MetaFilter posts tagged with diebold

Can we dare call it stolen, yet?

FatherDagon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:10:06 -0800

Diebold accidentally releases GEMS software with "Steal Election" button intact.

Free for All!

Fuzzy Skinner — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:11:02 -0800

"One dude's quest to save democracy!" Free for All! is a new documentary about the 2004 Ohio election results, which decided the presidential winner. It covers some familiar ground, but also a lot of details you might have missed. You can see it in theaters on October 8, or view it online right now. Here's Roger Ebert's review.

Ohio: L33T Wanted

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:19:30 -0800

David Byrd, the President of Premier (formerly Diebold), has acknowledged that an error in touch-screen voting machines used in half of Ohio's counties may cause some votes to be "dropped". Oh, and there's no time to fix the problem before the elections. Premier Election Solutions and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner are issuing guidelines to counties for how to avoid the problem.

Stop me if you've heard this joke: DIEBOLD VOTING MACHINES

spock — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:40:46 -0800

Once again, The Onion comes a little too close to the truth for comfort. Or in reality, are things working just fine? Security at Diebold is as tight as ever. Concerns (again) in Ohio. Also: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." (Bill Shakespeare)

Diebold is dead. Sorta.

mathowie — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:57:04 -0800

Diebold Election Systems is no more (at least in name). Taking a page from the cigarette companies, Diebold is changing their name and hoping to reverse the downward spiral after their recent news.

That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!

jacobian — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:08:16 -0800

California Restricts Voting Machines: after a source code review of voting machines turned up "significant, deeply-rooted security weaknesses" in voting machines by Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia, the California Secretary of State decertified all three vendors' systems. These weaknesses have been well covered here at MeFi, but some are bad enough to shock even the well-jaded, including the revelation that Diebold "uses at least two hard-coded passwords -- one is 'diebold' and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8." Time to think about open voting?

Hacking Democracy

Espoo2 — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:01:46 -0800

Hacking Democracy. A frightening and well-made full-length HBO documentary.

If voting could actually change anything...

clevershark — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:25:25 -0800

The election isn't until next Tuesday, but already problems are being reported. It's not just in Texas, and not just in relation to everyone's favorite electronic-voting whipping boy, either; it's becoming clear that every vendor has its own unsolved security issues. In fact it seems that an increasing number of voices are warning that the US is in for an awful lot of contention from all parties involved after next week's vote, and that can't be good. Others are taking a non-disinterested rose-colored view of things and loudly proclaiming that there's nothing wrong with the system, or at least that no one should imply or infer or investigate the matter. Still others are quick to point out that there's nothing wrong with electronic voting, except when they're linked to a foreign government that doesn't get along particularly well with them. Whatever is true about the state of electronic voting in 2006, you can't deny that it has led to a certain plurality of opinions...

Oh, Cruel Fate To Be Thusly Boned Or How To Steal An Election

sparkletone — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:41:02 -0800

A manual for electoral apocalypse in America. Quite a bit's been written both on MeFi and other places about how bad Diebold machines are. Rolling Stone wrote an article about election fraud in 2004 that was discussed here on MeFi. Tonight, Ars posted a very thorough, very clear article about how we are completely screwed if we do not enact expensive, fundamental changes in how we handle elections in America. It's too late to do anything about the elections in a couple weeks, but perhaps steps can be taken to fix things before 2008...

Will the Next Election be Hacked?

Saucy Intruder — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:12:09 -0800

[O]ne muggy day in mid-August [2002], [Diebold consultant Chris] Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done. . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Will the Next Election be Hacked?

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

chunking express — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:36:19 -0800

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. These voting machines are even more broken than you think. Ars Technia has posted nice summary of this article. The research was done in part by Professor Ed Felten who writes for the Freedom to Tinker web site, which is well worth reading.

Does it matter anyway?

Unregistered User — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:28:37 -0800

Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM."

New security glitch found in Diebold system:

leapingsheep — Thu, 11 May 2006 05:15:41 -0800

New security glitch found in Diebold system California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to "sequester" their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with "trusted" software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.

Man attacks voting machine in Cleveland

bitter-girl.com — Tue, 02 May 2006 18:14:55 -0800

Just 'cause they're made by Diebold doesn't mean you have to kick them! A 61-year-old man was arrested after an alleged "poll rage incident" today, kicking over 2 pricy voting machines. See here for more fun & games from the Ohio primary elections. Thanks to malfunctioning Diebold machines and overall shenanigans, polls are open 'til 9:30 tonight. Congressional rep Stephanie Tubbs-Jones was on the case earlier...

Delivering the Vote, with Dividends

digaman — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 11:32:59 -0800

Whooops! While making a required filing to the state ethics commission, Ohio Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell finds Diebold shares in his stock portfolio that he now claims to have bought "accidentally." Yes, that Diebold -- the e-voting company whose chairman promised to "deliver the vote" to George Bush. And yes, that Blackwell, whose state helped deliver the White House to the GOP. Blackwell insists that the humble amount of Diebold stock was in one of those "blind trust" type of arrangements that worked out so rewardingly for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. [newsfilter via RawStory.]

wistleblower busted.

delmoi — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:20:01 -0800

Diebold whistleblower busted for whistleblowin'. Stephen Heller, who leaked classified information showing how Diebold illegally used uncertified voting machines in California in 2002, is being charged with sundry computer crimes by the LA County DA's office.

HAVA has forced us to purchase systems that in my opinion are not appropriate for citizens to be voting on

amberglow — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 23:14:14 -0800

E-voting systems hacker sees ‘particularly bad’ security issues ...On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs.... More from the Washington Post here, where ... Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. ..."Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no. ... Verified Voting and Black Box Voting have much much more on all of this.

Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.

Artifice_Eternity — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:57:46 -0800

"After watching his computer expert change vote totals this week, Sancho said that he now believes someone on the inside did the same think in Volusia County in 2000." Leon County, FL election supervisor alleges fraud in the Bush/Gore election. "In Volusia County precinct 216, a memory card added more than 200 votes to George W. Bush's total and subtracted 16,000 votes from Al Gore. The mistake was later corrected during a hand count."

Diebold

Protocols of the Elders of Awesome — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:06:42 -0800

Diebold boss resigns pending fraud investigation

What is the sound of a "No Hearing Hearing"?

dinsdale — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 13:58:05 -0800

California holds a "No Hearing Hearing" on Diebold certification. "In June, over 200 people traveled to Sacramento to voice their concerns at a public hearing before a panel of advisors to the Secretary of State on voting systems. Since then, every scheduled meeting of the Voting Systems Panel has been cancelled, and now the Secretary has simply disbanded the VSP without notice, without hearings, without any type of due process." This isn't the only jurisdiction in which Diebold is attempting to circumvent legal requirements - in North Carolina they filed for and received a broad exemption from new disclosure rules recently passed into law. The EFF are now suing to force Diebold to comply with the law. As if that wasn't enough, an official Certification Test (PDF) for Diebold's Optical Scan voting machines confirms an earlier threat analysis test (PDF) that the memory cards on these machines run uncertified and arbitrary executable code, a charge that Diebold has vigorously denied.

This is what demockery looks like!

dinsdale — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 14:48:00 -0800

Project Censored places "Distorted Election Coverage" at number 3 on their list of ignored news stories of the last year. In more recent ignored news a Diebold insider speaks out (which security guru Bruce Schneier considers "sensationalist" but "good information") - just as Diebold shares plunge and top executives flee. In July Diebold's voting machines were rejected by the state of California after "possibly the most extensive testing ever on a voting system" revealed a high incidence of crashes and paper jams. Not to mention the undocumented backdoor in Diebold's GEMS vote tabulator. Meanwhile, in Ohio, two officials of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections have been indicted by a grand jury on charges that they "did not permit a random selection of precincts for the recount and it did not let witnesses oversee the opening of the sealed ballot cases and the first recount of the votes." And John Conyers is urging Americans to oppose a proposed national ID voting requirement, which he calls a "21st Century poll tax". Is this what democracy looks like?

20 Amazing Facts About

Postroad — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 09:00:07 -0800

20 Amazing Facts About Read this and cry. Or move to another country.

BE THE MEDIA

Pretty_Generic — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 13:33:37 -0800

The Diebold Variations. Yes, I'm in a one-trick pony mood.

oh, the irony.

Espoo2 — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:43:22 -0800

Diebold does it's part to protect the Constitution.

Quick! Call the media!

troutfishing — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 13:13:38 -0800

A bizzare pattern of impossible anomalies This has long been known : the welter of financial ties of Diebold and ES&S to the radical religious right (with stakeholders currently, it seems, on the secretive CNP) and Bob Fitrakis notes : "Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow." Howard Ahmanson was the original funder for Bob and Todd Urosevich's Data Mark,which became ES&S, Bob later left to head Diebold ,maker of HAVA Act mandated touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere....Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist (a form of Dominionism ) who has talked of imposing Biblical law on the US - including the death penalty for gays and drunkards - and is also a main funder of the Chalcedon Foundation. However, the most bizzare patterns of anomalies in Florida came not from touch-screen but optical scan machines. Florida's central vote tabulator also is Diebold made, raising questions on the a bizzare pattern of anomalies in which a large number of counties in Florida had increases in Republicans votes over expected levels - by an overall average of 50% to 100% and - in one county, as high as 700%. Meanhwhile, here are graphs of variance between exit poll results for battleground states.