Opinion: Does your vote count?

2-25-26

By Natalie Nice
Have you ever heard of the name Clint Curtis? In 2004, he testified under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that he created vote flipping software for electronic voting machines that could invert election results and produce a 51% to 49% desired result for any candidate. Ballots cast would match voter rolls and no election official would be the wiser. Curtis, attested the flip would leave no activity logs and be virtually untraceable; he noted the code was not even complex and any computer grad student could do it.
Curtis, a Republican computer programmer for Yang Industries, had been approached by then Republican Florida Speaker of the House, Tom Feeney, to create the prototype under the guise of election integrity. Curtis noted it became clear Feeney’s intent was to actually flip the vote after his rep told Curtis it was essential that “the code eat itself” and that the source code be “untraceable.” Curtis voluntarily took and passed a polygraph exam administered by one of Florida’s chief polygraph operators re-asserting his claims.
Curtis later went on to quit his job at Yang Industries, after allegedly being offered bribes to stay, and ran as a Democrat against Feeney in Florida’s 24th district. Curtis lost by a 16 point margin, despite pre-election polls only showing a two point lag, behind Feeney. Curtis went around to precincts in the district, asking voters to sign sworn affidavits attesting to their vote. The affidavits showed an up to 20% discrepancy in certain precincts favoring him, compared to the tabulated election results. The U.S. House Administration Committee refused to review the affidavits and denied his challenge. Regardless of whether you believe Curtis’s claims, the case highlights systemic vulnerabilities in our election system not talked about today nearly enough. I know less than zilch about computer programming, but even I can write a formula in excel to invert numbers.
Our elections are based on secret ballots. When you go up to the ballot box or electronic voting machine and input your vote, there is nothing that comes out on the other side that attaches you to that vote. Short of going door to door, and asking people how they voted, there is no standard process to verify electronic voting accuracy. This makes our system extremely susceptible to fraud, both by foreign powers and domestic, especially when we neglect to establish proper audit trails and chains of custody.
This idea is not new; pioneer computer specialist, William Ware, warned back in 1988 in the New Yorker that electronic voting machines were a “Chernobyl waiting to happen.” He noted they could be used to transfer, add, or delete votes and that it would be “virtually undetectable if done correctly.”
The most commonly used electronic voting machines throughout the 2000s were produced by Diebold Incorporated, an ATM machine manufacturer. The Diebold machines did not print a voter verifiable paper ballot. If glitches, let alone fraud, happened within the computer, there was no way to verify the original intent of the voter. Oddly, a company so familiar with providing a printed paper audit trail for banks and their customers did not think to provide the same security for elections. Why politicians widely adopted machines that did not leave a paper trail, and could not be audited, is a bit of a head-scratcher.
After being caught in innumerable scandals and systematic failures, Diebold testified in court that they did not want to release their source code for their voting machines due to its “proprietary nature.” They revealed their voting machines contained almost 50,000 lines of source code — a machine that was supposed to do two things: scan dots and tabulate totals related to those dots. Diebold’s electronic voting machines later merged with the Dominion Voting Systems company, widely used in elections today.
Regarding audit trails, federal law does not require states to keep physical paper trails for electronic voting machines, they only require that if paper trails do exist, those documents must be retained for 22 months. About half of our states require some paper-trail related to some electronic voting machines, again for 22 months.
These laws are stupidly complex, vague, and ineffectual. For example, Pennsylvania law states that if a recount is required on ballots that utilized electronic voting machines which printed a verifiable physical voter ballot, as long as the ballot is not flagged for problems, it can be rescanned into a different voting machine to re-tabulate confirmation results. Meaning, if a machine, subject to errors and fraud, did not itself flag a ballot as problematic in its initial counting, in a recount that same ballot can be rescanned into the same make and model of a machine, with only a different serial number, prone to the same errors and susceptibility, in order to validate the result. Considering Curtis’s testimony you can see how this may cause a problem.
Our own governor, Josh Shapiro, loves to shout from the rooftops that our elections are secure and repeat on loop that he fought against Trump in court and won. What he neglects to mention is that out of the 60 plus court challenges questioning election integrity in 2020, almost none heard the merits of the case and were dismissed preemptively based on standing. Quite the opposite of the public impression he spouts, Shapiro regularly advocated for courts not to hear any evidence proving election integrity. The only thing Shapiro has done for our elections is to bring on even more paid private companies to help “manage” them.
Last month, in Bost V. Illinois State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 7-2 decision, that candidates for federal office do have standing to challenge state election rules governing vote counting and ballot acceptance, based on their inherent interest in the integrity of the election.
Furthermore, another problem with maintaining fair elections, is that it is elected officials, themselves, who decide whether to investigate or prosecute election fraud. How likely is it that a District Attorney, Attorney General, or a Secretary of State is going to investigate claims of election fraud, in an election that put them and their cronies in their very positions of power? Even if legitimate claims are raised, it is the elected officials who decide whether those claims are pursued legally. In fact, in researching this article I could not find one case of this ever happening— pursuing a specific case of election fraud that presumably could result in an unfavorable outcome to those investigating it or their party, particularly in any federal or Congressional election.
In the first 150 years of our country’s existence Congressional incumbent re-election rates were not nearly as high as they are today. Federal politicians had a 50% to 60% turnover rate for most of our first hundred years. In the twentieth century, with the advent of more accessible and influential media, the re-election rate increased to around 70% to 80%. This aligns with the current rates of other global democracies.
However, today in America, an existing Congressmen is 94 to 98% likely to be re-elected, despite Congress having a 17% approval rating. The USSR would have (and frequently did) kill for those types of re-election numbers. Do our politicians cling to power, often for decades, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in each election cycle to secure a job that only pays 175k per year, for the title alone?
Opposition to the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship for new voter registrations, has not come just from Democrats, but Republicans, as well. Many ignored the bill while it sat on their desk for the last eight months, only to recently declare support under increasing public scrutiny. A bill which 83% of Americans support. There can, and are, many possible explanations for this, but I wonder if the most simple and logical conclusion is the right one — they all cheat.