Once a Liberal Darling, Bev Harris Still Thinks the Elections Are Rigged
When King County resident Bev Harris emerged as one of the nation’s leading critics of electronic voting machines the early 2000s, those who appreciated her work tended toward the left: U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, even Sen. Hillary Clinton all picked up, in some form or fashion, her talking points about the dangers of leaving vote tabulation in the hands of machines built by private corporations. Meanwhile, she proved most troublesome to those on the right, like Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who had an ownership stake in one of the companies writing software expected to impartially count our votes.
These days, Harris still thinks our elections are ripe for the stealing, and it’s safe to say you won’t hear any “Amens” from Democrats, who have had it up to their donkey ears with Donald Trump’s ravings about the fix being in. But that hasn’t deterred her. If raising the alarms puts her in league with The Donald, so be it. “Although many will say Trump is sort of a flawed model to put forth the message, I think it’s very important that he’s bringing this to the fore,” she says by phone on Thursday.
Now, if you’re a Democrat and you feel your blood pressure surging right now, let me deliver you some beta blockers: Nobody is saying that Trump isn’t being totally self-interested in his claims of rigged elections, nor does this story seek to defend his race-baiting claims of inner-city voter fraud. But what Harris is arguing is that if you were concerned about computerized voting during the Bush years, then you should still be concerned about it today. “It’s not a left/right issue at all … It’s not about the candidates anymore,” Harris says.
Harris’ latest bugaboo is something called “fractional voting,” which refers to a piece of code in some ballot-counting software that allows votes to be counted as a fraction rather than a whole number. This, she says, makes the systems vulnerable to a hack that would predetermine the percentage of the vote each candidate gets, and then match that figure to the number of ballots that come in without causing any logic issues the computer would detect—since it would allow the computer to assign, say, one-fourth of a vote to a candidate in order to make the figures compute.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/once-a-liberal-darling-bev-harris-still-thinks-the-elections-are-rigged/
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