Special Report

Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Repor...0604madsen.html

December 6, 2004—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 program, written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) and designed to operate in Windows and be portable to Unix-based vote tabulation systems, 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."

Feeney's desire to manipulate the vote would be manifested in his home base of Volusia County in the 2000 presidential election. According to The Washington Post, at 10 p.m. on election night, Al Gore was leading Bush in Volusia County by 83,000 to 62,000 votes. One-half hour later, Gore's vote total had been reduced by 16,000 to 67,000 and an obscure Socialist candidate saw a sudden surge to 10,000 votes in a precinct with only 600 voters. The information on the Volusia optical scanner voting anomalies came from a leaked internal Diebold memorandum. In the end, Bush won Florida and the White House by a mere 537 votes in the most controversial U.S. presidential election in history.

Feeney had long been a voice in Florida GOP politics. He was gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush's running mate in 1994, a race in which Democratic incumbent Lawton Chiles defeated Bush. Chiles once referred to Feeney as "the David Duke of Florida politics."

Continue reading: http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Repor...0604madsen.html

VB 5 is NOT portable to Unix. It is so heavily wrapped up in the Windows operating system that I don't think there could be any way to port a VB 5 program to Unix. Unless someone else can clear this up for me and explain how this porting could occur, this casts serious doubt on this whole story to me.

Here is the part of the DU thread addressing this:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...d=117320#117399

117399, Code written in VB cannot be portable to Unix
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 06:26 AM
Not sure what to make of this.

From the article: "According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the program, written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) and designed to operate in Windows and be portable to Unix-based vote tabulation systems,..."

Visual Basic is specific to MS Windows. VB code cannot be portable to any Unix-based system.

Maybe they wanted it to run in VB in Windows and to be ported (that is, rewritten) to run on Unix?

117401, I noticed that too, but...
Posted by mikeylove on Mon Dec-06-04 06:32 AM
...kinda wrote it off as the kind of thing that doesn't get communicated well to journalists with no computer background. I've seen it way too much before in the past.

I guess I should bring these things up, though. Gotta commit reporting inconsistencies and weirdness to muscle memory.

117410, I think you're right...
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 06:42 AM
I can picture a programmer saying "ported" and having it get innocently reported as "portable" by someone not intimate with the technologies.

117407, I didn't get that either...
Posted by americanwoman on Mon Dec-06-04 06:40 AM
Probably a mixup in the translation form techie to journo.

117443, I think FlyontheWall joined
Posted by FormerOstrich on Mon Dec-06-04 07:46 AM
DU and maybe he can answer the techie questions. The description makes it seems as if the code would run on individual vote machines and not the central tabulator. What platform are the e-vote machines?

Aside from the inability to port to unix, VB is not a true executable and requires the VB runtime. Unless the machine is already windows based with the vb runtime it doesn't seem a very stealthy way to implement code. Perhaps just the prototype was written in VB????

As far as the central tabulator PC you would think that not having runtimes (such as vb) would be a security mechanism (unless of course GEMS is written in VB).

Now that I have been thinking out loud...does anyone know what platform the E-Vote machines are per vendor?

117475, Looks like Diebold touchscreens are on Windows CE
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 08:15 AM
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61947,00.html

117482, VB 5.0 is (or was) available for Windows CE
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 08:22 AM
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1998/Feb98/VBV...

117499, The VB runtime could have easily been put on machine
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 08:38 AM
FormerOstrich wrote:
"Aside from the inability to port to unix, VB is not a true executable and requires the VB runtime. Unless the machine is already windows based with the vb runtime it doesn't seem a very stealthy way to implement code. Perhaps just the prototype was written in VB????"

Even if the machine didn't have the VB runtime loaded (and I'm not sure whether Windows CE comes with the VB runtime preinstalled), noone would notice if you copied those files onto the system. And apparently there were no controls or checks in place to determine that noone had modifed the operating system and/or programs.

That said, it still may be that this programmer only developed a prototype and then someone else developed another program that was actually used.

Edited for spelling.

117657, Yes, it would be easy enough to
Posted by FormerOstrich on Mon Dec-06-04 10:15 AM
copy the runtime.

However, it does seem checking for such would be a logical certification check. Unless required for the e-vote software there would be no valid reason to have the runtime or the development environments (someone mentioned Visual Studio which is 6.0 but the point is the same). IMHO, that is.

I am not sure you can get away with just a straight copy of the runtime. You may very well need an install or manual registration. Thus, you are leaving a lot more tracks.

The bottom line is I'm speculating....I would like to have FlyontheWall let us know some of the technical details. There are a zillion ways to minimize detection...I'm just curious...

117779, On desktop versions of Windows like Windows 95
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 11:02 AM
you don't have to register the VB runtime, you can just copy the files into the \windows\system folder. There are so many hundreds (thousands?) of files in there that noone would notice unless there was a specific check for this. From other articles I've read, there was typically not a check to confirm whether the operating system or programs were changed. It was apparently SOP that some tech would get the latest version of software from the vendor (or who knows where else), install it, and noone was checking what they were doing.

As far as how Windows CE might differ from desktop versions of Windows, I haven't worked with CE so I'm not sure.

117975, It has been documented that they don't even look at windows software...
Posted by pointsoflight on Mon Dec-06-04 12:00 PM
...in the certification process. Unlike the vote tabulation software itself, windows components can be added and updated at any time, without being reported, certified, or anything else. People forewarned about this years ago--that any vote modifying software could easily be built into windows software.

117468, Or perhaps MS visual studio?
Posted by Hamoth on Mon Dec-06-04 08:08 AM
Visual studio is a sweet that contains both VB and VC++.

117817, in my expericence, VB is usually only used as a front-end app
Posted by stella2cat on Mon Dec-06-04 11:14 AM
and there's a back-end in another language, for instance, C or C++ if they want it to run on unix. So the VB would provide the user interface and the C would really be doing all the work behind the scenes

(there aren't many of us that consider VB a REAL language)

117849, I agree with your feelings about VB (not my language of choice)...
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 11:25 AM
but you can get access to just about anything in Windows by way of VB and what was required here was not very difficult. VB can be used to develop programs with a user interface and it can also be used to develop ActiveX controls and DLLs and EXEs that do not have a user interface.

It may well be that the program talked about here isn't the one really used in the election but there's no technical reason you couldn't do whatever you wanted with VB.

(Ill repeat my caveat that I'm basing this more on desktop versions of VB, so CE version may be different)

117912, Isn't there video proving that even a chimp could be trained
Posted by eomer on Mon Dec-06-04 11:41 AM
to hack the election?

I'm willing to go a step further and say it's so easy that even a VB programmer could do it!

117934, yep, bottom line is there are many many ways it could be done n/t
Posted by stella2cat on Mon Dec-06-04 11:48 AM

117940, Be careful. This is the kind of thing that got Rather.
Posted by aquart on Mon Dec-06-04 11:49 AM
Get this fully explained before moving on.

I noticed that too, but lets all keep in mind that most (if not all) voting machines run in Windows anyway so a UNIX port isn't even necessary for fraud.

Yea, but a glaring error like that in an article casts doubt on the whole article, as far as I'm concerned.