Diebold Patch May Be Evidence of '02 Election Tampering

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Spoonamore, founder of IT security firm Cybrinth and former advisor to John McCain, claims he has new evidence of election tampering by Diebold in the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senate races. A whistleblower gave Spoonamore a patch that was applied to Diebold machines in person by the Diebold CEO. Spoonamore confirmed that the patch did not correct the clock problem it supposedly addressed, but contained two parallel programs. Without access to the hardware, he could not learn more. He reported his findings to the Justice Department, which has not acted."

and

the worst thing is even if the next election was rigged no body would really do anything.

Re:and

Once was America, now the Uber-Banana Republic.

Now is when we sing the UBR anthem...
[hand on crotch] "Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today."

Re:Manipulating elections another way

perhaps. However, there are many many many factions there. Do you know and trust all their motivations? Some factions might like the war because it is profitable, or gives them an edge in gang fights.

"Contained two parallel programs"

Were the Diebold voting machines Euclidean or non-Euclidean? Without this key bit of information, we can't know if these programs intersected or not.

Absentee Ballot!

I think I'll vote via absentee ballot and send it via registered mail. Paranoid? Maybe.

Re:Absentee Ballot!

plus they don't count the absentee ballots unless the rigged results are close enough that the absentee ballots might change the outcome.

Re:Absentee Ballot!

Here in Oregon, enough people were opting to vote by mail that they just decided to get rid of polling places altogether. We do still have ballot boxes at various community locations (libraries, schools, etc.) so you can drop off your ballot instead of paying for postage.

Oregon's vote by mail system does not protect against vote buying. However, Oregon citizens are willing to risk that potential danger in exchange for the ability to have voting parties, where a group of friends can get together, discuss each issue on the ballot, answer each other's questions, and make an informed decision while eating cookies and generally enjoying each other's company.

This needs a "paranoia" tag.

I live in Atlanta, and lived here in 2002. "King" Roy Barnes and Max Cleland didn't get "robbed" of anything. They lost their elections because they were both liberal Democrats running in a conservative state in a big Republican year. Barnes in particular had become so personally obnoxious that a good many in his own party crossed over to vote against him out of pure spite.

Good grief, people. Put the tinfoil hats away.

Re:This needs a "paranoia" tag.

The point is not whether those who won the election would have won anyway even without tampering. Obviously, those who perpetrated the alleged act believed that there was a chance there might be an upset, and alleged act itself remains criminal.

Sure Sign

The first flag should've been that it was the CEO who performed the patch. If a CEO _ever_ gets his hands dirty, you can rest assured that there is something illegal going on that needs to be covered up.

Something is fishy about that update.

As an IT support person, the scope of the Diebold patch update is suspicious. Why just two counties? Why not the whole state? Why a special trip by the CEO? Too many bells are going off here.

When I did IT updates. I would update a few test configurations and select users then let them run for a bit. Then roll out to the masses. About 2,500 PCs if you will.

The justice department needs to begin investigating this immediately.

This whole situation stinks to high heaven.

Thanks,
Jim

Diebold == Premier Election Solutions

Remember folks, Diebold is now known as "Premier Election Solutions" [wikipedia.org]--they changed their name to get away from the bad PR! So don't call them "Diebold" any more and don't forget!

Just like MediaSentry becoming "SafeNet", we shouldn't be so quick to forget who the scumbags are!

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property [eff.org]

More pieces of the puzzle ( muzzle? )

2003;
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

The CEO personally installed patches?

The story says "The computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds."

If that's accurate, that's astonishing to me.

I don't know much about "The Raw Story," which describes itself as an "alternative" news source. If this had appeared in the mainstream media I would regard it as something close to a smoking gun. I hope this isn't the end of the story.

Karl Rove

Interesting that he's not mentioned in the summary, but several [streetinsider.com] other [opednews.com] sources [bradblog.com] seem to indicate [epluribusmedia.net] that Karl Rove is behind this.

Go ahead and mod me down, I've got decent karma.

Diebold is a bunch of crooks

Jeff Dean, Senior Vice-President and Senior Programmer at Global Election Systems (GES), the company purchased by Diebold in 2002 which became Diebold Election Systems, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft for planting back doors in software he created for ATMs using, according to court documents, a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of two years[8]. In addition to Dean, GES employed a number of other convicted felons in senior positions, including a fraudulent securities trader and a drug trafficker.

Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute has analyzed the source code used in these voting machines and reports "this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.
Following the publication of this paper, the State of Maryland hired Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform another analysis of the Diebold voting machines. SAIC concluded "[t]he system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise."

Re:Anybody surprised?

Yes, Republicans. For all the screaming about we on the left have been doing about these rigged elections, the Republicans have largely blown it all off as a bunch of whiny, sore losers. And, I say this with actual understanding of their point (I'd be suspicious of our cries as well were the tables turned). I think if you could get Republicans to see how truly corrupt our election system has become, they'd be as outraged as well. But, it's hard to get a credible spokesman (read: a fellow Republican) to come out as vehemently against this as someone like Greg Palast has.

Re:Suspicious...

Three problems with your point:

1) The patch was made to certified machines, thus making them non-certified.

2) It was only applied in 2 counties. (*cough*Democratic counties*cough*) Why not the whole state?

3) I'm fairly certain that if *I* merely open the ballot box or machine during the election, that satisfies the requirement for "tampering" regardless of me touching ballots or flipping bits, and I'd be making an extra stop at the local police precinct before going home.

Of course, it all depends on who's prosecuting and how it gets presented.

Re:Suspicious...

But if:

1. it doesn't fix the problem it claims to fix
2. it was personnally installed by the CEO of the vendor's firm
3. it was only installed on a subset of machines (and those in democratic strongholds)

alarm bells should be going off all over the place.

If, at my bank, we tried to push a change that hit even one of the above, ten people would be on the phone to in-house lawyers, compliance, management, etc.

Had one of my new guys yesterday wanting to push a change. "I'll tell you what it does," he said. "Don't bother," I said, "if what it's doing is not obvious, it's not going anywhere."

Re:Suspicious...

The CEO personally getting involved is more suspicious to me.

I mean Deibold is a fairly large company, why is the CEO applying patches to products in person?

And how often does he do this?

Re:Obstruction of Justice Dept.

That's impossible. The bush administration would never use manipulate the Justice Department for political purposes.

Re:Why not open source voting code?

Why doesn't Diebold allow for open source code?

* They are afraid of scrutiny. They might have errors and some might turn out to be embarrassing.

* Competition might ensue.

* Hide any funny business.

* Have to follow someone else's rules

* Have to spend effort/expense making code available.

* Code files too big as they were written with PowerPoint (tm)

Re:"Up against the wall, MF"

If it's proven to be true, it could very well mean Diebold's CEO is guilty of treason.

And how is this making war against the United States or giving Aid and Comfort to it's enemies in time of war? Here in the USA, that's how treason is defined in the Constitution. [wikipedia.org] Calling any and everything you don't like "treason" is exactly why it was defined that way, and why the Constitution specifies that a conviction can only be obtained by direct confession in open court or on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act. I knew that the standards of education here were dropping, but I didn't thing they'd dropped that far.

Re:"Facts" wrong

Hm, you're right, there's only a few dozen websites out there claim Bob Urosevich was the CEO of Diebold Election Systems.

As far as I can tell his "official" title was, Bob Urosevich was the President [wikipedia.org] of Diebold Election Systems from January 2002 until the second half of 2004. Prior to 2002, he was the Chief Operating Officer and President of Global Election Systems (which was bought by Diebold).

Re:"Facts" wrong

Actually, he was President of Diebold Election Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Diebold... a slight oversight, but not as simply wrong as you make it out to be (and it's understandable how one might confuse it with the parent company). See for example http://web.archive.org/web/20030811034309/www.diebold.com/news/newsdisp.asp?id=2915.