Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, and we are at episode number 282 where we are going to talk about a few things today before we go to our guest, and not the least of which I guess is Meet the Masters. Yes, it is finally confirmed. I know a lot of you have been waiting and you’ve been waiting patiently and we look forward to seeing you in January 18th through the 20th at the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, California, in Southern California. By the time you’re hearing this message, I’m sure it will be up on the website at jasonhartman.com in the events section with some great early bird pricing for our Meet The Masters event and we’re really trying to mix it up a little and have a different variety of speakers. So look for that. There is more information to follow. Remember, we only do that once a year now. We used to do it twice a year but we had a little change in our business plan to focus more on area tours and doing Creating Wealth boot camps in those tours. So, only once a year. So if you want to come to Meet the Masters, rather than it being twice a year like before, this will be your only chance in 2013. So please register at jasonhartman.com.
Hey, I got another one of these. Actually, a great-looking — it’s sort of an info graphic or they call it a visualizer and this is on the Trulia website. Trulia is a big real-estate website like Zillow, with all sorts of great data and interesting information and this one is called Rent Versus Buy. Which is cheaper for you? Rent or buy? It amazes me how these myths are perpetuated throughout our media landscape because the question is not is it cheaper to rent or buy by the time you put 10% or 20% down, tie off a bunch of your money and then also lose the opportunity to purchase an investment property elsewhere that would have a higher yield than buying your own home. Again, people just don’t look at the big picture of the holistic picture, certainly the media doesn’t, but a lot of people don’t either because if you look at this chart which is at trends.truliablog.com. Once you’re there I’m sure you can just look for rent versus buy and it’s a great map. It’s a map of the United States and it’s got all these circles on it and the circles are colored and as you look at them, one part of the continuum says it’s cheaper to rent and another part of the continuum says it’s cheaper to buy. You can put some things in about your tax bracket and how many years you think you’ll stay in the home and what mortgage rate you think you can get when you borrow the money to buy it. Basically all over the country now, it is cheaper to buy. In all of these markets, it’s cheaper to buy. But they’re asking the wrong question. The question should be, is it cheaper to rent the home in which I want to live given the area in which I’m living and purchase investment properties elsewhere? Or is it better to buy my own home?
Categorically I will pretty much say in most of the market’s profile that it is better to rent your own home as long as you’re renting something that is above the median price, maybe 10, 20, 30% or even way more above the median price home because that’s where the rent to value ratios fall way out of sync. Now, my friend, Rebecca, emailed me the other day. She lives in Southern California and she asked me is it better to rent or buy, you know, the famous old question and I knew because of where she lives that it would be a better deal to rent. But it turns out — I gave her some homework and I said, “Look, go out and figure what you would want to rent versus what you would want to buy and then come back to me and tell me how much you can rent that property for and then tell me how much it costs to buy the property.” She did her homework, she came back and she writes me and she says, “Well, I can rent it for $1,550 per month and I can buy it somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000.” If you’re a regular listener, if you’re a follower of my work, what do you think I’m going to say? Much better deal to rent than buy.
So in her case, it was a better deal to rent than buy. Now, she’s been interested in investment property for a couple of years and think about what she can buy elsewhere in any of the markets we talk about where she can get an RV ratio exceeding 1%, 1.2%, maybe even 1.4%, maybe even better than that, and she’s renting for an RV ration of about — depending on the price, about 0.6 or 0.7. so it’s a far better deal to look at it holistically and think if I deploy $200,000 or $250,000, what is the cost to use that property? Because all I need to do to have a place to live is to use that property versus if I deploy that elsewhere, if I deploy it into smart prudent income properties, what kind of RV ratio will tenants pay me?
So this is all was the question and people get so murky and confused on it and I don’t know, maybe I’m just sort of a very straightforward numbers thinker on this stuff but I don’t think it’s murky at all. I think it’s better to rent in most cases your own home if it’s above the median price or if it’s an inexpensive highland value market like Southern California and buy investment properties and deploy that money where you can get the highest return. Deploy it, always wear it returns the highest yield. Enough about that. Well, maybe not quite enough about it.
As I look around this map, let me just share with you some interesting stats. So, in Los Angeles, it says it’s 32% cheaper to buy for a savings rate of $641 per month. Now, the uninformed mind just looks at this chart and says, “Well, I got to go out and buy a house. I live in L.A.” They could do much better because they’re not looking at it holistically. In Riverside or San Bernardino, it’s 43% cheaper to buy for a savings of $642 per month over renting and who knows what their comparisons are in terms of comparable homes. Let me give you another example. Houston, Texas. It’s 51% cheaper to buy. Now there, I would probably start to really agree with these people in this analysis because Houston is a great market in which to invest and if it’s a good market to be an investor, it’s also a good market to be a homeowner as long as you own something near the median price home for that market. If you want a really expensive home in Houston, you can get an absolute mansion for $700,000 to $1 million where in Southern California you’re going to shack. But you were to buy type of property in Houston, you would better off renting it. Okay, an expensive property but not the lower price properties.
Let’s look at another market. How about one of our markets where we just had a big tour, Atlanta, Georgia? It is 57% cheaper to buy for a savings of a whopping $767 a month. So, you know one way we can use this kind of chart? We can look at where they say the ratio is really good in favor of buying even though you’re not buying for yourself, you’re buying an income property, a rental property. But in Atlanta, 57% cheaper to buy if there are still lots of people willing to rent from you. So that’s a great place to be an investor. Versus L.A., they don’t count a bunch of things but it’s only 32% cheaper to buy than rent and of course, you see the fallacy in their thinking here.
Anyway, enough of that. Today, we have got a guest and I wanted to do one more thing for you. I know it’s not directly on the real-estate topic of course but all of this stuff relates back to real-estate because it affects us so much financially and it is so critical and so important. If you’ve been watching the presidential debates and listened to my recent episode about the debates and how they are basically a show, Gerald Celente who we had on the show before the trends researcher guy, and he calls it a presidential reality show. That’s what a debate is, a presidential reality show. You know, I tend to agree with that. But this time, let’s talk about voting machines and Black Box Voting. Originally, I plan to have this guest just on the Holistic Survival Show but given the timeliness, given the fact that we’ve got an election just a couple of weeks away, I think you’ll find this topic pretty interesting. And of course, we’ve got lots of shows on income property, on investing, on Wall Street and comparing Wall Street to income property and so forth. Lots of those are coming up but you should really know about some of the situations going on with these voting machines and the potential to rig elections. So again, originally for the Holistic Survival Show but I thought it was very fitting and timely to have on the Creating Wealth Show so that’s why we’re running this guest on out. So be sure to join us for the Meet the Masters event. Register at jasonhartman.com in the events section and let’s go to our guest here in just about 60 seconds.
Introduction: Have you listened to the Creating Wealth Series? I mean, from the beginning. If not, you can go ahead and get Book One that shows one through 20 in digital download. These are advanced strategies for wealth creation. For more information, go to jasonhartman.com.
Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Bev Harris. She’s coming to us today from Seattle, Washington and she is an expert on voting issues. In fact, she is the founder and director of Black Box Voting and she’s been featured in a HBO documentary film entitled Hacking Democracy and we’re going to talk about these voting machines and the illegitimacy in the process they may cause. Maybe that’s too light a way to put it but Bev, welcome. How are you?
Bev Harris: I’m glad to be here. I’m really glad that you’re having me on.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. Well, this is obviously so topical with the election right around the corner. So, when did he voting machines actually start? I think the first time I used one was in the last election cycle four years ago. People were talking about them years before but in my area I think there was still the good old punch card until just the last time around.
Bev Harris: Well, they’ve been evolving over the years. A hundred years ago, they had the lever machines but those are not software-driven. Those are mechanical. So although they are somewhat, you know, whoever the mechanic is, you can see if there is a problem with it. The software-driven system actually started with the punch cards which were read by software but then they moved into kind of like the SAT test where you fill in the oval and they scan and interpret the marks by computer. And then they moved into touchscreens. We still use actually both the scanning model and the touchscreen very widely, about 99% of the jurisdictions in the U.S. use one or the other of those computerized models and the reason I emphasize software-driven is that what that really does is it withholds from the public the process by which the votes are counted. You can really see what that software is doing and whatever programmer had his hands on that software had really complete control over how it counts the vote.
Jason Hartman: It’s really scary because you use the term authenticated, right? The votes can never be authenticated in a software-based system, right?
Bev Harris: There probably are some ways but we have to start focusing on that authentication step. The nation of Germany really got it right. In 2009, they did a lawsuit. Some citizens in Germany did a lawsuit and they took it to the equivalent of the German Supreme Court which ruled. And this is exactly what we need here in the United States. It ruled that the public must be able to authenticate all essential steps in the election without need for special expertise and no after defect procedure can be substituted for the original count and that ruling with all of those little phrases in it. What happened is they basically just ditched all their computerized voting machines 90 days later and they’re counting in public by hand now in Germany.
Jason Hartman: What are the companies behind this? There’s two of them. I think Diebold is one of them. Is that correct?
Bev Harris: Well, that’s an interesting question. I’m glad you asked. Diebold Election Systems sold its elections division to Election Systems & Software which was the other big company. What that does is it gives them a monopoly. There’s another couple of smaller companies and another one from Spain moving in. So there’s a little bit of movement on the playing but basically the biggest voting machine company in the United States, Election Systems & Software or ES & S, purchased Diebold Election Systems and basically controls two-thirds of the jurisdictions in the United States.
Jason Hartman: So literally, this company could influence elections if there is something — I mean, they could not only influence elections, they could completely control elections. Do we have to be that worried about it? I hope you don’t say that this company is owned by some foreign government. It’s even worse.
Bev Harris: Well, we don’t know who owns it. Their private and they say that who owns them is private and it’s a secret. Would you know that they operate globally? They’re based in Omaha, Nebraska but we don’t know who the owners are. And they operate much in the United States but they’re really having an expanding global reach.
Jason Hartman: Have there been instances of known election fraud with these machines?
Bev Harris: Yes, there have. The thing is not only — any person basically who gets private access to the system on the administrative level can do something. So even if this vendor didn’t do anything to the election, your local guy could do something, the local IT guy for the county or the place that repairs the voting machines and so forth. Because this is just a matter of putting in a chip or putting in instructions to the system and there’s actually multiple components where you can control the rest of the system. For example, the voting machine itself, you can control it through the voting machine itself with the one that’s out in the precincts or you can control it through the memory pack that’s in. There’s a memory card or a memory pack that’s in there and that also has the ability to control the election, or there is what we call essential tabulator or an election management system that sort of controls all the computers or has the ability to control all the computers in the county. And so, you can sort of look at it like a module or system where you can actually go after it and all through the results and any one of a number of places. So whoever has access and intent that has access to any one of these components can actually alter the election and it’s pretty invisible. You can’t see that it will change.
Jason Hartman: Very, very scary. I mean, can you imagine if a political party or a candidate owns or has a major interest in this company? I mean, why can’t we tell who owns this company? Every company has to register with the state and they have officers that sign the filing documents each year. How would this be kept secret?
Bev Harris: Sure, we know the officers, the corporate officers but we don’t know the stockholders. We don’t know who actually has ultimate control and the other thing is with this Election Systems & Software, ES & S, and also with one of the other big companies Hart InterCivic, the local county physically sends the information to the vendor who then programs the election and sends it back to the county to put in the machines. So, we may know the name of our election official but we don’t know the name of whoever they send it to in Omaha. We don’t even know who it is that have their hands on the system. They usually try to get around the precinct, it has the system. There is no test before the fact that will tell you what’s happening on Election Day. It’s a simple matter of saying if it’s not Election Day, count the vote correctly and if it’s Election Day, count the vote the way I see you count the vote.
Jason Hartman: I mean, this is incredible that something so important could be left to this kind of lack of accountability. I just can’t imagine that that can happen. I want to attack what you’re saying for being sensationalistic but I have a feeling you’re not being that way.
Bev Harris: Well, if you look back that the history of tampering with elections, it’s always been there, even since back in the days of the Greeks and so forth. But if it’s somewhat out in the open then we can catch the tampering. What this newer technology has done is made it impossible for the public to catch. So for example in 1948, LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, his campaign was caught rigging an election that put him in the senate but it was caught because it was in public and they found that somebody burned some of the poll books and they found the names and the remaining public were entered in alphabetical order. So it’s sort of obvious.
Jason Hartman: It’s not a very good fraud. Yeah, like all the voters came in alphabetical order.
Bev Harris: Right. So it’s not like the technology that’s producing the fraud. There’s always been that incentive there because it controls a huge amount of money and power. But by putting it in the public eye, the public had a fighting chance of catching the fraud. But with technology, the public no longer has a fighting chance and essentially what we have is the government in position to choose itself.
Jason Hartman: Incredible. Just incredible, and that means incumbency will always win because when the government chooses itself, they’re going to — people in power will stay in power.
Bev Harris: Yes, the people that they want. And you know, this is on several levels and actually the mechanics are a little bit different from level to level but you have your local level. Typically, the positions that are most prone to corruption historically locally are the counting supervisor, counting commissioners because they have purchasing control and the county sheriff who controls contraband and drugs and guns and so forth and those are the ones that are typically the most easily corrupted or the most frequently corrupt. Those folks are often the sheriffs on the elections board. So there’s that but then there’s the next level, the state level and the national level.
And so, depending on what level someone is at that wants to influence this, it will change their methods a little bit. But there’s always been the incentive and in fact, there’s a quite rich and colorful history of election fraud not just in America but in every place that has elections. But something that we need to stop being complacent about is the subtle change that has happened in our ability to detect it and do anything about it. You can’t make a law against breaking the law. They tried in Rhode Island. They said let’s make a law against corruption and they can’t even pass that law.
Jason Hartman: I thought corruption was already illegal.
Bev Harris: Yeah. But you can’t eliminate all corruption by passing law. But with voting machines and with elections, you can’t eliminate election fraud by it in the public eye. But you can give it a chance of being caught and that keeps the public in control of its own government because the fundamental thing here is citizen sovereignty that we’re based on the concept of self-government. That’s what the whole country is based on and if you set something up so that you no longer have the ability to see how people are being chosen then you no longer have self-government. It’s a fundamental change. It’s very subtle but it’s a huge change in the structure of our country. So people always come to me and they say, “Is it the Republicans who are rigging the elections? Do you think they’re going to rig the next election or the Democrats? Do you think the Democrats are going to rig the next election?” I say look, we have a structural problem as long as the structural problem is in place. Either party is going to want to use that.
Jason Hartman: Of course, just like I said about the incumbency and the group in power wanting to stay in power. But you know, Bev, what is the really the reasoning that the powers that they want electronic voting? I mean, is it the simple, well, it’s more efficient, we’ll be able to tabulate the elections more quickly, everything’s becoming technological, why not voting, all of those sort of standard arguments which makes complete sense in commercial endeavors and even government service type endeavors. I mean, everybody loves the fact that they can go interact with their government online and it’s much more convenient that way. But it just seems like the price, the risk is too high in this particular area to have that kind of efficiency and non-accountability.
Bev Harris: You know though, if you’ve ever gone and talked to your congressman or usually the aid to the congressman, it’s who you end up talking to, you realize very quickly that they don’t really wrap their heads around issues very deeply. They pretty much have someone do it. And so, somebody comes to them and says this will be cheaper, this will be faster, this will better or this will help trade and an awful lot of our public officials will just sort of go along with that without thinking about the deeper implications and it’s only really within the last few years that we have begun to articulate what the problem is with this. The problem is not that it’s a computer; the problem is not that it’s not secure. The problem is the public cannot authenticate. So the answer to it, they’ll say, “What message do you recommend?” and my answer is simple: any message that the public can authenticate without need for special expertise, without relying on an after the fact as a substitute for the actual data.
There are several ways you can do that but you first have to define the problem correctly. The problem isn’t whether you have paper ballots or not because in the many places that have paper ballots, no human eye is permitted by law to ever look at the paper ballots. It’s fully interpreted by a computer. So for a long time they would say we have paper ballots, everything is fine. No, it’s the public cannot ever look at it no human eye ever can look at it. It’s no different than not having paper ballots.
Jason Hartman: But in the election dispute between Bush and Gore in Florida, The Florida Dispute, people were looking at those paper ballots after the fact, you know, with the issue of the hanging chads and so forth. I mean, wasn’t that all subject to human inspection after the fact?
Bev Harris: Well, somewhat. After the fact is of course a problem. Let me describe why. There are four things that the public needs to be able to see and authenticate. Who can vote, which is the voter list; who did vote, which is the participating voter list or poll list; the count itself and the chain of custody. When you rely on an after the fact procedure, chain of custody has broken down because what happens to the ballots after they leave the poll in place? They go to the very same government officials who want to keep themselves in power and as an example of this, I went up New Hampshire after the 2008 primary where both the Republican and the Democratic candidates, a couple of the minor candidates requested recounts and they did and entire recount of the whole state but what they recounted was not the same as what they voted. We actually saw ballot boxes arriving for the recount that were open, that had slits in the side, that we actually caught them in the act of opening the ballot boxes afterhours in a warehouse.
So, once those ballots leave public view in the polling place, chain of custody breaks and you get a problem with that and that’s why that original count is so important. You got to put that in public eye. A lot of times they’ll say you could recount it if you want. Well, you don’t know what you’re recounting though because it has now gone right back to the hands of the same government officials who control the voting machines.
Jason Hartman: This is a real problem. So, in terms of authentication, you said your answer was anything the public can authenticate, which of course everybody listening would agree, except the voting company and the party or the person who wants to do evil. But is paper really the only thing they can authenticate? Is there any sort of way to do it with a computer, with software? I have a feeling there’s just not.
Bev Harris: Well, actually there’s a couple of things that have been tested that are really interesting. In Humboldt County, California, what they’re doing there, and they started this in 2008, they run the paper ballots through a computerized scanner and then they run them through a regular scanner they got at Office Depot and put them all on disk and they put them on the web. Everybody in the public can get copies of all the ballots. When you think about it, although that’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now. I guess what happened the first time they did this, you know, they counted them by computer with an optical scanner and then let the public have copies on CD and they put them all on the web, picture of every ballot on the web, and they found out that the voting machines miscounted. They just looked at the ballot. So, there are ways and another one that’s very simple would be to say, okay, when you go to the polling place at the end of day, if the public asks and wants to, you have to deal the ballots out like a deck of cards and let them video tape those ballots so that they have a record of what was on those things. That would cost nothing and it would take about 20 minutes to do that with a thousand ballots because we’ve timed it.
So, the solutions if you continue to use computerized scanning, they’re not even expensive solutions. Buy a scanner from Office Depot and make some copies of ballots or better, at the precinct, let the public photograph into that machine and compare it with what the machine says. So, simple things. That’s why I’m saying I’m not ruling out computers forever but I am saying that if the public can authenticate it, we got a problem. Now, there’s a big glaring whole in what I just brought up as a solution and that is this massive move we have toward absentee voting. With absentee voting, although they count all the absentee votes also in computer and there would be ways to authenticate those counts, the problem there is chain of custody is broken. Again, with absentee voting, you really don’t know if the ballots that went through the computer are all of the ballots, some of the ballots, extra ballots, replacement ballots, you don’t actually have a way of knowing if they’re the real thing.
Jason Hartman: We’ll be back in just a minute.
Female: Now, you can get Jason’s Creating Wealth in Today’s Economy Home Study Course. All the knowledge and education revealed in a nine-hour day of the Creating Wealth Boot Camp created in a home study course for you to dive into at your convenience. For more details, go to jasonhartman.com.
Jason Hartman: It almost seems — remember when the internet was really in its hay day about 12 years ago, the new economy and all of the money being thrown at it and so forth. There was a lot of talk back then about people being able to vote online and participate much more in government, being able to vote much more often on much smaller, more micro issues and I believe Dick Morris is an excellent writer by the way and has really interesting books. He was kind of behind that as I recall back in the day and it seemed like a good idea that we could really be far more involved in our government because we could just log in to a website and vote. I suppose that would just be fraud central now that I think of it.
Bev Harris: Exactly. What internet voting does is it actually conceals all four of the essential steps. It conceals the voter list because even though what voter list is input into that internet system and it conceals who actually voted, you don’t know what votes showed up in there. You can get a report but that doesn’t tell you anything about what’s really in there. You can’t see the counting of the vote and you can’t see the chain of custody. So I refer to internet voting as a funnel. It’s got this wide top and we feel like everybody can go pouring in and it will be easy but at the very bottom when they count the votes, the whole thing is narrowing down to just one or two people with complete control. So it’s actually quite deceptive.
Jason Hartman: That is really, really scary. First of all, I want to ask you maybe in closing what can people do obviously, what are the action steps, anybody listening who’s concerned about this can take. Hopefully it’s not just regular congressman which ought to just be write your lobbyist really because that’s who really runs the show. But you had some interesting stuff happen to you in the past. I mean, I guess the Secret Service has interviewed you and you were hit with gag order and threatened by Federal grand jury action and you didn’t turn over information. Tell us about this. This is fascinating.
Bev Harris: Okay. I don’t want to scare folks off from doing stuff because — that happened because I actually — it’s such a secret how the voting systems work that I got my hands on the code and as everybody has heard about Wikileaks and so forth, that’s a bit controversial. Well, it was kind of the same thing. I got my hands on the computer code that counted the votes and released it into the wild. Yeah, people were freaking out and I did. I was investigated by the Secret Service and I had all kinds of creepy stuff happening. I haven’t done anything wrong. So ultimately, they couldn’t do anything.
Jason Hartman: That code, why should that code be a secret? Everybody should be able to have access to that, right? That’s a freedom of information thing. We should see how their computers work and have every detail. Most people can’t figure out what any of that stuff means but there is certainly enough computer pros and programmers and hackers out there who can figure it out.
Bev Harris: Yes, and of course we found right away that it was just open for business. We were able to train a chimpanzee to change the elections. It was so simple. It was so riddled with holes and of course they didn’t like that we released that either. So it should be open. That doesn’t actually solve the problem. Some people would say it’s self-enforced but when you think about it, just because there’s some code that’s released to the public it doesn’t mean that’s what’s on the computer on a given day. What happened there was I had released the code because I had already found that it was just riddled with opportunities for fraud and people couldn’t really do anything to me because I found the code on a website that had no password and what they were doing is they were transferring to programmers in Serbia and Croatia and so forth to reprogram stuff for them. I don’t know what that was all about. So they have left the files on an open server and I found them and downloaded and released them because it was clearly in the public interest.
Jason Hartman: Of course it was, yeah, no question. Just to be clear. I don’t want to mischaracterize what happened. So you got a hold of the code and you put it on your website and then the Secret Service came to you and said, “Hey, we want to know who got that code from your website,” and you said, “No, I’m not going to tell you,” right?
Bev Harris: Actually it was a little more convoluted because Diebold didn’t want to have all this bad publicity on them so another company which hadn’t even sold any voting systems called Votehere, which had a bunch of National Security and military ties on its board. It had — seriously, high level — Robert Gates was one of the advisory board. This company which never sold any voting things claimed it had been hacked and claimed that they thought I had taken their code, which had nothing to do with Diebold. It was under that pretext that I was investigated. That all kind of fell apart because I had actually heard that they were trying to entrap somebody into taking that code and I had posted it on the web. By the way, there’s a company out there called Votehere who’s trying to entrap people into taking some code and I suspect it’s a trap. I would advise everybody not to touch the stuff. So that actually kind of saved me and the other thing that helped was a reporter got a hold of the fact that they were investigating me and outed the name of the agents and all kinds of things. It just went away after that.
It was very suspicious though because it was clear — let me put it this way. I was investigated by the Secret Service and the FBI and although they were ostensibly investigating Votehere and their supposed hack of their system, they only asked me questions about Diebold. It was clearly a route to try to get at something.
Jason Hartman: Right. Unbelievable. Tell us what can people listening, who are concerned about our government and the absolute fiasco and the powers that are taking too much power nowadays. What can people do?
Bev Harris: A couple things. One is get off the treadmill. We’re not going to get this solved by November in one month. People are coming two days before the election and say, “What can we do?”
Jason Hartman: Yeah, it’s way too late.
Bev Harris: We have to just take as long as it takes. If it takes us 50 years, we have to keep up and ask for or demand what we want, not some placebo. They love to send you down the — I call it the cattle shoot where you’ll say, “Hey, we want to be able to authenticate the election,” and they’ll say, “Come over here. We have a new congress bill that actually does something else,” and everybody go testify for that. Stick to what we expect, demand, and want, which is the public wants to stay in control and we have the right to authenticate every step of our elections, period, no negotiations. Just keep at it.
Jason Hartman: Very good. Give out your website if you would and tell people where they can learn more.
Bev Harris: Sure. The website is blackboxvoting.org. There is going to be some significant updates there within the next week. I hate to say this but I had some family emergencies that kept me away for the last month. So it looks like it’s not updated but in the next week or so we’ll be putting up a new toolkit for citizens for what they can do for the next election and people can actually go on the website. It’s self-serve and they can upload information they found in their local elections. So blackboxvoting.org. Just stay tuned for the information that’s coming out and first step in solving any problem is awareness of what the problem is.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, no question. Well Bev Harris, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for informing people about this very, very important issue. The old saying when Kennedy was running in Chicago was ‘Vote early and vote often.” But nowadays, I think it’s a lot more disconcerting than that with these voting machines. Thanks for informing us about it.
Bev Harris: Thank you very much for having me. (Top image: Flickr | Abode of Chaos)
The Jason Hartman Team
Transcribed by: Renee Naphier
