This article was originally published by the WND News Center
(WND News Center) — A computer programmer who previously testified to Congress on the integrity of voting machines has warned lawmakers in Arizona never to trust them.
“Don’t use machines, because you can never, ever trust them to give you a fair election. There are too many ways to hack them. You can hack them at the level that I did when you first build them, you can hack them from the outside, you can hack them with programs that load themselves on the side. It’s impossible to secure them. You will never beat the programmer. The programmer always owns the universe,” explained Clinton Eugene Curtis to the Arizona Senate Election Committee, a report from the Tennessee Star said.
He’s a Democrat who has worked as a programmer for NASA, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies. He had testified in 2007 to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that he could program voting machines so he could manipulate the results, and he’d never be detected.
His testimony included confirmation that he could use only a few lines of code to change the results of an election.
“He said county election officials would not be able to detect it unless they had access to the source code or could compare the count to the paper ballot count,” the report explained.
He said, “Nothing happens on that machine that the programmer doesn’t make happen… I control the vote, you guys don’t. I’m here to address the lies and to show basically, how my program works and how any other program can work.”
“Twenty-four lines of code can change it and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t catch it. You can’t find my module, and it can erase itself right after it does,” the programmer added.
Further, he warned, electronic voting tabulators don’t need a traditional connection to the internet to be breached.
“They say, ‘Oh, these computers are not networked therefore it’s impossible to get to them.’”
He said one big problem is that no one outside of the voting machine company can see the actual code, so manipulation cannot be revealed.
“I have spoken with many officials off the books. All that I know of are not allowed to test the machines outside of the parameters that the company gives them to test, can’t do it.”
The hearing was one of a series set up by Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers.
A report from Just the News explained his warning was that flipping votes is “very easy to do” but “hard to stop.”
The only way to assure integrity is to not use voting machines, he said.
“A losing candidate can win ‘not because he got more votes, but because twenty-four lines of code can change it, and there’s nothing you can do,’” said Curtis, according to Just the News.
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.