The Arizona Senate Election Committee heard testimony Monday from computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis about how susceptible voting machines are to manipulation. Curtis, a Democrat who previously worked as a programmer for NASA, DOD, and other defense agencies, famously testified in 2007 to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee about how he programmed voting machines so he could manipulate them without being detected.
His presentation began with a clip of that 2007 testimony to Congress, where he said it only took 100 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. He showed a second video clip, which compiled statements by prominent Democrats expressing their concerns on how voting machines are hackable.
Curtis said the voting machines are manipulated by programmers. He showed how easy it was to add the coding on an overhead screen.
He warned, “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.”
He added, “Nothing happens on that machine that the programmer doesn’t make happen. … I control the vote, you guys don’t.” He explained, “I’m here to address the lies and to show basically, how my program works and how any other program can work.”
Curtis said, “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.”
Also, the computer programmer said the voting machines don’t need a traditional connection to the internet to be accessed.
“They say, ‘Oh, these computers are not networked therefore it’s impossible to get to them,’” he said.
Curtis added that if the voting machines are plugged into an electrical outlet, there is a way to access them remotely.
Curtis said he believes voting machine manipulation took place in the 2016 and 2020 elections as well. His law office filed a challenge in Florida after the 2016 election.
He expressed concern that since no one outside of the voting machine company is allowed to see the code, the manipulation cannot be discovered.
“I have spoken with many officials off the books,” he said. “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.”
This hearing was the third of its kind set up by State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), chair of the Senate Election Committee. She held two hearings the previous two Mondays, also focusing on voter disenfranchisement during the 2022 midterm election. The first one, featuring testimony from We the People AZ founder Shelby Busch, revealed that almost half the ballots run through the tabulators on Election Day in Maricopa County failed. Busch also testified at the second hearing, explaining how there were thousands of misdemeanors committed during the election by Maricopa County.
Watch Curtis’ testimony:
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
