Bush's Votergate Mandate?

BUSH’S VOTERGATE MANDATE ?

By Wayne Madsen in Online Journal – Edited from 7 pages by POPPA - December 6th, 2004

In 2000, Representative TOM FEENEY (R-FL) hired Yang Enterprises computer programmer CLINT CURTIS to devise a program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines.

According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, Rep.Tom Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis thought the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, 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. Feeney told Curtis to design a vote switching program to operate in Windows, and be portable to Unix-based vote tabulation systems, to be "undetectable" to voters and Election Supervisors.
In the autumn of 1999, Clint Curtis first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging when Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" Tom Feeney also 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.

Rep. 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.

Clint Curtis’ firm Yang Enterprises is a computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin. Rep. Feeney was the Registered Lobbyist and general counsel for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc. He worked for Yang while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

In 2002, Rep. Feeney asked Curtis if he could develop a touch screen voting machine "flip flop" program. According to Curtis, Feeney asked him, "Can you write a program to flip votes around on touch screen machines?" Curtis said Feeney wanted the program to merely reduce votes in heavily Democratic areas and flip Republican votes to 51 percent and keep Democrat votes to 49 percent. Curtis added that Feeney "did not want to win by a lot." In return, Curtis said Feeney offered him "big jobs."

Curtis said he developed the voting stealing program and handed off his prototype to Feeney. The program was also reviewed by Curtis's senior coder, Hai Lin (Henry) Nee, who according to Florida D.O.T. sources, was an illegal alien. According Curtis, Nee constantly downloaded sensitive NASA data to his computer. At the same time Nee was reviewing Yang's vote switching program, he was also investigated by U.S. federal investigators for illegally shipping Hellfire missile parts to China. Oddly, although U.S. law enforcement agents had put Nee and his associates under surveillance for illegal exports of technology to China in 1999, he and his colleagues were not arrested until March of this year (2004).

Curtis claimed that Yang's corporate execs stressed the company had "unlimited" sources of money from China. According to Florida DOT employees, House Speaker Feeney pressured DOT to give money to Yang for nonexistent software. The sources also revealed that Feeney was aware that Yang was employing a number of illegal aliens on State of Florida and U.S. Federal contracts.

Tom Feeney's close ties to Jeb Bush and Cheney paid off. In 2002, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a race that also saw the re-election of Jeb Bush. Early in "vote switch's" development stages, Feeney had told Curtis that he wanted the program "made to control Palm Beach" in 2002.

When he arrived in Congress, Feeney was given a seat on the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees NASA's operations. Feeney was also appointed to the important House Finance, and House Judiciary Committees. Feeney was also given a clean bill of ethical health by Florida's Ethics Commission, a panel enjoying a Republican majority.

After Feeney's ascension to Congress, Yang's questionable billing activities on the Florida DOT contract came to the attention of Ray C. Lemme. Lemme was a seasoned Senior Investigator with the Florida DOT Inspector General's Office. Lemme had evidence that Yang was overbilling the DOT for "millions." Mavis Georgalis, the DOT's contracting officer for the Yang contract, was also aware of improprieties with the contract. As a result of pressure from the Florida State House, both Curtis and Georgalis were eventually fired by the DOT because of their complaints about Yang. Some agent sent Curtis a message when, on August 14, 2002, someone poisoned his pet Pomeranian dog, Emily. Lemme was forced to stop his official investigation of Yang. However, Lemme decided to continue an "unofficial" investigation of Yang and its practices on the side. It was a fateful decision.

Lemme claimed it was Jeb Bush who personally shut down his DOT investigation of Yang. Lemme also leaked details of his investigation to the Daytona Beach News Journal. Lemme then became aware of something else. Yang was involved in producing a prototype “vote switching” program for use with touch screen voting machines. The last time Clint Curtis spoke to Lemme, he remembers the silver haired investigator excited about where his case was leading. Lemme told Curtis that the cover up of Yang was coming from "as high up as I could imagine" and that he had "proof" that was "shocking."

Valdosta Police Detective Craig Spencer said on July 1, 2003 that officers entered the motel room and found a suicide note and then proceeded to the bathroom where Lemme was found dead in the bathtub. Police discovered that the inside of Lemmes's left elbow—the cubital tunnel—was slashed. There were spurts of blood on the wall but no blood found on the floor. Later on July 1, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Moultrie informed the Valdosta Police that based on the "suicide" details, no autopsy would be performed on Lemme. A doctor, with 25 years' clinical experience claimed that the circumstances appeared to him to be a classic "mob hit." An empty manila folder was found on the hotel room's desk. Also an undated and unsigned suicide note written on lined paper, which lacked any identifiable fingerprints. The note said, "I love my family (family underlined once) with all my heart. I am sorry. I am depressed and in pain. Mary Ann (Lemme's wife), I love you." ("I love you" underlined twice). It was certainly not indicative of a person who was ecstatic that he was finally going to nail a long investigation that involved vote rigging, over billing, and fraud abetted by the very top political leadership in Tallahassee. Interestingly, the last number on Lemme's pager was the number "911."

Sgt. Eugene Bell of the Valdosta Police Department interviewed a Female guest who was staying in Room 236. She and her daughter noticed three men standing in the parking lot across from Lemme's room at 8 a.m. on the morning of July 1. The behavior of the men made the guest suspicious enough to believe the men were engaged in a drug deal. According to the police report, the camera used to photograph the crime scene was later discovered to have a defect in the flash memory card. The defect resulted in no usable photographs being submitted with the official police report.

There is additional information that the election rigging principals connected to the State of Florida and Jeb Bush may have also used contractors tied closely to state contracts to parlay the vote switching software into Ohio, Maine, Texas, New Mexico, and Riverside County, California.

Email Outrage < Sen. Boxer at Senate.gov/Boxer + Rep. Henry Waxman at Waxman.House.gov >
Sen. Feinstein at Senate.gov/Feinstein and MDR/Venice Rep. Jane Harman at House.gov/Harman

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