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Programming Government Politics Technology

Programmer Claims he was Paid to Rig Votes 240

Duke Machesne writes "In the year 2000, Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney hired programmer Clint Curtis, while he was working for NASA contractor Yang Enterprises, to write an undetectable vote flipping program which could 'control' the votes of electronic voting machines, according to Wayne Madsen's latest article for the Online Journal."
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Programmer Claims he was Paid to Rig Votes

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  • yes yes I'm sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beatbyte ( 163694 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:34PM (#11014233) Homepage
    and Jesus built my hot rod.

    how about some proof? good thing he's getting his 15 minutes of fame though.
  • Ok (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:41PM (#11014288) Homepage Journal
    Like many others I would like to believe this. And if its true I would like to utilize this information in court to try to make something happen.

    But is there really enough evidence to hold this up? I don't see this article citing any sources. And towards the end it starts to sound more like a crazy conspiracy theory than something real.
    • Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:17AM (#11014520) Homepage Journal
      Like many others I would like to believe this.

      You, sir, are freakin' insane. You'd like to see the bloodbath that would probably ensue if it turned out to be true? You hate the results of the election so much that you'd like to find out that your republic had been destroyed?

      I desperately want not to believe this. As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything. The alternative is probably not far short of civil war.

      • Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 ( 812236 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:24AM (#11014565) Journal
        But you'd prefer to allow government officials to keep their positions even if they actually cheated in the elections?

        Perhaps the alternative is indeed a civil war. In the long term, how is that worse than a government and nation cheated by the elite few?
        • If the choice was between going to war or letting some cheating officials have office, let the damn cheaters have office. There's precedent here that isn't worth challenging.

          How many casualties does it take to settle a non-combatant struggle? Judging from the last civil war (not that those numbers would be too good of a metric for this sort of thing) about 110,000 lives (just from combat, not counting disease).

          Are casualties really worth a conflict? I suppose a more apropos question would be would this
          • Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

            by goatan ( 673464 ) <ian.hearn@rpa.gsi.gov.uk> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:04AM (#11016335) Journal
            let the damn cheaters have office. There's precedent here that isn't worth challenging.

            That's a very good way to start a war, when people know that there are cheaters in office they tend to want them out of office and are prepared to go to great lengths to get them out.

            Witness Ukraine where a lot of people don't want a suspected cheater to take office they are threatening to become independent, something that would spark civil war. Yet you think letting the suspected cheater take office anyway would stop a civil war! Judging by the real world example your wrong.

            As for saying there is precedent that's a pathetic excuse, what happened to Americas "moral" majority.

          • Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Khazunga ( 176423 ) * on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:25AM (#11016399)
            If the choice was between going to war or letting some cheating officials have office, let the damn cheaters have office. There's precedent here that isn't worth challenging.
            Americans never cease to surprise me. You mean you prefer living in a dictatorship (albeit masqueraded) than fight for your rights? I'd fight for the rights myself.
            • by KDan ( 90353 )
              Indeed. Countless great men throughout the ages have deemed their freedom to be worth fighting and dying for. The people who founded your country sure did.

              Daniel
      • Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jeif1k ( 809151 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:28AM (#11014588)
        As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything.

        You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?

        Who we elect matters. And if people get into government by corrupt means, they are probably up to no good and can cause serious harm to everybody. The US was founded by people who did not want to have hereditary rulers. Do you want to bring that back? Is Jenna's husband automatically going to be the next president?
        • The US was founded by people who did not want to have hereditary rulers.

          Correction: The US was founded by upper class white guys who turned the people against the current government in order to give themselves more power. Ever since then it's just been a trick of playing all the lower classes off of each other (servants against slaves by making laws not allowing the two groups to interact, poor farmers against indians by sticking the farmers on land the government promised to the indians, and for the last
        • You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?

          Don't forget alienating your allies, and imposing illegal trade sanctions on your largest trading partner.
      • Well said.
      • Re:Ok (Score:2, Informative)

        ---You, sir, are freakin' insane. You'd like to see the bloodbath that would probably ensue if it turned out to be true? You hate the results of the election so much that you'd like to find out that your republic had been destroyed?

        The republic stands if the people stands, not if the government can "live". If it means a bloody removal of the offenders, God bless them.

        ---I desperately want not to believe this. As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty m
      • Re:Ok (Score:3, Insightful)

        by reverius ( 471142 )
        civil war is better than ignorant peace. if your solution to the problems with the electoral process is to ignore them, stick your head in the sand, and have faith (despite evidence to the contrary), you've already lost what you were trying to protect. you might have peace, but you have to admit, you have theoretically zero control over the electoral process.

        i'd prefer civil war to faith in a broken electoral process. faith doesn't fix it. it just means we'll have false happiness while things get bad... re
      • Why the concern about "want to believe this, want to believe that"? Why don't you consider the facts that are there. Fact 1: This guy could be lying. Fact 2: regardless of his thoughts, the election results do not make much sense. Take a look at my roomate's page [gvsu.edu]. He's compiled a bit of data, from official sources (linked to from the page), that brings into question the results of the election. Real numbers. Scary, isn't it?
        • Fact 2: regardless of his thoughts, the election results do not make much sense.

          No, they don't make sense if you're wrapped-up in the message the democratic party developed this election--"Anybody but Bush!"

          I'm not saying that there wasn't fraud. There may have been. We simply don't know, and I hope the authorities thoroughly and publicly investigate every accusation. However, what I am saying is that this notion that fraud must have occurred because John Kerry lost HAS TO STOP.

          Like the linked p

      • Re:Ok (Score:3, Insightful)

        Political reasons aside, we are at the stage of the adoption of computer based voting technology where the discovery of fraud could be a good thing.

        There are some classes of applications, more broadly of systems, where a very high value is placed on security. I think our current voting systems do not place nearly enough emphasis on the integrity of the system. Therefore, discovery of wide scale fraud would be a good thing because it will force people to place a stronger emphasis on security.

        The w
      • Ah, the old "Ostritch" defense. Yes, please go bury your head in the sand and repeat "make the bad men go away!" over and over. That makes it all better, doesn't it?

        If this is true the *last* thing we should do is convince ourselves to not believe it. If bringing the truth to light sends us to civil war, so be it. The Constitution specifically says we have the right and the duty to overthrow the government if it becomes opressive. If we don't do that, if and when it becomes absolutely necessary, we aren't

        • I picked your post to issue a blanket reply:

          I don't have my head in the sand. If there are problems, then I want to see them exposed publically and remedied as best possible.

          However, I'd much rather find out that this whole thing was a hoax to get a few minutes of attention. When I said that "you'd like to find out that your republic had been destroyed?", I didn't mean that I'd want that information to be hidden, but that I'd rather find out that it was incorrect.

      • I'd much rather our Republic has been destroyed through malice and evil than the incompetence of the electorate, which is what evidence currently points to. Evidence of gross violation of the electoral process would restore people's faith in the concept of general election, as the obvious stupidity it has wrought would no longer be the fault of the process, but the fault of manipulations.

      • Maybe what you mean is that you hope that this isn't true. The question of what we believe or what we'd like to believe is less relevant here. I also think that no amount of revealed corruption will get people off their ass enough to fight a civil war. People are just too apathetic for this to happen.

        Or maybe it's not apathy. Maybe it's the notion many people hold that politics, while an interesting topic for conversation, shouldn't affect daily life.

      • by spitzak ( 4019 )
        I should point out that most knowledgable people know these problems do not mean that Bush stole the election. For the electronic voting machines to have actually changed the election result would require unrealistic scenariors where 70% or more of the voters in those counties voted for Kerry, while mysteriously neighbor counties voted for Kerry only 49% of the time. That did not happen. But that does not mean that nothing happened either. Also there is certainly the possibility of machines being fixed the
      • No, YOU are insane. You'd rather believe that the election was legit, even if it wasn't? As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, those who control it can get away with pretty much anything. The alternative is democracy. Remember that?
  • by revscat ( 35618 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:44PM (#11014307) Journal
    Noooo! They're the party of law and justice, morality, and ethics! Why, it is completely CRAZY to think that a Republican congressmen would do such a thing! And even if it IS true (which, of course, it isn't) it's just an isolated incident and says nothing about the character of the party itself. Why, I myself would NEVER support such a thing, and I'm a conservative! (More of a libertarian, really, which increases my credibility.)

    Besides, you know that both sides do the same thing, so whatcha gonna do LOL! That's the way the world works, doncha know! No need to get upset!

    Remember: It's a republic, NOT a "democracy." Calling America a "democracy" is just liberal propaganda.

    Look, over there! Two guys who want to get married, and they're both abortionists! We're winning the war! Propaganda is king!

    • More of a libertarian, really, which increases my credibility.

      In what way? By your naievté?

      Oh, right. By the fact that the Libertarian plank [lp.org] is "government is corrupt and evil, and corporations are good and benign, therefore we need to deregulate all corps and then we can sue them if they go bad"? Sure, that will stop corps from taking shortcuts [bhopal.com] to make a profit. Oh, and if the company gets caught [noaa.gov], they won't use their economic/legal power to reorganize into a sue-proof company [google.com], because only governme

  • How do we know this isn't Karl Rove setting us up, the way he set up Dan Rather?

    And for God's sake, why didn't this come out 4 years ago? (you know, besides the murder of an investigator and the poisoning of a pet and oy vey...)
  • by imsmith ( 239784 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:46PM (#11014315)
    The problem with this story is that it is too fantastic. Even if it were true, the depth of the corruption is so widespread, among so many high-profile characters and big power families, that it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Security through incredulity, anyone?

    Conspiracy theorists of the world unite.
  • Dubious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:46PM (#11014318) Homepage
    I'm with the other people in this thread. I think this fake. There is no real evidence and it just sounds fishy.

    I know there are many here at /. who would like to see a story like this be true (both for political reasons and for anti-e-voting reasons (I'm in this second group)). But if this has ANY truth to it, here is my guess:

    It's a half-truth. The guy was paid to write a program to do it as an exercise to see how simple it would be to do. For all we know it was requested as part of a security review to be turned over to the company that made the e-voting equiptment to show them security holes that people were concerned about.

    Now I have no proof, but if this is true at all, that would be my guess. And, of course, there is nothing wrong or illegal about writing such a program unless you intend to use or distribute it, which we also don't know about.

    • For all we know it was requested as part of a security review to be turned over to the company that made the e-voting equiptment to show them security holes that people were concerned about.

      That interpretation makes no sense to me: why would they carry out a security audit in that way? If they did, that alone would demonstrate complete incompetence in security matters.

      Now I have no proof, but if this is true at all, that would be my guess.

      I don't know whether the original claim is true, but if it is,
    • Red herring (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MarkusQ ( 450076 )

      It's a red herring.

      The real trick was much simpler: they didn't send enough voting machines or polling booths to predominantly Democratic precincts. Bingo--the number of votes for the opposition is limited [copperas.com] to something you can beat.

      --MarkusQ

  • by Zarf ( 5735 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:01AM (#11014414) Journal
    [tautological argument]

    [straw-man]

    [beat with stick]

    [close with soviet russia joke]
  • I remember reading somewhere that a few buggy voting machines in a backwater county (NC?) were found to be "resetting" when they tallied over 32,767(?) votes for a candidate - i.e. an overflow error.

    As a result, certain precincts that swung heavily for a candidate would end up going the other way after that candidate's votes went over the limit, rolling back to zero. Sounds too stupid to be true [why would they only allocate 8 bits of memory to the vote counting???], but that's what I read somewhere.

    So..
    • 8 bits signed would flip at 128 so I think you meant 16 bits.
    • YOu heard wrong. The backwater county (actually a frontwater county) is Carteret County, and the voting machines actually lost votes. Only one race was directly affected due to the closeness, and that race is being re-run in that county very soon.
    • >why would they only allocate 8 [actually 16] bits of memory

      Because the guys who wrote that piece of crap software didn't know that an "integer" in the programming environment they were using would overflow at 32767. They didn't bother to check, either because they didn't know about overflows, didn't anticipate a vote count over 32767, or (most likely to me) thought "integer" behaved the same as in the 32-bit environment they were used to.

      From other information I've seen about this system it looks like
  • Now this will be added to the urban legends about vote fraud and minority disenfranchisement, and we'll get to hear about it ad infinitum.

    Thanks a lot.
  • by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdot@u i u c . e du> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:29AM (#11014599) Homepage Journal
    Obviously the .pdf of an affadavit could be faked, but it still makes interesting reading. Especially since it describes how his program worked. ;)

    http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Af fidavit_120604.pdf [buzzflash.com]

  • He says this is for the 2000 election. Wasn't that the one where we had weeks and weeks of vote workers looking at dangling chad? That is, the ballots were peices of cardboard that people poked holes through. How the hell do you program a piece of paper?
  • by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:52AM (#11014793) Homepage
    Please note this article from the article:

    People may wonder why a group of intelligence insiders would come forward to a non-major media outlet with such tantalizing information at this time. The corporate-beholden media cannot be trusted to report such a news story. A common theme from all the intelligence and ex-intelligence officials with whom I have communicated is that George W. Bush made a major mistake in attacking and purging the clandestine service of the CIA. The "agency," which extends far beyond the confines of Langley, Virginia, is having its revenge. It has willingly exposed a portion of a traditional clandestine CIA money route to expose the vote scam that was used to ensure Bush's election.


    That's practically a tell-tale sign of a fake article...

    While the article is interesting, the connections run all the way to 419-ers...

    I want more info. After all, extraordinary claims (like these) demand extraordinary proof.
  • Why is Slashdot linking to this shit? Next thing the Yeti hooker does DC from the National Inquirer will be front page slashdot.

    First the online journal is essentially nothing but a Republican consiricy site. Its registered to a Bev Conover (courtesy of public WHOIS). There is a ton of anti-bush and anti rebulican shit. She must be a democrat cult hero. A quick google search turns up plenty of stuff. Bev apparently has not liked Bush since his pre-presidential days because in 1999 She shares credit fo

  • by juggleme ( 53716 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @01:46AM (#11015156)
    So I Googled around for Clint Curtis, the guy who is making these claims, and found the affidavit mentioned in the story. If anyone else is interested in reading more information on an article they didn't read... ;)

    Non-linkified because I'm going home from work soon and I want to go there sooner.

    the affidavit:
    http://www.rawstory.com/images/pdfs/CC _Affidavit_1 20604.pdf

    his website (basically a big rant with a link):
    http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/

    his vote changing program:
    http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefra udprogram. htm

    code:
    http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/VoteFrau dCode.zip
  • I think it's kind of funny that everyone assumed it was going to be the republicans who would rig the vote.

    I mean how else could they possibly win!
  • anyone I know (yes I'm in the USA and a citizen):

    + never had my privacy invaded by government or non-government individuals or organizations.

    + never been unreasonably detained - the closest ever was march of 2002 flying back to CA from NC - I had to take my shoes off and they took my 2 inch suisse army knife from it's keychain sheathe.

    + never felt like the economy of the nation I live in was going to go belly up and leave my world in shattered ruins.

    + never felt that my rights have been diminshed even i
    • Let me guess...

      You are an upper middle class white guy who lives in the suburbs far from any sort of diversity? (maybe there is a upper-middle class 'minority' somewhere in your neighborhood').

      I used to live right in the middle of Minneapolis. I heard first hand accounts of voter intimidation.

      And how would you know if you privacy had been invaded? The best invasions are the ones that go undetected.
    • Actually, point 5 happens all of the time - at least since I started voting. Interestingly enough - I have had "ballots dissappear" both when Republican and Democrat. As for Fraud - no, criminals are rarely caught. But this has been happening all of the time. Before this scrutiny of elections, dead people were known to have a very good voting record. In Philadelphia it barely mattered, because the cemetery vote was firmly divided between Republican and Democrat (ah, but if you were third party, well...)
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • In reviewing the previous posts, I see some concerns about a bloodbath. But remember this quote by Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants."

    I'll make up a quote to go with it: "Those who rig elections obviously 'wish to not live' in a democracy. Perhaps their wish should be granted." Yet that means either Democracy will die, or election-riggers will die. IT ALSO DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN that various elected officials parti
  • Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by joelt49 ( 637701 )
    OK, this probably won't get read this far down. However, I have my own $.02 to add.

    First, this story is essentially one guy's word against a bunch of other people's. How do we know he's not lying? The fact of the matter is, we have no objective (yes, objective) standard for weighing the truth value of this story, and so it's inappropriate to go and believe it.

    Second, has anyone seen the vote-switching program? It requires access to not just the voting machine software, but the voting official who set it u
    • While I don't think this story has any merit, your disbelief in the ability to program vote fraud is unwarranted.

      You say that it's logistically impossible because there is no way of knowing which candidate will be which. Even if this was true, a corrupted voting machine in the right precinct could still swing an election.

      Assume the existence of a corrupt machine that randomly (and I mean completely randomly) swapped one vote in ten from one candidate to another. Now, say that we place the machine in
  • Read closely the following paragraph:

    According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.

    Last time I looked, weren't the much maligned Diebold machines running Windows, as well as all their compe

  • by JimMarch(equalccw) ( 710249 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @01:15PM (#11020101)
    I did some googling. This guy Clinton has a serious beef with Yang Enterprises...him and some lady name of Mavis Georgalis.

    Some of it does look kinda fishy "in his favor".

    Example: the FL dept. of transportation's inspector general's report on the Georgalis case:

    http://www.dot.state.fl.us/inspectorgeneral/Report s/AnnualReport2003.pdf [state.fl.us]

    ---
    OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
    ANNUAL REPORT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2002-2003
    EMPLOYEE MISCONDUCT - REPRESENTATIVE CASE EXAMPLES

    Georgalis - This investigation was initiated based on a complaint against Mavis R. Georgalis by Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a Florida corporation.

    YEI provides information technology services and support under an eight-year (January 20, 1999 to January 20, 2007) and approximately eight million dollar contract for the Department, known as the Electronic Document Management System contract.

    The investigation established that Georgalis received travel reimbursements from the Department based on false claims for lodging and meals already paid by YEI. It also disclosed Georgalis engaged in a pattern of misconduct, over several years, by accepting gifts and other gratuities from YEI. These gratuities included trips with YEI officials to Biloxi, Mississippi and Las Vegas, Nevada. Georgalis further created a conflict of interest by accepting gifts from another contractor whom she regulated. Lastly, it has been documented that Georgalis used her position and Department resources to seek other employment opportunities.

    Summary of Findings/Resulting Actions

    Mavis Georgalis resigned her position with the Florida Department of Transportation on April 1, 2002.

    On March 6, 2003 Georgalis was charged with receipt of unlawful compensation (Section 838.016 F.S.) Georgalis surrendered to the Columbia County Sheriff's Office on March 12, 2003 and is awaiting a court date.
    ---

    So wait...Yang doesn't like a particular gov't official, so THEY admit to having bribed said official, official gets fired and charged (based on paperwork Yang submits?) and nothing happens to Yang which has connections to Jeb Bush and an FL congressman?

    OK, that's...kinda funky. Doesn't mean Clinton isn't full of it of course.

    If there is ANYTHING to this story, it looks like this guy Clinton got royally pissed at Yang, enough so to blow the secrecy off a Qui Tam action? Or did the secrecy period on the Qui Tam action already expire? "Qui Tam" whistleblower suits start out "in secret"...I oughta know, Bev and I filed one on Diebold back in Nov. of '03, secrecy wasn't lifted until just a couple months ago.

    Damned if I know what's up here. I'm going to wait for more data.

    Bev Harris is even more skeptical and has published this:

    ~~~

    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.

    Whil
  • by mike_lynn ( 463952 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @01:53PM (#11020611)
    Well, reading through his deposition, he mentions on item 12 a full name: Raymond Lemme. He calls Raymond the Inspector General of the Florida Department of Transportation.

    According to the FDOT website (http://www.dot.state.fl.us/inspectorgeneral/) and archive.org, Cecil T. Bragg, Jr., CPA has been the IG since at least 2001 up until the present.

    The only place that I could see Lemme's name mentioned anywhere was in http://www.dot.state.fl.us/businessmodel/pdf/Augus t%202003.pdf, where he was mentioned as part of the fraud investigation squad.

    Wayne Leaders, mentioned as an investigator for NASA, shows up as a 'Special Agent' in Jan 2003 in www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html, complete with a phone number you can reach him at (poor guy).

    More details here:
    http://web.archive.org/web/20030831121943/h ttp://w ww.n-jcenter.com/special/feeney.htm

    Which eventually leads to the real story:
    http://web.archive.org/web/20021030045304/ www.n-jc enter.com/2002/Jun/9/STAT001.htm

    Curtis is one fcked up little dude.

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