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I disagree, AC. Domains by proxy is a good service designed to prevent insane idiots from coming to your home address and beating your face in because they disagree with your blog. Basically it is a virtual P.O. box. If you want the real contact info, call or write the proxy in the whois record, and once the real contact gives permission, you'll get the real contact info.

Also, there is now a post on http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ stating that these files are actually posted by them, and on a different server to avoid a slashdotting.

Appreciate the thought and effort, kaan, but folks are still in the position of accepting one stranger's (your) word to confirm another stranger's (Gottesser's) claim that a site we can't directly verify (blackbox1.org) is truly being run by BBV.

Already done. Check http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and see for yourself.

Hopefully putting to rest any questions as to who is who. I posted this discussion at Slashdot as the lead story on blackboxvoting.org Cheers.

So you say. How do we know who you are?

Well, you don't know who I am, and there's not much I can do to earn instant creditibility with you. So I would suggest you go to http://www.blackboxvoting.org/contact.html yourself, and call the primary contact number. When I did that, Bev answered the phone herself. It will take about a minute to call and ask a few questions, and if you do call, please post back here. That way, it will be two nameless /. readers who say Bev (and www.blackbox1.org) is legit, not just me. :)

(Nothing personal, just illustrating the chains of trust necessarily involved in any security.)

I completely agree, as far as you know, I'm just some guy with a low uid.

Thanks for checking. If you really did ;-)

I did, and you're welcome. :)

The traceroute for one actually leads to floridawebmasters.com after going through rackspace.net.

Yep, I saw the same thing, don't know what to tell you.

12 vlan901.core1.dfw1.rackspace.com (72.3.128.21) 986.452 ms 756.475 ms 999.809 ms
13 aggr3a.dfw1.rackspace.net (72.3.129.11) 763.390 ms 1227.111 ms 1247.636 ms
14 floridawebmasters.com (72.32.2.234) 1504.584 ms 756.088 ms 250.646 ms

(I admit, I'm not going to call them)

Well, maybe you should call them. It will take 1 minute, probably less time than it would take you to write another response to this comment.

Their phone number is on their website:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/contact.html

If BlackBox is worried about people saving a list of exploits for a zero-day attack they can put their software through a strict accreditation process before they reveal their final release.

Actually, BlackBoxVoting.org is an organization that is fighting for change in electronic voting systems. ES&S is the company in question. I agree with what you're saying, but I think you got a little mixed up there. :P

If Google can find password files and the source code to Diebold's voting machines, they can surely find the pre-determined results to yesterday's vote.

What -- you thought the election was fair and square and only determined when the ballots were counted last night?

Partisan bias obstructs cleaning up the electoral process.

Don't let your always short-lived victory lodge your head in your ass. Now with the Republicans smarting maybe they can be encouraged to get behind some improvements?

Your "democracy" is owned by private interests. Your vote barely counts. Fix it.

One way your vote doesn't count:
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-723679120 7107726851

Organizations to support for change:
    Black Box Voting
    Open Voting Consortium

There's a PDF here that I believe is related http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf . From what I've gathered the counting machine runs a program that exists on the manipulated memory card. This program is hacked along with the initial vote values for the candidates (offsets adding up to 0, although it appears they use an overflow for the negative votes as the variables are unsigned). The program is also able to output the fake receipt saying all votes are intitially 0. The voting machine then adds the votes as they're counted, eventually triggering the overflow (from max to 0) and it just continues adding from there as normal.

I misunderstood the video. The executable on the card is actually run when the votes are counted. Subversion of the card's program is subversion of the tabulator.

Read section "Findings" in Hursti's report:
    http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf

Hmm, could you possibly list these checks and balances, for other people who may feel the need to take action?

I take your drift, of course, because we've seen remarkably little of "checks and balances" in action of late. To take one example, the election fraud in Ohio was pretty scandalous, but the Republican congress got out their rubberstamp and accepted the result anyway: party loyalty seems to have paralyzed the US system of "checks and balances".

But then, that suggests to me that in the near term the fix is simple: we need split government, we can't put one party in charge of all branches of the government.

So here's some things a citizen might do about it:

• Tommorow (Tuesday, Nov 7) you go to the polls and vote, and hope that the vote rigging in your area is just a finger on the scale and not a two-ton weight. You should almost certainly vote Democrat: they're more likely to try to replace the system that raped them twice.
  • Note: if you've got a video camera, bring it with you. You never know.
• You write your congressional reps, and tell them you really think they should push through the "Paper Ballot Act of 2006".
• You keep an eye on sites like this, looking for ideas:
  • Election Integrity
  • Black Box Voting
  • Move On
• You get ready to do some serious protesting in the streets if things don't improve. You might have to ask someone from Mexico how this is done, Americans seem to have lost their backbone.

My hats off to the lady who started it all.

You would be referring to Bev Harris, who runs the site Black Box Voting.

The movie makes some great points but rarely does it go into enough detail for the viewer to be able to make any real conclusions. Also, most of the movie focuses on this really mouthy woman I don't really care for. She seems so much like a typical pain in the ass neighbor.

Oh yeah, Bev Harris can be so annoying. Going around causing trouble, starting things like Black Box Voting. Life would be so much more peaceful if people would just shut up about Election Fraud.

By the way, Bev Harris was interviewed recently on Democracy Now. She didn't strike me as being a "mouthy woman" (but then, I've got no problem with Amy Goodman, either).

I caught the last half of this show last night on the Canadian equivalent to HBO: Movie Central.

It was certainly worth watching, even if the issues where "dumbed down" for the average viewers. I also thought the protagonists in the film, Black Box Voting, to be annoying fundamentalist technophobes, even though they're probably right. Perhaps they personalities just rubbed me the wrong way...

The demonstration at the end of the film, where they more or less proved the hackability of diebold voting machines, was pretty cool to watch though...

I am a Republican and for the last several years I have been quite concerned about the security problems with voting machines made by Diebold and several other companies. The unending series of unacceptable security problems with Diebold voting machines seems to be much than some kind of normal partisan bickering. To me, the integrity of our democratic voting process is something that goes far beyond the question of my party preferences. I suspect that anyone who dismisses the issue that way has most likely not really bothered to read up on the subject.

Several years ago, Bev Harris of documented some the problems in the free PDF book on her website. Several of the later chapters in the book describe what they found after the actual Diebold software and source code was download by various people from an unsecured Diebold FTP server. Another good source of information by someone who as also examined the Diebold software and source code is the book "Brave New Ballot" by Aviel D. Rubin. He is a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University who is a specialist in systems security. I doubt that anyone who has read either of those books would dismiss the subject so lightly. I have only read portions of the two books so far.

I am a Republican who has voted for the well known Barry Goldwater for Senator several times in the past back in the 1970s and 1980s. I am an fiscal conservative / social moderate which is almost the opposite type of Republican that George Bush is. People like me don't really have a party that represents our views any more. Neither party seems to represent the views of fiscal conservatives who are not part of the religious right. However, I am still unenthusiastic about the idea of voting for Democrats.

Back in 2000, I watched on live TV, as officials examined ballots with hanging chads in Florida. As someone who has had a few programming and networking courses, the very idea of computerized voting machines made me uneasy. How I could trust the counting of ballots with secret proprietary software running on a Windows box? That was before I even heard of the problems with the Diebold machines.

They do use voting machines where I live but at least those machines do print out a stub that I get to view before it goes into a sealed ballot box for possible use if a recount is needed. Most voting machines do not have that feature so a "real" recount is not possible. I won't get to see the HBO documentary because I don't have cable HBO doesn't come in on my TV's rabbit ears antenna.

"Pretty much pregnant"? Attacking the phrasing I used is needless. I made my point. To be honest, I did not "like" either candidate.

In response to the link you included, I never once stated that nobody else has an interest in rigging votes. I was NOT taking political sides here. A democrat is just as "able" to resort to such means as a republican. Your link merely backs up my assertion that vote tampering/harvesting is taking place. Thanks.

As far as the results in Florida being in question, have you actually researched that? I am not touting it as being "THE" truth, but the documentary "Farenheit 9/11" certainly raises questions about the validity of that race and the results of it. I research issues for my OWN benefit, NOT to persuade people to change their own opinions. If you look at my statements, you may notice that I suggest that readers view the show and then do their OWN research. I do NOT direct them to any information specifically, as that can be construed as biased information based on the idea that it was "provided"(such as the link you provided).

But I'll humor you. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

The gist of my post was to point out that people need to inform themselves. In order to do so, one must have access to information. The documentary in question is simply that. It is not incontrovertable, thus my suggestion to follow up with research into the issue. Your statement that "just because the can, does not mean they are..." is besides the point. The simple fact that they CAN, is, in itself, sufficient justification to question the whole premise of e-voting.

While you're right that the central vote consolidation box wouldn't be running WinCE (since the database used to consolidate the votes is a simple MS ACCESS DB), the actual voting machines themselves are running WinCE

Voting terminals TS6 and TSx employ custom made hardware running with an embedded
Windows CE operating system. As is true for all Windows CE systems, they require a boot
loader to prepare the hardware for the launch of operating system. Both the boot loader and
the operating system are custom built specifically for the unique hardware of the terminals.

-- From page 2 of the Black Box Voting Diebold TSx Evaluation

> So.. if it turns out differently, will you say that the analysts are wrong or the votes?

Depends on whether the votes are blatantly altered on a large scale like they were in the last 2 federal elections.

Please don't respond until you read.

First, the "ES&S" machine they're talking about as a base is the Automark, which ES&S bought and is now downplaying over their less secure setup.

Second: the optical scan half of this equation should scan GRAPHICS of each ballot, store them for later review, hash them to prevent later tampering and make them available by the DVD load (or HD-DVD or whatever) as a public record. Remember, the voter name is already stripped out at this point. And if you're burning data to "-R" media of some sort, that eliminates tampering with the data once it's out of the initial box. (Right now most vendors distribute the "electronic ballot box" data on either PCMCIA or USB flash read/write media, which is insane...only Avante burns end-of-day tally data from touchscreens onto CD-R.)

Fourth: once "we the people" have the graphic scans in hand, we can tabulate them with OUR software tools versus trusting the county's tools, providing a "software check and balance". The open source "Votoscope" program written by Harri Hursti was the first attempt at this. Now that we have a decent open-source OCR package (the one HP/Google just released), we have a foundation for building more. Imagine a world in which each news agency brought their best "gamer class" powerhouse monster PC to the elections office to get the scans and do a tabulation before anybody else can, with various non-profits like BlackBoxVoting, VoteTrustUSA or local equivelents chugging along on slower gear but still able to churn out accurate numbers on election night. If the various copies don't match, OK, let's figure out why, by eyeballs on the original paper if necessary.

A good electronic voting setup can backstop against paper fraud just as much as the paper backstops electronic fraud.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, Black Box Voting Inc.
http://blackboxvoting.org/

Actually it is excersized. The issue is not that people haven't searched(or that it's their responsibility) it's that nothing is being done.

Or did we? http://blackboxvoting.org/

The Gestapo isn't going to stop them from voting or rig the election.

Another source of info about e-voting problems is BlackBoxVoting.org. They have a free pdf book on their webpage. A couple of years ago I skimmed through a few chapters of it. Starting on chapter 9 they talk about accidentally finding an unsecured FTP server and downloading 40,000 files, including the sofware for the Diebold voting machines such as BallotStation.exe, GEMS.exe, and VCProgrammer.exe. They discovered that Diebold's secret proprietary software had various unacceptable security problems. It is surprising to see that a company, like Diebold, that makes ATM machines has created such insecure software and hardware. As voters we had just been expected to take the word of Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers that their proprietary software and hardware was secure. In the case of Diebold it came from and ATM manufacturer after all.

I also plan to buy Avi Rubin's new book "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting" to see what what other new security problems they have found. The change to electronic voting machines has been pushed as a solution to the "hanging chads" problem that Florida had in the 2000 presidential election between G.W. Bush and Al Gore. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines are creating more security problems than they are solving. If we do use voting machines, then we should at least requre that they all generate a paper stub which which the voter gets to briefly view before it is deposited into a box. Only some of the voting machines currently in use do that. That way, election officials could still do a "real" recount.

Another source of info about e-voting problems is BlackBoxVoting.org. They have a free pdf book on their webpage. A couple of years ago I skimmed through a few chapters of it. Starting on chapter 9 they talk about accidentally finding an unsecured FTP server and downloading 40,000 files, including the sofware for the Diebold voting machines such as BallotStation.exe, GEMS.exe, and VCProgrammer.exe. They discovered that Diebold's secret proprietary software had various unacceptable security problems. It is surprising to see that a company, like Diebold, that makes ATM machines has created such insecure software and hardware. As voters we had just been expected to take the word of Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers that their proprietary software and hardware was secure. In the case of Diebold it came from and ATM manufacturer after all.

I also plan to buy Avi Rubin's new book "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting" to see what what other new security problems they have found. The change to electronic voting machines has been pushed as a solution to the "hanging chads" problem that Florida had in the 2000 presidential election between G.W. Bush and Al Gore. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines are creating more security problems than they are solving. If we do use voting machines, then we should at least requre that they all generate a paper stub which which the voter gets to briefly view before it is deposited into a box. Only some of the voting machines currently in use do that. That way, election officials could still do a "real" recount.

One more reason to keep honest bipartisan humans counting our ballots rather than pre-programmed easily corruptable voting machines doing it. What is wrong with keeping human's in the loop, are we trying to end up with no voice at all? Is that the reason we all go to work every day and work our asses off? So these people can steal our voices and keep the sheep working for them for almost nothing?

It's time we TAKE ACTION!

I see that some of what I mentioned is in other chapters such as chapter 12. A few other details that I mentioned may or may not be in her book.

On the BlackBoxVoting.org website, chapter 9 of their free book describes most of what I was talking about including the GEMs software. They downloaded the peviously secret proprietary GEMs software, manuals and also a file called rob-georgia.zip from an unsecure FTP server. They wondered if perhaps the rob-georgia.zip file might have had something to do with robbing Georgia of the correct election results in an election. Chapter 9 of their book is in PDF format. Here is the link:

A few years ago, everyone was so angry about the "hanging chads" problem in Florida during the ultra-close election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The race was so close that decisions related to the hanging chads may have conceivably have decided if George W. Bush got to be president or not. Many Democrats were outraged. The change to voting machines was supposed to solve that problem, but they are realy only trading one imperfect technology for another.

At least one of the voting machine companies does also make voting machines. That is Diebold, but am not sure whose voting machines were used in this instance. A few years ago the software for either the Diebold voting machines or for tabulating the results (I forget which) was left on an unsecure server somewhere. People around the country got to look at the software and discovered that it allegedly had a back door. The software was briefly posted on websites around the world along with instructions of how to see for yourself how easy it is to modify vote totals in an undetectible way. The websites with that information were quickly going down as lawyers were busy stopping them from allowing people to illegally download their proprietary software. If I remember correctly BlackBoxVoting.org was very interested in those and other security flaws back then. They also criticized the fact that their voting machines did not print out a stub which could go into the ballet box as a backup for possible recounts. There was no way to do a meaningful recount.

When I last voted here in Northern Arizona, we used voting machines which did print out a stub which I breifly got to see before it was automatially dropped into a container in the machine. At least they could do a "real" recount then and it would be much harder to "steal" an election by secretly altering the totals.

By the way, at the polling place where I vote there is usually only one or two people in line ahead of me. I usually also recognize one or more of my neighbors, or local business owners working in the polling place.

There have been tests, they've found problems, but the local Secretary of State is corrupt, and the mainstream media has a blackout on the whole topic. Anyway, It isn't going to matter if Congress can just swear in a candidate before the votes were even counted or certified. And now citizens no longer have the right to supervise elections.

My Advice is to

1.) Freeway Blogging
2.) Hometown Broadcast Media Swarm/Protest
3.) FCC Station licence files/Public File (when they renew for their frequency, these files get reviewed.)
4.) Save, and Support Public Access (From the Telcos)
5.) Save The Internet (net nutrality)

According to a recent newspaper article, the new voting machines that will be used where I live will also print out paper stubs. I don't recall all the details, but the voter briefly gets to view the stub for accurary before it is stored somewhere. The paper stubs counld be used to do a recount. I am not sure what company makes those machines, but I doubt that it is Diebold.

Without a paper stub and the possibility of a recount, I would never trust a closed-source operating system on proprietary harware whose inner workings are understood by only a few political insiders and company employees. That is expecially true with Diebold and their history of security flaws.

Several years ago copies of what was allegedly the software used on Diebold voting machines was found on an unsecure sever and posted on the Internet? The software was examined and various outrageous securtity flaws and a back door was also found. Various websites at the time, suggested that you download the software and then follow their instructions to see for yourself how easy it was to use the back door to edit totals in an undetectable way. The software and the instructions quickly appeared and dissappeared for short periods of time from various websites around the world as lawyers went about getting websites to remove the illegal material. How many people here remember that incident? Is some version of that same software still being used on Diebold machines today or not? They also posted what allegedly were internal Diebold email messages from employees discussing various security problems but did not seem concerned about the problems.

BlackBoxVoting.org has a free online book in PDF form. If I remember correctly, later versions of their book had several new chapters on that incident. I haven't stayed up on the issue or with what that organization is doing or what the latest voting machines are like..

All voting machines should be required to print out stubs. Either that or use older methods (possibly with the hanging chads problem and all). Ironically, Diebold's ATMs used at banks print out receipts, so they already have the technology. They would just need to use that existing technology and have the receipts or stubs put in a ballet box for recounting purposes.

Yeah I remebered that aswell http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf, check out the pictures on page 11.

Here is the link to the original /. article where this appeared http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18557 9&cid=15316728.

And to think that here in the UK we're still stuck in the dark ages with a pen and piece of paper. I'd take our system anyday, there's no reset button (let alone two!) on a piece of 6"x4" paper.

"Diebold?... Diebold?... Diebold?..."

"Anyone?... Anyone?... Anyone?..."

One word: diebold

That's a very shotsighted solution. Local governments have been known to be just as corrupt as federal government; devolution is definitely not the answer. Without government regulations, we'd have the same situation as in Nicaragua and other developing nations where IMF and World Bank imposed economic policies have opened up vulnerable (suicidal) "free markets" which create corporate plutocracies where you have international conglomerates coming in to privatize social infrastructures such as water, electricity, farming, etc. and hiking up the prices because there's an inelastic demand for these monopolized inelastic necessities absent of any sort of formidable opposition from domestic businesses.* Why do you think we impose strong tariffs and heavily regulate imported products ourselves (a bit hypocritical, no?). A strongly united people-based democratic government is the only thing that can stand up against these powerful multinational conglomerates.

Imagine a U.S. where all roadways are toll roads, all schools are charter schools run on corporate sponsorship (with curricula dictated by said financial interests), entirely privatized healthcare (no more state-funded healthcare for the poor), where monopolized industries can freely practice price gouging (as california electric companies are have already been convicted of doing), and there's no FDA regulation of foods and drugs, no federal agencies to investigate corporate corruption, no form of corporate responsibility being enforced other than half-hearted PR campaigns, which are are just charades for the public. We need a government that represents its true constituents, not its political campaign patrons, otherwise all these regulations will simply be ineffective slaps on the hand. A libertarian government would allow corporate scandals to continue with complete impunity.

The problem should be solved by giving the power of government back to the people. Right now we have an ersatzs democracy run by corporate America and the media conglomerates which they also happen to own--sound like a conspiracy? Google "NBC and General Electric." Government offices are sold to the highest bidder through PAC funds, and our legislation reflects that; the strangle hold on American media outlets just closes the loop. A simple look at the contrast between media coverage in any European nation and major U.S. publications will illustrate this--why do U.S. press picture Hugo Chavez as a ruthless dictatorship when he is one of the most beloved (and first democratically elected) presidents of Venezuela; why was the CIA engineered military coup in Venezuela a massive failure.** What we need to do is follow the lead of true democracies like Venezuela, where the people vote on constitutional amendments and new legislation through broadbased referendums. We need to get rid of the bipartisan system/mascarade--(which faction of the American Business Party would you like to vote for), and create a truely democratic electoral system where independent 3rd parties aren't just nominal choices.

But looking at the past 2 presidential elections, we are a long ways from reaching this ideal democracy. Just take a look at the corruption uncovered by Black Box Voting that the unmarginalized constituency is still too indifferent/oblivious to do anything about. No reform can happen when the only ones willing to revolt are marginalized and the empowered are too complacent to take action. He who controls the media truly controls the government. We live in a kleptocracy of the rich and powerful. None bothered to heed Eisenhower's warnings in his farewell address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex[***]. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address January 17, 1961[8]

The political power and economi

Makes sense to me. If you have an illegal monopoly and are not worried about legalities, then you control.

I said my goodbyes in 2000 when the election was manipulated.

Spoken with true, (needless) defeatism. You think that because one election is suspect, that it's all over, just wait for the tanks?

You are a dumbf-ck. America wasn't founded in perfection, nor is it a vile overlord. Sometimes, things get a little screwy. As they say, the pendulum swings back and forth.

Perhaps you know nothing about McCarthyism???!?

Here's a hint - it happened in the 1950s, it was all about communism, and lots of rights were trampled on, terribly, in a sweeping wave of suspicion and media hype. While the (needless) Iraq war is terrible, remember that the world wasn't in a virgin state before your birth, and things will get better and worse hereafter.

People have been killing people ever since there were people. Evidence is mounting that modern man succeeded against other advanced primates by murdering them. It's not new - tribalism and exclusionism is inherent in humankind.

So lay off the drama already. Make sure you vote, actively support http://www.blackboxvoting.org (I've sent them several hundred dollars - what have YOU done?) be a good citizen, and have hope. Virtually never in all of human history has any group of individuals had it better than we do, now. Try to live a clean environmental life. Support alternative energy, and work to end global poverty by donating a few bux to a worthy Microcredit foundation such as the Grameen foundation.

Grow up, already, pull your sleeves up, and deal with the real world. You have more power than you realize, if only you act.

The United States lives in a distortion of wealth and power never before imagined in human history. Despite that fact, after invading a country/nation/continent, we expect to turn over the reigns to the local inhabitants and try to uphold local control and choice - AKA "Democracy". Don't trash that history in defeatism, be proud of your heritage and ACT!

considering the vulnerabilities of those Dibold voting machines do you think voting does any good anymore? i sure dont...

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/15/154 5222

I live in the U.S. and I completely agree with the guy from NZ. Doom and Gloom is what we're facing here, guy! They're chipping away at us a bit at a time.

Until we have true accountability of our voting process.. we can't call ourselves a true democracy. I do not believe our votes were counted properly. We need to start with our voting system if we're to take back the government and be free.

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ and http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

I wouldn't mind if the US turned into something along the lines of a democracy, a nice variant, say a representative constitutional republic with free and HONEST elections, and an executive branch that followed the laws as written and intended, not as they feel like doing. Tell us when that happens, then maybe we can "export" that idea to other nations. Perhaps if we even had more than one political party in the "official" running for national office we would be taken more seriously.

BTW, we are never leaving iraq, never. Never. You can read about it in the PNAC documents, and you can see the proof in the embassy they are constructing and the permanent military bases. Iraq is centrally located in the last remaining huge region with cheap oil(cheap as in energy needed for extraction versus proven reserves), has the bulk of the fresh water in the entire region (this is to not be underestimated in importance) and was the most immediate potential threat that Israel had, and they control a big part of US mideast foreign policy and a lot of our MSM for consciousness shaping/brainwashing. And no, it is not racist to notice that, it is the simple truth, anyone can see it.

    The US military will be spreading out in all directions. This is a permanent war, it will never end, just get bigger. If they have to go to nukes or use biologicals and blame that on the "terrorists", they will do so. They want all that oil, and they don't want china to get it, and they don't care one bit about the people there, and a small but pretty powerful group of someones want one billion muslims just *gone* eventually, either completely gone or so beat they are just a small husk of what they were, and totally cowed. It's a big task but the stakes are larger, control of that area means control of the planet for the next century.

Your assertion is true only if you accept that the Ohio numbers weren't the result of massive vote fraud and that for the first time ever, exit polls had and error rate orders of magnitude higher than they normally do.

Perhaps you looked up in the sky that night and saw the two moons as well.

You need to get some facts. I'd suggest you start here:

Footnote 2 in http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf Files found by Bev Harris on Diebold FTP site Jan. 23, 2003 is not referenced in the body - probably refers to the filenames that were redacted. Anybody gone to the site to check what they are?

There are no cryptographic signatures or other security related measures involved. Replacement of the Windows CE operating system file is performed without even the most basic level of source, authentication or compatibility testing, allowing even code that is impossible to execute to be installed.

The TSx also has an unmarked button hidden in the casing. On the circuit board, this switch is labeled "battery test". The switch is physically similar to many reset buttons, necessitating application of substantial force to press the button, requiring it to be depressed by about 1/5 - 1/6 inch in order to activate the switch. This switch is also software accessible. It is completely accessible for all voters in the standard voting booth configuration. The logic behind the button is unknown, but for an attacker it presents yet another way to interact with the machine, and an exceptionally convenient button switch for an attack designed to be triggered by a voter.

Well, this seems very insecure to me. BBV criticizes the three layer architecture and states that it would be very easy to target it three different ways (at each layer):

- The application can be imagined as written instructions on a paper. If it is possible to replace these instructions, as it indeed seems, then the attacker can do whatever he wishes as long as the instructions are used.

- The operating system is the man reading the instructions. If he can be brainwashed according to the wishes of the attacker, then even correct instructions on the paper solve nothing. The man can decide to selectively do something different than the instructions. New paper instructions come and go, and the attacker can decide which instructions to follow because the operating system itself is under his control.

- The boot loader is the supreme entity that creates the man, the world and everything in it. In addition to creating, the boot loader also defines what is allowed in the world and delegates part of that responsibility to the operating system. If the attacker can replace the boot loader, trying to change the paper instructions or the man reading them does not work. The supreme entity will always have the power to replace the man with his own favorite, or perhaps he just modifies the man's eyes and ears: Every time the man sees yellow, the supreme being makes him think he is seeing brown. The supreme entity can give the man two heads and a secret magic word to trigger switching the heads.

In the world of the Diebold touch-screen voting terminals, all of these attacks look possible.

The instructions (applications and files) can be changed. The man reading the files (Windows CE Operating System and the libraries) can be changed. Or the supreme entity (boot loader) can be changed, giving total control over the operating system and the files even if they are "clean software."

Specific conceptual information is contained in the report, with details and filenames in the high-security version which is being delivered under cryptographic and/or personal signature controls to the EAC, Diebold CEO Tom Swidarski and CERT.

1) Boot loader reflashing
2) Operating system reflashing
3) Selective file replacement

In addition, the casing of the TSx machines lack basic seals and security, and within the casing additional exploitations are found.

The article talks about a "standard tool you can buy at any computer store" and I believe this is referring to a PCMCIA card (what you use in laptops). I guess these are used to boot, upgrade & ready the machines for use. They do not go into detail but I wager that using a PCMCIA card with a USB port on it, you could load your own data from a thumb/pen drive. This would be small and easy to carry in. If you had access to it outside of the voting window, you could potentially use a PCMCIA card that functions as a NIC (probably with RJ45 cable port) to use cross over cable and a laptop for a 'live' attack.

"It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes" --Josef Stalin

Here's the first part of the report from Black Box Voting. Note that there are several problems that turn up in the inspection of the machines, not just the memory discrepancies.

For those people who are saying that what Bruce Funk and Black Box Voting did violated the agreements with Diebold, however from a different article on the Black Box Voting website:

Bruce Funk, the elected official who has run elections in Emery County for 23 years, noticed a critical shortage in flash memory/storage in seven of his 40 brand new Diebold machines. He arranged for an independent evaluation, a right granted to Utah county officials in the Diebold contract [empasis mine].

I've also heard people say that Black Box Voting should have made a better record of thier activities, ie videotaping the whole thing, to those people, please note this paragraph from yet another article:

The testing was performed for an elections official who noticed anomalies in the county voting machines. It was underwritten, videotaped [emphasis mine] and photographed by Black Box Voting and performed by Harri Hursti and Security Innovation, Inc.

Has anyone bothered to look at "the third party"'s website? http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ Those Diebold machines didn't seem too stable a week ago...

After reading your comment about voter fraud by the NAACP, I googled it because I hadn't heard about it before. It seems like the republicans went ahead and fiddled with the voting machines while both republicans and democrats seemed to have fiddled with provisional balloting and logistics at the polling station to try and win. Ballot boxes seemed to have been lost, electronic polling machines were tampered with before election night and junkies were paid with crack to create false ballots.Neither side appears to be free of wrong doing on this issue.

The election process in america is a disgrace and I don't participate.

If you want more ammo for the pro-republican arguments:

http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/cat_voter_fraud.h tml

Democratic Side

http://blackboxvoting.org/

Democracy is three wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner

The memos themselves show that the lawyers KNEW Diebold was performing "unnatural acts" with America's elections and hence hose *every* voter. That part is plain as day. Jeez, they describe budgets for contingency planning for criminal charges probably coming...this when no such charges were filed (and thanks to Bill Lockyer never were...).

So deciding that this should be run through the typing pool can be described as Pretty Damn Stupid[tm].

Let's see, it's kinda like sketching out a memo saying "to reward our new clients running a gay S&M club, we'll invite them over to anally rape the whole typing pool" THROUGH THE TYPING POOL and not expect all hell to break loose.

Diebold fired 'em. Gee, I wonder why?

Jim March
Staffer - BBV
http://blackboxvoting.org/

Would it change your opinion to know that large portions of the file show Jones Day actively helping Diebold cover up ongoing violations of election law?

Understand something: as a voter, Heller was a direct *victim* of the misconduct being jointly committed by Diebold and Jones Day. So he had more than a passing interest in the matter, he was directly being screwed over by these actions and through these documents.

That's part of what sets this completely apart from most other breaches of this nature. It's as if a rape victim working for a lawyer found out that the lawyer was concealing the identity of her assailant.

Screaming bloody murder about it is a natural result.

Jim March
Staff, Black Box Voting
http://blackboxvoting.org/

...I can tell y'all that the most important thing in it is what's NOT in it: any indication that Diebold was fixing the actual problems, or for that matter even interested in doing so.

There are also several places where Jones Day was actively involved in covering up ongoing illegalities by Diebold, which is probably what got Heller as upset as he was.

Jim March
Staffer, Black Box Voting
http://blackboxvoting.org/
Lead plaintiff, March v. Diebold, the suit that got California that $2.6mil refund...which believe me, had a TON more support than just the Heller material and would have come out the same way regardless, basically quashed by California Attorney General Lockyer before we could even get to discovery. It should have been a refund of all Diebold contracts in California, somewhere over $100mil.

Sigh.