http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_story.asp?category=1700&slug=Profile%20E%20Voting%20Gadfly
SEATTLE
POST-INTELLIGENCER
July
3, 2004
Activist: E-voting to be
a 'train wreck'
By
Rachel Konrad, Associated Press Writer
SAN
JOSE, Calif. -- Ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their
homes and offices, a literary publicist has uncovered conflicts of interests
and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.
Searching
the Web and poring over newspaper clippings, Bev
Harris has unearthed obscure arrest records, ties to conservative political
groups and other embarrassing secrets of senior executives at voting companies.
Her
conclusion: there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless
voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the
fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of
2000.
"We
have a train wreck that's definitely going to happen," Harris said.
"We have conflict of interest, we've taken the checks and balances away,
and we know the votes are already being miscounted fairly frequently. This is
going to be huge."
Harris,
52, didn't set out to become a muckraking voting technology expert.
Accustomed
to working with manuscripts and authors in suburban Seattle, she preferred
doting on her new grandchild to debating politics. She still doesn't vote
regularly.
But
when Harris was idly surfing the Web during a lunch break two years ago, she
became obsessed with an issue essential to democracy, quickly becoming the
unlikely center of a movement to ensure integrity in the nation's voting
systems.
Critics
say Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century," is a fear-mongering grandstander and a presumptuous conspiracy
theorist. The prime target of one investigation - voting equipment maker Diebold Inc. - says her antics undermine democracy.
"We
must not frighten voters or inadvertently provide any type of disincentive to
voting," Diebold spokesman David Bear wrote in
an e-mail when asked to respond to Harris' claims that the company's software
is riggable and insecure. "While security is an
important issue ... improvements can and will be made."
Others
question the motives behind her obsessive investigations of politicians and
executives at big voting equipment companies such as Diebold,
Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and Election Systems & Services Inc.
"She
bases her whole theory on a continuous string of untruths," said Lou Ann Linehan, chief of staff for Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. In the 1990s, Hagel headed
voting equipment company American Information Systems Inc., which later became
ES&S. Hagel maintains investments between $1
million and $6 million in McCarthy Group Inc., a private bank with a large
stake in ES&S.
Harris,
who dubs Hagel "poster boy for conflict of
interest," says the Republican did not disclose the extent of his American
Information Systems involvement and questions whether a former executive of a
company whose machines count votes in precincts nationwide should run for
public office. Hagel's staff insist
that his former career doesn't affect his political life.
"I
don't know if it's sloppy research or she doesn't
care," Linehan said. "I don't spend a lot
of time worrying about it because it's all so ridiculous."
Criticism,
as well as legal threats from ES&S, Diebold and
other companies, has enervated Harris, whose blond hair turned completely gray
last year. But legions of fans - from New Zealand bloggers
to respected computer scientists - encourage her.
Exploiting
the power of the Internet, Harris has created a Web site that documents
hundreds of local, county and state elections that have been botched or
contested because of flaws with voting software.
She
details an incestuous web of voting company executives, politicians and
election officials - people who are often related or have worked for each
other.
Her
style is brash. She drives her Toyota Corolla and rental cars thousands of
miles to ambush registrars in counties where election results didn't match exit
polls.
Frustrated
that few mainstream journalists have publicized her exploits, Harris once left
voice mail for Washington Post star Bob Woodward. When he didn't call back, she
trashed him in a Web forum called "Media Whores Online."
"It
took me a while to recognize that despite her over-the-top personal style, she
was doing valuable sleuthing," said Douglas Jones, associate professor of
computer science at the University of Iowa and a member of Iowa's Board of
Examiners for e-voting. "But her style, which tends to be a bit alarmist
and tends to appeal to conspiracy theorists, may be necessary to get the
attention of the people who need to pay attention."
Harris,
who in the 1990s freelanced as an investigator for companies that suspected
employees of embezzling, dismisses conspiracies. She blames a lack of federal
oversight, and human nature for voting problems such as those in the November
2002 election, when Bernalillo County, N.M.'s turnout
was 48,000 - but only 36,000 votes were tallied on Sequoia touchscreens.
"I
never looked at this as a computer problem or even a conspiracy," said
Harris. "I always looked at it as an auditing problem, the exact
equivalent of taking away canceled checks, invoices and receipts. You take away
oversight - someone will steal. I guarantee it."
Harris'
obsession with e-voting began during a lunch break in autumn 2002. On the Web,
she stumbled upon an article called "Elections in America - Assume Crooks
are in Control," by freelance journalist Lynn Landes.
Harris
began wondering how easy it would be to change electronic ballots to rig an
election without a trace.
By
trial and error, she tracked down people who work at voting companies by
trolling on online job boards, high school reunion sites and other Internet
haunts. She collected e-mail addresses and phone numbers for eight dozen
programmers. Some boasted they could easily insert malicious code, alter or
delete ballots and "flip" an election.
Harris
wondered how easily these people could be bribed.
"I
figured that if a middle-aged woman like me who has never done a `covert op' in
her life, working on the Internet, could find the people who program our voting
machines, then certainly the bad guys must know who they are," she wrote
in her roughly edited book, which reads the way Harris talks - full of
enthusiasm, gall and expressions such as "oookay"
and "right," dripping with sarcasm.
She
took a loan from her father to self-publish her book. When critics said she was
fear-mongering for money, she posted chapters free online. She says the book
has cost her and her second husband, who works at Boeing Co., about $50,000,
and they've made almost nothing from it.
In
January 2003, Harris did a Google search for
Vancouver, B.C.-based Global Election Systems Inc., the
software company Diebold acquired in 2002. On the
search engine's 15th page of hits was a link to proprietary code, which Harris
burned on seven CDs and stashed in a safe-deposit box. She didn't sleep for 44
hours while downloading 40,000 files.
Blogs began buzzing about secret voting software
without password protection. Eventually, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins
and Rice universities analyzed the code.
Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information
Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, concluded that any clever 15-year-old
could rig the system and vote multiple times. Alarmingly, "1111" was Diebold's default password identification number for
microchip-embedded "smartcards" that voting administrators used.
Diebold issued a 27-page rebuttal, insisting the
code was out of date and not used in more than 30,000 machines nationwide. But
the study hit a nerve among computer scientists, who lended
legitimacy to a ragtag movement.
"I
worry that sometimes her arguments sound farfetched, and I have been told on
more than one occasion that she is hurting the credibility of all of us with
her wild theories," Rubin said. "On balance, though, I am grateful
for the work that she does. We each have our own style."
Harris
hopes more secretaries of state reach the conclusion of California's Kevin
Shelley, who this year banned some Diebold machines
and required counties to have a paper record of ballots.
"I
would consider this last year a year of crisis," said Harris, who last
year struggled to meet mortgage and heat payments. "I didn't want to get
involved in this. I just don't understand how anyone could discover this stuff
and live with themselves if they didn't say anything
about it."
---
On
the Net:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
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