Rob Kall: Alright, now
Greg, we've talked over the years a lot about electronic voting, but it hasn't
come up in our conversation yet today. So you're bringing up just the basic
idea of e-voting. Why do we still have this abomination? I really believe
e-voting has significantly diminished that the U.S.'s reputation as the place
where honest voting happens. It is really allegorical Afghanistan!
Greg Palast: Well here's
the trick. In Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, I think I quote Ion Sancho, who is one of the most
experienced vote experts in America. Actually, he's in charge of voting in
Tallahassee, Florida: not for the state, just for the county. And he says, look
electronic voting machines have a higher failure rate than paper ballots,
higher, a higher spoilage rate as they call it, higher spoilage rate, and they
cost five times as much. So why would someone deliberately spend five hundred
percent more than you have to for something that doesn't work as well for
example, paper ballots with scanners in a precinct. Why would you spend more to get a crappier
product? The answer is that it's not
crappy from the guys who put it in. They
know what's going to happen! It's not a question that they can reprogram the
software. The votes are going to get
lost where they want them lost.
In Sarasota, Florida, in the rich
areas there was a vote for Congress that counted the votes on e-machines. The
e-readers went down, towards Tampa where it's poor and black. Eighteen thousand
votes simply disappeared. It was all black precincts and the Republican won, it
was Katherine Harris' old Congressional seat, they won, the Republicans won by
five hundred votes with eighteen thousand votes missing. Now, whose votes were
they? And they say, we don't know. Gee,
we lost eighteen thousand votes, but we don't know who they voted for. So the black areas lose eighteen thousand
votes and the Republicans win by five hundred.
They know what happens. And again, it's the hardest thing to trace as a
steal, because,e unlike software, where you switch one vote from one to
another, which is difficult, the machine's going down is easy as pie. Every
computer expert could tell you that. If
all you want to do is make a machine not work, or malfunction"so it loses track
of what it's done, that's easy.
Rob Kall: Why didn't the Democrats when they had control of the
House, the Senate, and the White House get rid of e-voting?
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