[Voterescue] Election Software for San Diego "Lost in Transit"

[Vickie Karp]

San Diego's Diebold Election Software 'Lost In Transit'

EPROM Chips Fed-Exed from CA Secretary of State Turn Up Missing, Package
Arrives Empty, Police Investigating

UPDATE: SoS Confirms Precinct-Based Scanner Chips Missing, Will Voting
Machine 'Sleepovers' Be Held Anyway?

Posted By John Gideon On 19th December 2007 @ 15:31 In Diebold/Premier,
California, San Diego | 6 Comments

[IMAGE]Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org [1]

Two shipping tubes sent from the California Secretary of State's office
in Sacramento to the San Diego County Election Office arrived without
their contents. The tubes left the SOS Office with more than 174 memory
chips, or Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EPROM), containing
firmware for the county's Diebold/Premier central-count optical scan
voting machines. UPDATE: Precinct-based op-scan chips confirmed by the
SoS to be missing as well! See update info at end of article.

The tubes arrived in San Diego but they were empty. The chips are now
considered to be either lost or stolen.

WIRED's Kim Zetter reports today... [2]

Two cardboard shipping tubes containing more than 174 EPROMs loaded with
voting machine software were sent via Federal Express from the secretary
of state's office in Sacramento last week to election officials in more
than a dozen California counties that use optical-scan voting machines
made by Diebold Election Systems. But two shipping tubes arrived empty to
one county on Monday.

In San Diego County, one of the empty tubes arrived with no lid on the
end of it to close the tube; the second tube had a lid, but it was
loosely taped shut.

According to Zetter, the new firmware was being sent to San Diego
following software and security modifications made following the state's
recent "Top-to-Bottom Review" of e-voting systems. The packages were sent
from the Secretary of State's office after being packaged by
Diebold/Premier employees with SoS personnel standing witness.

New chips will now be sent and the state says the February primary will
not be delayed by the issue. The California Highway Patrol and Sacramento
Police are now investigating.

But the story gets worse, in this LATE UPDATE (FROM BRAD):

[IMAGE]We've confirmed, via an SoS spokesperson, that some of the missing
chips were to be used for precinct-based optical-scan systems as well as
central-scanners as reported originally by Zetter. Which raises new
concern about allowing those precinct-based systems to be released to
poll-workers for "sleepovers" prior to the election, as has been the
notorious and dubious custom in SD. The practice may still be allowed in
next year's election, according to recent comments by the SoS Debra
Bowen, though with additional security procedures in place.

Now that there are actual "official build" chips out there, somewhere,
that could be used to replace the chips during a "sleepover", that issue
needs to be looked at closer than ever before, as we see it.

SoS spokesperson Nicole Winger confirmed in an email to The BRAD BLOG [3]
late this afternoon:

We understand some ePROMs were for the central office and some were for
precinct-based machines. Of course, as soon as Secretary Bowen learned
the news from San Diego, she asked law enforcement authorities to
investigate. So we hope to learn more about this soon.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from The BRAD BLOG: http://www.bradblog.com
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