[Tfug] technical help needed with the election?

[John Karns]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Steve Franks <stevefranks at ieee.org> wrote:
>> So lets head this and get back to Linux
>
> these things.  No one has even mentioned what these things run - I'm
> sure it's not a custom OS, and since diebold is mostly in the business
> of ATM's (and since I saw one crash to DOS) they are probably running
> dos.  Anyway, it seems like a relevant topic to me, I apologize for
> chastising Eric for hijacking our thread (since I didn't see anything
> related to voting machines or linux in his post, but maybe I'm blind).

It's been quite some time since I've explored the site, but

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

has quite a bit of info on the subject.

IIRC, the Diebold machines were said to run some form of our favorite
OS from Redmond, with the data being managed by MS Access.  Back when,
the person who spearheaded blackboxvoting.org got a hold of the Access
code, and it was asserted that there was a duplicate set of tables
where the vote count was subject to some dirty tricks.  At the very
least, Diebold's (and other corps in the voting machine business)
manner of handling of the code certification and  machine maintenance
was suspicious to say the least.

But as I said, I haven't kept abreast of the issue at all, so I don't
know what the current scuttle-butt is concerning Diebold et al.

-- 
John