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Attack of the Machines!

As activists go, Bev Harris is somewhere between Eliot Ness and Michael Moore. The middle-aged blond book publisher from Seattle found a new passion and notoriety beginning in 2002, when she decided to look into Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel's part ownership of a voting machine company that counted the votes in his successful election bids.

That investigation led her down a very dark path — into the black box of modern voting in America. If you recall, after the national fiasco of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress decided to reform elections.

In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed. Among its many provisions was a particular drive toward fully automating the elections process, thus removing the potential for human error. Unfortunately as put into practice, HAVA and other state and local election reform laws also frequently had the effect of removing human accountability.

So we went from messy paper ballots to clean, supposedly efficient, and totally unverifiable computer tabulations. The process became more secret, and, we were told, safe. Trust us, the government said. And we did.

Harris, though, didn't buy it. "That only works if everybody you had to trust was honest," she told me recently. "It's the same as if your bookkeeper said, 'Well, you just have to trust me.'"

Harris caused a sensation when she found a bunch of source code for one of the voting machine companies and published it online for anyone to see (and potentially hack). That, as well as efforts by other voting activists, helped create a larger movement pushing for verifiable voting, with a paper trail, audits, and an open chain of custody.

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