Bev Harris
American writer who in 2003 found Diebold's election software sitting on an open server, then spent years showing what could be done with it.
Harris was not an engineer but a freelance author who started digging into voting machines around 2002. The following year she came across thousands of internal Diebold files — source code, manuals, vote-tabulation software — downloadable by anyone from an unprotected FTP server. The material spread quickly and became the basis for the first serious academic analysis of an American voting machine, by a team that included Avi Rubin.
She founded Black Box Voting, and in 2005 she arranged for Harri Hursti to attack a real optical-scan reader in Leon County, Florida. The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy (2006) was built around her. Her methods were more activist than academic, but without her the researchers would have had a lot less to research.