Programmer Built Vote-Rigging Demo for Florida Politician

Syre writes "therawstory reports that a programmer named Clinton Curtis says in a sworn affidavit (mirror) that he developed prototype vote-rigging software at the request of then-Florida state representative Tom Feeney. The affidavit has been turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, of which Feeney is now a member. Should we call for inspection and disassembly of all the voting machine code to see if it contains any of these secret vote tampering functions he was asked to include in his prototype?" A follow-up interview is available. A point to emphasize: he's not making any claims of actual fraud occurring in the Florida elections.

Comments

Re:Obviously...

[scowling]

Whether or not www.therawstory.com is a biased publication is irrelevant, since the PDF containing the affidavit is not a biased source in and of itself.

Bev Harris comments

[jazzwind]

See comments from Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting on this here:
http://blackboxvoting.org/#feeny
and why this may be disinformation here:
http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Mad sen/120604madsen.html

Blackboxvoting.org doubts story

[sparkhead]

Blackboxvoting.org has a story regarding why this story sounds like disinformation.

From BlackBoxVoting.org

[pHatidic]

Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation

ABOUT DISINFORMATION: Like a good lie, it has elements of truth. Trouble is, the truth doesn't relate to the nuts and bolts of the story. For example in the Tom Feeney vote-manipulation story, people are documenting relationships between Tom Feeney and Yang, and between the writer of the story and other scandals, but so far the evidence presented does not back up the vote manipulation story itself.

DISINFORMATION IS DANGEROUS TO THE CLEAN VOTING MOVEMENT: Black Box Voting is finding real evidence consistent with fraud. We are even finding, in one of our investigations, evidence consistent with a systemic, or widespread breakdown in security, possibly exploited. Getting the facts is tedious, unexciting work, consisting of auditing and personal interviews, and it takes time. Many Americans want a magic bullet, a single shot that will blow the lid off everything at once.

That's risky. If the mainstream media continues to be bombarded with stories that sound credible, but aren't, when the real thing comes down the pike it will be ignored.

While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and I had a run-in last week, I agree absolutely with Olbermann's earlier critique of the Madsen homeland security story, and this new Madsen story is just as weak. Most of both Madsen stories are bait and switch.

While real journalists "write tight" and include only the information directly relevant to the topic, Madsen wanders all over the place, recapping unrelated information from real news agencies, piggybacking onto their credibility, with only the most tenuous ties to what he is actually trying to prove. Analyze the meat of the story, taking out all the loose references to other stories, and Madsen's work gets very weak indeed.

Here are questions raised by the Feeney vote-manipulation story:

1. One of the most significant problems is that, while Clint Curtis describes a technique of writing a program, he never mentions HOW he supposedly got this program into the voting machines.

2. A second significant problem is that several of the Florida counties used different software in 2000 than they do now, and that various Florida counties use different manufacturers and different systems. Writing one program that would tamper with ES&S punch cards and Diebold optical scans at the same time is somewhat unrealistic. The questions this raises are these:

a. Which specific counties was this software supposedly used in for 2000, 2002 and 2004? Actually, from reading both the affidavit and the Madsen article, there is no evidence it was used anywhere.
- Madsen does a bait and switch when he discusses Volusia County. He starts by saying it is Feeney's district, and then actually goes on to report a story broken by Black Box Voting in October, 2003, about minus 16,022 votes for Bush in Volusia -- which appears to have nothing to do with the Feeney story. What systems was his vote rigging program for? Which manufacturers?

3. The techniques used to program a vote-rigging system in the Madsen article don't actually match the techniques in the affidavit by Clint Curtis, and neither one makes much sense. It's a simple matter to re-map a touch-screen to flip votes, and you don't need a special program for it. Simply switch the candidate ID numbers and it's done.

4. Most political shenanigans are not conducted by the candidate himself, but by operatives. It is certainly possible for a politician to hold several meetings in which he commits a felony in front of several witnesses, but that's not usually how it is done. A more common technique is an envelope full of cash left in a drawer of an operative, with at least one, sometimes more, buffer layers between the operative and the politician.

Clint Curtis says Feeney himself had meeting after meeting to directly discuss election rigging software. Could happen, certainly, but this seems unusual.

5. There are some statements that don't hang together from

About Ray Lemme, the dead Inspector General

[Animats]

There really was a Raymond Lemme, and he did work for the inspector general of the Florida Department of Transportation, and he's dead. He got a brief "memorial" on page 57 of this FDOT annual report.

That's all that comes up in Google. Can anyone find out more? A "suicide" of an inspector general staff member of anything is inherently suspicious.

Please

[daveschroeder]

Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).

A frequent charge levied after the 2000 election was voter disenfranchisement and ballot spoilage due, in large part, to antiquated, malfunctioning, or broken mechanical voting equipment. Legislation was introduced guaranteeing a minimum standard for the equipment and processes associated with voting in all jurisdictions. Since we are living in the 21st century, electronic systems were specified. $3.9 billion was set aside under HAVA to replace all mechanical punch card systems with electronic systems by 1 January, 2006. The goal is to ensure a consistency and fairness in the appearance and operation of the voting systems, both for voters and local election officials.

After the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA):

To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections...

The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.

A bill has been introduced to amend HAVA. H.R.2239 and its twin Senate counterpart S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter, and that "any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen".

Additionally, the three electronic voting manufacturers already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products. Some e-voting critics make it seem like vendors are resisting. However, it is the local election boards that are resisting (as well as the slow march of bureaucracy). The e-voting vendors will build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.

Disclaimer: this comes from a previous post of mine on the subject

Re:Don't get your panties in a twist too fast

[The boojum]

Yes, but what has he sworn under affidavit? That he built a prototype? That he built a prototype, and the guy who asked him to intended to use it? Or that he built a prototype and it was used in the election?

From the affidavit (bolding theirs):

She immediately stated, " You don't understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida." I was shocked that they were actually trying to steal the election and told her that neither I nor anyone else could produce such a program. She stated that she would hand in what I had produced to Feeney and left the room with the software.

Of course, why you'd tell someone what you intend to do is beyond me. No one seems to come off very classy in this business. You'd also figure that if they were that free with their information, surely there'd be more people around to corroborate this guys story if it's true.

Re:Let's do this rationally and carefully

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Some of the alleged felons purged were purged for felonies allegedly committed in 2007, even though that is still in the future.

There wasn't even the simplest reality check done.

We'll know more Wednesday

[skids]

The buzz is he is going to be one of the people testifying at the Conyers hearing in D.C. This will be blogged here:

http://www.truthout.org/cblog.shtml

Everyone has been speculating like wild over whether this is true and what the implications are. The affidavit also provides backup evidence to anecdotal accounts that police patrols may have been placed in spots intended to suppress the Black vote in Florida, for instance. It's really about intent, more than means.

Links proving US voter fraud via 2004 exit polls

[leftie]

Site...

http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm

link to pdf of study...

http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/ExitPol l.pdf

Re:It's completely possible

[Krow10]

"You don't understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida." I was shocked that they were actually trying to steal the election and told her that neither I nor anyone else could produce such a program.

Guess the programmer never heard of Perl, eh?

Heh. Actually, a more interesting way to hide the malicious code would be to do as Ken Thompson did with Unix.

Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognise when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as ["Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763].

By hiding the hack in the compiler binary, and having it recognize when it's compiling the target program and when it's compiling a new version of the compiler binary, there is no way that source code analysis could detect the malicious code. All code for running elections should be decompiled and examined -- and individual voting machine binaries should be audited to make sure that they are the same as the analyzed binaries. There is absolutely no excuse for not requiring this kind of check by all civil agencies that operate elections.

Cheers,
Craig