It doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes ... or ... Diebold is Stalin' on their security risks

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:00 PM Permalink

New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems

With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.

"It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday.
[...]
Officials from Diebold and from elections' offices in numerous states minimized the significance of the risk and emphasized that there were no signs that any touch-screen machines had been tampered with.
[...]
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company's technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.

Yeah, update their 'systems' ... in case any of their candidates are losing. I mean, it's not like Diebold has had any other flaws, right ...right!? Uhh, no!

"For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software," he said. "I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Uhh, I guess he never met:
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris

Or Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell

Or Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer.

Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, did the first in-depth analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold touch-screen machines in 2003. After studying the latest problem, he said: "I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding."