Wednesday, September 01, 2004
To dieBOLDly steal an election...
No, it's not the touch screen machines that are the issue this time - you can only do retail cheating there. The Diebold vote tabulation computers, using their GEMS software, can get it for you wholesale. It has a simple-to-use backdoor that allows anyone to change vote tallies, with no passwords, no audit trails, no alarms. And it's no accident - it's in there by design.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created in the Diebold central tabulator, a program installed in 1,000 locations, which controls both paper ballots and touch-screens, each system handling up to a million votes at a time. Full storyIf you're in a location where they're using Diebold voting machines, contact the local papers AND your state's Secretary of State or Supervisor of Elections. Let them know about this - and that you do NOT want this crapola software to make your vote meaningless. Point them, and yourselves, at BlackBoxVoting.org.After invoking the 2-digit trigger, this second set of votes can be changed so that it no longer matches the correct set of 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. It is not too late to do so, and the corrective measures are relatively simple.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments, and has been in place for four years.
