Diebold cannot own the vote

Update: I have received a cease and desist letter from Diebold. My mirror below is no longer active.

I suppose what I'm about to do is mostly symbolic at this point. I choose to be electronically disobedient. This (lists.tgz) is a compressed file of damning memos from Diebold Election Systems. If you live in Alameda County like I do, you voted on Diebold voting machines. Even if you don't live near me, you have every reason to be concerned. You should know that they are insecure, run secret software that we, as citizens, are not allowed to see (imagine not being able to see the laws that run our country!) and do not currently provide an audit trail necessary for a recount of votes. Learn more here and here.

Fellow SIMS student, Parker Thompson, has two additional mirrors here and here.

Here are some excerpts from the memos:

�If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.�

�I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".�

Read on for more excerpts courtesy of why-war.com

_�Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed.�

In response to a question about a presentation in El Paso County, Colorado: �For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo.�

�I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.�

�I feel that over the next year, if the current management team stays in place, the Global [Election Management System] working environment will continue to be a chaotic mess. Global management has and will be doing the best to keep their jobs at the expense of employees. Unrealistic goals will be placed on current employees, they will fail to achieve them. If Diebold wants to keep things the same for the time being, this will only compound an already dysfunctional company. Due to the lack of leadership, vision, and self-preserving nature of the current management, the future growth of this company will continue to stagnate until change comes.�

�[T]he bugzilla historic data recovery process is complete. Some bugs were irrecoverably lost and they will have to be re-found and re-submitted, but overall the loss was relatively minor.�

�28 of 114 or about 1 in 4 precincts called in this AM with either memory card issues "please re-insert", units that wouldn't take ballots - even after recycling power, or units that needed to be recycled. We reburned 7 memory cards, 4 of which we didn't need to, but they were far enough away that we didn't know what we'd find when we got there (bad rover communication).�

�[...] while reading some of Paranoid Bev�s scribbling.�

�Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the closing of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit Log an entry for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this, to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed. However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting functionality, that would be even better.� (emphasis added)

_

�4K Smart cards which had never been previously programmed are being recognized by the Card Manager as manager cards. When a virgin card from CardLogix is inserted into a Spyrus (have tried CM-0-2-9 and CM-1-1-1) the prompt "Upgrade Mgr Card?" is displayed. Pressing the ENTER key creates a valid manager card. This happens in Admin mode and Election mode.�

Posted by joebeone at Octubre 27, 2003 11:17 PM