Return of the living dead voting machine issue.

[Kevin_Lowe]

It has been a long, long time since anything significant has come down the pike with regard to the hypothesis that the US 2004 presidential election was marred by electronic vote fraud.

However the Black Box Voting people have dug up and verified a very interesting arrangement in the Diebold optical scan vote machines.

The memory cards on which votes are stored are not, it turns out, purely for storing votes. They also contain an executable, which can do whatever it likes with the scanner and which apparently is not subject to any checksum, test for file size or other security measure. So any reasonably cluey programmer can alter a memory card so that it will transfer votes from one candidate to another, at a nominated date and time if they so wish, and no evidence of tampering will show up on the polling tapes.

Or given access to the GEMS central tabulator which is used to program the memory cards before the election, a similarly cluey person could arrange that any or all of the memory cards in a given area were corrupted.

As the article says,

"The ease with which a system -- which clearly violates dozens of FEC standards going back to 1990 -- was certified calls into question the honesty, competence, and personal financial transactions of both testing labs and NASED certifiers".

Full details here:

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/5921.html