Separating Fact from Fiction about the writing of the BBV book

[Kelvin Mace]

As promised, I am now taking time to respond to the myriad of false accusations and misrepresentations made by Bev Harris about myself, my company and the writing of the book Black Box Voting.

I will post each of Bev's accusations along with rebuttals of her claim or distortion of the facts.

The first issue to be dealt with is this claim from Bev:

...he never typeset the book (I did);

What Bev means is that she typed up the book. She did type the manuscript in PageMaker, but this was her idea.

From December through June 2003, Bev sent her files to me in Microsoft Word format. During a conversation about the format of the book and the ongoing editing process, I was explaining that I was importing Bev's chapters into PageMaker, then formatting the pages. Bev perked up and told me that she knew PageMaker and wouldn'y it save lots of time if she just typed the manuscript directly into a PageMaker file. I said yes it would, but did she really want to mess with this? She said it was "no trouble" at all and it would save me some time since I was fielding a lot of email and phone calls for her at the time. (I was arranging interviews for Bev, answering emails, running the bbv.com web site, all while reading through her submissions and answering her questions.)

That said, I did spend a lot of times formating the pages, handling the graphics, and handling re-writes.