Diebold Defect Described
The description of Stan Klein (in the post below) has been echoed by a pair of computer scientists, Avi Rubin and Ed Felten, at the website Freedom to Tinker:
compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine’s software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.
On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.
They conclude that the current crop of touchscreen voting machines ought to be scrapped.
Unfortunately for 18 Iowa counties, no other polling place equipment is handy. Sixteen of the counties have the now discredited Diebold stuff, while two of the counties have the yet to be discredited Ivotronic,sold by ES & S of Omaha.
They could go to paper and pencil for the June 6 primary. All that is needed is to hand out absentee ballots at the poll and count them with the other absentee ballots. Blind voters or others who need the special help of the “accessible” voting machines to vote secretly could do so at the courthouse on a single one of the vulnerable Diebolds. That should minimize the vulnerability.
I don’t expect this, however. More likely is a heroic effort to control access to the machines. But the descriptions of the problem by Klein and Rubin cited in this post and the previous post make any such effort look disingenuous.