Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?

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Harvey Wasserman of Columbus, Ohio, has been a vocal critic of electronic voting machines. He co-wrote the book, "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election." His upcoming book is titled "The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft." We talk to him about his concerns for the upcoming presidential race.

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TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We're in Westerville, Ohio, just outside Columbus. We're at Otterbein University, where I'll be teaching some classes today, or, let's say, talking with students. We're at OTV, which is Otterbein Television. And, Harvey Wasserman, I wanted to talk to you now about voting machines --

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: -- and your concern over the years that electronic voting could be used to steal elections. Are you still concerned about this?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, electronic voting was used to steal the presidential election right here in Ohio in 2004. John Kerry was the rightful winner in 2004 over George W. Bush. The secretary of state at the time, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and the governor, Robert Taft, used their power of electronic vote count to flip the vote to George W. Bush from John Kerry.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We watched it -- I grew up here, Amy. We watched it, totally, right up close and personal. We did the accounting. I work with a political scientist named Bob Fitrakis. We're about to come out with another book, The Strip & Flip of the 2016 Selection. They are stripping the voter rolls -- and Greg Palast, the great investigative reporter, is doing great on this -- removing African Americans, Hispanics, people who might incline to vote progressive, and they -- so that -- in 2004, they stripped 300,000 people from the voter rolls here in the urban areas. Bush only won by less than 120 [thousand].

And this year, about 80 percent of the vote nationally will be cast on electronic voting machines. There is no verifiability. In six key swing states -- Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona -- you have Republican governors and Republican secretaries of state, and no method of verifying the electronic vote count. At midnight or whenever it is on election night, those two guys can go in there with an IT person and flip the outcome of an electronically counted vote within about 60 seconds. So all this millions and millions of dollars, people out campaigning and so on, can be negated by an electronic vote flip late at night on election night, and there is no way to verify what's happened.

AMY GOODMAN: They didn't do this with President Obama in 2008.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: They did. He had too many votes; he was too far out. They couldn't -- it would have taken them too many, to flip too many states. [inaudible] believe Obama won by well over 10 million votes. The last -- the final vote count was in -- official, was in 7 or 8 million.

AMY GOODMAN: But what gives you this idea?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Because we've seen it happen. When you compare exit polls, which are generally accurate to within 1 percent, with the electronic outcome, there are huge variations. And we have documented many dozens of different things that they have done over the years to flip electronic votes.

AMY GOODMAN: How does e-voting, electronic voting, work? And who controls the controls on it?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that's the key. The electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations, which are Republican in orientation, generally. And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary. So, even the governments that buy or lease these machines have no access to a final verification process. Even Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify." And we know that the vote count was flipped in 2004. We know it was flipped in Volusia County in 2000.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is Volusia County?