Howard Dean: "Voting machines not reliable & shouldn't be used"

Amaryllis

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Sat Apr-22-06 11:39 AM
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Howard Dean: "Voting machines not reliable & shouldn't be used"

Transcript from a talk Dean did April 12
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11436

David Grossman: Governor, one question by way of the blog Daily Kos. How concerned are you and others at the DNC about Diebold voting machines, and...

Dean: Very.

Grossman: ...other issues of voting fraud?

Dean: Very concerned. I am actually calling Democratic public officials. I called one yesterday to try to head off the use of these machines. We spent half a million dollars after the election with a task force, headed by Donna Brazile but made up of academics that were relatively neutral and very careful, to look at these machines very carefully. We concluded that are easily hackable and cannot be verified and that they are not reliable. And we concluded the best machine you can use is an opti-scan machine because at least it has paper ballots and you still get the rapidity of the counting. There are Democratic officials who still use these because they get huge amounts of money from the federal government to buy these
kinds of machines, well, not just ... the other machines, the Sequoias and Diebolds and such. I'm not an expert on these machines, although someone did actually teach me how to hack one on live TV once, which was kind of fun. It's pretty shocking -- I know so little about the intricacies of all this stuff so ... I wouldn't pretend I ... I did change the vote totals on the machines, but I don't know if it was really -- could have been a program that was elaborately programmed to fool me into thinking I was doing something I really wasn't doing.

But yes, our conclusion is that these machines are not reliable and they undermine confidence in democracy. I, as you know, keep in pretty constant touch with lots of people around the country, many of the people who supported me for President are people who are very much involved in exposing this. There have been some success stories in North Carolina, for example, the legislature wrote the bill so that essentially Diebold's unwillingness to provide source codes or any kind of reliability disqualified them from the bidding. So, we're pushing back on this hard. Republican legislators seem to think these are great things. We don't get very far in states that are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, but we have had some success. We believe it's important to keep talking about these machines. These machines are a problem. This is not some Internet conspiracy; this is a serious problem that faces American democracy. These machines are not reliable and they shouldn't be used. We should not be using machines in this country where the results of the vote can't be verified after the fact. Period. Any machines.

Also see:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/22/13728/8193