Do the touch screens have a driver?

[MominTN]

Do the touch screens have a driver similar to the ones we have on pcs that could be downloaded as an update or as a fix? Few people can see these drivers' source code or know how to program them.
The program on the machine might have been not properly installed or not in sync with the new driver and then redisplayed the vote shift for the person to actually see. Sometimes my pc has a problem and certain fields disappear and if you run the mouse over them they redisplay.
Does anyone know if they have a driver for the touch screen and how it works? Would it be possible to hide screen manipulation code there so that other people wouldn't notice it even if they were looking at the program?
Just an idea. I was wondering why so many touch screens were voting for Bush.

[LisaM]

1. I know that you can't depend on the calibration

I heard a woman call in to a radio show and say that she worked at a fish market and that the touch screens they used to ring up the seafood would un-calibrate frequently - they had to check them all the time, all day long, to make sure the calibration hadn't slipped.

[Canuckistanian]

2. EVERYTHING can be tampered with..

The key assignments, the screen display, the vote calculations and the memory data.

That's what you get when Diebold et al use 'proprietary' software that is hidden and un-knowable.

It's like a buffet of vote-rigging. You design the machine, you write the code and nobody can question you! It's fool-proof!

[MarkusQ]

3. Not a driver per se

...but what you describe is a common property of closed source software (one of the reasons Open Source Software people don't trust it). It could literally be doing anything with the input.

That said, I think e-voting is only part of the issue. The election could have been flipped by simply not sending enough polling stations to predominantly Democratic precincts, and there is some evidence that this was done.

--MarkusQ

[libertypirate]

4. There are third party DLL's in many places

Yes It's a display/input device it has to have a driver,

But wouldn't you think it would make more sense to use a library that could be shared throughout multiple systems.

[MominTN]

5. driver programmer

When I was searching the internet for that company in Florida who is owned by the Korean woman I ran across a meeting that was attended by a driver programmer so that also got me thinking about drivers because I think people download drivers on their pcs from the internet when the hardware vendor tells them to, not thinking that they may affect the programming. It is a part of the system that an audit should include.

[Boredtodeath]

6. Yes, multiple drivers

Including custom ones on the Diebold system written by BSquare.

There are drivers for the PCMCIA (floppy and modem) slots, the screen, the printer, the card reader, every component of the machine.....

[dbonds]

7. Since they used Windows CE

the driver is below the OS. At that level there is not any concept of fields or data. It is all pixels and coordinates. This would not be a good way to manipulate the election. The programing concepts need to do that would be above the OS, at the API or application level. Oh, btw, I have written drivers that are in the Linux kernel.

[merh]

8. What is FoxPro8?

communication from someone with Triad that might mean something to a programmer.

Subject: Language Reference & Developer's Guide for VFP8.0? Cheryl Bellucci From: Cheryl Bellucci
Category: Helpfiles Xenia, United States
Version: Visual FoxPro 8 Date: September 25, 2003
Hi, all!

We've got VFP8.0 on CD from the MSDN subscription. I've been tasked to order a set of books from Microsoft Press for VFP8.0, but I can't find reference to them on Microsoft's web site. Are there books available? If so, can someone get me the order numbers?

Someone else is looking at books from Hentzenwerke Publishing.

Thanks!
Cheryl A Bellucci
TRIAD GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEMS, INC
http://www.foxite.com/archives/0000030048.htm

[dbonds]

9. That would be a database language

http://databases.about.com/od/foxpro/ is one starting point. If I remember right, foxpro was an addon tools for dbase files originally, and soon became a more popular tool for writing apps. Then Microsoft bought them. Added the Visual interface. I haven't heard much about it in many years.

[americanwoman]

11. FoxPro is a programming language

There was another thread with concerns about this woman's online questions. There's nothing to them fraud-wise. In the one you cite, she's just asking for reference books on FoxPro.

[MominTN]

12. Coordinates

So if someone placed an x behind "Kerry", could a driver change the coordinate to look like an x behind "Bush"?

[AntiFascist]

13. I have also worked on Windows drivers.....

and if they want to manipulate voting data at the driver level its certainly possible. I don't understand what you mean by "at that level there is not any concept of fields or data." All you need is the right kind of buffer or I/O protocol.

[GAspnes]

14. The meaning is that drivers don't understand the data

Driver code is hardware specific. Your keyboard, f'rinstance. It talks to the hardware, but doesn't know anything about the 'meaning' of the data it translates. It reads a signal line from a chip, interprets that as a byte code and hands that byte code up to the OS. Even the OS doesn't know that the "b" you just typed is the first letter of your son's name in the word processor you're writing him a letter on.

To add a layer of complexity, the Diebold programs don't know anything about the data. The local election officials design a form containing the candidates' names and the location of the box to check, the programs simply count "name in position A, add 1".

One of the better places to put a hack would be in the form compiler, but I never found anything suspicious in that code.

This is not to say the code itself wasn't a mess (it was), and the fact that it worked at all was a miracle. Accidental errors (mis-aligned touch panels, mis-designed forms, interger rollovers, &tc.) are the obvious candidates for creating mis-counts.

[AntiFascist]

15. Traditionally, that is how drivers are supposed to work, but......

let's say, for example, you have a hospital computer application that controls a piece of medical equipment and it also maintains a Microsoft database file containing confidential patient information. There is a driver which is supposed to control the medical device and transfer data from the device into the application. I could demonstrate, fairly easily, how the driver module alone could also be modified to hack into the database file and change the information, without the larger application playing any role in this "covert" behavior. It could also be very difficult to try to reverse-engineer the application to see what is going on, without having specialized tools that detect what is also going on within the driver.

[Goldeneye]

10. We should have just stole a couple of machines

Illegal sure, but so is cheating, and it would have been for a good cause...democracy.