Rage Against the Machines

Rolling Stone magazine's National Affairs Daily published the following interview with Howard Dean today, 6-6-06.

Portions appear below:

Rolling Stone: How confident are you Ohio in 2004 was fairly decided?
Howard Dean: I’m not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided. We did our own Democratic party study in Ohio with a panel of experts. We absolutely know that there was a systematic voter suppression. We couldn’t say one way or another if the election was stolen. We couldn’t rule it out, but we couldn’t prove that it was. We know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. That’s clear.

...of the reports that we’ve received, where you push the screen for one candidate and the other name comes up repeatedly — most of those reports are on Diebold machines. In the governor’s race last year, we had reports from a southwestern district in Virginia that people were in fact pushing Democrat Tim Kaine’s name and Republican Jerry Kilgore’s came up.

This is going to be a very critical election in 2006. We’re very aware that there’s huge potential for additional mischief in 2006. We have no doubt that some of the folks who were active in vote suppression will be active again. It’s very, very difficult to deal with it. We just have to keep pushing forward doing the best we can. The real question is why the mainstream media won’t write about this.

It is supposed to be bad for the Democracy to allege such impropriety, but when a great American like Dr. Howard Dean brings the subject up, one has to take another look. However, the allegations and suspicions bring up the prospect that the whole thing is sour grapes from the Democrats, which masks the potential accuracy of the story.

In other words, I'm sure there was voter fraud and I'm sure we will never be told the truth.