Late this week, Politico’s Anne Schroeder ran details of a purported public showdown, in a D.C. steakhouse, between Karl Rove and Jason Roe, the former Chief of Staff to FL’s former Republican U.S. House Rep (and alleged vote-rigging conspirator) Tom Feeney.
During the exchange between Rove and Roe, as reported by Schroeder, Rove tells Roe that he has a file on Feeney, and Roe, who was angry with Rove for cracks he’d made on Fox “News” at Feeney’s expense just after the extremely corrupt FL Republican had lost his 2008 election, says angrily to Rove: “You guys wouldn’t be in the White House without Tom.”
Given the coverage we’ve offered over the years on Feeney, and former Republican computer programmer Clint Curtis’ allegations against him, several folks — including our friends Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel and Patty Sharaf, filmmaker of Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story — sent us the link to the Politico article, asking our opinion on what Roe may have meant by that crack.
In the interest of keeping links to that story from continuing to pile up in our Inbox, here’s our take on Roe’s purported comment to Rove…
Feeney Shenanigans On the Record
In truth, the most interesting aspect of the smackdown between Rove and Roe was, if accurate as reported, that it’s yet another example of the Republican Party in rapid disintegration and continuing to eat each other alive. Other recent examples include the Republican veteran who recently smacked Rush Limbaugh down on air, Laura Ingraham’s attempted smackdown of Megan McCain after she’d dared to criticize Ann Coulter, and even the salacious internecine battle between the Palins and the Johnsons. All a sign of a political party in utter disarray.
But as to the “You guys wouldn’t be in the White House without Tom” line, we don’t have any hard evidence of anything newly nefarious in that, given what is already on the public record concerning Feeney’s helping hand to Bush during the FL 2000 democracy abortion.
Amidst the 36 day battle following Election Day 2000 in the Sunshine State, Feeney, who was then Speaker of the FL House and arguably the second most powerful politician in the state (after Dubya’s brother Jeb, who was Governor at the time), made it clear that he was prepared to pass legislation in the Republican Florida House to grant all of Florida’s electors to George W. Bush no matter what the U.S. Supreme Court ended up deciding. As the state’s Constitution grants the power to determine Presidential Electors to the legislature, and that power has been passed on by them to the voting electorate, Feeney was prepared to take that power back for his buddy Dubya (Feeney had previously run as Jeb’s running mate in his unsuccessful 1994 bid for the Governorship), and select Bush’s electors by government fiat, no matter what the courts had determined.
Sleazy? Of course. We’d expect no less from Feeney. But nefariously illegal? Not really. But that, we suspect, is what Roe was most likely referring to in his comments to Rove.
Feeney had other roles to play, of course, in the theft of Florida’s 2000 election, according to the whistleblower Curtis who spoke of “exclusion lists” and the use of armed police at polling places in minority areas which, he says, “Feeney used to brag about”. Of course, we now know that thousands, perhaps as many as 20,000 legal FL voters were inappropriately removed from the voting rolls vis a vis Jeb’s “Felons List” which succeeded in inappropriately excluding all sorts of voters merely because their names sounded like someone who may have been a felon at some point, in some state.
But as to the implications inherent in the questions from various folks sent to us this week, suggesting that, perhaps Roe’s comment was alluding to a larger, even more insidious theft of the election, perhaps by computer manipulation of election results, that’s probably not likely — at least according to the information offered to date by Curtis and what we know about how FL ran their elections in 2000.
If Roe was referring to 2004, and he could have been, that’s another story. But on the presumption he was referring to Feeney’s role in helping Bush “win” in 2000…
Feeney’s Touch-Screen Vote-Rigging Software
In his now fairly well known allegations against Feeney, first broken here in December of 2004, Curtis had alleged that Feeney first asked the CEO of the company where they both worked (Yang Enterprises Inc. — Curtis as computer programmer, Feeney as general counsel and registered lobbyist, even as he was also speaker of the FL House) for what amounted to a touch-screen vote-rigging software prototype, in “late September or October of 2000”, according to his sworn affidavit [PDF]. That would have been just a month or two before the 2000 FL election, and the short demonstration program that Curtis says he created for him, wouldn’t likely have been in time to use for that November’s election. Furthermore, though a version of the program could easily have been adapted for use on central tabulating computers (the main vote counters), the progam was allegedly meant for use on touch-screen voting systems, which FL hadn’t yet been using at the time.
After the 2000 race however — where paper ballots were allegedly gamed in Palm Beach County, according to the stunning on-camera testimony of 7 former company employees from Sequoia Voting Systems who’d produced the bulk of the state’s punch-card paper ballots (broadcast video here) — Florida moved quickly thereafter to touch-screen voting systems across much of the state.
As luck would have it, Sequoia had “successfully” deployed touch-screen voting for the first time, county wide, across Riverside County, CA that year, and they stood to make huge profits from the widespread adoption of such systems, versus the comparable very low profit margins from the continuing sale of punch-card ballots, and inexpensive mechanical punch-card readers.
When Curtis’ story initially broke, one of the points used by critics in their attempted debunking of Curtis’ claims was that, since FL hadn’t used touch-screens at the time, his allegations made no sense. But, after the testimony from the 7 Sequoia employee/whistleblowers were aired on HDTV’s Dan Rather Reports in 2007 (subsequently picked up by absolutely nobody in the corporate mainstream media, by the way, despite the myriad of stunning, corroborated claims in that broadcast), that purported “hole” in Curtis’ story was also substantially sealed up.
Other Still-Unexplained 2000 Anomalies
Other still-unexplained anomalies from FL’s 2000 election were the -16,022 votes (that’s negative 16,022 votes) registered for Al Gore in Volusia County by the optical-scan tabulator made by Global (which was purchased by Diebold shortly thereafter). The reasons for that “glitch” have never been reasonably explained, to this day, by anyone. It was that negative 16k vote count which led to Gore’s initial concession to Bush on Election Night, and the discovery of the problem — and subsequent restoration of 16k votes — which then led to Gore’s now famous unconcession an hour or so later.
That initial concession, however, would prove to be a linchpin in Bush’s eventual “win”, as it was following Gore’s concession that the bulk of the media would call the election for Bush, a point that was later used by Republicans to argue to the U.S. Supreme Court that their client, George W. Bush, would be “irreparably harmed” if Florida were allowed to actually count their ballots and Gore was discovered to be the winner, since the media had already declared Bush the winner.
Of course, as we now know, even with all of the scheming and gaming and voter suppression, Al Gore still received more votes across the state of Florida that year than did Bush, as seen in the exhaustive post-election study of all ballots in the state, as completed by a consortium of news outlets and universities (here’s that actual study [PDF], as posted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute for you misinformed skeptics out there.)
If Roe meant something more than all of the above in his purported comments to Rove, we’ve got no additional light to shed. Of course, Feeney has never been questioned by investigators, to our knowledge, about Curtis’ allegations, even though Curtis made his allegations via sworn affidavit, during sworn video-taped testimony to a U.S. House Judiciary panel, and via a polygraph test which he successfully passed.
While Curtis has maintained that he has no knowledge of his software prototype ever having been used in an election, and only that he was asked by Feeney to create it, the once powerful, former Republican Congressman, on the other hand, has long refused many years of requests that he take a similar polygraph test to backup his claims that he never asked Curtis to create any such thing.
So that’s what we know. Perhaps we’re too conservative in our offering Roe the benefit of the doubt on his comments, but we’re often accused of being too conservative in such matters. Ironic, that, since even though we try to report nothing here at The BRAD BLOG which can’t be independently verified, we’re also frequently accused — by nefarious opportunists and lazy writers on both the Right and the Left — of being “conspiracy theorists” around here. Of course, that may just come with the territory when investigating, and writing about, criminal conspiracies.
– A Quick Summary of the story so far.
– An Index of all the Key Articles & Evidence in the series so far.
– In late 2008 a documentary film, Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story was released. More info on the remarkable film here
– Exclusive DVD versions of the film, as signed by Brad Friedman and filmmaker Patty Sharaf, are available here as BRAD BLOG premiums.
Rove should be in jail – he has refused to show up for 2 (count ’em) subpoenas.
The dems are fully complicit with this, as they have been for most of the criminality and stolen elections of 2000 and 2004..
Appreciate the timeline, Brad. I had similar inclinations to forward that story to you as well, but the timeline does seem to make it clear that whatever Roe meant, it had nothing to do with electronic ballot manipulation.
It’s sad to me that in this age of technology, we can’t use the skills we have for some of the things we do all the time, like vote. It seems to me that unless the voting was done on PAPER ballots in an old fashioned voting booth, someone could question the validity of the election. That just shouldn’t be.
[Ed Note: This was a spam comment with links to completely unrelated commercial concerns, so I originally deleted it, but it turns out some people wanted to address it, so I have deleted only the links and reinstated it. Sorry for any confusion. –99]
It doesn’t need to be Angela. There ARE verifiable electronic voting methods available.
Good open source technology.
But the methods on the market today, put forth by the likes of Diebold/Premier, Sequoia, Hart Intercivic…and lobbied very effectively for at the state and federal levels…well. They just suck.
They fail on too many levels to protect the integrity of the vote. And in some cases, they even shred the integrity of the votes they are intended to record. And if you want to check that vote, they offer NO CERTIFIABLE MEANS TO VERIFY THE VOTE TALLY.
OT Easter thought, if WE ammended OUR CONSTITUTION to no longer afford corporations personhood (they’re bottom line is DIFFERENT.) I think we could all come together and work this out peaceably. 🙂 OH yeah, watch Link TV!
Dan-In-PA @ 4 said:
“There ARE verifiable electronic voting methods available.”
Really? Do tell. What are they? Because I’ve not heard of any to date. (And for some help, Open Source has nothing whatsoever to do with whether an electronic voting scheme is verifiable or not.)
Brad, I think you may have understated the number of innocent voters purged from the FL 2000 roll, which you place at 20,000.
According to Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse there were at least 91,000 mostly Democratic and mostly African Americans purged by ChoicePoint’s DBT unit. ChoicePoint, which had hired by Katherine Harris for the task, was fined $15 million by the FTC in 2005 when it sold 145,000 credit card records to identity thieves.
You might say that thieves put other thieves into the WH.
As usual, I was being conservative, Ernie 🙂 Though, for some reason, I recall 20k as the number of voters who were actually disallowed to vote (versus on the list in the first place). Either way, that’s why I used “at least”. Happy to defer to your cite from Palast.
Though, as long as we’re picking nits, my understanding is that it wasn’t actually ChoicePoint’s unit at the time, but rather, a separate company which was then purchased by ChoicePoint after the election. FWIW.
Does anyone know the relationship between CACI and ChoicePoint? Just curious…
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/449
– Tom
Brad,
PDF forms stored in an SQL database on an open source secure Linux/Unix platform.
PDF can be encrypted.
PDF can be serialized.
PDF can be password protected.
PDF can be printed.
PDF can be locked.
SQL and not MS Access.
It can be done Brad. But not when the product is treated as a proprietary trade secret.
I don’t know if there is a relationship between CACI and ChoicePoint. Perhaps what they both have in common is Randi Rhodes shining a light on both.
– Tom
ps. I wonder what Randi is up to these days…
To be a little clearer…
Print that PDF once you’ve voted, and THAT printed form is then the official ballot.
The technology to secure an electronic election does exist.
One more thought, One of the biggest problems with our elections is not the technology, it’s the lack of integrity of personnel involved who’ve been charged with executing our elections.
In Vermont, a serious issue ignored by the media was the chain of custody of the memory cards.
In Kentucky, the issue was the election judges.
A Paper ballot is key to secure elections, but it’s entirely possible to develop that paper ballot through electronic tools.
Our biggest problem with elections, however, remains, even with a paper ballot. That problem is….people.
Dan-in-PA:
Use of PDFs, encrypted or otherwise, have nothing to do with whether citizens can verify that their elections have been counted accurately. Nothing. Neither does the use of open source. Not sure where you got that idea, or what product you may be pushing, but if that’s all ya got, it won’t be pushed very far around here.
As to “our biggest problem with elections [being] people”, well, yes. Sort of. People will *always* be the problem and people will *always* try to game elections. However, people are also the solution. The more of them who can watch the process, the harder it becomes for the bad people to game them.
You will never have 100% good people, not even the ones running elections (though, even if they are, it makes no difference — unless citizens are allowed proper oversight to *know* that those people are good, being “good” is meaningless.)
Hence, the key to clean and fair elections begins with citizen oversight. Citizen oversight begins with transparency. As soon as you remove that transparency (for example, through the use of computerized encryption, ballots counted by software instead of eyeballs) you have degraded your democracy, and given away your right to self-governance.
I hope you’ll consider what I’ve said here, and re-visit your theory that there is somehow a computerized answer to our electoral “problems”. You are underscoring the idea of a “solution” in search of a “problem.”
what ever happened about rove testifying?
Brad, I have considered this, the printed PDF is the ballot. Not the electronically stored form. The electronic form exists only as an historic archive.
It does still require full transparency and an open and verifiable chain of custody. Both of which are sorely lacking in the system of electronic balloting these private companies are pushing on us.
But don’t trust me, ask Hari.
And open source bypasses these private company’s crappy argument that they have a right to protect proprietary trade secrets and therefor can prevent the public debugging of their shitty machine failures. Open source allows for public inspection.
Karen – The House Judiciary Comm. was waiting, before their interview, to get more docs (about 1000 pages, as I recall) from DoJ and/or White House, so they could include them in the questions to Rove. So I don’t believe the interview has happened yet.
Dan-in-PA
There is no way to know, on a computer printed ballot, whether it actually reflects the will of the voter or not. See my experience last June when a computer printed 4 out of 12 of my votes incorrectly.
Most people, of course (80% according to CalTech/MIT) don’t bother to check their printout. Of those who do manage to review the summary at the end of voting, two-thirds of them (Rice U.) don’t notice vote flips.
Finally, if everyone checks their printout (and most don’t) and everyone notices vote flips (most don’t), there is still no way for you and me, when auditing the election later, to know that they did, and whether or not we’re actually looking at the voters intent or not.
It’s as meaningless as the computer printed paper.
Yup.
I trust no one. Not even Hari 🙂
Understood. And certainly agree that if you must use computers in any way in elections, they should obviously be open source. That said, it’s no silver bullet. For just one example, there is no way to know that the source code you reviewed today is the same code used on the machines during the election.
Again, I’d suggest you (and many others like you) are seeking a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. We already have perfectly good technology for use in elections: Paper, pen, clear plastic box, eyeballs.
I’m not …Looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
I suggested to Angela that there are far better ways to secure an electronic election than what these criminals have done to us.
I think you read too much into my comments.
If there must be an electronic election (I’m not advocating for it), then a locked down printed PDF for a ballot is far more secure than anything Diebold/Premier has to offer.
brad ,thank you for the update,since i doubt the msm will follow thru on the rove crime stories,i am counting on u to keep me informed
my greatest disappointment in the obama administration is the new blind eye the justice department seems to have(saying they r not investigating seiglmans prosecution,which means they r not planning on investigating the 87 percent dem prosecutions,and defending the illegal warrentless wiretaps) while ignoring the peoples questions on legalizing and taxing mj
and yet the day to day stealing of elections with blackboxes continues,in bloomington,il, we just voted for the mayors office last tues,we have diebold counters and the dreaded middleman software of soe reporting our results,the progressive candidate lost by 11 votes out of just over 8000
i was thrilled when he said on election eve that he would ask for a recount but he really doesnt have the finances for an election attorney and get this,even if the recount shows he actually won, the local board of elections says because of the timing of the sworn in date for the mayor and the date for the canvassing to be completed(only 2 days apart)he would have to go to court to have it overturned
i spoke to him and told him dont give up,told him about diebold in cali,the law suits going on across country and to back up my facts i had him google u and he saw the stories with his own eyes,with out u i am pretty sure he would of thought i was lil daft(afterall it does all sound a lil crazy)
so again thank you,thank you,thank you for all ur great reporting and for keeping the articles available
Karen, we saw a lot of that this cycle–the progressive candidate being wiped out of the election by various means. That exact thing happened to Clint Curtis, who was stomped all over by the friggin’ Democrats, who recruited pro-war blue dog Dem millionaire Suzanne Kosmas to run against Feeney. “Progressive” represents change form the status quo, and neither party wants that, it seems. They just want to continue their name-calling while keeping everything as-is. It’s all sound and fury signifying nothing, to quote the Bard.
To that end, it’s important for all of us to wake up fast and realize that Obusha and the Democrats in general have sold us all down the river. The rhetoric coming from the White House may have changed and sound all populist now, but the actual substance has not. Don’t expect any significant departure from Bush policies. In fact, Obama is escalating the wars, protecting Bush and moving to lock in warrantless wiretapping. Jusitice Dept. is still completely mobbed up. Rove testifying? Forget it. That will be buried, as will the ‘truth and reconciliation commission’… all that stuff will get no traction under Obusha. A new bill developed with White House help gives the President new broad powers to shut down the internet in the event of a crisis. This is the exact same crap Bush was doing. Had McCain won, there would at least be opposition to all these moves. But because everyone still buys into Obusha’s cult of personality, the Bilderbergers behind him can continue their globalist agenda.
In short, I used to be concerned about the gaming of US elections via electronic means. Now I’m more concerned about the gaming of US elections by not actually allowing real choices. Obama/McCain… same difference. Either way, the military/industrial complex wins.
This has been a public service announcement from You’ve Been Hosed Again, America! Manipulating the truth for over 45 years.