Interview w/ Brad Friedman, election integrity advocate and blogger

[babylonsister]

WTG, Brad!

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6115

Interview w/ Brad Friedman, election integrity advocate and blogger
by Allan Uthman | Mar 15 2007

Eenie, Meenie, Miny, Moe: Blogger & journalist Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog on the hijacking of democracy, why a paper trail isn't enough, and the Democrats' flawed remedy.

Do you think that the Democratic gains in the midterm elections have had a deflating effect on the election integrity movement?

Actually, by and large no, and I’m happy to say that because I was concerned about that. I think it has had a deflating effect only in a very small respect, in that the general public out there—the folks who were terrified, “Oh, are they going to throw another election?” Those people have turned their attention to other things for the moment. But the election integrity movement as a whole is really making as much noise and raising as much hell as ever. And that is good to see, because the entire movement sort of came out of 2000, and then certainly 2004, and you had a lot of progressive folks, folks on the left who made it up. Now, mind you, there are a bunch of Republicans and libertarians and intellectually honest conservatives—when you can find them—that are in the movement as well, but by and large there’s a lot of progressives. And I did have those concerns, and it has not come to pass. In fact, in many ways it has made the fight a lot easier, because there was that notion, the sore loser, sour grapes notion that had always been used; “Oh you guys are just mad because you can’t win elections.” And now folks like that can say, “We won the election and we are still mad.” I used to hear that a lot: “You’re just an angry lefty who is angry that Kerry didn’t win,” and I always had to point out, “Well, frankly, I didn’t vote for John Kerry.” It has never really been about that for me. So I think that it has actually been good. I also think what happened in Florida-13 in many ways has been a godsend.

Tell us a little bit about the problems in Florida’s 13th.

I’ll give you the short version: Essentially, you’ve got a race decided by just 369 votes, and yet 18,000 votes completely disappeared. That’s a problem. And these are on paperless, touch screen voting machines. And when I say disappeared it means that 18,000 voters appear to have not voted only in that race, but only in that particular county—I think district 13 makes up about 5 different counties—and only on those touch screen DRE voting machines—DRE is direct recording electronic. So it was a huge undervote rate, some 15%, even higher in some precincts, and in fact, what the bad guys have been saying here is that they just didn’t want to vote; they were angry with both Jennings and Buchanan; it was a dirty campaign, whatever. It doesn’t bear out, because in fact the other counties in that same race had normal undercount rates in the same race. And even in Sarasota County itself, on the paper ballots, the absentee paper ballots, you had a normal undervote rate. So there really is no explanation for it other than something went wrong with those machines. And even the only expert to be put on the stand by the voting machine company, ES&S , has admitted that were it not for problems with the voting machines, Jennings would have won. So, it’s pretty extraordinary and in one sense a bullet has been dodged in that the balance of the House was not hanging on that one race.

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[texpatriot2004]

1. Brad is fantastic nm