The E-Vote Factor: Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose? (D.Now)

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<snip> BEV HARRIS: Well, first, we’re seeking internal audit logs of the machines, which are public record. There's nothing proprietary about this. It's interesting so far. We have been getting responses, but the officials who run the machines, the county officials, are really so clueless. They don't know what their machines' records are, or how to print them out. So we find ourselves guiding them through the menus on their own software to show them how to print this information out which is a bit scary. But we also sought documentation on all of the troubled slips in all of the documentation of any problems that they had. Right now, we're following up, you know, we have all of the anomalies such as the viewer mentioning, and we're following up with specific public records requests, for example, give me the internal log of machine number such and such of that precinct, or depending on the type of anomaly they're reporting, we are seeking the specific types of records that will shed more light on that. <snip>

AVIEL RUBIN: Well, I think that we have a problem now, which is that we have dug ourselves a big hole by running an election using systems that -- there's really no way to tell what's going on inside the voting machines. So, when -- I'd like to separate out all of the talk about the glitches and things not working from the idea that somebody, you know, security -- somebody may have rigged the machines or tampered with them. And I think the fact that we're using systems where it's impossible to tell is very scary. So, Bev talked about these problems that they're trying to uncover, and we have seen the news stories about problems, but what I worry about are the ones that may have happened that are totally undetectable. For example, it doesn't make bug news if a voting machine switches 5% of the votes from one candidate to another, because nobody ever knows it because we have a secret ballot in this country. I think it's very important that we move away from systems where nobody can really see what's going on inside at the time of the election. And there's no capability of doing a recount towards more verifiable, auditable systems, for example, if you had a voter verified paper ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the opposition? You had the Election Monitoring Group, that the State Department brought in itself from the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation Europe. Some of their election monitors were saying that this is worse than the situation in Serbia, another one referring to the Venezuelan elections and saying, their electronic voting machines, people were given a ticket that they dropped in a box and randomly around the country, they can compare the paper trail in the boxes to the voting machines. Why is there such fierce opposition to having any paper trail, which means zero possibility of recount?

AVIEL RUBIN: I have always been very surprised that the people running elections are not jumping at the chance of having a way to recount the election. I think that, you know, the best thing would be to get one of those people on the show and ask them that question, because it doesn't make any sense it me. From the vendor's perspective, they would sell a more expensive, more feature-rich product if they could add photograph verifiable printout. I have been completely confused about why they're -- everybody is not embracing this concept. <snip>

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513252