Jason Hartman goes through headlines and the upcoming US presidential election. He hosts Black Box Voting founder, Bev Harris, who was recently featured in the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy.” Bev gives us some insight into her research on the subject of electronic voting. She shares a story about US Senator Chuck Hagel who had ownership in and was the CEO of the company that built the machines which counted his own votes. This spread light into the seriousness of a monopoly on voting machines controlling the outcomes of elections.
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Once we did encounter some challenges because we were part of your network and because I have an investment counselor, I always felt like I had somewhere to go for an answer. I always felt like I had somebody with more experience than me that I could lean on. And if Sarah didn’t know the answer, she got the answer. Welcome to this week’s edition of flashback Friday, your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason is handpicked to help you today in the present, and propel you into the future. Enjoy.
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Welcome to creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before and a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walk the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states. 17 cities this program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Jason Hartman 1:23
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 guests, 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 January 18 through the 20th at the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, California, Southern California. By the time you’re hearing this message, I’m sure it will be up on the website at Jason Hartman calm in the event 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 and you know more information to follow. Remember, we only do that once a year now we used to do it twice a year, but 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 or so if you want to come to meet the Masters rather than it being twice here like before, this will be your only chance in 2013. So please register Jason Hartman calm Hey, you know I got another one of these actually a great looking well sort of an infographic 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 to rent or buy. And, you know, it amazes me how these myths are pervasive. awaited 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 up 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. And, you know, again, people just don’t look at the big picture of the holistic picture. Certainly the media doesn’t. But Heck, a lot of people don’t either. Because if you look at this chart, which is at trends, truly a blog calm, and 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 of these circles on it and the circles are colored. And as you look at them, one part of the continuum says you know, it’s cheaper to rent. And another part of the continuum says it’s cheaper to buy and you can put some have 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. And 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 and categorically, I will pretty much say in most of the markets profiled, that it is better to rent your own home as long as you’re renting something that is above the median price, maybe 1020 30%. Or even way more above the median price home because that’s where the rent to value ratios fall way out of sync. No, my friend Rebecca emailed me the other day, and 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 would be a better deal to rent. But it turns out, I gave her some homework and I said, Look, go out and figure out 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 1500 and $50 per month, and I can buy it for somewhere, although she wasn’t sure. between 200,200 and $50,000. So if you’re a regular listener, if you’re a follower of my work, what do you think I’m gonna say, much better deal to rent than buy. So in her case, it was a better deal to rent By 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 talked about where she can get an RV ratio exceeding 1% 1% 1.2%, maybe even 1.4%, maybe even better than that. And she’s renting for an RV ratio of what about a point? Well, depending on the price about a point six, or maybe a point seven, so far better deal to look at it holistically. And think, if I deploy, if it was purchased in her example, 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 deployed into smart prudent income properties, what kind of RV ratio Will tenants pay me? So this is always the question and people get so murky and confused on it. And I don’t know, maybe I’m just a very sort of 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 expensive high land value market, like Southern California, and buy investment properties, and deploy that money, where you can get the highest return, deploy it always where it returns the highest yield. So enough about that, but 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 Oh, Well, I better go out and buy a house I live in LA. And 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 home owner is long as you own, you know, 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 six 700,000 a million bucks Where is in Southern California you get a shack, but if you were to buy that type of property in Houston, you would be You better off renting it. Okay and expensive property, but not the not the lower priced properties. Let’s look at another market. How about one of our markets? Well, we just had a big tour in Atlanta, Georgia 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 it, there are still lots of people willing to rent from you. So that’s a great place to be an investor versus LA. 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 in their thinking here. So 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 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 he listened to my recent episode about the debates, and how they are basically a show, Gerald cilenti, who we had on the show before the trends researcher guy, he calls it a presidential reality show. That’s what a debate is a presidential reality show. And, you know, I tend to agree with that. But this time, let’s talk about voting machines, and blackbox voting. Now 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 what 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 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 app. So be sure to join us for the meet the Masters event register Jason hartman.com in the events section, and let’s go to our guests here in just about 60 seconds.
Announcer 11:29
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Jason Hartman 11:50
It’s my pleasure to welcome Beth Harris. She’s coming to us today from Seattle, Washington, and she is an expert on voting issues. In fact, She’s the founder and director of black box voting. And she’s been featured in an HBO documentary film, entitled hacking democracy. And we’re going to talk about these voting machines and the legitimacy in the process they may cause I don’t know if that’s up, maybe that’s too light away to put it. But Ben, welcome. How are you?
Bev Harris 12:15
Well, I’m glad to be here. Yes. I’m really glad that you’re having me on.
Jason Hartman 12:19
Yeah. Well, this is obviously so topical with the election right around the corner. So when did the 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 you know, I don’t think in my area, I think they were still doing good old punchcard until just the last time around.
Bev Harris 12:39
Well, you know, they’ve been evolving over the years since, you know, 100 years ago, they had the lever machines, but those are not software driven. Those are mechanical. So although they’re somewhat, you know, whoever the mechanic is you guys with those, but you can see if there’s a problem with the software driven systems actually started with the punch cards which were read by soft But then they move into kind of like the SA t 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 US use one or the other of those computerized models. And the reason I emphasize software driven is that what that really does is it withhold from the public the process by which the votes are counted. You can’t really see what that software is doing. And whatever programmer had his hands on that software has really complete control over how it counts to vote.
Jason Hartman 13:42
Yeah, it’s really scary because use the term authenticated, right. The votes can never be authenticated in a software based system. Right?
Bev Harris 13:50
Well is 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 the fact procedure can be substituted for the original count. And that ruling with all of those little phrases in it. What happened is they ban they basically just ditched all their computerized voting machines 90 days later in the accounting in public by hand now in Germany,
Jason Hartman 14:39
what are the companies behind this? There’s there’s like two of them. I think Diebold is one of them. Is that correct?
Bev Harris 14:44
Well, that’s an interesting question. Glad you asked at diva election systems sold its elections Division Two election systems and software, which was the other big companies. What that does is it gives them a monopoly. There’s another couple smaller companies. Nice and another one from Spain moving in, but there’s so there’s a little bit of movement on the playing field, but basically the biggest voting machine company in the United States election systems and software or esns, purchase disabled election systems, and basically controls two thirds of the jurisdictions in the United States.
Jason Hartman 15:21
So literally this company could could influence elections if there was something. I mean, they could they could not only influence election, they could completely control elections. I mean, is it is it that is it Do we have to be worried about it that there? And now I hope you don’t say that this company is owned by some foreign government? That’s even worse?
Bev Harris 15:42
Well, we don’t know who owns it. They’re 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 not just in the United States, but they’re really having an expanding global reach.
Jason Hartman 16:00
Have there been instances of known election fraud with these machines?
Bev Harris 16:05
Yes, there have. The thing is not only that, you know, any 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, the place that repairs the the voting machines and so forth, because this is just a matter of putting in a chip or putting an 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 precinct, or you can control it through the memory pack that’s in there’s a memory card or a memory packs, it’s in there and dad also has The ability to control the election, or there is what we call a central tabulator, or an election management system that sort of controls all the computers in the ER has the ability to control all the computers in the county. And so there’s, it’s you can sort of look at it like a modular system where you can actually go after it and alter the results in 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 with and it’s pretty invisible, you can’t see that it was changed.
Jason Hartman 17:35
Very, very scary. I mean, can you imagine if, 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? You know, every company has to register with the state, and they have officers that signed the filing documents each year. What How would this be kept secret if it’s not as fun all the time
Bev Harris 18:00
Nobody’s sure we know the officers, the corporate officers, but we don’t know the stockholders You see, we don’t know who actually has ultimate control. And the other thing is, with this election systems and software esns, and also with one of the other big companies harder civic, the local county sand physically sends the information to the vendor, who then programs the election and send it back to the county to put in the machine. 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. They had their hands on the system, and they usually try to get around this person. Well, we test the systems. What you know, 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, if it’s not Election Day, count the vote correctly. And if it is Election Day, count the vote the way I say it counted.
Jason Hartman 19:02
I mean, this is this is incredible that something’s so important could be left to this kind of lack of accountability. You know, I have I almost must. I just can’t imagine that that can happen. I, I want to attack what you’re saying for being sensationalistic, but I have a feeling you’re not being that way.
Bev Harris 19:23
Well, you know, if you look back at the history of tampering with elections, it’s always been there, you know, 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 these this newer technology has done is made it impossible for the public to catch it. So for example, in 1948, LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson was his campaign was caught rigging an election that put him in the Senate and it but it was caught because it was in public, and they found that the you know, somebody burned some of the public Books. But they found that the names and the remaining public were entered in alphabetical order. So it’s sort of obvious, like,
Jason Hartman 20:09
yeah, like
Bev Harris 20:10
all the right order. So it’s not like it’s the technology that’s producing the fraud. There’s always been that incentives there because it controls a huge amount of money and, 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 20:37
in credible just just incredible and that means incumbents will always win. Because the when the government chooses itself, they’re going to the people in power will stay in power.
Bev Harris 20:48
Well, yes, the people that they want and you know, this is on several levels, and it actually the mechanics are a little different from level to level, but you have your local level. Typically the positions that are most prone to corruption historically, locally are the county supervisor, county commissioners because they have purchasing control. And the 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 corrupted. Those folks are often the sheriff is on the elections board, you know, so there’s that. But then there’s the next levels up the state level in 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 quite a rich and colorful history of election fraud, not just in America, but in every place that has elections. But what is 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. We’re not going to you can’t make a law against breaking the law. If they tried that in Rhode Island, they said let’s make a law against corruption. By the way, they defeated that they didn’t even pass that.
Jason Hartman 22:08
I thought corruption is already illegal. Yeah,
Bev Harris 22:11
yeah. But you know, you can’t you can’t eliminate all corruption by passing a law. But with voting machines. And with elections, you can’t eliminate election fraud by putting 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 were 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. So it’s a fundamental change. It’s very subtle, but it’s it’s a huge change in the structure of our country. So people always come to me and they say, Well, is it the Republicans who are rigging the election? Do you think They’re gonna read the next election or the democrats who think the democrats are going to read the next election. And 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 23:14
Of course, just like I said about the incumbency and you know, the the group who are wanting to stay in power, but you know, when I mean what is really the the reasoning, that the powers that be want electronic voting, I mean, you know, is it the simple Well, it’s more efficient will, we’ll be able to tabulate the elections more quickly. Everything’s becoming technological, why not voting, you know, 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 their government on 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
Bev Harris 24:02
accountability, you know, though, if you’ve ever gone and talked to your congressman are usually the aide 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 you know, somebody comes to them. And so this will be cheaper, this will be faster, this will be better. And this or this will help trade you know, and, you know, 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 you know the answer to it. They’ll say, Well, what method do you recommend? And my answer is simple and easy method that the public cannot can authenticate without Need for special expertise without relying on an after the fact procedure as a substitute for the actual data. And there’s 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 full, be interpreted by a computer. So for a long time, they would say, Oh, we have paper ballots, everything’s fine. No, it’s the public cannot ever look at it. And no human eye ever can look at it. It’s no different than not having paper ballots.
Jason Hartman 25:39
But But you know, in the election dispute between bush and gore and Florida, the Florida dispute, I mean, people were looking at those paper ballots after the fact you know, with the issue of the hanging chads and so forth, I mean, what wasn’t that all subject to human inspection after the fact?
Bev Harris 25:56
Well, some somewhat after the fact is, of course, it problem, let me describe why there’s four things that the public needs to be able to see and authenticate. You know, who can vote which is the voter list who did vote, which is the participating voter list of the polis, the count itself, and the chain of custody. And when you rely on an after fact, after the fact procedure, Chain of Custody has broken down, because what happens to the ballots after they leave the polling place, they go to the very same government officials who want to keep themselves in power. And as a an example of this, I went up to New Hampshire after the 2008 primary, were both the republican and the Democratic candidates. A couple of the minor candidates requested recounts, and they did an entire we can read out 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 slips in the side, that we actually caught them in the act of opening the tower. auctions after hours 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. But yeah, so a lot of times they’ll say, Well, yes, but you could recounted if you want. Well, you don’t know. What’s your recounting, though, because it has now gone into that right back to the hands of the same government officials who control the voting machines. Well,
Jason Hartman 27:29
this is a real problem. So, you know, 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 27:51
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 it Office Depot and put them all on disk and they put them on the web, everybody in the public can can get copies of all the ballots. And and when you think about it, although that’s not it’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now. And guess what happened the first time they did this, you know, they, they counted them by computer, and you know, with an optical scanner, and then they let the public have copies on CD and put them all on the web picture of every ballot on the web. And they found out that the voting machines miscounted when the public ballot, you know, they just looked at about so there are ways another way that would be very simple would be to say okay, when you go to the polling place at the end of the day, if the public asks and wants to you you have to deal the ballots out like a deck have cards and let them videotape 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 1000 ballots because we’ve timed it. So it’s not the solutions, if you continue to use computerized scanning, they’re not even expensive solutions, you know, buy a scanner from Office Depot and make some copies of the ballots or better at the precinct, you know, let the public photograph what went into that machine and compare it with with what the machine says. So simple things. So 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 hole in what I just brought up as solutions and that is this massive move we have toward absentee voting, which, with absentee voting, although they count all the absentee votes also on computer and there would be ways to authenticate those counts. The problem there is Chain of Custody is broken you again with 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. We’ll be back in
Jason Hartman 30:17
just a minute.
Bev Harris 30:20
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 bootcamp created in a home study course for you to dive into at your convenience. For more details go to Jason hartman.com.
Jason Hartman 30:43
It almost seems I mean, I remember when the internet was really in its heyday about 12 years ago, the new economy and the you know, all of the money being thrown at it and so forth. And you know, there was a lot of talk back then, about people being able to vote online and participate pay much more in government being able to vote much more often on much smaller, or micro issues. And I believe did Morris, who is an excellent writer, by the way, has some really interesting books. He was kind of behind that, as I recall, back in the day, and, you know, it seemed like a good idea that we could we could really be far more involved in our government because we could just log in to a website and vote now. You know, I suppose that would just be fraud Central’s now that now
Bev Harris 31:30
that I think yeah, that’s exactly what Internet voting does is it actually conceals all four of the essential steps that conceals the voter list, because you don’t know what voter list is input into that internet system, and it can feel 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 So I refer to Internet voting as a funnel. It 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 32:16
Wow, just that is that is really, really scary. Well, first of all before I want to ask you maybe in closing, you know, what can people do? Obviously, you know, what are the action steps anybody listening who’s concerned about this can take hopefully, it’s not just write your congressman, which is you know, which way like exactly which ought to just be right your lobbyists really, because that’s what really runs the show. But you had some interesting stuff happened to you in the past I mean, I guess the Secret Service has interviewed you and and you know, you were hit with a gag order and threatened by a federal grand jury action, and you didn’t turn over information. What tell us about this. This is fascinating. Okay,
Bev Harris 32:58
but But now, I don’t want that. To scare folks off from doing stuff, because that happened because I actually, you know, it’s such a secret how the voting systems work that I got my hands on the code. And as you as everybody has heard about Wikileaks and so forth, how, wow, you know, that’s a bit controversial. Well, it was kind of the same thing. I got my hands on the computer code that counted the debug votes, and released it into the wild. And yeah, people were freaking out. And I did, I was investigated by the Secret Service, and I had all kinds of crazy stuff happening. I hadn’t done anything wrong. So ultimately, they couldn’t do anything that code
Jason Hartman 33:36
that code, why should that code be a secret? Everybody should be able to have access to that, right? I mean, that’s a that’s a Freedom of Information thing. We should see how their computers work, and have every detail. I mean, you know, most people can’t figure out what any of that stuff means. But there are certainly enough computer pros and programmers and hackers out there who can figure it out. Yes. And of course, we found right away that it was just open for business. Even if we were able to train a chimpanzee to change the election.
Bev Harris 34:06
It was so simple with you it was 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 will say, Oh, it’s open source itself. But when you think about it, just because there’s some code that’s released to the public doesn’t mean that’s what’s on the computer on a given day. So but but yeah, 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 they I found the code on a on a website that had no password. And what they were doing is they were transferring it to programmers in Serbian Croatian so forth to reprogram stuff for them. I don’t know what that was all about. But so they had left the files on an open server, and I found them and downloaded them, and then released them because it was Clearly in the public interest,
Jason Hartman 35:01
worst of lines, yeah, no question. Now I just to be clear, I just 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 35:20
Right. Right. Well, actually, it was a little more convoluted, because people didn’t want to have all this bad publicity on them. So another company, which had even sold any voting systems called vo here, which had a bunch of like national security and military types on its board. It had, you know, seriously, high level, Robert Gates was one of its advisory advisory board, you know, well, this company which never sold any voting things claimed it had been hacked and claimed that they thought I had taken their code. It had nothing to do with people. And it was under that pretext that I was investigated. But you know, 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 on the web. By the way, there’s a company out there called boot here 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, you know, so that actually kind of saved me. And the other thing that helped was a reporter got ahold of the fact that they were investigating me and out of the name of the agent and all kinds of things and and it just went away after that. So it was very suspicious, though, because it was clear that the let me put it this way. I was investigated by the Secret Service and the FBI. And although they were ostensibly investigating vote here, and they’re supposed hack of their system, they only asked me questions about the bold, so it was clearly a ruse to try to get at something right. Right. Yeah.
Jason Hartman 36:53
Unbelievable. Okay, well, hey, Beth, tell us what to people listening who are concerned about our gun. Government and the absolute fiasco when the powers that be just taking too much power nowadays, what can people do?
Bev Harris 37:07
Well? Well, a couple things. One is get off the treadmill, we’re not going to get this solved by November in one month. You know, people always come to me two days before the election and say, What can we do? It’s way
Jason Hartman 37:17
too late. You
Bev Harris 37:18
can do, we have to just take as long as it takes, if it takes us 50 years, we have to keep up and ask for what we are demand what we want, not some placebo. They love to send you down the cattle at the cattle shoot where you’ll say, Hey, we want to be able to authenticate the election and they’ll say, oh, come over here. We have a new Congress bill that actually does something else and everybody go testify for that, you know, stick to what we 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 election. Period. No negotiations and just keep at it.
Jason Hartman 37:58
Yeah, very good. Well, Give us your website, if you would, and tell people where they can learn more.
Bev Harris 38:03
Sure, the website is black box coding.org. There’s going to be some significant updates there within the next week, I think since I had some family emergencies that kept me away for the last month, and so it looks a tad outdated. But in the next week or so, we’ll be putting up a new toolkit for citizens. So what they can do for this next election, and people can actually go on the website, it’s self serve, and they can upload information that they’ve found in their local election. So blackbox voting.org. And, you know, just stay tuned to the information that’s coming out. And first step in solving any problem is awareness of what the problem is. Yeah,
Jason Hartman 38:42
no question. Well, Beth 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 off and but nowadays, I think I think it’s a lot more difficult. Concerning the map with these with these voting machines, thanks for informing us about it.
Bev Harris 39:04
Thank you very much for having me.
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