Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the Twenty-First Century

Bev Harris

The first thing that needs said about Black Box Voting is that Bev Harris has some things to say that people certainly need to hear. And since the release of this book, things certainly haven't gotten better; electronic voting machines of the type Harris talks about in this book continue to proliferate, and politicians continue to use the system to their own ends. (Anyone shocked by the recent Rolling Stone article about the theft of the 2004 election simply wasn't paying attention; those of us in Ohio were well aware of Ken Blackwell's underhanded tactics throughout 2004.) There's a lot that the average American can learn from this book. However, it has one massive flaw that will keep it from ever being effective: its presentation of those facts.

Technical books, as a rule, should not be written by non-technical people. Harris makes some mistakes that are especially confusing given that she does seem to know, sometimes, what she's talking about; for example, she explicitly defines the term open-source as it relates to software, and the definition is correct, but every other time she uses it in the manuscript, it's misused (open-source software, for those of you who don't know, is software whose source code is generally available, and is usually built and maintained by a community of developers, most, if not all, of whom are unpaid; Harris mostly uses the term to refer to Diebold software that was left on a server accidentally, was never meant to be available to the public, and has never been built or maintained by anyone but Diebold employees and Diebold-maintained consultants). She also mistakenly uses the terms PCMCIA card and memory card interchangeably despite noting in at least one place that a PCMCIA card can also be a modem. I've never seen a modem with its own memory before.

Aside from that, there's the issue of Harris' prose style. Nonfiction writing, be it boring or readable, always maintains at least some minimum standard of professionalism. Harris is quick to throw professionalism to the wind too often here, and as a result comes off sporadically as the schoolyard bully chanting nah-nah-nee-foo-foo at teachers while across the street from the school.

Both of these shortcomings hamstring what would otherwise be a very important, valuable contribution to the world of the political expose. I hope there is eventually a second edition, one that has been attacked by an overzealous editor. That book, if it is ever brought to light, could well change the face of American politics. As it is, it's far too easy to write it off as the ravings of a crank.