I grew up reading comic books wanting to be a superhero. Comics taught me that those who speak the truth are heroes, all the rest are liars.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Diebold's Criminal Quackary

Holy quack! A duck got out of the pen....

We all know about Diebold's vulnerabilites and ties to the rethugs...
But now there's a strong "if it walks like a duck" case to be made that the Georgia election in which Vietnam veteran Max Cleland (D) was ousted from his Senate seat was probably cooked....As in fraudulent fudging irregularities revolving around secret software patches.

A DailyKos diary broke this and now Rolling Stone magazine has the story. Seems like there's a dead victim, some smoke, and now indications of the the gun..that doing more than quacking:
Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.

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