'Hacker Hanky Panky' on a Diebold

Voting for the rest of us, thanks to Diebold -- all you need is a flash drive, a screwdriver, a USB gender changer ($2.99) and a USB-to-serial converter in your pocket when you head into the voting booth if a Diebold is in use at your polling place.

You start laughing, and then you want to cry.

Video by Marty Kaplan at HuffPost.

Think it's BS? Try looking at this series of shots of the interior of the same machine at Open Voting Foundation, the source of the shots in the video.

Open Voting Foundation is releasing 22 high-resolution close up pictures of the system. This picture, in particular, shows a "BOOT AREA CONFIGURATION" chart painted on the system board.

The most serious issue is the ability to choose between "EPROM" and "FLASH" boot configurations. Both of these memory sources are present. All of the switches in question (JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2 and SW4) are physically present on the board. It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts votes. This could be done before or after the so-called "Logic And Accuracy Tests".

A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the "external flash" memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.

Oh hell, why worry about messing with the damn thing on election day anyway, when the software can be set up in advance for the "right outcome." From VerifiedVotingFoundation's David Dill:

Typically, modern voting machines are delivered several days before an election and stored in people's homes or in insecure polling stations. A wide variety of poll workers, shippers, technicians, and others who have access to these voting machines could rig the software. Such software alterations could be difficult to impossible to detect.

Diebold spokesman David Bear admitted to the New York Times that the back door was inserted intentionally so that election officials would be able to update their systems easily. Bear justified Diebold's actions by saying, "For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software... I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Bear said the above comments in May. Elections are already under way and these touch-screen electronic voting systems are still in use. With enough organization, time and access to do the hanky-panky, your vote is toast.