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HBO: How did you come to the project, Bev?
Bev Harris: Well, I became interested because of a story
I'd written which raised some questions in my
mind, and the more I started looking into the
questions, and getting answers, and seeing
that the answers were the wrong answers, the
more interested in it I became. And, that has
continued. Literally, every rock you turn over
there's something underneath it that you
don't really want to see. And this is our
election system today.
Some of the things I found, almost on the first
day, were corporate records and disclosure
documents. So we really weren't looking at
anything that someone could spin because we
were looking at public records, and actual
files. I realized very early on that the thing to
do would be to publish the actual documents,
publish actual videotapes. Publish things that
can't be spun. It doesn't matter if someone
listens to me. The records tell the truth.
HBO: Initially, you stumbled onto proprietary code
on Diebold 's FTP site. What did you think
when you first found it?
Bev Harris: It was stunning. I really couldn't believe what
I was looking at. It just doesn't happen when
you're trying to get answers to a story. The
files were the secret program files for Diebold
Election Systems, which is one of the most
widely used systems in America.
HBO: What did you do after that?
Bev Harris: I talked to several people that night, and I
also downloaded the files and made several
copies of them. It took seven CDs to make
one set. It was a vast number of files. Forty
thousand files. I sent a set overseas, and I
sent four copies around the country, and put
one in a safe deposit box.
HBO: What compelled you to do all that?
Bev Harris: Well, I knew they had something important in
them, and I thought I'd better download these
right now and get to the bottom of it, and see
what's in them.
HBO: Had you ever had any kind of activism in your
past?
Bev Harris: No. I actually was not an activist, I'm a
writer. I have familiarity with investigative
writing because I had done marketing writing
for Jack Anderson who was legendary as an
investigative reporter. And he would tell me
these wonderful stories about how he
dumpster-dived J. Edgar Hoover! [LAUGHS]
And he said, that's how he found information
many times. He didn't go to the press
conferences, he went to the dumpster. And
that's actually how we got the idea to do it--
from Jack Anderson.
HBO: What we throw away is quite revealing, isn't
it?
Bev Harris: Well, it's pretty symbolic: our democracy is
literally lying in the dumpster. These are
things that if the government was really
running elections, and they weren't privatized,
we would have a right to that information. We
would have a right to know where every penny
went that had anything to do with our
elections. It's amazing that we have to dig it
out of a dumpster to find out.
HBO: Russ, how did you enter the picture?
Russell Michaels: I found a story on the internet which Bev had
broken. And I rang Bev, and we basically
swapped stories, and got to know each other
over the phone. I realized that if half the stuff
that Bev was telling me was true, and it all
was true, then, I have stumbled on the most
amazing, disturbing story.
HBO: What were some of the obstacles you had to
overcome as you continued work on the film?
Bev Harris: One of the most frustrating things is the
secrecy part of it. Diebold made everything a
proprietary secret. So every time you ask a
question, they either ignore you altogether, or
say, I'm sorry, that's proprietary. And then
when you speculate if something is true,
Diebold would say that's not how it works.
Well, how does it work? Well, that's a secret.
So that was very frustrating. The bottom line
of this whole problem is that if we don't have
the ability to authenticate our own elections
as citizens, we don't live in a democracy.
Russell Michaels: One of the most difficult things was to get
answers from the companies that make the
voting machines. And sell them. The
problem is what is inside the machine.
Finding out how it works, and what the
company is saying it does. Because that's the
secret. It's proprietary, and they own it.
HBO: That seems so wrong. And yet we have laws
that protect and back this up?
Bev Harris: When I first found the files and went to
scientists to look at the files, they refused
because they said they were afraid that they
would break the law if they reverse-
engineered it. I was told I could be thrown in
jail for looking at the computer programs that
count our votes.
I learned, [LAUGHS] through firsthand
experience, that the role of a whistleblower is
really no fun. I don't know how much danger I
really was in of going to prison, but there's an
awful lot of intimidation that goes on. I got
interviewed by the Secret Service at one point.
I received three cease and desist orders. And
I'm not a person who's ever gotten a cease
and desist order ever in my life! That was
frightening. Diebold came after a lot of other
people too, which, ultimately, was their
undoing. When my website was shut down,
college students all over the country started
publishing the files that Diebold wanted me to
shut down the website over. And they ended
up serving multiple cease and desist orders
on college students. And that ended up being
covered in the New York Times. When
someone does something they shouldn't, and
then they overreach, that's when they really
get exposed and fall apart.
Russell Michaels: Before she met the hacker Harri Hersti,
Diebold Election Systems put out an
explanation of why Bev's research was
meaningless. They claimed that this kind of
system vulnerability was not true, it couldn't
be hacked, there were backups, and that even
if something was done to the system, the
inconsistencies would be detectable because
you'd compare them with other calculations in
the voting process afterwards. Well, what
we've done is show that that's not true.
Everything can add up if you know how to
attack it correctly.
HBO: What can someone watching this movie do to
change things?
Bev Harris: Well, that's a good question, and I think the
movie is going to be very helpful in showing
people in a way that's understandable what
the real problem is. The next thing we need
to do is get people out of their chairs, away
from the internet, and teach them to become
real participants in their democracy again.
One of the things that Black
Box Voting, my
organization did, was create a simple toolkit
that shows people how to collect evidence.
There's no magic wand right now, it's a pretty
complex problem. But we need to look at the
next election as the biggest citizen evidence-
gathering expedition in history; evidence
meaning video, audio, photographs, public
records. Not stories.
Russell Michaels: It's taken me three years of investigation with
my co-producers to ask the right questions.
And when you know the right question to ask,
and when the wrong answer is clearly telling
you a lie, then you know to ask that question
again, and again, and again. People have the
right to know how their democracy-America's
democracy-works. Or doesn't.
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