Last week there was a video making the rounds which showed a computer programmer testifying before the Ohio state legislature. It featured the attention-grabbing headline: “Programmer under oath admits computers rig elections!”
Oh boy – just the sort of thing to get we conservative tin-foil hat types all riled up about a stolen election.
The only problem was the video was from 2004. And the programmer claimed that he was approached by a Florida Republican to devise a way to electronically alter votes ~
Computer programmer Clinton Curtis testified at the December 13th, 2004 Congressional hearing in Columbus, Ohio naming Republican Congressman Tom Feeney as the person who hired him to prepare vote-rigging software.
The programmer claims that he designed and built a “vote rigging” software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida’s 24th Congressional District.
Clint Curtis, 46, claims that he built the software for Feeney in 2000 while working at a sofware design and engineering company in Oviedo, Florida (Feeney’s home district).
Was the guy telling the truth? Hard to say – Curtis strikes me as kind of smirky. And I don’t recall the case making national headlines, or anyone being prosecuted.
Two years after his testimony, and again in ’08, Curtis challenged Feeney for his U.S. congressional seat in Florida, losing by a fairly decent margin. In this last election cycle, he was running for U.S. rep in… California. So who knows?
But political affiliations and motivations notwithstanding, Curtis did raise the shady specter of election tampering. And that was eight long years ago – just consider the sophisticated technological advances since then…
Here’s a much more recent video that pretty much confirms the relative ease of flipping votes:
Roger Johnston works for Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Sounds like he has a job he loves; “Getting paid to break into things.”
The day before the election Popular Science published an online piece that Johnston had written titled: “How I Hacked An Electronic Voting Machine.” On the video and in the article he explains that rigging an electronic voting machines is practically child’s play.
I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.
Maybe not too easy for most of us non-techies – but it sure doesn’t appear to be very difficult for someone who’s into electronics.
And between the deceptive nature of most politicians, and the propaganda peddled by the mainstream media, you really don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to be awfully suspicious when an election that looked like a done deal for Republicans suddenly transforms into a Democrat win.
Related:
Polling Place Shenanigans – Expanded Version
