Video Testimonial: Computer Programmer Hired to Write Election Fixing Software

Oh it is going to be a great election this year – and forever. Computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis testifies in 2004 to the U.S. House Judiciary Members in Ohio:

Are there computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?

Yes.

How do you know that to be the case?

Because in October of 2000, I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]…

It would rig an election?

It would flip the vote, 51-49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.

And would that program that you designed, be something that elections officials… could detect?

They’d never see it.

Why bother with a dictatorship when democracy can be re-engineered.

Full transcript:

1 DIRECT EXAMINATION
2 BY MR. ARNABECK:
3 Q. Mr. Curtis, would you please state your full
4 name for the record.
5 A. Name is Clinton Eugene Curtis.
6 Q. And where do you reside?
7 A. Tallahassee, Florida.
8 Q. And what is your profession?
9 A. I am a computer programmer.
10 Q. Would you please speak into the microphone so
11 the audience can hear your testimony.
12 A. I am a computer programmer.
13 Q. Mr. Curtis, are there programs that can be
14 secretly used to fix elections?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. How do you know that to be the case?
17 A. Because in October of 2000, I wrote a
18 prototype for present Congressman Tom Feeney at the
19 company I worked for in Florida that did just that.
20 Q. And when you say did just that, it would rig
21 an election?
22 A. It would flip the vote 51/49 to whoever you
23 wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted it to
24 win.
25 Q. And would that program that you designed be
1 something that elections officials that might be on
2 county boards of elections could detect?
3 A. They’d never see it.
4 Q. Mr. Curtis —
5 REVEREND JACKSON: Ask that question again.
6 Q. Would you answer that question once again.
7 A. They would never see it.
8 Q. So how would such a program, a secret program
9 that fixes the election, how could it be detected?
10 A. You would have to view it either in the
11 source code or you would have to have a receipt and
12 then count the hard paper against the actual vote
13 total. Other than that, you won’t see it.
14 Q. All right. Mr. Curtis, if you had been
15 asked, you or others with your professional expertise
16 had been asked to design and protect a program that
17 would protect the Ohio elections against such software
18 to fix the election, could you have done so?
19 A. If we had been asked to make a program that
20 would fix the election? Sure, anybody could.
21 Q. No. Could you have designed a program or a
22 procedure or a protocol that would have protected Ohio
23 against this kind of rigging?
24 A. No. You have to look at the source code.
25 You have to get probably programmers from both or all
1 parties to look at the source code and determine if
2 there’s something in there that shouldn’t be there. I
3 mean, it’s a simple program. You’re adding one to a
4 person’s total. It’s a hundred lines of code, tops.
5 Q. All right. Are you aware of whether there
6 was any protective action in Ohio against this kind
7 of, quote, rigging through software?
8 A. I don’t know.
9 Q. You don’t know?
10 A. I don’t know.
11 Q. You were not asked to assist in that
12 development of any protective system; is that correct?
13 A. No, I was not.
14 Q. In your — have you reviewed at all the
15 election results in Ohio?
16 A. No, I haven’t.
17 Q. Okay. Given the availability of such vote
18 rigging software and the testimony that has been given
19 under oath of substantial statistical anomalies and
20 gross differences between exit polling data and the
21 actual tabulated results, do you have an opinion
22 whether or not Ohio election — the Ohio election,
23 presidential election was hacked?
24 A. Yes, I would say it was. I mean, if you have
25 exit polling data that is significantly off from the
1 vote, then it’s probably hacked.
2 Q. And your testimony is under oath?
3 A. Yes, sir.
4 Q. And the testimony you’ve given is true?
5 A. Yes, sir.
6 Q. Thank you.
7 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Congresswoman
8 Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.
9 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE TUBBS-JONES:
10 Congresswoman Waters and I have the same question.
11 Mr. Curtis, can you come back to the podium, please.
12 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Mr. Curtis, please
13 come back.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE TUBBS-JONES: Who did you
15 say you were asked to prepare?
16 MR. CURTIS: I was asked by Tom Feeney. He’s
17 now a Congressman. At that time, he was speaker of
18 the House in Florida, Yang Enterprises who to work for
19 lobbyists, and their corporate attorney. He wore a
20 lot of hats.
21 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE TUBBS-JONES: And at the
22 time, he was the speaker of the House of Florida, is
23 that what you’re saying?
24 MR. CURTIS: Yes.
25 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE TUBBS-JONES: Thank you.
1 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Congressman.
2 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Did you say he
3 was the lobbyist to the voting machine company at the
4 same time he was the speaker of the House?
5 MR. CURTIS: I don’t know what the voting
6 machine company is. He was a lobbyist for Yang
7 Enterprises. We had NASA contracts and —
8 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Yang Enterprises
9 is what, computers?
10 MR. CURTIS: Computers.
11 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Okay. And he
12 was your lobbyist, the lobbyist for that company?
13 MR. CURTIS: Yes.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: And he asked you
15 to design a — to design code to rig an election?
16 MR. CURTIS: Yes.
17 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: While he was the
18 speaker of the Florida House?
19 MR. CURTIS: Yes.
20 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: This is during
21 or previous to the 2000 election?
22 MR. CURTIS: Yes, October, end of
23 September.
24 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: And did he ever
25 say and why he wanted the code to rig an election?
1 MR. CURTIS: No. I immediately assumed that
2 they were trying to keep you guys from cheating on
3 them. So I wrote up the documentation of what you
4 would look for in the source code, how you would make
5 sure that you didn’t get taken advantage of, make sure
6 that all voting machines had receipts and that way you
7 could back count the ones that looked funny, and I
8 handed in —
9 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: By receipts, you
10 mean the paper trail?
11 MR. CURTIS: Yes, yes, paper trail. And I
12 handed that in to Mrs. Yang and said, here’s a report,
13 here’s your program. And she said, you don’t
14 understand, we need to hide the fraud in the source
15 code.
16 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Hide the fraud,
17 not reveal the fraud?
18 MR. CURTIS: Not reveal the fraud, because
19 it’s needed to control the vote in south Florida was
20 what she said.
21 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: That’s what she
22 said?
23 MR. CURTIS: That’s what she said.
24 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: To your
25 knowledge, was this used?
1 MR. CURTIS: I have no idea. I was ready to
2 leave, so — I was tired and left the company.
3 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: But your
4 testimony a moment ago, I think you said just before
5 you left in response to Stephanie Tubbs-Jones question
6 that — would you just repeat what you said in terms
7 of the exit polls.
8 MR. CURTIS: Oh, the exit polls should not be
9 significantly different than the vote.
10 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: And if they
11 were, you would conclude what?
12 MR. CURTIS: I would conclude someone is
13 playing with the vote.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Not with the
15 exit polls?
16 MR. CURTIS: That’s possible, too. Something
17 is definitely skewed.
18 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Something is
19 definitely skewed in one or the other?
20 MR. CURTIS: Right. To select which one,
21 you’d have to see where the problem is.
22 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Let me ask you
23 one further question. Assuming for the moment that
24 such software — that’s what called it, such software
25 to rig a vote was used in one or more machines in Ohio
1 or in Florida, could you, today, detect that if you’
2 looked at the source code?
3 MR. CURTIS: If you get the machines and they
4 have not been patched yet — once they get in and
5 touch them, anything can happen. You could also set
6 timers to do that, but then you’d see the timers.
7 Then you’d have to take those machines, decompile
8 them, which I couldn’t do, but possibly Microsoft, an
9 MIT something could do, you might, you might be able
10 to see it.
11 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: You might?
12 MR. CURTIS: It depends on how good they are
13 at destroying what they had.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Destroying what
15 they had by tampering with the machine afterwards or
16 by programming them to destroy instructions in the
17 first place?
18 MR. CURTIS: Right.
19 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Either or both?
20 MR. CURTIS: Either or both. You didn’t
21 actually see what’s in there, so you don’t know if the
22 code is running as a single executable or running in
23 various modules. If it’s running in modules, you can
24 make the code actually eat itself.
25 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Let me ask you
1 one further question. I have been told that people
2 who assume that lots of the election results, that a
3 large fraction of the election result within the state
4 may have been affected by deliberate fraud in the
5 computer are paranoid because, in order to do that,
6 you’d have to have access to thousands of machines and
7 then that would be readily detectable. To what extent
8 is that true?
9 MR. CURTIS: It depends on the technology
10 used. If you did a central tabulation machine that
11 fed in, all you’d have to do is set a flag. You set a
12 flag, a central tabulation machine would then flip
13 your vote.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: So one person
15 putting in bad code in a central tabulation machine
16 could affect thousands and thousands and tens of
17 thousands of votes?
18 MR. CURTIS: Right. And you could activate
19 it either automatically or you could make it so
20 there’s code existing on an obtomic machine that would
21 feed it, where you would punch it in, it would see the
22 flag, the server would see the flag and then —
23 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: And if you had a
24 recount and there was no data trail, would that be —
25 assuming that that had happened, would that be
1 reversible by seeing the discrepancy between the
2 tabulator, the central tabulator showed and what the
3 individual machines which had not been tampered with
4 showed?
5 MR. CURTIS: Not if I wrote it.
6 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Why not?
7 MR. CURTIS: I would make it match.
8 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: You could work
9 back to tabulate the individual machines so that the
10 tabulator could tell the machines to switch their
11 results?
12 MR. CURTIS: Yes. It talks both ways. You
13 can flip it to whatever you need.
14 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: And they
15 actually do talk to each other?
16 MR. CURTIS: Yes. As long as they’re hooked
17 up and networked together, they could copy each
18 other.
19 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: So in other
20 words, there’s absolutely no assurance whatsoever on
21 anything with regard to these machines?
22 MR. CURTIS: Absolutely none unless you look
23 at the source code and make sure it’s safe before it
24 goes in.
25 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Thank you very
1 much.
2 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Thank you, Congressman
3 Nadler. I know that Congresswoman Waters has a
4 question and then Senator Miller and then
5 Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.
6 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: This will only
7 take a moment. If you would, come back to the
8 podium.
9 MR. CURTIS: I’m new at this.
10 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: As you know,
11 there has been a lot of discussion about I think it
12 was Diebold company and their relationship to the
13 president and the administration and supposedly
14 comments about helping to ensure that the president
15 was reelected. In your world, in your environment,
16 have you heard any of these kind of discussions? Do
17 you know people from Diebold? Do you have any sense
18 of any actions that may have been taken?
19 MR. CURTIS: I don’t know anything about that
20 at all.
21 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: Thank you.
22 MR. CURTIS: I’m sorry.
23 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Senator Miller.
24 SENATOR MILLER: Thank you, Madam Chair.
25 Sir, I suspect people will attack you in
1 terms of your credibility. Could you restate, once
2 again, your credentials.
3 MR. CURTIS: I am a programmer. I worked for
4 NASA. I worked for Exxon/Mobil. I worked for the
5 Florida Department of Transportation.
6 And other elements of my story — because
7 this company — well, let’s get into it. Why not.
8 This company also, they have a NASA contract. And
9 they were basically downloading tons of information, I
10 mean gigabytes worth, and handing them off to this
11 little Chinese guy named Henry Nee. It didn’t seem
12 right and, you know, he was hacking things. And I
13 wrote a program for DOT that allowed contractors to
14 send their information into DOT, and he was kind of
15 the quality assurance guy for software. He put a wire
16 tapping module in the program that went out to the
17 contractors so that it actually sent everything they
18 sent back to Yang. So I reported all this. And just
19 last March, I think, he was arrested for attempting to
20 send an anti-tank missile chips to the capital of
21 Communist China. So if that’s correct, this is such a
22 small thing. Of course, I think he only got a $100
23 fine and no time.
24 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NADLER: Thank you.
25 COUNCILWOMAN TAVARES: Thank you.
1 Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.
2 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE TUBBS-JONES: No more
3 questions. Thank you.


Posted

in

, ,

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Video Testimonial: Computer Programmer Hired to Write Election Fixing Software”

  1. Donna Avatar
    Donna

    Well…Thank God all of us in Florida can put that hanging chad nonsense behind us. I feel soooo secure now that we have officially become a facist regime. That’s better living through technology baby. I mean come on. Now that Katherine Harris is having some credibility issues, is it so much of a leap to think that the woman appointed by the President elect’s brother, may have been instrumental in securing the 2000 election. Of course everyone’s going to claim they knew it all along, but what do I know I’m just an idiot from Florida who probably left her chad just hanging by a thread. So remind me why we couldn’t have just had a re-vote in 2000. Or why I couldn’t have a hard copy receipt? Just smile and say “Sieg Heil” everyone.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *