Black Box Voting (.ORG) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501c(3) organization funded by citizen donations. Contact info: 206-335-7747; Mailing address: 330 SW 43rd St. Suite K, Box 547, Renton WA 98055. E-mail
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- Founded: 2004
- A national organization based in Renton, Washington (suburb of Seattle)
- Closest network TV taping location: Fisher Pathways, Seattle WA
- Mission: The mission of Black Box Voting is to restore citizen's ability to see and authenticate each step of our public elections.
Black Box Voting investigates election problems, communicates the problems to the citizenry, and teaches citizens how to manage their own government -- which means teaching citizens how to identify elections problems and providing citizens with the tools to oversee elections. Each of the four crucial steps in a public election must be something the public can see and authenticate, without need for special expertise.
- Citizen's Tool Kit: Black Box Voting provides a concise Citizen's Tool Kit to help citizens learn how to oversee elections. Citizen's Tool Kit
- Founded by: Bev Harris, author of the book Black Box Voting (an expose on electronic voting).
Following are the kinds of issues Black Box Voting can address:
Voting machine glitches:
- "The worst scenario you can imagine," officials reported in Clark County Indiana shortly after the polls closed in the May 2, 2006 election. Computerized voting system didn't work. Results were read to a woman who manually typed them in. - June 2006, A Pottawattamie County, Iowa election official hand counted her ballots and was surprised to find a total entirely different than the results noted on the voting machines. The manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, admitted that it had programmed the machines incorrectly. Cuyahoga County, Ohio's May 2, 2006 primary:
- Machines were turned off and on many times by overwhelmed poll workers trying desperately to make them work;
- Memory cards replaced midstream; paper trails that got thrown away
- Voters who were told they were done when the machine was reading 'error';
- After the screen went blank, ballots without all the appropriate issues appeared in some precincts. Better than a pregnant chad, these machines can actually give birth:
- Boone County, Indiana: 19,000 registered voters, 144,000 votes counted . (Nov. 2003) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2004/10/22/politics/main650884.shtml
- Tarrant County, Texas: 58,000 votes cast, 158,103 votes counted (Mar. 9, 2006; The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram "Vote spike blamed on program snafu")
- Allamakee County, Iowa: 300 votes fed into the machine, 4 million votes came out (Nov. 2000; According to the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 17, 2000 "Fuzzy Numbers") Lawsuits: Colorado voters filed a lawsuit to halt touch-screens, citing deficiencies in security, reliability, and verifiability in systems made by four manufacturers. (June 2, 2006; http://www.voteraction.org) Voter databases What happens to your personal information once it enters the elections industry? The Denver Election Commission acknowledged that about 150,000 voter records had been missing at least since February, when it moved to a new office. Last week, the commission found about 87,000 of the records. The rest are still missing. (June 18, 2006; http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20 060618/ap_on_re_us/voter_records_missing) Voter ID cards In Georgia, if you do not have a driver's license (or your name on a utility bill, bank account or paycheck) you may have difficulty voting due to new voter ID requirements. These kinds of requirements have been struck down by the courts in Georgia, but officials appealed the decision.
In New Mexico, newly required voter IDs arrived with hundreds of errors -- names spelled wrong, and in some cases the wrong addresses (which can result in wrong polling places, wrong candidates on ballot). Vote fraud: Kentucky, May 2006: According to news reports, the state attorney general's office received over five-hundred complaints of voting fraud from 77 Kentucky counties from the May primary election. The Clay County Sheriff for 17 years said the problem wasn't that voters didn't know how to use machines, but that several precinct officials claim that they were bribed to change selections in the voting booth. http://www.wkyt.com/Global/story.asp?S=4997 119&nav=4CAL Missing ballot boxes: The 74 Ballot boxes for computerized voting systems are called "memory cards" "cartridges" or "memory packs" depending on which manufacturer makes the machines.
- Cuyahoga County (Cleveland): Seventy memory cards [ballot boxes] disappeared during the May 2, 2006 election.
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=51716
- Detroit: Lost track of ballots in nine precincts -- or almost 3,000 votes -- in the Nov. 2005 election, and did not count them until two days after polls closed. Detroit Elections Department Director Gloria Williams insisted it was completely normal for poll workers to temporarily lose track of precinct results -- stored in computerized memory packs. (Detroit Free Press, Nov. 12, 2005; "Bungled Votes Probed") Gerrymandering: Re-drawing district boundaries can be a tactic for manipulating elections. It's only supposed to happen with each 10-year census, but politicians find reasons to change things more often -- sometimes for political gain. For example, part of a new Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was thrown out by the courts in June 2006 because new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights. (http://www.nbc11.com/politics/9438639/detail.html ) Black Box Voting is familiar with redistricting and gerrymandering issues and can provide lively and articulate nonpartisan commentary when such matters are in the news. Campaign finance issues and lobbying - Diebold Lobbyist Donates $10,000 to Kenneth Blackwell; maximum-donor list also includes Mitch Given, who is a registered lobbyist for Diebold Election Systems, one of the vendors of voting machines for election boards in Ohio. Blackwell's office urged Diebold's selection as a vendor and negotiated the contract. (Blackwell was also found to own stock in Diebold). June 10, 2006 Associated Press) Testing failures: Test labs admit in California Senate Elections hearing that they never looked at key components of the voting system, blame vendor for misleading them. ITA hearing transcript
Firm couldn?t test machines - >>>what state is this???
State investigating election glitch
Employees of Election Systems & Software failed to successfully test whether Jackson County?s voting systems could merge their results. They tried but couldn?t get it done, Jackson County Clerk Sarah Benter said Thursday of ES&S employees. ?At first they thought it was that lightning affected our server, but that wasn?t a problem,? Benter said. ?He (an ES&S employee) decided he didn?t know enough about one of the systems to really test it. He assured me, though, they would work.?
They didn?t. (BROWNSTOWN ? get cite) Recount irregularities: After the 2004 presidential election, Cuyahoga County election workers secretly skirted rules on recount, a special prosecutor charges. Three county elections officials have been indicted, and Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter says more indictments are possible. Black Box Voting investigator Kathleen Wynne captured county officials confession on videotape.
SOLUTIONS: WHAT CAN CITIZENS DO TO SOLVE PROBLEMS?
We may have just discovered Einstein's theory of democracy: We the People = Us. Download the Black Box Voting Citizens Tool Kit. It contains 20 modules, each just a few pages, bullet points. Pick any module that interests you. Choose one action and see it to its completion.
There is no bill, legislation, public official or citizen leader who can keep elections fair and honest. Citizens are the missing ingredient.
View elections oversight as a fundamental civil right -- one to guard carefully and fight for when necessary. Civil rights are not a good place for compromises. Insist upon the fundamental civil right to oversee our own elections, fight for this, do what's needed to restore election oversight rights when they are taken away.
TOP 10 STRANGEST ELECTION PROBLEMS ~10~ In an act of disrespect that defies all logic and reason, Riverside County Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore decided for the June 6, 2006 election that she would cast the paper ballots chosen by voters into the touch-screens.(more on this story). In Riverside, citizens who didn't want to vote on touch-screens were allowed to vote on paper ballots. However, when the paper ballots were brought into election headquarters, Dunmore had Riverside employees enter the paper votes into Sequoia electronic touch-screen voting machines instead of counting the paper ballots. ~9~ $21,642,717.80 calculated by word of mouth: When he heard that taxpayers would be footing the bill for a new Diebold touch-screen system in Cuyahoga County, Ohio citizen Norm Robbins did public records requests trying to obtain the cost calculations. Precise figures had somehow materialized without any worksheets showing how those figures were arrived at. Robbins grilled the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, who asked the finance director to answer his questions. While citizens videotaped her response, she said that the figures were arrived at "by telephone and word of mouth." Video of $21,642.717.80 'Word of Mouth' explanation ~8~ Diebold Election Systems tossed 12 bags of financial documents into an unprotected dumpster. They appeared to be in a hurry because they failed to shred them. (see: Diebold financial document copies ) These were retrieved by Black Box Voting, and they include hundreds of thousands of dollars in procurement-related "success fees," as well as payments of over $150,000 to a Lottery company and the pay stub and credit card receipts for then-President of Diebold Election Systems Bob Urosevich. Also in the dumpster: The social security numbers for dozens of Diebold employees. Diebold is a company that specializes in security. ~7~ According to Cuyahoga County: the failure of their brand-new touch-screens was not a problem. The problem was that "the techs couldn't get there fast enough to fix them all."
- The new absentee vote-counting program was unable to read the ballots at all; instead of hand-counting them, county officials paid temporary employees to enter each ballot into a touch-screen.
- Six-dozen ballot boxes went missing altogether, and the Yellow Cab company refused to take the rap. Elections officials' had arranged to transport electronic ballots boxes (memory cards) all over town on the back seats of cabs. Cleveland cab drivers understood that this was a security problem and a chain of custody issue, a fact which apparently eluded every member of the elections division staff.
- A report by an independent firm, Election Science Institute (commissioned at a cost of over $300,000 by the Cuyahoga Board of Elections) revealed that the paper trail from the voting machines did not match the voting machine results in approximately 35 percent of the locations. More on election problems in Cleveland ~6~A 61-year-old man was arrested for beating up a voting machine. (more ) He was threated with disorderly conduct, obstructing official business and resisting arrest charges. In another incident, a touch-screen was damaged when a citizen tried to enter a write-in vote by writing it on the touch-screen with a pen.
~5~ According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Diebold has stated that its admitted nuclear-bomb-sized security issue, of being able to entirely replace voting systems with malicious software, is "only a problem if someone wants to commit a felony." The company stated that they planned their voting systems that way, to make it easy to replace software. (Using this logic, bank robbery is only a problem if someone wants to commit a felony, so there is no point in locking the doors to the bank.) ~4~West Virginia elections official sells own vote to FBI agent: Glen Dale "Hound Dog" Adkins, who spent 18 years as Logan County clerk, sold his vote for $500 reports the Charleston Gazette (June 14 2006: "Ex-clerk gets home confinement"). "Hound Dog" pleaded guilty and, one would hope, stepped down as elections chief?
~3~ In 1996, according to the Washington Post, the biggest upset landslide victory in the U.S. was won by Chuck Hagel. What Hagel failed to mention to the press (or reveal in his required disclosure documents) was that he had up to $5 million invested in, and had been the CEO of, the voting machine company whose machines elected him. Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems) was owned by Hagel and a company run by Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, and the machines counted an estimated 80 percent of Hagel's votes. ~2~"No human can alter the audit log" proclaimed Diebold in a formal response to a Request for Purchase (RFP) to the state of Georgia. This declaration doesn't quite match the internal memos from Diebold's own employees, who admit that "Jane" did "end runs" around the voting system in Gaston County North Carolina and mentioned that "King County (WA) is famous for it." While Diebold engineers were admitting that the system could easily be tampered with, another Diebold employee made arrangements with certifiers to look the other way. A Black Box Voting consultant, Dr. Herbert Thompson, took a look at the system and told the Associated Press that his 13-year-old sister could hack it. Check that--he called in to say it was so easy to hack that a monkey could do it. Black Box Voting engaged the services of a chimp named Baxter from Steve Martin's Working Wildlife, and in one hour the chimp was taught to hack the Diebold audit log. What's next? A pigeon? ~1~Volusia County, Florida has become known by the locals as "The Bermuda Triangle of Elections." In 1998, then-election supervisor Deanie Lowe was censored by a judge for allowing employees of a sheriff who was running for office to sit in her office and "enhance" the ballots. In 2004, Lowe again ended up in court when her employees were caught throwing away elections records in the trash. As a film crew showed up to ask about missing poll tapes, an elections worker was spotted trundling out the back with a green bin full of what looked like -- well -- poll tapes. Florida activists quickly went out to inspect the garbage and found newly deposited -- poll tapes! The poll tapes did a complete circle, out the back in a bin, back in the front in the hands of activists, and by 5 p.m. they had been sequestered by lawyers.
But this isn't the worst of Volusia County: In 2000, an electronic ballot box was replaced in Volusia County, Florida. The ballot box, Memory Card #0, had the correct votes on it. In some fashion another ballot box, Memory Card #3, replaced #0, and #3 had incorrect votes. In fact, the results on Memory Card #3 gave minus 16,022 votes to Al Gore. According to a CBS internal report, this was exactly the amount needed to call the election for Bush; nine minutes later, the election was erroneously called for George W. Bush and shortly afterward, the Gore conceded to Bush. Anchor Dan Rather, upon learning of the Volusia County voting machine error, asked when the networks would pull back that call. CBS News president replied that he wanted to wait and find out what Gore was going to do. Gore was two blocks away from conceding to the nation when he learned of the bogus Volusia votes; he withdrew his concession. Details and links on Volusia County.
Had Al Gore conceded to the nation, Election 2000 would have ended on Election Night due to a replaced ballot box in a Volusia County voting machine.
Title: Founder and Director of Black Box Voting
Bev Harris, featured in the HBO documentary film Hacking Democracy, began writing on the subject of electronic voting in 2002 after she discovered that U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel had ownership in and had been CEO of the company that built the machines which counted his own votes. Vanity Fair magazine credits Bev Harris with founding the movement to reform electronic voting. Time Magazine calls her book, Black Box Voting, "the bible" of electronic voting. The Boston Globe has referred to her as "the godmother" of the election reform movement.
Her articles were among the first to reveal that modern-day voting systems are run by private for-profit corporations, relying on a few cronies for oversight, using a certification system so fundamentally flawed that it allows machines to miscount and lose votes, with hidden back doors that enable "end runs" around the voting system.
"Bev Harris stumbled onto a national story ignored by every big-city newspaper in the land, and worked it deeper and deeper with scoops that would have made her career at the New York Times or Washington Post. -- Vanity Fair
Harris's investigations have led some to call her the "Erin Brockovich of elections." (Salon.com) In 2003, just weeks after a stunning electoral upset in Georgia that tipped control of the U.S. Senate, she discovered 40,000 secret voting machine files -- including a set of files called "rob-georgia," containing instructions to replace Georgia's computerized voting files before the election. The files she found contained databases with votes in them and the voting machine programs themselves. She downloaded the files on Jan. 23, 2003 and set them free on the Internet a few months later, where they were studied by scientists and security experts.
The files found by Harris were later used by Johns Hopkins University scientist Avi Rubin for his report on the "stunning security flaws," in Diebold voting machines, covered by the New York Times on July 24, 2003. These files were also used by Dr. Herbert Thompson and Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti for their groundbreaking "hack" demonstrations for Black Box Voting, covered by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and in formal reports by the the United States General Accounting Office.
Harris has received four cease & desist notices from private manufacturers for releasing information to the public about their secret voting systems. In 2004, she was interviewed repeatedly by the U.S. Secret Service Cybercrime Task Force, and was ultimately hit with a gag order and threatened with a federal grand jury action for refusing to turn over information on visitors to the BlackBoxVoting.org Web site. The action was dropped after it was exposed by a Seattle Reporter.
In 2003, Harris and a colleague (Jim March) filed a lawsuit against Diebold Election Systems, resulting in Diebold paying $2.6 million in restitution to the state of California for making false claims in selling its voting system to Alameda County, the first successful litigation against a voting machine manufacturer in the United States.
Her work on another manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, revealed over 100,000 errors in the logs for the 2004 election in Palm Beach County, Florida, including over one thousand "recalibrations" performed on machines during the middle of the election. The most shocking revelation she found in the Sequoia logs: More than four dozen machines had votes that were time and date-stamped weeks before the election, some of them in the middle of the night.
Her facts check out. Her original investigative work has been featured frequently in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, and on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, and in many European media outlets.
After discovering that we have a voting system that has become divorced from the citizens it serves, Bev Harris founded a nonprofit group to help citizens fight back. The focus of Black Box Voting is to restore the ownership of elections to The People.
BLACK BOX VOTING:
- Bev Harris - (206) 335-7747
- Jim March - (916) 370-0347 CURRENT AND FORMER ELECTIONS OFFICIALS:
- Bruce Funk: Former elections chief in Emery County Utah, where the Hursti II "Nuclear Bomb" voting machine security defect was found. e-mail 435-749-1886
- Ion Sancho: Leon County (FL) Supervisor of Elections, where the first Hursti Hack took place: (850) 606-8683
- Julie Anne Kempf, former King County (WA), where embezzler Jeffrey Dean accessed the voting system: (Call Black Box Voting for phone contact info) VENDORS:
- Diebold: David Bear of Diebold Election Systems, Inc., 1-800-433-8683, ext.112, or dbear@pstrategies.com
- Sequoia Voting Systems: Michelle Shafer Vice President Communications and External Affairs 512-426-5658
- Election Systems & Software: Phone: Omaha, Nebraska; 402-593-0101
- Hart Intercivic: Megan Haywood, 512.372.6362 or megan.haywood@bm.com STATISTICIANS & EXIT POLL ANALYSIS:
- Bruce O'Dell, Digital Agility Incorporated, 952-249-9099
- Steve Freeman, sf@alum.mit.edu TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
- Jim March, (916) 370-0347
- John Washburn, cutwaste@washburnresearch.org
