Black Box Voting

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Black Box Voting signifies voting (usually on electronic systems that don't print paper ballots) which reports a result without allowing proper verification or auditability of the votes and totals. The term was coined by David Allen, publisher, technical consultant and co-writer to author and activist Bev Harris, who popularized the term in her book with that title and runs the BlackBoxVoting.org website. Allen's formal definition is found on page 4 of the book: "Any voting system in which the mechanisms for recording and/or tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter, and/or the mechanism lacks a tangible record of the vote cast."

Many citizens are concerned that such electronic voting machines can be rigged. If a computer programmer for one of the private companies which makes such machines writes code which steals votes, it will be difficult to detect-particularly if the company uses closed source and fails to use sound digital authentication techniques. Afterwards, if election results are suspicious, there is no way to do a meaningful recount.

Though the paperless Diebold electronic machines used in 2004 were said to have been subject to tampering in certain states, an alternative electronic voting system which leaves a paper trail and issues a receipt to the voter, TruVote, has since been developed.

In the U.S. presidential election, 2004, about 25% of voting was done on electronic voting machines. As of February, 2006, 80% of all votes in America were counted by only two companies: Diebold and Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and there was no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry. [1]

In federal elections in Canada, by contrast, and in Britain, votes are cast with paper ballots, and Canadians usually get election results the same night.

Bev Harris split with Allen in the Spring of 2004. Allen runs the BlackBoxVoting.com web site which continues to publish news pieces on electronic voting. Allen claimed that Harris left to pursue a qui tam lawsuit against Diebold, something he had ruled out early on, since it would look like they were trying to profit from their activism.[2] For her part, Harris claimed that Plan 9 Publishing never sold any books and that Allen was in breach of contract.^{[citation needed]} The claim was later disproven when Allen posted a cancelled check Harris cashed.^{[citation needed]} Harris self-published a second version of the book with edits down-playing Allen's contribution. [3]

Allen withdrew from anti-BBV activism for a time, but was coaxed back into working on the issue in North Carolina by state activist Joyce McCloy. He served on the NC Joint Select Committee on Electronic Voting, which drafted the toughest anti-electronic voting machine bill in the U.S. The bill was signed into law in 2005 and was instrumental in Diebold's withdrawal from North Carolina as a vendor of voting machines.

Harris continued on with her organization, establishing it as a "consumer protection" agency for voting, and using donations to investigate e-voting issues.

There is a bill in Congress to ban black box voting by requiring all electronic voting machines to print paper ballots. The bill also requires some of those ballots to be audited and stored for possible recounts. The bill, entitled the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, was introduced by Congressman Rush D. Holt, Jr..

Allen supports the bill, Harris opposes it.