In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Fighting For Our Future: Bev Harris
Voting Machines (Search TCS) and their makers, such as Dieblod (Search TCS) have been stories that we’ve been interested in here at TCS since the very beginning, with our link to Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century in our template being there from day one.
We’ve watched the story grow wider and wider, which can only be good news for the future of American. And it was great to see this article (its Salon, but if you watch an ad you can read the whole thing for free):
An open invitation to election fraud
Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.
...
according to Bev Harris, a writer who has spent more than a year investigating the shadowy world of the elections equipment industry, the replacement technologies the court cited may be worse -- much worse -- than the zany punch-card systems it finds so abhorrent. Specifically, Harris' research into Diebold, one of the largest providers of the new touch-screen systems, ought to give elections officials pause about mandating an all-electronic vote.
Harris has discovered that Diebold's voting software is so flawed that anyone with access to the system's computer can change the votes without leaving any record. On top of that, she's uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic -- Diebold even sent Harris a notice warning her that by posting the documents on the Web, she was infringing upon the company's intellectual property. Diebold did not return several calls for comment.
…
So what was the flaw?
Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.
So you can break in and then hide your tracks.
You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did.
Who would have access to this? Are we talking about elections officials?
A couple situations. Obviously anybody who has access to the computer, whether that's the election supervisor, their assistants, the IT people, the janitor -- anybody who has access to the computer can get into it.
Where is this computer -- is there one per county?
Yes, there's one per county.
…
There's nothing -- no security in this?
No, in fact in the memo, [Ken Clark, an engineer at Diebold] says specifically that they decided not to put a password on it because it was proving useful. They were using the back door to do end runs around the voting program. And he named two places where they were doing this, Gaston County, N.C., and King County, Wash.
Right, in the memo he says, "King county is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before."
What does that mean? Why would the counties find this useful?
I have no idea what they were doing. [But] because you can change anything on the database, they could have been doing anything, whether it was nefarious or just fixing a stupid thing that they had done. The problem is this: You should set up the program so that anything you do is going to be recorded and watched and audited -- it's official. There's nothing you can do that's legitimate by going into a back door that never records anything. If you need to go change some vote total because they came out wrong, that needs to be done publicly and the candidates should be aware of it. You don't do that by going into a back door.
This isn’t “chicken little” stuff. In fact, it looks as if our democracy has already been attacked, but that any evidence of it has been wiped clean. That sad thing is that we’ll never know.
And Georgia also had some wacky results, right?
They did. They had six upsets. The most famous one is Max Cleland [the Democratic senator and the incumbent]. That's because he was quite far ahead in the polls and an 11-point shift happened overnight and [Republican] Saxby Chambliss won instead. And the other upset that surprised people was Sonny Purdue, who was the first Republican governor elected in 134 years.
Do you think those elections were legitimate elections?
Well, I think that it was an illegal election in that they had no idea what software was on the machines at the time. Georgia was a situation where they had changed the software not once or twice but seven or eight times so it went through so many permutations without even being examined by anyone, and nobody has any idea what the machines did. [Harris says she confirmed these preelection changes to Diebold's software in conversations with Georgia voting officials, but Diebold denies that any changes were made. In February, Joseph Richardson, a spokesman for the company, told Salon: "We have analyzed that situation and have no indication of that happening at all."]
I do find this suspicious -- they have since scrubbed clean the flash memory and gotten rid of the small cards that store the results from each touch-screen machine. They've overwritten it with a whole new thing. What's amazing is you keep paper ballots for 22 months, and they're an awful lot bulkier than these credit card-size memory cards, but for some reason they felt compelled to get rid of them all. They have also overwritten all of the GEMS programs in the counting machines. They've gone through and overwritten everything in the state.
Dieblod has basically authenticated the memos by stating Harris’s posting of them is breaking copyright law, and if fact have made Harris take down Black Box Voting’s sister site: Black Box Voting.org, which now features only this message on the home page:
NOTICE
Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.We regret any inconvenience this may cause visitors and journalists to the blackboxvoting.org site and hope to have this matter resolved shortly.
In the interim, send questions or information requests to admin@blackboxvoting.org.
This matter cannot be taken seriously enough. Voting is the key to freedom. It is what protects our rights described in The Constitution, it is the means in which we try to live up to the ideals described in the Declaration of Independence.
If nothing is done about this, Diebold will be left guarding The Bill of Rights.
Diebold, Incorporated is now safeguarding the foundation of America’s history, the Charters of Freedom: the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, in three customized high-tech vaults installed at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. The recently renovated rotunda and re-encasement of the Charter documents is being unveiled to the public on Thursday, September 18, 2003 at 10 a.m.
oh. Not good. Sometimes irony really stings.
- rob 12:37 PM - [PermaLink] -
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