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Diebold Voting Machines DESIGNED for Election Fraud
(Matthew Cardinale, YubaNet.com, Jun 4, 2005)
Two new and startling discoveries announced by Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org indicate that Diebold Optical Scan Machines are vulnerable to, and designed for, hacking that would modify the results of an election. . . . Whereas Touch Screen voting machines have received the most attention, she asserts, Optical Scanning Machines pose as much cause for concern based on recent findings. . . . "This is really the most important thing," Harris said. "Yes we can hack the poll tapes [and the Central Tabulator]. But what we've learned is there is a 'built-in' [on the individual machines] that provides the mechanism to hack any election on the poll tapes in the Diebold Optical Scan System." . . . "It's probably not an accident," Harris said, "because you can look back through the source code to see that [Diebold] went through some programming contortions to keep this thing there. It had to have been expensive for them, frankly." . . . Hursti is said to have confirmed that the built-in hacking program ‘lived' in the memory card of the "ballot box" on individual election machines, according to Harris. "What this means is that the program operates on the votes. You can change what's on there; it's just a disk," Harris said. . . . "So when the Optical Scan Machine asks it to count the votes, instead of using its own program to count the vote, it asks the ballot box how it should count, and that is what's so bizarre," Harris explained. . . . Ion Sancho, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, reportedly allowed Harris and her experts to conduct a number of testing and auditing operations on their Diebold Scanning Equipment in recent months. . . . "Mr. Sancho is famous for his integrity and openness," Harris said. "We wanted to get a county with an Optical Scan System so we could prove once and for all if they're vulnerable." . . . A series of demonstrations were held on February 14, May 02, and May 26, 2005, in Leon County Elections Offices, she said. . . . With U.S. Representatives Corinne Brown (D-FL) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) on hand, Dr. Herbert Thompson, a Professor of Computer Science, took less than five minutes to "hack" a Central Tabulator in the second public audit on May 02, 2005, Harris asserts. . . . "[Election officials] loaded up an actual election. Elections are saved as a file. And [Dr. Thompson] went in and had his way with it," Harris said. . . . "The second time they'd put in additional security measures, unbeknownst to us, and he got in even faster," Harris said. "And [U.S. Rep.] Corrine Brown said, can you make it so it changes, say one in every 5 votes? And [Dr. Thompson] was like, no problem! And she said, it IS a problem!" . . . It was after discovering problems with the Central Tabulator, that the BlackBoxVoting Team turned their attentions to the individual scanning machines. . . . "My question was, can you [hack the machines] in a way that wouldn't be detected. And the answer we found is yes, absolutely." . . . "We proved it by going down there," she said. On May 26, 2005, "We made bogus memory cards. We put them on the machines. And the cards told the voting machines how to come out. It proved the memory card was controlling the machine and not the other way around," Harris said. . . . "We used real election results from Leon County. We simply re-wrote the program on the card, and we manipulated the recording of the voting. It would flip em, it would do different things, and the results came out wrong," she said. . . . "Everybody is like, oh, paper ballots, we can check them if we need to, but that's not a true statement. That's the big distraction." Harris cites a number of cases where recounts of the actual ballots were not allowed by state officials. . . . Diebold's computer program is written in ABO basic, a new language written by Diebold. "They made up their own computer language!" Harris said. "Which is a flat-out violation of all FEC standards. It's completely against federal law not to use standard language."

posted by Lorenzo 10:42 AM