Former Maryland delegate gets purported Diebold code

Baltimore Sun ^ | October 20, 2006 | Melissa Harris

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004.

Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.

spokesman for Diebold, which manufactures the state's touch-screen voting machines, said the company is treating the software Kagan received as "stolen" and not as "picked up" at the State Board of Elections, as the anonymous note claimed. Lawyers for the company are seeking its return.

....Kagan, a former state Democratic delegate from Montgomery County who is now executive director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, said the disks were delivered to her office Wednesday.

An accompanying letter refers to the State Board of Elections and calls Kagan "the proud recipient of an 'abandoned baby Diebold source code' right from SBE accidentally picked up in this envelope, right in plain view at SBE. ... You have the software because you are a credible person who can save the state from itself. You must alert the media and save democracy."

[longtermmemmory]

no but if a this professor is able to perform a real time demonstration of the process then it is something for concern.

The solution Diebold is using is to randomly pull terminals from the line up and test them to see if they are recording votes correctly. Essentially sacrifice random terminals to ensure there is no malicious code installed.

This is no different than the Rush limbaugh video showing how a simple wire throu a stack of punch cards can sway an election result.


We must be vigilant to tampering.

[DBrow]

"if a this professor is able to perform a real time demonstration "

Which he has not done, nor has he accounted for common safeguards like security seals. He has a bogus story that is repeated often as The Truth, but there is no independent verification.

Plus, since there is no such thing as self-deleting code, a machine suspected of tampering could be checked in a police forensics lab.

He has to show that he can get his code into a machine without detection, that there is no operating systems check for tampering in the machine, that his malware works as advertised, and that it cannot be detected after the election. Plus, he must show that the magic code can propagate to other machines and still remain undetected.

I call it magic because no real code could do that.

Until he does that, I don't think you need to worry about his claims.

[Chode]

how many friggin lines of code can it possibly take to bump a dozen or so counters here and there???

but it prolly has several KLOCs of code.

[zbigreddogz]

Umm, no, actually, Erlich has trailed in almost every poll for the past 3 months.

If there is something funny going on, it's more likely aimed at Steele.

[pray4liberty]

Diebold and the media are behind the vote scamming. Sign onto to http://www.votescam.com

[BigSkyFreeper]

If you read the article, the disks came from independent testing companies, not from Diebold.

Right, and Democrats in MD are trying to imply this is just another diabolical attempt on Diebold's part to steal an election.

[Vicomte13]

"Right, and Democrats in MD are trying to imply this is just another diabolical attempt on Diebold's part to steal an election."

That's the way they think.
But how comfortable will you be with the security of elections when Democrats are back in charge of the voting commissions, chose the electronic voting programmers and supervisors...and don't allow a paper record?
That's the problem.

[BigSkyFreeper]

But how comfortable will you be with the security of elections when Democrats are back in charge of the voting commissions, chose the electronic voting programmers and supervisors...and don't allow a paper record?

That's exactly why I'm against electronic voting. For one thing the Democrats want to tie Republican's to Diebold, yet at the same time, they're doing everything possible to hack the code of these machines to tilt the machines in their favor.

Get rid of the damn things. It ain't worth the hassle every time we haven an election.