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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.
Goverments have been overthrown for less than this.
-Dipster
Voting fraud... If Florida??!! What is this world coming to?
Presto, the Republican wins!
sulli
RTFJ.
this is hardly journalism. www.therawstory.com is obviously a left wing biased publication and I would not trust it further than I would Rush Limbaugh's website. However, there needs to be a full investigation. I would like to see a little more than one person's testimony befor curcifying this guy. If the request for developing this software took place in a meeting, who else was there and what do they have to say about this?
This is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Who is Clint Curtis? What is his background? Criminal history? Most importantly, what evidence does he bring to the table? Is it his word against someone else's?
Can he produce call logs? Appointment books? Witnesses? Tapes or memos? Can he demonstrate an extraordinary knowledge of voting systems in the state of Florida?
There is a troubling taint of money on this: a "$200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud..." He is claiming he doesn't want the reward; money may have nothing to do with it. But we may have a grifter going after a score, directly or indirectly, by telling people what they want to hear. I am not saying either one: we simply don't know until more facts come out.
I fully believe we have arrived at a stage in american politics where a politician (yes, sure, a Republican politician) would tamper with an election. There is already plenty of documented funny business. I'm speaking of the felon purging in FL, stop-and-search roadblocks in OH, for instance.
Let's not forget the real moral of this story, illustrated by one thing Clint says certainly rings true regardless of the rest of his claims:
"I can't believe the Democrats were stupid enough to allow [this]," he says. "I can't imagine anyone going to a bank and not getting a receipt. But yet we have our voting machines that way. It strikes me as really odd that machines like that could even exist."
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See comments from Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting on this here:d sen/120604madsen.html
http://blackboxvoting.org/#feeny
and why this may be disinformation here:
http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Ma
Blackboxvoting.org has a story regarding why this story sounds like disinformation.
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
Do they mean this fella?
I saw this link a few days ago. Unfortunately he removed much of his more hilarious tin-foil hat content. The guy would actually do screen prints of sorta-related newspaper stories, then black out the names to make it look scandalous.
His demonstration program is underwhelming. You could make the same kind of thing to show any program could be trojaned.
Don't get me wrong, the e-voting situation is crazy and needs substantial reform, examination, and a general fixin'. But this guy is just another conspiracy guy trying to sell a book.
Stuff like this does NOT help address the real problems in e-voting.
This infuriates me for a different reason - the lack of vision of law-makers. I cant believe voting machines are not force to have open source code. I said personally many moons ago this would happen and ...
Its the only way to defraud fake conspiracy theories and protect peoples voting rights. People desserve to know exactly how their vote is being processed. Is mankind that stupid. Do we want revolutions and rebellions because people are too stupid to make voting (a fairly important task to be fair..pff) transparent, honest, whatever you want to call it..
it sounds more to me like the programmer is disappointed with election results and wants to pretend he's a whistleblower
Yes, but he's sworn under affidavit. I say we put an end to this quickly by disassembling the code to see if it's true. If it is true then this is something every American should be concerned with -- Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, or Anarchist.
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
I think I remember an episode of MacGyver where he overthrew a violent dictator with a rubber band, 2 bottle caps, and some navel lint.
Beat that.
Cheers,
Craig
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.