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SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- New touchscreen voting machines failed to win the approval of a state advisory panel, throwing into question multimillion dollar contracts between the company that built them and at least three counties with plans to use them as early as next year. Instead of certifying the Diebold AccuVote-TSX system as expected, the advisory panel to the secretary of state said Monday it would investigate uncertified software and hardware that may have been used in a recent election. Assistant secretary of state Marc Carrel said the panel had discovered disconcerting information about the equipment, according to several...

*NOTE* For those of you who do not know Mr. Niman, he is the alternative journalist who “predicted” the “assignation” of Paul Wellstone after the “fact”. In this piece, Mr. Niman establishes his next Republican-driven conspiracy theory. Here, Mr. Niman sets the groundwork to challenge all future elections won by Republicans as being rooted in Republican voter fraud. This is his preemptive strike; his attempt to taint every future Republican victory with alleged conspiracies. Mr. Niman is doing this, of course, because he knows that with voting reforms will come less opportunities for DemonRats to commit voter fraud; thereby ushering...

<p>MIAMI — With the 2004 presidential election just a year away, cutting edge voting machines once touted as foolproof are coming under fire.</p> <p>"There's no paper trail," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., "And there's no assurance that what you put into the machines actually happens."</p>

Questions have been raised recently about touchscreen electronic voting machines, even as many states explore switching their election systems over to them. Some of the latest developments: -A July study by Johns Hopkins and Rice universities found one popular maker of electronic voting machines was susceptible to hacking. Diebold Election Systems said the study's findings were wrong and relied on outdated computer code. -Maryland, Georgia and New Jersey were among states that conducted or began studies into questions regarding electronic machines. Maryland's study concluded any problems could easily be addressed, though lawmakers called for a new study. -National Association...

Black Box Voting Blues Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections By Steven Levy NEWSWEEK Nov. 3 issue — After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many...

By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. - Despite lawsuit threats from one of the nation's largest electronic voting machine suppliers, some activists are refusing to remove from Web sites internal company documents that they claim raise serious security questions. Diebold Inc. sent "cease and desist" letters after the documents and internal e-mails, allegedly stolen by a hacker, were distributed on the Internet. Recipients of the letters included computer programmers, students at colleges including Swarthmore and at least one Internet provider. Most of the 13,000 pages of documents are little more than banal employee e-mails, routine software manuals...

<p>Diebold Election Systems has had a tumultuous year, and it doesn't look like it's getting any better.</p> <p>Last January the electronic voting machine maker faced public embarrassment when voting activists revealed the company's insecure FTP server was making its software source code available for everyone to see.</p>

BALTIMORE (AP) — A Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who co-wrote an influential report alleging flaws in touch-screen voting software used by a leading manufacturer has resigned from the technical advisory board of a provider of competing software. The researcher, Avi Rubin, resigned this week because "he didn't want any perception of conflict of interest," Jim Adler, chief executive of VoteHere Inc., said Tuesday. Rubin, technical director of Johns Hopkins' Information Security Institute, said he was returning stock options, resigning from the VoteHere board of advisors, and asking Hopkins to review his outside consulting work. "I believe it was careless...

<p>Welcome to Wired News. Skip directly to: Search Box, Section Navigation, Content.</p> <p>Diebold Election Systems has had a tumultuous year, and it doesn't look like it's getting any better.</p> <p>Last January the electronic voting machine maker faced public embarrassment when voting activists revealed the company's insecure FTP server was making its software source code available for everyone to see.</p>

September 28, 2003 Diebold Machines Agonist Exclusive Diebold Machines and Your Vote by creativelcro and quietBill With the emergence of paperless billing and online banking, many of us save considerable effort, time and money every month. The transition to digital information has gone well beyond paying bills or taxes, and booking airline flights. Virtually all aspects of our lives are affected. Not surprisingly, the same technological shift has been occurring in the field of voting machines, accelerated by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed by Congress at the end of 2002. No paper trail. While differing in implementation, these...

October 05, 2003 Diebold Machines and Your Vote: Part II Diebold Machines and Your Vote: Part II Timeline of the Diebold Case Susceptibility to Election Tampering Revealed; Legal Battles Ensue by creativelcro and quietBill On September 28, 2003 the Agonist published an exclusive, ?a href="http://www.agonist.org/archives/009016.html#009016">Diebold Machines and Your Vote?outlining the susceptibility of electronic voting machines to tampering and election fraud. Here in Part 2, for the first time in print, the Agonist discloses in extensive detail the Diebold case timeline, and the legal battles that ensued. The phases of this timeline are as follows: A) Diebold system becomes available to...

<p>As Californians head to the polls on Tuesday, voters in at least one county will cast their ballots electronically on machines that have been shown to be flawed.</p> <p>Election officials around the country have been switching to new computerized polling machines with the hope of avoiding a repeat of the Florida debacle over punch-card voting that marred the 2000 presidential election.</p>

<p>SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) --  Punch-card ballots from Tuesday's historic recall election are sure to get a going-over by political activists, but some computer scientists think touch-screen voting machines deserve just as much scrutiny.</p> <p>While punch-card ballots caused headaches for Florida election officials with their "hanging" and "pregnant" chads, 10 percent of the touch-screen machines in California don't produce paper printouts. And no printouts, the scientists say, would make a legitimate recount impossible.</p>

VeriSign announced Monday that it will provide key components of a system designed to let Americans abroad cast absentee votes over the Internet. The contract was granted by consulting firm Accenture, which is working with the U.S. Department of Defense on a voting system known as the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. When completed, the system will allow absentee military personnel and overseas Americans from eight participating states to cast their votes in the 2004 general election. "The solution we are building will enable absentee voters to exercise their right to vote," said George Schu, a vice president at...

Less than two years after spending $17 million to replace Broward County's election system, county commissioners expressed growing apprehension Tuesday about electronic voting and decided to rethink what they had done. Commissioners ordered their staff to explore retrofitting the new touch-screen voting machines to print copies of each ballot or ditching the machinery in favor of paper ballots read by optical scanners. They want the study completed in the next couple of months so they can make any changes before next year's presidential elections. The ATM-style touch screens replaced the punch-card ballots that were banned in Florida after the 2000...

Recent findings suggest the machines -- sometimes called "DRE" machines for Direct Recording Electronic -- are prone to hacking, critics say. Tampering is hard to detect because companies making the machines are secretive about how they work, add the critics. They prefer a more retro technology: Paper and ink. Touch screen systems should spit out paper backups, so voters can verify on the spot if their votes were recorded properly, some contend. These paper tallies would be stored by election officials, to match against electronic results for recounts. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.), a physicist, is pushing a bill to...

"Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal."

In the end, Friday's two-hour discussion of whether computers should be the sole tabulators of Georgia voters' ballots came down to a challenge. Roxanne Jekot, a 51-year-old computer program developer from Cumming, said she and a few expert friends could crack Georgia's $54 million touch-screen voting system in a matter of minutes. Bring it on, said state election officials. "If something can beat the machine, we need to know that," said Brit Williams, a retired Kennesaw State University professor who helped design the state's touch-screen security system. He put the odds of corrupting the software undetected at 1 billion to...

Voting Fraud Circuses and Diebold by Russell Madden The Silly Season is upon us early this year. No. I am not talking about the Fall television schedule nor even the rush to Christmas. I refer, of course, to the recent feverish focus on voting that has the jaws of the Talking Heads flapping in overdrive. Specifically, the airwaves are glowing red-hot with excited gasps of horror or excitement (depending on which horse they're backing) at the prospect of the upcoming recall vote in California. Governor Gray I'm-Available-For-Birthday-Parties Davis magically transformed a budget surplus in that western mecca of wackiness into...

AKRON, Ohio - It was just an obscure Internet portal tucked in one corner of the Web. With a black background and blue writing, it wasn't much to look at - on the surface anyway. Truth is, the Global Election Systems' Web site was a Pandora's box of controversy just waiting to happen. And it did happen - exposing Global's new owner, Green, Ohio-based Diebold Inc., to a new level of scrutiny. Now Diebold, and perhaps the whole electronic-voting industry, could pay the price. And it all started with a simple Web site. That site, which Diebold took over with...