Video of programmer’s testimonyabout rigging Vote Counting Machines

Did you see this video?

YouTube description:

Clinton Eugene Curtis testified under oath, before the Ohio State legislature, that he wrote a program to rig elections. This program would flip the total vote from the real winner to the candidate who had been pre-selected to win by the electronic vote counting machines….

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35 Comments

  1. frahobbit says:

    Wasn’t this already handled in 2000 and in 2008?

  2. LisaP. says:

    This was after the Bush election, right?

    It seems to me blatantly obvious that the system is so large and complex that guaranteeing honest voting is impossible.

    I hope that means it is so large and complex that rigging voting is impossible. But if you note the huge pause after President Obama’s reelection campaign was announced in the conservative media, I think the thought was crossing everyone’s mind simultaneously, and we all made a collective decision not to go there. The discrepancy between conservative expectation and results was huge.

  3. iPadre says:

    It’s time for election reform. Nation wide ID and voting system that can’t be monkeyed with.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylAknbSh8M4&feature=youtu.be

  4. Thom says:

    This is one of the reasons I don’t bother voting in national elections anymore. You can’t believe the results. Furthermore, no matter who “wins,” we lose.

  5. LisaP. says:

    Sorry, President Obama’s reelection, not his reelection campaign.
    Decaf doesn’t serve me well.

  6. wmeyer says:

    I hope that means it is so large and complex that rigging voting is impossible.

    As a software developer, I am sorry to say that rigging a machine would be much easier than guaranteeing that a) it is not rigged, and b) its software is free from errors, either intentional or unintentional.

    There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. — Alan J. Perlis

  7. AnnAsher says:

    @Thom, I agree with your perspective. It is why I didn’t vote based on who the media told me had the steam to win. I voted only because I found a candidate whom I could vote for considering God was watching. If I hadn’t heard of and researched Virgil Goode in the 11th hour, my vote would have been a write in for Jesus Himself. I don’t believe our vote counts in national elections; it only counts in that God is watching. I view abstaining from voting as a valid and noble option.

  8. AnnAsher says:

    “Still, was there not one contrarian voter in those 59 divisions, where unofficial vote tallies have President Obama outscoring Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0?”
    Almost 20K votes and not one for Romney or another 3rd party? We think that’s legit?
    http://mobile.philly.com/news/?wss=/philly/news/politics/&id=178742021&viewAll=y#more
    Philadelphia isn’t the only place reporting strangely, just sayin’

  9. LisaP. says:

    wmeyer, love the quote.

    Totally believe you.

  10. pmullane says:

    I’ve got to say I do find the movement towards purely electronic voting methods dangerous in the extreme. It does leave the ability to ‘rig’ votes in the hands of a very few people with very sophisticated knowledge that your ordinary man on the street would find very difficult to notice. So long as there are no ‘freak’ results that cause suspicion, why would anyone even question a result in a close race? It must be dead easy to write a program that keeps candidate A’s total 5% higher than candidate b’s. And with the amount of money involved in (especially american) elections, I cant believe that noone will every try to steal an election this way.

    Whilst imperfect, a verifyable mark on a recountable ballot that can be traced to a voter number is by far a more effective way of conducting an election process.

  11. Imrahil says:

    Why have electronic voting at all?

    Even if it were not true that paper and counting on hand by arbitrarily chosen people placed under an oath and supervised by other people placed under oath is safer…

    voting is one of the highly symbolic, in a secular sense sacramental happenings in a nation’s life. You just do not want electronics there, just as little as you want voting by e-mail even if it is digitally signatured e-mail; just as little as you want to replace candles by mercury lamps when it comes to a dinner with your heart’s beloved. Even voting by letter, you accept only with a grudge because otherwise too many would lose the possibility of voting.

    You want a voting that is preceded and followed by the traditional going-to-vote walk, done by writing a cross on a paper, on one Election Day which outside the United States is needs a Sunday. That’s what we want for voting.

    (Forgive my repeatedly advertising Continental ways of doing things.)

  12. LisaP. says:

    Imrahil,
    Because they didn’t ask me. ;)
    Also didn’t ask me which guys I should be run for president this year — 300 million people and we get less than 10 viable options? Which shakes down to 2 viable options?
    All of this is pretty hinky stuff, I guess, so why should electronic voting be any less a suspension of disbelief?

  13. The Masked Chicken says:

    I think everyone who votes should be strapped to a table and have Truth Serum injected into them. I say, let the CIA handle the whole thing :)

    The Chicken

  14. frjim4321 says:

    Thank you for keeping a very important story alive.

    Also very much related is Karl Rove’s probable murder by sabotage of a repubican operative who was scheduled to testify in the vote rigging of the Ohio and Florida 2004 election returns.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Connell

  15. wmeyer says:

    Voting methods all seem to have problems. Everyone seems intent on getting immediate results.
    – punch cards suffer hanging chads
    – mark/sense cards can be smudged
    – electronic machines can be hacked
    – online — don’t even think of it

    In California, they used mark/sense cards with special felt pens. Seemed to work fine. But I am no expert.

  16. frjim4321 says:

    wm and frjim agreeing again . . . Armageddon approacheth?

    The perceived need for immediate results works against the notion of a careful and precise process.

    That being said, a delay of several days as we saw in Florida certainly calls their process into question.

  17. David Zampino says:

    Three quick points related to the topic but not necessarily to each other!

    1) Call me old-fashioned, but I’m all in favor of paper ballots which are hand-counted with observers by each party present. We know that the old mechanical voting booths could be tampered with (Texas in 1960?); how much more the electronic system. Will it take time? Sure! But honestly? Not THAT much time! Even in a large ward, counting a few thousand ballots could be done in only a couple of hours.

    2) I understand the frustration of not having a national candidate one likes. But according to paragraph #2240 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, voting is a moral obligation.

    3) I also understand the frustration with the two-party system. It seems that the only thing that the two parties agree upon is that nobody else should be allowed at the table. (My personal belief, for what it is worth, is that any party which can gain ballot access in enough states to THEORETICALLY win the Electoral College should be allowed to participate in the Presidential debates. That would certainly make things interesting!)

    That being said, the system is what it is — not what we’d like it to be. I have no issue with someone who wishes to make a “protest vote” in a state which is wildly blue or wildly red. It does make a point. However, I do have an issue with someone making such a decision in a close election or in a “swing” state, especially when the stakes are extremely high and the choice is between an imperfect candidate and an imperfect party, and a candidate and party which openly and unabashedly support intrinsic evil.

    Just my three cents worth . . .

  18. wmeyer says:

    In software development, we often refer to “code smells.” It’s a way of saying something is probably wrong in the way a thing has been written. It seems to me that there were a number of smells in the recent election. One was the stories of people voting for Romney, and the machine displaying Obama. (the problem may also have manifested in the other polarity, but I haven’t heard about it.) Another was the stories of hours-long lines in early voting AND in election day voting. It has not been so long since we did all the voting on one day–what has changed so radically?

    I’m not drawing any conclusions, but these need to be investigated.

  19. Thom says:

    David Zampino: The CCC does not say that one must vote in every election, and it seems to presume genuine elections and not fraudulent ones as we have here in the U.S.

  20. RJHighland says:

    I think there is a simple way to solve this fraud issue. You use electronic polling, after voting the machine posts your vote in the system and two paper reciepts are printed. The voter reviews paper ballot reciepts, retains one and turns the other over to the polling station. Have exit polling at each voting station. If there are abnormalities detected by exit polling the electronic vote can be verified by the reciepts retainted by polling station. Also you have the quick vote count wanted by computer systems. I think both parties are guilty of vote fraud, I just think the democrates are better at it.

  21. Philangelus says:

    @AnnAsher, re: {{“Still, was there not one contrarian voter in those 59 divisions, where unofficial vote tallies have President Obama outscoring Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0?”}}

    Shouldn’t it be possible to find even one person who voted for Romney or a third party? You’d think those people would speak up and ask where their vote went.

  22. Clinton says:

    Several weeks ago one regular commenter here caused a stir by accusing the Republican
    party of plotting voter suppression in the presidential election. The results of the election
    would seem to show that his accusations were unfounded.

    However, national and local news outlets are alive with reports of voting fraud/ suspicious
    totals/ turnout exceeding the number of registered voters. In the swing state of Pennsylvania,
    59 voting districts reported not a single vote for Romney. (Even Robert Mugabe had the
    decency to throw the ‘opposition’ a token percentage or two when stealing an election!)
    In Ohio, Obama received over 106,000 votes in one county that has only ~98,000 registered
    voters. The litany goes on and on…

    I agree with frjim4321 that voter suppression is a huge issue in this recent election, and
    therefore it will be a huge issue in the 2014 mid-term. It’s just that it obviously wasn’t the
    Republicans who were doing it.

  23. Clinton says:

    @Philangelus/Ann Asher: In the matter of those 59 Philadelphia voting divisions, for Obama
    to have carried the unanimous votes of all 19,605 cast there would have also to have been no
    human error or miscast votes among his supporters. Statistically likely?

  24. wmeyer says:

    You use electronic polling, after voting the machine posts your vote in the system and two paper reciepts are printed. The voter reviews paper ballot reciepts, retains one and turns the other over to the polling station.

    Not bad, but I think three printed receipts are needed. The third stays on a roll in a special printer, but contains the votes for each voter, with their receipt ID#. This third receipt, which would be machine readable, can later be scanned as a cross-check on the electronically stored counts. The voting machine should also display the tally from this receipt for the voter to approve against his own printout.

    One advantage to this approach is that multiple devices (read: multiple software apps and multiple developers) are involved, and this makes the tampering more difficult to manage.

    In the end, there is only one hard verification: the receipt the voter holds, matched to the receipt he gave to the election official, and after that was verified by that official, should then have been dropped directly into a vault.

    Think it through, however, and none of this is truly proof against tampering. It simply makes it more difficult.

  25. Veronica says:

    All this looks too similar to what happened in Venezuelan Presidential elections… “Supossedly” there were counties where the Opposition candidate did not get a single vote. Hard to believe after the massive demonstrations on the streets. There are several stories of people that is denouncing a fraud. Now I see the same sort of thing happening in the USA. And I saw on the news during my lunch break that there are some groups now advocating to implement the same voting system that we have in Venezuela and in Russia… talk about rigged machines! *smh*

  26. Desertfalcon says:

    You know, I told friends who just couldn’t believe that, “the worst president in history” (The standard phrase.), would be reelected, that I thought he would be. I also told them that due to the bizarre cosmic rabbit hole of birth certificates, Fox News, and conspiracies that is working hard to destroy the intellectual tradition of the conservative movement, that I bet, (long, long, before the first vote was counted), that when the President won there would be a storm of viral e-mails and stories about how the election was stolen and it’s all part of a wider conspiracy. I voted for Mr. Romney, as I have voted the straight GOP ticket in about every election for decades but this stuff is not helping us, it’s hurting us. We did not lose because of a rigged election and if we did, we need to find out why all those Republican Secretaries of State in so many swing states (Ohio, Florida, Colorado, etc.-all GOP.), are part of the wider conspiracy to keep Mr. Obama in power. They were totally responsible for the conduct of elections in their state and they have certified them to have been fair and accurate in their count. No, we lost because the country has demographically changed as well as the society and that is just the facts. My party adopted the “southern strategy” in 1968 that worked successfully for 40 years. It’s over. Time for a re-think.

  27. How about this suggestion for Archbishop Chaput:

    If there’s a Catholic church located in any of those Philly precincts that voted unanimously for Obama, then close it, for the reason that there evidently are no real Catholics in that precinct.

  28. frjim4321 says:

    Henry Edwards says:
    14 November 2012 at 1:53 pm

    How about this suggestion for Archbishop Chaput:

    If there’s a Catholic church located in any of those Philly precincts that voted unanimously for Obama, then close it, for the reason that there evidently are no real Catholics in that precinct.

    Double Take!

    The first time I read that I thought he had actually said that! Then I thought even he wouldn’t be that foolish . . . then on second read I saw that it was just a tongue-in-cheek suggestion.

  29. wmeyer says:

    Henry makes a good point. And I think, not in jest.

  30. If I thought that these unanimous precinct votes had been accurately and honestly reported, then I would indeed wonder whether those precincts contained any faithful practicing Catholics.

    However–given the vagaries of human behavior and the impossibility of thousands casting the same vote even if that is their intent (since some will inevitably pull an unintended lever)–so I know that these unanimous precinct totals are just as certainly fraudulent as one in which the number of votes recorded exceeds the number of voters.

    Otherwise, the only explanation would be that every faithful Catholic voter mistakenly voted for Obama despite his or her intent to vote conscientiously for Romney, but none of the thousands of Obama voters mistakenly voted for Romney. So the search for an explanation other than outright fraud gets more and more absurd, the further you pursue it.

  31. wmeyer says:

    …and let us not forget the precinct in which 108% of registered voters actually voted.

  32. frjim4321 says:

    wmeyer says:
    14 November 2012 at 6:20 pm

    …and let us not forget the precinct in which 108% of registered voters actually voted.

    Think we should bring this to the attention of the ACLU for a full investigation.

  33. Lisa Graas says:

    The video in this post appears to be from a Congressional hearing examining the possibility of election fraud in Florida when George Bush was re-elected in 2004.

    One problem we run into in such things is that neither party wants to hold itself accountable.

  34. PA mom says:

    Fraud is always possible. Having been in the business of hunting and preventing fraud I stumbled across a statistic that 85% of people can talk themselves into committing fraud. For their own benefit, someone close to them, due to the sense of having been cheated, the greater good, whatever it is, we humans are a rather shady group.
    This is why things like voter ID and election monitors are important, not so much for “catching”, it is discouragement of vice. Stats are helpful too, the 140% turnout in Rep Wests district is a fairly clear sign of tampering. I am glad to see the RNC support of his case. The Democrats should be ashamed of the silence of their Party in these matters. There is not even a surface support for the rule of law, and I wish they would be called on it.
    Still, best not to get too worked up about these things. Get involved, ask your representatives, push for appropriate laws, and whatever will be will be.

  35. SKAY says:

    frjim said-
    “Think we should bring this to the attention of the ACLU for a full investigation.”

    They would already be investigating on their own if Obama had lost. In fact they probably would have already found enough ballots who knows where to turn the election.They are not at all interested in changing anything now.

    “Otherwise, the only explanation would be that every faithful Catholic voter mistakenly voted for Obama despite his or her intent to vote conscientiously for Romney, but none of the thousands of Obama voters mistakenly voted for Romney. So the search for an explanation other than outright fraud gets more and more absurd, the further you pursue it”

    Exactly

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