An edition of Voice of the Voters that includes news of the opposite fates in committee of two relevant House bills. There is also an interview of Clint Curtis, once a computer programmer, since then a whistleblower, and now a candidate for the U.S. Congress in Florida, for the second time. Against whom is he running? The infamous Tom Feeney. Read on for more.

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2 April 2008: No Foolin’, but Helpless, Helpless, Helpless

The day after April Fool’s Day was no laughing matter for two congressional committees voting on voting bills.  The Universal Right to Vote by Mail, HR 281, was passed by the House Administration Committee, so that those who wish to vote absentee—that is, on paper ballots—won’t have to lie anymore.

      So while Representative Susan Davis, who sponsored the bill, had cause to celebrate, HR 5036, Representative Rush Holt’s emergency bill that would reimburse any municipality that chose to opt out of touchscreen voting in favor of  paper ballots, passed out of the Committee on House Administration adulterated. Now, instead of providing for paper ballots, the bill will authorize hooking touchscreen machines up to printers, a measure that has caused so much trouble in New Jersey that an effort has mounted to postpone implementation until after election 2008.

     And even with “evidence” of who or what you have voted for, visible on paper rolling out of the printer, many voters forget to look. The concept is new. Think about it. We just flipped some levers, pulled a great big handle and presto the curtain opened and our vote was cast. Old habits die hard.

     Personally, I voted on an absentee ballot in DC last month, giving the reason that I wanted to vote on paper. I got it.

     If I had my way, we would never grow old, and Edwards, my candidate, would already be sparring with McCain and besting him hands-down.

     Back to John Gideon’s appearance on Voice of the Voters, broadcast Wednesday evenings from 8 to 9 on Renaissance Radio in South Jersey. He packed a lot into the program’s final five minutes.

     At that point my sound system was crackling, so I had to go to his daily newsletter to figure out what he actually said, but in other news, New Jersey’s problematic Sequoia touchscreens will finally be examined by Princeton University expert Ed Felten, famous for hacking into a touchscreen in less than a minute. Oh, the palace of lies erected by the touchscreen universe is collapsing like a sand castle attacked by high tide.

      But not yet in Pennsylvania, where VoV host Mary Ann Gould said that 25 percent of all the touchscreens in the nation are located. She urged all Pennsylvanians to vote and report any problems they experience. She mentioned two Web sites in this context: www.voteraction.org and www.voiceofthevoters.org. Pennsylvania is the state most at risk in the country, with no way to prove who voted for whom in most counties.

     Why is New Jersey, flooded also with touchscreens, less at risk? I figured this out myself. It’s not a swing state, leaning rather toward the blue most of the time.

      Having reported what I found most newsworthy this evening, I cannot bypass a rising star who was interviewed first, Clint Curtis. You have probably heard of him. A head programmer for Yang Industries in Florida, he was approached in 2000 by Ed Feeney, then the company’s chief lobbyist, to design a program for him that would apportion 49 percent of a given vote to one candidate and 51 percent to the other.

      Thinking Feeney was trying to prevent election fraud instead of invent the phenomenon of vote flipping, Clint produced the program. He next became a famous whistle blower, when he found out the real motive behind the requests by Feeney, who had since then become a Congressman in Florida.

       Clint took his case to Congress after Florida 2000, but the audience he aimed for shied away uneasily despite the overwhelming evidence.

     Today thanks to the efforts of some enlightened Republicans, Florida’s touchscreens are being hauled off to the junkyard in favor of optical scanners. But it’s not that easy to rid this nation of vote flipping. A programmer can set the percentages of victory and defeat in a touchscreen, said Clint. A programmer can activate the flip surrounded by a “lay” audience that would not suspect anything amiss.

     What happens on the screen doesn’t have much to do with what’s going on inside, he said.

     Mary Ann said that it’s time for the people to speak up. Abraham Lincoln said it better, she said, warning that one’s back to the fire will only occasion pain in the buttocks—something like that only, as I said, Abe said it better.

     And these Pennsylvanians then shifted to the impasse in Bucks County, where two of the three commissioners refuse to hear the incontrovertible evidence that they may as well vote by scratching on a pebble as on a Danaher 1242. With its dumb terminal and dependence on a central server, it represents the worst of all voting systems, said Clint.

     This scenario is worse than precinct-based tabulation, he said. With 90 percent of votes in Pennsylvania now paperless, there is no way to know if any of them is worth a scratch on a pebble, and this plight in a swing state could rock the nation, as did Florida and Ohio most famously.

     In a Lincoln-esque mood, Mary Ann called this situation “faith-based elections.”

     The power is with the programmers, not with the people, continued Clint. The commissioners really have nothing to worry about broken voting-machine seals, he said. First you perform an accuracy test and run the tapes and then seal the whole thing up. Magnets and power surgers . . . anything can affect the touchscreens.

     Remember the machines in North Carolina that reached a certain total and then began counting backwards? The fault was in the program—the wrong one was used. The backward-counted votes could be interpreted as undervotes also, Clint answered to Lori Rosolowsky’s question.

     And, back to Bucks County, where the two Republican commissioners argue that a paper trail resides inside their Danahers, Clint explained that a computer won’t generate a log—people do. The programmer owns every component of the voting system.

     An internal hack is worse than an external one, continued Clint. On a Danaher, the virus will attack the server. External hacks are performed with the network card, the famous black-box skullduggery.

       Helpless, helpless, helpless—remember that old sixties song? We must show up at the polls in stampeding proportions—united we stampede?

     Is the conclusion of the evening that the fate of the nation lurks within the brains and preferences of computer programmers?

     Not exactly. The power is still, somewhere, with the people, dormant and quiet as Mary Ann calls her home state. The truth will need some buckshot to emerge from this ethical swamp in the Buckeye State.

     This is the time, then, not to mourn for HR 5036, but to get everyone to vote absentee, I say. If the ballots get hacked, the hackers will have a hard time of it with all the election protection united against them. There will be mountains of paper ballots. We can distribute stamps. We can go door to door. We can fight racism and discrimination, as usual.

     But there’s no time to waste on tears right now, but think of the paper mountains and what a boost not only USPS will receive, but all of us, back to paper at last. Helpless, helpless, helpless let the opposition be, for a change, and stay that way.

©

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.