Ad Removed in Wake of BRAD BLOG Report Earlier this Week...
By Brad Friedman on 5/26/2006, 3:19pm PT  

We reported earlier this week about an ad placed on the Internet by Kelly Services seeking temporary workers for the upcoming California primary elections in San Francisco.

The ad sought workers to "assist in dropping off election voting machines and picking these machines up when voting is complete." (See our full story and the complete text here.)

That ad has now been removed from Monster.com. We'll try and offer some updates if we can gather any additional information about the removal of the ad.

As we noted in our original story on Tuesday, the ad was notable given CA Sec. of State Bruce McPherson's recent approval of Diebold voting machines shortly after it was revealed, and then confirmed by his own independent analysis [PDF], that those machines were vulnerable to hackers. After the revelations, McPherson implemented what he described as increased physical security procedures to protect such machines from tampering --- procedures which would seem to be out the window by allowing $11.99/hour temporary workers hired from the Internet to shuttle California's electronic voting machines, unsupervised, before and after the election.

Apparently the systems in question in San Francisco are reportedly made by Diebold's "rival" company ES&S. Unlike Diebold's systems, ES&S's have never faced the rigorous independent "hack testing" that systems made by Diebold have undergone. Given our lack of knowledge, therefore, about the security in ES&S electronic voting systems and whether or not they are any more or less prone to hacking than Diebold's systems, it would seem that allowing unknown individuals to have unsupervisored access to those machines is equally as irresponsible as McPherson's own less-than-safe security measures as recently prescribed for Diebold systems.

We will, of course, keep you updated with new developements as we are able to acquire them.

A sample from the original screen shot of the Internet ad posted by Kelly Services on Monster.com. Click the graphic below for the complete story...

Share article...