Re: NBC: Senate Kills Right Wing Bigot pandering anti-gay amendment



The Weasel wrote:


I guess you don't take the CEO (At the time) of Diebold's words. You do
know what he said, right?


This is another one of those silly conspiracy theories. In July 2004,
Blackwell threw out all of the Diebold electronic voting machines. Tell
us just exactly how did these Diebold electronic machines, that were
NOT used in the state, stole the Ohio election??

"......and 88 Ohio counties that had contracted to buy electronic
machines from Diebold Election Systems Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, now
are scrambling to find money for alternatives now that the Diebold
machines have been decertified there."

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/1_1/daily_news/24072-1.html

"When Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell halted the purchase of
new electronic voting machines on July 16 after two investigations
identified 57 potential software and hardware security threats, North
Canton, Ohio's Diebold Electronic Systems' dream of a $100 million
contract with the state disappeared."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0909-12.htm

"Blunt's action echoes those of officials in some other states. Last
week, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell stopped the
deployment of machines from Diebold Inc.'s Diebold Election Systems in
that state, citing unresolved security issues. California Secretary of
State Kevin Shelley recently decertified touch-screen machines there,
and set a list of conditions that local elections officials must meet
in order to use them in November."

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0719/web-evote-07-21-04.asp

"The directive also banned the use of touch-screen systems from
Diebold."

http://tinyurl.com/4ymcp

Sure, why use the controversial touch-screen machines, when the tabulation computers for the Diebold optical scan voting system are so much easier to hack?

It was only the counties in Ohio and other states which used the Diebold optical scan machines which didn't match the exit polls.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

" While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies."

And here is a more visual analysis:
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm

From the same commondreams source:

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Laurie

.

Relevant Pages

  • OT| U.S. democracy in peril
    ... Diebold software program -- Diebold's source code -- which runs ... their e-voting machines. ... Democrats largely voted for Kerry. ... the rich and powerful were exempt ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • OT| U.S. democracy in peril
    ... Voting Fraud in the USA" ... The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are ... "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to ... Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Of course theres no election fraud here: In MD, former head of state Republicon party owns trucking
    ... A family-owned trucking firm that has a contract to deliver Diebold ... electronic voting machines to 14 voting districts in Maryland is ... Maryland, received the contract from Diebold Election Systems to ... transport the company's machines from warehouses to the polls for the ...
    (alt.politics)
  • for Mike: the latest on Diebold
    ... In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly ... "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into ... trouble-free election, ... Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the ...
    (alt.guitar.amps)
  • OT Career Criminal: From Watergate to Your Vote
    ... Convicted of 23 felonies for computer crimes, Jeffrey Dean ... internal memos from Diebold refer to an ongoing consulting ... Global Election Systems shortly before election 2000. ...
    (rec.radio.shortwave)
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