Dean, Dems sound off on e-voting security

[Renew Deal]

Pols sound off at Democratic convention

By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service July 28, 2004

Former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean joined prominent Democrats on Wednesday to call attention to the need for election machines that are accurate, secure and can be audited to ensure the accuracy of vote tallies.

Dean joined U.S. Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey at a press conference with the Campaign for America's Future and Rock the Vote to call attention to a plank in the Democratic Party's 2004 platform that calls for voting systems to be "accessible, independently auditable, accurate, and secure," and to excoriate Republicans in Congress and the states who have blocked legislation mandating a paper trail for votes cast using electronic voting machines.

"We can spend millions on security, surely we can do just as much to safeguard the central piece of representative government -- the voting process," Holt said. He spoke in a Cambridge, Mass., hotel, just across the Charles River from the FleetCenter, where Democratic Party delegates and luminaries from across the country are meeting to nominate presidential and vice presidential candidates.

Holt was joined briefly by Dean, who said that he initially heard of the now-notorious security problems of prominent electronic voting machines while running for the Democratic nomination and dismissed the complaints as coming from "conspiracy whackos." A closer look convinced Dean of the seriousness of the issues, which he said threatened to undermine democracy in the U.S. if left unaddressed.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/28/HNdncevote_1.html

This is from a tech mag so it's a different perspective.

[NMDemDist2]

1. Finally!! It;s about time this starting getting some headlines eom

[NMDemDist2]

2. Lou Dobbs is doing a piece on it too tonite

:bounce:

[phantom power]

3. There was a piece on the news last night

I forget which network, but anyway it was nice to see some coverage. Even so, it also reminded me that we should have been having this discussion at least two years ago. And they are only having it now because they've actually seen the system fail in Florida.

People are still astonishingly naive about what's at stake here. My wife was watching the story with me, and I commented that they were missing the main problem: that if anybody *did* tamper with the voting software, there will be absolutely no way to know. She looks at me and says "you're quite a lot more paranoid than I am".

Et tu, my spouse...?

[Myrina]

4. Dean dismissed us as 'conspiracy whackos' ?

Thanks alot, Doc ... :(