Man who says he developed vote-rigging software details
purpose
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
It has been a long day for Clinton Curtis.
Curtis, who signed an affidavit which has been delivered to the House Judiciary Committee, has accused Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) of requesting the development of software which would allow vote totals to be tampered. Feeney, who now sits on Judiciary, was then the general counsel and lobbyist for Curtis’-then employer, Yang Enterprises, as well as a rising star of the Florida state congress.
His allegations have raised a deluge of questions. Why now? What is his agenda? What made him decide to come forward?
The 46-year-old fielded some of these questions Monday in an exclusive interview with RAW STORY.
Curtis says he first leveled charges to the CIA, the FBI and other agencies, none of whom seemed to take an interest, and in a book, published in September. None of these venues, he said, drew much concern. So when he heard of a $200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud, he bit.
“I contacted Justice through Music,” Curtis says. But “I told him that I didn’t want the reward because I didn’t want to taint the equation.”
A spokesman for Justice through Music confirmed the reward is still available.
Since then, he has found an outlet among those in the blogosphere, where his affidavit was first released on The Brad Blog. Two newspapers have begun the process of vetting his claims. The Floridian’s appearance in Washington, and the delivery of his affidavit to Congress, may signal a deeper investigation in progress.
While he stresses that the development of a prototype of vote-rigging software does not of itself indicate fraud took place, he is certain that the intent of Rep. Feeney, who he charges commissioned the code, was to taint the election.
Curtis has been tangled in long-running disputes with Feeney that date back to his years as a state legislator. Feeney was cleared on an ethics violation charge after the Feeney-friendly ethics committee (Feeney was speaker of the Florida House) found no wrongdoing.
“He definitely had the intent to do it,” Curtis says. “And he bragged about trying to adjust the vote in the previous [2002] election, not with the machines but the minority lists and things like that.”
“They’re willing to win,” he says. “They’re willing to play the game and win.”
Curtis doesn’t mince words in his opinion of Feeney: on his website, he calls him a “total piece of crap.” When representing Yang Enterprises, Curtis’ former employer, Feeney was the only dually registered lobbyist and state congressman, and he once promised to put Florida in the Bush column in 2000 even if it meant defying the courts.
For his part, Feeney has strenuously denied the wrongdoing of Curtis’ previous charges. On this claim, however, he has remained decidedly mum. Two calls placed by RAW STORY Monday were not returned.
When asked why it took him so long to come forward with his story, Curtis stresses that even after hearing that there was intent to potentially use the program for ill ends, he knew it would never work, because the source code would have to be vetted before it was approved for Florida’s voting machines.
That was, until it became clear that those providing the source code for voting machines would not provide access to their code. Despite the fact that federal officials called for access to the code, nothing was done.
In a way, he says he blames Democrats for not requiring a paper trail for Florida voters.
“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.”
If the program were used, he says, its probably too late to ever detect.
“If you inspect the code, you will see it,” he states. “Once the vote is flipped, you will not. Once it flips those, the other number is permanently gone. There’s not receipt, there’s no trace, there’s no track.”
“You could be watching the guy do it, and unless you watched his every move, you would never know,” he adds.
What does he hope to get out of his claims?
“If the Democrats ever want to win again, they need to change,” he says. “You’ve got to get rid
of the machines and replace [them] with verifiable source code that only counts votes.”
This way, he says, you can “get a standard, clean vote.”
Knowing that another Florida investigator investigating his charges in Florida was found dead, in what was ruled a suicide but which he and others still have questions about doesn’t deter him he says. Safety, he claims, is less important than the story he’s trying to get out.
“Sometimes you just have to give that up,” he says. “Some things are more important. The more the story gets out, and the more I say, the safer I am.”
And adds, “Probably.”
------------------------------------
12/8/2004
Washington watchdog group which wrote DeLay complaint meets with programmer and offers him legal advice
Filed under: General— site admin @ 12:17 am Email This
Watchdog group meets programmer alleging vote-rigging program
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
The inside-the-beltway ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has met with programmer Clinton Curtis and is reviewing myriad documents he has provided, RAW STORY has learned.
The group recently wrote the ethics complaint filed by Congressman Chris Bell against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) for which DeLay was later admonished by the House Ethics Committee. The Republican-controlled Committee, however, later dismissed Bell’s complaint.
At the advice of House aides, who thus far have declined to go on the record about Curtis’ charge, he met with the group and provided them with documentation on this and previous allegations. Curtis has also charged that his former employer overbilled the state of Florida; that case remains under investigation.
“CREW has met with Mr. Curtis and is investigating his allegations and is providing Mr. Curtis with legal advice,” Executive Director Melanie Sloan wrote RAW STORY in an email message Wednesday morning.
A spokesman for CREW confirmed the details of the meeting late Tuesday evening, but did not provide further details.
“They seem interested, they’re looking over the stack of information that I gave them, and I’m trying to get them other affidavits from individuals I told this to many years ago,” Curtis said Tuesday evening.
He says that he hopes the affidavits will at
least prove that he mentioned that he had spoken about then Florida Republican state legislator Tom Feeney asking him to develop vote-rigging software, though he acknowledges that it still “wouldn’t put anyone in the room.”
Questioned further, he said, “I don’t want to give their names out [now] because there’s no protection for them.”
Having had his claims rebuffed for years, he says he remains skeptical that CREW will act on his charges.
The blog which originally published Curtis’ affidavit, The Brad Blog, continues to follow the case and has released additional details at a new site to increase traffic capacity, http://bradblogtoo.blogspot.com.
Copyright (c) 2004 by John Byrne and Raw Story Media, Inc.
--------
‘Vote-rigging prototype could be used for optical scan machines’
Previous interview: Programmer details purpose
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
The Florida programmer who alleged that a legislator commissioned him to write a vote-rigging prototype said Tuesday that his software could easily be used to change the totals of votes from optical scan readers as well.
Optical scan readers, which electronically scan paper ballots to expedite determining results, are subject to the same vulnerability of any system that uses proprietary and uninspected code for tabulating results.
Programmer Clinton Curtis also addressed questions on the technical aspects of his program which programmers have posed to RAW STORY over the past several days.
Curtis says the prototype he developed took just ten minutes to write, with a detailed explanation on detecting such a program several hours. It’s a very simple program, he says.
“A three year old programmer could write that code,” he says.
The program was not written for any specific touchscreen hardware, but instead designed to work with a Windows database, he states. It could be implemented at a precinct, county or state level.
“You could do it server side,” he remarks. “Then you can flip entire areas by connecting to one machine. If you have one server running the entire state, you can flip the entire state. All you’re doing is accessing the code that no one can see.”
He noted, however, that were the prototype made into an actual program used to rig the vote in Florida, a voting company would have to have participated.
He noted that such a program could have been implemented without the color codes signaling who won each county changing.
“You wouldn’t have to win the vote [in a specific county], you’d only have to narrow the margin,” Curtis says. “You can still let the Democrats win the area but with the margins reduced where its no longer going to have impact across the state.”
For example, he stated that that the vote for a Democratic candidate could be reduced in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County. The candidate would still win the county, but the reduced margin might allow a Republican candidate to win the state overall.
But Republicans, he says, should be equally concerned. If the vote were to be rigged, Republican candidates wouldn’t need the support or concerns of Republican voters either.
“Republicans should be just as concerned if they machines are assigning the vote, because once they have those in place, they don’t need anybody,” he states. “We have ourselves a king instead of someone who gets voted in or voted out.”
Some programmers have written RAW STORY taking issue with Curtis’ claim that such a program would be impossible to detect. Curtis admits it might be detectable, but not without extreme difficulty.
“It could be possible,” he concedes. “Microsoft might be able to deconstruct that code. It’s very tough to decompile. Microsoft has made it very tough to take apart an executable.”
But “I have a feeling that the manufacturer of those machines would scream really loud that their proprietary rights were being stamped on,” he adds.
Others asked why Curtis didn’t keep a copy of the program. As a NASA contractor, Yang Enterprises’ facilities are a secure site – nothing leaves the building.
Curtis says the proprietary machine code
should be dumped and replaced by open source code that is reviewed by both parties before it is put on the machines. He states that it would be inexpensive to write.
“I suggest that we right code and replace the machines,” he says. “It would be terribly cheap, and make the whole thing much more foolproof, and then if your exit polls don’t match, you run your receipts.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that a vast majority of Floridians are confident their vote was counted and few had “voting problems.”
RAW STORY has not received inquiries from the Associated Press.
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
It has been a long day for Clinton Curtis.
Curtis, who signed an affidavit which has been delivered to the House Judiciary Committee, has accused Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) of requesting the development of software which would allow vote totals to be tampered. Feeney, who now sits on Judiciary, was then the general counsel and lobbyist for Curtis’-then employer, Yang Enterprises, as well as a rising star of the Florida state congress.
His allegations have raised a deluge of questions. Why now? What is his agenda? What made him decide to come forward?
The 46-year-old fielded some of these questions Monday in an exclusive interview with RAW STORY.
Curtis says he first leveled charges to the CIA, the FBI and other agencies, none of whom seemed to take an interest, and in a book, published in September. None of these venues, he said, drew much concern. So when he heard of a $200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud, he bit.
“I contacted Justice through Music,” Curtis says. But “I told him that I didn’t want the reward because I didn’t want to taint the equation.”
A spokesman for Justice through Music confirmed the reward is still available.
Since then, he has found an outlet among those in the blogosphere, where his affidavit was first released on The Brad Blog. Two newspapers have begun the process of vetting his claims. The Floridian’s appearance in Washington, and the delivery of his affidavit to Congress, may signal a deeper investigation in progress.
While he stresses that the development of a prototype of vote-rigging software does not of itself indicate fraud took place, he is certain that the intent of Rep. Feeney, who he charges commissioned the code, was to taint the election.
Curtis has been tangled in long-running disputes with Feeney that date back to his years as a state legislator. Feeney was cleared on an ethics violation charge after the Feeney-friendly ethics committee (Feeney was speaker of the Florida House) found no wrongdoing.
“He definitely had the intent to do it,” Curtis says. “And he bragged about trying to adjust the vote in the previous [2002] election, not with the machines but the minority lists and things like that.”
“They’re willing to win,” he says. “They’re willing to play the game and win.”
Curtis doesn’t mince words in his opinion of Feeney: on his website, he calls him a “total piece of crap.” When representing Yang Enterprises, Curtis’ former employer, Feeney was the only dually registered lobbyist and state congressman, and he once promised to put Florida in the Bush column in 2000 even if it meant defying the courts.
For his part, Feeney has strenuously denied the wrongdoing of Curtis’ previous charges. On this claim, however, he has remained decidedly mum. Two calls placed by RAW STORY Monday were not returned.
When asked why it took him so long to come forward with his story, Curtis stresses that even after hearing that there was intent to potentially use the program for ill ends, he knew it would never work, because the source code would have to be vetted before it was approved for Florida’s voting machines.
That was, until it became clear that those providing the source code for voting machines would not provide access to their code. Despite the fact that federal officials called for access to the code, nothing was done.
In a way, he says he blames Democrats for not requiring a paper trail for Florida voters.
“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.”
If the program were used, he says, its probably too late to ever detect.
“If you inspect the code, you will see it,” he states. “Once the vote is flipped, you will not. Once it flips those, the other number is permanently gone. There’s not receipt, there’s no trace, there’s no track.”
“You could be watching the guy do it, and unless you watched his every move, you would never know,” he adds.
What does he hope to get out of his claims?
“If the Democrats ever want to win again, they need to change,” he says. “You’ve got to get rid
of the machines and replace [them] with verifiable source code that only counts votes.”
This way, he says, you can “get a standard, clean vote.”
Knowing that another Florida investigator investigating his charges in Florida was found dead, in what was ruled a suicide but which he and others still have questions about doesn’t deter him he says. Safety, he claims, is less important than the story he’s trying to get out.
“Sometimes you just have to give that up,” he says. “Some things are more important. The more the story gets out, and the more I say, the safer I am.”
And adds, “Probably.”
------------------------------------
12/8/2004
Washington watchdog group which wrote DeLay complaint meets with programmer and offers him legal advice
Filed under: General— site admin @ 12:17 am Email This
Watchdog group meets programmer alleging vote-rigging program
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
The inside-the-beltway ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has met with programmer Clinton Curtis and is reviewing myriad documents he has provided, RAW STORY has learned.
The group recently wrote the ethics complaint filed by Congressman Chris Bell against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) for which DeLay was later admonished by the House Ethics Committee. The Republican-controlled Committee, however, later dismissed Bell’s complaint.
At the advice of House aides, who thus far have declined to go on the record about Curtis’ charge, he met with the group and provided them with documentation on this and previous allegations. Curtis has also charged that his former employer overbilled the state of Florida; that case remains under investigation.
“CREW has met with Mr. Curtis and is investigating his allegations and is providing Mr. Curtis with legal advice,” Executive Director Melanie Sloan wrote RAW STORY in an email message Wednesday morning.
A spokesman for CREW confirmed the details of the meeting late Tuesday evening, but did not provide further details.
“They seem interested, they’re looking over the stack of information that I gave them, and I’m trying to get them other affidavits from individuals I told this to many years ago,” Curtis said Tuesday evening.
He says that he hopes the affidavits will at
least prove that he mentioned that he had spoken about then Florida Republican state legislator Tom Feeney asking him to develop vote-rigging software, though he acknowledges that it still “wouldn’t put anyone in the room.”
Questioned further, he said, “I don’t want to give their names out [now] because there’s no protection for them.”
Having had his claims rebuffed for years, he says he remains skeptical that CREW will act on his charges.
The blog which originally published Curtis’ affidavit, The Brad Blog, continues to follow the case and has released additional details at a new site to increase traffic capacity, http://bradblogtoo.blogspot.com.
Copyright (c) 2004 by John Byrne and Raw Story Media, Inc.
--------
‘Vote-rigging prototype could be used for optical scan machines’
Previous interview: Programmer details purpose
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
The Florida programmer who alleged that a legislator commissioned him to write a vote-rigging prototype said Tuesday that his software could easily be used to change the totals of votes from optical scan readers as well.
Optical scan readers, which electronically scan paper ballots to expedite determining results, are subject to the same vulnerability of any system that uses proprietary and uninspected code for tabulating results.
Programmer Clinton Curtis also addressed questions on the technical aspects of his program which programmers have posed to RAW STORY over the past several days.
Curtis says the prototype he developed took just ten minutes to write, with a detailed explanation on detecting such a program several hours. It’s a very simple program, he says.
“A three year old programmer could write that code,” he says.
The program was not written for any specific touchscreen hardware, but instead designed to work with a Windows database, he states. It could be implemented at a precinct, county or state level.
“You could do it server side,” he remarks. “Then you can flip entire areas by connecting to one machine. If you have one server running the entire state, you can flip the entire state. All you’re doing is accessing the code that no one can see.”
He noted, however, that were the prototype made into an actual program used to rig the vote in Florida, a voting company would have to have participated.
He noted that such a program could have been implemented without the color codes signaling who won each county changing.
“You wouldn’t have to win the vote [in a specific county], you’d only have to narrow the margin,” Curtis says. “You can still let the Democrats win the area but with the margins reduced where its no longer going to have impact across the state.”
For example, he stated that that the vote for a Democratic candidate could be reduced in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County. The candidate would still win the county, but the reduced margin might allow a Republican candidate to win the state overall.
But Republicans, he says, should be equally concerned. If the vote were to be rigged, Republican candidates wouldn’t need the support or concerns of Republican voters either.
“Republicans should be just as concerned if they machines are assigning the vote, because once they have those in place, they don’t need anybody,” he states. “We have ourselves a king instead of someone who gets voted in or voted out.”
Some programmers have written RAW STORY taking issue with Curtis’ claim that such a program would be impossible to detect. Curtis admits it might be detectable, but not without extreme difficulty.
“It could be possible,” he concedes. “Microsoft might be able to deconstruct that code. It’s very tough to decompile. Microsoft has made it very tough to take apart an executable.”
But “I have a feeling that the manufacturer of those machines would scream really loud that their proprietary rights were being stamped on,” he adds.
Others asked why Curtis didn’t keep a copy of the program. As a NASA contractor, Yang Enterprises’ facilities are a secure site – nothing leaves the building.
Curtis says the proprietary machine code
should be dumped and replaced by open source code that is reviewed by both parties before it is put on the machines. He states that it would be inexpensive to write.
“I suggest that we right code and replace the machines,” he says. “It would be terribly cheap, and make the whole thing much more foolproof, and then if your exit polls don’t match, you run your receipts.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that a vast majority of Floridians are confident their vote was counted and few had “voting problems.”
RAW STORY has not received inquiries from the Associated Press.