Programmer's Affidavit—Rigged Election in Fla
RAW STORY exclusive interview with programmer —By John Byrne RAW STORY Editor
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=477
In a sworn affidavit (pdf file) Monday, a former programmer for a NASA contractor said that he developed a vote-rigging prototype at the request of a then-Florida state representative who is now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
RAW STORY acquired the affidavit from The Brad Blog, which has been in contact with the programmer in Washington.
While working for Yang Enterprises in Florida, the 46-year-old programmer says he was instructed by then-Republican state representative Tom Feeney to "develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in the election and be undetectable."
Feeney, a former failed running mate of Gov. Jeb Bush, now represents Florida's 24th district in the House of Representatives. At the time, he was serving both as general counsel and lobbyist for Yang Enterprises and the Florida state congressman.
Feeney's office in Orlando told RAW STORY they would check with the congressman and hoped to provide comment later today. A second call was placed this afternoon; the congressman's press secretary was said to be "unavailable."
A receptionist at Yang Enterprises said she would pass a message along to a vice president, who she said would return the call.
"They will give you a comment," she said.
The programmer, Clinton Curtis, said that he was told the program needed to be "touch-screen capable, the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, [and that] the programming was to remain hidden even if the source code was inspected."
Curtis asserts that he told Feeney it would be nearly impossible to write a code to change the voting results if anyone were able to view the source code.
"However," he added, "if the code were compiled before anyone was allowed to review it then any vote fraud would remain invisible to detection."
Nevertheless, he says that he was asked at the meeting by Yang to build the prototype anyway.
Curtis states he initially believed that Feeney's sought to stop Democrats from using such a program and "wanted to be able to detect and prevent that if it occurred."
It was not until after the prototype was delivered that he says he got wind of its possible, more nefarious usage.
According to his affidavit, Yang, his employer, later informed him that the software might be used to "control the vote in South Florida." He says that he would never have developed the software had he known its alleged ultimate purpose.
Curtis details his claims on the fraud program in the affidavit:
In the vote fraud prototype that I created things are not what they seem. Hidden on the screen are invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons can then use them to alter the votes of everyone before them. By clicking the correct order of invisible buttons the candidate selected by the user is compared to other candidates within that same race. If the candidate they selected is leading the race nothing happens. If the other candidate is leading the race the vote totals are altered so that the selected candidate is now leading the race with 51% of the vote. The other candidates then share the remaining 49% in exact proportion to the totals they had previously. In the prototype supplied to Feeney the vote totals show on the screen. In an actual application the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred. Since the vote is applied by race, any single race or multiple races can be altered. The supervisors or any other voter would never notice this fraud since no visible sign would appear. Additionally, the procedure could be repeated as many times as was necessary to achieve the desired results. No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine.
The same procedure could be automated to activate without any user intervention whenever the machine detects a certain pattern of voting. The algorithm could also be altered from hidden keys or triggers that would allow the fraudulent user to manipulate both the margins and percentages of any particular race. In most national elections it is not necessary to win every area.
Yang Enterprises is currently under investigation by the FBI. Curtis has filed a suit with the state alleging the the firm also overbilled the state on another contract, and his report of an illegal alien resulted in the arrest of a Chinese national in March who is accused of sending information on radar guidance chips for the U.S. Hellfire missile to China.
Curtis' affidavit has been turned over to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee for further investigation.
VIEW FOLLOW-UP POST: Why did Clinton Curtis file Affidavit?
VIEW FOLLOW-UP POST: Clinton Curtis Interview on Air America Radio
(Click "COMMENTS" below to view follow-ups or add your own.)
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=477
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| Rep. Hs. Speaker Tom Feeney |
In a sworn affidavit (pdf file) Monday, a former programmer for a NASA contractor said that he developed a vote-rigging prototype at the request of a then-Florida state representative who is now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
RAW STORY acquired the affidavit from The Brad Blog, which has been in contact with the programmer in Washington.
While working for Yang Enterprises in Florida, the 46-year-old programmer says he was instructed by then-Republican state representative Tom Feeney to "develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in the election and be undetectable."
Feeney, a former failed running mate of Gov. Jeb Bush, now represents Florida's 24th district in the House of Representatives. At the time, he was serving both as general counsel and lobbyist for Yang Enterprises and the Florida state congressman.
Feeney's office in Orlando told RAW STORY they would check with the congressman and hoped to provide comment later today. A second call was placed this afternoon; the congressman's press secretary was said to be "unavailable."
A receptionist at Yang Enterprises said she would pass a message along to a vice president, who she said would return the call.
"They will give you a comment," she said.
The programmer, Clinton Curtis, said that he was told the program needed to be "touch-screen capable, the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, [and that] the programming was to remain hidden even if the source code was inspected."
Curtis asserts that he told Feeney it would be nearly impossible to write a code to change the voting results if anyone were able to view the source code.
"However," he added, "if the code were compiled before anyone was allowed to review it then any vote fraud would remain invisible to detection."
Nevertheless, he says that he was asked at the meeting by Yang to build the prototype anyway.
Curtis states he initially believed that Feeney's sought to stop Democrats from using such a program and "wanted to be able to detect and prevent that if it occurred."
It was not until after the prototype was delivered that he says he got wind of its possible, more nefarious usage.
According to his affidavit, Yang, his employer, later informed him that the software might be used to "control the vote in South Florida." He says that he would never have developed the software had he known its alleged ultimate purpose.
Curtis details his claims on the fraud program in the affidavit:
In the vote fraud prototype that I created things are not what they seem. Hidden on the screen are invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons can then use them to alter the votes of everyone before them. By clicking the correct order of invisible buttons the candidate selected by the user is compared to other candidates within that same race. If the candidate they selected is leading the race nothing happens. If the other candidate is leading the race the vote totals are altered so that the selected candidate is now leading the race with 51% of the vote. The other candidates then share the remaining 49% in exact proportion to the totals they had previously. In the prototype supplied to Feeney the vote totals show on the screen. In an actual application the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred. Since the vote is applied by race, any single race or multiple races can be altered. The supervisors or any other voter would never notice this fraud since no visible sign would appear. Additionally, the procedure could be repeated as many times as was necessary to achieve the desired results. No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine.
The same procedure could be automated to activate without any user intervention whenever the machine detects a certain pattern of voting. The algorithm could also be altered from hidden keys or triggers that would allow the fraudulent user to manipulate both the margins and percentages of any particular race. In most national elections it is not necessary to win every area.
Yang Enterprises is currently under investigation by the FBI. Curtis has filed a suit with the state alleging the the firm also overbilled the state on another contract, and his report of an illegal alien resulted in the arrest of a Chinese national in March who is accused of sending information on radar guidance chips for the U.S. Hellfire missile to China.
Curtis' affidavit has been turned over to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee for further investigation.
VIEW FOLLOW-UP POST: Why did Clinton Curtis file Affidavit?
VIEW FOLLOW-UP POST: Clinton Curtis Interview on Air America Radio
(Click "COMMENTS" below to view follow-ups or add your own.)
posted by Kara at 2:27 AM
2 Comments:
As confirmed by a Florida Press report, Curtis was indeed in the employ of Yang enterprises, a computer firm which was on contract with Tom Feeney, who at the time was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
http://www.informedvolusian.com/2002/Issue_24/issue_24_article_1.htm
Readers are cautioned in assessing this material not to jump to conclusions. We will provide additional material as events unfold.
FOLLOW-UP TUESDAY DEC 7 2004 from Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org:Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation
…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.
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 a programming standpoint. The author says that it will be difficult to write a program that will escape notice if the source code is examined. That's not quite true.
Writing a trigger into a program can involve a very small amount of code and there are several ways to do it. The idea is you write a very simple, hard to detect trigger with as little code as possible -- or you comment the code such that it looks like it is there for another purpose. The trigger can do several kinds of things -- allow a user to open up remote access without authentication, for example, or change permissions so that the user can do things that are supposed to be forbidden. In other words, the more complex program certainly would not reside on the voting system, but would appear only when triggered, or inserted by someone with access, or by remote access through telephone lines.
6. Why write a whole software program anyway? You can do what needs to be done with a VBA script, which never goes through certification, never gets compiled, and enters the system like a virus. The program described by the author is not a VBA script, but a compiled software program. You can do anything you want if you obtain remote access such that penetration of the computer itself is enabled. Why lock yourself in, by writing a specific program into the source code?
7. The originator of the story, Clint, says he has filed a "QUITAM" whistleblower suit, that is "pending." This is one of the least credible parts of the story. First, he doesn't spell it correctly. The correct spelling is two words, "Qui Tam." Next, Qui Tam cases MUST be filed under seal. If a Qui Tam is filed in Florida, both the evidence and the existence of the case must be sealed, and only the Florida Attorney General can unseal it.
Black Box Voting Executive Director Bev Harris, and Black Box Voting board member Jim March, filed a Qui Tam suit in California. Using a California law, they refused to seal the evidence, but still had to keep the existence of the case under seal. It did not come out from under seal until the California Attorney General got the court to unseal it, and the Associated Press covered the unsealing of the case. You cannot keep the unsealing of a Qui Tam case away from the press. The press has mentioned no such Qui Tam in Florida.
This leaves two possibilities: (1) He filed the Qui Tam and is violating the court order to keep the case under seal, or (2) There is no Qui Tam case on this.
To develop a more credible story, we'd like to see answers for the following:
1. How the program got into the machine. Not "theoretically" how it got in, but how Clint Curtis says he got it in there.
2. What systems were used (which manufacturers, and were they punch card, optical scan or touch screen) in each of the counties, during each of the years this manipulation supposedly occurred.
3. What's the deal on the Qui Tam, and how is he getting around the sealing of the case?
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