Below is forwarded email from the lead plaintiff in the California
Lawsuit against the California Secretary of State and Diebold which
details a few of the known security flaws of Diebold voting machines.
I will remind the Utah Elections Ofice that the work of the
MIT/Caltech Vote project has already been refuted by Utah's computer
scientists of BYU and the U of Utah and was formally submitted to
their office last September and has been publicly posted here:
http://utahcountvotes.org/voting_systems.pdf
differences did not cause the memory differences in the Diebold voting
machines.
Bruce Funk is under attack as I type this, in a special meeting of the
Emery County Commission and he needs our support:
http://utahcountvotes.org Bruce Funk is the first responsible
election official in Utah who invited computer scientists and computer
security experts to examine the Diebold voting machines which have
been recently ditched state-wide in Maryland, and in several Florida
and California counties, and impounded by the New Hampshie Attorney
General - due to security flaws.
I am redoing the web page of irrefutable photographic evidence of
Diebold flaws to make it download faster:
http://utahcountvotes.org/bbv-diebold-images.php
Why has Diebold not been held accountable for meeting its contractual
obligations to Utah? Why instead has the Lt. Governor attacked the
hero who is doing his job to have experts examine his voting equipment
and protect voters? This would be like telling Utah highway patrol to
drive cars without brakes due to "contractual obligations".
Kathy Dopp http://utahcountvotes.org
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joseph Holder
Date: Mar 27, 2006 2:34 PM
Subject: Diebold's "alleged" vulnerabilities
To: prolly@sltrib.com
Salt Lake Tribune
Dear Mr. Rolly:
I read your column of March 24 regarding County Clerk Bruce Funk of
Emery County, and his allowing an independent examination of the
Diebold AccuVote-TSx voting system. There needs to be some
clarification regarding the "alleged" vulnerabilities of the Diebold
AccuVote-TSx that Utah has recently purchased, and the basis for the
California lawsuit. The facts supporting the California lawsuit also
supported his desire for further examination of the new AccuVote-TSx
voting system.
First is the use of the word "alleged" to describe the vulnerabilities
discussed in the California lawsuit. The plaintiffs in the suit are not
going forward based upon an "assertion without or before proof".
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, the chief elections
officer of the state, did impanel at taxpayers expense a Voting Systems
Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB). On February 14, 2006 the
Secretary issued a Security Analysis that is available at the
California Secretary of State's website at
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm. It is available as a
PDF at the link titled "State Independent Review Report". The analysis
and report were limited in scope to the issues involving the memory
card used by Diebold voting systems to control the ballot definitions,
and record the actual vote choices made by voters. The basic question
to be answered by their analysis was:
"What kinds of damage can a malicious person do to undermine an
election if he can arbitrarily modify the contents of a memory card?"
Of significant note is the fact they did not have an actual
AccuVote-TSx voting unit to examine, as occurred in Emery County. They
"did not do a comprehensive code review of the whole codebase, nor look
at a very broad range of potential security issues." Their main
concentration was to "the AccuBasic scripting language, its compiler,
its interpreter, and other code related to the potential security
vulnerabilities associated with the memory cards. We found a number of
security vulnerabilities, detailed below."
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