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California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold

Posted by timothy on from the hey-no-fair dept.

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."

6 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Upset? by buckhead_buddy · · Score: 5, Informative
    Well, the President of Diebold did claim in 2003 that his company was
    committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.
    I suppose the California officials are upset that Diebold didn't include their state in the obvious corruptions of an opaque and unmonitorable voting system.
  2. Backdoor by bluelarva · · Score: 5, Informative

    You might be also interested to know that their system has a HUGE security hole (backdoor).

    http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78

  3. Re:Is this the right way to go about it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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/

  4. What about conspiracy to commit election fraud? by nietzsche_freak · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    A good start, maybe, but what about the election fraud backdoor built into Diebold machines? From my link:
    By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location [on the vote tabulation machine], a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set.
    Now I (who ANAL) would call building such a backdoor into a voting machine conspiracy to commit election fraud, which is, by the way, a felony in California.

    Why isn't the attorney general taking them to court over that?

  5. Re:Is this the right way to go about it? by JimMarch(equalccw) · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Re:Download the election software - author's reply by JimMarch(equalccw) · · Score: 5, Informative

    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