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)
posted on Feb 29, 2008 - View this thread

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.
posted on Aug 17, 2007 - View this thread

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?
posted on Aug 5, 2007 - View this thread

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...
posted on Oct 25, 2006 - View this thread

[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?
posted on Sep 22, 2006 - View this thread

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.
posted on Sep 14, 2006 - View this thread

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...
posted on May 2, 2006 - View this thread

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.
posted on Jan 23, 2006 - View this thread

Diebold boss resigns pending fraud investigation
posted on Dec 13, 2005 - View this thread

20 Amazing Facts About Read this and cry. Or move to another country.
posted on Dec 31, 2004 - View this thread

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.
posted on Nov 5, 2004 - View this thread

Monkey hacks Diebold voting machine. Really.
posted on Sep 23, 2004 - View this thread

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location in the Diebold voting machine, a second set of votes is created. "This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks."
posted on Aug 31, 2004 - View this thread

indian electronic voting vs. diebold
"Reading this article, some of you might remember that Cold war era joke, about NASA and its multi million dollar experiment with a pen that can write in micro gravity to solve the writing problems of astronauts, and the Russian solution of using a Pencil to solve the same problem."
posted on May 14, 2004 - View this thread

Diabold touchscreen voting has suffered a setback. The Sec. of State of California (Kevin Shelly) has just decertified 14,000 Diabold AccuVote machines and ordered an investigation of whether or not to charge the company with fraud. Main story here (Washington Post reg required). A few .pdf related documents include the decertification order/finding and what must be done to be recertified including allowing voters a strictly paper vote option. (more inside)
posted on May 2, 2004 - View this thread

NationalCity Diebold ATM crashes, giving anyone admin access. Amazing, some college students found a crashed Diebold WindowsXP ATM and were able to use it like a desktop machine. Your money isn't feeling too safe right about now. Your vote is probably just as unsafe.
posted on Mar 17, 2004 - View this thread

The Diebold scandal might have reminded us all of Stalin's famous quote, "who votes doesn't count, it's who gets to count the votes." But, perhaps another modern version might read, "who votes doesn't count, it's who gets to draw the maps of the voting districts." As you are settling in to greet your new overlords, you might want to take a look at one of their software tools: Caliper Maptitude.
posted on Dec 3, 2003 - View this thread

Anthony Argyriou uncovers what seems to be a serious problem either with California voting machines or the vote tallying system: The Secretary of State's summary of votes on the Davis recall shows three counties--Alameda, Kern, and Plumas--that apparently had zero voters who didn't vote on the recall. Not one. All three counties used Diebold machines. Other counties ranged from 0.5% to 10.3% of voters not voting on the recall. More from Rick Hasen, a top election law scholar. [Via Volokh.]
posted on Nov 16, 2003 - View this thread

In Lebanon, 144000 e-votes casted by 19000 registered voters. No need to blame Middle East crisis, try Lebanon , Boone County, Indiana. Diebold is no longer alone.
posted on Nov 11, 2003 - View this thread

The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
posted on Oct 26, 2003 - View this thread

"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal." More fun from Diebold: on Tuesday, two PA-based student groups announced they will engage in "electronic civil disobedience" by ignoring Diebold's demands to remove public access to leaked memos from Diebold offices, which indicate among other things "...that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection."
posted on Oct 22, 2003 - View this thread

Important expose and interview runs on Salon today. "This evening the site the aritcle features is shut down. As soon as we get that new server up we'll host the materials (yes, we have a copy) that Diebold doesn't want the public to see. Diebold cannot silence everyone. " The links (2) for this piece can be found at URL given here. "If you're not outraged you are not paying attention. " The Agonist, as usual, is both outraged and paying attention.
posted on Sep 24, 2003 - View this thread

Who Counts your Votes? This book published back in 1992 is a good launching pad to begin the quest regarding elections and election fraud in America. Joseph Stalin had a saying: ``Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.'' When I voted on November 5, I was handed a little card stuck it in to a Diebold voting machine and presto all the votes I submitted were counted correctly right? Well I'm not sure after I read the article Diebold: The face of modern balloting at http://www.bartcop.com/110702otter.htm and some of the articles at http://www.votefraud.org/. Perhaps we Americans have handed a bit to much over to computers and the people who own the companies that make the computers and that write the code. Perhaps to restore faith in our Democracy its time to to go back a simple hand counted system, with observers from multiple parties stationed in the local precincts counting the paper ballots.
posted on Nov 9, 2002 - View this thread