Diebold's Letter To Pennsylvania: A Rebuttal

Diebold's Letter To Pennsylvania: A Rebuttal

By Roxanne Jekot, CountTheVote.org

January 21, 2006

On January 3, 2006, the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Pedro Cortes and his consultant Dr. Michael Shamos submitted a series of questions to Diebold Elections Systems regarding the AccuBasic (which Diebold also calls ABasic) reporting scripts used by their AccuVote TSX touchscreen voting system. Diebold responded in a letter dated January 5, 2006. While Diebold's answers in this letter apparently met with "the statisfaction of the Secretary and his consultant", they are wholly unsatisfactory to the voters in Pennsylvania whose democracy is being entrusted to Diebold's equipment.

While failing to adequately answer Pennsylvania’s questions, Diebold did make some serious revelations. Specifically, while Hursti used old firmware (1.94w), Diebold confirms in Appendix A that their newly certified firmware (1.96) will behave with the same lapses in security. They confirmed that the Zero Total Report relies on the public counter variable and NOT database (ballot image) contents and that Diebold’s basic point of security is dependent on the Windows Operating System security. After years of scrutiny and published reports by computer security experts worldwide, Diebold has still failed to close the most basic security flaws in their source code.

snip

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=815&Itemid=113

,er... i mean security flaws? :D