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

yes yes I'm sure..

[Beatbyte]

and Jesus built my hot rod.

how about some proof? good thing he's getting his 15 minutes of fame though.

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

[Just Some Guy]

Like many others I would like to believe this.

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.

Re:Ok

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

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?

Re:Ok

[jeif1k]

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?

Re:Ok

[reverius]

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.

Re:Ok

[goatan]

let the damn cheaters have office. There's precedent here that isn't worth challenging.

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.

Re:Ok

[Khazunga]

If the choice was between going to war or letting some cheating officials have office, let the damn cheaters have office. There's precedent here that isn't worth challenging.

Americans never cease to surprise me. You mean you prefer living in a dictatorship (albeit masqueraded) than fight for your rights? I'd fight for the rights myself.

Republicans? Criminal?

[revscat]

Noooo! They're the party of law and justice, morality, and ethics! Why, it is completely CRAZY to think that a Republican congressmen would do such a thing! And even if it IS true (which, of course, it isn't) it's just an isolated incident and says nothing about the character of the party itself. Why, I myself would NEVER support such a thing, and I'm a conservative! (More of a libertarian, really, which increases my credibility.)

Besides, you know that both sides do the same thing, so whatcha gonna do LOL! That's the way the world works, doncha know! No need to get upset!

Remember: It's a republic, NOT a "democracy." Calling America a "democracy" is just liberal propaganda.

Look, over there! Two guys who want to get married, and they're both abortionists! We're winning the war! Propaganda is king!

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:wow, is this the next Oliver Stone screenplay?

[krymsin01]

You know, I thought the same thing about how the Catholic church gave safe passage to Nazis when the war was ending...

Dubious

[MBCook]

I'm with the other people in this thread. I think this fake. There is no real evidence and it just sounds fishy.

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 Template]

[Zarf]

[tautological argument]

[straw-man]

[beat with stick]

[close with soviet russia joke]

Re:Strange Bedfellows? Or Not?

[revscat]

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.

Re:zerg

[finkployd]

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

Link to the affadavit

[menscher]

Obviously the .pdf of an affadavit could be faked, but it still makes interesting reading. Especially since it describes how his program worked. ;)

http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Af fidavit_120604.pdf

Possibly a troll article?

[nuxx]

Please note this article from the article:

People may wonder why a group of intelligence insiders would come forward to a non-major media outlet with such tantalizing information at this time. The corporate-beholden media cannot be trusted to report such a news story. A common theme from all the intelligence and ex-intelligence officials with whom I have communicated is that George W. Bush made a major mistake in attacking and purging the clandestine service of the CIA. The "agency," which extends far beyond the confines of Langley, Virginia, is having its revenge. It has willingly exposed a portion of a traditional clandestine CIA money route to expose the vote scam that was used to ensure Bush's election.

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.

Some links I found for Clint Curtis

[juggleme]

So I Googled around for Clint Curtis, the guy who is making these claims, and found the affidavit mentioned in the story. If anyone else is interested in reading more information on an article they didn't read... ;)

Non-linkified because I'm going home from work soon and I want to go there sooner.

the affidavit:
http://www.rawstory.com/images/pdfs/CC _Affidavit_1 20604.pdf

his website (basically a big rant with a link):
http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/

his vote changing program:
http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefra udprogram. htm

code:
http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/VoteFrau dCode.zip

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.