Diebold Internal Mail Confirms U.S. Vote Count Vulnerabilities

Scoop has obtained internal mail messages from Diebold Election Systems which clearly and explicitly confirm security problems in the GEMS vote counting software that were highlighted in reports published on Scoop.co.nz and widely elsewhere in July.

In the internal mail Diebold Election Systems principal engineer R&D Ken Clark - then working for Global Election Systems before Diebold took the company over - responded to an internal query over a security problem. The official certification laboratory responsible for assessing the voting technology company software's robustness had noticed a problem, and a staff member was seeking Clark's advice.

Diebold Election Systems technical writer R&D Nel Finberg wrote to the "support" list on 16th October 2001: "Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) [this is the certification lab responsible for certifying all United States voting software] has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?"
[...]

Clark: "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. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents.

Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the .mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out."
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Yolanda Flanagan sent me the link to this audio interview with Bev Harris...

Black Box Election Steal

Dennis Bernstein talks with Bev Harris from Black Box Voting with Diebold persons meeting regularly now with George W. Bush. in the Crawford Family Compound. The strange case of the 57 voting machines which appear to have automatically phoned home to Diebold in the middle of an actual state primary election in San Luis Obispo County, in California in 2002. Ms. Harris feels that people who contribute heavily to George W. Bush should not have unquestioned autonomy and unfettered access (without oversight) to the elections process including voter registration and tabulation. For an earlier story by Flashpoints on this subject click here... This story just won't go away! More information regarding efforts to understand the deeper underlying issues such as, "Just because they gave me a printed receipt how does that in any way reflect certainty that my electronic vote inside the voting machine was recorded for my choice, or tabulated correctly for my candidate, or transmitted correctly for my candidate to the central computer, or purloined at any number of locations along the way and altered?". How do 8 million people who have their receipts and suspect vote count fraud come together for a recount??? How do you organize that in the face of a victorious loser pushing hard to bulldoze the concerns of the voters? Sound familiar?
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