Diebold Threatens Wary Voting Clerk

An anonymous reader writes "From the Salt Lake Tribune: a wary county clerk called in BlackBoxVoting.org to test the integrity of Diebold voting fraud machines, part of a recent $27 million statewide purchase (to make sure that only the "Right" candidates win). Diebold goon says machines are now jinxed and it may cost up to $40,000 to fly in a company witch-doctor to make sure there were no warranty violations. Since EVERY SINGLE VOTER who uses these machines is a potential hacker looking to alter election results, why is Diebold so concerned? "

Comments

Answer

[daveschroeder]

Since EVERY SINGLE VOTER who uses these machines is a potential hacker looking to alter election results, why is Diebold so concerned?

Because EVERY SINGLE VOTER isn't allowed a level of access to the machines to presumably perform an audit or otherwise tamper with and/or view the inner workings of the machines.

The solution is quite simple:

- Have a permanent, voter verifiable, auditable, and recountable paper trail (a feature Diebold and ES&S both offer)

- Have an open source system (which actually isn't at all required if the above condition is met)

couple points of info

[frankie]

The article blurb here is low on detail and high on gasoline, so here's some tidbits:

1. Emery County is majority Republican in both population and voting.
2. Bruce Funk was not skeptical of the machines until after inspecting them.
3. He was, however, a bit worried that the state expected local officials to be responsible for all problems, but mandated the use of these machines.
4. He then noticed that supposedly identical & pristine machines had widely differing amounts of free memory.
5. Rather than go to the state or to Diebold, he called Black Box Voting.
6. It's really doubtful that (as Diebold claims) font differences could eat up 20MB.

Some more information about the testing...

[no haters]

Over at blackboxvoting.org they have some more information about what tests were actually run on the machines, what they found, and what diebold's official response was. Apparently, BBV did not actually do the tests themselves, they arranged for 3rd party security experts to go in and do the analysis.

Here's the link:

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth .cgi?file=/1954/19743.html

It's on black box voting's website, so obviously it will be biased, but at least it gives more detail than the gloss-over provided by the tribune.

It is a serious problem.

[Irvu]

In answer to the poster's question Diebold is behaving this way because the machines are not secure nor can they be. Anyone who gets a close look at them can see that. Diebold, like ES&S, and Sequoia is opting to muscle in and abuse people rather than admit that no machine is perfect and try to make them as good as possible.

The companies have done similar things in other states. In Florida All 3 have refused to sell any systems to Volusia County. The county's Election Director Ion Sancho was the one who allowed his systems to be tested for security and discovered the "Hrusti Hack" namely whereby the machines will load arbitrary code stored on their memory cards and execute them. Such a hack makes it trivial to change ballots, erase totals, etc. It has since been shown that systems by Sequoia Inc. are vulnerable to the same hack.

Volusia county is also the county that caused Al Gore to initially declare defeat in 2000. During election night Al Gore was leading Bush with a comfortable margin. At 10om someone uploaded a card that reported -16,022 votes for Al Gore and 10,000 for some socialist canidate all from a precinct with 600 voters.

This card passed all of Diebold's stringent "safety checks" (whatever the hell they were) and changed the statewide totals putting Gore well behind Bush. Gore declared defeat. After that the county discovered the errors and reset the system claiming that the new totals were correct. Nevertheles the fact remains that the card got in, was loaded, and threw off a U.S. Presidential election.

Now the companys won't sell to Volusia and are telling the state and the feds that it's Sancho's fault because he wants to test the systems for security. Florida's Governor Jeb Bush (brother of shrub) has also personally blamed Sancho for putting the state behind.

Meanwhile the Department of Justice is threatening to sue the state or withold funds because the county has not bought new systems even though noone will sell said systems to them. The idea being, apparently, that he should just sell out the elections.

At the end of the day the collusion and bullying going o by the companies, by the U.S. Government over HAVA (written by Bob Ney former congressmen for Diebold and now a leading figure in the Abramoff corruption investigation) and by frightened state governments is insane. At the end of the day the only losers will be the American People, of all stripes.

Re:what does it matter?

[swillden]

o you've never heard of having a different voting slip for each actual office position then... and putting the marked slips in the correct boxes makes things easier at the counting places as well

We'd need at least 30 boxes. That's just impractical. Come to that, it's better to put everything on one paper ballot and then figure out how to count (which is what has been done for many, many years).

You have to remember how governments are structured in the US. City, County, State and Federal governments are all separate, and we vote for offices for each. Within each government, executive, legislative and judicial branches are separate, and we vote for people in most of them. On top of that are ballot initiatives at the city, county and state level.

Whether or not having so many choices actually improves democracy is an open question, but this is the system we have, and the voting approach must work with it.

County Clerk != Voting Clerk

[ishmalius]

Just a short civics refresher: A voting clerk is usually a retired little old lady volunteering to watch a polling station. A county clerk is a prominent elected official. Depending on the laws of the state, the county clerk likely has more than sufficient legal powers to call the election procedures into question. The summary makes the person sound like a poor downtrodden powerless gnome being bullied by an evil corporation. Maybe the story should tilt just a little bit in the other direction. But, still, more power to anyone who fights this questionable product.

Are you aware of the test in Florida?

[VP]

Black Box Voting demonstrated in Florida that whoever has access to the flash memory card, used to keep track of the votes can determine the results of the voting on that machine: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1559 5.html?1141791589. No tinkering with the machine is necessary.

I would say even the submitter's point of view is not biased enough - Diebold should get a corporation death penalty for even agreeing to provide voting machines without paper trail. This is such no-brainer, that no amount of outrage is sufficient.

I took apart an ES&S touchscreen voting machi

[goombah99]

I went to a demo-day for voting machines. When I got to the voting booth no one could see what I was doing. So I flipped over the machine, and removed the back panel. I yanked out the voting flash cards. put them in my pocket. Then I took them back out of my pocket and put them back into the machine. This was all done while two vendors stood 3 feet away watching just me. their was no curtain either, just the carol enclosure was sufficient to obsure their view.
Not making this up.

I noticed that the next time they cam to town thie newer model which has a paper logger attached no longer fit in the voting carol, So it was mounted on a stand and this would have been slightly harder to flip upside down. On the otherhand if I were a poll worker this would not have been a problem. The places where the tags and seals attach is easily defeated since you can snap out the plastic hinges.

The point here is not that you fould not make one with a better design but that they chose not to. Just as diebold chose to use interpreted code on the ballot configuration cards that has the authority to re-write the vote files.

SO it's not that you cannot make a secure system--eventually--but that there isn't even the slightest effort to attend to some mac-truck size holes. they know they are their and they prefer to hide them in propriatary obfuscation not secure them. These are not people we can just trust because they seem nice. You have every right to be 100% skeptical because every time someone looks hard we find they are not fixed right.