Vote Fraud Expert Warns Of New Hampshire Chicanery
Key vulnerabilities of Diebold machine identified within ten minutes by programmer
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." Joseph Stalin.
Vote fraud expert Bev Harris has warned that New Hampshire's electronic voting machines are wide open to fraud and that even modestly skilled computer programmers were able to identify key vulnerabilities within ten minutes of assessing them as key Democrat and Republican primaries unfold today.
The contract for programming all of New Hampshire's Diebold voting machines, which combined will count 81 per cent of the vote today, is owned by LHS Associates, which also holds the contracts for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
LHS is owned by John Silvestro, who has been at the center of a long-running public dispute in trying to deflect accusations made by hacker Harri Hursti that the machines can easily be rigged.
"The exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County is used throughout New Hampshire, where about 45 percent of elections administrators hand count paper ballots at the polling place, with the remaining locations all using the Diebold version 1.94w optical scan machine," writes Harris.
One area of disagreement between Hursti and Silvestro was the amount of expertise needed to exploit the Diebold 1.94w optical scan system.
Silvestro claimed (in a strange contortion of reasoning) that he doesn't hire very skilled programmers, implying that this makes New Hampshire elections more secure.
Hursti pointed out that hiring programmers with a lack of knowledge is generally not considered a security feature, and also that an average high schooler can learn to exploit the system in two days to two weeks.
After purchasing a Diebold 1.94w machine, a computer repair shop employee picked at random by Black Box Voting was able to zero in on the system's vulnerable memory card within just ten minutes.
Harris points out that LHS is a private company that will count over four fifths of the New Hampshire vote with no oversight whatsoever.
LHS is not subject to public records requirements, as the government is, at least, not in New Hampshire. The control over memory card contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings the replacements.
Since LHS maintains the machines, repairs the machines, and replaces the machines -- often on Election Day -- when they malfunction, they have intimate access to the chips, sockets, ports, communications devices and other electronic components.
A recent CNN report featured on Lou Dobbs' show highlights just how easy it is to hack a voting machine and change how votes are tallied with just rudimentary programming skills. Experts warn that it takes only a minute for an unsupervised machine to be inserted with a virus and hacked.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/010808_vote_fraud.htm
For those who don't know who Hurtsi is or how he proved the software in these machines have been PURPOSEFULLY coded for fraud ..
Google: Leon County Hack
