Via Election Law Blog, there’s a report that Diebold machines are facing decertification, at least in California:
Diebold programmers created their own language, AccuBasic, for the interpreted code used in all of the voting machines supplied for polling places. But they have told election officials in several states that AccuBasic is a very limited language, able only to read vote counts and not modify them, then print out vote reports in the various ways that counties may ask. Tailoring those reports for individual jurisdictions is the main reason for using the interpreted code.
According to several elections officials and voting system experts, Diebold managers persuaded Ciber Inc., a private, software lab in Huntsville, Ala., which tests voting systems for national approval, that the files were inconsequential and not worth a look. Ciber engineers cleared the system, and the National Association of State Elections Directors gave it a national stamp of approval last year under 2002 federal voting system rules that with few exceptions bar the use of interpreted code.
Last summer, Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti took a twin of Diebold’s memory cards and preloaded it with votes, a negative number on one side of an issue and an equal, positive number on the other side. Then he retooled Diebold’s AccuBasic files so the computer never looked at the preloaded votes before an election. A printout of the vote counters before any ballots were cast would show zero votes although the election already was rigged.
Considering how arrogant Diebold has been with the security of our machines…how aggressively they argued that their machines couldn’t be abused, and didn’t need effective audit controls…I take a certain amount of perverse pleasure with their encounter with a clue-by-four depicted above.
