Bev Harris Predicts Election Day Chaos, with rouble Already Brewing in Ohio

September 14, 2008

By Laura Vecsey
Seattle People Examiner

This is now the season of Bev Harris, the nationally renowned, Renton-based elections watchdog whom the Boston Globe called "the godmother" of the movement to reform electronic voting. It was Harris who, in 2003, broke the news to wary America that their Diebold voting machines were easy targets for hacking.Thus, the 2006 documentary about Harris, Hacking Democracy.

Since then, Harris, a Seattle grandmother, has gone on to collaborate with many other citizen activist in a massive, cross-country, non-partisan effort to attempt to uncover voting improprieties, fraud and nefarious other dealings, especially around electronic voting machines.

Her organization, Black Box Voting, has a website where news and voter information could cause the neck hairs of many citizens of this country to not only stand on end, but quiver and shake, too. Harris and Black Box Voting have released the 2008 Election Protection toolkit. The kit offers citizens five ways each of us can do to stop election theft.

We called Bev Harris today to check in. She was in full, election season gear, reeling off a list of concerns already surfacing eight weeks ahead of Election Day.

Mostly, we wanted her feedback from Harris on stories out of Hamilton County, Ohio, where John McCain's campaign had mailed out about one million absentee ballots. Turns out, there was a small box on each ballot that voters were asked to check if they were eligible to vote. If they did NOT check the box, the ballots, it turns out, are invalid, according to Ohio's Secretary of State.. The confusion has causedmassive trouble for the county election board, which has 48 hours to notify voters who used the ballot that they did not fill out the ballot correctly. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"The McCain campaign mailed over a million of the applications last week. A Republican aide estimates that the number of affected registrations will be “in the thousands."

As Bev Harris said: "How is it legal for campaign organizers to send unsolicited ballots to voters?"

We're with you Bev. And we're going to check in with you, a lot, over the next eight weeks.



Source: The Examiner