- The woman who launched the controversy over electronic
voting machines has formed a nonprofit consumer group that plans to investigate
election officials who may have conflicts of interest with voting companies.
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- Washington-based publicist Bev Harris recently formed
Black Box Voting in an attempt to improve the integrity of the election
process and represent the interests of voters. Harris brought attention
to the perils of e-voting last year when she discovered the source code
for a voting system made by Diebold Election Systems on the Internet. The
code, computer scientists determined, contained serious security flaws.
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- As a result, voting activists in California, Maryland
and other states have been calling on election officials to replace e-voting
systems or make them more secure. But some officials have resisted that
call and vehemently defended the voting companies and their machines, raising
suspicions that they may have ties to the voting companies.
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- In California, for example, Riverside County registrar
of voters Mischelle Townsend was investigated recently for accepting plane
fare to Florida from Sequoia Voting Systems to help film an infomercial
in support of e-voting sponsored by Sequoia. Although Townsend, an unwavering
supporter of the Sequoia machines used in her county, was cleared of impropriety
by her board of supervisors, she announced plans to retire this week. Former
California Secretary of State Bill Jones became a paid consultant for Sequoia
after pushing through a $200 million state bond measure to help counties
purchase new e-voting machines. Support for the measure was financed by
Sequoia and another voting firm.
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- To kick off her new organization's activities, Harris
and another member will launch a 90-day road trip to examine conflict-of-interest
issues in several states. Harris and Andy Stephenson, a former candidate
for secretary of state in Washington who now devotes his attention to voting
activism, plan to examine officials in Georgia, Florida, Texas and other
states where they've received tips that something might be amiss. They're
focusing on local election officials who made the decisions to purchase
the machines.
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- "The story about the voting machines that we uncovered
was very interesting, but we felt it was really important to study the
causal factors of how these things got pushed down everyone's throat,"
Harris said.
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- They are aiming at officials who have expressed a strong
aversion to conducting audits of voting systems or who have refused to
entertain the idea that e-voting systems could be flawed.
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- "The typical politician's response (when the security
of the machines comes up) is: Let's set up a task force to study it,"
Harris said. "When you have someone who is not at all interested in
studying it or getting information, you want to find out what mechanism
motivated him to take such a strong position."
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- The road trip will end in mid-August, but the group will
publish information as they uncover it, working with newspapers.
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- Harris said there is an obvious need for a consumer organization
to protect elections and the interests of voters since, in some counties,
nearly every part of the election process is now in the hands of private
companies. Diebold Election Systems, for example, through its acquisition
of another company last year, now controls voter registration, voter outreach
and poll worker training in some counties, in addition to the actual casting
and counting of votes.
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- Voting firms are chasing contracts worth billions of
dollars in federal funds allocated by the Help America Vote Act of 2002
to help states upgrade voting systems and election procedures.
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- "When you take hunks of the whole system and you
start privatizing it, it makes sense to have a consumer organization that's
completely independent," Harris said.
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- Black Box Voting gets its funds from individuals, though
Harris wouldn't say how much money the group has gathered. She said she
wants to avoid letting voting companies and election officials know the
extent of her group's resources.
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