JaBbA's Hut

The Diebold Opti-scan machines, built by the Diebold Corporation here in Ohio, whose owner famously stated that he was going to "deliver Ohio to the Republicans", were shown during a test to be vulnerable to multiple attack vectors due to their dangerous design.

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.

These are the machines that Ohio Secretary of State, Bush Election Committee Chair and potential Governor candidate Ken Blackwell tried to force every Ohio county to use. Diebold's code, leaked to the public long ago, has been shown to be riddled with flaws.

From the Crypto-Gram