Filed under: fly-by-wire
Aaron Brown on the scary prospect of using Diebold electronic voting machines in the upcoming recall election in Berkeley:
Berkeley uses the Diebold Accuvote DRE machine. Somehow the source code to these machines leaked onto the Internet… several well-respected security researchers took a look at it, and found it riddled with flaws. Without any access to the code, voters could vote multiple times, view partial election results, or even close the polling station. Poll workers could do far more damage. And the machine doesn’t authenticate the remote server when reporting results, meaning that an ISP on the path between the voting machine and the backend vote tabulator could manipulate ballots, results, etc.
Pretty damn scary.
After Rubin’s paper came out, Diebold wrote a hasty hand-waving rebuttal, and then spent some time publicly ridiculing the academics who wrote the paper, hoping to mollify their clients. As a result, they produced some incredible propaganda which includes, among other gems (emphasis mine):
It was most unusual to find the industry leader [Diebold] being discredited by a couple of Johns Hopkins University graduate students… [in] a report that directly contradicts information provided by Robyn M. Downs, elections administrator of Prince George’s County, Md., for a story on her implementation of electronic voting…. We believe Ms. Downs. Like most Black people in high-profile jobs, she is not in a position to make mistakes and survive.
I guess that settles it then.