Unbelievable that Diebold has been able to get away with all this crap....so far.

Brad...

...You and I both know why nothing was done...it was PLANNED that way.

...This electronic voting system was designed to cheat.

...I think you should re-Headline the piece to reflect that.

I’m listening to The Randi Rhodes show right now and a very interesting show indeed! She just interviewed the chief Marketing Officer of ChoicePoint because he wanted to refute “blogger (here we go again)” Greg Palast’s earlier appearance discussing the new book he AUTHORED.

Once again as with Brad’s “debate” on the radio recently with an election official, he wouldn’t agree to come on the show unless Palast was on hold during his interview. These “bloggers” (or the truth) are just too intimidating I guess.

Go here to download the Rhodes show from May 16th.

It's long overdue that Diebold's chickens come home to roost.

Hursti, BBV, Security Innovations, Bev Harris, Bruce Funk, Stephen Heller and Ion Sancho have been heroic pathbreakers in getting the goods on these machines and some of them have paid a heavy personal price. With Hursti's most recent revelations--that some of the vulnerabilities CANNOT BE REPAIRED OR MADE SECURE--it begs the question how any election official can continue to use these machines.

Diebold memos have long revealed that they knew about various security vulnerabilities yet chose to do nothing, presumably because it was more convenient for their staff.

It is even harder to understand how Election Boards across the country can continue to believe Diebold's steady stream of oft-repeated lies.

These machines should have their certification revoked immediately and states, counties and municipalities that have purchased their machines should give serious thought to legal proceedings against Diebold.

Locations that purchased other voting machines should entertain the possibility that their equipment is every bit as unreliable and insecure as Diebold.

This is the time for citizens to get informed and start asking question. (Ask at blackboxvoting.org in the 1-on-1 Consulting forum if you want to take action in your local area but you're not sure how to proceed.)

Thanks for all you do Brad. I haven't emailed my friends or relatives for a long time about the election 2004 irregularities. But now I think I am going to remind everyone within reach of my email account about my previous claims that e-voting was (is) very vulnerable. This article here has a ton in it. I think this article would be the perfect thing to show all of them.

...of course they didn't "fix" those pesky machines, heh, heh

Speaking of Palast, did anyone catch him this last Sun a.m. on Washington Journal? It was a "round table" discussion with ...well, I forget who exactly, as if it really matters, LOL ...it was some ol codger who heads up a seminal "conservative" organization, and he spent most of the time fiibustering Greg with the usual "you're an UNAmerican CONSPIRACY THEE-RIST!," and of course would always dodge confrontation and shift gears when Greg would calmly site the documentation that proved his point.

That old guy was just stammering, fit to throw a rod when Greg would state that our press is virtually a closed system of state/corporate propaganda, and that there is no "oil market," but rather a Saudi oil market we're ensarned in.

Brad,

We have known the Diebold touchscreens load updates via PCMCIA cards for a long time now. Yes, RABA mentioned it. No doubt Doug Jones knew it. We at Black Box broke the story a year before RABA and then got it confirmed by James Dunn's declaration in early '04 - if you recall, he is the whistleblower Diebold temp who worked the California primaries and noted that different versions of Diebold files were getting loaded and not tracked.

What Harri added to the picture is the firm knowledge that there isn't any validation - nothing inherent in the system makes sure that what's loaded is a valid Diebold-supplied (and "certified", for whatever that's worth) file. You can load a copy of a tic-tac-toe game in there, give it the right filename for whatever type of file you claim it is, and the TS/TSx will load it.

The machine won't boot if it's an old videogame of course, but the point is there's no checking and it WILL start up a completely faked Windows CE installation or a "stunt bootloader".

That's problem one.

Problem two is that it's impossible for a county elections official to tell what code is really in there. Yes, the machine reports version numbers on startup but if you're going to fake a code set, faking the version numbers is simple.

Problem three is that given how critical physical ("case") security is related to access to the PCMCIA slots, making sure anybody could get in and out with nothing but a standard Phillips screwdriver while leaving no trace is inexcusable.

Only an onsite inspection by people outside of the voting system industry and agencies could have documented all this. And doing so has moved the ball forward a good solid distance.

There have been misrepresentations that RABA covered all of this. Posters on DU have libeled Hursti as a plagiarist. This is unconscionable. Yet the election integrity community has yet to take these individuals aside and inform them of the harm they are doing to Hursti's reputation at a critical time when we've finally made the pages of the New York Times.

The RABA report is online. Anyone can see that the bootloader is never mentioned as a separate installable component, that the lack of validation means that completely malevolent components including an entirely subversive bootloader or anything else can be loaded and that NO elections official can possibly tell what's been done. I also note the lack of any mention of creative uses of screwdrivers as a security threat in the RABA document. There's certainly no photographs of the Diebold motherboard by RABA.

Now, all that aside, it IS worth noting that Diebold knew that people were at least thinking about the PCMCIA slots as an attack vector several years ago. While we on the "outside" may not have known about the lack of validation of the files, Diebold sure as heck knew and has done nothing, and kudos to Brad for pointing this out!

Time to vote Diebold off the island.

Hidden Hand #6

The Washington Journal?

Really?

People in the same room, LIVE, with Greg Palast? The investigative reporter who knew all about the 2000 election theft WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING and couldn't get Salon.com to cover it because Jeb Bush said everything was OK?

That Greg Palast?

No!

Brad:

I want to thank you once again for your coverage, and resulting dissemination of the inherent risk that electronic voting poses to the future of our form of government.

I am very glad that Jim March has added clarification of the differences between what was previously known, and the latest report sponsored by and distributed by Black Box Voting (org).

Jim and I were in constant contact during the latter half of 2003. We went over the SAIC, Compuware, and later RABA Reports thoroughly. Both Jim and I submitted Comments to the California Secretary of State's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel throughout the fall of that year. We also were in touch with Bev Harris. Her making available the contents of the FTP site, and the subsequent emergence of the Diebold Memoes, were a treasure trove of "gems" that hinted at all the various security vulnerabilities resident in the Diebold voting systems. We attended and testified at every VSPP hearing held that fall. When I asked a series of questions regarding the known security risks in my public testimony the reaction from the chairman was "That's interesting". It took several months of misrepresentations and outright lies before the VSPP and Kevin Shelley finally started to realize what we had been telling them was true. Ending in the culmination of the de-certification of the TSx by Kevin Shelley in April 2004. Shorthly thereafter he started being hounded from office.

Black Box Voting has provided the consistent and relentless push that this movement has needed. The information that has had to be gathered from various sources, despite the obstruction, obfuscation, and stonewalling of election officials and vendors, which established they had something to hide. Because of the courage of a few election officals, the perseverence of Black Box Voting, and Bev Harris in particular, led to the opportunity to examine an actual touch-screen voting machine. The suspicions were more than confirmed. they were validated and enhanced.

In the Staff Report issued by California Secretary fo State Kevin Shelley in April 2004, it describes a pattern of deception engaged in by Diebold in relationship to its seeking certification of its AccuVote-TSx touch-screen voting system.
This despite the assurances of Diebold Election Systems' President Bob Urosevich at a public hearing that Diebold was instituting a "new day" in its approach to complying with the law. I can assure your readers that the attitude and reception of the VSP Panel to voting activists changed markedly between the October public hearing and the following April hearings. They discovered that we were right about Diebold Election Systems and their corporate personality. That personality had already been revealed in the Memoes.

Here we are two years later and they are still using every tactic possible to prop up their untenable position and product. What they have engaged in is a form of domestic terrorism, the willful and duplicious subverting of our right to choose our representatives. They are just as culpable in attacking our form of government as are those supplying means to attack us physically.

We knew from the Memoes that it was acceptable in the organization to deceive election officials and the public. We now know that the public pronouncements made by Diebold of addressing the security risks revealed in every prior report were a lie. Even now, they had the gall to describe these major security risks as "low". It also appears there is a campaign to attack the "messenger". I urge all voting reform activists not become part of such a campaign.

There is no mitigation available to ensure the public that these voting systems have not been compromised short of stripping them of all coding and re-installing trusted firmware and software, without the inherent security risks. Barring that, these voting systems should not be used in another election. The Department of Justice, and State Attorney Generals should also start a criminal investigation.

Maryland vote from 2004 ..... rough #s

750,000 repubs produced 1,100,000 bush votes
1,200,000 dems produced 1,200,000 Kerry votes

https://BradBlog.com/Images/emoticons/doze.gif

Hi Brad! One quick correction to your story. Diebold didn't find out about this "flaw" when RABA told them about it two years ago, they knew about it the day they signed off on the design and called it a "feature".

The real question is who the people are behind the RABA study that knew about it. What qualifications do the 'red team' members have to do these tests?

What are their backgrounds?

Just a hint, for many of the red team members, there's no need to phone their former employer, they're already on the line.

Hi, Brad, and thanks for continuing to cover the story. Pat Vesely beat me to it --- but I think this point should be underlined.

Diebold knew, because Diebold DESIGNED the back doors into the system. What you have is three levels with separate back doors designed into each of the three levels. If someone spots one, closes it, you can always use one of the other back doors to go right back and reopen it.

Or, in the politician's sound byte, "It's the DESIGN, stupid!"

One reason Diebold is admitting this so quickly and "fixing it" is that they want to get the press reporting "Diebold is fixing its system" instead of the even more fundamental question, "How did this get in there in the first place?"

Who designed this in? How can we subpoena that person and get them under oath for public questioning in front of TV cameras?

The importance of Watergate-style hearings is this: To implement REAL election reform, the American citizenry needs to see these lying, spinning bastards doing their obfuscation before congressional examiners. Taking a page from the tobacco industry expose's, it may be more feasible to do this at state levels and compile together results, since the federal level lacks the will to do the people's business.

It's going to take public hearings and exposure of the pattern of false claims and lies to galvanize the public to FORCE representatives at the federal level to take appropriate action.

It is, of course, inaccurate to depict the Hursti II study as repeating the RABA study --- it breaks new ground with several stunning developments. Among these are that there are three different back doors built into three different levels --- the PCMCIA card software delivery is one of the delivery mechanisms, but the report describes others as well, including the use of a (redacted) hardware connector and the use of a hidden SD card built into the motherboard.

The importance of the Emery County study performed by Hursti and Security Innovation is that it takes away all excuses and produces real evidence, not theories or snippets from memos or words from interviews, but demonstrable evidence that these back doors are designed in to the latest systems delivered just weeks before the study.

I believe Hursti has done our republic a great service by proving, once and for all, that these machines contain multiple delivery mechanisms which can enter through multiple back doors on at least three different levels, built in.

Let's keep our eye on the ball: The question now is not "can Diebold redesign it" but "who put this elaborate system of back doors in?"

You see, if the back doors are designed in by a Diebold programmer, you have to get the guy under oath and learn straight from his lips what he thought he was doing. This is not a situation where the PR team should be answering those questions. If a Diebold programmer did this, perhaps we should think twice before asking him to "fix" his own back doors.

Brad

You indicated that "criminal charges for their negligence in failing to correct the problem" ...

This is not criminal negligence, because, as Bev and Jim point out, it is deliberate. That means intentional.

The IT department at Diebold which does the election machines does not operate at the professional level that the ATM machine division does.

This is intentional or in other words by design.

Three people are in charge of the IT departments at Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S. This tiny number of people can effect the votes of hundreds of millions of people, and therefore they are clearly targets of nefarious scheming that would destabilize the election system of the United States.

If that system is now destabilized, which is what all these stories scream, democracy itself in the United States is destabilized.

Which leads to a republican dictatorship, if one accepts the definition of a modern and sophisticated dictatorship: that is, a modern dictatorship exists anytime the will of the people cannot be expressed by their votes.

I'll chime in a little as well,

1. Indisputable evidence, that voting machines were intentionally built with three separate, unique and fatal design flaws, so that results could be altered without detection if someone wanted to...

vs.

2. Indisputable evidence that voting machines had a severe problem (only part of "one of the three" identified by Hursti), and the manufacturer didn't fix it after RABA's detection...

I have no doubt that all real BBV activists would choose door #1.

John

Larry,

Yes, the one and only Greg Palast, live on W.J. in a "round table" discussion. Don't know if C-SPAN provides video links to W.J. segments or not, but you could try there if you want to see it.

As to what you mentioned, yes, exactly! CBS contacted Greg about his story and said they wanted to check into it, Greg said by all means do. A few days passed and it became clear nothing was breaking, Greg contacted CBS and was told that they contacted Jeb Bush's people who naturally denied any wrong doing, and that was good enough for CBS to DROP IT. The target of the allegations made the deciding factor for our press to leave it alone.

...but hey, there's not really any, ahem, "conspiracy" at work here. :plain:

Links with topic descriptions related to recent BBV Hursti II Report is here.

Just reading the list of topics is quite interesting.