delusionofgrandeur

Brad Blog has a simply wonderful story of how the infamous company Diebold managed a colossal snafu by posting a picture of their electronic voting machine’s cabinet security key on their website. Diebold manufacture electronic voting machines under the brand ‘Premier Election Systems’.

Now, one of my many hidden talents is that, given the correct blanks and a cutting machine, I can cut keys with reasonable accuracy (I used to work for a security company). I think that, given the picture on Diebold’s site, I could cut duplicates. As it turns out, a friend of Brad Blog did just that and of the three keys cut, two worked in the Diebold machines. Inevitably the Diebold machines all use the same keys.

Diebold have now attempted to cover up their either cavalier or inept attitude towards common-sense security but replacing the mechanical key re-order page with an electronic key advertisement page. A screenshot of the original page remains over at Brad Blog.

An even greater issue has come to light with Sequoia Voting Systems voting machines which apparently allows any voter or polling station worker to vote as many times as they like for any candidate they please by simply pushing a yellow button on the back of the voting machine. The potential for DIY election fraud is simply horrifying.

The issue with the Sequoia machines was apparently reported to California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s office by Ron Watt, a Tehama County, CA precinct inspector around 30 days ago but in a recent interview, McPherson denied any knowledge of the problem.

Both the Sequoia and the Diebold machines are in use for the 2008 presidential elections in the USA and by the looks of it, it would be very, very easy for another US election to go ‘walkies’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under News, Politics, Tech News.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.