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Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At a public hearing in California, Diebold's western region manager has admitted that the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fails to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards."
I used to work as a "Computer Audit Analyst" for the Florida Division of Elections, certifying voting systems for use in the State of Florida. Certification for Premier/Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia was pretty much a given, no matter the fact that their systems are complete shit and the certification process is a joke. Scan a few thousand ballots, have an independent testing lab review your source code, and you're good to go. Google "sequoia yellow button" to see what I mean.
Not to mention the attitudes of the folks who work there. They call people like me "activists" with a sour tone of voice, grudgingly fill public records requests, and the newly-built [2006] voting-systems lab was the size of a damn closet. Think the types of people who think F/OSS is so high-school students have something to tinker with.
Sadly, most American voters don't even think about the voting backend, and are wholly uninterested in the fact that three corporations have a legally-enforced triopoly in voting equipment, sell overpriced shit to the counties, and take legal action against anyone who finds security flaws in their systems.