Touching up the matter

In April, California's Secretary of State called for a criminal investigation into the Diebold company, the state's largest touchscreen voting machine supplier. Plans for a criminal probe were dropped, but Reuters tells us that

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has said Diebold deceived California with aggressive marketing that led to the installation of touch-screen voting systems that were not tested or approved nationally or in California.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving outfit. Why's that, you say? Well, apart from the by-now reasonably well-known fact that the president of the company is a GOP activist who promised to "deliver Ohio" for Bush this election, there's the fact that their machines are notoriously full of security holes. In fact, BlackBoxVoting announced another one about 10 days ago, and it's a biggie. In several models of the company's machines,

[b]y entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

BlackBoxVoting says there are 1,000 of the affected systems in place across 30 states. What makes it particularly serious is that the machines involved are central tabulators at the county level, capable of dealing with up to two million votes at a time, not the individual touchscreen machines voters will use, making them much more inviting targets for manipulation.

Thanks to the Department of Louise for linking to an article on Slashdot which linked to BlackBoxVoting's announcement.