US election could have been hacked, says Kerry wife

The United States presidential election could have been computer hacked, the wife of Democrat candidate John Kerry has claimed.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush’s victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes.

“Two brothers own 80% of the machines used in the United States,” she said during a fund raising event in Seattle.

They are “hard-right” Republicans, she claimed, arguing that it was “very easy to hack into the mother machines”.

Heinz Kerry urged Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“We in the United States are not a banana republic,” she said. “I fear for 2006. I don’t trust it the way it is right now,” she added, referring to mid-term elections.

Heinz Kerry also expressed her outrage at the attacks of some Catholic bishops on her husband’s support for abortion rights.

“You cannot have bishops in the pulpit – long before or the Sunday before the election – as they did in Catholic churches, saying it was a mortal sin to vote for John Kerry,” she said.