Air America will investigate Diebold and electronic voting.

[liberal72]

O'Franken just said this.

[madmax]

1. Details??

How are they going to go about doing that?

[liberal72]

2. Not sure, O'Franken just said they will.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. I hope to hell someone there reads this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

IBM programmers wanted to pop into supervisor state on the fly in their normal application state programs. So they had a stealth method for doing this. There are many systems calls a program can call, for now lets talk about the time-of-day system call. So IBM did some funny things with the time-of-day system call. IF you loaded a secret value into one of the computer registers, not only would you get the time of day return to you but your program would be running in supervisor state. If you looked at the application program, nothing looked strange, just a "normal" call to time-of-day. And because most people could not see the code for the Operating System from IBM, this method was really used for many many years.

What does this have to with Touchscreen Fraud. Well there is a major push to get the code for Touchscreen software to be "Open Source". This is a RED HERRING Even if the TS code is release and reviewed, IMHO nobody will find the fraud because it will be done in the non-reviewed operating system.

Let's pick the famous voting machine company Acme (beep-beep) Voting Machines. Well Acme picked for their operating system for their Touchscreen product the Linux Operating System. You can get Linux source code and compile it yourselves but 99.99% of the people get a pre-compiled version from somebody like Red Hat. But if you go to the Red Hat site, you can get the source for most of their Linux code. And if you wished to, you could re-compile a module yourself.

How TS Fraud could happen at the Operating System Level

OK some very simple code examples.

First a voter record with three fields
1) One character for a vote for Bush.
2) One character for a vote for Kerry.
3) One 36 character field to hold the time of day.

Second in the TS software we have some code that looks like

move -1 to hold_time_of_day.

{10-20 statements }

Remark - go get the time of day for this voter.
call time_of_day with hold_time_of_day.
.
.
record vote......

If a outside company reviewed the TS code, there would not be anything to point to voter fraud. Why because the votes were changed in the time_of_day function.

Acme had change the Red Hat Linux time_of_day function to do something funny if the hold_time_of_day field was -1. It would change every 10th vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush.


Please, if anybody knows how to email them, get this through. I think it's pretty important & easy to overlook.