counting ballots IS REQUIRED as part of the audit that takes place after each election. As noted in Thinking Critically About 2020 Stolen Election Claims, "3,077 Post election county audits did not discover any vote flipping scheme. That includes the 509 audits in the swing states that were won by Biden"
Mr. Curtis says that the vote flipping code can be inserted into either the voting machines or into the central scanners & tabulators. Let me address this in the context of the 2020 election;
- The notion that the voting machines used at polling places were hacked has been addressed by Bob Zeidman. Zeidman is a Republican. He is a computer expert who voted for Trump. He explains in his book "Election Hacks" why the chance of this happening is "zero."
- Mr. Curtis claims that a hack of polling place voting machines could have taken place if the voting machines were networked with the central system. This is fictional. Neither the scanners and tabulators that are part of an air gapped system nor the voting machines at the polling place are connected to the internet. All the voting machines do is print out a paper ballot that is then placed in the sealed ballot box with all of the ballots that were filled out by hand. Moreover, all votes are cast using paper ballots - none are transmitted electronically. Finally, ask your Registrar of Voters what percentage of votes are cast on those voting machines (sometimes referred to as ballot marking devices or BMDs). I volunteer to work elections here in Sutter County. I can tell you that only about half of one percent of the ballots are cast using those machines. The 2020 election was a COVID election where nearly every ballot cast was a mail in ballot – those BMDs were rarely if ever used.
- Mr. Curtis claims that the scanners and tabulators can be hacked. The first thing to understand in analyzing this claim is that one of the strengths of our election system is that it is distributed. That is, 3,144 counties conduct their own election. How many air gapped county systems in how many states would hackers have had to hacked into in order to flip the election? A 2021 report from the cyber security firm ESET listed the 17 known cases of air gapped systems being hacked in the previous 15 years. None were hacked wirelessly. None were any of our 3,144 county election systems. Finally, flipping a vote on a machine in an air gapped tally system doesn't change the indelible ink mark on the ballot. 49 States required 3,077 counties to perform post election audits (Alabama does not). Those audits would have easily identified inconsistencies between machine counted vote totals and hand counted vote totals."
- Mr. Curtis claims code can be written that guarantees a certain target outcome. He uses a 51/49 split as an example. That example conjures up a vision that it would require the least amount of manipulation making vote flipping harder to detect. Just the opposite is true.
There is variation in every county. Here is a color coded election map from Sacramento County after the 2024 election. It shows areas of heavy Democratic voter registration and other, mostly rural areas, with a heavy Republican concentration.
Ballots are processed in batches. The total number of ballots to be received is not known. It's too late to flip votes after a batch of ballots has been scanned, bundled together and the results of that batch are recorded. Achieving a target split of 51/49, or some other target rate, throughout a county or multiple counties requires a continuous flipping operation. That continuous flipping of votes would result in flipping large numbers of votes from Republicans in Republican leaning precincts. It would also require flipping large numbers of votes from Democrats in Democrat leaning precincts. The vote split in both red and blue areas would be roughly the the same in in all areas.
The additional vote flipping necessary to achieve a target voting split would make it even easier to detect.
