Re: just got back from obama event

[Jordan Wiens <numatrix () ufl edu>]

On Aug 27, 2007, at 10:25 AM, dan () geer org wrote:

>  |
>  | Someone should put up a "Hackers for Diebold" website. Motto:
>  | Diebold: The technology you need, the election results you want!
>  | Although it looks like Florida doesn't get to vote in the primary
>  | anymore either way.
>  |
>
>
> W.r.t. Diebold, they and all others suffer from a
> universal election commission requirement that might
> be worth discussion here.  It is that on election day
> if something in an election machine breaks, then the
> (various) election commision(s) insist on being able to
> reload/restart on demand, and to do so with essentially
> unskilled help.

Our county gets around this issue by training up a staff of mid-level  
techies whose job is to drive around between polling locations and  
provide "higher" level technical support.  In the case of a machine  
going really bad, we have spares of everything and can re-program a  
spare to become any local machine.  They do have someone from the  
county come out though with a programmer in some situations though.

As a side-note, this led to a rather interesting practice called  
sleep-overs in which the techs in question get to have one of the  
machines without any seals on the memory card slot (presumably  
because the device will be reloaded with the appropriate config as  
necessary) over-night since they have to be at their first polling  
location at ridiculously early hours.

So yeah, I've got some fun photos of me with an unlocked touch-screen  
diebold voting system in my trunk from the day before elections last  
year.  ;-)

The only good news in that situation was that our county only uses  
the touch-screens for accessibility reasons, and primarily uses paper- 
scanners unless folks /really/ want to use a touch-screen.

--
Jordan Wiens, CISSP
UF Network Security Engineer
(352)392-2061

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