Tickler
11-01-2006, 01:15 AM
From CNN's Lou Dobbs tonight
DOBBS: Florida the scene of one of this country's worst election breakdowns ever. Already a series of e-voting glitches have plagued early voting in the state of Florida. It could be a debacle there all over again.
Kitty Pilgrim has the report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Voter activists are warning there have been problems with electronic machines in Florida in early voting. They are worried about Election Day.
Some of the most populous counties, Broward, Pinellas and Volusia counties, have reported serious problems. In Pinellas County the machines malfunctioned. In seven percent of precincts, the number of votes didn't match the tally of registered voters.
PAMELA HAENGEL, VOTING INTEGRITY ALLIANCE: In Pinellas County in the primaries we found over 150 calibration errors from precinct workers' logs. That's when a voter goes to touch the screen and it hops to a candidate that they didn't necessarily vote for.
PILGRIM: Today, Governor Jeb Bush gave his full vote of confidence to the machine.
GOV. JEB BUSH (R), FLORIDA: We're a model for the reset of the country and we're a model on how we certify equipment as well.
PILGRIM: The Florida hanging chad debacle of 2000 is what really launched the Help America Vote Act and the funding for most of the country to switch to electronic voting. But even now, Florida does not have a voter-verified paper trail.
REGINALD MITCHELL, PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY: Despite all the problems that are going on all over the country and all of the reports and all the tests verifying that it's possible to rig a system, we have nothing in place for a paper trail in Florida.
PILGRIM: Volusia County has 300,000 registered voters. Last Saturday during early voting, seven churches mobilized buses to take voters to the polls.
SUSAN PYNCHON, FLORIDA ELECTION COALITION: The voting started at 8:00. At five minutes before 10:00, the power failed. It's probably coincidental, but one of the surefire ways to disenfranchise voters with electronic voting machines is a power failure.
PILGRIM: That power outage kept the electronic voting machines down for hours and hundreds of voters were turned away.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PILGRIM: Another problem, in some places representatives of the voting machines company are in charge of running the software that tabulates the votes. And that's because not enough election officials could be trained in time -- Lou.
DOBBS: This is one troubling, concerning report on top of another. This country -- we are beginning to behave like a Banana Republic, this great superpower of ours.
PILGRIM: It's unbelievably shocking this close to the election we're dealing with this.
DOBBS: Idiotic. Idiotic. Unbelievable. It's just -- it's incredible.
And later on .....
A new documentary, "Hacking Democracy" is set to air on HBO Thursday evening telling the story of writer turned voter activist, Bev Harris, she joins us now and along with Bev, Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at the firm Security Innovations.
...
SUSAN BERNECKER, "HACKING DEMOCRACY": This is where I came the day that the warehouses opened to the candidates to inspect. So I came here with an old college buddy, he grabbed his camera and I asked them to show me how the machine worked. So I just started fooling around with the machine. And it's when I pressed the button next to my name and then I looked down and I see Mr. Gambaluca's (ph) name in the display when I pressed Susan Bernecker.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/31/ldt.01.html
DOBBS: Florida the scene of one of this country's worst election breakdowns ever. Already a series of e-voting glitches have plagued early voting in the state of Florida. It could be a debacle there all over again.
Kitty Pilgrim has the report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Voter activists are warning there have been problems with electronic machines in Florida in early voting. They are worried about Election Day.
Some of the most populous counties, Broward, Pinellas and Volusia counties, have reported serious problems. In Pinellas County the machines malfunctioned. In seven percent of precincts, the number of votes didn't match the tally of registered voters.
PAMELA HAENGEL, VOTING INTEGRITY ALLIANCE: In Pinellas County in the primaries we found over 150 calibration errors from precinct workers' logs. That's when a voter goes to touch the screen and it hops to a candidate that they didn't necessarily vote for.
PILGRIM: Today, Governor Jeb Bush gave his full vote of confidence to the machine.
GOV. JEB BUSH (R), FLORIDA: We're a model for the reset of the country and we're a model on how we certify equipment as well.
PILGRIM: The Florida hanging chad debacle of 2000 is what really launched the Help America Vote Act and the funding for most of the country to switch to electronic voting. But even now, Florida does not have a voter-verified paper trail.
REGINALD MITCHELL, PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY: Despite all the problems that are going on all over the country and all of the reports and all the tests verifying that it's possible to rig a system, we have nothing in place for a paper trail in Florida.
PILGRIM: Volusia County has 300,000 registered voters. Last Saturday during early voting, seven churches mobilized buses to take voters to the polls.
SUSAN PYNCHON, FLORIDA ELECTION COALITION: The voting started at 8:00. At five minutes before 10:00, the power failed. It's probably coincidental, but one of the surefire ways to disenfranchise voters with electronic voting machines is a power failure.
PILGRIM: That power outage kept the electronic voting machines down for hours and hundreds of voters were turned away.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PILGRIM: Another problem, in some places representatives of the voting machines company are in charge of running the software that tabulates the votes. And that's because not enough election officials could be trained in time -- Lou.
DOBBS: This is one troubling, concerning report on top of another. This country -- we are beginning to behave like a Banana Republic, this great superpower of ours.
PILGRIM: It's unbelievably shocking this close to the election we're dealing with this.
DOBBS: Idiotic. Idiotic. Unbelievable. It's just -- it's incredible.
And later on .....
A new documentary, "Hacking Democracy" is set to air on HBO Thursday evening telling the story of writer turned voter activist, Bev Harris, she joins us now and along with Bev, Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at the firm Security Innovations.
...
SUSAN BERNECKER, "HACKING DEMOCRACY": This is where I came the day that the warehouses opened to the candidates to inspect. So I came here with an old college buddy, he grabbed his camera and I asked them to show me how the machine worked. So I just started fooling around with the machine. And it's when I pressed the button next to my name and then I looked down and I see Mr. Gambaluca's (ph) name in the display when I pressed Susan Bernecker.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/31/ldt.01.html