Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Black box voting

Bev Harris steps through the Diebold electronic voting machine software here.

At first glance, it looks like it's got a lot of the classic kinds of security flaws:

The manual, also available on the ftp site, tells that the default password in a new installation is "GEMSUSER."

Well, uh...

And the "host computer" software, to which the voting totals are transmitted by modem, is written using Microsoft Access. Sigh...

Do we have any alert readers who know Access well enough to evaluate the claims Bev makes?

Because if she's right, this software enables even the most hog-stupid Thug to steal an election without leaving any evidence at all ...

P.S. How hard can it be to write a database system that counts votes? Where the heck is open source software system using MySQL? Any hackers out there who care about saving democracy?

UPDATE: Thanks, alert readers, for the detailed, thorough comments. Now I know what time of night to post the technical questions.

UPDATE: I removed the word "server" and replaced it with "host computer" (per Bev's article). I don't think the system uses a client/server architecture, though alert readers may correct me on this.

Can this stuff possibly be the real software?! It's not some cheesy demo?