UPDATED: Complete Video Now Linked! Also, Complete Text Transcript!
By Brad Friedman on 9/27/2006, 1:28pm PT  

Heard from Bobby an hour or so ago, that he's going to be on MSNBC's HARDBALL with Chris Matthews tonight at 5:10pm ET (2:10pm PT).

He'll be discussing his recent Rolling Stone piece on Diebold's duplicity in their voting systems, and our elections from 2002 on up to now. At least, that's what he's been told.

As well, we're hoping he'll put out the words calling on folks to demand that Congress pass legislation for Emergency Paper Ballots this November.

UPDATE 3:35pm PT: Full video now linked below! Kennedy spoke about how easy it now is to steal an election on an E-Voting Machine ("in just 60 seconds") as based on recent studies by Princeton, NYU's Brennan Center and the non-partisan GAO office.

He also discussed the new congressional Emergency Paper Ballot legislation, and even recommended your friendly neighborhood BRAD BLOG as a good source for information on all of the above.

Video links now below. Thanks to Bobby for the kind plug. Thanks to Chris Matthews for letting him get out a sentence or two in a row. (Thanks to HotPotatoMash for the video links!)


-- Video in Flash Format is now here...
-- Video QuickTime format is here...

UPDATE: A Complete text transcript of the interview now follows in full...

MATTHEWS: Coming up, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says Republicans could steal the 2008 presidential election. He‘ll be here to tell us what he thinks.

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

With the midterm election just 41 days away now, chances are when you go to vote, you‘ll find electronic voting machines. they‘re sort of the automatic teller machines, what do they call them, AMT machines. The question is—ATM machines, I use them all the time, forget the name—anyway, are those machines accurate?

We use ATM-style election machines, or can they be hacked into? Or could someone rig an election using these machines?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writing in this month‘s “Rolling Stone” magazine, says many of these electronic machines, these ATM-style machines, are not secure and could be vulnerable to tampering.

Let me ask you right now, Robert, could this election be stolen, coming up for president?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR., ROLLING STONE: Well, there‘s no doubt it could be stolen, and this is --- recent reports by the federal government‘s GAO, by the Congressional Research Service that say that this is a national security issue for us. There‘s four—and also the Brennan Center at NYU that says that there‘s 120 vulnerabilities in the machines that 80 percent of Americans are now using.

A Princeton University study that was released last week shows on video how a computer virus can be injected. If somebody has access for 60 seconds to one of these machines, that they can insert a malicious code that can steal the entire election.

So there is no doubt, that all of—there is four companies that make these machines on which 80 percent of Americans are now voting. The machines are not secure, they are prone to breakdown, they have a lot of other problems and right now, Chris, Congress is considering a law to, an emergency provision to deal with these machines that everybody now recognizes is a huge problem for our democracy. And the upcoming election is too soon for these problems to be fixed. So what Congress is doing in the next two days is considering an emergency paper ballot provision that will allow people to vote on paper ballots when they get to the polls. During the primary season this August and September over the last couple of weeks, in every state where these machines was used which is now every state that voted, every state that had primaries, there were thousands of people turned away from the polls because of breakdowns in these machines.

This has turned out to be an extraordinary disaster. My article in “Rolling Stone” this week, and if you go to “Brad Blog,” which I encourage people to do—but my article in “Rolling Stone” this week shows how these private companies have come to own America‘s electoral process.

MATTHEWS: What‘s the track record of corruption? Any here that you can prove right now? Has any company used its power through this electronic voting, ATM style voting, to fix an election? Has anybody done that?

KENNEDY: Well, there is no proof that an election has been fixed. There is a lot of evidence that many, many elections have been fixed since we started using these machines. There is no proof because the machines, the machinery itself is proprietary.

We‘re not allowed to look—election officials are not allowed to look inside of these machines. There are no records. And in fact, it‘s really, it‘s a kind of corruption that Help America Vote act that was authored by Bob Ney, who is a cohort of Jack Abramoff‘s that provided $3.9 billion to every injured jurisdiction in America and mandated that they buy these machines, that there is a provision in there, Chris, that says these machines are not to have paper records. Why would that be done?

MATTHEWS: I‘d like to know. What‘s your suspicion here? Here‘s one concern I might have in growing up in a big city, you don‘t want the local ward leader or poll watcher checking to see how you voted. Can you have a paper trail without letting them know how you voted?

KENNEDY: Here‘s what you do. You have the—you vote on the touch screen machine. Then the touch screen machine spits out a piece of paper with your vote on it. Can you check it to make sure that the machine counted your vote correctly, registered your vote correctly. Then you take that ballot and you put it into a locked box. And that ballot is not counted unless there is a recount of the election but at least we have a way to audit it the same way that you audit an ATM machine or any other machine—we ought to have a paper trail. It‘s insane.

MATTHEWS: How do you keep the poll watchers from the two parties from seeing that? So you don‘t certify to them that you‘ve done your duty. How do you keep that away from the hands of the local polls?

KENNEDY: Chris, that‘s not a problem. That is not a problem. That‘s easy. All you do is the voter takes the piece of paper out of the machine and puts it in a box and nobody sees it but him. The real problem is without paper ballots, you have no idea what is happening in those machines and we now know that those machines—that anybody who has 60 seconds with one of those machines alone, that is takes 10 seconds to pick the lock to get into the machine—that in 60 seconds you cannot only fix that machine but you can fix the entire state election.

MATTHEWS: Let‘s bottom line this, Robert, do you believe now knowing all that you‘ve studied on and reported on, do you believe now that someone could actually steal a presidential election through hacking?

KENNEDY: I think it would be a very easy thing and this is not just me saying this, this is Princeton saying it, it‘s the NYU, it‘s the Congressional Research Service and GAO, that if you fix an election for example in a state like Ohio or Florida, which are keys to the presidential election, all have you to do in Ohio this time, if you had flipped, one—six votes in every precinct across the state, the results of the presidential election would have been changed.

There is strong indication that over 350,000 votes were fixed by these machines just in Florida. That alone could have flipped this election.

MATTHEWS: Well it‘s going to be interesting to see what you say Robert after this movie comes out, “Man of the Year,” the one with Robin Williams in it, because it‘s all about a company called the Delacroix Corporation, which sounds a lot like the Diebold Corporation, and it‘s about how machinery can go wrong in a presidential election. Thank you very much for voting us, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Article Categories: Diebold/Premier, RFK Jr., Election Reform, MSNBC, Election Fraud, Paper Ballots Legislation