Turns out the Diebold system is so easy to hack, if you can get your Windows machine to go online,
YOU can hack their system.
Excellent article in
Wired:
In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery.
Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.
Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.
Jim March has a nice graphical representation of how it's done:
Click on the small picture for a link to March's article.
If this looks a little familiar, it's because Bev Harris of
www.blackboxvoting.org showed Howard Dean how to do this on "Topic A With Tina Brown" on CNBC back in August.
Link to report on how insecure Diebold code is
here (PDF, of course).
The
Wired article has WAY more, including links between part-owner/Senator Chuck Hagel and his election by E S & S machines.
Update [2004-11-7 15:20:32 by doug r]: morgie5912 found a good link on the
GEMS hack