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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.
Knowing that the editors don't always read the previous day's stories before posting new ones makes me feel better when I miss a few stories.
I guess this story was so good that it had to be posted twice within 24 hours.
This could be some bizarre case where the Representative was trying to persuade people he knew that electronic voting wasn't to be trust and could be rigged. So he got a vote rigging device installed on a voting machine and showed it off to his buddies and they all immediately knew that electronic voting would be a bad thing if vote rigging software could so easily be tossed in. Electronic voting nevertheless was rolled out thanks to the millions of dollars already invested in it so they decided that rather than raise public fears and insecurities they'd sit on the knowledge and wait it out.
I still don't see how this guys software could have been anything but prototype. Did he get a copy of the voting software used in the Florida machines? Were they left unguarded so that someone could have slipped this sort of thing in?
Direct away from face when opening.