Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
Two shipping tubes sent from the California Secretary of State’s office in Sacramento to the San Diego County Election Office arrived without their contents. The tubes left the SOS Office with more than 174 memory chips, or Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EPROM), containing firmware for the county’s Diebold/Premier central-count optical scan voting machines. UPDATE: Precinct-based op-scan chips confirmed by the SoS to be missing as well! See update info at end of article.
The tubes arrived in San Diego but they were empty. The chips are now considered to be either lost or stolen.
WIRED’s Kim Zetter reports today…
In San Diego County, one of the empty tubes arrived with no lid on the end of it to close the tube; the second tube had a lid, but it was loosely taped shut.
According to Zetter, the new firmware was being sent to San Diego following software and security modifications made following the state’s recent “Top-to-Bottom Review” of e-voting systems. The packages were sent from the Secretary of State’s office after being packaged by Diebold/Premier employees with SoS personnel standing witness. The Secretary of State’s office confirms that Diebold/Premier regularly uses Fed-Ex as their preferred shipper.
New chips will now be sent and the state says the February primary will not be delayed by the issue. The California Highway Patrol and Sacramento Police are now investigating.
But the story gets worse, in this LATE UPDATE (FROM BRAD):
We’ve confirmed, via an SoS spokesperson, that some of the missing chips were to be used for precinct-based optical-scan systems as well as central-scanners as reported originally by Zetter. Which raises new concern about allowing those precinct-based systems to be released to poll-workers for “sleepovers” prior to the election, as has been the notorious and dubious custom in SD. The practice may still be allowed in next year’s election, according to recent comments by the SoS Debra Bowen, though with additional security procedures in place.
Now that there are actual “official build” chips out there, somewhere, that could be used to replace the chips during a “sleepover,” that issue needs to be looked at closer than ever before, as we see it.
SoS spokesperson Nicole Winger confirmed in an email to The BRAD BLOG late this afternoon:
Boy, I guess be would be a lot cheaper just to send a bunch of paper ballots down to be hand marked by the voter, wouldn’t it.
Sure would be easier to use paper ballots.
FedEX isn’t federal. Could have shipped the damn thing UPS, or Greyhound and have the same thing happen.
That’s a serious security problem. EPROMS are easy to copy. And easy to replace. There can be no trust with this system. you could plug an eprom in there or any other chip that fit in the slot for the DIP riser. Could be a damn digital delay loop chip. You wouldn’t know.
This gets back to what I said about “specially crafted chips”
Who’s to say an RF receiver isn’t built into the logic as a logic bomb (at the doping level.) Drive by with a transmitter and boom the vote logic flips. You could burn any hypothetical logic in that circuit, and the receiver could XOR the output. To find it you’d need to destructively reverse engineer it. This is exactly why electronic tabulation should be banned globally.
Note that I didn’t say electronic PRINTING.
If they want to PRINT a ballot electronically that’s one thing, we can see the output because it’s physically a piece of paper. This gives the disabled a way to input information and yet leave a real paper ballot to be counted. For this we’d only need a few crappy 80286’s running DOS 5, Word Perfect and printers.
This nightmare never ends.
Got to wonder who knows the logic inside now.
HEY CORPORATE MEDIA DO YOU HEAR US YET?!
HEY CONGRESS, SENATE, SOS, QUIT THE LIES AND FAKE ACTION WITH THE PERCEIVED DILIGENCE.
Hey, what do you think secret service is for? Especially The Secret Service … preserving Amurka for amurkans.
FYI – Eprom = Bios = firmware = Erasable Read Only Memory
Hmmm… Stalling the firmware until the last minute … they can either change
an algorithm or a fudge factor thus keeping the rig margin small.
BTW – DILIGENCE isn’t some ya stick between ya legs madam . . .
FYI – Eprom = Bios = firmware = Erasable Programable Read Only Memory
{please replace line}
How many hundreds of millions now spent on crappy corruptable equipment, legal battles, investigative research by experts, hours of official’s time, and now law enforcement manhours? I guess 1+1+1+1+1 = massive waste + ZERO CONFIDENCE!
Amuraka land of in your face corruption.
Keep burning the evidence dick.
Pay no attention! Don’t you know that Bratney’s sister is pregnant? We’ve got baseball players on steroids for Christ sake! Our “intelligence” tells us that the chips were intercepted by members of the CI..uh Bin Laden has them. War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Go back to sleep…
When Black Box Voting took the Diebold op-scam machine that we bought in for a checkup, we learned that the chip inside is basically plug and play reprogrammable from any laptop with a common clip-on device.
The significance of the lost chips is that someone can now examine or reverse engineer the upgrades to see if they can find new ways to defeat the new security problems. Round and round we go.
My understanding is that it’s not so significant from the standpoint of being able to replace chips — they don’t need to be replaced to reprogram them, just clip-on the laptop connector and have your way with them. But I’m sure it is very nice for someone to learn the most recent defenses.
We’re heading the wrong direction when we keep trying to find better locks for all the windows, vents, doors, and crawl spaces. It’s a lot easier just to let the public see what’s going in and out of the machine.
There are various ways to do this, but we need a shift in thinking. Stop thinking “security” and start thinking “let the public capture evidence of what went into the machine to compare what came out of it.”
Sorry I couldn’t make it more complicated.
With all the tampering and right wing insanity here , there isn’t much point in voting at all , here in the Peoples Republic of San Diego.
If you don’t vote, DMcD, they don’t even have to try to steal it. Don’t let them win that easily. Please vote. For whoever you wish. But vote.
Knowing that these Operational instructions for Voting Machnes are loose and in the wild should be grounds for immediate DECERTIFICATION of every single machine that these chips are programmed for.
Not a peep in the media either.
And that stooge Martin and his cronies at the FCC just LOOSENED media diversity restrictions, thereby GUARANTEEING that we will continue to get garbage as news.
Brad,
Listen. Michael Vu was “transferred” to San Diego.
He’s the one that threw the election for Bush in Cleveland Ohio.
HE WAS THE ELECTIONS CHIEF!!!!!
He’s now the Election Chief out there!!!!!
I can’t seem to find an email for you, Brad, but you need to know this.
Michael Vu and vote fraud….ask GOOGLE about it.
If someone could forward this to Brad….
I couldn’t be more disgusted. There’s been huge lack of attention to the voting problems of the past with these damn machines and the caging of voters around the country. I thought that we would have had enough of it by the time the 2008 elections were held and that we’d have come up with a national standardized way of voting for the country. As soon as the Dems won the Congress, all was forgotten as if everything was OK now. When the next presidential election takes place and everything starts all over again with vote flipping, teerrorist plots on precincts during the counting stage (Ohio) and the skewed numbers that end up electing Tom Tancredo or something like that, will the politians once again wonder what the hell happened? No wonder we couldn’t convince Al Gore to run again.
I’m seen pop-up banner ads that are easier to read than this site of yours. Yuck. I didn’t even read the damn article.
If at all possible, vote absentee…but DO vote. I live in Ohio and we are able to do that without any given reason. I believe our ballots are scanned after all other ballots are in on election day, but I still feel safer because our headquarters in Portage County does a great job.
Multiple missing packages is VERY suspicious. If it was just one package, you could come up with innocent reasons. Two manipulated packages is as suspicious as a suicide with 2 bullets in the head.
Bev’s point is well taken. You can never make these voting systems safe from fraud or manipulation. No more than you can make any computer system safe. Using computers to record and count votes is inherently insecure, and every computer security expert, and most of us that use computers, know that.
Worse, these systems were never designed with security in mind but were patched together over multiple election cycles as problems arose. The latest Ohio reports confirm every other previous independent study of these systems.
What is disgusting, and criminal, is the fact that counties and states are willing to endanger the citizens’ right to elect our representatives in exchange for convenience. It is certainly not to save money, for these systems have proven themselves to be financial blackholes.
The California election code mandates that the Secretary find that these voting systems are secure from fraud or manipulation prior to approving them. Not one Secretary has made that finding, because no manufacturer has produced such a voting system. Yet the onus for implementing and paying for the multiple mitigations in trying patch these defective products is placed upon the citizens of this state, while also endangering the conduct of elections and the citizens’ confidence in the outcomes.
It is time the law was followed by our elected officials. No more compromises, no more convenience trumping security and accuracy, no more hiding from the citizens our electoral processes.
Election officials who continue to thwart public oversight by obfuscation, lawsuits, outright lies or distortions, are beneath contempt, for they are betrayers of the public trust and the law.
For those election officials who might read this the answer is rather simple. If you have nothing to hide, quit hiding.
You guys got to stop bagging on the government. dont you know that they want protect us from those filty commies.
So it dont matter who you vote for we are going to get the same as the last boss. over and out
If any presidential candidate wants my vote, come up with the organizational system for states to follow for HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS WITH COMPLETE TRANSPARENCY. Ten to one it would cost less than this NIGHTMARE!
Well at least we have a dip for a registraar of voters here, for all those chips when they finally show up.:-)
i live in san diego. this is the first i am hearing about this. what a disgrace. we MUST go back to paper ballots. these people cannot be trusted.