Diebold Voting Systems: built to be hacked

The title of this posting would be an unusual slogan for a product that is supposed to make us confident in our voting system. It seems that Diebold optical scan voting machines -- not the newer touch screen machines, but machines that have been in use for years -- are not only hackable, they are designed to be hacked. In other words, they have built-in back doors. Here are some great quote from Bev Harris:

It's probably not an accident, because you can look back through the source code to see that [Diebold] went through some programming contortions to keep this thing there. It had to have been expensive for them, frankly. When we saw the way they designed it [the back door], Harri [Hursti, computer expert] said 'We have the Holy Grail'. The Elections people are very concerned... My question was, can you [hack the machines] in a way that wouldn't be detected. And the answer we found is yes, absolutely... They made up their own computer language! Which is a flat-out violation of all FEC standards. It's completely against federal law not to use standard language... We need to now get the complete set of memory cards used in 2004 and have them looked at by the right experts. We need cooperative counties with some anomalies and Diebold scanners. Someone needs to examine those memory cards to see if they were misused in 2004.

So, a smoking gun that Diebold machines are designed to ease election rigging. This from a company whose CEO promised to "deliver Ohio" for G.W. Bush. Makes those folks demanding an investigation into the Ohio vote in the last presidential race sound less paranoid, doesn't it?

Topics: elections, Computer Security.