BBV update: Diebold hid major flaws

[AmBlue]

Fasten your seatbelts: It's time to bring this thing in for a landing

original at
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/14296.html

Posted on Thursday, November 17, 2005 - 02:50 pm:


Two testing labs in Huntsville, Alabama need to be visited by people
with badges, guns and search warrants. The small offshoot office of
Ciber Labs, run by Shawn Southworth, and the Wyle Labs office which
has been supervised by Jim Dearman, are responsible for repeatedly
certifying defective voting machines that violate Federal Election
Commission standards.

1. New California report confirms that a security problem identified
by Harri Hursti affects both touch-screens and optical scans – Diebold
Election Systems' whole product line.

2. Records obtained by Black Box Voting show that Diebold executives
lied to the Arizona Secretary of State, the Cuyahoga County Board of
Elections, and to hundreds of elections officials throughout the U.S.
about the existence of specific defects.

<snip>

This is a government boondoggle. It won't be solved by being
politically correct.

PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED, WITH LINK TO http://www.blackboxvoting.org


Jim March
BBV Citizen Watchdog
Username: Jimmarch

Post Number: 61
Registered: 01-2005

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)Posted on Thursday, November 17, 2005 - 05:39 pm:


Let's clarify something regarding the absentee ballot processing on
any Diebold system (optical scan county or touchscreen county):

Since mid-2003, Bev Harris has been pointing out the easy
"hackability' of the GEMS central tabulator database: how it can be
hand-edited with a standard copy of MS-Access. We later learned that
it doesn't even take Access present to do it - somebody who knows what
they're doing can type a quick Visual Basic script or Java script in
plain ol' Notepad as Dr. Thompson showed.

Diebold's response has always been "yeah, but then the results in GEMS
won't match the end-of-day tapes at each polling place". And it's true
that both optical scan and touchscreen terminals produce a "results
printout" on cash-register-type-paper showing how many votes were
taken in for each candidate and/or issue. The list looks a bit like:

PRESIDENT
Bush: 46
Kerry: 50

Proposition X:
Yes: 56
No: 34

...and so on, a daily total often three feet or more worth all folded
up and forming a paper audit record stuffed into the official results
envelope by pollworkers.

Good feature. It's open to hacking as Hari Hursti discovered in Leon
County FL but let's ignore that for the moment.

Folks, THERE IS NO SUCH RESULTS PRINTOUT (VOTING MACHINE TAPE) FOR
ABSENTEE BALLOT PROCESSING.

The Diebold absentee ballot optical scanners ("Central Count") don't
record the vote totals this way, even though they're based on the same
hardware as a standard precinct optical scan AND they have the little
printer installed! They could easily print results for each "batch" of
absentees but that feature is completely turned off.

By Diebold.

Which makes the original "GEMS hack" we've been screaming about since
'03 a serious danger, more than Diebold has EVER admitted.

And the only reason we know is that the Libertarians were kind enough
to hire us to inspect the systems in a handful of California counties.

Jim March

[sam sarrha]

1. recomended ....

:kick:

[Land Shark]

2. kicked and recommended for consideration; high tech content

[babsbunny]

3. Why do people hate Bev

At Blackbox voting?

[Kelvin Mace]

5. You can answer that question by reading these threads

where Bev damns herself with her own words, smears and lies.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x340188

She came damn close to discrediting the entire movement due to massive ego.

Still waiting on her to account for over a million dollar in donations.

[onthebench]

4. I knew Jim and Shawn and they are not the problem

I knew them pretty well. I have been to both facilities on the inside. The problem is not the labs. It was the standards. The standards are so loose that my son's toy calculator could qualify as a voting machine. I know that they try to get the standards tighter but they are shut down by the NASED people. The bulleye should be on the Secretaries of States and their technical gurus that whisper in their ears. Most technical state experts are appointed and stay through many administrations.

Bottom line is that the standards are loosely written. They are written for 10 year old computer technology. States don't add their own tougher standards on the machines. If you want to search someone, go to the SOS offices and set up 50 state protest camps a la Sheehan and demand for better standards.

[Bill Bored]

6. Yo Bench dude, welcome to DU!

Could you please post a few more times so I can send you a private message (PM)? I can't do it now because of your piddlingly low post count! There are rules about that sort of thing.

Thanks!

[onthebench]

7. As a newbie I did not know about limits

But it makes sense being that there are always disruptors.

Thanks for the welcome. I was on DU a few years ago under a different name. I had used my work email address which is now different so I could not get my old password. I was in the election biz as I implied before. I am no longer in the biz as my screen name implies. I know a lot of the old stories. I know a lot of the county people and the vendors and some activists also. I do not believe that evil doings are afoot other than some hard driving business people just looking for a buck. My opinion of election officials is that they are just not smart enough or just do not care enough to figure out what is going on. They like being wined and dined by the vendors. They like having the attention and now the power that 2000 thrust on them. Yes they always had such power but as citizen's we never acknowledged that power. Now they get to spend money on new equipment.

I know how important that voting is. I know that this issue should transcend the every day dog eat dog of the business world but in practicality it does not. The vendors are like all other technology vendor that promises everything, delivers minimums, and performs most of the time. By using Wyle labs, the FEC thought that the same attention that is given to the satellite and weapon systems that they test would be given to voting machines. The sad fact is that Wyle is given a protocol to test that is substandard. It is like have a car tested to make sure the engine works but not requiring a test of the steering and seat belts.

Turkey is now taking over brain...losing thoughts fast...will try again later...

[Bill Bored]

8. Ha! And here I thought Bench meant some kind of bench tech!

Shows where my head is at!

But I know what you mean. I used to eat vendors for breakfast myself but so far I've been unimpressed with the way these elections professionals seem to deal with them. Seems like they're either too stupid or too lazy to demand what they want and let the vendors jump through hoops and claw each other to death trying to provide it, as they should do. After all, that's what vendors are for right? :)

[onthebench]

9. That's right - I am riding the pine

It also could connotate something about being a judge as well.

For the election officials it is just because they lack the experience. The only time that they saw vendors was at national conferences where the wine flowed and they danced til dawn. The vendors were their buddies that helped them get the funding so that they could buy the machines in the first place. I recall a story of a county official wanting to get rid of his 800 lb lever machines because he could not get parts for them anymore. This was in 1992. When he asked the local county board for money to change the machines, they rejected him. He did not even have a particular machine in mind. Then at a national meeting he mentioned it to one of the vendors and the vendor worked the local county purse strings until one day (out of the blue) the official got his proposal for money signed. Since that vendor got the money for him, he just went with that vendor. From knowing the person a little, I did not detect a sleazy thing. He just was the lowly election department that could not even get (in 1992) those new fangled things called desktop computers for his office so he could automate the registration information.

Once 2000 hit, the county officials had no training on how to buy the billions that were going to come down the pike. No one wanted to try any new vendors as the old ones that sold them their paper ballots were the ones that they knew. Heck, ESS offered a 5% kick back to the Florida Election Officials organization for every contract. When mentioned in the news, none of the officials said that anything was wrong. That is when I knew that this was going to be a mess.

[onthebench]

10. If you really need to PM...

You can send an email to [e-mail]