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Diebold Patch May Be Evidence of '02 Election Tampering
An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Spoonamore, founder of IT security firm Cybrinth and former advisor to John McCain, claims he has new evidence of election tampering by Diebold in the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senate races. A whistleblower gave Spoonamore a patch that was applied to Diebold machines in person by the Diebold CEO. Spoonamore confirmed that the patch did not correct the clock problem it supposedly addressed, but contained two parallel programs. Without access to the hardware, he could not learn more. He reported his findings to the Justice Department, which has not acted."
As an IT support person, the scope of the Diebold patch update is suspicious. Why just two counties? Why not the whole state? Why a special trip by the CEO? Too many bells are going off here.
When I did IT updates. I would update a few test configurations and select users then let them run for a bit. Then roll out to the masses. About 2,500 PCs if you will.
The justice department needs to begin investigating this immediately.
This whole situation stinks to high heaven.
Thanks,
Jim
Remember folks, Diebold is now known as "Premier Election Solutions"--they changed their name to get away from the bad PR! So don't call them "Diebold" any more and don't forget!
Just like MediaSentry becoming "SafeNet", we shouldn't be so quick to forget who the scumbags are!
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
2003;
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
plus they don't count the absentee ballots unless the rigged results are close enough that the absentee ballots might change the outcome.
Interesting that he's not mentioned in the summary, but several other sources seem to indicate that Karl Rove is behind this.
Go ahead and mod me down, I've got decent karma.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Here in Oregon, enough people were opting to vote by mail that they just decided to get rid of polling places altogether. We do still have ballot boxes at various community locations (libraries, schools, etc.) so you can drop off your ballot instead of paying for postage.
Oregon's vote by mail system does not protect against vote buying. However, Oregon citizens are willing to risk that potential danger in exchange for the ability to have voting parties, where a group of friends can get together, discuss each issue on the ballot, answer each other's questions, and make an informed decision while eating cookies and generally enjoying each other's company.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
And how is this making war against the United States or giving Aid and Comfort to it's enemies in time of war? Here in the USA, that's how treason is defined in the Constitution. Calling any and everything you don't like "treason" is exactly why it was defined that way, and why the Constitution specifies that a conviction can only be obtained by direct confession in open court or on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act. I knew that the standards of education here were dropping, but I didn't thing they'd dropped that far.
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Jeff Dean, Senior Vice-President and Senior Programmer at Global Election Systems (GES), the company purchased by Diebold in 2002 which became Diebold Election Systems, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft for planting back doors in software he created for ATMs using, according to court documents, a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of two years[8]. In addition to Dean, GES employed a number of other convicted felons in senior positions, including a fraudulent securities trader and a drug trafficker.
Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute has analyzed the source code used in these voting machines and reports "this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.
Following the publication of this paper, the State of Maryland hired Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform another analysis of the Diebold voting machines. SAIC concluded "[t]he system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise."
Hm, you're right, there's only a few dozen websites out there claim Bob Urosevich was the CEO of Diebold Election Systems.
As far as I can tell his "official" title was, Bob Urosevich was the President of Diebold Election Systems from January 2002 until the second half of 2004. Prior to 2002, he was the Chief Operating Officer and President of Global Election Systems (which was bought by Diebold).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Actually, he was President of Diebold Election Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Diebold... a slight oversight, but not as simply wrong as you make it out to be (and it's understandable how one might confuse it with the parent company). See for example http://web.archive.org/web/20030811034309/www.diebold.com/news/newsdisp.asp?id=2915.
Oh, God, no! Once US troops leave, Iraqi insurgents will be able to kill... other Iraqi people. Big deal to you, eh? Are you aware of all the other wars and everyday murders of innocent people (including children) in the rest of the world?
"Diebold Election Systems, Inc.", the subsidiary of Diebold, Inc. involved in electronic voting systems, was renamed "Premier Election Solutions", a.k.a. Premier or PES. The parent company remains Diebold.
I wonder how many people have stopped to think through the implications of this charge. If it's proven to be true, it could very well mean Diebold's CEO is guilty of treason.
Treason eh, you mean like intentionally exposing a secret agent's identity to the enemy? We all see how effective the government with an executive branch controlled by the Republicans has been at prosecuting treason committed by their fellow party members.
" Remember, remember the Fifth of November, The Gunpowder Treason and Plot, I know of no reason Why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot. "
When one cites this case, can't the argument be made that the USA is just like any other third world country?
If you asked me, I'd say "yes" "yes" "yes" it is.
And I'd say you're an idiot.
You obviously don't know what a third world country is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
The quality of elections is not a characteristic upon which you can base which "World" a country is in. As a matter of fact, you can't even use the phrase "third world country" without accepting that the frame of reference is to the Cold War, where the USA & friends = the first world and the Soviets & friends = the second world.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Though some of the fungi in military showers can be pretty tough.
So can a ground fault
in case first link fails
What?
The story doesn't appear at the linked URL anymore.
And, it's been scrubbed from Google's cache. A search shows a matching page, but clicking the link for the cache brings up no document found.
I hope somebody kept a copy ... assuming that person hasn't been disappeared.
What fake documents? Wingnuts screamed accusations, the military declined to confirm or deny their authenticity, but no one ever proved them to be fake unless I missed it, and I was paying attention. They most certainly were not composed in Microsoft Word, as most of the accusations went. A close comparison of the number symbols in the document to Word's various typewriter-style fonts easily proves that.
They never proved the documents were fake... just that they weren't originals.
The problem with the American educational system is not, at the moment, a lack of money.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Then, why isn't Donald Rumsfeld, at least, in jail? The instructions to make that prison the way it was came from the top. The punishment should reach there too.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
ohhh, the sight of anonymous asking for cites tingles my irony ...
cnn good enough for you?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
The claims that the documents were fake, were based on the incorrect belief that typewriters could not produce superscript "st" and "nd"... this argument is patently false as many typewriters were available during that time which did in fact have those keys. It's another example of the way evidence can be shouted down by loud morons with an agenda. Just to be clear on this... I have used many typewriters that had fonts other than courier and countless typewriters that had fancy keys. Once electric typewriters appeared on the scene, kerning fonts started to appear too. STOP REPEATING THIS BULL-SHIT abbout the documents being fake.
"At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before."
"Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British."
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I'm a former typewriter technician from 'those days'. You are ignoring some significant information.
Back 'then', and up to about 1990, typewriters were, as you pointed out, capable of printing fonts other than Courier and Prestige Elite. Such machines were somewhat rare, the most common alternative being Orator from IBM.
More significant, however were two features of 'those' documents: Proportional spacing and text centering. These capabilities were significantly less common, and centering is not a typewriter feature - it is an operator's skill.
Looking at one of the documents here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guardgif.gif, you can see in the first paragraph the word 'Ellington'. It appears to me that the 'i' is properly spaced for proportional type. This limits the available typeariters at that time to pretyt much the IBM Executive or IBM Composer, neither of which were common, and both would have been uncommon on GSA purchasing. It's possible that the Lt. Colonel who is shown as the author could have a clerk using one of these, but very unlikely.
More interesting, the unit designation in the second paragraph, 111th F.L.S., has the superscripted 'th'. I don't think this was common on even the Composer, but maybe the Excecutive would have had that character. So this document was probably typed on an IBM Excecutive machine?
It doesn't seem likely that this was typed on any Selectric machine. There are characteristics that pretyt much leave out a Selectrtic as the source.
This picture of the document is pretty much inadequate for more serious analysis, sadly. It's been thorugh too many duplications, and many characteristics of the type are lost and useless for further investigation. Looking at the 'r's in the document, some are missing serifs. The word 'MEMORANDUM' has the 'R' dropped significantly, where further on the line the word 'FOR' is fairly well aligned. This is not easy to do on a typewriter, but then again the quality of the picture makes it nearly impossible to do a better analysis.
When I first saw these documents, I was astonished. These were not typed.
Oh, and the centering? On a proportional space machine, this is not a trivial operation. You need to space characters using 1,3,4, or 5 sub-spaces, and I forget the technical term for this level of escapment. A fair amount of training, and practice, are necessary. Maybe the clerk for a Pentagon commander has this skill, but not likely the clerk for a Texas ANG officer.
Nice try, but this was a fake. Though I'd LOVE to see the originals. The ink and impressions would answer a lot of questions. Copies fail these tests.
Give it up. Rather was fooled, and willingly so.
Let's ban all-electronic balloting so WE won't get fooled again, k?
ps- you wrote "The claims that the documents were fake, were based on the incorrect belief that typewriters could not produce superscript "st" and "nd"". Name me four. Hint, one I mentioned above. Second hint, ignore Adler typewriters, none used in GSA back then. Third hint, ignore Smith-Corona, Facit, Underwood, they dndn't make that sort of machine. Fourth hint, stick to IBM, Olympia, Royal. NOt so sure about Royal. You don't know typewriters.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Al queda marginal regional thugs? Are you totally unaware of the facts? they WON a war with the USSR! Bin Laden's real skill has always been raising tons of arab oil money to finance them. They have been well funded( sometimes by the US) for decades.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
The point being that Indians were lucky (some might say "blessed", but I wouldn't) that they were forced to nonviolence because they had no alternative. Lucky because nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, the mightiest force in the world. Mightier than the atom bomb. Since Indians were forced by lack of alternatives, not so much from any greater enlightenment, they failed to stay nonviolent once the British were out.
And that's why their resorting to violence lost India Pakistan. Which of course is the greatest turning point in world history of the last century apart from the splitting of the Allies into the Cold War with the Soviets. And the Pakistan war is still raging 60 years later. In Afghanistan, Pakistan's secret police's colony, Pakistan is "winning". And along the Pakistan/India border, their nuclear "Cold War" (that is not infrequently a hot, shooting war), the brink is usually closer than it ever was between the US/SU, but for a couple-few times some fool actually ordered the launch of armageddon.
Gandhi was of course not criticizing nonviolence. He was criticizing the weakness of Indians who abandoned it once it was no longer necessity, though nonviolence was the mightier force. Through it India and "Pakistan" could have gone down a road that these weaker forces, including nukes, only make more dangerous to everyone.
--
make install -not war
This is a categoric misapprehension, and specious, not only to say astoundingly wrong. the Department of Justic administrates the application of federal law. It is NOT an arm of the executive branch.
The executive branch retains the privilege of installing administrative heads of cabinet, secretarys, and etc. it does not exercise operational or even policy control over departments.
I sincerely hope you are not, as your .sig implies, a lawyer for anyone, or at least for anyone involved in litigating a federal case.
Cite this ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...
./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median
in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,
looking 20-50 years down the line, and the kind of world we want to live in
then? You think a festering cesspool of little dictators with access to nukes
or radiological bombs would be a bright place to live? If nothing else, Iraq 2
has started to drain the swamp.
Here.
See above.
Here.
Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.
He suspended habeas corpus despite the Constitution explicitly mandating that only Congress could do that.
So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq, and how exactly would that have been better for the US's future?
They wouldn't have invaded Iraq. We would have a trillion dollars more in our pocket than we do now, we wouldn't have seriously damaged international relations and lost as much clout as we have, and about a half million Iraqis would probably still be alive.
Should we ignore the problem represented by the *entire* mideast, till someone pops a nuke in an American city?
Here's where your lack of knowledge of the situation really kicks in. The "mideast" isn't a monolithic entity out for blood, it's a highly fragmented mix of different nations, ethnicities, and ideologies. We don't have the resources to invade every country, so we have to actually deal with the mideast problems individually. Afghanistan needed to be invaded. Nobody, including Obama, has criticized Bush on the subject of invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq was an idiotic mistake. Now if Iran gets close to developing nuclear weapons, invasion might be necessary; however, since we've spent so much militarily and diplomatically on Iraq, we might not be able to deal with Iran.
The weapons inspector program worked. Saddam didn't have WMD and he wasn't building them. All invading did was show the rest of the world that not having nuclear weapons makes you vulnerable. North Korea simply announced that they had nuclear weapons and would use them if they felt like it, and Bush knuckled under and suddenly insisted on diplomacy rather than force. This is a kind of cowardice that severely undercuts our ability to deal with future despots with nuclear weapons.
I've usually found
You've missed another point. There aren't a finite amount of terrorists, and if we kill them all we win. New ones are created every day, and all using overwhelming force like we have done in Iraq does is create new ones. Invading Iraq was the wrong move to make. It made the world less safe of a place. If your judgment is so faulty that you can't see that simple fact, then you're certainly not someone I can trust to look 30-50 years in the future.
Please, for the sake of our country, try and read a little bit. Whatever political beliefs you may have, knowing a little bit of history will make you a better citizen. Wikipedia may not be completely unbiased, but it's a good starting point.
Here's a quick overview...
An alliance of tribal chiefs (the Mujahideen) with support from three successive U.S. administrations from Carter to Bush I (are you old enough to remember all those Stinger missiles?) was the primary opposition to the USSR's invation. Once the USSR withdrew -- starting in 1989 and primarily due to economic reasons of their own making -- a civil war ravaged the country as the various warlords jockeyed for position. Eventually, the winning group, a psychotic group of religious fanatics known as the Taliban, took control and ruled as a theocracy until we overthrew that overnment.
It was under the protection of the Taliban that al-Queda -- not even a cohesive group until 1988 -- was able to establish terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Now, I can already foresee the attacks on this post:
1. many of the founders of al-Queda were part of the Mujahideen
2. their ability to fund their operations was perfected during that war and the subsequent civil war
3. Bin Laden, who led the group that was later to become al-Queda, did have a broader view than just the regional conflict
However, to claim that Al queda WON a war with the USSR is a gross misrepresentation of history.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Errr....I think someone has a grave misunderstanding of how our electoral system works in the U.S.
Speaking as a deputy director of a Board of Elections[1] in Ohio, I will say that yes we DO count all of the absentee ballots, regardless of how unbalanced the race results are. The absentees are counted and are included in the results that we report on election day after the polls close.
And for those who maintain that provisional ballots aren't counted either...yes, we count those too. And, once again, we count them regardless of how unbalanced the race results are.
Provisional votes, however, are not counted on election day; we have to research the validity of every provisional ballot in the 10 days after the election to ensure whether or not it can be counted.
It's funny. Just yesterday one of the 4 board members called into the office to report that his mother -- a cashier at one of the local restaurants -- was talking to a customer who informed her that "naw...I ain't votin' absentee...they never count them votes!" This seems to be a very common belief in America. Completely wrong, but pretty common.
footnotes:
[1] Our county uses the Diebold touchscreen machines, in case you care. Personally, I've worked in debugging software for more than a decade and am a luddite when it comes to election technology.
I think we'd be better off if we still used the old punchcards. They were cheaper, non-proprietary, simpler for our non-tech-savvy poll workers to understand, cheaper, easier to archive, and a lot less hassle overall. (Oh...and did I mention they were a lot cheaper?)
Now we can argue that had Labour not won and had the Tories refused to grant independence that the situation would have degenerated and the British forced out anyway as happened in Iraq, Palestine, Iran, etc. etc. But independence had been an objective for Labour for decades.
The key difference between the Diebold situation and the McCain attempt to sabotage Obama's trip to Afghanistan is that we have no direct evidence to link the Diebold situation to the party that benefited. But we do know that McCain did in fact reveal Obama's trip and the only room for speculation is whether it was reckless or intentional.
I don't see how either is a recommendation for McCain. Was he as cavalier with confidential information when he was in the military? Is that why his career ended at captain and he was never on track to become a flag officer?
Why is it ok for McCain to make this statement that could get Obama killed but not ok for people to point out the fact that McCain is too old for the job? Perhaps he let the information drop because he is already going senile. I think that is a fair debate to have. Why is it ok for McCain to joke about 'seizure club' but not ok for people to ask if he is too old?
Why is it ok for McCain to put US servicemens lives at risk in this way but not ok for people to ask about the nature of the military service that he bases his entire campaign on? A fighter pilot that graduates bottom of his class and looses three planes is not exactly the first choice for a President. Maybe if he had studied harder and not had such a party reputation he would not have been shot down in the first place.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/