Psst? Wanna get a look at some vote-counting software?

[w4rma]

A computer programmer discovers a widely used computerized voting program on a publicly accessible Internet server.
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By Farhad Manjoo

Oct. 30, 2003 | Software used to count the votes in as many as 16 states has been found available on a publicly accessible Internet server. The files, which appear to reveal technical details about how votes are stored in machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, have been accessible on the site for at least two years.

A computer programmer, who asked not to be named for fear of legal retaliation from Sequoia, says that he came upon the FTP server holding the files on Friday, when he visited the Web site of Jaguar Computer Systems, a computer consulting firm in Southern California that provides technical services to, among other customers, Riverside County. In the 2000 presidential election, Riverside became the first county in the nation to employ touch-screen machines in its precincts. Its machines are made by Sequoia.

Jaguar's site advertises its FTP server as a service to help clients who want to download files from the firm: "Our FTP site is ftp.jaguar.net," it says. "We support 'anonymous' logins and our '/PUB' directory is stuffed with many of the files that we use." When the activist logged in to this FTP site, he spotted a file called WinEDS200.zip -- a 44-megabyte file that turned out to be the installation program for software that tallies the votes in Sequoia's voting software.
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http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/30/vote_counting_software/index.html

[denverbill]

1. Damn. That's scary.

Good find.

[Military Brat]

2. I wouldn't touch touch-screen with a 10-foot pole

I'll give up my paper ballot when they pry it out of my cold dead hands.

[leftchick]

5. unfortunately for me I touch, touch screen every time I vote...

and watch it disappear into the black box voting machine, never to KNOW if it ever was counted.... :(

[Liberal Veteran]

7. Use an absentee ballot, leftchick....

That way you can be sure that your vote can be traced and counted.

[w4rma]

9. It's important that everyone else's vote counted properly, also (n/t)

[Noordam]

3. this is the site Bev's partner in BBV found

and within 30 minutes of posting it on their site were getting legal stuff for Sequoia. :evilgrin:

[leQ]

4. jaguar responds

This statement is in reference to articles written pertaining to Jaguar Computer Systems' Anonymous FTP website:
Jaguar Computer Systems has always kept its primary focus on customer relationships and satisfaction, as indicated on this website under Company Profile. The Anonymous FTP Website, which has been designed to help facilitate productive workflow on a customer-to-customer and customer-to-vendor basis, is a service tool that has been operating without issues for years providing virus-free file storage and retrieval. This productive service which has now been abused and violated is disabled. We will still facilitate merging FTP technologies but on a controlled and monitored basis. Any suggestions or responses should be directed to [e-mail]. Thank you.

[Kelvin Mace]

12. Actually it was three minutes

after I posted that the email arrived.

David Allen
Publisher, CEO, Janitor
Plan Nine Publishing
http://www.plan9.org

[sendero]

6. so this ....

... is not the source code, just the executable?

[w4rma]

8. No. Just the whole 44 Megabyte installation of the software.

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The files install a full working version of the vote-counting system on a user's machine. Because the program does not include source code, the system's innards are not completely laid bare for public review -- which is what happened to Diebold when Bev Harris, an author who's investigated problems with touch-screen voting machines, discovered that company's code on a public FTP site earlier this year. In July, the source code she found was reviewed by scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities, who found that security in Diebold's voting software fell "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts."

But even without the source code, the Sequoia files will still provide some insight into the inner workings of the Sequoia system. The system is coded in Powerbuilder, a programming system used to quickly develop database applications; even though the Powerbuilder files have already been compiled into machine language, the code in these files that is used to send instructions to the voting database is still readable to humans. This database code -- written in the SQL language -- could possibly instruct critics of touch-screen systems (or, for that matter, anyone, even people without very noble intentions) on how to manipulate a Sequoia voting database.

The package also included many SQL files that seem to have been used to set up voting templates for several elections Sequoia has run. There's a file for Arapahoe County, Colo.; one for Burlington County, N.J.; another for Lake County, Ohio -- and about a dozen others. The files all seem to do the same thing -- create an empty database (one whose default password is set to "password") that the vote-counting software will fill up on Election Day.
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[joeunderdog]

10. try these links... It's not like this story isn't out there.

http://www.linkcrusader.com/vote_machines.htm

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/04/159216#transcript



Why are there NO headlines about this?

[joeunderdog]

11. Here's a very good site. Recent newsmaker.

http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html#excerpts