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MissoulaNews.com Issue Date 11/27/2003
Brave new elections
by Mike Keefe-Feldman
The complete article is currently (3/28/04) available on the
Missoula News website at-- http://www.missoulanews.com/Archives/News.asp?no=3670
Excerpt--
..... Most of this information has come to light
thanks to the efforts of Bev Harris, a Seattle-based literary publicist who quit her day job in order to work on a forthcoming
book, Black Box Voting, and a website, www.blackboxvoting.org, along with a team of 22 computer scientists.
“I was just on my lunch hour and I decided to search LexisNexis and find out
who owns [the voting technology companies]. No big deal, right?” says Harris. “But the name that pops out was
Chuck Hagel, a Republican Senator running for office at the time. So I thought, ‘Well surely this has been reported,’
but it hadn’t. Then I thought, ‘Well surely he disclosed it,’ and I looked at his disclosure documents and
he hadn’t. So then I thought, ‘My goodness!’”
That discovery was the first of several that Harris would make in the ensuing months.
When Diebold left thousands of internal documents available on an unprotected website, Harris downloaded them. What she found
included hundreds of internal memos discussing the company’s security problems. The problems were not entirely theoretical,
either. One memo discussed an “unauthorized upload” during the 2000 presidential election which negated 16,000
votes for Al Gore and added 4,000 for George W. Bush in Florida.
“The correct votes were on a card numbered ‘zero,’ and… those
votes were replaced with card number ‘three,’ and card number three had everything correct in all the races except
the presidential race…card number three is now missing,” Harris says. “The memos are quite clear about this.
In fact, in one, one programmer wrote, ‘Be careful. The boogieman might be reading these.’”
Among the files, Harris also found one titled “Rob Georgia,” which contained
instructions for replacing voting system files for the 2002 congressional elections.
“I knew it was illegal because I had done enough research on how they do the
certification,” Harris says. “Georgia had several upsets and was using 100 percent Diebold touchscreen machines.
After seeing that file, I knew we had a problem.” ...
Copyright 2003 Missoula News?
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BuzzFlash.com
December 4, 2003
Bev Harris on the Perils to
Democracy by Electronic Voting
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
The complete article,
with links, is currently (3/28/04) available on the BuzzFlash website at-- http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/12/int03323.html
Opening words--
What remains the greatest threat to
democracy in the 2004 election?
Some would argue that it may be the
ability of the companies who manufacture and maintain electronic voting machines to elect a candidate through reprogrammed
software – or maybe a third party who could hack the vote counting software and change the tally.
At first, dismissed as the paranoid
delusions of a few diehard researchers, a growing number of states are researching these accusations -- among others -- and
discovering that many of the concerns are valid. On December 3, the "Cleveland Plain Dealer" reported that, "Ohio's sweeping
review of electronic voting machines turned up so many potential security flaws in the systems that the state's top elections
official has called off deploying them in March."
When we first interviewed Bev Harris,
a pioneer in exposing the dangerous potential for election manipulation that electronic voting machines pose, she wanted to
ensure that BuzzFlash didn't make her into a hero. Harris wrote us a long e-mail detailing many of the people who have tirelessly
worked to bring this issue to the point that it is now being seriously addressed. And Harris is right: dozens of patriotic
Americans have endured a lot of skepticism and legal threats for working to ensure that elective democracy works.
Nonetheless, Harris, a resident of Washington
State, has been the most visible writer and spokesperson on the issue....
[Interview with Bev Harris follows]
Unless otherwise noted, all original
content and headlines are © BuzzFlash.
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