Florida Election Stolen

Computer Programmer Reveals Scheme to Steal 2000 Vote
By Christopher Bollyn

21 December 2004

TITUSVILLE, Florida—While the mainstream media has focused on a sensational murder trial in California and the political crisis that followed the flawed elections in Ukraine, it has ignored a huge domestic story about the computer programmer who has come forward and explained how he had written computer code to steal elections in Florida.

An affidavit signed by the programmer, Clinton Curtis, in Prince George’s County, Md., on Dec. 6, 2004, names the individuals involved in a computer vote fraud scheme that he worked with in “the early fall of 2000” as “lead programmer” for a company called Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), based in Oviedo, Fla.

The 4-page Curtis document contains 15 points that he swears are both true and correct.

“I declare under penalty of perjury,” Curtis signed on the affidavit, “that the above is true and correct.”

By the fall of 2000 Curtis had worked as a programmer for two years with YEI, a listed “small, minority, woman-owned business” that does extensive business with NASA and Florida. The CEO of YEI is a Chinese immigrant named Mrs. Li Woan Yang.

On its web site, YEI says it has 250 employees working at its Oviedo headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Patrick Air Force Base and Tallahassee, Fla.

According to published company documents, the contact person for YEI is Mike Cohen, Yang’s “executive secretary.” Cohen, named by Curtis as being one of the three key persons at YEI involved in creating the program in 2000, has not answered telephone calls.

Beside Cohen, two other employees of YEI met with Curtis “in late September or October of 2000” to determine if he could write a program to steal votes on computer voting systems. They were Mrs. Yang and Tom Feeney, “corporate counsel and lobbyist” for Yang Enterprises. At the time, Feeney, a Republican, was also a member of the Florida legislature.

A month later, Feeney became speaker of Florida’s House. Feeney was instrumental in the controversial 2002 reapportionment and redistricting in Florida that became known as “the speaker’s fix.” Feeney had been Jeb Bush’s running mate in Bush’s 1994 attempt to win the Florida governor’s mansion.

As a result of population growth, in 2002, Florida obtained two more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and one of them, the 24th district, went to Tom Feeney of Oviedo.

Curtis served as “technology adviser” to Feeney at YEI. After consulting Curtis, “Feeney would advise YEI on how best to procure the contracts for these projects.”

Regarding a fall meeting in 2000 when Feeney asked about developing a program to steal votes, Curtis wrote:

Mr. Feeney said that he wanted to know if YEI could develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable. He was very specific in the design and specification 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 remain hidden even if the source code was inspected.”

After further discussion, Mrs. Yang told Mr. Feeney that we would attempt to build a prototype for this program so he [Feeney] could see it, test it, and show it to others.

Curtis said he believed that Feeney was interested in creating this program “to be able to detect and prevent” vote fraud—not to commit it.

As directed by his employer and Feeney, Curtis created the vote fraud software prototype. He delivered the program “to Mr. Hai Lin Nee, the quality control person at YEI,” according to his affidavit.

Curtis explained to Feeney and Yang how they could detect fraudulent source code so it could be prevented. Mrs. Yang responded, “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.”

“I was shocked that they were actually trying to steal the election and told her that neither I nor anyone else could produce any such program,” Curtis wrote. “She stated that she would hand in what I had produced to Feeney and left the room with the software.”

Curtis said he attended subsequent meetings between Feeney and Yang prior to the 2000 election.

“It became clear to me,” Curtis wrote, “that Mr. Feeney was well aware that by artificially reducing the margin of victory of the opposition party in areas where they were the strongest, the overall outcome would then favor his candidate.”

According to Curtis, Feeney “bragged” that he had implemented “exclusion lists” to reduce the “black vote.” Feeney also said, “proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent,” he wrote. “Shortly thereafter, I resigned from YEI, and took another job at the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT).”

From computerized vote fraud, the Curtis affidavit goes on to describe “illegal activities of YEI” with the FDOT, “involving over-billing and defrauding of the state of Florida.” Curtis reported the information to the FDOT inspector general’s (IG) office and was eventually fired.

The IG, Raymond Lemme, pursued the allegations made by Curtis regarding YEI. Lemme and Curtis continued to meet after Curtis had been fired from the FDOT.

“In June of 2003, he [Lemme] told me that he had tracked the corruption ‘all the way to the top,’ ” Curtis wrote. On July 1, 2003, Lemme was found dead in a Valdosta, Ga., hotel room the victim of an apparent suicide. His arm had been slashed.

The Curtis affidavit also says that YEI has engaged in espionage through its work at the various NASA and Air Force facilities it contracts with. “I saw Mrs. Yang send a great deal of internal information to her brother in China,” Curtis wrote, “who, she had informed me, had been deported for spying. . . .

“Hai Lin Nee was subsequently arrested by federal officials in Orlando, Fla., on or about March 17, 2004,” according to the affidavit, “on charges that included sending radar guidance system chips for Hellfire antitank missiles to a company in communist China.”

‘GOD BLESS AMERICA’

As a response to the Curtis affidavit, YEI posted the following statement on its web site: “Recently there have been several accusations against this corporation by Clinton Eugene Curtis. All of the allegations are 100 percent FALSE!! An official statement will be forthcoming. Thank you for your concern, and God bless America.”

On Dec. 14, Michael A. O’Quinn, a lawyer representing YEI, issued a statement that the allegations found in the Curtis affidavit are “categorically untrue.” The statement also says, “Mr. Nee has never been an employee of YEI.”

Calls to O’Quinn went unanswered.

Feeney serves on the House Science Committee, which oversees the activities of NASA. Six days after Curtis signed his affidavit, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe handed in his resignation. O’Keefe said he is quitting NASA for a better paying job at Louisiana State University.

Numerous calls to NASA regarding the O’Keefe resignation and the allegations found in the Curtis affidavit have so far gone unanswered.