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Election History Being Made in Texas!
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Texas "Hand-Counted Paper Ballot Bill" sponsored at legislature.
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If miracles happen, Texas could be the first state in the union to legislate a
return to hand-counted paper ballot elections and an almost total elimination
of electronic voting machines.
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Citizen action for election integrity has resulted in the sponsorship of a bill
for hand-counted paper ballots at the Texas Legislature on March 13th, 2009. If
passed, HB 4653, sponsored by Rep. Donna Howard (House District 48, Austin
area), would eliminate all electronic voting machines in Texas, with the
exception of ballot-marking devices for the disabled. Texas elections would be
conducted in the most transparent manner possible: With hand-counted paper
ballots, counted at the precinct level by citizens.
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"Our goal at VoteRescue
has always been to bring total transparency to the
election process by stopping the secret vote counting which occurs whenever
electronic voting systems are used to cast or count ballots", explains Karen
Renick, founder and director of Austin-based election integrity group
VoteRescue. Karen was the primary author of the bill, which actually debuted
last legislative session when it was sponsored by Rep. Lon Burnam of the Fort
Worth area.
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The myriad of critical security issues with electronic voting began to reach
the public in 2003 when Bev Harris of election watchdog group Black Box Voting
discovered the secret election software of the second largest vendor of
electronic voting systems in the country, Diebold, when they accidentally left
it on their website.
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After analyzing it, Harris and some computer experts pronounced the election
software "a handbook on how to tamper with elections", and added that it was
so simple to hack an election with these instructions, "any hacker with a
laptop" could do it. She then set up a mock election on her own laptop, and
using the instructions in Diebold's software, she was able to hack in a hidden
backdoor, "flip" election results, and exit without a trace, all in under
three minutes.
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Today, this hack can be executed in less than a minute. Bev Harris proved how
simple it was when she taught a chimp to hack an election and posted a video of
it, known as "The Baxter Video", which can still be viewed on her website, www.blackboxvoting.org
under video archives.
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Computer experts from Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities validated Harris'
conclusions in a study they conducted on the Diebold software in 2003.
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Bev Harris later created an expert "hacking team" with Finnish world-class
computer expert Harri Hursti and Dr. Herbert Thompson of Florida, author of
twelve books on computer security. In 2005, at the invitation of respected
election supervisor Ion Sancho of Leon County, Florida, they were invited in
to see if they could hack into Sancho's election equipment: Diebold optical
scan counters, used to count paper ballots.
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By simply changing out the credit-card sized memory card in the scanner with
one he had pre-programmed, Hursti was able to hack an election and flip
election results in an undetectable manner. Sancho was stunned because numerous
individuals have access to the scanners' memory cards both before and during
the election process. This hack can be seen in the shocking Emmy-award
nominated HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy", and should be viewed by all
Americans who value their right to have their votes counted accurately. The
DVD can be purchased through the website, www.hackingdemocracy.com.
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Since then, numerous scholarly studies, as well as many other hacks on real
electronic voting equipment by world class computer experts and teams at
universities such as Princeton, have been conducted on the Diebold machines,
as well as the other top four vendors' equipment: ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and
Sequoia. The results have led to the decertification of most of these vendors'
paperless voting systems in California, Colorado, Ohio, and Florida.
Diebold has even changed the name of their elections division to "Premier"
because of all the bad press and lawsuits.
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The outpouring of such evidence for the ease of undetectable hacking on all
electronic voting equipment prompted us to compile our book "HACKED! High Tech
Election Theft in America" in 2006 in an effort to further educate the public
about stolen elections in America ( http://www.hackedelections.com).
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