Bev Harris

Bev Harris is an American writer, activist, and founder of Black Box Voting, a national, nonpartisan elections watchdog group. She helped popularize the term "black box voting", while authoring a book of that title.

Original investigative work by Harris has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC, as well as by the Associated Press, NPR, and many other mainstream news outlets.

In 2006, HBO released the documentary Hacking Democracy, which was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Long Form Investigative Journalism.

In 2003, she discovered the source code of voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems, which changed its name in 2006 to Premier Election Solutions.

After examining these files, Harris wrote an article on July 8, 2003 detailing how to bypass passwords and manipulate election results on the Diebold GEMS central tally system. The information in Harris's article was subsequently confirmed by internal memos written by Diebold's own engineers.

Researchers at Rice University and Johns Hopkins University also studied the programs she obtained and found security weaknesses that afforded opportunities for abuse Diebold officials and state election officials disputed the findings of the Rice and Johns Hopkins researchers.

An organization founded as a nonprofit by Harris, Black Box Voting, was invited by Ion Sancho, Leon County, Florida Supervisor of Elections to conduct a series of tests of Diebold's GEMS central tabulator and Diebold's optical scan voting machines. The tests took place February 14, 2005; May 2, 2005; May 26, 2005 and December 13, 2005 and allege to prove that Diebold machines were not secure and could be hacked and results altered.

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