Posted on 12/20/2004 8:24:57 PM PST by Uncle Vlad
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.
Think there might be an agenda there on the part of the reporter?
If the software has already been written, they should pony up with it. Let's see it!!!!!
The Supervisors of Elections do not "program" the voting machines. They configure the machines within the constraints of the operating systems source code.
One way to change the vote totals would be as follows: The programmer builds in hidden routines during development of the source code that would allow manipulation of vote totals at a later time. These hidden routines could be in the form of multiple code fragments located in many different areas of the program. These fragments would not be documented thus making it very difficult for other programmers to understand the function of those fragments even if they had access to the source code.
Since the source code would not be available to the end users the Supervisors of Elections would never even see the code much less understand its true function. The hidden code would be constructed in such a way as to allow the manipulation of vote totals for any candidate in any location on the ballot. This would be necessary because many States require the positions of candidates to rotate on the ballot between precincts. In other words in some precincts candidate A is position 1 and in other precincts candidate B is in position 1 and A is in 2.
Remember the programmer is writing generic code that will be used for many different elections in different States thus he has to provide for manipulating the totals for any position on the ballot.
After the code is distributed to the end users the programmer can manipulate the vote totals in the following manner.
The programmer (or his flunkies) obtain fake voter registration in all precincts where they want to manipulate the votes. When he votes he marks the ballot in a way that no one would normally use.
For example he could mark every position on the ballot, for all candidates, except for the candidate that he wants to support, lets use candidate B for our example. The voting machine correctly rejects the ballot as being marked incorrectly and alerts the voter that he needs to recheck his ballot. This is normal operation for the machine but the hidden code has now been activated. The hidden code could tell the voting machine to shift 10% of candidate A's votes on that machine over to candidate B.
Now the person manipulating the vote totals completes his ballot in the normal correct method and moves on to the next precinct and his next fraudulent identity.
If the voting machine does not produce a paper ballot there is no way to detect the fraud.
Touch screen voting machines that do not produce a paper trail are an open invitation to fraud. If they haven't already been used to steal votes they certainly will be before long.
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