Citing concerns that Diebold Election Systems installed uncertified software on some electronic voting systems in a California county without the state's knowledge, officials are forcing the company to pay for an audit of all the company's voting machines used in the state in order to win certification for a new model ...
Last week, the voting systems panel surprised Diebold executives and county officials when it halted certification of the TSx system, saying it had received "disconcerting information" about the company violating state election law by installing uncertified software on Alameda County voting systems.
The software, known as GEMS, for General Election Management System, runs on the server which sits in county election centers. GEMS is responsible for tabulating votes sent in from precincts and producing reports from the results.
GEMS is used with Diebold's optical scan system as well as its touch-screen units. And since 12 California counties use the optical scan machines and a thirteenth uses the TS machines also used in Alameda, the state is concerned the problem may exist elsewhere. Los Angeles County also uses a few touch-screen machines for early voting.
But lets stop hearing other people talk about problems with Diebold, let's here from within Diebold itself:
Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new.
4K Smart cards which had never been previously programmed are being recognized by the Card Manager as manager cards. When a virgin card from CardLogix is inserted into a Spyrus (have tried CM-0-2-9 and CM-1-1-1) the prompt "Upgrade Mgr Card?" is displayed. Pressing the ENTER key creates a valid manager card. This happens in Admin mode and Election mode.
It does not matter whether we get anything certified or not, if we can't even get the foundation of Global stable. This company is a mess! We should stop development on all new, and old products and concentrate on making them stable instead of showing vaporware. Selling a new account will only load more crap on an already over burdened entity.
Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed.
I feel confident about the validity of the results of some of these elections, don't you? Hey Maryland (and others) your tax payer dollars are being used to give an incompetent company money to steal you vote!
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