Judiciary Committee Democrats hear testimony on Tom Feeney (R) FL Vote Fraud Software

[host]

Link to video segment of Clint Curtis's December 13 testimony
before house judiciary committee democrats <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~clotheshorse1967/video/curtis121304.wmv"> http://home.comcast.net/~clotheshorse1967/video/curtis121304.wmv</a>

Link to .pdf of 4 page Clint Curtis's sworn affadavit,
dated December 6, 2004. (So far, "reputable news organizations are not
reporting this story.....I guess Scott Peterson's future is more important news.........) <a href="http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf">http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf</a>

02:00 AM Dec. 13, 2004 PT
<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,66002,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3">More Questions for Florida</a>
A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer that are whipping up a frenzy among bloggers and people who believe Republicans stole the recent election.

Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

He said his employer told him the code would be used "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach, Florida. But a fellow employee disputed the programmer's claims and said the meetings he described never took place.

Many questions have been raised about Curtis, the 46-year-old programmer, who said he doesn't know if anyone ever placed the prototype code on voting machines. But this hasn't stopped frustrated voters and bloggers from seizing his story. Daily Kos mentioned the allegations, and Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog has written extensively about them.

Staff members for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) met with Curtis last week to discuss the election allegations. Representatives for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) inquired about other allegations from Curtis that his former company spied on NASA.

The FBI in Tallahassee, Florida, has set up a meeting with Curtis, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said it was trying to corroborate his claims about possible election fraud and NASA spying.

The group hopes that even if the election allegations aren't proven, they will inspire legislators to pass a law requiring voting software to be open to public inspection to help deter fraud and restore public confidence in the election process. The software code used in voting machines is considered proprietary and it is protected from public examination -- an issue voting activists have been trying to address.

"I think Mr. Curtis helps make that issue a little more difficult to shunt aside," said CREW Executive Director Melani Sloan. "You don't even have to believe what he says (in order to be concerned about voting machines), just that he created a program. If he can do it, anyone can."

In September 2000, Curtis was working for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo, Florida, a software design firm that contracts with NASA, ExxonMobil and the Florida Department of Transportation, among other clients. According to Curtis, Feeney met with him and Lee Yang, the company's president, to request the voting software.

At the time, Feeney was Yang's corporate attorney and a registered lobbyist for the company as well as a member of Florida's legislature. A month later, he would become speaker of Florida's House of Representatives. In 2002 he was elected to Congress.

Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found.

"Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida," Curtis said. "Once she said, 'We need to steal an election,' that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should."

Curtis says he left the company in February 2001 because he found its ethics questionable. He doesn't know if his code was ever used.

Neither Feeney's spokeswoman nor election officials in Palm Beach County returned calls for comment. But a man who identified himself as Mike Cohen, Yang's executive assistant at the time whom Curtis said was in the meeting, told Wired News the meeting never occurred. Cohen said Curtis was "100 percent" wrong and that Cohen didn't attend such a meeting. He added he knew nothing of any meeting on the topic that occurred without him.
<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,66002-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1">Story continued on Page 2 </a>

[theusername]

Maybe your right but take this into account. If Kerry had won every single vote in Palm Beach County he still loses Florida. In reality, Gore got 64% in 2000. Kerry got 61% in 2004. This time Social Security took the backburner to Terrorism. I'm not pro-bush, and we do have to improve our voting system. However, anyway you look at it Bush won the election and the numbers just don't reflect any major fraud.

[guy44]

Originally Posted by theusername

Maybe your right but take this into account. If Kerry had won every single vote in Palm Beach County he still loses Florida. In reality, Gore got 64% in 2000. Kerry got 61% in 2004. This time Social Security took the backburner to Terrorism. I'm not pro-bush, and we do have to improve our voting system. However, anyway you look at it Bush won the election and the numbers just don't reflect any major fraud.

That doesn't matter. Nobody is disputing that Bush, for the first time in his life, won a President election. That doesn't mean that every instance - by anyone, for any reason - of vote fraud or tampering shouldn't be investigated and prosecuted. Safe, free, fair elections are the minimal requirement for a successful democracy - it should be our duty to ensure that every vote is counted, every attempt to illegally alter the election outcomes is stopped, no matter who is as fault.

[connyosis]

I'm not so sure I believe Bush won this election fair and square, but thise story just seems a little too good to be true. I guess we'll see in time...

[theusername]

lol, yes i agree with everything you said Guy. It should be investigated, maybe you should note in my response, "we do have to improve our voting system." All I was trying to get across was that this was not some "huge" scandal that swung the election. According to the numbers, it is very doubtful there was any scandal. I was just trying to make that point.

I just know that all those sour liberals want to find whatever they can so they can whine about it and call this election illegitimate. I voted for Kerry but he didn't win. We need to improve the election system, indeed. However we also need to recognize it wasnt the "evil" Republicans stealing the election.

[pedro padilla]

I think that all the attention being thrown at Ohio and Florida may be a drop in the bucket. These machines were very widely used. A bit here and a bit there...

[KMA-628]

/from Fark, earlier today
//note the title for the Fark thread

LINKY-POO

[sob]

Originally Posted by host

Link to video segment of Clint Curtis's December 13 testimony
before house judiciary committee democrats <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~clotheshorse1967/video/curtis121304.wmv"> http://home.comcast.net/~clotheshorse1967/video/curtis121304.wmv</a>

Link to .pdf of 4 page Clint Curtis's sworn affadavit,
dated December 6, 2004. (So far, "reputable news organizations are not
reporting this story.....I guess Scott Peterson's future is more important news.........) <a href="http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf">http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf</a>

I guess you must not have read my thread where the comment below was posted (I must have touched a nerve--there were two requests to close the thread, and one remark that it was "divisive.")

Originally Posted by Locobot

there is a policy against posting content without comment, mods please lock the thread