Why We Vote Ep. 185: Clint Curtis, the Man Who Coded the Vote Flip

This is the guest the audience kept demanding, and Zak Paine pushed CannCon to book. Clint Curtis, now Registrar of Voters in Shasta County, California, is the programmer who, back around 2000 in Florida, was asked to write software that could flip an election, and did, in 24 lines of code. CannCon and Ashe in America walk him through that origin story, the congressional testimony every mainstream camera mysteriously abandoned at lunch, the hanging chad "designed problem," and the eerie 51-49 pattern that haunted results for a decade. Then Clint explains his current fix: livestreaming every ballot on video before and after it touches a scanner so the machine simply cannot afford to cheat, and how that process accidentally uncovered a counterfeit ballot-stuffing problem. A rare, technical, and slightly jaw-dropping conversation with someone who has seen the guts of the system. Plus cacao, mystery toner, and a Las Vegas geography quiz.