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."

Comments

Ok

[Apreche]

Like many others I would like to believe this. And if its true I would like to utilize this information in court to try to make something happen.

But is there really enough evidence to hold this up? I don't see this article citing any sources. And towards the end it starts to sound more like a crazy conspiracy theory than something real.

Re:Ok

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You deny the rich are getting richer based on percentage of yearly income?

Yup. The Current Population Survey says that real earning for male members of the population has remained unchanged since 2002, and for female members of society the median has actually gone down very slightly as demographics shift. The rich are not getting richer. The earnings figures are pretty stable.

Based on total accumulation?

I don't understand. Are you trying to say that there are some rich people with a big pile of money somewhere in, like, a cave or something? I'd love to hear how you measure that.

Based on percentage of the wealth in this country?

According to the latest figures, the middle class expanded slightly last year because the stock market underperformed. So by percentage of investment assets, no, the rich are not getting any richer. The total wealth held by the rich declined in the 2003-2004 fiscal year.

You deny thousands of people are dead because of the war in Iraq?

That's many thousands fewer than would have been dead if not for the war in Iraq. Saddam was murdering 30,000 people a year on average, and the terrorists about 7,000 more on average. According to ICRC estimates, the total dead in the war in Iraq since March 2003, military and civilian, is between 9,400 and 11,800. So we've saved the lives of over 62,000 people.

Get pissed already.

No, thank you. I prefer to save my uppity indignation for stuff that's actually related in some way to reality. But if you want to keep chanting the same old tired lines without bothering to look at the actual data, that's fine. It's a free country. Knock yourself out.

Re:Ok

[Profane MuthaFucka]

The founding fathers seriously considered installing a King. They also considered the common rabble to be too stupid to effectively govern themselves, thus the Republic instead of a purer form of democracy.

OK, I stated that a little harshly, but the idea that the founding fathers were true liberal idealists is not quite true. They were a flawed bunch, some of them very very flawed. Thankfully, what they came up with worked OK, and has been able to change with the times.

wow, is this the next Oliver Stone screenplay?

[imsmith]

The problem with this story is that it is too fantastic. Even if it were true, the depth of the corruption is so widespread, among so many high-profile characters and big power families, that it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Security through incredulity, anyone?

Conspiracy theorists of the world unite.

Re:Corrections

[Jahf]

Oh come on ... a mural found in Iraq -after- 9/11 is supposed to make one "think"? I am assuming by "think about this" you are inferring "look at this and you'll see a connection".

Bogus.

Yes, once 9/11 happened there were people all OVER the Muslim world that were radical and embraced the death and destruction.

That doesn't mean they were guilty of committing the act.

Think about this: if we had been able to prevent 9/11 that mural wouldn't have existed ... though I think in the end we would have invaded Iraq anyway. It is obvious (to me, I'm not claiming to be able to know what you see) that there was twisted intel and intent fashioned before 9/11. 9/11 just made it that much easier.

Does having a Nazi swastika in a militia HQ of some radical fascist group at some point after WWII mean that the people there are Nazis and committed murders during the Holocaust? No, the "neo" in "neo-Nazi" is added for a reason. Are they twisted and possibly evil jerks? Yes. Do they represent everyone in their culture or mean that they are guilty of war crimes? No.

Do I think there are Al-Qaeda in Iraq? Sure ... but FAR FAR more with far more popular support because we invaded, not because of 9/11.

Basic fact checking, thanks to the Internet

[mike_lynn]

Well, reading through his deposition, he mentions on item 12 a full name: Raymond Lemme. He calls Raymond the Inspector General of the Florida Department of Transportation.

According to the FDOT website (http://www.dot.state.fl.us/inspectorgeneral/) and archive.org, Cecil T. Bragg, Jr., CPA has been the IG since at least 2001 up until the present.

The only place that I could see Lemme's name mentioned anywhere was in http://www.dot.state.fl.us/businessmodel/pdf/Augus t%202003.pdf, where he was mentioned as part of the fraud investigation squad.

Wayne Leaders, mentioned as an investigator for NASA, shows up as a 'Special Agent' in Jan 2003 in www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html, complete with a phone number you can reach him at (poor guy).

More details here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030831121943/h ttp://w ww.n-jcenter.com/special/feeney.htm

Which eventually leads to the real story:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021030045304/ www.n-jc enter.com/2002/Jun/9/STAT001.htm

Curtis is one fcked up little dude.

Re:What you want to believe is irrelevant.

[Grym]

Fact 2: regardless of his thoughts, the election results do not make much sense.

No, they don't make sense if you're wrapped-up in the message the democratic party developed this election--"Anybody but Bush!"

I'm not saying that there wasn't fraud. There may have been. We simply don't know, and I hope the authorities thoroughly and publicly investigate every accusation. However, what I am saying is that this notion that fraud must have occurred because John Kerry lost HAS TO STOP.

Like the linked parent's roommate's page, for instance is ridiculous. SO WHAT if the proportion of democratic votes don't match the proportion of registered democrats? Since when is everyone required or even expected to vote along party lines? What if, rather than a national conspiracy of unparalleled magnitude to disenfranchise democrats, people simply voted Republican? What if it turns out that all or at least a disproportionate (>50%) amount of the independent voters (or even conservative democrats), turned off by the Democratic Party's embracement of extremists like Michael Moore (I, a registered Independent, distinctly remember him being ON-STAGE at the national convention), voted Republican?

If the liberal democrats in this country can't accept that their candidate lost without--or at least before--any definitive evidence (and I would hardly classify this guy's nonsensical accusations as that) to prove otherwise, they're only going to marginalize themselves in the minds of reasonable Americans more than they already have. And, even though I voted for Bush, I really hope that doesn't happen. We need a healthy, viable opposition for our system to work.

-Grym

Re:Hoping that something isn't so...

[jonadab]

> Can be very close to keeping one's head buried in the sand.

If you go RTFA, you won't think so anymore. That article is one of the most
humorously pathetically bad pieces I've read in quite a significant while. It
tries to pass itself off as investigative journalism, but the style is all
totally wrong for that. (The word "alleged" doesn't occur once in the whole
thing, for example, a dead giveaway that it's not the mainstream press article
it wants to be.) The most hilarious thing, though, the thing that had me
rolling on the floor, was when the article stated flatly that VB5 was used
to prototype a program that would run undetectably on unix-based systems.