As a follow-up to this problem for anyone this may happen to in the future (hopefully not!):
My solution was to change line 54 in the INSTALL.pl file:
 our $use_curl = 0; to  our $use_curl = 1;

This let the program download the appropriate files using an alternate method rather then the default one. I believe that the underlying problem to this code was related to the LWP::Simple module, as suggested by Hauke D. I tried everything under the sun to fix this code but in the end, it was really just changing a 0 to 1