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As we enter the new year, let's hope that our elected officials take the threat of stolen votes seriously.

From this article in the Miami Herald (12/15/05), we learn:

A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.

Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.

Mr. Sancho comments on this finding on the Leon County, Florida, Supervisor of Elections website:

Granted the same access as an employee of our office, it was possible to enter the computer, alter election results, and exit the system without leaving any physical record of this action. It was also demonstrated that false information or instructions could be placed on a memory card (the device used to program the individual voting machines and record the voter's votes) and create false results or election reports.

If you haven't been following this story, it's chilling, actually. BlackBoxVoting.org has been leading the way in tracking down possible voter fraud with respect to electronic voting machines.

They have published Diebold memos dating back to 1999 about changes to software programs that have subsequently been released and are uncertified! (see page 15 of this .pdf). This problem is what led to California halting the certification process for certain Diebold machines.

Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting posted the memos on the website, and in her research found the following:

While the certified version of the voting software sat in escrow at the secretary of state's office, unauthorized versions were being put on the FTP site and, from there, downloaded and installed, overwriting the approved software. The memos documented this.

You might be yawning now. Someone used version 1.18.14 instead of version 1.17.23. Ho hum. Except for this: A programmer never changes a version number unless he changes the underlying computer code. If the versions are never submitted for certification, only the individual who programmed the change knows for sure what he put in there. Certification is the foundation of the voting industry. Remove it, and the whole house of cards tumbles.

Dmitry Papushin, is one of five Diebold programmers who have been putting programs on the FTP site. Take a look at his memos. What he's doing here is placing uncertified software versions on a Web site, and people are using it. (Underlines represent versions that were never certified, or the implementation of poor security procedures).

18 Jan 2000 memo from Dmitry Papushin: GEMS 1-14-5 is ready.

January 25, 2000 memo from Steve Knecht: Will all future 1.14x versions be compatible with 1.14.5 if we burn mem cards in San Luis Obispo now?�

15 January 2003 memo from Dmitry Papushin: Ballot Station 4-3-14 for Windows CE and Windows NT are ready.

Ms. Harris concludes:

From 1999 to 2003, Papushin uploaded more voting-system software onto the unprotected Diebold Web site than any other programmer. Papushin has been a keeper of the passwords and the king of single sentence memos. He knows the voting-system programming intimately and has uploaded computer code that programs your smart card, captures your votes at the polling place and accumulates and reports them at the county.

His programming skills and his ability to distribute programs to techs and county officials make him a tempting target for bribery. We assume that Dmitry Papushin has integrity and ironclad ethics. But to deter the unscrupulous from making inappropriate solitications to programmers like Papushin, we need to enforce regulations which require that only authorized software be used, and we need fraud-deterring audit procedures.

Finally, from that same .pdf (starting on page 7), we return to the stolen 2000 election in Florida:

Fox News Network, 29 November 2000: Brit Hume, host: ... It seems a broken computer modem and a faulty memory card were culprits in the erroneous election-night call of George W. Bush as the Florida winner ...computers with a bad memory card caused it to appear for a time that Al Gore had lost more than 16,000 votes, which seemed to put George W. Bush up by 50,000 at that stage in the night, an insurmountable margin. Every network saw that as a basis for calling the state for Mr. Bush. ...

Ms Harris asks and investigates:

Was it a bad memory card that produced the 16,000-vote spread? Or is there another explanation? And is it true that these 16,000 mystery votes caused the networks to call the election for Bush? Let's look at the symptoms of a bad memory card. A memory card, as you'll recall, is like a floppy disk. If you have worked with computers for any length of time, you know that a disk can go bad. When it does, which of the following is most likely:

a) In an Excel spreadsheet that you saved on the bad disk, is it likely to read a column of numbers correctly the first time: 1005, 2109, 3000 ... but the second time, replace one of the numbers like
this: 1005, 2109, 16,022 ...
b) Or is it more likely that the bad disk will do one of the following things: Fail to read the file at all; crash your computer; give you an error message; or make weird humming and whirring noises
while your computer attempts unsuccessfully to read the disk

For most of us, the answer is b). But according to news reports,
the official explanation from Global Election Systems (the previouse name for Diebold) was that a bad memory card reported votes correctly in every race except the presidential race, where it changed Gore's total to minus 16,022.

Ms. Harris continues:

If the symptom of a corrupted memory card was arbitrary vote changing, as explained to the media in Volusia County, we'd be in real trouble according to Diebold sales representative Steve Knecht in a March 24, 2000, memo: Cards were corrupted throughout California at a rate exceeding our normal 1 in 100 that we've been seeing. Marin is now up to 8 cards corrupted out of 114.

The Diebold memos reveal that the story given to the media about Volusia County's sudden vote discrepancy isn't quite the whole story.
On January 17, 2001, Volusia County employee Lana Hires asked the technical staff at Global Election Systems for help. She was being
put on the hot seat over Al Gore's strange tally of negative 16,022 votes. I need some answers! she wrote. Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here looking dumb.

Talbot Iredale, senior vice president for research and development,
explains: Only the presidential totals were incorrect. Iredale then
hits us with this bombshell:

The problem precinct had two memory [sic] cards uploaded. The second one is the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have been one memory card uploaded.

Furthermore, Ms Harris asks:

Where did this second card come from?

Iredale then gives a cursory nod to the official explanation given to the media: Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination [sic] for the problem but since I know nothing about the second memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.

Again, where did the second card come from?

Talbot writes: Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been uploaded). There is always the possiblity that the second memory card or second upload came from an un-authorised source. If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the second memory card is or whether it even exists. I do know that there were two uploads from two different memory cards (copy 0 (master) and copy 3).

Finally, Ms. Harris concludes:

There were two uploads from two different cards. The votes were uploaded on the same port about 1 hour apart. Only one memory card was supposed to have been uploaded. Copy 0 uploaded some votes. Copy 3 replaced the votes from Copy 0 with its own. Iredale believes the second one is the one that caused the problem. The problem: 16,022 negative votes for Al Gore We know that the problem was noticed and corrected. An election worker noticed Gore's votes literally falling off the tally, and the number of votes in Precinct 216 was totally out of whack. Eventually, a manual recount was done. No harm, no foul

No harm, no foul? she asks, tongue-in-cheek. No harm, indeed...chilling stuff...

Read the report, spend some time on BlackBoxVoting.org, investigate yourself. Is there election tampering going on? The clues are disturbing, indeed.

ya rite but some times its not work yaar. Give me some more info

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