Looking in Diebold Source Code is the WRONG Place to look
A couple points:
1) I have been in the computer-programming world for 30 years and have worked on embedded processors like the Touchscreen/Optical Scanners use.
2) I will be writing this for the non-computer geeks out there and will try to make it as simple as I can. While I will be talking about things known to Windows users, the TS/OS machines main operating systems are based other operating systems but the names of things I use are just called different things on the other operating systems.
3) Most people talk about Diebold and it’s CEO that promised Ohio to Bush, but the true facts are that all the major TS/OS makers are heavy Repugs. While I will talk about Diebold in this piece, all TS/OS makers could use this method.
4) While the Flash Memory card “device driver” I will use in this paper is a prime candidate for the vote corruption changes, it is ONLY one of many places the corruption software could be hidden. I have picked the name of the flash memory maker as Lexar, not because I think they had anything to do with this but because I like their products in the digital camera world.
5) While I strongly believe that the vote corruption software has to have been written to change votes only at a select true date and time, I will leave that piece out for this white paper. But this is still an important piece; you would not want the machines changing votes while being tested in a mock election in a county.
HIDE THE VOTE CORRUPTION SOFTWARE in PLAIN SIGHT BUT NOT WHERE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING
In the TS/OS world there are two major pieces of software. The operating system, which I will call Windows TS/OpS and the application, in this case for Touchscreen voting, which I will call, Touch Me.
I would never put the corruption software in the Touch Me application. As Diebold found out this code can get out. Plus a lot of people are “auditing” the software. No I would hide the corruption software in the operating system. Because it is “standard” software, most people would not think to check it for vote corruption changes.
Vote Corruption Software in the Flash Memory Device Driver.
When a maker wants to add a new device to an operating system, they have to write a “device driver” for that device. So when Diebold wanted to use Flash Memory cards to store the records of all votes on, they would have to have a device driver for that card. Well Microsoft is very helpful, they provide you with something call a Device Driver toolkit. In this toolkit are sample programs of other device drivers.
When Lexar was talking to Diebold they probably gave them a working device driver for their flash memory card. The only problem was Diebold wanted to “add” some new functions to the device driver. Those functions were to change the vote’s records being written to flash. After a voter has finished voting and is happy with all their selections the final step would be the saving of the selections in a file to flash memory. Then at the end of the day, all the files are download to a central computer, read and the votes added up, if the flash memory device driver makes the vote corruption changes, the voter would not know it, and no matter how many times the flash memory card is read, it will always show the corrupted votes.
So Diebold came up with this plan. The device driver would be made up of two parts, the program part and a control file part. The device driver program part would never change, only the control file part. This control file would have some funny system name and be encrypted. For each election the control file would be download as part of a “security update” to the Windows TS operating system. Because this would never be updated at the same time as the Touch Me app, most people would not put two and two together.
In my simple control file example it would be made up of one record for each vote you wanted to change. IE
P,10,Kerry, Bush
This would tell the flash memory device driver for the President race, move 10% of the votes from Kerry to Bush. Very simple. This control file could be tailored well in advance for an election. Hopefully Rove would have the needed numbers well in advance of the election, he would not like it if Bush lost.
OK we how have a control file, and when the Touchscreen/Optical Scanner booted up, it reads this control file and is now ready to work.
The next file is the completed ballot file. This is the file that Touch Me “writes” to the flash memory card at the completion of each voter selection. In my simple example this file would look like:
P,Kerry
S,Castor
.
.
With these two files, the flash memory device driver has all the information it needs to modify the Kerry votes to Bush votes. The control file told it to only change 1 in 10 Kerry votes to Bush votes. If it was time to change the vote in the Presidential race, “P,Kerry” would become “P,Bush”. Very Very Simple.
And if you were auditing the Touch Me application for vote fraud you would NEVER see it. The last thing you would see would be two lines like
write (flashmemory, fileofvotes);
goback to New_Voter;
And because programmers are lazy, Diebold picked for its Optical Scanner hardware the Windows OpS operating system, and gee the flash memory device driver is used on it too. One really special device driver that can be used on both Touchscreens and Optical Scanners. How simple and how cheap.
And how about exposure to being caught, well in this simple example you have ONE programmer. This programmer may not even work for Diebold but could be a “special contractor” brought on to “write” the device driver software. And remember once the “special added functions” was written once, that special contractor would be passed from Touchscreen maker to Touchscreen maker and their “special added functions” could be reused from maker to maker.
Then you would need ONE person to create the “control file” for each election. Once it is created, the normal “update” person would just update the Windows TS/OpS software with this “security update”.
Some ending points:
Sad to say, if the vote corruption software is in fact in the operating system, it would be almost impossible to find. While at the higher levels of the TS/OS companies, they would know what their machines would be used for, 99.9 percent of the people in the company would have no idea. As I have shown, as little as a one to three person programming team could have written the code for all the TS/OS machines out there.
After the hanging chads of the 2000 election, everybody knew that a newer way for people to vote would be used in the 2002 and later elections. You also have to believe the Repug party has many great software types as would the Democratic Party. I believe the vote corruption software was first tested in the 2002 election to help Jeb Bush in Florida and to replace Democratic Senators like Max Cleland in Georgia.
Any election vote that was to be corrupted the race must be close. If the day after the election, the machines showed Alan Keyes the winner over Barack Obama, then nobody would believe the machines.
Maybe the release of the Diebold Touchscreen software was NOT an accident, but done on purpose by Diebold so people were looking at the wrong place and many man-years of programmer’s time were spent going over the WRONG code. Almost all magic acts use miss direction to pull off their “magic”. The release of the Diebold code could have just been miss direction.
In 2001 George Bush’s biggest problem was the Senate. A lot of theories are out there about what happened to Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane. A couple points to think about. Was Paul Wellstone so far ahead of the person he was running against that the machines could not switch enough votes for the Repug candidate to win, and/or what was the state of the Minnesota voting machines and were they the wrong type. So maybe Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed because of pilot error or maybe because they could not control the election, he had to be gotten rid of at any cost.
Remember, the vote corruption would take place in all states not just Florida and Ohio. While some well meaning Democratic leaders point out that Bush got millions more votes than Kerry, in the real world a shift of only 5% or less of the Kerry votes to Bush would account for Bush’s “win”.
And finally a well known saying:
"When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains,
however improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes, A Study In Scarlet, 1887 by A.C. Doyle
Note: Feel free to copy, edit my grammar errors, and pass on this white paper.
/s/
Florida_Geek
1) I have been in the computer-programming world for 30 years and have worked on embedded processors like the Touchscreen/Optical Scanners use.
2) I will be writing this for the non-computer geeks out there and will try to make it as simple as I can. While I will be talking about things known to Windows users, the TS/OS machines main operating systems are based other operating systems but the names of things I use are just called different things on the other operating systems.
3) Most people talk about Diebold and it’s CEO that promised Ohio to Bush, but the true facts are that all the major TS/OS makers are heavy Repugs. While I will talk about Diebold in this piece, all TS/OS makers could use this method.
4) While the Flash Memory card “device driver” I will use in this paper is a prime candidate for the vote corruption changes, it is ONLY one of many places the corruption software could be hidden. I have picked the name of the flash memory maker as Lexar, not because I think they had anything to do with this but because I like their products in the digital camera world.
5) While I strongly believe that the vote corruption software has to have been written to change votes only at a select true date and time, I will leave that piece out for this white paper. But this is still an important piece; you would not want the machines changing votes while being tested in a mock election in a county.
HIDE THE VOTE CORRUPTION SOFTWARE in PLAIN SIGHT BUT NOT WHERE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING
In the TS/OS world there are two major pieces of software. The operating system, which I will call Windows TS/OpS and the application, in this case for Touchscreen voting, which I will call, Touch Me.
I would never put the corruption software in the Touch Me application. As Diebold found out this code can get out. Plus a lot of people are “auditing” the software. No I would hide the corruption software in the operating system. Because it is “standard” software, most people would not think to check it for vote corruption changes.
Vote Corruption Software in the Flash Memory Device Driver.
When a maker wants to add a new device to an operating system, they have to write a “device driver” for that device. So when Diebold wanted to use Flash Memory cards to store the records of all votes on, they would have to have a device driver for that card. Well Microsoft is very helpful, they provide you with something call a Device Driver toolkit. In this toolkit are sample programs of other device drivers.
When Lexar was talking to Diebold they probably gave them a working device driver for their flash memory card. The only problem was Diebold wanted to “add” some new functions to the device driver. Those functions were to change the vote’s records being written to flash. After a voter has finished voting and is happy with all their selections the final step would be the saving of the selections in a file to flash memory. Then at the end of the day, all the files are download to a central computer, read and the votes added up, if the flash memory device driver makes the vote corruption changes, the voter would not know it, and no matter how many times the flash memory card is read, it will always show the corrupted votes.
So Diebold came up with this plan. The device driver would be made up of two parts, the program part and a control file part. The device driver program part would never change, only the control file part. This control file would have some funny system name and be encrypted. For each election the control file would be download as part of a “security update” to the Windows TS operating system. Because this would never be updated at the same time as the Touch Me app, most people would not put two and two together.
In my simple control file example it would be made up of one record for each vote you wanted to change. IE
P,10,Kerry, Bush
This would tell the flash memory device driver for the President race, move 10% of the votes from Kerry to Bush. Very simple. This control file could be tailored well in advance for an election. Hopefully Rove would have the needed numbers well in advance of the election, he would not like it if Bush lost.
OK we how have a control file, and when the Touchscreen/Optical Scanner booted up, it reads this control file and is now ready to work.
The next file is the completed ballot file. This is the file that Touch Me “writes” to the flash memory card at the completion of each voter selection. In my simple example this file would look like:
P,Kerry
S,Castor
.
.
With these two files, the flash memory device driver has all the information it needs to modify the Kerry votes to Bush votes. The control file told it to only change 1 in 10 Kerry votes to Bush votes. If it was time to change the vote in the Presidential race, “P,Kerry” would become “P,Bush”. Very Very Simple.
And if you were auditing the Touch Me application for vote fraud you would NEVER see it. The last thing you would see would be two lines like
write (flashmemory, fileofvotes);
goback to New_Voter;
And because programmers are lazy, Diebold picked for its Optical Scanner hardware the Windows OpS operating system, and gee the flash memory device driver is used on it too. One really special device driver that can be used on both Touchscreens and Optical Scanners. How simple and how cheap.
And how about exposure to being caught, well in this simple example you have ONE programmer. This programmer may not even work for Diebold but could be a “special contractor” brought on to “write” the device driver software. And remember once the “special added functions” was written once, that special contractor would be passed from Touchscreen maker to Touchscreen maker and their “special added functions” could be reused from maker to maker.
Then you would need ONE person to create the “control file” for each election. Once it is created, the normal “update” person would just update the Windows TS/OpS software with this “security update”.
Some ending points:
Sad to say, if the vote corruption software is in fact in the operating system, it would be almost impossible to find. While at the higher levels of the TS/OS companies, they would know what their machines would be used for, 99.9 percent of the people in the company would have no idea. As I have shown, as little as a one to three person programming team could have written the code for all the TS/OS machines out there.
After the hanging chads of the 2000 election, everybody knew that a newer way for people to vote would be used in the 2002 and later elections. You also have to believe the Repug party has many great software types as would the Democratic Party. I believe the vote corruption software was first tested in the 2002 election to help Jeb Bush in Florida and to replace Democratic Senators like Max Cleland in Georgia.
Any election vote that was to be corrupted the race must be close. If the day after the election, the machines showed Alan Keyes the winner over Barack Obama, then nobody would believe the machines.
Maybe the release of the Diebold Touchscreen software was NOT an accident, but done on purpose by Diebold so people were looking at the wrong place and many man-years of programmer’s time were spent going over the WRONG code. Almost all magic acts use miss direction to pull off their “magic”. The release of the Diebold code could have just been miss direction.
In 2001 George Bush’s biggest problem was the Senate. A lot of theories are out there about what happened to Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane. A couple points to think about. Was Paul Wellstone so far ahead of the person he was running against that the machines could not switch enough votes for the Repug candidate to win, and/or what was the state of the Minnesota voting machines and were they the wrong type. So maybe Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed because of pilot error or maybe because they could not control the election, he had to be gotten rid of at any cost.
Remember, the vote corruption would take place in all states not just Florida and Ohio. While some well meaning Democratic leaders point out that Bush got millions more votes than Kerry, in the real world a shift of only 5% or less of the Kerry votes to Bush would account for Bush’s “win”.
And finally a well known saying:
"When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains,
however improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes, A Study In Scarlet, 1887 by A.C. Doyle
Note: Feel free to copy, edit my grammar errors, and pass on this white paper.
/s/
Florida_Geek
posted by R7 | 11/11/2004 05:51:00 PM
3 Comments:
Keen insights. The device driver is definetly a strong candidate. I wish someone would look at systemic differences from exit polling. IE if the results were consistently 10% (or some other number) skewed from exit polls.
Computers are great at counting but poor at randomness and noise.
I think if several counties in question had the same skew from exit polls it would be a smoking gun.
Keen insights. The device driver is definetly a strong candidate. I wish someone would look at systemic differences from exit polling. IE if the results were consistently 10% (or some other number) skewed from exit polls.
Computers are great at counting but poor at randomness and noise.
I think if several counties in question had the same skew from exit polls it would be a smoking gun.
I agree with your assessment.
Think of it this way.
Guy works in a store.
Everyday he takes home a wheelbarrow full sand, old newspapers, gravel, bottles, screws and bolts.
He is stealing. What is he stealing?
Wheelbarrows.
You hide it in plain sight.
The flash memory card is the wheel barrow.
Thanks for the input.
Note the following:
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
11/12/04 4:48 PM Update: PDF link goes to version "00l."
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper (271k PDF) on the exit polls from the 2004 election.
In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman says:
"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
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