Ready or not Touchscreen voting machines await election test (California)

[Kadie]

Ready or not
Touchscreen voting machines await election test

Nick Juliano
Record Staff Writer
Published Saturday, May 27, 2006


STOCKTON - Lined up like little electronic soldiers, rows of Diebold voting machines sit in a warehouse waiting for deployment next month.

In the weeks leading up to the June 6 primary, San Joaquin County election workers have been busy inspecting electronic voting machines to ensure vulnerabilities identified in Diebold's software don't affect voters at the polls.

All 1,625 of the county's Diebold TSx touchscreen machines have been hand-checked to ensure no malicious software snuck onto their motherboards or memory cards, said Deborah Hench, the county's registrar of voters. Memory cards have been loaded into the ATM-like machines and covered with a piece of tamper-proof tape.

Hench, like dozens of other election officials who will be overseeing the use of Diebold machines, received a letter earlier this month informing her that the company had identified a potentially devastating flaw, which could let someone with access to the machine insert a virus into the system.

"It's like holding a loaded gun to your head and saying, 'Well, unless you pull the trigger there's not much risk,' " said David Dill, a Stanford computer science professor who has studied the Diebold machines. Computer experts are not reporting the specifics of the flaw, not wanting to tip off potential hackers on how to corrupt an election.

more...
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060527/NEWS01/605270339/1001

[BeFree]

1. The beauty of it is...

...all it takes is one crooked worker to wirelessly introduce a programming code into these machines. Even better, the code may already be placed in the machine, set to begin working on the date of the election.

Sounds crazy, huh? Well, it's not crazy at all. Computer experts have shown that those capabilities are built in to those machines. David Dill is just one of those experts.

A loaded gun to the head is a very apt depiction of these machines. Lets call it what it is: Republican roulette.