The E-Vote Factor: Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose?

[RBHam]

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

excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: What about this letter, Bev Harris, that has been signed by three Congress members, including Florida Congress member Robert Wexler, John Conyers, and Gerald Nadler. Can you talk about it? We have hardly seen any reference to it.

BEV HARRIS: Well, you know, the concern I have is, we have got to go after this from all fronts. I haven't seen any reference to it in the media. I have also been told from sources that I have inside the media that are fairly high up that particularly in TV, there's been -- there is now a lockdown on this story. It is officially and from an executive producer level, let's move on time. And I am very concerned about that, because it looks like we're going to have to go to places like BBC, to get the real story out. I find it amazing that we went ahead with an election without even auditing it. You are never going to find the problems with the machines that you can quantify until you at least do the basic canvassing that's in the current election procedures, such as, comparing how many people showed up to vote with how many signatures are in this poll book with how many votes show up in the machines. They haven't even done that. And to make it even worse, Ohio, they don't even know how many provisional ballots there are. They don't know if there's 150,000 or 500,000. They don't seem to be able to tell us what records they have. This is amazing, and I knew this was going to happen. They set up this thing. They said we're going to have provisional ballots nationwide. They didn't set up any auditing for them. And so, in case after case, we're not able to account for those ballots. We ought to know, because they're cast at the precinct. We ought to know how many provision ballots we have on election night. Why wouldn't we if we have proper book keeping?

AMY GOODMAN: There's been serious questions raised about New Mexico, but does it hurt trying to find out the ultimate counts that John Kerry and John Edwards so immediately conceded, despite the fact that Edwards had said as they promised during the campaigns, making references to Al Gore squelching protests four years ago, that they would make sure that the votes were counted?

BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in Ohio, they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from someone in the Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured there was only 150,000 provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They couldn't tell me. You see, I don't understand how you would concede anyway without even beginning the canvassing, because with these voting machines, we don't have adequate auditing in place, but we have some. The full auditing we have does -- it does find some anomalies that are quite big and sometimes they flip elections. So, you know, why not just wait a couple of days. The other thing I'm seeing is that in some parts the media gave a huge push to hurry, hurry, hurry, certify. This was happening in New Mexico. They're saying -- they're putting tremendous pressure on Governor Bill Richardson to hurry and certify the election. Well why? You have x-number of days to certify the election. One would think you would want it to be right, and you’d think would you want to go through and you want to check out the information. And understand, a lot of this is already election procedures. We keep saying that election procedures are what really save us from the insecure and mysterious machines, and that the election procedures would catch anomalies. Understand, that they have not done the election procedures yet in most cases. They have chosen to go ahead and call elections without doing the very procedures that they say protect the system.