O.K. THIS GETS DANGEROUSLY WEIRD,
I'll try to make it simple...
More than a full year after I wrote the original draft for them,
Hustler is now running my story on the mysterious "suicide" of Raymond Lemme, of the Florida Inspector General's office. This is the first time that uncovered police photos — the ones which were not supposed to have existed — have appeared in print, not counting the Internet, to our knowledge.
Here's a
pornography-free PDF of the article — (WARNING: Includes graphic photos. Plus a sidebar on Clint Curtis'
run for congress!) — as it's currently running in the September issue now available at a newstand near you. Unless you live in Utah.
(NOTE: Previously broken PDF link now fixed.)For
BRAD BLOG readers who may not have been around here long enough to know, read on for an explanation of who Lemme and Curtis are.
And meanwhile…in other 'Clint Curtis for Congress' related news…
He's now been
endorsed by Democracy for America (DFA) Miami-Dade chapter, and is now hoping to receive an endorsement from the
national DFA. You can help!
1)
Sign up here for a DFA login.
2) Vote for who you think DFA should endorse nationally! Clint Curtis is on the list.
3) Then, go to the
DFA campaign page for Clint Curtis for Congress post your endorsement there too!
Lots of work, huh? Who said saving this country was gonna be easy?
Lastly, go tell
Russ Feingold's Progressive Patriots Fund that they should support Curtis as well! That one's a bit easier to do. But they all matter.
Okay, for newbies here, wondering who the these Ray Lemme and Clint Curtis guys are in the first place…
Lemme was the investigator from the Inspector General's office at the Florida Department of Transportation who turned up dead in a Valdosta, GA motel room just weeks after allegedly telling Clint Curtis that his investigation into Curtis' claims went "all the way to the top."
The
photos taken at the scene by the cops didn't exist, according to the police report, until they turned up on the Internets after some jerk reported the whole story (we are that jerk) — causing the Valdosta Police to re-open the case, before swiftly shutting it back down again for equally mysterious reasons. You can catch up on
that story here, as we broke those new details in the Lemme case in early 2005.
Clint Curtis (for those who don't know) is the software programmer who has claimed in a
sworn affidavit and
video-taped testimony before members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that Rep. Tom Feeney asked him to create vote-rigging software when they both worked at a Florida software firm. At the time, Feeney was the Speaker of the Florida House and the firm's lobbyist; he is also known for being Jeb Bush's former running mate. Now he's a member of the U.S. House and sits on the Judiciary Committee himself. A href="http://"www.citizensforethics.org/press/pressclip.php?view=1828">(When he's not taking golf junkets to Scotland with Jack Abramoff).
Curtis has since
passed a polygraph test in regard to these charges (unlike Feeney) and is now running for Congress in Feeney's district with the hope of unseating him this fall. He can use your
financial help to take on one of the GOP's top-tier corruption/money boys.
NASA Labor Union Endorses Whistleblower/Candidate Clint Curtis!Alleged Republican Vote Rigging Conspirator Congressman Tom Feeney Smacked Down by Space Agency — Where His Wife Works!NASA's own Transit Workers Union has endorsed vote-rigging whistleblower
Clint Curtis for Congress. Curtis hopes to unseat corrupt Republican congressman Tom Feeney in Florida's 24th U.S. congressional district this fall… and this particular endorsement has gotta smart.
The irony here (among many): Feeney's wife works for NASA, or at least she used to, and we believe she still does. As well, Yang Enterprises Inc. (YEI) — the company for whom both Curtis and Feeney worked back when Curtis claims Feeney
asked him to create vote-rigging software in 2000 — has huge contracts with NASA to this day.
We're certain that even though Feeney was the Speaker of the Florida House at the same time he was YEI's general counsel and registered lobbyist, there was no conflict of interest there and Feeney had nothing to do with helping to secure those lucrative NASA gigs for YEI.
We're also certain that the junket Feeney took to Scotland to play golf with Jack Abramoff (on the lobbyist's dime) was purely for congressional business as well.
Here's the text of the ringing endorsement from the TWU Local 525…
Dear Clint,
The 800 members of Local 525 officially endorse your candidacy for Congress. Due to your continual efforts to bring honesty and integrity to Washington, we believe you are the right choice and the only choice for the working men and women of Florida.
During the course of this elections cycle, we intend to offer you whatever resources we have available in order to make your bid for congress a successful one and I personally will make myself available to you and your staff if I am needed.
We look forward to working with you,
Sincerely,
Kevin P. Smith
Vice President, TWU Local 525
Clint Curtis' website, should you wish to support him (and he can use it, as Feeney is rolling in dirty money) is
www.ClintCurtis.com. You can read more about Clint Curtis's remarkable story in this
quick summary including links to our original coverage of Curtis starting back in December of 2004.
On Thursday, we ran
another Clint Curtis related item including a link to the first print publication of 'discovered' police photos taken at the 'suicide' scene of the investigator from the Florida Inspector General's office who had been looking into Curtis' claims when he suddenly turned up dead one morning in Valdosta, Georgia in 2003.
A scan of the actual endorsement letter follows…Click here for REST OF STORY 
Clint Curtis Invoked in Mexican Election Integrity Fight!Video of BRAD BLOG's Vote-Rigging Whistleblower Shown by Presidential Candidate's Advisor to Suggest 'Cyberfraud Possible' in Recently Disputed Election
From today's Salon…July 8, 2006 | MEXICO CITY — "Ciberfraude," or cyberfraud, is not a word in the average Mexican's vocabulary. But most Mexicans have heard of the extraordinary electoral debacle that befell their neighbors to the north in 2000, and Martí Batres, the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Party's Mexico City chapter, was going to capitalize on that knowledge. At a press conference Friday afternoon at PRD headquarters, the close advisor to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist politician who lost an exceedingly close election here this week, nodded to an aide to turn on his laptop. "And now I'm going to show you a video," he told the roomful of reporters.
The lights went out, and on a pull-down screen, computer programmer Clinton Curtis explained in English to an American audience how he had allegedly been hired by Tom Feeney, speaker of Florida's House of Representatives and a Republican, to create a computer code that fixed that state's vote in favor of George W. Bush six years ago. Batres, or someone on YouTube, had added Spanish subtitles to the 3 and a half minute clip. "This video shows that cyberfraud is possible," Batres insisted when the lights came up. "There may have been a source code used to manipulate our elections just as with the Florida elections in 2000."
More available at the
Salon link above.
Not certain which video of Curtis was shown (haven't been able to follow the Mexico Election crisis too closely, as we've been waylaid by the current fight for electoral integrity in
this country of late), but it may have been the video of
Curtis testifying under oath to a panel of U.S. House Judiciary Committee members in late 2004 or one of several available online in which I interviewed him (
here's one, here's
another with text transcript) during a late 2005 Election Reform summit in Portland, OR.
And so that you don't have to jump through hoops at Salon...
Mexico 2006: Florida all over again?Members of Mexico's losing leftist party are invoking America's recent electoral scandals to convince the world that last Sunday's presidential election was fixed.
By Eliza Barclay
July 8, 2006 | MEXICO CITY -- "Ciberfraude," or cyberfraud, is not a word in the average Mexican's vocabulary. But most Mexicans have heard of the extraordinary electoral debacle that befell their neighbors to the north in 2000, and Martí Batres, the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Party's Mexico City chapter, was going to capitalize on that knowledge. At a press conference Friday afternoon at PRD headquarters, the close advisor to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist politician who lost an exceedingly close election here this week, nodded to an aide to turn on his laptop. "And now I'm going to show you a video," he told the roomful of reporters.
The lights went out, and on a pull-down screen, computer programmer Clinton Curtis explained in English to an American audience how he had allegedly been hired by Tom Feeney, speaker of Florida's House of Representatives and a Republican, to create a computer code that fixed that state's vote in favor of George W. Bush six years ago. Batres, or someone on YouTube, had added Spanish subtitles to the 3 and a half minute clip. "This video shows that cyberfraud is possible," Batres insisted when the lights came up. "There may have been a source code used to manipulate our elections just as with the Florida elections in 2000."
Rumors of fraud were swirling in Mexico's streets, on TV and on blogs long before Thursday's official count confirmed that Felipe Calderon of the conservative PAN party had beaten Lopez Obrador of PRD by .58 percent, a difference of just 236,000 votes out of 42 million cast. "A black hand was at work, I believe," says Jorge Ortiz, a taxi driver who voted for Lopez Obrador. "The numbers just don't make sense."
Some of the rumors were reminiscent of the bad old days when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ran Mexico without challenge and elections were rife with fraud and ballots were burned in bonfires. There were tales of 3 million votes missing from the preliminary tally issued early in the week, which had Calderon winning by more than a million votes. There were allegations of vote buying and ballots buried in a Mexico City garbage dump.
But the fraud claims made at the PRD press conference were decidedly 21st century and very American. Batres, head of the PRD's Mexico City chapter, detailed several instances where the votes reported by the government's preliminary tabulation system, called the PREP, did not match the actual voting record, always to the deficit of Lopez Obrador and the benefit of Calderon, in one case by as many as 3,828 votes.
According to Batres, the inconsistencies cannot be chalked up to human error or deliberate destroying of paper votes, but to conspiracy, to a source code like the one Clinton Curtis claimed to have designed in Florida that systematically moved votes from the PRD to the PAN.
"In many different states around the country, we have seen what we believe to be cybernetic manipulation," Batres insisted. "We are going to enlist the help of information crime experts to look for a code inside the [electronic tabulation] system and then we need a recount, vote by vote."
Batres did not specify whether the PRD believes the entire election was manipulated or if the numbers were tweaked for only a select number of polling sites. The party will make a formal presentation to the Federal Electoral Tribunal contesting the validity of the election as soon as Saturday morning. As of Friday night, the party had not yet announced which tack it would take, but there were three likely scenarios.
1. The PRD could claim that certain polling sites were manipulated and call for the reopening of the ballot boxes at those sites for a vote-by-vote count.
2. The PRD could claim that the entire election should be annulled because cyberfraud was widespread and affected every polling site.
3. The PRD could claim that the entire election should be annulled because of cyberfraud and because of other factors.
Chief among those "other factors" is the annulment of more than 904,000 votes, 2.16 percent of all votes cast. While discussion of cyberfraud sounds as much Ohio 2004 as Florida 2000, it's annulment that really inspires a Tallahassee flashback.
Explains University of Texas political science professor Kenneth Greene, who has been in Mexico as an observer, "This election had the 'overvote' factor, similar to the butterfly ballot issue in Florida where people punched more than one option. Here people sometimes marked more than one box and so the IFE didn't know who to count it for and annulled it."
The Federal Electoral Institute, known by its acronym IFE, is controlled by appointees from Calderon's party, PAN, just as the chief vote-counter in Florida, Katharine Harris, was a member of George W. Bush's party. In fact in Mexico, the IFE has even tighter control than Harris had six years ago. "It's parallel to what happened in Palm Beach except that in Mexico only the IFE can count the votes, unlike in Florida where the lawyers and the party members got involved with counting."
Once Lopez Obrador presents his formal complaint, he may not have any better luck. The Federal Electoral Tribunal, which will review the complaint, contains no PRD affiliates.
PRD officials are unlikely, therefore, to persuade anyone in power of their arguments. They seem confident, however, that they can convince the public that something untoward happened in this election. Expert observers are skeptical.
Victor Manuel Alarcón, head of the sociology department at the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Iztapalapa, says the errors were likely human, a common occurrence with any non-digital voting system. "A lot of the people tallying the votes were poorly educated -- remember this country is poor -- so it's very possible the discrepancies between the PREP and the official count were their fault, not the result of fraud."
Despite a history of vote fraud, it's also difficult to reconcile the claims of manipulation with Mexico's revamped electoral institutions and voting procedures. While Mexico's electoral system has remained technologically simple, with voters using fat black crayons and paper instead of touch screens, it is also one of the most expensive and labor-intensive in the world. The government spent $1.2 billion this year in part to ensure that no polling site would have more than 300 voters assigned to it. In the 1990s, procedures were changed so that no party officials would work at polling sites. Parties are allowed to have representatives observing the procedures, but the sites themselves must be manned by ordinary citizens to create accountability.
According to Ulises Beltran, a professor of political science at CIDE, a leading graduate research institution in Mexico City, organized fraud is virtually impossible in contemporary Mexican elections because of all the safeguards. "To find enough evidence of fraud for Lopez Obrador to win," explains Beltran, "there would have to be 50,000 citizens involved with the conspiracy. The small size of our polling sites and the large number of citizens working in them should really prevent it."
Still, no matter how plausible or implausible the PRD's case turns out to be -- and enlisting the questionable Clinton Curtis on their behalf is hardly convincing -- 65 percent of the public voted for someone besides the election's declared winner. Some, at least, are likely to remain dubious about Calderon's victory. Cuahtemoc Cardenas, the founder of the PRD, who could make a much more compelling case that he was robbed of the presidency in the controversial election of 1988, argues that all questions must be answered for the sake of Mexico. "Without even being at fault," wrote Cardenas in a Friday editorial, "those who resist and oppose the clearing up of doubts awake unnecessary suspicions."
