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Diebold Patch May Be Evidence of '02 Election Tampering
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jul 18, 2008 06:51 PM
from the you-can-trust-us dept.
from the you-can-trust-us dept.
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."
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Submission: GOP IT expert claims Diebold election tampering by Anonymous Coward
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and (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and (Score:5, Insightful)
that is because the people you expect to do anything are the ones that got elected so of course they won't do anything to themselves
however, this is a democracy and you have the right to free speech and you can make sure that your voice is heard by every politician and journalist and ear in earshot
and, in the end, if necessary, we can just start over from 1776
but that means that YOU have to do what YOU are supposed to do, instead of sitting on your fat ass eating cheetohs and whining about how unfair it is on slashdot
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Re:and (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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Re:and (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell does that mean? These linear political spectrums are not only stupid, their single dimensionality eradicate way too many variables to reduce someone's position arbitrarily on the line.
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Re:and (Score:5, Interesting)
You just say that because you're a far-(right/left) radical NUT.
Liberal and Conservative have no definition and are therefore useless as argumentation techniques. Watch:
National Journal voted Obama the most liberal senator in office. This is bullshit on face, because Obama is still tied to the democratic party line; Bernie Sanders is probably the most liberal senator because, and get this
HE'S A FUCKING SOCIALIST. THE ONLY FUCKING SOCIALIST.
Oh, but National Journal can place an actually fairly moderate senator (dennis kucinich and his friends were far more liberal than obama) on the "most liberal" side, because you can't argue with it. Most in the republican party simply call someone Liberal if they disagree with them, but then again, republican leaders inserted that definition into their heads [fair.org], so you can't blame them too much.
National Journal, therefore, is a rag.
Liberal and Conservative mean nothing.
Left and Right are names for your arms and legs, not political associations.
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:5, Insightful)
If we talk while our enemy fights, we lose.
Yep and thus India remains firmly under British control.
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is, Obama should feel pretty safe in Iraq.
Not from the Blackwater goons. And he might want to stay away from the showers.
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:5, Insightful)
There has to be a line. Yes, bad things happen in the world, and my heart bleeds a little every time I hear about a child starving to death, or the AIDS epidemic, or genocide. But the United States is only so strong, and only capable of dealing with so much.
Would you, personally, by hand, go out and try to feed EVERY homeless person in your city? Not build a shelter and feed the ones that come in. Actually walk the streets with a bag/shopping cart/truckload/whatever of food, and find the homeless, and feed them?
We spread ourselves too thin. We try to do so much good in so many places that all we manage is a barely mediocre achievement anywhere. I believe that isolationist policies are stupid, but we can't be the world's nanny anymore, we can't kiss everyone's boo-boos anymore. Our economy is in bad enough shape. Pouring so much of it into other places, nay, wasting it, is doing NOTHING to help stabilize ourselves. Yeah, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to say 'My country feeds starving Nigerian babies' but what nobody says is that our aid programs drain public resources that could be put into health care, education, public works, or reducing the national debt.
Think about it. Yeah, it makes you warm and fuzzy to clothes a homeless man, but if you give him the clothes off your back, now, YOU are naked. How much good can we do to third world countries and those in need if we reduce ourselves to third-world status?
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt Wallmart would want a greeter with Tourette's Syndrome, or undercontrolled Schizophrenia. Not so coincidentally, a disproportionate number (I've heard upwards of 50%) of the homeless population has mental disabilities. The rest? Yes, some are lazy. Some are young people who escaped abuse in a broken home, took up drugs, and are now essentially unemployable. Some people suffer from chronic pain which prevents them from working. Many are women who have escaped abuse, have young children to look after 24/7, and no marketable skills. Have you ever try applying for a job without an address or a change of clothes? Of course, don't let any of these cases get in the way of your simple and elegant world view.
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Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be silly, making speeches is lousy theater. Video of anguished families rending their garments over the corpse of their child killed by an American soldier is a lot more effective in recruiting dissatisfied people than giving a powerpoint presentation about the oppressors.
Your enemies will certainly try to spin anything in their favor (what do you think the job of the White House press secretary is?) because nobody is going to hold a press conference to say "wow, we're idiots, it turns out those other guys are really great, look at this awesome aid package they're giving us!"
You have to convince people not to follow crazy leaders, which is difficult (it's taken eight years for us to ignore ours). You can either kill them mercilessly and terrify everyone into not wanting to risk it, you can give them jobs and food so that they're too comfortable to want to upset the status quo, or you can give them an alternate leader who they believe will be more effective (see: political history of Hamas).
As it stands, we're giving them jobs and then shooting them on their way to work, which doesn't make us look either strong or benevolent, it makes us look alternately malicious and idiotic.
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"Contained two parallel programs" (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I'll vote via absentee ballot and send it via registered mail. Paranoid? Maybe.
Re:Absentee Ballot! (Score:5, Informative)
plus they don't count the absentee ballots unless the rigged results are close enough that the absentee ballots might change the outcome.
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Re:Absentee Ballot! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Absentee Ballot! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
We do that on local government elections here in Australia, but the electoral commission sends out a reply paid envelope for you to send back. One time I got about five ballot papers addressed to names like "John J Jones, Jane Q Smith" which I very carefully did not open, complete or send back. I suspect somebody forgot to remove example records from a database, though it might have had something to do with the fact I lived next door to a hostel with a large itinerant population who could be persuaded to fill out ballot papers in false names.
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Re:Absentee Ballot! (Score:5, Interesting)
Either Diebold is a 1-person company, or the CEO prefers a "hands-on" approach to doing business
Purely hypothetical answer...
Let's say you have a master plan to make it possible for you to rig elections. Your plan involves your company becoming a major supplier of voting machines; machines which you can manipulate. How many people do you share your plans with?
Clearly your best chance for success is for as few people as possible to know about your plans; the ideal situation would be if your whole company were run as a legitimate enterprise and just you knew what was really going on.
If the CEO in fact did go where he was said to go (and that should be verifiable), then it should be brutally obvious he was up to something. Of course CEOs don't go out in the field to apply patches. But he might be the one to do it if he were rigging an election and trusted no one else to do it.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections. It blows me away the amount of power your politicians have over the elections they have to run in. In my country the house of commons, especially the PM, runs the country with no real counter point, but neither have any direct say in how elections are run - there is a separte body for that.
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No actors in the DOJ. (Score:4, Funny)
> He reported his findings to the Justice Department, which has not acted.
Bush co already patched the justice dept.
No worries.
This needs a "paranoia" tag. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This needs a "paranoia" tag. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cute very narrow redefinition but I was thinking more in line with something in the dictionary. Thanks for the personal attack too - what are they teaching in those schools there?
It became clear to me when Cheney visited Sydney with ten times the pomp and ceremony of a real Royal visit. We even had to have a special night time sitting of parliment to change a gun law for him the night before the visit. Consider what little the Congress, the Senate and the Supreme Court can do if they oppose actions of the Executive now - they can only draft laws that can be ignored or make judgements that will be ignored. Now compare that to the little European Kingdoms of a couple of centuries ago - some of which had elected kings (by the nobles) and sometimes even with limited terms.
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Re:This needs a "paranoia" tag. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? You obviously have no idea what a monarchy is, but a theocracy? Just because religious people vote for another religious person does not make it a theocracy. Is Germany a theocracy? Because they actually have a Christian party, and their leader is the Chancellor of Germany.
He did not declare war unanimously. Only Congress can declare war, and Congress overwhelmingly supported the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The president actually has very little direct power, he's mostly a figurehead. Congress are the people rubber-stamping his policies.
George Bush is an asshole, but please respect the English language and common sense.
And people, get over it! There is absolutely zero hard evidence that the Republicans have stolen any elections. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, not small amounts of circumstantial evidence and the ramblings of bloggers. You have to live with the fact that approximately half of the voting public voted for a complete jackass (making the large assumption that Kerry or Gore weren't idiots as well). That's one of the unfortunate things about living in a democracy. But you apparently don't know what that means either.
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Sure Sign (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sure Sign (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not denying or claiming that anything is wrong but how does CEO's hands-on involvement for patching indicate anything?
I don't think anyone has said it's a "proof" of a cover-up when a CEO gets involved. It's just that it's very suspicious (why didn't he send a technician/engineer, who should be cheaper and more competent than a CEO at this sort of thing?).
It's same with voting irregularities (also mentioned in TFA). It doesn't prove anything, but it is very suspicious and warrants a detailed investigation in hopes of picking up (or not picking up) something more concrete than suspicion.
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Something is fishy about that update. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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? ) (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Karl Rove (Score:5, Insightful)
Go ahead and mod me down, I've got decent karma.
Yeah, bashing Karl Rove will really get you modded down on Slashdot. Who's next, RIAA?
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Diebold is a bunch of crooks (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Electronic voting will never be safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Electronic voting can be subverted very simply indeed, just by one person with the right technical knowledge. All electronic voting should be scrapped until a reasonably secure system can be organised, most likely by open source solutions. Even then there's no real reason for it.
And what the hell was the CEO doing installing patches? Sounds highly suspicous to me.
Diebold Technician's POV (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anybody surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Anybody surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I think you severely underestimate a *partisan's ability to write off information that could force them into a state of cognitive dissonance.
Abu Ghraib was written off as "hazing" and "a fraternity prank."
I don't really see that mindset getting too outraged over election fraud in their favor.
*This goes both ways really. Anyone remember Dan Rather's fake documents?
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Re:Suspicious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Suspicious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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Re:Suspicious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Suspicious... (Score:5, Insightful)
why is the CEO applying patches to products in person?
And how often does he do this?
Whenever he needs to get paid
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Re:Obstruction of Justice Dept. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obstruction of Justice Dept. (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the Attorney General under U.S. law is to represent the United States, not the President.
Why does it need to be a (wholly irrelevant) Bush hate-fest?
Because the president of Diebold publicly stated that he would do everything he could to elect Bush president? Because Bush's flunkies have been inappropriately pushing prosecutors to investigate purported election fraud when it benefitted them? Because Bush has created such a culture of cronyism and corruption that's trickled down throughout the entire DOJ has basically become completely unreliable?
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Re:Why not open source voting code? (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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Re:"Up against the wall, MF" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:"Up against the wall, MF" (Score:5, Insightful)
And how is this making war against the United States or giving Aid and Comfort to it's enemies in time of war?
Well, in the military, your oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign, and domestic. Someone subverting the voting process, which is set forth in the Constitution, could be seen as an attack on the Constitution. Since the primary purpose of the military is to wage war, and their foremost oath is to defend the Constitution, it could follow that this act could be considered making war against the United States.
Another way to look at it is the act of changing the votes could change who has control of Congress, removing the "winning" party from power. This would be an unconstitutional method of changing government, which would be an act of war against the "true government" of the United States.
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Re:"Up against the wall, MF" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I exactly agree with this definition, but clearly an argument could be made that subverting elections would in essence be "war" against the republic.
Umm, election fraud, pure and simple. It's not a new crime, and it has never been held to be treason. It's just more screechy politics that you would laugh at if the other side were making similar charges.
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Re:"Up against the wall, MF" (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how many people have stopped to think through the implications of this charge. If it's proven to be true, it could very well mean Diebold's CEO is guilty of treason. In a time of war (which President Bush has repeatedly said is the case), that's a death penalty offense. While I don't favour the death penalty, I think you have to take a very serious look at it for somebody who hasn't just killed people, but who has attempted to kill democracy in an entire nation. This particular incident may have been restricted to one state, but Diebold has been very active in attempting to get its machines and methods protected from legal supervision at the federal level.
So what you're saying is, not only are liberals going to actively pursue the death penalty, but they're going to have to admit that we're at war to get there?
I don't know if I see that happening.. But I'm heading to the grocery store for some popcorn, just in case.
(yes, you can mod me down now)
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Re:"Up against the wall, MF" (Score:5, Interesting)
Prescott Bush, the grandfather of our current president, and father of our past president, is guilty of this right here. He was involved in a large corporate-based scheme to overthrow the US government early in the last century. Look it up, I can't make something this crazy up...
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Re:"Facts" wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Re:"Facts" wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Any Evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
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