Whiskey Wednesday

Hacker's Delight?

Required reading kiddies: this is long and not funny, but I have a feeling it will be VERY important.

A few months ago I posted about a Diebold insider who had come forward with allegations that, prior to the 2004 elections, the company deliberately ignored warnings from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team that the company’s electronic voting machines and central tabulator were vulnerable to hacking.
This story continues to evolve and gain footing. There is still no damning proof that any votes were actually manipulated, but now we do have evidence that such a hack would have been pretty easy to accomplish. Leon County, Florida election officials have teamed up with BlackBoxVoting.org (an elections watchdog organization) to conduct an independent test of the Diebold system in Leon County. [source]

In one of the tests conducted for Sancho and the non-profit election-monitoring group BlackBoxVoting.org, the researchers were able to get into the system easily, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace, said Herbert Thompson, who conducted the test.

He also said the machine that tabulates the overall count asked for a user name and password, but didn't require it.

In the other test, the researcher who had hacked into the voting machine's memory card was able to hide votes, make losers out of winners and leave no trace of the changes.

The quotes above are from the AP – yep, the MSM is finally taking note. This should be evidence enough for a major Congressional investigation or independent commission investigation into the 2004 elections electronic voting. And this should put an end to future electronic voting until these concerns are addressed and all votes have a verifiable paper trail. It won’t, but it should.

Related: On Tuesday, a Securities Fraud Class Action suit was filed in the U.S. Federal District Court in Ohio charging eight current and former executives with “Fraud, Insider Trading, Manipulation of Stock Prices, Concealment of Known Flaws in Voting Machines and Company Structural Problems” Diebold CEO and chairman Walden O’dell, who is named as a defendant, unexpectedly resigned the day before sighting personal reasons.

Look for the lid to blow off of this story in the run-up to the 2006 elections. This could be lots of fun!

Thanks to Brad Friedman at BradBlog for his tireless coverage of these issues.

Update: Hacking may have altered vote in 2000 Presidential Election.

posted by ThomG @ 11:23:00 AM