Reply #4: If the vote is crooked, what kind of politicians can we expect..... [View All]

[Zan_of_Texas]

Here's a quote from Charlie Matulka, who lost to Chuck Hegal in the Nebraska Senate race. As an 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.

Matulk's quote is from a 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."

Also, see David Dill's website, www.verifiedvoting.org

From the website:
"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."

Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford, has gotten nearly 1000 computer experts to sign a petition recommending a voter-verified audit trail to accompany electronic voting. That trail would likely be a paper ballot, printed at the time a voter casts his or her vote, viewed and verified by the voter, and locked in a safe box, and available for random checks of accuracy.

In my opinion, EVERY race should at least be randomly spot checked -- preferably in high proportions.

In fact, I'd be in favor of going back to paper ballots right now for all races, until the computer guys can prove their machines work. Right now, all they do is say "Trust us."

It's faith-based voting. Kinda like faith-based corporate management. Kinda like faith-based weapons of mass destruction.