Diebold Internal Mail Confirms U.S. Vote Count Vulnerabilities

[rainbow4321]

From a Sept 2003 webpage article


http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00106.htm


Scoop has obtained internal mail messages from Diebold Election Systems which clearly and explicitly confirm security problems in the GEMS vote counting software that were highlighted in reports published on Scoop.co.nz and widely elsewhere in July.

In the internal mail Diebold Election Systems principal engineer R&D Ken Clark - then working for Global Election Systems before Diebold took the company over - responded to an internal query over a security problem. The official certification laboratory responsible for assessing the voting technology company software's robustness had noticed a problem, and a staff member was seeking Clark's advice.

Diebold Election Systems technical writer R&D Nel Finberg wrote to the "support" list on 16th October 2001: "Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?"

Clark: "Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents. Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the .mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out."

[htuttle]

1. There's a lot more in those mail archives

And a lot worse.

I kept my own copy of them offline, but does anyone have a link to an online archive of them for those who weren't here back then?

[rainbow4321]

3. Is this it?

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but I found it in another thread:


http://www.hacksonville.org/diebold/lists.html

It is in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=100515&mesg_id=101549

[htuttle]

5. That's it

At one point, we searched it for really obvious words like 'fraud' and found some very interesting things -- very incriminating!

[Shalom]

2. Motive + Opportunity = CRIME n/t

[rainbow4321]

4. More on Diebold-GEMS/shrub/TX backers

Some go way back to when shrub was connected to the TX Rangers deal that scored him a hefty amount of $$

Scroll down towards bottom of the link:

http://bushvchoice.blogs.com/bvc/2004/10/cause_its_more...

Immediately after <Jeffrey> Dean joined Diebold, according to corporate memos, another Diebold programmer, Dmitri Papushin, flagged bogus votes appearing in vote tables; but after a dozen changes before the November 2000 election, all the changes retained the new hidden vote tables! And this has continued up to the present, according to Harris, who says anyone can use or sell the information.

Dean told prosecutors (whose offices were on the ninth floor of the King County courthouse) that he was unemployed, when in fact he was working for Diebold who afforded him with 24-hour access to Diebold's King County. Washington GEMS central tabulator, according to Stephenson. (Dean worked on the GEMS tabulator on the fifth
floor of the same King County courthouse!)

<snip>

Unfortunately, New York Attorney General Elliott Spitzer is not employed by the state of Washington. Stephenson says that Jeffrey Dean (by his own admission) is subject to blackmail; but more critically, his embezzlement charges in the police record indicate he was involved in " 'sophisticated' manipulation of computer accounting records," and that "he was embezzling in order to pay blackmail over a fight he was involved in, in which a person died."

<snip>

Some would consider it strange that both GEMS and Austin-based Hart InterCivic are both based in the Lone Star state. But not when one considers that Hart is backed by wealthy Republican Texas investor Tom Hicks of Stratford Capital Partners. Hicks' primary investment company Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst coordinated the 1998 purchase of Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers from George W. Bush and his partners, in which Dubya pocketed a $14.9 million profit from his original but controversial $1 million Harken Energy stock sale just days before Gulf War I hostilities commenced.