Lou Dobbs transcript Tuesday, July 11

[Amaryllis]

PILGRIM: New fears about the integrity of our democracy tonight. Voter activists worry that standards for electronic voting machines breaking down are dangerously lax.

Now, federal officials say they're working on tighter standards, but those new standards may not be ready for years.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PILGRIM (voice over): Electronic voting machines, fast, easy, but what happens when they break down or fail? Federal guidelines permit one failure every 163 hours, which means one out of every 11 machines may break down on Election Day.

Critics say that's not acceptable.

JOHN WASHBURN, VOTETRUSTUSA: The reliability quotient for the hardware is too high. It allows too many machines to fail in any given election day and also be down for too long during that given day.

PILGRIM: Congressman Jerrold Nadler says voting machines have a higher failure rate than ATM machines and VCRs.

REP. JERROLD NADLER (D), NEW YORK: No machinery should be allowed to be purchased or used for voting that don't have a guaranteed mean time between failures of at least several thousand hours -- 70,000 would be good. That's what a VCR is. An ATM machine will go thousands of hours.

Do we care less about our voting machines than our ATM machines?

PILGRIM: The election assistance commissioner defends the current standards.

PAUL DEGREGORIO, CHAIRMAN, ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMM.: We believe that it is very important that these guidelines and any kind of standards be improved all the time, and we're working on spending federal money to do that because we want voters to have trust and confidence in the voting process in America.

PILGRIM: DeGregorio says a federal advisory board is currently examining options for tighter reliability guidelines, but it's not clear if those standards could be implemented in time for the 2008 election.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PILGRIM: Now, federal law says machines may not have more than one error per 500,000 votes, but critics say that tough standard doesn't mean much if the machines fail altogether.

DU his poll:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x439679
Do you think it's an acceptable standard that electronic voting
machines can fail almost a tenth of the time?

[Kurovski]

1. Kick...nt

[Wilms]

2. Electronic Voting Machines: Programmed for Failure?

Electronic Voting Machines: Programmed for Failure?

By Joan Krawitz, Executive Director, VioteTrustUSA

March 13, 2006

Howard Stanislevic's full report, “DRE Reliability: Failure by Design?” can be downloaded here. A second report "Voting Systems Batch Test Results – Reliability," by Stanislevic and John Gideon can be downloaded here.

What if your computer had to be replaced every month or two … ATMs failed to work properly 10% of the time … your cell phone broke down every ten days?

Current federal standards allow almost 10% of electronic voting machines to fail every Election Day, according to “DRE Reliability: Failure by Design?” a new report issued by the VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project. The report notes that the acceptable failure rate is even higher – approaching 25% -- in a 5-day early voting period.

The report was authored by Howard Stanislevic, a network engineering consultant whose experience includes working with the Internet Engineering Task Force on Internet Protocol Performance Metrics. Stanislevic points out that the failure rate allowed for touchscreen voting machines (also known as Direct Recording Electronic or DRE) exceeds the actual failure rate of the 40-year-old lever machines still in use in New York by 44%. The Department of Justice has filed suit against New York State for failure to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA provides funding for states to replace lever and punch-card voting machines with more modern and accessible equipment in time for the first federal election of 2006.

A second paper, "Voting Systems Batch Test Results – Reliability," by Stanislevic and John Gideon of VoteTrustUSA and VotersUnite.org, examines the results from the recently completed "batch testing" of voting systems manufactured by Diebold, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems, and puts the information from those tests, provided by the California Secretary of State’s office, into the context of the inadequate reliability standards.

snip

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1041&Itemid=26

[Bill Bored]

3. Watch video of this segment here:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3058

[Wilms]

4. .