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California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold
moby11 points to this Reuters story carried by Yahooo!; it begins "California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products."
Diebold machines have been ruleed illegal in the state.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You might be also interested to know that their system has a HUGE security hole (backdoor).
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78
Similar story in the UK not so long ago, the Government wanted to use postal and telephone voting as a means of increasing turnout, but they were seen as open to fraud and abuse (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3602170.st m), including voter intimidation. What is wrong with making it compulsory for people to turn up to a voting station to cast their vote in person? I accept that some people cannot do this, for physical reasons (disabled, etc) or work (emergency services, etc), but if people are saying they're too busy to vote then why not reallocate a public holiday so they don't have to go to work that day? And if voting is compulsory, they cannot complain about who wins in the end. If you don't vote, don't complain!
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
Because we all know that Democrats never commit vote fraud. Just ask all the dead people at the polls in chicago ;->
> They don't deliberately insert loopholes into their electronic voting systems
How would you know? It's closed-source, trade-secret code.
> and it's only because of relentless pounding that a periodic vulnerability is found.
If you actually bother to read the sordid history of Diebold's voting products, you'll see they've been bug-ridden and insecure from the get-go. Yay for our MS Access-backed product!
"For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo."
Read the memos at any number of sites, like http://www.hacksonville.org/diebold/
Why isn't the attorney general taking them to court over that?
The purchasor has no legal obligation to verify that claims made by the vendor are true. The obligation is entirely on the vendor. And if the vendor makes untrue claims, a court may award damages, or even find the vendor guilty of fraud.
Caveat emptor is common sense, but it is not a legal principle.Caveat emptor says that if I buy second hand car, I would be wise to get an independent mechanic to check its condition. After all, everyone expects used care salesmen to be a bit shonky. But it I buy a brand new car, I shouldn't have to do this. I should be able to trust Ford / General Motors to design and build cars that are mechanically sound when they leave the showroom.
In this particular case, it is not clear to me whether the State of California or individual voting districts (?) purchased the machines. Either way, the purchaser was entitled to believe Diebold's assertions about the products' fitness for use at face value. Given that Diebold does not disclose its source-code, the purchasors have little choice wrt voting integrity issues.
Folks,
This is the March/Harris lawsuit. Lockyer has decided to "join in", bringing the government in as a co-plaintiff.
At around 10:30am today, Lowell Finley (our lawyer) calls me with the news that Lockyer and the AG's office have decided to join the suit Bev Harris and I filed all the way back in October. Lockyer and company have taken this long to decide whether or not to jump in.
Their decision to do so is VERY welcome by myself, Bev and our lawyer.
Here's the repercussions:
* Bev, Lowell and myself will be splitting 15% of any winnings, versus 30% if we had to prosecute this on our own.
* We ain't complaining, first because we were never in this for the money and second because Diebold is much more likely to settle early, confronted with Lockyer's legal staff instead of just Lowell. MAYBE they'll cave in before the November election, which would be great.
* Second, our odds of any sort of win is now better.
* Third, Lockyer has sent notice to the REST of the Diebold customer counties in California that they can "join in the fun". So this could spread beyond Alameda County, the original gov't entity that Bev, Lowell and I filed on behalf of.
* This idea of suing Diebold for fraud becomes the alternative to what Solano County decided to do: pay $415,000 in their case to get out of their Diebold contract! (Note: Solano's settlement means it's TOO LATE to join in the March/Harris/Lockyer lawsuit and solution. There's a fair chance Lockyer announced all this today to prevent any more "Solano-style" mistakes.)
Other bits:
The AG's staff are promising Lowell that they are NOT getting into this in order to "sabotage the case and settle early for peanuts". They *could* do that but I believe them that they aren't.
The fact that this is being done as a "whistleblower suit" by two private citizens strongly HELPS the government versus a situation where they did it themselves, even when you factor in the small "bounty" to Bev, Lowell and myself. This is because the whistleblower laws include a triple damages provision if we can prove fraud. This becomes a "big stick" to threaten Diebold into settlement with (for less than triple damages; we'll be OK with actual costs returned plus 15% so that the gov't agencies get "made whole" despite the 15% cut.)
Without whistleblowers, first off the gov't wouldn't have had the data to do this at all and even if we just gave them the data "for free", the gov't wouldn't have the damage tripler "stick".
Finally, the question WILL come up (and already has among these replies): "Is all this legit? Did Diebold REALLY screw up here in a fashion worth suing over?"
My answer to that is at this new page showing the actual vote fraud rigged into Diebold's central tabulator software via screenshots of actual Diebold code and database structures:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
That is all I need to say about the basic morality of this lawsuit.
Jim March / jmarch@prodigy.net
The problem with this "blaming of the victims" (California and it's "customer counties") is that they weren't allowed to see the source code for the product!
Only the Federally approved "Independent Testing Authorities" (ITAs) are allowed to see voting product source code. In the case of Diebold, this was Wyle Labs and Ciber Inc. (formerly "Metamor"), both in Huntsville Alabama and often relying on the same pool of employees. These agencies are approved for this "certification" process by the Federal Elections Commission.
These two acted as the "Arthur Andersons" to Diebold's "Enron".
We know that in at least two cases Diebold specifically decieved the testing labs. We have Diebold's internal memos in which managers instructed lower-level people to lie to the labs; in one case Ken Clark (Sr. Engineer and head of the tech support group) didn't think that the BS they were to pass off would fly, but the report came back from the underling that it did.
For detailed quotes of all this and technical analysis, see also my first two letters to the California Secretary of State, archived in the yellow table, right column:
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html
Without the ability to even see source code, it's rather hard to blame anybody in California for this fiasco.
Diebold on the other hand had a contractual duty to provide software that obeys the Federal certification process sans fraud AND California's election laws (which require high-security products). They blew off both contractual elements, so this isn't "tort law", it's "contract law", a much more cast-in-stone (and legitimate) area of law.
Jim March / jmarch@prodigy.net
But, let's all yammer about California suing them while ignoring the huge revelations that have happened in the last two weeks WRT Diebold.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
AP is covering the same story in a wee bit more detail:
A ID =@@2004409071097
:).
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
Yup - Lockyer didn't FILE suit, he joined in the one by Bev Harris (Executive Director of BlackBoxVoting.org) and myself (Member of the Board of Directors, same org).
AP keeps reporting that I'm a "programmer". Not true, I've tried to correct that several times now (I'm a former LAN sysadmin/tech support type).
You can see an alternate version of Bev's "cheat code problem" described with screenshots here:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
See also my other posts in this thread for more of the background by one of the OTHER plaintiffs - Bill Lockyer is only the newest
NOTE: Bev and I demoed the same stuff as described in the link above to the California SecState's staff on August 18th of this year. Also present was an attorney from Lockyer's office. That may have been the final "tilt" Lockyer needed to join in; that or he saw how Solano County hosed themselves by paying Diebold $415,000 to go away less than two weeks ago.
Jim March
"It's a publicity ploy...and since the ex-actor is now a politician, that means it's a political ploy."
Not that the governor of California has anything to do with California's AG. California, like most states, chooses its attorney general by direct popular vote, in accordance with Article 5, Section 11 of the California Constitution.
If you're going to criticize a government, it helps to know a little about how it works.
As the author, I can tell you that's a good page and the links to actual code still work.
The information therein should be supplemented with this later data:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
That's a "walkthrough" of the "hack demo" Bev Harris did with Howard Dean on CNBC a bit over a month ago. Complete with screenshots. It can be replicated with pieces downloaded from the "Dieboldtestnotes" page.
Putting the actual code and sample data online REALLY pissed Diebold off something fierce; they filed a cease'n'desist notice against my ISP.
Which did NOT succeed in taking my site down; on the contrary, mine is the only site to have completely survived a Diebold C&D with no downtime.
To see how I pulled that trick off:
http://www.equalccw.com/liebold.html
My main "Diebold page" is at:
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html - the "Dean Demo" page will be linked from there soon (prolly tomorrow).
Jim March