This is Off-Topic, but If anybody is getting an annoying buzzing sound on their computer and thinks it's Brad's Blog getting hacked or something, relax, It's an ad that gives you the option to "Zap" a bug!

Boy, now that's intrusive!

Larry, that would be a good ad for a Diebold site ... ...

Everyone has to listen to this video !

It should get top billing on every blog, its grrreat!!!

Link

John Gidean deserves credit for all his hard work reporting on this election fraud too.
I haven't noticed him get mentioned for it.
Thank you John!
We certainly appreciate your work.

With my dial-up connection, I’m going to have to download this hearing all night before I can watch it without going crazy, but I’ll only have to get the second part of it, because the first part is mostly garbage from officials who seem to think the whole process is going to take a thousand years and much more money thrown at voting machine companies who don’t deserve one more dime. The second part looks more interesting, from what I saw. That’s my unofficial statement. Take it or leave it!

There is one really good statement from David Wagner that you can read

For those of you with broadband, go here and click on "Archived Webcast" to watch the entire hearing.

Rush Holt gives this small statement, but I don’t know why his written one isn’t on the web page I gave above:

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for the courtesy of taking part in this, I appreciate your calling the hearing. I would like to ask unanimous consent to put, at this point, in the record a written statement which will make the basic point that the subject of today’s hearing, standards for design and certification are good but not sufficient, and that one needs auditability and a required audit process as well and I will have to excuse myself at some point soon for an intelligence committee hearing and I thank the chairman for his courtesy.

Although it actually talks about the Hursti report from Utah, I think most here will reject this paragraph from the Hearing charter.

Recent issues

Although the majority of new electronic voting equipment performed well in the 2004 election and in the 2006 primaries held thus far, some problems have occurred. During the 2004 election, the race for the post of agriculture commissioner in North Carolina had to be rerun because a problem in a voting machine caused it to stop counting votes. During the Indiana and West Virginia primaries this year, election officials in several counties had to manually count ballots because of programming errors in the equipment that tabulated the results from the voting machines. Recently tests in Utah revealed potential security vulnerabilities in one manufacturer’s machines (see attached news article). Many new voting systems that have exhibited problems related to software errors had their systems evaluated and passed by testing laboratories, which did not catch these errors. This raises questions about how to improve software standards and testing for voting systems so that these types of errors are caught in the future.

Linda H. Lamone, who said on NPR, she wants to give a whole lot of money to the companies to improve their machines says:

In conclusion, I would like to compare the process of improving voting systems to the process of improving air quality. When the U. S. Congress ecacts a law to limit air pollution, the date by which the affected industry must comply is often twn years down the road. This delayed effective date allows the industry to evaluate options , develop technologies that will enable thim to comply with the mandates, and implement the necessay changes to the industry’s infrastructure.

I believe this is how voting system technology should be viewed. In the meantime, however, the VVSG are a good first step, but they must be veiwed as the first step of many. Like cleaning our air, improving voting systems takes time, and I caution you not to expect overnight changes to voting systems.

Great, so we have to wait until global warming is turned back to get elections we can verify!

The only thing you can conclude from the hearing held on the 19th is that without Hand-Marked, Hand-Counted ballots, 2006 is lost!

I call these the yada, yada, yada hearings.