Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI),[1] was a subsidiary of Diebold that made and sold voting machines.
In 2009, it was sold to competitor ES&S. In 2010, Dominion Voting Systems purchased the primary assets of Premier, including all intellectual property, software, firmware and hardware for Premier's current and legacy optical scan, central scan, and touch screen voting systems, and all versions of the GEMS election management system from ES&S.
At the time ES&S spun off the company due to monopoly charges its systems were in use in 1,400 jurisdictions in 33 states and serving nearly 28 million people.
In January 2003, Diebold Election Systems' proprietary software, and election files, hardware and software specifications, program files, voting program patches, on its file transfer protocol site, were leaked, later 7 August 2003 leaked to Wired (magazine).[11] [12][13][14][15]
In 2004, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute, analyzed the source code used in these voting machines and reported "this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts."[16][17] Following the publication of this paper, the State of Maryland hired Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform another analysis of the Diebold voting machines. SAIC concluded "[t]he system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise."[18]
In January 2004, RABA Technologies, a security company in Columbia, Maryland, did a security analysis of the Diebold AccuVote, confirming many of the problems found by Rubin and finding some new vulnerabilities.
In June 2005, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that when given access to Diebold optical scan vote-counting computers, Black Box Voting, a nonprofit election watchdog group founded by Bev Harris, hired Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti and conducted a project in which vote totals were altered, by replacing the memory card that stores voting results with one that had been tampered with. Although the machines are supposed to record changes to data stored in the system, they showed no record of tampering after the memory cards were swapped. In response, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of State said, "Information on a blog site is not viable or credible."[21]
In early 2006, a study for the state of California corroborated and expanded on the problem;[22] on page 2 the California report states that:
"Memory card attacks are a real threat: We determined that anyone who has access to a memory card of the AV-OS, and can tamper it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways. The fact that the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots" and "Harri Hursti's attack does work: Mr. Hursti's attack on the AV-OS is definitely real. He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system, including the GEMS election management server."
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Is there enough scrutiny of voting machines as there should be? Have security issues with these voting machines been resolved?