A couple of 54-year old women with $12 worth of tools penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace. The seals do nothing whatever to protect against access by insiders after testing, and the seals also are worthless in jurisdictions where voting machines are sent home with poll workers before the election.
See photos below - a couple of 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace. This experiment shows that the seals do nothing whatever to protect against access by insiders after testing, and the seals also are worthless in jurisdictions like Washington, Florida, California, and many other locations where voting machines are sent home with poll workers for days before the election.
The Busby-Bilbray contest in San Diego now has proof that the optical scan machines sent home with poll workers subjected the tamper-friendly memory cards to an non-recoverable lapse in chain of custody. The recipe for tampering has been on the Internet for over a year: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbvreport.pdf
The photos below blow apart claims by elections officials that voting machine "sleepovers" -- sending voting machines home with poll workers for days or weeks prior to elections -- are secure because of seals over the memory card.
Two Black Box Voting studies in Leon County, Florida proved that election results can be altered in such a way that the supervisor of elections cannot detect the tampering. Not to worry, we were told by elections officials. The memory cards are sealed inside the machines.
But then Black Box Voting purchased an optical scan machine and obtained discarded voting machine seals from King County, Washington. Here's what we found:
The cover can be removed without detection by removing five screws. Inside, all that stands between a pollworker (or an insider at the warehouse or elections office) and the open-for-business memory card is a washer which you can unscrew.
See the memory card: It is the item in the slot that says "this side up." Diebold's first line of defense is a metal door that pivots down over the memory card slot.
See how the door works: The hole in the right side of the door is over-large, so you can move the right-side bolt in and out at will. Therefore, they seal the right-side bolt.
See the plastic seal: This plastic seal was used by King County. It had been broken and discarded, so we used the high-tech method of putting an orange rubber band on it to hold it together for this demo. The seal is pointless anyway, as you'll soon see.
Since you can open up the machine, remove and reprogram the memory card, and put it back, without having to touch the "tamper-evident seal," those seals are totally worthless.
Of course Diebold knew about this. They designed the machines, the little metal door, and the "tamper-evident seals." It was obviously a ploy to distract our attention.
This has to be demonstrated to every elections authority that has a contract with Diebold. Even if they are using different model machines, it demonstrates how worthless Diebold "security" is, in a manner that nobody who sees it can dispute.
This is the most glaring evidence of consumer fraud I've ever seen. Any District Attorney who sees this demonstration and is aware that Diebold promoted their "tamper-evident seals," as a means of securing the memory cards, should bring charges immediately. The seals do not do what they were advertised to do. Consumer fraud pure and simple. Worse, the taxpayers, through their local elected officials who signed contracts with Diebold and bought those machines, were the consumers who were defrauded. That's all of us.
--Mark
by
Mark E. Smith (20 articles, 28 quicklinks, 68 diaries, 817 comments)
on Sunday, September 3, 2006 at 2:50:46 PM
San Diego Registrar of voters Mikel Haas has explained that he cannot hold an election unless he is allowed to send the voting machines home with poll workers prior to the election.
So if I was a bad guy who wanted to rig an election, I'd just encourage a few of my friends to sign up as precinct inspectors. Once they had the voting machines in their homes, I'd go over for a friendly social visit, and they'd probably be happy to show me the machine. Then I'd take out a twenty and ask them to go to the store and get us a six-pack or a bottle of wine, and while they were gone I'd open up the machine, reprogram the memory card, close the machine back up, and they'd never be the wiser.
Nor would anyone else.
Voting machines are a lot like teenagers. If you let them go on unsupervised sleepovers without protection, it is quite possible that they could pick up a virus. A responsible parent would either ensure that they understood the dangers and were protected, or forbid unsupervised sleepovers. Failing that, it might be a good idea to have them tested.
