For years, Diebold has embarrassed itself by claiming that obvious faults were actually not faults at all, and during the past decade or so, it mastered the act of pointing the finger. Now that it has ironically renamed itself Premier Election Solutions, it's finally coming clean. According to spokesman Chris Riggall, a "critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point" has been part of the software for ten years. The flaw is on both optical scan and touchscreen machines, and while Mr. Riggall asserts that the logic error probably didn't ruin any elections (speaking of logic error...), the outfit's president has confessed to being "distressed" about the ordeal. More like "distressed" about the increasingly bleak future of his company.

[Via Techdirt]

With as much fuss as we raise over the myriad of Diebold security and stability failures, it looks like we've got it pretty good in the States when compared to the e-voting methods of the Dutch. Their ES3B voting system is based on circa-1980's computing hardware, which seems to be rather lacking in the areas of physical and software security. A few hackers got a hold of a unit and essentially had their way with the machine. Their first order of business was installing a chess program, since Jan Groenendaal of the Nedap/Groenendaal company -- which manufactures the machines -- had responded to the hackers' claims of it being possible with a smarmy "I'd like to see that demonstrated." After they got bored playing chess against a weak sauce 68000 processor with 16KB of RAM, they installed their own "PowerFraud" app to demonstrate methods for generating phony election results, and then went on to do some RF reading that helped them discover ways to wirelessly detect which votes were being registered on the machines by spotting "spurious emissions" from the computer display whenever it gets refreshed. The hackers responsible were kind enough to recommend fixes for most of their hacks, but we would think a bit of a technology refresh could help these Nedap/Groenendaal guys immensely. Or maybe Diebold can give them a ring once they're done botching our elections and they can all work together to further their respective nefarious and democracy-ending aims.

[Via Hack-A-Day]