posted 09-19-2003 01:52 PM            

More Diebold ''Mysteries''
Media Coverage Possible flaw triggers electronic voting concerns
AP Wire

The strange case of an election tally that appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines.

During San Luis Obispo County's March 2002 primary, absentee vote tallies were apparently sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold Election Systems Inc., the maker of the voting machines used in the election.

At least that's what timestamps on digital records showed.

County election officials say the unexplained gaffe probably didn't influence the vote, and Diebold executives -- who only recently acknowledged the lapse -- say voters should have confidence in the election process.

"Probably didn't influence the vote..."

PROBABLY?!

"...voters should have confidence in the election process."

ARE THEY SMOKING CRACK?

But computer programmers say the incident is further evidence that electronic voting technology could allow a politically connected computer hacker to monitor balloting and, if the vote was going the wrong way, mobilize voters to swing the election.

"If you're at the state party headquarters and you know how the vote is going in a county, you can allocate scarce resources to the county where you're losing by a close margin," said Jim March, a computer system administrator from Milpitas who examined ballot results that ended up on a Diebold site without password protection. "This data is incredibly valuable to a campaign manager."

March said he found absentee ballot totals from 57 of 164 San Luis Obispo County precincts in an easily accessible File Transfer Protocol site operated by North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold. The votes were time-stamped at 3:31 p.m. on March 5, 2002 -- more than four hours before polls closed.

By law, election officials cannot release tallies until voting is finished -- typically 8 p.m. on election day. Activists discovered the data in January.

Diebold, which won't say when the data showed up on the site, acknowledged the incident and says it is investigating how the data ended up on a public Internet site.

Diebold's investigating? Well, that puts my mind at ease.

Deborah Seiler, Diebold's West Coast sales representative, said Diebold engineers may have published the results as part of a test -- possibly days, weeks or months after the county primary, regardless of the time stamp. She said a system of checks and balances safeguards Diebold's 33,000 voting machines nationwide from fraud.

That's our story and we are sticking to it.

"These activists don't understand what they're looking at," Seiler said.

She says that like we're something that crawled from under a rock. Honey, we're activists second, voters first. And what are your credentials to utter such a damn fool sentence? You're a salesman, and your paycheck depends on people buying these crappy machines. We, on the other hand, include programmers, engineers, and computer security experts, and we DO know what we are talking about and we know our democracy depends on us stopping you.

County election officials insist the primary was fair. No one has called for a criminal investigation or recount. Most local supervisors were running unopposed, and the winning candidates and proposals enjoyed large margins.

Huh? So, potentially crooked machines are okay, as long as they cheat by a large margin?

County clerk-recorder Julie L. Rodewald said she was "concerned" about the results winding up online, but she has no plans to get rid of Diebold equipment.

posted 09-25-2003 06:11 AM            

DIEBOLD ATTEMPTS TO SILENCE ITS CRITICS...