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Edited on Sun Jul-13-03 10:53 PM by Zan_of_Texas
Hey, I'm glad some of you were able to access the webcast!
Here's the quote from Charlie Matulka, who lost to Chuck Hegal in the Nebraska Senate race. As the article in The Hill documents, Hegal was owner of a stake in the company whose subsidiary owns most of the voting machines used in Nebraska.
This was a clip from the fine special done by Geoff Brady for Free Speech Radio News called "Hacking Democracy." (You can listen to that by going to www.fsrn.org)
Charlie Matulka, after the votes showed he lost the Nebraska Senate race in 2002: "They got the law set up to where I can't get a manual count of the election. They said, well we can do the same thing --have the software recount again. There were gonna have the same result they just covered up...All I wanted is the 4 or 5 largest counties. Like for example, North Omaha, it's a heavily black district. Hegel basically swept it the last two elections -- he didn't do nothing to get that vote. Never represented any minorities, never represented the people. Never represented the farmers, never represented the teachers. All he represents is big business....You can't prove it, can't disprove it."
From David Dill's website, www.verifiedvoting.org: Prepared by Dill and three other computer experts: "The risks of paperless DRE machines are large. Programming errors are an inevitable fact of life given current technology. With these paperless DRE machines, there is nothing that can stop a determined group from achieving large-scale election theft. We see no reason why major problems will not occur, including obviously messed up elections, election of incorrect candidates, and, certainly, disillusioned and disenfranchised voters."
From the interview with David Dill of Stanford University, 7/13/03 KPFT Radio Houston:
Q: Something like 800,000 lines of software code are in Diebold's proprietary software. Is it realistic to expect a certification board to go through and find any problems, if there were one?
David Dill: "It is practically impossible for someone to review software of any length at all -- even 10,000 or maybe even 1500 -- lines of code to make sure that's 100% error-free. The certification is done by organizations called independent testing authorities. They couldn't do it, no matter how hard they tried. Now, from what I have learned, they don't try hard enough. There are claims that the code is inspected line by line. I know that that is not sufficient to find bugs and certainly not to find tampering that is deliberately hidden in that software. In fact, the tampering may not even be in the software that's presented to the independent testing authority."
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Q: If I said to you right now, you could either vote on an electronic machine, such as the kind that's being put into place, without a voter verified paper trail, OR you can use a piece of paper and a pen with real human being counters as they do in rural Maine, which would you do?
David Dill: "Assuming there are good election processes, given a choice between voting on a paperless DRE and voting on a paper ballot, I would vote on the paper ballot. Because I would know that it was my vote that was being counted, not some vote that had been handled by a vendor who I don't know and don't have any reason to trust. There are various reasons that it's desirable to have electronic voting. Voters with certain types of disabilities have a lot of trouble manipulating paper ballots. For example, if someone has limited control over their hand motion, or if they can't -- are visually impaired, then they are gonna have problems filling out a paper ballot. And we need to provide some technology to enable those people to vote without assistance whenever we can. And I think that can be achieved without sacrificing the integrity of our election system."
After the interview with David Dill, Bev Harris was on the show live for the final fifteen minutes. She did great, as usual! I do not have a transcript yet of that.
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