Black Box Voting—Interview with Bev Harris and Walter Reddy

2008 April 8

Walter Reddy has been active in the liberty movement from an early age and was there on the ground in New Hampshire, on behalf of Granny Warriors, to effect a recount of the primary election on 2007. He has been an active Libertarian since 1972. He and co-host Jill St. James interviewed James Collier, co-author of Votescam, The Stealing of America, in the 1990s on their public-access television show, an hour-long interview available via Google video. He is currently active in the Free State Project in New Hampshire.

Bev Harris is the founder of Black Box Voting, “The Citizen's Center for Elections Oversight”, is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan elections watchdog group. Bev's group is the subject of Hacking Democracy, a video featured on this blogsite.

Black Box Voting investigates election problems, communicates the problems to the citizenry, and teaches citizens how to manage their own government—which means teaching citizens how to identify elections problems and providing citizens with the tools to oversee elections. Black Box Voting takes the position that being a citizen means taking an active role in government oversight. Elections procedures must be fair, they must be inclusive, they must prevent voter disenfranchisement, they must protect each individual's vote by reducing the ability to tamper or miscount. Systems do not achieve quality automatically—citizen oversight is the key ingredient to fair and accurate elections. Because We, the People are the owners of our government, we citizens should expect to take an active role in managing the quality of the government systems we have created.

Walter mentions that, even though both James and Kenneth Collier are deceased, Victoria Collier is still publishing the book and remains active in the voting reform movement. Online is a very revealing interview with Bill Headline, the head of Voter News Services.

Bev says, “Citizenship is not a spectator sport.”

The best way to vote is a transparent vote.

Mail-in and absentee votes should be minimized, and should be counted, under citizen supervision, on election night.

Bev relates her process of radicalization, with her background working with investigative reporter Jack Anderson and her experiences doing her own investigations. 

Caller Scott from Pennsylvania prompts a discussion of how a person can get active locally.