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Board Administrator
Username: admin
Post Number: 550
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 | | Posted on Thursday, June 2, 2005 - 2:16 pm: | |
Post from Daily Kos, response:
CalbraithRodgers - This doesn't make sense
In the aftermath of the 2004 election there was a huge amount of diary space given over to Bev and BBV. What I got from it was that the group was probably well-intentioned, but was unwilling or unable to "put up or shut up" when it came to proving many of their claims.
Like Judicial Watch, the group that counted Florida's ballots, but didn't finish for nearly a year, Black Box Voting is doing hard core research and sorry, we didn't pull out a magic bullet in 10 days or less. Our objective has always been to get at the truth -- not to make sure any particular candidate wins.
Unfortunately, alot of money was sent to this group by Kossacks and others in the blogosphere.
Actually, this keeps getting repeated, but the primary source of our funding has always been donations in response to coverage of our work by mainstream media -- Vanity Fair, Time Magazine, CNN, Good Morning America, the New York Times, PBS broadcasting, and many more. That accounts for about 55 percent of our funding, with another 40 percent coming from grants and about 5 percent from all Internet sources combined.
Now we have a diary that provides a bunch of interesting content with a number of links to show the legitimacy of the content, but guess what? All the links are to BBV. It's deja vu all over again.
"Links?" Our research is primarily field research, not surfing the Internet for links. The formal report is due out in mid-June, and it will contain source code etc. to back up what's in the article. This was for the general public, and source code plus technical specs would confuse, rather than enhance, the article.
... this diary is sadly lacking in verifiable content. I say "sadly" because I think this diary (without any non-BBV links) hurts the cause.
The "hurts the movement" talking point is frequently cited by people who are into turf wars. The point is not to beat our chests and say who got there first, or who's the bestest activist of all. The point is to develop solid research.
The following can be verified from the information provided in the article: The credentials of the experts, whether they participated in tests, whether a congressperson observed the tests, when and where the tests took place, and -- because the complete set of Diebold memos are online -- the existence of the executable program in the memory card can also be verified. Far from "hurting the movement," this important report is moving the ball forward in a very tangible way. We now know where one of the most manipulatable programs is and we now know how it works.
Next we need to examine the memory cards used on Nov 2, 2004. Thanks for the feedback, glad to straighten this out. -- Bev Harris
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