Diebold Threatens to Pull Out of North Carolina

foobaric writes "A North Carolina judge ruled that Diebold may not be protected from criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the code behind its voting machines as required by law. In response, Diebold has threatened to pull out of North Carolina." From the article: "The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow 'all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system,' as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software. That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows."

Comments

Hmm...

[Concern]

Hmm... Good point.

Hey Diebold, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

(Not that state regulators which didn't require a voter-verified paper trail up front have qualifications for anything but a prison cell, but hey...)

Re:Hmm...

[Philip K Dickhead]

Diebold is frequently dinged for their ATMs whenever this topic arises. There are many fair criticisms and accusations against Diebold - this is not one of them. Banking termials are a fundamentally different set of problems than those presented by voting. Hell, aside from that, ATMs can depend on a well-connected private backbone network, with company owned lines and premise equipment.

The Diebold voting outfit was an aquisitio of a startup company, that was demonstrably lax in design and practices. The system cobbled together, of mostly desktop-oriented COTS was little more than a system for demonstration purposes, meeting almost no "behind the scenes" requirements that most anyone could have proposed. I would go as far as to say that this effort was, in likelyhood, a swindle.

Diebold is culpable for aquiring them - after a technology assessment - and continuing in this fashion. Possibly with the intent of enabling fraudulent vote recording and tabulation. Certainly Diebold "stonewalls", misrepresents and obfuscates every attempt to legitimately investigate their capability, practice and compliance.

But I don't worry about their ATMs!

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in the banking business, in IT. I work in downtown Manhattan, at a bank that probably has some of your money in it.

When the voting systems thing hit I got interested in them. They are a vendor we do business with and I started informally asking questions around the watercooler, seeing if the old guys have any stories. For instance, have we ever had security issues with their equipment, etc?

We have. And the stories. Oh, my god, the stories. It's enough to bring tears to your eyes. They've blown it in such amazing, over-the-top ways, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. What I take away from all this is that the only reason many financial institutions stay in business is the (ongoing) laziness of criminals.

So in other words, worry about their ATMs. Worry about anybody who does business with these guys. Before "paperless voting" Diebold was just another bunch of well-connected old white men swindling their buddies with 3rd rate code. But now they're just plain shady.

Re:Hmm...

[OWJones]

If the government makes an acknowledgement that certain components of the working system, including hardware and software, are proprietary materials owned by unrelated third parties and that Diebold is not responsible for the intellectual property pertaining to those components, then Diebold ought to be more than willing, certainly able, to comply with the order for those materials specifically under their own control.

That argument is fine for commercial activities like banking, airplanes, etc, etc, but this is voting we're talking about here. No one forced Diebold to use Windows. It was a design decision. I'm all for the free market solutions, but when the problem is how citizens select their representative government, any arguments in favor of "secret counting methods" just won't fly.

Why not just put a Diebold employee at each precinct and have each voter whisper their choice to that person through a curtain? Then, at the end of the day, the Diebold employee just tells us what the total is. If anyone questions their accuracy, they can point to some tic marks they made on a piece of paper (not that any voter actually saw these tic marks made) to "prove" they did it right.

Oh, and Diebold won't let us do background checks on these people because they hired some of these people from a temp company, and that temp company doesn't like publicising who works for them. Does that sound fair?

Besides, the source code is being held in escrow and is available only to certain NC Elections employees, and under NDA. If, even then, Diebold doesn't want to or can't comply, it's not our fault. It's my vote, not your experiment.

-jdm

Re:Hmm...

[fajoli]

Fortunately for banks, if the ATM equipment screws up and the customer can prove it (with receipts, etc), the banks have exposed themselves to lawsuits.

Unfortunately for the electorate, if the voting equipment screws up, it undermines the very foundation of a democratic country. And in this particular case, the customer is being asked to give up any hope of proving the equipment is flawed.

Closed source is not the best tool

[nharmon]

This is simply a situation where closed source software is not the best tool for the job. Diebold is more than welcome to submit an open source solution, or play the the crybaby-going-home-and-taking-my-toy-with-me game.

My only question is how far down do these legal requirements go? If the operating system the voting software is running on needs to be open sourced, what about the hardware firmware? Does it need to be open source as well?

Interpretation of responsible

[sam_handelman]

Other posters are making a lot of hay over the responsible programmers portion of the statute - obviously, if you need to list everyone who contributed code that would tend to be impossible (although a few projects could probably comply.)

  However, I'm fairly sure that you could meet that requirement with a list of the *responsible* programmers - i.e., the people in charge making decisions. Thus, you don't need to list every programmer - the person in charge of your particular embedded system fork ought to be sufficient.

Re:The headline should read:

[SpaceLifeForm]

How about:

"Under pressure to comply with State Law, Diebold comes up with great excuse".

There is no way they will meet the law, because once it becomes apparent that the software has holes that allow vote manipulation, the remaining states will do the same.

Of course, the darkside is still trying to keep the public in the dark, at least in California.

Here's the rules that BlackBoxVoting must meet.

California protocols sent to Black Box Voting when they invited us to do the test Nov. 30:

- The media cannot attend
- The public cannot attend
- The number of people we can bring is so small that we cannot bring our attorney or a court reporter
- We cannot videotape, record, or keep explicit notes on it
- We cannot retain our own work product
- We cannot tell anyone what happened in the test

Evidence of guilt.

[Fantastic Lad]

Idiotic.

When it comes to individual rights, I thoroughly disagree with the argument which runs, "Why should you mind the police searching your home unless you have something to hide?"

But when it comes to the State, and it's employees, (like Diebold), the same logic is quite acceptable.

Let's all remember, the State is there to serve the public, not the other way around. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

Thus, non-compliance with the most basic and rational doctrine, ("You must let us see how your voting machines work"), means to me that Diebold is hiding the fact that their machines are indeed faulty, and almost certainly deliberately faulty.

I'd love to see this break wide open, and have the journalists see the light and revolt against their Zionist-neo-con-Christian-brain-washed overseers, and publish the story far and wide. And then put Bush and his crew and the entire ruling elitist segment of the populace into prison. But I don't really expect this.

The most we'll see is a scapegoat being hung out to dry while the parade of evil continues.

The best way to resist is to do it on a personal level. Shine brightly and follow your internal compass as best you can. Defy The Lie. --Living in such a way will affect others in an ever-expanding ripple effect.

-FL

WTF WTF WTF WHAT. THE. FUCK?!!!

[Thud457]

"Jeffrey Dean was convicted early '90s of 23 counts of computer-aided embezzlement. He was a computer consultant for a large Seattle law firm and defrauded them of about $450,000 in what US courts called a "sophisticated computer-aided scheme". In a statement to Seattle PD, he claimed he needed the money because Canadians were blackmailing him; in that country, he'd gotten into a fistfight and the other guy had died. (Yes, I've seen the police report.)"

Ok, aside from being a convicted felon who comitted the very kind of crimes one should be worried about someone pulling in this situation... Usually, rational people being duly diligent about security would not trust someone who had anything in their background that would make them succeptible to BLACKMAIL.

This is some sort of goddamned perverse JOKE, RIGHT?!!!

Re:Is that a threat or a promise?

[jkauzlar]

This sounds conspiratorial, but there's a lot of very fishy evidence. It seems that if Diebold weren't fixing the election, it would be very easy for them to offer proof. Diebold's ATM machines all leave very clear paper trails of the transactions. Why didn't they use the exact same technology for their voting machines?

And even spookier, this link says:

Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold's electronic voting software contained "stunning flaws." The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access.

and:

Wired News reported that ". . . a former worker in Diebold's Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials." Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes - 18,181.

It gets spookier still when you look at Diebold's CEO Bob Urosevich's ties to the Republican Party and strong fundamentalist backgrounds. Whereever Diebold goes, the article says, historic Republic upsets follow.