Committee on Administration and the media contacts on the EI database (which
is in need of fixing, if anyone's interested).
_____________________________________________
Subject: Please consider the evidence of a corrupted count in Florida CD-24
Honorable members of the US House of Representatives Committee on
Administration
the evidence of a corrupted count in Florida CD-24. As House members should
know, a parade of scientific studies have shown the corruptibility of new
electronic voting machines. Indeed, there is little debate among scientists
that elections can be stolen by insiders who control the proprietary
software which reports vote totals; the only real issue is whether a
particular election has been stolen.
Unfortunately, we are rarely in a position to determine whether a particular
election has been stolen because electronic voting machines provide no audit
trail by which an investigation can be conducted. And even in highly suspect
elections, investigators have been prevented from access to machines that
could provide key evidence. Of course, that very shortcoming provides the
opportunity that emboldens those who have means and motive to steal votes.
In Florida CD-24, we have the rare situation in which evidence has been
painstakingly documented indicating a corrupted count, and also in which we
have evidence of an incumbent, Tom Feeney, using the power of public office
to undermine democratic process.
The evidence of a corrupted count in the US Florida CD-24 congressional
elections includes, but is not limited to, signed affidavits from voters in
several Florida precincts indicating more votes cast for the challenger,
Clint Curtis, than he received by machine counts.
In November 2000, Feeney, the incoming speaker of the Florida House of
Representatives, gained national notoriety, openly defying the Florida
Supreme Court and the Florida electorate by vowing to choose Presidential
electors for George W. Bush regardless of whether a court-ordered recount
showed that Gore won Florida. The evidence indicating that the incumbent has
further sought to illicitly negate the will of the electorate, includes, but
is not limited to a signed affidavit that Feeney, in October 2000,
approached the engineering firm of Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer
consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida to design a "vote-rigging software
prototype" to "rig the vote in South Florida."
All that we, the growing numbers of election integrity activists, are asking
is that the committees fully consider the evidence. Indeed, if an
investigation is not pursued, the result will be taken as further evidence
that US elections are no longer decided by the will of the people, but
rather by those who control the machinery of voting, and that even a
Democratic Congress cares neither about its voting constituencies, nor about
democracy itself.
In the name of justice, values, the future of democracy in America, and
self-interest, Congress must hear this evidence. If Feeney and friends, in
fact, are manipulating vote counts, our right to representative government,
and indirectly all other rights are in jeopardy. Indeed, it would be
difficult to overstate the danger. At some point the degradation to
democracy may no longer be possible to reverse. To address the threat while
it is still possible to do so, this committee must take pains to find out
what, in fact, has been happened in Florida CD 24 in 2006.
Steven F. Freeman
Founder, Election Integrity
Research Scholar and Affiliated Faculty, Center for Organizational Dynamics,
University of Pennsylvania
