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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."
the worst thing is even if the next election was rigged no body would really do anything.
Were the Diebold voting machines Euclidean or non-Euclidean? Without this key bit of information, we can't know if these programs intersected or not.
I live in Atlanta, and lived here in 2002. "King" Roy Barnes and Max Cleland didn't get "robbed" of anything. They lost their elections because they were both liberal Democrats running in a conservative state in a big Republican year. Barnes in particular had become so personally obnoxious that a good many in his own party crossed over to vote against him out of pure spite.
Good grief, people. Put the tinfoil hats away.
The first flag should've been that it was the CEO who performed the patch. If a CEO _ever_ gets his hands dirty, you can rest assured that there is something illegal going on that needs to be covered up.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
That's impossible. The bush administration would never use manipulate the Justice Department for political purposes.
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"
The story says "The computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds."
If that's accurate, that's astonishing to me.
I don't know much about "The Raw Story," which describes itself as an "alternative" news source. If this had appeared in the mainstream media I would regard it as something close to a smoking gun. I hope this isn't the end of the story.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Three problems with your point:
1) The patch was made to certified machines, thus making them non-certified.
2) It was only applied in 2 counties. (*cough*Democratic counties*cough*) Why not the whole state?
3) I'm fairly certain that if *I* merely open the ballot box or machine during the election, that satisfies the requirement for "tampering" regardless of me touching ballots or flipping bits, and I'd be making an extra stop at the local police precinct before going home.
Of course, it all depends on who's prosecuting and how it gets presented.
plus they don't count the absentee ballots unless the rigged results are close enough that the absentee ballots might change the outcome.
The CEO personally getting involved is more suspicious to me.
I mean Deibold is a fairly large company, why is the CEO applying patches to products in person?
And how often does he do this?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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."
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.
why is the CEO applying patches to products in person?
And how often does he do this?
Whenever he needs to get paid
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Credibility? You want credibility on an anonymous third-hand account of something that allegedly happened six years ago? Get real. There will be many, many claims of fraud, affairs, and other misdeeds against the Republicans in the next four months. To paraphrase Dan Rather "We're sure the story is true, even if the evidence doesn't support it".
It looks like from older sources that the CEO was traveling with a technician who actually installed the patch. The technician has since thought that it was an unusual thing to be doing. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked/2 "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
Go ahead and mod me down, I've got decent karma.
Yeah, bashing Karl Rove will really get you modded down on Slashdot. Who's next, RIAA?
Why is it that nobody seems to understand that the DoJ is an executive agency, therefore an extension of the President. There is no "politicizing" DoJ. It is inherently a political agency. Its purpose is to carry out the President's policy.
The purpose of the Attorney General under U.S. law is to represent the United States, not the President.
Why does it need to be a (wholly irrelevant) Bush hate-fest?
Because the president of Diebold publicly stated that he would do everything he could to elect Bush president? Because Bush's flunkies have been inappropriately pushing prosecutors to investigate purported election fraud when it benefitted them? Because Bush has created such a culture of cronyism and corruption that's trickled down throughout the entire DOJ has basically become completely unreliable?
If we talk while our enemy fights, we lose.
Yep and thus India remains firmly under British control.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.