HARVEY WASSERMAN: In Florida, when Al Gore basically was the rightful winner, and George W. Bush won the election. I mean, the only great --
AMY GOODMAN: And they were electronic voting machines?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: In Volusia County, they were, yes. In the southern part of Florida, they used butterfly ballots, as you'll recall. The only good thing we can say about George W. Bush is the American people never actually elected him president. And we're looking now at 2016, at an election that will be very easily flipped, in those six key swing states and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the answer?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: We have to have universal, hand-counted paper ballots. And Bernie Sanders has endorsed that. We have to have automatic voter registration, where people can monitor the registration rolls, because people are being stripped from the registration rolls, mostly, of course, African-American and Hispanic. But this year, we're not going to get that. And this year, it's going to be very, very difficult, in a close election, to monitor exactly what happens, because these are black boxes. We have a wonderful actress named Bev Harris, who's been working with Greg Palast and others, who has shown, in black box voting, that the public has no real access, no verification process for the electronic votes. And so we're going through this huge charade here of a national campaign, primaries and then a general election, where hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent, and on election night, in 60 seconds, the actual outcome can be flipped electronically in key swing states with no verification whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: If there are electronic voting machines everywhere, which there are now, right?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Pretty much, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you think they can be protected, people can be sure that their vote is counted, that they cast, even using electronic voting machines?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They can't be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine. They are privately owned by private corporations, and the proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count. We're going into a national election, and not just the presidency, but Senate seats, House seats. We believe three Senate seats in 2014 were stolen -- in North Carolina, Colorado and Alaska -- that the Republicans do not have a legitimate 54-seat, or whatever it is, majority in the Senate. And this will happen again. It's not just the presidency. And we've been -- we have written seven books about this, Bob Fitrakis and I, from our experience here in Ohio in 2004. And again, we have a Republican governor, Republican secretary of state, no verifiability on the electronic vote count. It will be arbitrary, when push comes to shove, on -- midnight, 1:00 on election night -- what the outcome will be.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think just Republicans would do it?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Oh, no, Democrats definitely do it. I have -- we have strong questions about Rahm Emanuel being re-elected in Chicago, for example. We have no doubt that Scott Walker stole his re-election in Wisconsin.
AMY GOODMAN: Based on what?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Based on the miraculous discovery of several thousand votes in a so-called glitched computer voting machine that gave him a victory where it was clearly a defeat. You know, this is stuff that's been going on a long time. These methods were perfected more or less overseas by the CIA and other covert and overt operations. They came back. It started in 1988 with George H.W. Bush using electronic voting machines in New Hampshire to beat Bob Dole in the 1988 primary. And we have seen since then the use of electronic voting machines all across the country to flip elections after they have stripped the voter rolls. And, you know --
AMY GOODMAN: When you say "stripping the voter rolls," you mean?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes, well, Greg Palast has reported on this. In Florida 2000, 90,000 mostly black and Hispanic voters were stripped out of the voter rolls before the election, in a vote count that was won by 600 votes. And in Ohio 2004, 300,000 voters in primarily urban areas were stripped off the voter rolls. People showed up to vote in the same precinct -- as did I, by the way -- they were -- I was denied my absentee ballot, and we had a federal lawsuit on this, which we won and went nowhere after that.
But the reality is that we are voting in black boxes and that the governors and secretaries of state of these key swing states -- but wherever you have a governor and secretary of state from the same party, be they Democrat or Republican, they have the power, under the electronic voting system, to flip the outcome of an election, with no verifiability, because the courts have ruled that these privately owned voting machines have proprietary software. It's a nightmare. And it's not democracy. I mean, Bernie Sanders has shown that the election -- that the campaign finance is rigged, that the economy is rigged. Why wouldn't they take the very small next step to rig the electronic voting machines?
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