Voting on electronic voting machines this year? Don’t worry. Your vote will be counted. One way or another:
Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland’s polls in 2004.
Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland’s elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her – along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board – demonstrates that Maryland’s voting system faces grave security threats.
The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns nationwide about the security of the November elections and the ability of the state to keep tight controls on the thousands of machines that will be used next month.
(cont)
Those earler problems during the primary? So yesterday, people:
Maryland’s September primary – which used voting machines and electronic check-in equipment made by Diebold – suffered a series of mistakes, and the outcomes of some contests were not known for weeks. […]
Diebold has not confirmed that the code received by Kagan is authentic, said Mike Morrill, a spokesman for the company in Maryland. But Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Aviel Rubin reviewed one of the disks and said he believed it was genuine. If it wasn’t, he said, “someone went to great lengths to make it look like it was.”
“My feeling is that it may have come out of the testing labs, which means that if that’s true, their procedures for protecting their clients’ valuable proprietary information have failed,” said Rubin, who in 2003 published a report on Diebold security flaws after discovering a copy of the code on the Internet.
Isn’t this just peachy? But not to worry people. Diebold and Maryland election officials want to assure you this doesn’t mean what you think it means:
Morrill said two of three disks were never used and that the third was version 4.3.15c, which was used in Maryland during the 2004 primary.
Ross Goldstein, the state’s deputy elections administrator, said Maryland now uses version 4.6 and that the public should be confident that their votes are secure. […]
“These disks contain codes used for testing purposes,” Radke said. “They were shipped from the testing authority. Diebold was never in the chain of custody.”
The disks contain “nothing that’s being used in this election,” Goldstein said.
And those claims about chaos on election day this year? Well that’s coming from that well known mouthpiece of liberal propaganda, the New York Times. Who can believe anything they have to say? Really, our elections are safe, secure and trouble free:
Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, was less inclined to sound the alarm. She said that since it was not a presidential election year and many states had encouraged voting by mail, fewer people would turn up at the polls than in 2004.
With computerized registration rolls, Ms. Markowitz said, there will be far fewer people incorrectly excluded from the new databases compared with when registration rolls were on paper.
“There will be isolated incidents, there is no doubt about that,” she said. “But over all the system will move faster and with fewer problems.”
That’s right folks. These aren’t the disks you’re looking for. Your votes are secure. Move along, move along.
