California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold 394
moby11 points to this Reuters story carried by Yahooo!; it begins "California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products."
Upset? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And then what? (Score:5, Informative)
Backdoor (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78 [blackboxvoting.org]
UK Elections (Score:4, Informative)
Re:From TFA... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is this the right way to go about it? (Score:5, Informative)
How would you know? It's closed-source, trade-secret code.
> and it's only because of relentless pounding that a periodic vulnerability is found.
If you actually bother to read the sordid history of Diebold's voting products, you'll see they've been bug-ridden and insecure from the get-go. Yay for our MS Access-backed product!
"For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo."
Read the memos at any number of sites, like http://www.hacksonville.org/diebold/ [hacksonville.org]
Mo' LINKS! (Score:3, Informative)
Washington Post, answers critics [washingtonpost.com]
Might be redundant cache [infowars.com]
Dems want aditing [washingtonpost.com] Where have we heard this b4?Hmmmm...
F-L-O-R-I-DeU-H wants papertrail [bradenton.com]
Well well well... (Score:2, Informative)
(okay, so I'm a little biased.)
Re:In other news . . . (Score:1, Informative)
Face it guys, +5 Funny isn't in the cards.
Re:From TFA... (Score:3, Informative)
What really surprises me is the last half of what you quoted: "that were not tested or approved nationally or in California."
Who could authorize the move to Diebold's system, the Sec of State? And how the hell did he manage to let a fact like not being approved in his own state slip by? How did the people funding the change not realize it?
Somebody's head should be chopped for that alone, nevermind Diebold's other faults. That is just incompetence as far as I'm concerned, and a basic lack of fact-checking.
Re:From TFA... (Score:2, Informative)
you learn from the mistakes this time around, but that doesn't mean you have to live with the consequences.
Re:From TFA... (Score:4, Informative)
To reply:
I've always used "guv'mint".
Let the AG know! (Score:3, Informative)
What about conspiracy to commit election fraud? (Score:5, Informative)
Why isn't the attorney general taking them to court over that?
Check yer facts there, sonny (Score:2, Informative)
Screenshots showing how to hack election (Score:3, Informative)
If we can't get remove these systems (or give them paper trails) by November, perhaps we can instead follow the steps ourselves? Actually, we wouldn't even need to click through MS Access as shown above -- a quick little Visual Basic script would do the trick. It'd be neat if the US had Michael Badnarik [wikipedia.org] and Ralph Nader [wikipedia.org] as President and Vice President for the next four years.
Re:From TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
The purchasor has no legal obligation to verify that claims made by the vendor are true. The obligation is entirely on the vendor. And if the vendor makes untrue claims, a court may award damages, or even find the vendor guilty of fraud.
Caveat emptor is common sense, but it is not a legal principle.Caveat emptor says that if I buy second hand car, I would be wise to get an independent mechanic to check its condition. After all, everyone expects used care salesmen to be a bit shonky. But it I buy a brand new car, I shouldn't have to do this. I should be able to trust Ford / General Motors to design and build cars that are mechanically sound when they leave the showroom.
In this particular case, it is not clear to me whether the State of California or individual voting districts (?) purchased the machines. Either way, the purchaser was entitled to believe Diebold's assertions about the products' fitness for use at face value. Given that Diebold does not disclose its source-code, the purchasors have little choice wrt voting integrity issues.
Download the election software to try at home! (Score:4, Informative)
Also on the page is Election Support Guide [equalccw.com] for Diebold staff pulling support duties at the elections. It includes such gems as:
The AccuFeed is often sensitive to the orientation, size, and print quality of the ballot.. AccuFeed units tend to reflect varying behavior in terms of speed and quality of processing. Familiarize yourself with the functioning of the AccuFeed before the election if it will be used in the election. Do not offer information as to the AccuFeed's shortcomings to the jurisdiction, even where obvious.
Re:What about conspiracy to commit election fraud? (Score:3, Informative)
Conspiracy is the crime of "conspiring" or agreeing with someone to do something which, if actually carried out, would constitute another crime or offense. Since the crime of conspiracy is merely the plan or agreement to commit crime X, it is not necessary for you to actually commit crime X to be convicted of conspiracy.
The rest of the story: the OTHER plaintiffs (Score:4, Informative)
This is the March/Harris lawsuit. Lockyer has decided to "join in", bringing the government in as a co-plaintiff.
At around 10:30am today, Lowell Finley (our lawyer) calls me with the news that Lockyer and the AG's office have decided to join the suit Bev Harris and I filed all the way back in October. Lockyer and company have taken this long to decide whether or not to jump in.
Their decision to do so is VERY welcome by myself, Bev and our lawyer.
Here's the repercussions:
* Bev, Lowell and myself will be splitting 15% of any winnings, versus 30% if we had to prosecute this on our own.
* We ain't complaining, first because we were never in this for the money and second because Diebold is much more likely to settle early, confronted with Lockyer's legal staff instead of just Lowell. MAYBE they'll cave in before the November election, which would be great.
* Second, our odds of any sort of win is now better.
* Third, Lockyer has sent notice to the REST of the Diebold customer counties in California that they can "join in the fun". So this could spread beyond Alameda County, the original gov't entity that Bev, Lowell and I filed on behalf of.
* This idea of suing Diebold for fraud becomes the alternative to what Solano County decided to do: pay $415,000 in their case to get out of their Diebold contract! (Note: Solano's settlement means it's TOO LATE to join in the March/Harris/Lockyer lawsuit and solution. There's a fair chance Lockyer announced all this today to prevent any more "Solano-style" mistakes.)
Other bits:
The AG's staff are promising Lowell that they are NOT getting into this in order to "sabotage the case and settle early for peanuts". They *could* do that but I believe them that they aren't.
The fact that this is being done as a "whistleblower suit" by two private citizens strongly HELPS the government versus a situation where they did it themselves, even when you factor in the small "bounty" to Bev, Lowell and myself. This is because the whistleblower laws include a triple damages provision if we can prove fraud. This becomes a "big stick" to threaten Diebold into settlement with (for less than triple damages; we'll be OK with actual costs returned plus 15% so that the gov't agencies get "made whole" despite the 15% cut.)
Without whistleblowers, first off the gov't wouldn't have had the data to do this at all and even if we just gave them the data "for free", the gov't wouldn't have the damage tripler "stick".
Finally, the question WILL come up (and already has among these replies): "Is all this legit? Did Diebold REALLY screw up here in a fashion worth suing over?"
My answer to that is at this new page showing the actual vote fraud rigged into Diebold's central tabulator software via screenshots of actual Diebold code and database structures:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
That is all I need to say about the basic morality of this lawsuit.
Jim March / jmarch@prodigy.net
Re:Is this the right way to go about it? (Score:5, Informative)
Only the Federally approved "Independent Testing Authorities" (ITAs) are allowed to see voting product source code. In the case of Diebold, this was Wyle Labs and Ciber Inc. (formerly "Metamor"), both in Huntsville Alabama and often relying on the same pool of employees. These agencies are approved for this "certification" process by the Federal Elections Commission.
These two acted as the "Arthur Andersons" to Diebold's "Enron".
We know that in at least two cases Diebold specifically decieved the testing labs. We have Diebold's internal memos in which managers instructed lower-level people to lie to the labs; in one case Ken Clark (Sr. Engineer and head of the tech support group) didn't think that the BS they were to pass off would fly, but the report came back from the underling that it did.
For detailed quotes of all this and technical analysis, see also my first two letters to the California Secretary of State, archived in the yellow table, right column:
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html
Without the ability to even see source code, it's rather hard to blame anybody in California for this fiasco.
Diebold on the other hand had a contractual duty to provide software that obeys the Federal certification process sans fraud AND California's election laws (which require high-security products). They blew off both contractual elements, so this isn't "tort law", it's "contract law", a much more cast-in-stone (and legitimate) area of law.
Jim March / jmarch@prodigy.net
Jesus Christ (Score:5, Informative)
But, let's all yammer about California suing them while ignoring the huge revelations that have happened in the last two weeks WRT Diebold.
Re:Jesus Christ - the BlackBoxVoting connection (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
Yup - Lockyer didn't FILE suit, he joined in the one by Bev Harris (Executive Director of BlackBoxVoting.org) and myself (Member of the Board of Directors, same org).
AP keeps reporting that I'm a "programmer". Not true, I've tried to correct that several times now (I'm a former LAN sysadmin/tech support type).
You can see an alternate version of Bev's "cheat code problem" described with screenshots here:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
See also my other posts in this thread for more of the background by one of the OTHER plaintiffs - Bill Lockyer is only the newest
NOTE: Bev and I demoed the same stuff as described in the link above to the California SecState's staff on August 18th of this year. Also present was an attorney from Lockyer's office. That may have been the final "tilt" Lockyer needed to join in; that or he saw how Solano County hosed themselves by paying Diebold $415,000 to go away less than two weeks ago.
Jim March
Re:What He Really Oughta Said (Score:4, Informative)
Not that the governor of California has anything to do with California's AG. California, like most states, chooses its attorney general by direct popular vote, in accordance with Article 5, Section 11 of the California Constitution. [ca.gov]
If you're going to criticize a government, it helps to know a little about how it works.
Re:Download the election software - author's reply (Score:5, Informative)
The information therein should be supplemented with this later data:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
That's a "walkthrough" of the "hack demo" Bev Harris did with Howard Dean on CNBC a bit over a month ago. Complete with screenshots. It can be replicated with pieces downloaded from the "Dieboldtestnotes" page.
Putting the actual code and sample data online REALLY pissed Diebold off something fierce; they filed a cease'n'desist notice against my ISP.
Which did NOT succeed in taking my site down; on the contrary, mine is the only site to have completely survived a Diebold C&D with no downtime.
To see how I pulled that trick off:
http://www.equalccw.com/liebold.html
My main "Diebold page" is at:
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html - the "Dean Demo" page will be linked from there soon (prolly tomorrow).
Jim March
Re:Guess... (Score:2, Informative)
Th-th-th-th-the MEMOS [hacksonville.org]
The BIGGER issue... (Score:3, Informative)
Hacking democracy [baltimoresun.com]
Speak for yourself! (Score:1, Informative)
Some of us are Multi-millionaires incorporated in the Cayman Islands so we don't have to pay income tax, and, like the President and Vice President, hold a sizable fraction of our personal wealth in companies, like Halliburton, that help maintain important energy infrastructure in rogue terrorist nations like Iran.
Keep your eye on the ball if some Saudies blow up my accountant, I can get a new accountant. But the value of my shares increase proportunately with the uncertainty in energy production, since theoretically Halliburton provides services that reduce that uncertainty. That kind of return, you can't just get that anywhere....
No security, or even backdoors? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:From TFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it is legal principle.
If you buy a house with major defects in plain view, and then decide six months later to sue to get your money back, you'll probably have trouble. On the toher hand, if the house has hidden major defects that the prior owner knew about, you might be able to get your money back.
Caveat emptor basically says that you can't back out of a deal simply because you kept your eyes tightly shut when going into the deal. If there was a problem that you should have seen, then you are expected to have done enough research to have seen it.
Now, if there is a defect in plain view that only somebody with a Ph.D. in engineering would recognize then caveat emptor would not apply.
The fact that we bother to use a latin term for this concept should clue everyone in that it is in fact a legal principle...
I'm baffled... (Score:2, Informative)
...Survival of the fittest...
...So when do all these idiots get dealt with?