Diebold vs Princeton

You may not heard (as usual the ‘mainstream media’ is ignoring a story that doesn’t involve Anna Nicole Smith, George Clooney or Whitney Houston) but a Princeton University professor and two of his graduate students have proven (again!) that the electronic voting machines being used across much of the nation are vulnerable to hacking.

A paper (and video) on Princeton's web site describes how Edward Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs, found ways to upload a computer virus that was able to spread between Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machines (which was donated by an unidentified party back in May).

The professor and his students said they were able to change vote counts and that the machine did not detect the tampering, once again proving just how damn-easy it is to compromise the Diebold voting systems.

You can see the video from Princton’s site HERE and from YouTube HERE.

These are normal folks… not superstar celebrities… not blogging royalty… just a college professor and a few of his wards… trying to show, once and for all, just how piss-poor these Diebold voting systems are in relation to voting security.

Now… it’s not a new thing for people to be attacking Diebold, what is new here is that these aren’t Liberal bloggers or candidates decrying their system, but Academics who have decided to discover for themselves if all the nagative hype against Diebold is warranted.

Apparently… it is.

And it’s struck a nerve with the folks at Diebold. Before the Princeton study, the company would ignore any charges about their machines and claim it was propoganda, but this time they’re pushing back… and they’re using PR to do it.

Now the company has started to issue press releases that are meant to sully the report and ignore the issue altogether.

In fact, one such release stated that the system used by the Princeton group was outdated (version used in the 2004 elections across the country) and therefore not relevant.

So… the systems used in the 2004 Presidential Elections were security risks, but these “aren’t”?

And they also claim that since the machines aren’t networked (meaning they’re not attached to others) they are low-security risks… despite the fact that the study reports that when election judges usually start-up the election process, they tend to take one machine’s memory card and insert it into another machine… this would certainly spread the virus in that particular polling place.

Here’s a thought Diebold… since the company claims that the machine the Princeton group used in their study is old, hows about you let them test your current generation of machines?

What do you say guys???

Anyone???

Helloooooo???

I don’t think that suggestion is going to get a response... what do you think?