Black Box Voting is voting on electronic machines which don't print paper ballots.
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.
In the U.S. presidential election, 2004, about 25% of voting was done on electronic voting machines. In federal elections in Canada, by contrast, votes are cast with paper ballots, and Canadians usually get election results the same night.
The term "Black Box Voting" was recently popularized by author and activist Bev Harris, who wrote a book with that title and runs the Black Box Voting (http://www.blackboxvoting.org) website.
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 is titled Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 and it was introduced by Congressman Rush D. Holt, Jr. (D-NJ).
BlackBoxVoting knows an informed citizenry would demand that this cancer be confronted and excised before another election is held and has chosen to bypass the officials and go direct to the voters.
BlackBoxVoting’s team discovered several security hazards so critical they immediately notified both national and local election officials of their existence prior to issuing a formal report.
BlackBoxVoting has now revealed to us the insidious nature of this disease that attacks our very right to choose who shall govern us; now we need to demand the immediate removal of this cancer from our nation.
In the minute-long video produced by Black BoxVoting (search), Baxter the chimp is shown deleting the audit log that is supposed to keep track of changes in the Diebold central tabulator, the computer and program that keeps track of county vote totals.
BlackBoxVoting founder Bev Harris said the demonstration shows that the system — which will be used in more than 30 states, including Maryland — is dangerously inadequate when it comes to stopping election fraud.
The entire voting record can be deleted by choosing "reset the election" on a drop-down menu, he said, or a hacker can destroy a tabulator's ability to recognize ballots by un-selecting three checkboxes on a program control panel.
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