Rep. Feeney Story Inches Closer to The Mainstream

From the Seminole Chronicle in Florida:

Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.

Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.

In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled.

Curtis said he wrote a prototype program for Feeney, and that he believed the program might not only be usable on touch-screen voting machines, which some counties - predominantly in South Florida - now use, but also on optical-scan machines, which most of the state's counties used in the 2004 elections

They also have an editorial:

The clear path to maintaining public trust in our elections process is to ensure that adoption of new technologies uses common sense. If there's a risk of tampering -which, through computers, can be widespread and unnoticed - the software that runs those voting machines needs to be open to public inspection, and each machine that has software installed on it should be inspected by experts before they are taken to the precincts. Otherwise, votes will continue to be called into question, and America's faith in the power of the people will wither further with each election.