Black Box Voting is reporting more strongarming and deceit from election machine manufacturer, Diebold.
First a little background:
Bruce Funk, the elected official who has run elections in Emery County for 23 years, noticed a critical shortage in flash memory/storage in seven of his 40 brand new Diebold machines. He arranged for an independent evaluation, a right granted to Utah county officials in the Diebold contract. Black Box Voting secured the services of Harri Hursti and also Security Innovation, Inc. for the Emery County evaluation.
The initial assessment was not encouraging: The memory was so low it appeared likely to compromise elections held on the affected machines, and the most likely explanations were all pretty bad: 1) Different programs on the machines 2) Data already residing on the machines from use elsewhere 3) Flash memory near the end of its life cycle.
More below the fold...
First, Diebold tried to say that the memory shortage was due to additional fonts installed.
Actually, the memory discrepancies were as large as 20MB, and the low memory triggered text on the TSx machine to flip to RED, clearly an alert that there was a problem. Hursti and Security Innovation cast doubt on the font explanation:
Hursti: "Fonts, which there are only few, can explain few 100 kilobytes [each] at the most, not 20 meg we have."
Security Innovation, Inc.: "I went into the tool that builds Windows CE and after adding ALL of the fonts that it contains they totaled to 4 megs. Harri is right in that each font individually was small with the largest being a meg but most being like 30k-60k. There exists the possibility that they created a custom font but I don't know why...The only one that's any where near big enough (22meg) is a UNICODE one that can represent things like Japanese characters, Chinese characters.
Then they offered another explanation:
On Monday Mar. 27, Diebold attended a meeting in Emery County and here they claimed there were actually several versions delivered to Utah. Now, bear in mind that all are the TSx 4.6.4, but in this tape recorded meeting, Diebold stated that within this there is an A, B, and C version.
The main question, of course, is:
Is it the A, B, or the C version that is the certified version?
And now for the threats:
Diebold's immediate response to Funk's decision to have his machines independently tested was to threaten to charge over $1,200 to check the machines tested to make sure they were suitable for elections.
This brings to mind the question -- why did Diebold deliver machines with memory so low they were not suitable for elections in the first place? The backup election file is 7.9 MB; Note in the photograph above, this "new" machine had only 4 MB of storage left.
And, if the Deseret News report above is correct, if some machines were "hosting illicit programs which could affect performance or in worst case, affect election results," why were they delivered in the first place and why should Emery County pay to have the defects corrected?
And the $1200 per day to examine two machines has resulted in a bill of $40,000! And they tried to get the election official to step down, much like they have tried to do in Leon County Florida.
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