Diebold Patch May Be Evidence of '02 Election Tampering 526
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."
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:Anybody surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
a video worth watching (Score:2, Interesting)
if you believe in the American Dream then you better wake up because the only people that are dreaming are asleep...
not to sound like a troll but do you really think voting does any good? the evidence seems to prove otherwise, i think its all smoke & mirrors...
Metagovernment (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Diebold Technician's POV (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainstream? (Score:3, Interesting)
And why would a huge corporate company make noise about criminal activity done by one of their possible advertisers, or someone with connections in Washington? They wait until the feds start busting them up. That way, you know they don't have any leverage inside the beltway, and there's nothing you can do to save them anyway.
When the feds are bought and paid for, and the media is bought and paid for, mainstream media becomes an outlet for AP stories that don't offend anyone.
bert sticks (Score:1, Interesting)
I come from the UK and I really can't understand how it is possible that a company can suddenly provide an update to some software in certain states that supposedly correctly fixed some problem in only a few states......
(ok we don't have states in the uk)
SURELY! being concerned with the election, any software should be open source to *ALL* parties in the election to make sure it is fair and just?
no?
If software was used in the UK election and only the labour party was able to view it - I would say this was un-constitutional and many people would kick up a huge fuss....
(actually the fuss would be quite large, like a large riot with many peoeple with sticks and bottles, and stuff...)
If something is being provided as being as a means as voting then all parties should be in agreement with the method before the public is allowed to use it. "upgrading the software" of some application seems.... erm... wrong!
Bert.
We should use evoting AND keep the paper trail (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the only way to make eliminate problems, or suspicions of problems, like this one.
It's not hard. The voting machines would work the same, but produce paper ballots printing the voter's choice and also encoding it in bar code (if you are afraid of bar codes print it a second time with an OCR-friendly font). The voter then verifies that the ballot prints what was chosen and casts this ballot (and he can print many ballots to fix errors, but can cast only one).
At the end of the day the ballots are scanned and we get the result. In case of problems we go back to the ballots to check them. The result is as fast as the electronic, and as reliable as the paper version.
So why is everyone pushing evoting trying to kill the paper trail? That is what creates the problems. And it is totally unnecessary.
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...
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.
Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:1, Interesting)
These "Kooky terror groups" are a figment of your and the group imagination projected by the media. They do not exist. The people fighting the US in Iraq are the people who want the USA to leave their country alone. During the American Revolutionary War (1776), this type of person was called a "freedom fighter". Stop spewing crap or you might as well call yourself Bill O'Reilly.
Re:Absentee Ballot! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
An honest question: when a traditionally authoritarian country claims to change its ways and have a fair election, isn't it the case that they can have international (UN?) parties there to monitor the election? If so, how do we get some of those?
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.
Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm inclined to agree. Believing in a deity does sort of indicate a weak mind, but you've got to give it to the New Testament, as an outline for living a decent life, it's not that bad.
It's no Hitchiker's Guide of course, but you can't go wrong with that "love your neighbor" and "help the poor" and "do unto others" stuff.
Re:Manipulating elections another way (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, no, they failed to stay nonviolent long before that. The "Quit India" campaign during WW2 saw quite a few terrorist acts on behalf of Indian freedom fighters.
In general, it makes more sense to consider that the British left India not because Ghandi's nonviolent resistance campaign was particularly successful by itself, but simply because the colonial era has ended. Other colonies (some of which had far more violent resistance movements) were vacated shortly after - or even before, in some cases - by the European powers.
Re:Anybody surprised? PS... (Score:2, Interesting)