Murder at Florida motel, an Iran-Contra arms merchant, illegal aliens at NASA, a prototype vote rigging machine and other Exciting Tales

Its the middle of finals time, and I was delayed in putting this post together for the better part of the week. Here it is, hodgepodgy and overgrown with intrigue...

Now, kiddos, it's back to tinfoil hat land for another installment of Tracking Election Irregularities, and we've got some great tales tonight. Sit back and hear of the prototype vote hacking machine that a Florida congressman allegedly ordered built, and hear more about offshore banking—and how the CIA may be so angry about Bush's purges that they're revealing some of the parapolitical financial arrangements used to finance their schemes.

(A quick note: breaking the programmer story caused the BradBlog site to get overwhelmed with internet traffic, so it got bumped over to BradBlogtoo.blogspot.com for now. more below...)

Do not assume these stories are credible. First, take them as examples of the kinds of ways the world might work. Then look at it as audacious journalism. Then, and only then, should you start on the what-ifs. and there are a lot of what-ifs tonight. Smoke the pipe of conspiracy, and get high on its strands of intrigue... Damn it, I'm feeling pretentious tonight.

First item for the hodgepodge: A contributing writer, Larisa Alexandrovna, at a site called RAW STORY (reposted by BlueLemur) found a couple news story references to 21 voting machines in good old Broward County, Florida getting rolled out of polling sites—after several days of voting—and possibly back to some local voting administration center. Apparently these machines may have been recalled because they showed the wrong votes for buttons touched. (story via DailyKos diary)

The RAW STORY writer's catch is that there ought to be some kind of chain of custody for these machines, and we ought to be able to find out what their serial numbers were, if they did exist. How many votes might be recovered from such machines? Were they wildly statistically skewed for Bush, as many other errors have been?

Who knows? Either way, she tried to pester the AP wire journalist that wrote the original story, who said they were "moving on." The Miami Herald doesn't seem to care much either. In the end, she had to post this story, incomplete, another frustrated path on the quest to find out what happened within the Black Boxes.

“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”

This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.

I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?

This brief mention in the AP was all I could immediately find. Documented in an article entitled “State lauds performance of touch-screen machines; critics uncertain,” other voting irregularities were briefly mentioned with the same terse detail. These references are delivered as a matter of fact, as if most of us should know that large-scale voting glitches occur and are corrected instantaneously.

How then are we to correct these issues for future elections? I wondered.

After some thought, I contacted an Associated Press editor not involved with the Nov. 4 article, who quickly dismissed me as “paranoid,” though I neither discussed the outcome of the election or commented on anything other than the 21 machines allegedly removed in Broward County.

NOW let's throw in some more colorful tales about these very sorts of tech specialists. This story is caroming around the Internet because, well, it's a darn good one. If, hypothetically, you were spoofing an election, you would need to pay off a lot of technical specialists, and for that matter, you would need source code designed to be compiled into voting machines that could manipulate the numbers. (Daily Kos :: Sworn affadavit: vote-rigging prototype developed for FLA congressman)

Fortunately, some programmer dude has surfaced claiming that a Florida Republican congressman paid him to make this code back in 2000, and now he's pissed about it. This story stretches off into all kinds of bizarre directions. The programmer has a website, JustAFlyOnTheWall.com.

Another election held and another election stolen. In 2000 Bush stole the election by restricting the ability to vote by those people most likely to vote against him. The abuses were wide spread and the Democrats and other groups that believe in each individuals right to vote put together an impressive attempt to make sure that every individual that wanted to vote would not be turned away. Everywhere you went there was booths where new voters could register. Celebrities in commercials were urging voters to get out and vote. Poll watchers were placed in polling stations across the country to guarantee that every voter would not be turned away on any technicality.

What these well meaning groups failed to account for was that they were defending the 2000 election fixing plan and not taking into account that this election would be decided not by voters but by the rise of technology. Every one might be allowed to vote but their vote, and your vote made no difference at all. The programmers had already decided who would win and by how much.

Prior to this election I personally sent out information to the media which should have been provided to the electorate. It was not. The biggest turnout in history had no chance to win this election or any other unless the programmers of the voting machine allowed it. I believe they will allow it less and less as the machines control the elections and the Republicans control the machines.

This is not speculation. It is not a rant designed to make the losers feel better. I speak from first hand information and unless people stand up and act, democracy in this country is ended.

While employed at Wong Enterprises, Congressman Feeney had requested if Wong could write a voting program that could alter the vote and be undetectable. As the technology advisor, I explained that as long as the source code was provided and complied under supervision, code which altered the vote and was undetectable could not be built. Another problem would be that no one would trust a program that provided for no paper trail to substantiate its accuracy. When the vote was flipped the paper trail could easily detect the fraud.

This request was early in my exposure to Congressman Feeney, so I was not familiar with what a total piece of crap he truly was. My assumption was that he was worried that the other side (the Democrats) would introduce voting machines which could manipulate the vote. Mrs. Wong volunteered that we (meaning me) could put together a quick prototype that he could view and show others.

I have recreated that prototype and posted it at http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefraudprogram.htm. It is essentially the same code that I built for the vote fraud demo for Congressman Feeney. You will notice that by clicking on the correct hidden spots on the screen, the vote will flip so that the Republican candidate will receive fifty one percent of the vote. The hot spots make it possible to flip the vote as often as necessary yet it will never fire accidentally so as to avoid detection. My prototype was actually very simplistic. The actual sequence to flip the vote could be as complex as the programmer wished or even to operate automatically. In cases when the Republican is already leading, the vote is left as is. I built the program to demonstrate that with proper supervision that the election machines would be safe. The code would not be able to be hidden.

The next day I complete the prototype and presented it to Mrs. Wong. I stressed how the tampering could be detected. She quickly set me straight as the to true intention. Her exact words were "If we can’t hide the manipulation, we won’t get the contract the program is needed to control the south Florida vote." Another confirmation of why I needed to get a different job. I would not build something that would defraud every voter in this country. Even better, I knew that as long as the election supervisors used proper computer procedures, no one else would or could either.

What I did not anticipate was that this country would allow the placement of voting machines where the source code was not provided. The programs were pre-compiled (you have no idea what is in them or what hidden triggers exist), and where no paper trail would be required to check their accuracy. Any moron could build a voting program that could flip the vote under those circumstances and no amount of testing could discover the deception.

The plausibility of the idea of this vote hacking software has been basically confirmed.

There are two main branches to the story. BradBlog has a more circumscribed look at it, having interviewed the dude in question a couple times, and offering a PDF version of his sworn affadavit that Congressman Feeley paid him to write the software.

Then, on the other hand, mysterious investigator Wayne Madsen writing on OnlineJournal.com has asserted that this is just an element of a complex scheme involving offshore banks tied to Iran-Contra schemer and Richard Perle's dinner friend (as Sy Hersh reported) Adnan Khashoggi. Madsen's exciting claim is that the CIA is really pissed off that the Bushites are trying to purge their agency, so CIA partisans have deliberately chosen to reveal part of their sketchy shadow finance network in an effort to smoke the Bushes. And they're showing this network to.... taa-daa, Wayne Madsen.

In other words, let me restate. I am not asserting that the above two paragraphs are true. In fact, Madsen's writings, the last round which I posted earlier, seem to fit like puzzle pieces into a classic paranoid conspiracy tale, like an Iran-Contra projected forward into our present context. It all sounds a little too slick to me so far. Nevertheless, I always enjoy a good baroque conspiracy yarn, and this one doesn't disappoint.

The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.

An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.

According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.

According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.

Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.

In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."

CANNONFIRE: Exposed: Funding vote fraud -- a "five star" investigation Digests the Wayne Madsen story. Don't know who Cannonfire is, but they are following along further.

OffshoreBusiness.com has got interesting stuff on the shadow financing.

More from Bob Fitrakis in Ohio. Suppression: STEALING VOTES IN OHIO URBAN AREAS. what happened in Columbus, Ohio?

Minor details for the obsessed Data tables from Ohio precincts, reflecting on the changes in registered voters etc.RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS : uncounted votes. comment from John Allen paulos. Also we got Warren County registration stuff here as well. Onward....