Renton foe of computerized voting is featured in HBO documentary

While researching a political candidate in 2002, Bev Harris became curious about elections and whether voting technology was secure.

Two years later, Harris was traveling the country to investigate elections. At one point, she found herself wrestling with a Florida election worker over a bag of garbage she claimed contained illegally trashed election records.

With the voter-advocacy nonprofit she started in Renton, Harris has become the leader of a nationwide citizens movement on election oversight, and exposed what she says are frightening cracks in the foundation of democracy.

On Thursday at 9 p.m., HBO will air "Hacking Democracy," a 90-minute documentary that chronicles Harris' quest to expose security holes in computerized voting systems, which she says could be exploited by computer hackers and, worse, never discovered because of the lack of a paper trail. Her nonprofit, Black Box Voting, monitors election integrity.

"She's like the Erin Brockovich of the voting-machine world," said Sarah Teale, an executive producer whose previous films include "Dealing Dogs" and "Bellevue: Inside Out" (about the New York City psychiatric hospital, not the city on the Eastside).

Two British filmmakers tail Harris, 55, as she digs through records in elections-office trash and confronts officials with a video camera Michael Moore-style. The film insinuates — but does not prove — voter fraud in several counties around the country.

Opening with the backdrop of a fluttering flag, "Hacking Democracy" feeds the doubt that has spread across the country since the hanging and dimpled chads of the 2000 presidential election and, locally, since the 2004 gubernatorial election revealed that King County had mishandled hundreds of ballots.

Harris' criticism, though, is reserved for the transition from public transparency to computerized, privatized voting systems that citizens cannot observe. Most of the movie's criticism targets Diebold Elections System, the Texas company that is one of the largest providers of equipment to election departments, including King County.

The president of Diebold, David Byrd, has written a letter to HBO saying the documentary contains "significant factual errors" and that the company's voting machines can be fully audited.

At its climax in 2005, "Hacking Democracy" shows Harri Hursti, a computer scientist, changing vote tallies on Diebold memory cards in a test run on Florida equipment.

While the documentary focuses on events between 2003 and 2005, issues around electronic voting remain a topic of debate here and around the country.

In King County, computerized equipment includes scanners that read ballots into a database, touch-screen machines at polling places and a central computer that tallies all votes. Snohomish County uses electronic scanners and touch-screen machines as well.

The King County elections department says it has never found any evidence of equipment tampering and that the lost ballots in 2004 represented human error, not anything involving the equipment.

Well-publicized criticism of Diebold nationally prompted the Metropolitan King County Council to recently withhold a $4.8 million federal grant for new machines until the elections department details a security plan and identifies which company will supply the equipment.

The chairman of the Capital Budget Committee, Bob Ferguson, D-Seattle, said he's concerned "about the ability of individuals to break into elections software and manipulate elections results."

"I don't think there are vulnerabilities here," said interim King County elections director Jim Buck. The people who work in elections "can be trusted," he says, and "we have other safeguards in place so that we aren't trusting one person alone in any step of the process who can monkey around."

King County election officials say Harris' experiments do not take into account any of the security procedures they've put into place. The memory cards are set to zero before the election, sealed and locked up with party observers watching. The central computer that counts votes is not networked and is protected by a chain-link cage with limited access.

Harris hopes the movie will motivate people to get involved in monitoring elections. She doesn't sees herself as one with all the answers.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com