MB of free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For
perspective, the backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is
about 7.9 MB. Now why would brand new voting machines have used-up
memory?
Time to get a more in depth evaluation
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 Security Innovation, Inc.
breadth of the problems discovered. Based on these discoveries we will
begin with a series of articles followed by concise, but more formal
reports.
Part I
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.
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