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Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud
Philip K Dickhead writes "After numerous ethical lapses and much controversy, Diebold CEO, Wally O'Dell resigned to the applause of the markets. Diebold's price improved more than 5% today, as the story broke. Business Week is reporting that O'Dell is leaving for "personal reasons", although the news blog Raw Story cites board action on imminent securities fraud litigation, and legal challenges by states claiming fraudulent certification of Diebold voting machines. Latest vulnerability tests show an impossibly negligent attention to vote security and privacy." Not overly surprising, considering their recent childish antics in NC.
Going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison? Hey, a guy can hope.
Boy, is this long overdue. This man bears a lot of responsibility for the current lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our elected officials and elections.
Whether or not you believe that elections in this country were stolen, you must admit that Diebold's response to questions about the security of their machines and software have, to put it mildly, not been helpful.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
god's party is the majority of his favorite country
Since when were Republicans touched by his noodly appendage?
another contract for Haliburton to take over.
We geeks need to contribute to the open source voting software efforts!!
There are only two very early stage projects for the US market:
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evacs
I'm trying to help out openvotingconsortium.org and am reading up on the other one which I just found out about.
What are you doing??
He delivered Ohio to Bush, as promised.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The head of Diebold is also a top fundraiser for President Bush's re-election. In a recent fund-raising letter Diebold's chief executive Walden O'Dell said he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
'Nuff said.
Oh, what a beautiful symbol it is though!
The downside as I see it is that there’s an excellent chance that in the long run Diebold will be depicted as a good company that was badly run for a while by one bad man, but once he left, returned to goodness. This would make his resignation, ironically enough, a setback for that vanishingly small minority of us who care deeply about the legitimacy of our nation’s electoral process.
But hey, I’d love to be wrong about this.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Try Australia, or even India. Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.
India went simple - in a country where many villages are only accessable by elephant or similar transportation, and where there is a huge population (the electorate alone is over 660 million, more then twice the US popultion), they chose to use voting machines with the simplest of components - no operating systems, no databases, just simple electronics designed to allow an official to release one vote at a time to a voting board (list of candidates with a button beside each one), and then close the unit (no more votes could be cast).
E-voting isn't the problem, it's American politics. Privatized elections carried out with minimal or no government regulation will give you privatized results - not only have private e-voting companies refused to fix major flaws in their software, made untested and unapproved patches to voting machines hours before elections, but the results from those voting machines have been highly suspect - not just that e-voting districts have been the only ones that are wildly out of line with exit polls, and always in favor of the same party, but instances where outright fraud in favor of that same party is obvious - district e-voting machines reporting impossible numbers like many more votes then actual voters, and often negative votes for a non-republican candidate (i.e. Volusia County whose diebold machines recorded -16,022 votes for the democratic candidate). In Ohio the numbers got as high as -25 million votes for democratic candidates.
The "e-voting" concept should be ... the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it into the ballot box.
The computer counts the number of paper ballots it has printed for each candidate. This number can be released to the news agencies. But the real vote is the paper ballot.
At the end of the day, the names of the voters who used that machine are counted, the paper ballots are counted and both of those are compared to the total number of votes the machine says were cast. If they don't match, there is a problem.
In case of recount, the paper ballots are hand counted.
A random number of machines should also be checked against the ballots cast at them.
Multiple checks.
What is the US Secret Service doing?
l eges_company_plagued_1206.html
...
It is supposedly their responsibility to see that election fraud doesn't happen, yet the evidence of fraud is clear as a day.
Why? Are americans happy with this?
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_insider__al
Shortly before the election, ten days to two weeks, we were told that the date in the machine was malfunctioning, the source recalled. So we were told 'Apply this patch in a big rush. Later, the Diebold insider learned that the patches were never certified by the state of Georgia, as required by law.
Also, the clock inside the system was not fixed, said the insider. Its legendary how strange the outcome was; they ended up having the first Republican governor in who knows when and also strange outcomes in other races. I can say that the counties I worked in were heavily Democratic and elected a Republican.
To quote the latest article on the Black Box Voting site (and then some background below that):
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http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1559 5.html?1134523376
Due to security design issues and contractual non-performance, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho told Black Box Voting that he will never use Diebold in an election again. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. He will issue a formal announcement to this effect shortly.
Finnish security expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold lied to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the memory card.
A test election was run in Leon County today with a total of eight ballots - six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thomson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.
At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been:
Yes:2 No:6
However the results tape read:
Yes:7 No:1
The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator. The central tabulator is the "mothership" that pulls in all votes from voting machines. The results in the central tabulator read:
Yes:7 No:1
This proves that the votes themselves were changed in a one-step process that would not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure - using only a credit-card sized memory card.
Diebold Elections Systems head of research and development Pat Green specifically told the Cuyahoga County board of elections that votes could not be changed on the memory card.
According to Public Records responses obtained by Black Box Voting in response to our requests shows that Diebold promulgated this misrepresentation to as many as 800 state and local elections officials.
In other news, according to Bradblog a stockholder suit was filed today against Diebold by the law offices of Scott and Scott:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002153.htm
Permission to reprint granted with link to http://blackboxvoting.org/
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Jim again. Let me fill you in on the background.
Six months ago Leon County elections administrator Ion Sancho asked us (Black Box Voting) to "test hack" his Diebold optical scan system. We brought Finnish security expert Harri Hursti and Dr. Hugh Thomson from Florida along.
Dr. Thomson proved that the central tabulator's database (in MS-Access of all things) can be hacked without a retail copy of MS-Access present. He used Visual Basic to control the MS Jet database engine directly, using very small script files...small enough to be typed in via MS-Windows Notepad at the tabulator console. We already knew the MS-Access database was tamper-friendly but this was real-world proof that you didn't need to bring in and load a copy of Access to tamper. The same things can almost certainly be done in Java and probably other ways as well.
Harri Hursti pulled off something new.
The report co-written with Bev Harris proved it's possible to doctor the poll tapes. These are the end-of-day printouts showing the number of votes for each candidate or issue taken in on that machine. It's basically