I would very much appreciate it if you post every chapter you get at your web site, distribute them to public officials, call reporters about them, e-mail this message to your contact lists. If you are a journalist, review the information. If the site goes down, due to hacking or legal retaliation by voting machine vendors, write about it.

If you are a citizen who is skilled with flash media or shockwave, we encourage you to create presentations; you will find it easy to script them when you read these chapters. Whether your work takes a serious or humorous tone, you'll have plenty of fodder to work with. Write songs, perform poetry, make documentaries. Don't wait. We can solve this thing, and we can do so quickly, but you must get involved.

(TIP: Watch for "real time" voting forum to go live with citizen voting reports, on Monday, just in time for the California recall).

The Black Box Voting project has been "open sourced" from the get-go. It was an "open source" investigation, with citizens joining in all over the world to contribute expertise and research. We "open sourced" the book, making electronic versions free of charge. A trade paperback version will also be available so you can distribute attractive and compact versions to everyone who needs them. Select whichever information format meets your needs.

WHAT IS IN THE BLACK BOX VOTING CHAPTERS?

They are posted chapter by chapter, in both PDF and PNG formats. The open source license is quite generous, but of course we ask that you adhere to it. (It contains provisions like: you cannot sell the book for money; you cannot change the book…quite simple, really).

Chapter 1 (which also includes introductory material) explains what the founding fathers had in mind when they chose to control the governance of a country through voting. Chapter 1 contains a call to engage.

Chapter 2 is what we call the "I don't believe there is a problem" chapter. It contains a dizzying assortment of real voting machine miscounts in real elections, all documented to help you do additional research if you like. Next: Chapter 3 - Solutions; Chapter 4: Can the machines be rigged?

Watch for new uploads - they may appear early. Post them as many places as you can; you should know that there are continuing efforts to block publication of information about how our votes are counted, though doing so has no legal merit and thwarts the First Amendment.

Diebold Election Systems issued a DMCA pull-down demand and successfully shut down BlackBoxVoting.org, the sister site of BlackBoxVoting.com, simply for putting a link to an unrelated page containing a link to damaging internal memos. They asserted copyright privileges (confirming the memos' authenticity).

The memos are still available on the web, but Diebold's action shut down our popular discussion and planning forum. We may move our discussion forums to New Zealand, where there is more support for free speech. ES&S sent a threat letter simply because they said the information made them look bad.

Diffusion will help, and we ask you to assist us with this. There is perhaps nothing simpler, or more important, that you can do. Read the chapters and see: There is nothing illegal about them, and citizens throughout the world have an absolute right to the information. If you are a reporter, read the chapters, verify the information for yourself, and then watch: If there is any corporate retaliation, please write about it.

Thanks to all of you who have contributed to bringing these issues into public awareness.

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