bbvcover.jpg - 29476 Bytes

Diebold has been selling states new voting machines that are all electronic touch screens that produce no paper trail. The problem with that is demonstrated in chapter 11 of Bev Harris's forthcoming book "Black Box Voting- Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century." In that chapter Ms. Harris describes how on election night 2000 Volusia county (Florida) uploaded their vote totals and a worker noticed that as a result Al Gore was credited -16022 votes. That's NEGATIVE 16022 votes. It was later explained away as a memory card problem, but the only reason it was caught is because someone was watching the results closely- if the totals had been a more reasonable number... (for instance, NOT A FUCKING NEGATIVE NUMBER) it probably would have gone unnoticed. Also, if Volusia county had moved to the paperless version of the election system as many other counties did before the 2000 election there would have been nothing to recount- if that had happened at least there would have been some sort of change- as it stands there was still paper as a backup.

The future of voting (if Diebold has it's way) is paperless. Currently the GEMS program (Diebold's voting machine software component)does not prevent users from bypassing passwords, changing audit logs and overwriting vote tallies. If one were so inclined, one could open up the Microsoft Access database, change the votes to favor their candidate, remove the audit information and save the adjusted results with no way of knowing the results had been changed and no record of the previous totals. Add to all this the fact that Diebold's CEO Walden O'Dell pledged in a Republican fundraising letter recently that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" and you've got the possibility for the first time in American history of a single corporation being able to decide the outcome of a national election. This is scary stuff- and Diebold is doing all it can to keep it quiet.

Here are the Diebold memos.

Below are the first free chapters of Bev Harris's Black Box Voting- Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.
If you would like to support the author and publisher of this work, please go to www.blackboxvoting.com/support.html
Black Box Voting Chapter 1
Black Box Voting Chapter 2
Black Box Voting Chapter 3
Black Box Voting Chapter 4
Black Box Voting Chapter 5
Black Box Voting Chapter 6
Black Box Voting Chapter 7
Black Box Voting Chapter 8
Black Box Voting Chapter 9
Black Box Voting Chapter 10
Black Box Voting Chapter 11

lists.zip- Posts to an internal Diebold listserv email list. This is where several the most incriminating allegations cited in Black Box Voting came from.