General Question

SquirrelEStuff's avatar

Is the US still using Diebold electronic voting machines?

Asked by SquirrelEStuff (10007points) April 20th, 2016 from iPhone

Here are the voting machines that I am referring to.

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1 Answer

Espiritus_Corvus's avatar

After the voting scandals of 2000 and 2004 which included accusations of voting machine software fraud, easily accessible memory card hacking and black box voting, Diebold removed their company name and logo from their voting machines, but kept using the AccuVote TS as the slightly modified TSx “Verified” Voting machines as featured in the clip you linked to above.

In 2006 the TSx machine was deemed even easier to hack than the TS model by Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute. According to Rubin, the machines are “much, much easier to attack than anything we’ve previously said… On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It’s a totally different ballgame.”

The company RABA did a security analysis of the Diebold AccuVote model TSx confirming many of the problems found by Avi Rubin and finding some new vulnerabilities. Diebold removed their company name from the voting machines soon after these revelations surfaced.

The Diebold voting machine division, Diebold Elections Systems re-branded as Premier Election Solutions in 2007, was sold to competitor Election Systems and Software in 2009. In 2010, ES&S was bought by Dominion Voting Systems, a Canadian corporation. As of August 2010, ES&S, now a division of DVS uses the AccuVote TSx voting machine in 600 jurisdictions in 22 states of the United States.

—From numerous Wikipedia articles.

It appears that they are still using the AccuVote® TSx touch pad voting machine:

“The self-contained AccuVote®-TSX provides election officials and voters with a proven and intuitive voting machine that automatically records and stores encrypted ballot information and election results. Each unit features intelligent voter card technology that allows a voter to activate the voting process unassisted. AccuVote®-TSX is accurate, lightweight, and cost-effective.”

—From their site as linked above. Emphasis mine.

Hacking Democracy

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