Bush stole the election...or whatever

jimtron,
I didn't read the whole article this time, but I've read it in the past. In my opinion, the "cleansing" system cost Gore enough votes to win the election. However, I reject the conspiratorial aspects of most articles, including Palast's, that I've read on the subject.

If I recall, the legislature of the State of Florida passed a law saying that the voter rolls had to be cleansed of felons, and they specified that a private company be hired to do the work. Katherine Harris, complying with the law, sent out for bids, and a Texas company got the job, and did it poorly. This cost Gore several hundred votes. Another unlucky break.

Of course, Republicans are more likely to want to purge felons from the voter rolls, because felons are more likely to vote Democratic, but beyond that, Harris et. al. really were just doing their jobs.

BTW, Davefoc is right about Gore's request. Gore supporters tried to put a good spin on his request, but Gore's initial recount request was phony and transparent. Let's count every vote, but only where it benefits me.
 
davefoc said:
And finally while I'm agreeing with people, I thought meadmaker was right about the butterfly ballot issue and I though Upchurch was right about the problems with the precision of the election.
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Although I hate to agree with people in the politics section, I think your summary re: Florida was correct, as well.
 
Meadmaker said:
Katherine Harris, complying with the law, sent out for bids, and a Texas company got the job, and did it poorly.
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From Palast's article:

Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to “scrub” from their list of voters.

But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list — the state of Texas.
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The state of Texas can't be responsible for how (the Atlanta-based) DBT Online (since merged into ChoicePoint) used the information bought here.
 
Are people seriously still obsessing over chads????

Really????

Really?????????

My thought is that if you are too incompetent to punch out a piece of paper correctly, you most likely are not educated on the issues and should probably NOT be voting in the first place.
 
I talked with my friend's grandmother just after the election. She lived in Coral Springs, FL...in Broward County. At that time, she voted for herself and her husband who had some old age/mental problem. She claimed that she accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan 2x instead of Gore. She found out because they said so on the tv.
 
firecoins said:
I talked with my friend's grandmother just after the election. She lived in Coral Springs, FL...in Broward County. At that time, she voted for herself and her husband who had some old age/mental problem. She claimed that she accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan 2x instead of Gore. She found out because they said so on the tv.
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Maybe they should work on the anonymity part of voting rather than concentrating on the mechanics. ;)

Aaron
 
sivazh said:
Are people seriously still obsessing over chads????

Really????

Really?????????

My thought is that if you are too incompetent to punch out a piece of paper correctly, you most likely are not educated on the issues and should probably NOT be voting in the first place.
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A few other have expressed a somewhat similar idea as well. I don't think people are obsessing over the hanging chads or any other aspect of the election in this thread. It looks pretty much like an academic discussion of the issues involved in the Florida 2000 presidential election to me.

As far as the uneducated voter issue deserving what they get, I sympathize with this view. I am not one that believes in all the get out the vote hoopla or the print the ballots in lots of different languages idea. If people aren't reasonably aware of the issues involved in an election I don't think there is much societal advantage to having them vote.

However, in the Florida election the issues didn't lend themselves to being resolved by simple slogans (even non PC slogans like yours). With regard to the hanging chad problem that you reference, the fact is that a certain percentage of ballots will not be able to be read unambiguously. It is conceivable and perhaps likely that some of those ambguous ballots will be produced even by voters that you would approve of. In a close election, it may not be possible to definitively determine a winner.

I have never lived in an area that has used a punch card system similar to the one used in Florida but I am old enough to have used punch cards for programming and I would say that the idea of using them for a voting system was a bad one. The cards were designed to be punched by machine and even when that was done misreads occurred and even non reads would occur as a card was skipped over entirely.
 
It won't let me post the link but there is testimony about vote rigging software... iwilltryit(dot)com/fixed1.htm

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).

Curtis, in his affidavit, says that as technical advisor and programmer at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) he was present at company meetings where Feeney was present "on at least a dozen occasions".

Feeney, who had run in 1994 as Jeb Bush's running-mate in his initial unsuccessful bid for Florida Governor, was serving as both corporate counsel and registered lobbyist for YEI during the period that Curtis worked at the company.
Feeney was also concurrently serving as a Florida state congressman while performing those services for YEI. Feeney would eventually become Speaker of the Florida House before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002. He is now a member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

At an October 2000 meeting with Feeney, according to the affidavit and BRAD BLOG interviews with Curtis over the past three days, Feeney inquired whether the company could build a "vote fraud software prototype".

At least three YEI employees are said to have been present at that meeting; Curtis, company owner, Mrs. Li Woan Yang, and her executive secretary, Mike Cohen. Two other YEI employees may have come in and out at different points of the meeting according to Curtis.

Curtis says that Feeney "was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program."

"He detailed, in his own words, that; (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment (c) the programming to accomplish this needed to stay hidden even if the source code was inspected."

Though there was no problem with the first two requirements, Curtis explained to the Congressman that it would be "virtually impossible to hide such code written to change the voting results if anyone is able to review the uncompiled source code"

Nonetheless, he was asked at the meeting by Mrs. Yang to build the prototype anyway.

Curtis, "a life-long Republican" at the time, claims that it was his initial belief that Feeney's interest was in trying to stop Democrats from using "such a program to steal an election". Curtis had assumed that Feeney, "wanted to be able to detect and prevent that if it occurred."

Upon delivery of the software design and documentation on CD to Mrs. Yang, Curtis again explained to her that it would be impossible to hide routines created to manipulate the vote if anybody would be able to inspect the precompiled source code.

Mrs. Yang then told him, "You don’t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida."

Mrs. Yang then took the CD containing the software from Curtis, reportedly for later delivery to Feeney.

In other meetings with Feeny prior to the 2000 elections, it became clear to Curtis that Feeney had plans to suppress the vote in strong Democratic precincts. In the affidavit, Curtis claims that in those meetings Feeney had "bragged that he had already implemented 'exclusion lists' to reduce the 'black vote'." Feeney also mentioned that "proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%."

Curtis says that he submitted his resignation to YEI effective December 2000, but stayed on until they had found someone to replace him in February of 2001. He eventually became employed by the Florida Dept. of Transportation (FDOT) after leaving YEI.
 
Drew said:
It won't let me post the link but there is testimony about vote rigging software... iwilltryit.com/fixed1.htm
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Interesting, thanks. Here it is on youtube.

I wonder if Feeney was investigated....

Add: Truth is stranger than fiction. Curtis is running against Feeney for congress. wiki
 
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I listened to the whole video.

My cut at this is that there was very little surprising or interesting that any computer literate person wouldn't have known.

The only thing that was weird was that he was actually engaged to write such a program for the speaker of the Florida House. So now the question is why did the speaker request that the program be written and was the program used for any purposes.

He also said that he thought based on the discrepancy between exit polling data and actual election results that the Ohio election was hacked. This conclusion sounded like something that was outside of his area of expertise. I think the testimony of statisticians and polling experts would be more informative on this issue.

Of course none of this has to do directly with the 2000 Florida election.
 
NoZed Avenger said:
We may have ruined the entire politics section with agreement.




. . . is it too late to get the secton back on track by viciously defaming Upchurch?
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Not to worry, it looks like all this agreement is just an anamoly. I see that Mycroft had some not nice things to say about my approach in another thread. It appears that this momentary bubble of agreement in the politics section may already be fading away.
 
davefoc said:
I listened to the whole video.

My cut at this is that there was very little surprising or interesting that any computer literate person wouldn't have known.

The only thing that was weird was that he was actually engaged to write such a program for the speaker of the Florida House. .....
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I read a bit more about this and I must admit, I hate it when this happens.

Either Curtis is telling something incredibly important, or Curtis is a nut case.

The reason I'm saying I hate it when this happens is I have spent a lot of time investigating sensational claims, only to find that the claimant was basically a nut case. I'm a bit skeptical at this point.

Here's a sticking point for me: Curtis is saying that a high ranking Republican asked him to write vote-rigging software in 2000, and in the midst of an election drama in which the Presidency rested on some dimpled chads, no one would listen to his claims. Or, is he saying he didn't actually start making his claims until later?

The bottom line for me is that I believe the vast majority of people in the United States would strenuously object to real, genuine, vote fraud. When I say vote fraud, I mean actually making up votes, or actually destroying real votes. Dirty tricks, such as voter intimidation, are a different story. Ohio had lots of those in 2004. However, I think most Americans would draw the line at actually modifying vote totals. Furthermore, when I say vast majority, I mean damned near everyone. I mean that it is so out of character with American perceptions of themselves that any conspiracy to change vote totals in an election would have to be the work of a very small and very secret group, because almost every single person in America would treat such a thing as something akin to treason. Maybe I'm naive about that, but I know that you couldn't pay me enough to write software to change vote totals. If I thought you were doing it as an exercise, even, I'd make sure, and I'd keep a paper trail. Wouldn't you?

So I'm left with two options. Either I acknowledge that my whole perception of people in general and Americans in particular is wrong, or I suspect that some software engineer is exaggerating the significance of his place in history. I'm open minded. Talk me into it. However, the latter explanation is a bit more believable to me, until further notice.
 
Meadmaker said:
I read a bit more about this and I must admit, I hate it when this happens.

Either Curtis is telling something incredibly important, or Curtis is a nut case.

The reason I'm saying I hate it when this happens is I have spent a lot of time investigating sensational claims, only to find that the claimant was basically a nut case. I'm a bit skeptical at this point.
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Same here across the board. And it doesn't exactly clarify things that he's running for congress against Feeney, which is odd no matter the facts.

I expected to be able to quickly google articles debunking Curtis, but my hasty effort didn't reveal anything of this nature except for counter-claims from Feeney.
 
Thanks for the YouTube link varwoche. You're absolutely right truth is stranger than fiction.

I just typed out a longer response but something happened and it didn't go through and I really don't want to type the whole thing out again. LOL

BUT...

I believe it's dangerous when people just pass off these types of things as someone being a nutcase. If whistleblowers can't feel comfortable coming forward then how many will just keep it to themselves?

How many Americans would really stand up to this type of thing? There were clearly problems with the last two elections but nothing really was done.

HR 6166 has basically shred the Bill of Rights and there doesn't seem to be too many people that are too concerned as long as they have their Starbucks.

Most people don't change their lifestyle until they have a heart attack. If it doesn't have a dramatic effect on their life most won't bother to change something.

Every scandal can't be debunked.
 
Drew said:
Thanks for the YouTube link varwoche. You're absolutely right truth is stranger than fiction.

I just typed out a longer response but something happened and it didn't go through and I really don't want to type the whole thing out again. LOL

BUT...

I believe it's dangerous when people just pass off these types of things as someone being a nutcase. If whistleblowers can't feel comfortable coming forward then how many will just keep it to themselves?

How many Americans would really stand up to this type of thing? There were clearly problems with the last two elections but nothing really was done.

HR 6166 has basically shred the Bill of Rights and there doesn't seem to be too many people that are too concerned as long as they have their Starbucks.

Most people don't change their lifestyle until they have a heart attack. If it doesn't have a dramatic effect on their life most won't bother to change something.

Every scandal can't be debunked.
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Any more platitudes, or did you finally run out?

Curtis' testimony is of interest. Is there corroborating testimony from others in the company working on this project? QC, peer review, other programmers?

DR
 
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