Former delegate gets purported Diebold code

Baltimore Sun:

Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004.

Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.

A spokesman for the governor said the apparent distribution of the voting-machine software was troubling. "This raises yet another unanswered question with regard to Diebold technology," said Henry Fawell, a spokesman for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

The availability of the code - the written instructions that tell the machines what to do - is important because some computer scientists worry that the machines are vulnerable to malicious and virtually undetectable vote-switching software. An examination of the instructions would enable technology experts to identify flaws, but Diebold says the code is proprietary and does not allow public scrutiny of it.

LSB: Could this be the reason Bush and Rove seem so unconcerned about the November elections? If someone could just pick-up and mail these disks, is it a stretch to believe that the security on these machines is so lacking that a bright software writer could exploit any flaw in the programming to alter the election outcome?