Diebold Audit Released, BlackBoxVoting.Org Shut Down

Chris Soghoian writes "The State of Maryland requested an audit of the Diebold electronic voting system by SAIC, after a report released by Johns Hopkins University and Rice Researchers (disclaimer: I'm one of Dr Rubin's students) noted several security issues. A condensed, from 200 to 40 pages, and censored version of the report has been released online (PDF link). The report notes that 'SAIC has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could have significant impact upon the AccuVote-TS voting system operation.'" However, Diebold says Maryland are moving forward with installation with "new security features" included, and elsewhere, Badgerman points out "Diebold has shut down blackboxvoting.org, apparently with copyright claims made to their ISP. But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site."

Comments

Blackboxvoting is a great case waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The Supreme Court is always most willing to hear cases when they involve political speech and voting, and this involves both.

Diebold is winning

[corebreech]

Pending: your vote is now the property of Diebold, Inc. Any attempt on your part to ascertain the disposition of your vote is hereby declared to be in violation of federal law, e.g., the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

You have the right not to vote. Any vote you make can be used against you in a court of law. The judge presiding in such a court of law may be appointed by Diebold, Inc., and need not require a jury, but if a jury is summoned, it need not be a jury of your peers.

By acting to vote you consent to our determining whether your vote is valid, and in the event it is judged not to be valid, you consent to our voiding your vote and further voiding your right to vote in the future.

You furthermore acknowledge that owing to storage and bandwidth limitations that Diebold, Inc., may experience, your vote may be digitally compressed in a way such that your true intent in casting the vote may be lost. If such an eventuality should occur, your vote may be determined using statistical data derived from any source we deem appropriate or convenient.

You have the right to protest if your vote is cancelled, altered, or in any way modified as the result of such action on our part, however, you hereby acknowledge that in such an eventuality, Diebold, Inc. may determine that your right to vote is deleterious to democracy as implement by Diebold, Inc., and therefore may be considered to be an overt act against the national security of these United States.

You have 10 seconds to comply.

God Bless America.

hanging bits?

[kd5ujz]

Are we going to have to check the bit bucket for hanging bits?

I insist on paper and pencil voting

[Anonymous Coward]

How else can I add one option at the end of the ballot:

__X__ CowboyNeal

Why is the mass media not all over this????

[Blademan007]

This totally need to be crammed down every voting American's throat. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[AaronW]

Actually this was part of a headline article over at Salon.com. The article is available here.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kramer2718]

Why? Because the mass media has no interest in overthrowing the corrupt big-business driven world of politics. And why should they? All the major media companies are owned by huge corporations who profit by people not being fairly represented. How does that work? Well, if people were fairly represented, then campaign finance reform would happen and businesses wouldn't be able to bribe our elected officials. Yes, I know there's not a direct connection to Diebold voting systems except that Diebold IS big business.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[LostCluster]

Diebold's market capitalization is roughly $3.775 billion... That's not exactly a small business, but it's not quite on the same level as the major media companies either.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[cmarkn]

No one wants campaign finance "reform" more than the major media companies. Because the "reforms" that everyone talks about would turn total control of who gets to use the mass media over to the media. As it is now, even the people who are not popular with the media moguls get to be heard because they can spend money, and the media are forced to sell them ads. Once you put in your "reforms", anyone who is not being supported by either Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch will completely disappear from any coverage at all.

And the best part? They won't have to spend any money to bribe elected officials, all they have to do is give them some attention, and they'll own them. Only it will be from the day they start considering whether to run, not from the day they get elected.

At least two people will be fairly represented. None of the rest of us though.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[EchoMirage]

Because the mass media has no interest in overthrowing the corrupt big-business driven world blah blah blah

Parsing error: Too many typical conspiracy/Slashdot-cynicism words in one sentence. Please remove the ad hominem text cited above and try again, proceeding with logic this time instead of hysterics.

Seriously, is this the best we can do? Of course there are vile reasons behind Diebold's getting away with this, but do you have to resort to this tired, adolescent "mass media loves big corporations loves evil government" schtick to get your point across?

I'll give you a hint: when you start your arguments like this, absolutely nobody listens to what follows.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[gaijin99]

Of course it needs to be aired publicly. Its a potential threat to the very basis of our government. The reason why it isn't is quite simple: corporate ownership.

CEO's are a quite tight group of people. Generally a person who sits on the board of one company sits on the board of up to ten other companies as well. Do you really think that MSNBC, CNN, FOX, ABC, etc, don't a) own stock in Diebold and other voting machine companies, and b) have board members who sit on Diebold's board as well?

Walden O'Dell, President of Diebold is also a board member of Lenox (yes, the heating and air conditioning company). This has nothing to do with media ownership, but demonstrates the amount of spread involved in corporate ownership.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kramer2718]

You mean reforms like forcing those media companies to GRANT free portions of the PUBLIC's air-time to political candidates as part of the fee to let them use their part of the spectrum?

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ad hominem" - Means against the man, to not attack the argument but the person. There is nothing ad hominem about:
"Because the mass media has no interest in overthrowing the corrupt big-business driven world blah blah blah.

It's not the most eloquent sentence but the point is valid; the large media outlets very obviously have self interest in maintaining the status quo hence, Britney kissing Madonna is front page news while actual documented vote fraud is overlooked.

The irony here is that you then go on to use an ad hominem attack by calling the original poster "adolescent". Simply amazing.

I'll give you a hint: Do not attempt to sound smarter than you are, it's very transparent.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kcbrown]

Seriously, is this the best we can do? Of course there are vile reasons behind Diebold's getting away with this, but do you have to resort to this tired, adolescent "mass media loves big corporations loves evil government" schtick to get your point across?

Of course, since mass media is big corporations, the above reduces to "big corporations love evil government", something which has been proven repeatedly over time.

Jesus, do you need us to spell it out for you?

1. Large corporations have a common set of interests and attributes:
   • They want to lock out as much competition as possible.
   • They want their labor pool to be as cheap as possible.
   • They want their customer base to be as captive as possible.
   • They want to be as free as possible to do whatever they want.
   • They are short-term thinkers, so they don't care about the long term consequences of their actions upon their market.
   • They are driven only by profit, so ethics never enters the equation when they decide upon an action, only law (and then, only law that they don't think they can get away with breaking) and profit.
2. Because of (1), they will naturally tend to lobby for roughly the same things, and these things will often be at odds with things that would be beneficial to the general population.
3. The media is owned, and thus controlled, by some of those very same corporations.
4. Because of (2) and (3), no federal-level politician who is unwilling to cater to the needs of the corporations that own the media is likely to win their first election, because you can't win an election if the voters don't know about you. In fact, such a politician would be very unlikely to win for that very reason.
5. You're a moron if you think the media corporations and other corporations don't talk to each other about their common interests.
6. Hence, the only politicians that, in general, can win an election are those who bow to the demands of this country's large corporations.
7. And hence, the politicians will listen to large corporations to a much greater degree than they will listen to the voters directly. Rare indeed is the issue that will galvanize an entire voter population against you if you side with the corporations. Rarer still is such an issue that the voter population hears about through the mass media; because, as I said, you're a moron if you think the media corporations don't talk with other corporations about their common interests.

Call it a "tired conspiracy theory" if you want, but the links in the chain from a to b to c are so strong and backed by so much evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) that you'd be a fool to discount this "schtick" out of hand.

Come up with a hypothesis that does a better job of explaining both what we've been seeing and what we haven't been seeing and is consistent with everything we currently know and I, for one, will sit up and take notice. But until then, this "conspiracy theory" does a better job of explaining just about everything that has been happening than anything else I've seen.

I'm no conspiracy nut. My most valuable tool is the scientific method, and most conspiracy theories are certainly crap. But this particular "schtick" is very different, and I'll continue to use it to explain the goings on until I find a better explanation.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kcbrown]

But nothing in your post explains why the media would look out for Diebold, a maker of banking and security equipment.

One reason the media corporations might not be interested in covering something like the Diebold situation is that there's little corporations hate more than uncertainty. The ability to rig elections via voting machines like the Diebold ones introduces certainty into the election process itself. While the current situation means that the person elected will probably be someone favorable to the corporations that own the media (at the very least), the ability to rig an election will make that a certainty.

The media has covered (to death) lots of stories that hurt corporations, big and small. Alar? Firestone tires? Faked truck explosion?

The Firestone tire incident was over two years ago! What has the media done since then that has actually caused a large corporation to lose significant money? And how often does the media do so? I'd say it's relatively rare. The Firestone tire incident is the last such incident I can think of that really qualifies.

You seem to be going on the assumption that corporations just like to help each other out, but that same short-sighted greedy nature you correctly identified means that corporations generally don't help each other out, even when it would be easy or beneficial.

Huh? Then what exactly do you call all the partnerships, preferred providers, mergers, etc. that happen all the time in the business world? What do you think collusion is ?

You're right that corporate greed will hinder corporations from assisting each other, but that's only when the corporations in question are in direct competition with each other. And even direct competitors might assist each other at some level when they all stand to gain in the short term by doing so.

What else do you call the RIAA, but a partnership between corporations that would otherwise be in competition with each other?

No, there are far too many examples of corporations, even competitors, cooperating with each other to ignore it, especially when talking about something as important and lucrative as influence over the government.

If you take off the biased glasses, you'll see that the media is just dumb and slow to respond. Eventually some lazy, plagiarizing journalist will copy the story from Salon and Wired, and it will trickle through the normal channels. About six months after you're completely sick of it. See RIAA lawsuits for another example.

If the media is slow to respond then why is it reporting RIAA lawsuits as they happen, but not saying anything about Diebold? No, the media is perfectly capable of reporting events quickly when it wants to.

The RIAA lawsuits are a good example, actually: they're reporting them, but they're doing so in such a way that it makes the RIAA look good (or at least not look bad). What do you think is the most plausible explanation for that spin?

Diebold sure liked that report

[exhilaration]

From: http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/maryland.htm

SAIC's independent review states, "While many of the statements made by Mr. Rubin were technically correct, it is clear that Mr. Rubin did not have a complete understanding of the State of Maryland's implementation of the AccuVote-TS voting system...The State of Maryland's procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report."

SAIC's report continues, "Rubin states repeatedly that he does not know how the [Diebold] system operates in an election and he further identifies the assumptions that he used to reach his conclusions. In those cases where these assumptions concerning operational or management controls were incorrect, the resultant conclusions were, unsurprisingly, also incorrect."

Electronic Voting...

[samj]

if implemented properly, could revolutionise governance in general - pity it's being so badly implemented thus far. If voting were faster and cheaper it could be involved more regularly in all manner of decision making processes. I simply cannot believe that someone would implement such a critical system on any Microsoft platform, especially when there's plenty of alternatives out there. QNX comes to mind. Mind you it is no surprise to me that a company who chooses to start behind the 8 ball by making such a poor choice in platforms is subsequently found to show a disregard for security in general ('compromised' servers, serious flaws, etc.). I hope they're enjoying 'whack-a-mole' because you can bet that for every site they manage to take down, 10 others will pop up!

Re:Electronic Voting...

[gaijin99]

That isn't "governance." It's mob rule.

Feh. And other words of disgust. One of the main purposes of the constitution, and the bill of rights, is to avoid the problem of "tyrany of the majority", while simultaniously allowing free and democratic government.

Certainly a free for all democracy, without any sort of "No, you can't use the government to do this" would cause problems. Democracy, in and of itself, is not sufficient. But we have more than just a democracy, and so does every other first world nation. By explicitly limiting the government's power, and by making those limits quite difficult to change, things work quite well.

What we need is more accountability, less secrecy, and greater transparency. A government of a few tyranical types tends to have a half-life of around 30 to 40 years, and when they collapse (and they always do) its not pretty. Look at the Soviet Union for an example of this.

Re:Electronic Voting...

[Dalcius]

Well, something needs to swing one way or the other. In this day, you can only choose between two people, thus you don't have a whole lot of choice when it comes to stances. And it's pretty ludicrous to argue that representatives are generally responsible for their actions or to their constituents.

Maybe I'm just too cynical.

I'd personally like to log onto a secure website (I mean NSA type secure), select the issues I'm interested in (business, privacy, computers/internet, etc), and by default have a list of 5 "daily votes" related to my selected topics come up for me to vote on. Let everyone have the same. This removes a boatload of bureaucracy, makes government abide by the people, etc.

Then, IMO, it'd be a good idea to have government funded public debates in every community that anyone can attend. I akin it to Slashdot: a community debate is going to have lots of absolute retards, but I'll hear at least a few ideas and points of view that I hadn't considered for any given issue. On top of that, I'll hear from a number of folks who know more about an issue than I do. Most disagreements in my experience aren't based on judgement, but on information and communication. An open community debate would seem to be a better solution to this problem.

[end ramble]

Re:Electronic Voting...

[kfg]

Two words: Patriot Act.

You do understand that in a number of polls the "people" have been shown more than willing to completely renounce Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

And, of course ( here comes Godwin's Law), Hitler was voted dictator for life in a democratic election.

KFG

Re:Electronic Voting...

[kfg]

Ah, but that wasn't my conclusion at all. My conclusion was that democracy was no prevention at all for it happening. This is a very different conclusion from the one you stated.

And of course fear and thuggery has never been a deciding factor in an election in America and could never happen on a national scale.

Because, well, because this is America, God Bless Her, everyone.

Right now America is broken. Most of it doesn't even know it's broken, even though every time Ashcroft opens his mouth more fascist hate spews out of it.

Why is it broken?

Because the voting public has already refused to use their democratic rights inherent in the Constitutional system to prevent it from becoming this broken.

In fact, most approve of it.

KFG

Typical...

[Black Parrot]

The meme for the 21st Century seems to be "if your product is faulty, abuse IP laws to squash anyone who mentions it", rather than, say, fixing the damn problem.

Re:Typical...

[jjoyce]

I don't think that their systems are faulty. I think they work as designed.

How many precincts in CA use Diebold?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I wonder how many precincts in CA plan to use the Diebold system, with its well-known cracks, in the upcoming Gubernatorial Recall election.

With a broad field of candidates splitting the vote, and the field-leader taking the race, small margins could easily swing the election - which means a small number of compromised precincts could swing the election.

And with no human-readable audit trail, if you thought the stink over the Florida Presidential results was bad you ain't seen NOTHING yet.

Undprecedented!!!

[ChangeOnInstall]

Just read this quote from a Diebold press release that is being refuted on blackboxvoiting.com:

"The thorough system assessment conducted by SAIC verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security." (emphasis mine)

Unfortuantely, in this case, blackboxvoting is quite wrong, and Diebold press release is entirely correct. You see, the word "unprecedented" doesn't necessarily mean "good". It means "without precedent". The level of security offered by these voting machines is most certainly "without precedent".

Auditor Weighs In

[Inexile2002]

We are f**ked. If a political system is so broken that it can't keep this from getting through then... well...

We are f**ked.

I really am an IT Auditor for a living and this is exactly the kind of work I do (although I mostly work for Utility Companies like water or electricity) and I know how these reports are created. There is HUGE pressure to "build assurance".

What that means is that you find an risk that is not addressed by a suitible control - and try to find a control - something, anything, that you can call a control to cover that risk. That's all fine and good, but what it means is that the risks that actually make it into the report are the really big, bad, completely unaccounted for ones. Put another way, for every risk that gets in, three didn't that a normal person would have thought should have.

Long and short, I write reports like this for a living and this is way, way, way worse than it looks.

This is very scary: but... Diebolt will lose

[sjgman9]

OK Dieboldt, do you really think that suing computer scientists will give you any good PR?

Look, your voting software has more holes than swiss cheese. We are willing to help you, but there are some requirements you must follow.

1) your voting machines must have a printer attached
2) the votes must be counted electronically, optically, and by humans
3) if the printout doesnt match whats on screen, then remove the machine.
4) the paper ballot is the final record.

Look let the computer science community improve your software. We all want the election to go through in an error-free way. No one wants a florida to happen again.

But, if you fight this tooth and nail, you will have no fiercer enemy. Ignore the Slashdot nation at your own peril

Re:This is very scary: but... Diebolt will lose

[Nogami_Saeko]

On the contrary...

I rather think the Republicans aren't all that worried about a "Florida happening again". After all, it did get a Republican into the oval office didn't it...

It's odd though, speaking as a Canadian who has always though that although not perfect, the US electoral system had a fair number of checks and balances, it absolutely blows my mind that this sort of un-checked corporate crap isn't being stopped in it's tracks.

It's like 9/11 gave the politicians and big business license to do whatever the hell they want to with your entire country and the economy, and they're screwing it up at a simply astounding rate. "Patriot" take-away-your rights acts, a court denying a "do-not call list" that 50 MILLION people want for the benefit of a few telemarketing lobbyists, big companies trying to patent even the most trivial of ideas... Where does it end?

I mean, this latest info about a company making machines to support democratic elections that has no "unalterable record", easy bypassing (or complete lack) of database passwords, and executives talking about just printing "system check" on the screen without any actual checking being done because the electoral regulations require a full system check before the system begins recording votes.

Frightening, absolutely frightening...

N.

in other news

[SHEENmaster]

6,000,000,000 people placed type-in votes for an independent candidat known as "I.P. Freely"

"I.C. Weener" of the Cryoget Washington Head party and "Amanda Hugenkiss" tied for second with exactly 42424242 votes apiece.

Why not hand-count?

[daffmeister]

With all the problems with electronic voting, punch-card voting, hanging chads etc, why even use machines for vote counting? Why not just have paper and pencil and hand-count?

Federal elections in Australia with a population of 20 million are run this way with no problem.

Before you say, "but America has many more voters", well, they can also have many more vote counters.

Re:Why not hand-count?

[lpontiac]

Hand-counting? But what about all the companies that sell voting machinery? Think of the impact on jobs, on industry!

Clearly, these 'volunteers' are unacceptable. Maybe hand counting would work if the government subcontracted counting to a company which charged hundreds of millions to employ counters at minimum wage, and keep the rest for shareholders.

Re:Why not hand-count?

[gaijin99]

Sure, you can have double-counts and triple-counts, but in a land where the campaign costs almost as much as budget of the office-holder, you can also double-bribe and triple-bribe.

That's why the security of these automated systems is so important... they *must* be more secure than a bunch of volunteers hand-counting.

The problem with this line of argument is that with machine count it becomes a matter of bribing one person: the one in charge of the machine...

This is why transparency is important. It really doesn't matter whether the ballots are counted by people, machines, or trained chimps, as long as the process can be viewed, verified, and checked by any concerned party (including individual voters) it will work quite well. When only a select few are allowed to see, verify, etc, the process than those select few can, and will, be corrupted.

An open source system, which produces paper receipts, looks like the only real option.

If these things are used in election 2004...

[robson]

...we're screwed. I mean all kinds of screwed.

Not just "they messed up my vote" screwed, but entire-election-results-legitimately-contested screwed.

The problem is that they're raising the margin of error by an unknowable amount. No matter which party wins in the 2004 Presidential election, the loser will easily be able to argue that the voting system was highly flawed and vulnerable to foul play. It will be a replay of 2000, except worse.

Using a system that's known to be insecure for national elections... it's just a guaranteed disaster. We'll have another election settled in court, and the populace of the U.S. will become even more polarized.

Really, only one possible reason

[Wierd Willy]

For the elections to be so obviously and openly rigged is to make sure that there is no dissenting opinion available. The Communists and Facists regularly skewed and falsified election results to prevent anyone from actually challenging their methods and agendas. Which, I might remind you all, was mass murder, wholesale pilliaging of national treasuries and imprisonment of dissedents. Fact is, Americans already have accepted the Fascist philosophy now being touted as "patriotism". Call me a nut, but thats what we are looking at. If Bush wins, I will consider this to be the end of the United States, and I will make serious efforts to leave the country. It would no longer be worth my time, effort or loyalty if the Fascists win another election.

And these men ARE fascists people, in every sense of the word. You think there would be any "open source" after that? This administration has already made little noises about Linux and BSD being "hackers" operating systems, there have been several years worth of propaganda about "freeware" being something only criminals use to steal and sabotage. You can damn well bet that it would be outlawed, or at least, brought under private control of some sort where it would be rigidly controlled.

Can you say heil SCO? Whether or not they actually have a claim, which they don't, it would only take a few lines of obscure law written into some other peice of legislation to change all that. It would be nothing for the fascists to declare something to be criminal or subversive and use that as an excuse for a major crackdown on the information industry.

But nobody really cares, as long as they can have their Hummers and Porches and Rolex watches.

Help the Electronic Voting Machine Project

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

I've posted some similar notes to most of the recent articles about problems with commercial voting machines. For this one, I really want to actively recruit some developers to help out. There are parts of EVM2003 that are on track, but other parts need more developers. In particular, we really need some people with experience in blind-accessessibility for that portion of the project (both a system to allow voting, and one to vocalize printed ballots).

The idea of EVM2003 is to create Free Software voting machine, and to implement machines that also produce voter-verifiable paper trails (i.e. visually readable printed ballots). We will do a number of security things right, where the commercial companies have done them wrong... they have aimed for "security through obscurity" or "just trust us." As well, part of our requirement is to have fully blind-accessible voting that maintains complete anonymity.

Anyway, I (David Mertz) have taken over as Developer Lead recently, and am trying to move the development of the demo along.

Feel free to contact me--the standard ballot system (in the demo version at least) is being done in wxPython; but conceivably we would choose other languages/technologies for bar-code reading, printing, blind-voting, etc. (my preference is to use Python though, for consistency and rapid development).

There won't be any stink at all

[roystgnr]

That's what the lack of a human-readable audit trail avoids: those pesky "ballots" that people might want to recheck for accuracy. The Diebold systems might not be any better than hanging chads, but you can be sure they'll seem better because there won't be any way to remeasure the results and get a different number.

The conclusion of that thought

[Anonymous Coward]

The State of Maryland's procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report."

And the report itself continues:

However, these controls, while sufficient to help mitigate the weaknesses identified in the July 23 report, do not, in many cases meet the standard of best practice or the State of MarylandSecurity Policy.

Machine voting not the problem

[Ian Bicking]

Machine voting isn't the problem, Diebold is. They've created a horrible, insecure system. It's simple enough to create a more secure system that it's hard not to believe Diebold is deliberately enabling fraud.

A system where votes were printed to a machine-readable piece of paper, verified by the voter, then deposited in a secure box, would be simple and secure. By printing votes you create a self-verifying system -- voters can check their vote is correct, and an audit can easily verify that votes were recorded as voters intended. Management of the printed records would be just like the ballots we already are using, but without the reliability problems of punch-card systems. Tallying could be done mechanically, as a barcode could accompany the printed text.

The whole system is very simple. Even if they just used an ATM style of security (printing to an internal paper log) they would be far superior to Diebold. But using logic is difficult in this case, because Diebold is clearly making absurd claims, and it's difficult to refute absurdity.

EVM 2003 is trying to create a complete open source voting system (not just machine). I wish them the best of luck. This is more than just philosophy about copyright and IP, it's the defense of democracy from those that want very much to take away even the slight accountability that currently exists. They've already made it into office with one fraudulent election (2000), and very possibly kept control of congress with another (2002, with many states being won with unverifiable votes that didn't match up with predicted results).

Diebold is aleady screwing California.

[tinrobot]

A number of CA counties use the touch screen machines, but the big holes are on the servers, not the voting machines. Those who use OCR ballots are also just as vulnerable because the back-end servers are the same.

There was an article on the Blackboxvoting.com site about how time stamps on files found on the Diebold FTP site indicate that Diebold downloaded vote counts DURING an election in Santa Barbara (??) county. For those who are unaware, it is against the law to count votes before the polls close.

So... part of the evidence suggests that employees of Diebold BROKE THE LAW by counting votes before the polls closed. No wonder Diebold wants to keep things secret.

So... this brings up a question. If I obtain a document indicating that a company broke the law, can that document be suppressed by saying it's copy righted? If so, that's a BIG problem.

Public Beta Test in 13 Days...

[chickenwing]

Great, I live in Alameda County, CA where I remember Diebold machines being used in the last election. Now we have the recall coming up, so I guess we will just have to have some kind of blind faith that our votes are counting. I suppose if the results are other than to be expected from this more liberal area, it will raise some eyebrows.

The horrible thing is, that this is really far below the general public's radar. I find it extremely amusing that we had a court battle over how reliable punch cards are, when electronic voting may be far worse.

The problem is that the general public is very computer illiterate, and have been pretty much been conditioned to accept bugs and viruses as normal. At the same time, strangely, computers seem to be viewed as infallible.

It is very importaint for Democracy that people are able to be able to see and verify that their votes are counted.

My previous experience with the Diebold machines left me more puzzled than anything. Where was my vote counted, on the card that I put in the machine, in the machine itself, or both? Were the votes transmitted via phone, wireless, or physically transported to a centeral location? I don't know for sure, and I'm sure regular people off the street were more puzzled. Then again, maybe the thought never crossed their mind.

Good news!

[gad_zuki!]

Now hackers can use this to get rid of Bush and put in whoever is willing to part ways with the DMCA and the Patriot act.

Faux News election night:

"And the results are in for the popular election, Jane"

"75 million votes for..wait.. who the fuck is Lawrence Lessig?"

"I would say he's our new President, Steve."

Small correction: link to memos, not source code

[BevHarris]

I found the source code on their wide open web site (using the google search engine) in January.

The memos were sent to me by an insider, and I just got them 2 1/2 weeks ago.

This is important, because one is similar to software piracy (though debatable, because they are under some obligation to protect things if they want to call them trade secrets, and no one in their right mind would want to pirate this system, called "junk shit" by their own technicians, to resell it.

The memos, though, are just internal communications that were leaked, and once leaked and public, which they certainly are by now, when used only for fair use reasons in the public interest, the legal issues are quite different.

Diebold's CEO is a big Republican Donor

[ianscot]

Salon's article referred to the Cleveland Plain Dealer's earlier story on this:

"in August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."

The internal memos from Diebold (they get referred to from Salon) show a shockingly cavalier chief engineer 'managing' the security concerns of various clients, steadily resisting the idea of even password protecting the .mdb file (.mdb file!?!) so that just anyone couldn't overwrite audit logs. Nothing overtly political in those memos, though, thank God.

Still -- how does it affect the credibility of any (new, or old) voting system for the people overseeing it to be acknowledged partisans? Imagine a Florida 2000 in which there were no physical records, and in which the systems that counted votes were frighteningly insecure and had been programmed by a company headed by a partisan figure. We already had more than enough partisan elements there -- the brother who happens to be governor, the Supreme Court justice who has a wife on Bush's transition team, the different standards for counting absentee ballots in different counties, and so on.

The thing about those memos is, they really show the states to be one more relatively uninformed client of an IT company. They'll buy the FUD of the Diebold person as long as he sounds assured enough, you know? Even when it comes to something as obvious as "I double-clicked the file of votes and it opened with no password, is that bad?" Which is all the more reason to be sure you're dealing with someone who has no conflict of interest, right?