In 2000, America dodged a bullet in Al Gore. In 2004, they dodged a bullet and a flowerpot throwing crazy old aunt in the attic.
“Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States,” Heinz Kerry said. She identified both as “hard-right” Republicans. She argued that it is “very easy to hack into the mother machines.”
“We in the United States are not a banana republic,” added Heinz Kerry. She argued that Democrats should insist on “accountability and transparency” in how votes are tabulated. “I fear for ’06,” she said. “I don’t trust it the way it is right now.”
I don’t know if there was many problems with the voting machines or not in the 2004 elections. The problem is that no one else really does either. Unless the voting machines also generate some sort of paper record that the voter verifies and then drops into a box somewhere, there is no way to audit these voting machines. As someone in the IT industry, I’d be very hesitant at pushing a button and just trusting that my vote was recorded correctly without any hard backup that could be verified.
No argument from me on that part, Todd.
THK has every reason to be concerned. Take what happened in the Washington State Governor’s race, for example: the reconciliation between the record of who voted, and how many ballots were counted, leaves a gap of a few thousand votes. And the margin of victory was a mere 129 for the Democrats … after the third recount during which about 500 “newly discovered” ballots were included in a heavily Democrat county. Details available at http://www.soundpolitics.com/
As for a paper trail (and voting problems) in DRE’s (so-called Direct-Recording Electronic voting machines), follow the status state-by-state at any of a number of websites, such as http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
The problem is that it’s THK. It’s like Ted Kennedy bellowing about “war for oil” and then fighting the wind generators off the coast of his estate….
C’mon people, how do you take her fears seriously when she refers to the Mother Machines? It’s an X-files parody. Elsewhere in the article she accuses Catholic clergy of some pretty outrageous things without a scrap of evidence. She’s a toon.
It’s OK friends…Miz Heinz has just been eating those gin-soaked white raisins again.