Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since the passage of the Help
America Vote Act to inform people of the dangers present in this new process,
got a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an election on that
central tabulation computer while a guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With
Tina Brown.' Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was none other
than Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone
watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it is to steal an election
because of these new machines and the flawed processes they use.
"In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "you have all the different
voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a
county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All
those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So,
of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting
machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines,
or just come in here and deal with all of them at once? What surprises people
is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just
a regular computer."
Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that had on it the software
used to tabulate the votes by one of the aforementioned central processors.
Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next: "So Harris had Dean
close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software, go back to the normal Windows PC
desktop, click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local Disk C:,' open the
folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder 'LocalDB' which, Harris noted,
'stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes.' Harris then
had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled Central Tabulator
Votes,' which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like
Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the
numbers from one cell into the other. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled,
and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'"
