Slashdot Mirror
Programmer Claims he was Paid to Rig Votes
Duke Machesne writes "In the year 2000, Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney hired programmer Clint Curtis, while he was working for NASA contractor Yang Enterprises, to write an undetectable vote flipping program which could 'control' the votes of electronic voting machines, according to Wayne Madsen's latest article for the Online Journal."
and Jesus built my hot rod.
how about some proof? good thing he's getting his 15 minutes of fame though.
Get paid to code OSS
I know there are many here at /. who would like to see a story like this be true (both for political reasons and for anti-e-voting reasons (I'm in this second group)). But if this has ANY truth to it, here is my guess:
It's a half-truth. The guy was paid to write a program to do it as an exercise to see how simple it would be to do. For all we know it was requested as part of a security review to be turned over to the company that made the e-voting equiptment to show them security holes that people were concerned about.
Now I have no proof, but if this is true at all, that would be my guess. And, of course, there is nothing wrong or illegal about writing such a program unless you intend to use or distribute it, which we also don't know about.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You know, I thought the same thing about how the Catholic church gave safe passage to Nazis when the war was ending...
stuff
What does that say about Slashdot?
What does it say about your dependence upon straw man arguments? This may or may not be true, but what sites reference it or do not reference says nothing about the same. Given the history of the Republicans to engage in and condone rampant criminality it certainly passes the smell test.
How do we know this isn't Karl Rove setting us up, the way he set up Dan Rather?
I hadn't heard this one before... Rove forced Rather to not check sources or even get competent document experts to validate the memos?
Finkployd
You, sir, are freakin' insane. You'd like to see the bloodbath that would probably ensue if it turned out to be true? You hate the results of the election so much that you'd like to find out that your republic had been destroyed?
I desperately want not to believe this. As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything. The alternative is probably not far short of civil war.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
But you'd prefer to allow government officials to keep their positions even if they actually cheated in the elections?
Perhaps the alternative is indeed a civil war. In the long term, how is that worse than a government and nation cheated by the elite few?
As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything.
You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?
Who we elect matters. And if people get into government by corrupt means, they are probably up to no good and can cause serious harm to everybody. The US was founded by people who did not want to have hereditary rulers. Do you want to bring that back? Is Jenna's husband automatically going to be the next president?
civil war is better than ignorant peace. if your solution to the problems with the electoral process is to ignore them, stick your head in the sand, and have faith (despite evidence to the contrary), you've already lost what you were trying to protect. you might have peace, but you have to admit, you have theoretically zero control over the electoral process.
i'd prefer civil war to faith in a broken electoral process. faith doesn't fix it. it just means we'll have false happiness while things get bad... really bad.
Conspiracy theories breed when government isn't transparent. So even if it isn't true the question you should ask yourself is "why can't I easily disprove this?"
Why? Because your government "of the people and for the people" is secretive. And that you americans foolishly let binary only voting machines into your system. And you are led on a merry chase into iraq by your government on no evidence. All these events that have been happening in the US, even if they stem from ignorance rather than malice, are damning of your status as a democracy.
I no longer consider America to be a real democracy; rampant gerrymandering, inability to do simple vote counts that every other western country does fine by hand, stacked courts, corporations writing law (from energy to RIAA), extreme abuse of "patriotism" as a political attack (which brings dishonour to the user), attacks on war vets (McCain was attacked by repubs too), corporatised media which is just a joke by everyones standards asides from the italians or maybe the chinese, rampant invasions of privacy, high court sorting out your fucked up voting system, unrepresentative voting system designed for duopoly, intellectual property in general is a joke, corporate scandals, corporations getting away with anything (MS monopoly, union carbide etc.), attacks on multilateralism, the UN and landmine treaties, kyoto and the very concept that there is a risk to the environment from our actions whilst being the biggest polluter, the biggest arms dealer in the world, not to mention the fatest nation on earth, economy tumbling down into ruins, largest military spender in the world, most nukes, most wars conducted in the last few decades, political assasinations in sth america and a big dose of ego (as fat as the waist lines) which claims all the above is flawless.
Irresponsible, greedy, fat, polluting, corporatist bastards who think they are god's "democratic freedomfighting" gift to the world.
You are nothing, nothing besides a fucking cautionary tale.
That's practically a tell-tale sign of a fake article...
While the article is interesting, the connections run all the way to 419-ers...
I want more info. After all, extraordinary claims (like these) demand extraordinary proof.
The dollar is falling; it will rise again. Yes, we will get through it. The economy is not failing. We are winning the war. Here's a lesson on tax cuts. War deaths - deaths in a volunteer military, fighting for our freedom and security. The only loss of civil rights is from the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance "Reform" Act, which prohibits paid political speech 30 days before an election (or something close to that). The Constitution is being upheld strictly (*cough*) by the administration.
Political reasons aside, we are at the stage of the adoption of computer based voting technology where the discovery of fraud could be a good thing.
There are some classes of applications, more broadly of systems, where a very high value is placed on security. I think our current voting systems do not place nearly enough emphasis on the integrity of the system. Therefore, discovery of wide scale fraud would be a good thing because it will force people to place a stronger emphasis on security.
The worst thing that can happen would be for precincts all over the US to dish out big bucks for 1.0 level voting technology and then have to use it for the next 15 years to justify the costs. Better to expose the problems now than to commit to an unproven voting infrastructure.
If we don't identify voter fraud, then people will assume it doesn't exist. Ironically, most of the found cases of errors so far have been caught within the overall voting system. This particular allegation is interesting because it alleges an uncaught error. This is the kind of thing that really demonstrates system failure, and it's the kind of thing we need to come out now if we are going to have a trustworthy electronic voting infrastructure in the future.
The precise nature of their control is to effectively remove the imposition of term limits, giving unlimited de facto control over all aspects of government. Many of the elected officials are simply figureheads for the people that do the moving and shaking anyways, changing an 'elected official' to maintain the appearance of an operational system doesn't change the fact that the underlying entities that propell those officials remain.
Before you consider the law on term limits to be so sacrosanct, let me point out that there's currently a law saying that no foreign-born person can be president, but there's a lot of things in motion this very moment to have that removed. Do you think that if a sufficiently large margin of representatives (obtained through whatever dubious pseudo-electoral means) wants to overturn term limits, they wouldn't do so?
Quite frankly, I think things would have to be much much worse before anyone had the balls to do anything, period. People are lazy. They have no genuine concern for neighbors, only a modicum of concern for family. There is no revolutionary spirit any more except from psychotic survivalist hillbillies living on K-rations in the hills of Montana, any stirrings of true reformist sentiment beat out of people with the relentless drumbeat of jingoism from pisspoor cable news.
Yes, people should have demanded voting machines that'd allow them to audit the vote. People should be much more aware of how the government works in general, but when you're working for your $8/hr at walmart and spending all your free time thinking about how to survive in a dismal economic environment, paying attention to what senator so-and-so is doing with such-and-such money is low on the list of priorities. News media is SUPPOSED to be in that business of keeping track of the powerful, but most outlets have long since given up the idea of inciteful analysis, and many on the concept of truly objective reporting. They'd rather opt for 'balanced' reporting which pits one side's spin versus another side's spin, resulting in far more heat being generated than light... an entertaining and content-free pablum served up as the 10 O'clock ratings grabber with headlines only just slightly more respectable than "Bat-Boy Snatches Baby from Roller Coaster", with a commesurate amount of actual, factual data.
Yes indeed, some people are getting exactly what they deserve for inviting this in either actively with votes and complicity, or passively by sitting in the darkness instead of lighting a candle... while the rest of the world shakes its head and waits to see the form the collapse will take, helpless to prevent or seriously alter the path of a country so determined to self-destruct from a combination of greed, laziness, ignorance and myopia.
OK, this probably won't get read this far down. However, I have my own $.02 to add.
First, this story is essentially one guy's word against a bunch of other people's. How do we know he's not lying? The fact of the matter is, we have no objective (yes, objective) standard for weighing the truth value of this story, and so it's inappropriate to go and believe it.
Second, has anyone seen the vote-switching program? It requires access to not just the voting machine software, but the voting official who set it up! As a Diebold programmer pointed out, they program the code to accept _generic_ ballots, to be made by voting officials. Think about it. Although they can switch a vote from person A to person B, how do you know who person A is in the first place? Also, person A can change from time to time. Furthermore, do you know how many people you'd have to keep quiet about this in order to pull it off? It just isn't logistically possible.
Furthermore, as has been pointed out, this software could be created to just see how easy it would be to do. However, this guy just sets up a VB interface, and he makes basic assumptions about how the interface would work. In practice, you'd need to know the internal structure of the vote tally file, and that can change, as I said. And who the HELL would write this in VB?
Also, I'd like to point out that having a president win due to voter fraud won't cause the fall of the country. JFK did it in 1960, and we survived him (and his successor, and the Vietnam War, which Nixon got us out of).
I didn't get the time to read the whole article, as it's getting late; however, it's simply an amalgation of unsubstantiated rumors on an anti-Bush, anti-Repubican conspiracy site. Bias, anyone?
Lastly, I'd just like to point out that I'm tired of these baseless allegations coming out about voter fraud by the Republicans. Every single time an error with voting comes up, it's blown up by the media, but only if it somehow helps Republicans, and the facts are distorted to make a story seem more plausible. When it's shown that no conspiracy existed, it isn't reported. For example, the whole felon mess in FL in 2000? You hear the claims that more blacks were removed from the rolls than whites? Well, as a matter of fact, while that may be true in absolute terms, an investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that, in fact, whites were actually disproportionately wrongly disenfranchised (because there are more black felons than white ones, probably because more black people live in poverty than white people). Did you hear about this in any sort of major way? Of course not, because the mainstream media is largely biased towards the liberal side (doubt me? I think the Dan Rather/forged memo scandal, the ABC memo saying that Bush should be held to a higher standard than Kerry, the editor of Newsweek saying that the media's positive coverage of Kerry would be worth 15%, later revised downward to 5%, in the polls, and the economy being spun as constantly bad, while the '96 economy was spun as good, despite the fact that they were comparable, shows that most of the media, except Fox and talk radio, were out to defeat Bush).
Oh, and to those who ask why more stories about republican voter fraud is coming out that democrat fraud, I say the answer is simple. The republicans don't care; they won. The democrats are trying to soil the republican victory, trying to find even the most improbable thread of illogic to convince themselves that the U.S. really wants someone like Kerry to be president. The republicans aren't turning over every stone looking for votes, the democrats are, and every time they see a situation where Kerry might have lost a vote due to simple mistakes, they cry wolf.
That's a very good way to start a war, when people know that there are cheaters in office they tend to want them out of office and are prepared to go to great lengths to get them out.
Witness Ukraine where a lot of people don't want a suspected cheater to take office they are threatening to become independent, something that would spark civil war. Yet you think letting the suspected cheater take office anyway would stop a civil war! Judging by the real world example your wrong.
As for saying there is precedent that's a pathetic excuse, what happened to Americas "moral" majority.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
never had my privacy invaded by government or non-government individuals or organizations.
How do you know? Under the PATRIOT Act, warrantless searches can be conducted against you and you might never know it. In fact, the FBI can go to your local library to ask what books you've checked out or for records of what web sites you visited while there -- and the librarians are prohibited from even telling you of the inquiry. How do you know if your phone has been tapped, your Internet connection monitored, or your e-mail traffic examined?
never felt that my rights have been diminshed even in the least possible way, in fact I have more ways to express myself, more ways to share my views and absolutely no hint of having my freedom of speech oppressed or my freedom to life, liberty and property... I have more of each now than 2000.
Yes, your rights have been diminished -- whether you choose to exercise them or not. Show up at George W. Bush's inauguration carrying a sign protesting the war, his handling of the economy, or anything related to his Presidency. You will find yourself cordoned off in a "free speech zone" -- a euphamism for a remote, fenced-in area that's outside of the public's view.
Here's a link to a December 15, 2003 article in "The American Conservative" entitled "Free-Speech Zone": The administration quarantines dissent.. Notice how I chose a conservative publication to prevent you from whining about it being a liberal source.
It's a red herring.
The real trick was much simpler: they didn't send enough voting machines or polling booths to predominantly Democratic precincts. Bingo--the number of votes for the opposition is limited to something you can beat.
--MarkusQ
So go buy one and learn how to use it. So much the better if you're in one of the states where the Federal "assault rifle" ban expired.
Tech Public Policy stuff