Former Bush-appointed official says e-voting “ripe for stealing elections”
In this interview, Soaries states that he feels duped by the White House and Congress in regards to their seriousness about voter reform.
Soaries was appointed by George W. Bush as the first chair of the commission created by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election Debacle. In the interview, available here for the first time, Soaries excoriates both Congress and the White House, referring to their dedication to reforming American election issues as “a charade” and “a travesty,” and says the system now in place is “ripe for stealing elections and for fraud.”
Having resigned from the commission in April of 2005, Soaries goes on to explain that he believes he was “deceived” by both the White House and Congress, and that neither were ever “really serious about election reform.”
The explosive comments are the latest evidence highlighting serious deficiencies in the federal body, created by HAVA for oversight of elections systems, including new electronic voting devices, and standards for the use and security of those systems.
In the unaired interview, conducted last August, Soaries says there are “no standards” for voting systems and that Congress and the White House “made things worse through the passage of the Help America Vote Act.”
Due to underfunding and lack of attention to the EAC and the Election Reform it was supposed to oversee, Soaries says we now have an “inability to trust the technology that we use” to count votes in our American democracy, even as “we’re spending a billion dollars a week in Iraq.”
“We know more today about how to build a machine to take pictures of rocks on Mars than we know about how to build a machine to safeguard the American right to vote,” complained Soaries in the interview.
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