If Paul Boutin did an excellent job, he would have reported accurately.

I am the so-called "conspiracy-mnded Renton woman" he refers to.

Though he interviewed me for about half an hour, he apparently lost his notes, or made it up altogether. Here are the factual errors in Boutin's article, which is actually an editorial, not a news piece:

"He also delves into the little-publicized backstory of the Johns Hopkins study: a conspiracy-minded Renton woman stumbled across the Diebold source code while trying to link the company to supposed vote manipulation by the Bush administration."

No. Here is exactly what I told him. He made up the part about the Bush administration altogether. The real story:

My publisher asked me to see if I could obtain a technical manual. The voting companies are so secretive it was impossible to examine a machine, or even find out how they worked.

We were most interested in ES&S, due to conflict of interest in its ownership (a story I broke on October 10, which was subsequently vetted out and published by a very respectable publication called "The Hill" on Jan. 29,2003.)

I was trying to find phone numbers of technicians to call to see if I could persuade one to part with a manual. To do this, I looked up the company e-mail and ran a Google search on the back end of the email. For example, ES&S employees have essvote.com on the end of their email address. Diebold has a few dieboldes.com emails, but many of their programmers could be found by searching for gesn.com. While looking for Diebold technicians to call, I was on about the 15th page of Google looking for gesn.com, when I saw an old half-finished web page. It had a link to all the files on a completely unprotected ftp site.

"Diebold's proprietary code was released accidentally,"

No, it was sitting on that ftp site for six years, and even their User's Manual advises people to go there and download files. "It's fun!" the manual says.

"that may have been the "smartest mistake" the company could have made because it allowed skeptical security experts to evaluate it for themselves"

This is possibly the dumbest mistake ever made in the history of corporate America. On that site was a virtual tutorial for vote-riggers; it contained all the passwords, schematic drawings of remote access, IP addresses, port settings, technical manuals, testing protocols, source code and simulators so you can actually practice vote-rigging in the comfort of your own home.

I have now broken five stories in a row on the electronic voting issue, and every one has checked out. My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com, Wired, about 200 other news outlets, and has been thoroughly vetted out on slashdot.org, which is probably the premier computer wonk site in the world.

Boutin works for Slate. Slate is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft just announced that it plans to enter the marketplace for electronic voting.

Bev Harris
Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century