Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org sends out the following notice this morning…
Last time a voting system company did a DMCA take-down notice (Diebold, in 2004) it got socked with punitive charges for abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trying to use it to block distribution of material clearly published in the public interest.
If you want a copy of the voter registration software I posted Thursday, might as well get it right now — and mirror it, torrent it, dropbox it, or whatever. I’ll probably pull it down by June 27, not because their claim is valid, but because there are higher priorities for spending my time during this election season and thanks to Slashdot and some pals in Europe, this software has now been widely mirrored elsewhere.
The full takedown notice is here. The “highly problematic” Accenture voter registration software — used by TN, WI, PA, CO, KS and others — is still posted here, as of now if you’d like to download it, poke around into some of the source code, and/or mirror it on your site.
Other than “crap-on-a-stick high-school sophomoric completely insecure [and] malfunctioning”, Harris previously described the software this way: “This voter registration and voter history system has been widely criticized — in Colorado, where it reportedly assigned voters who are Republicans as Democrats, and vice versa, and in Tennessee where it has been proven to lose voter histories.”
Brad,
I took a look at the code for a few minutes and realized that it’s written in Visual Basic 3.0. Which is older than dirt and no longer supported by MS. That is a horrible choice of languages and version for writing critical software like this.
I cannot imagine their reasoning for this decision to use a really unsecured language except they wanted it to be unsecured and easily hacked.
The forces of Mordor continue to try to spread their darkness and fear. They’re fucking with the wrong hobbit when they start messing with Bev. She’ll find a way to throw their crappy code into the fires of Mt Doom.
Thanks for those insights, Dixie Blood.
That said, I used to LOVE writing code in VB 3.0! 🙂
–Bev Harris
…I love this quote.
from bev’s original article …I have also posted a file with work orders and release notes which shows the Accenture software has a history of tripling votes in certain (“random”) voter histories, going back to 2004. Except it is not random: Other files I have found prove it is with primarily white Republican precincts that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report. …..///tripling votes in certain primarily white republican precincts…what could possibly go wrong?
Thanks, Brad, for publishing this! And by the way, congratulations on your Florida Lying scoop, and yes, Desi does look fabulous though you could both be TV stars in my book.
Brad: And I used to love coding in M$ PDS BASIC 7.1, but of course that doesn’t mean either language is suitable for democracy-critical applications. I’d give Accenture an F for that alone.