BB: Do you know Suzanne Kosmas? Why do you think they picked her?
CURTIS: She was in the [Florida] legislature for eight years, and she has, I think, $3 million in the bank, and I think that was as far as it went. In the legislature, all she really did -- I think she sponsored one bill that got through the entire time she was there, something about kids couldn’t ride in the back of a pickup truck. If you’ve ever driven in Florida, you know that bill’s not been too effective. There may be a law on the books; I don’t know if there is or not, and apparently, no one else knows either. You see kids hanging out of the back of a pickup truck going down the road all the time.
BB: Was there even a courtesy call from the DCCC telling you they’d recruited Kosmas?
CURTIS: Nope. We found out the same way as everybody else. We actually ran a little poll. She won’t win in Brevard [County]. She won’t win in Seminole. She might be able to pick up something in Orange and Volusia. The problem is she can’t take the high ground. She can’t say [about Feeney,] “I’m running against this guy, and he’s corrupt.” They’ve blown their Abramoff card if she actually wins the primary, because you can’t come out and say he took vacations and sold his vote when she tried to give away tax dollars to one of her contributors in a contest, where she was one of two people who got to make the decision.
BB: She’ll likely take the high ground anyway, facts be damned. Still, it boggles my mind that some people still don’t get that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can't have confidence in how the votes are counted.
CURTIS: I wonder if they’re not trying to just make the whole thing go away. I talked to the Supervisor of Elections last night, and I told him after the election, we wanted to do an audit -- basically the audit protocol I’m trying to [spread nationwide.] I prefer to do a 10% audit; this was our chance to show that the audits work, and how long they take -- probably one or two days in each section. But we have paper ballots in Florida now, so I think it may be harder to cheat if people know we’re going to check it. The problem is, most people will never check it. [Election fraud perpetrators] think the elections can be flipped, and they can make the audit go away. Well, they can try.
BB: Right, case in point: the New Hampshire primary, which defied all the polls which had Obama ahead by a double digit margin, anomalously resulted in a Clinton win. Yet once again, none of the Democratic candidates (except Dennis Kucinich), nor the corporate media paid attention to all of the evidence of problems found after the election. There has been some progress on e-voting issues, but practically speaking, do you think it will be any better by election time?
CURTIS: In Florida, we have paper. But right now, the audit procedure in Florida is terrible. The ballots that are now paper are still counted by machines. So the flip can still occur. The only difference is now you can’t get away with it if someone checks. And since we’re running, we’re going to check. Even though we don’t have good audit procedures in Florida, we have the ballot inspection procedure. Which means, as a candidate, you’re allowed to see every ballot in your race, minus the couple of handicapped ballot machines, for the people who vote on that. Last time we didn’t have that.
BB: None of that does any good if you go to Congress with your challenge and all the evidence, and they don’t even want to listen to you.
CURTIS: At minimum, we had prima facie evidence...if you have all these affidavits, and you go to court, that’s prima facie evidence, and you have a case. At a minimum, Congress could have done a walk just like we did and asked people. It’s not like we had to force (people to cooperate). People were quite willing to tell you how they voted. It’s very simple to do; it could have been done on a volunteer basis and still receive 80 to 90 percent participation. And they chose to bury it, which is kind of sad. They said, “We’re not going to do anything.” In Christine Jennings’ case [FL-13, where she lost by 369 votes in 2006, despite 18,000 votes disappearing on touch-screen machines in Sarasota,] they stretched it out for 16 months, and then finally rejected her challenge in February.
BB: I just cannot understand why the Democrats think this is good policy. Why constantly bury their heads in the sand? It can’t be good for them as a party, let alone the nation.
CURTIS: I think they think they can control it. They don’t like what we’re saying, so they’ll make us go away. And they’ll run a millionaire against us -- and they’ll run the advertising -- and their hook is, people are stupid enough that they’ll make it go away. If Kosmas gets elected, she won’t do anything about the war. She won’t do anything about voting. She won’t do anything about anything. She’ll vote with Pelosi.
BB: Let’s fast forward. You’re going against Kosmas in the primary for the Democratic nomination. When is the primary?
CURTIS: The primary is August 7th.
BB: Wow. So that’s a long time ‘til the primary, and not much time to prepare after that.
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