This prompted Funk to seek an evaluation. He asked Black Box Voting to help
him analyze his voting system.
After several consultations, Black Box Voting determined that the
nature of the
problems in Emery County might be systemic and might be national in scope.
Therefore, we arranged for and underwrote the services of Harri Hursti and
also Security Innovation, Inc.
Neither Funk nor Black Box Voting were prepared for the depth and
breadth of the
problems discovered. Based on these discoveries we will begin with a series of
articles followed by concise, but more formal reports.
Hursti quickly determined the three most likely causes of the low
memory problem:
1. There might be completely different software in the machines with
low memory.
2. Some machines might contain different external data
3. Or, some of the machines might have been delivered with natively different
amounts of memory available.
Hursti approached issue #2 first. If the used memory was due to
external data or
archived election files stored on the system, he reasoned, removing
any such files
would clear the memory. He discovered that some of the machines did
contain test
election data, and he deleted the extra data. This produced only a
small improvement
in available memory, however.
As for issue #1, different programs on the machines -- or, the
existence of something
stored in memory which is hidden, such a find would obviously be disturbing.
Issue #3, the possibility that some machines had different amounts of
memory left in
their life cycle, is particularly troubling. The technology choice
Diebold made -- memory
storage consisting of flash memory, which is known to degrade over
time -- carries
with it a possibility that used machines will be near the end of
their memory life cycle.
If such machines were delivered to Emery County as "new," this would
be like buying
a "new" car with 100,000 miles already on it.
The only thing that was known about the cause of this problem was
that there were
different amounts of memory. The reason remained to be discovered. In
the course of
evaluating the reason for the low memory, we learned much more about the TSx.
IS THERE AN INFRA-RED PORT FOR REMOTE COMMUNICATIONS?
Hursti also examined the remote communications capabilities of this
system. He found
no infra-red (IrDA) ports.
"The whole thing here is that it's network aware even when RAS is not
running. You're
not dialing out and it's network aware. And it's actually configured
to use an Ethernet board..
.It's all the time network aware...Perhaps all you need is this
Ethernet cord and a wireless
cord inserted and off you go."
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