Eight applicants were interviewed by the Shasta County Board of Supervisor Tuesday for the ROV position. From left: Thomas Toller, Clint Curtis, Jennifer Waltman, Assistant ROV/County Clerk Joanna Francescut, John Gaglione, Debbie Burkett, Ken Michaud and Dan Sloan. Photo by Doni Chamberlain for A News Cafe.
Those of you who took my advice and tuned in to the Board of Supervisors meeting (video pending) as they made a show of trying to act like they don’t have an agenda in their pending Registrar of Voters/County Clerk appointment saw outsider Clint Curtis take the podium and present a chuckling appeal to the public. Curtis wants to bring his “election integrity” experience to our troubled county already full of division and mistrust.
So, who is Clint Curtis?
Clint Curtis reads prepared answers to Shasta County Board of Supervisors publicly released ROV interview questions Tuesday. Photo by Doni Chamberlain.
Curtis is the attorney based in Florida describing himself as an “election attorney” and claiming absolutely vast experience in this area. At today’s interview, Curtis claimed in response to Supervisor Rickert’s question that he has testified hundreds of times, including in connection to the Shasta/Dominion debacle, and that he was slated to testify tomorrow afternoon in Hawaii. As I mentioned in my last article, Curtis used language in his cover letter designed to appeal to those who don’t trust that voting systems are a reliable way to tabulate ballots.
Today I did a bit of a dive into Curtis’s background. Curtis is also a programmer. In 2000, he created software that he maintained can change the outcome of an election.
Here’s a screenshot out of an Orlando Weekly article from 2006 about Curtis titled: Is This Man Crazy?
All this talk of “election integrity,” but Patrick Jones specifically voted today to advance the only candidate that has actually gone on record saying he knows how to cheat.
Curtis has fully embraced the popularity he received as a “whistleblower” against Republican Congressman Tom Feeney that he claimed was behind the effort to get Curtis to create the software. He claimed to believe this was intended to detect Democrat-based fraud, and that later he discovered the program was an effort to benefit the Republican Party.
Curtis is currently listed as a registered Democrat (gasp!) in the state of Florida and ran on the Democratic platform seeking to represent Florida’s 6th Congressional District in 2020. Curtis also ran for Congressional districts in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Curtis has engaged in some social media activities that might trouble a majority conservative community, even if they are not decidedly involved in supporting baseless conspiracy theories. For example:
Is the famously ultra-conservative former chair of the Board of Supervisors seriously considering someone who has previously run for Congressional office as a Democrat and reposted material hashtagged with #TrumpIsPathetic on his election candidate Twitter page? This certainly doesn’t fit with the typical Patrick Jones playbook. Here’s the still-current profile picture from the Facebook page, “Patrick Henry Jones for Supervisor District 4” posted March 28, 2021:
Interesting approach to a nonpartisan local government position.
Does this mean Patrick Jones is suddenly rethinking his sentiments about Democrats, or is this an optics play? Locals are reasonably wary, and some have already commented on “the fix is in” rumors, noticing from hallway chitchat that Curtis may already be house-shopping for his relocation to Shasta County. If the plot is to claim that this clearly wasn’t a fixed appointment because Curtis is a Democrat, Jones is now fully locked and loaded (fitting for someone still trying to build an unpopular gun range). Jones will say “but Curtis is a Democrat!” for the same reasons far-right conservatives have collectively embraced Candace Owens, a conservative political commentator who rose to national prominence after Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Election. Owens routinely makes controversial statements, such as when she addressed a House committee in 2023 claiming that “White supremacy and white nationalism is not a problem that is harming Black America.” It’s an ideal combination: you get to support them because they already agree with you, plus, you get to now hide behind them too.
Curtis, who claims to bridge the gap between both parties, is a frequent guest on Mike Lindell’s programs.
Clint Curtis was welcomed to Redding by the Shasta County Board majority. Here, he chats with Mike Lindell at the Lindell’s August 2022 Moment of Truth Summit.
Is Clint Curtis a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Clint Curtis, a Mike-Lindell-connected attorney, invited by Kevin Crye, speaks at the Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting in 2023.
Hear him in his own words: Clint Curtis was a Republican when he was asked to come up with this magical program that can “flip elections.” It seems like the switch from Republican, who at best was trying to “expose Democratic voter fraud” and at worst, was a complete liar and profiteer trying to use controversy for personal gain, only happened after Curtis went on the offensive against Tom Feeney. It looks like the first person Clint Curtis ran against was also Tom Feeney. Feeney won re-election that year by 58%.
Curtis mentions “hand counts” in his ROV application, and when asked by District 2 Supervisor Tim Garman about Assembly Bill 969, which passed on October 4, 2023 prohibiting manual counts for any election contest with more than 5,000 eligible registered voters (certain elections would be prohibited from using a manual tally if the registered eligible voter count is more than 1,000). The self-described “elections expert” hadn’t heard of that legislation.
Curtis was adamant during his first interview that he would follow the law, but let’s revisit the 2000 incident where Curtis programmed software capable of interfering with an election one more time. Here’s a trailer for “Murder, Spies & Voting Lies – The Clint Curtis Story” a documentary released in 2008, where Curtis talks about being asked to build “vote-flipping software.” He describes how he was told that the software should be written “in such a way that the manipulation was hidden even if you saw the source code.”
Curtis could point out that he went on record to expose this situation. But that didn’t stop him from…claiming he did in fact build that software. According to a Tampa Bay Times article, Curtis didn’t keep a copy of the software.
This is what Congressman Feeney had to say in response to Curtis’ allegations.
Another sore election loser?
Clint Curtis shares some interesting common ground with failed District 2 Supervisor candidate Laura Hobbs. He filed a speculative election contest in Florida against Republican Tom Feeney, who he ran against as a Democrat for the 24th Congressional District of Florida Congress seat, later filing a contest of that same election on December 20, 2006. That action was summarily dismissed.
It doesn’t add up
Ron and Patty Plumb, New California State leaders, pose with Crye’s guest Clint Curtis inside the Shasta County Board of Supervisors chambers in 2023.
More telling observations about Curtis: his claim that he was able to program an undetectable vote-flipping program doesn’t entirely check out. Curtis talked about touch screen technology, which wasn’t in use in West Palm Beach city when he released his big expose.
Adam Stubblefield, a Johns Hopkins computer science graduate who wrote a published research paper entitled “Analysis of an Electronic Voting System” back in 2003, stated that the code Curtis wrote was “so trivial” that it would be easier to write new code than to try to incorporate Curtis’s code into the actual voting machine.
But wait, Curtis passed a lie detector test regarding his fraud-enabling software allegations! But fittingly, this same test was passed by Patrick Jones, despite all others involved denying his claims were even slightly truthful.
Patrick Jones concentrates on his replies to a polygraph technician Jones hired in 2021 to “prove” he didn’t lie about former Supervisor Leonard Moty.
R.V. Scheide summed up the problem with lie detector tests beautifully in his 2021 article with a quote from Doug Williams, former Oklahoma police officer:
“The polygraph is not a lie detector, and it is not a truth verifier, it is simply a crude reaction recorder, and the reactions it records can be indicative of just about anything except deception,” Williams writes. “I can even teach you how to duplicate this reaction by a simple breathing and muscle exercise. In fact, when you finish reading this manual, you will be able to control every tracing on the polygraph chart at will.”
Clint Curtis may have passed that polygraph simply by believing his own lies. Sound familiar?
Clint Curtis couldn’t accept the results of an election, speculating that it was fraudulent. Sound familiar?
Tomorrow is Day 2 of the interview process, and something tells me that Patrick Jones will insist that this is who we now need in office.
Someone who will magically find the mystery voter fraud he’s been claiming without evidence for years now.
Someone who changes political affiliations and stories when it suits him.
Someone who got a round of applause when he mentioned that he will immediately tear down the security fence that was erected at the Elections Office to protect workers from the increasingly hostile conditions during election counting.
Someone who seems perfectly poised to run our elections office, so long as the goal is to plunge Shasta County even deeper into chaos.
Silence DoGood is an anonymous guest writer who would like to help stop the insanity in Shasta County. Motivated by the strong desire to go back to doing the dishes instead of worrying about a potential civil war, DoGood seeks to bring humor, sarcasm, and insight to the sane folks who have resisted the very reasonable urge to move somewhere that isn’t currently determined to eat itself.
