Kurt Hyde was born in Texas 1945 and raised in Connecticut. He joined The John Birch Society in March of 1965 during his sophomore year in college.
After graduating from college with a degree in Physics in 1967, he went to Air Force Officer Training School and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He earned a master’s degree in Systems Management while on active duty. He left the active-duty Air Force in 1976 and joined the Air Force Reserves in 1977 and retired in 1990 at the rank of lieutenant colonel. His primary duties were as a navigator, but he also served as Missile Launch Officer and as an Aircraft Maintenance Officer.
In civilian life, he became a computer professional. He started as a programmer and worked his way up to becoming a systems analyst and also a database administrator. He occasionally taught computer science courses as an adjunct faculty member. It was in that capacity that he led his systems analysis students in a study of a computerized voting booth in 1985 and 1986. He presented his findings at a symposium in Boston on August 14th, 1986 where he recommended that computerized voting equipment should have a voter-verified paper trail to ensure the computer did as the voter instructed. In October of 2000, he co-wrote an article for The New American similarly warning of the dangers of Internet voting.
After retiring in 2011 he became a full-time John Birch Society volunteer and has written numerous articles for The New American, many of them dealing with election integrity. He accepted an appointment to the JBS Council in October of 2016.