A very clear, simple, explanation of how a guy hacked into a Diebold voting machine and changed the results. So easy to read, even those of us who are computer-challenged can understand it.Diebold in Florida
By SUSAN PYNCHON
I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan).
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What follows is my description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event. To select which voting machine to use for the test, Ion drew a serial number of one voting machine from a container holding all the serial numbers of all the Leon County machines. Since the test took place at the elections warehouse, all the voting machines were already stored there and the one machine, whose serial number was selected, was located and brought into the warehouse office, where it was plugged into an electrical outlet (so it could operate!). It was not networked to any other machines. We checked the serial number of the machine against the serial number that Ion had randomly selected.
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Everything was conducted as in a normal election. Ion first printed a "zero tape" (a poll tape from the machine that is supposed to show that nothing has been altered before the election begins). This was the first step in the hack --the zero tape showed zero votes for both the "Yes" answer and the "No" answer, even though Harri had altered the memory card and votes had been subtracted from one answer and added to the other answer. Harri used the interpreted (executable) code to cover up the fact that he had changed the vote counters.
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At that point, Ion Sancho's technician, TJ, said, "Well, that doesn't prove anything because the printer template can be changed." (And that is true. The poll tape can be made to read anything at all, which was proved in an earlier test on a Leon County op-scan in May of 2005, when the poll-tape was made to say, at the bottom of the tape, "Is this real or is it Memorex?") Ion responded to TJ that they were taking this to the next level and that he wanted TJ to upload the memory card to the central tabulator. TJ, who had quite apparently been talking to the Diebold reps, said he didn't want that to happen because he didn't know if Harri might have planted some kind of virus on the memory card that would infect the central tabulator.
(snip)
So, TJ became convinced that it was all right to upload the memory card, which he did. And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/pynchon01232006.html
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