De-Diebolding the elections?

Did you hear? Diebold is set to sell its voting machine division to Election Systems & Software – creating a company that would produce nearly three-quarters of our country's voting machine systems.

Please join us in calling on the Justice Department's Antitrust Division to investigate!

One company dominating the voting machine market means it will be more difficult for election officials to negotiate for voting systems on limited budgets, and raises serious concerns about reliability and election fraud issues.

Take action today!

Gee, I wonder why?

Diebold's Chief Financial Officer, VP Steps Down Under SEC Investigation

CFO Kevin Krakora was largest inside trader during mass August 2007 sell-off, near historic company high, as reported exclusively by The BRAD BLOG

Diebold's bad month gets worse...

It's been a bad month for Diebold (DBD), what with the findings in CA that their voting machines drop votes and their audit logs allows deletion of records; their admission that all of their voting machines fail to record ballot deletions, and that their ATMs were hacked, likely by insiders, just to point to a few of their recent embarrassing headlines.

But things are getting still worse by the minute, it seems. This, from Cleveland's Plain Dealer today:
Diebold Inc.'s chief financial officer has stepped down in the wake of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into possible violations of federal securities laws.

Kevin Krakora, 53, who also stepped down as executive vice president, will remain in a nonfinancial reporting capacity until the matter is resolved, Diebold said Wednesday in a filing with the SEC.

Almost too true to be funny

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

To celebrate Super Tuesday

And for those who are voting today:

Compiled by Nancy Tobi of Election Defense Alliance; this video shows testimony to the NH legislature on what it costs to purchase access, by security expert Harri Hursti, and rebuttals by John Silvestro of LHS Associates, the firm that programs memory cards for all of New England.

Curiouser and curiouser

Via Avedon Carol of the Sideshow, a very curious thing ...

More than a hundred computer chips containing voting machine software were lost or stolen during transit in California this week.

Two cardboard shipping tubes containing 174 EPROMs loaded with voting machine software were sent via Federal Express on December 13th from the secretary of state's office in Sacramento to election officials in San Diego County for use in optical-scan machines made by Diebold Election Systems. But on Monday, the two shipping tubes arrived empty.

One of the empty tubes arrived with no lid on the end of it to close the tube; the second tube had a lid, but it was loosely taped shut.

Nicole Winger, spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, says that the California highway patrol and the Sacramento County sheriff's department are investigating whether the chips fell out of the tubes or were stolen.

The chips contained firmware to run the optical-scan equipment that San Diego uses in its central counting office.

According to Winger, chips with the new firmware were sent out to nineteen California counties that use the Diebold optical-scan voting machines. Only San Diego County reported not receiving the chips. The new firmware was being shipped to the counties because previous software had been changed following a top-to-bottom review of voting machine software and hardware that the state had recently completed.

Diebold, which recently changed its name to Premier Election Solutions, asked the secretary of state's office to observe the preparation, packaging and shipping of the chips. Winger says this was all done from the secretary of state's office, with both state staff and Diebold staff present. Winger says Federal Express is Diebold's preferred shipping method for delivering its product to counties. She said the state is currently working out plans to deliver new chips to San Diego and that preparations for the presidential primary election on February 5th will not be delayed by the mailing mishap.

I should note that San Diego filed suit against California Secretary of State Debra Bowen this week for a new requirement she has instituted that compels counties using voting machines to conduct hand recounts of 10 percent of randomly selected precincts in races in which the margin of victory is less than half of 1 percent. State law requires electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail, and California law already requires counties to conduct a hand count of 1 percent of randomly selected precincts after an election -- a move that, in the case of ballots cast on electronic voting machines, can help catch discrepancies between the digital votes and the paper records.

San Diego County's registrar of voters, Deborah Seiler, says the extra 10 percent requirement would cause more work for election staff and delay election results. She says Bowen overstepped her legislative authority in demanding the hand count and wants a court to exclude San Diego from the requirement.

The article ends with this stunner:

Seiler is a former sales representative for Diebold Election Systems.

Gee... do you think the heist of the computer chips will prevent the electronic voting machines from being used? No?

How very curious....

(crossposted at SteveAudio)

Diebold loses court case

To a bunch of college kids:

Diebold Loses Key Copyright Case

Kim Zetter

Students who sued Diebold Election Systems won their case against the voting machine maker on Thursday after a judge ruled that the company had misused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ordered the company to pay damages and fees. Lawyers for the students call the move a victory for free speech.

A judge for the California district court ruled that the company knowingly misrepresented that the students had infringed the company's copyright and ordered the company to pay damages and fees to two students and a nonprofit internet service provider, Online Policy Group.

Last October, students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania posted copies and links to some 13,000 internal Diebold company memos that an anonymous source had leaked to Wired News. The memos suggested that the company was aware of security flaws in its voting system when it sold the system to states.

Diebold sent several cease-and-desist letters to the students and threatened them with litigation, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Online Policy Group was also threatened after someone posted a link to the memos on a website hosted by the ISP. Diebold said the memos were stolen from a company server and that posting them or even linking to them violated the copyright law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which took on the case for the Online Policy Group, argued that the memos were an important part of the public debate on electronic voting systems.

After a slew of bad publicity criticizing their strong-arm tactics, Diebold backed down and withdrew its legal threats in December, but a spokesman said at the time that no one should interpret the move as implying that the DMCA did not apply in the case.

"We've simply chosen not to pursue copyright infringement in this matter," spokesman David Bear told Wired News.

But the California district court judge ruled otherwise.