Keep in mind: it’s not just the votes “counted” by these machines, it’s often the voter rolls of eligible voters as well. Keep an eye on Brad’s place over the next few days. He’s doing Pulitzer level work of late, for all our SCLM takes note. Some choice selections:

It seems that Maryland’s State Board of Elections (SBE), under orders from Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, hired another firm, Freeman, Craft and McGregor, to review the vulnerabilities identified in the SAIC Report, the real, unredacted version, in order to confirm to the Governor and the State that all of the issues addressed had been corrected by Diebold.

The Freeman report has been completed but Linda Lamone, despite briefing her own staff about it on August 11, 2006, refuses to disclose its contents to Governor Ehrlich and even refused to release it to her board, saying it was “proprietary” until this past Monday.

Lamone’s dictatorial control over information in Maryland doesn’t stop there.

Remarkably, Lamone didn’t even allow Giles Berger, the Chairman of the Board of Elections, to see the original, un-redacted SAIC report. He and his staff — the people who were charged with oversight over the execution of elections and the training of local boards on these machines — have only been allowed to see the much smaller report, redacted and altered by Diebold.

—snip—

The full State of Maryland Electronic Voting System Security Study, conducted by The SAIC and delivered to Maryland on September 17, 2003 is 152 pages plus 41 pages of appendices. The report that Linda Lamone handed to the Governor and to her own Board members was only 38 pages. 38 pages!

In total there are hundreds of edits, omission and additions. Here are a few examples:

Un-submitted Edited Version:

Risks identified were predominantly associated with a wide variety of ABSENT administrative controls for voting system security. Among management and operational controls, SAIC found risks in the controls on access to servers, administration of passwords, use of system audit logs, intrusion detection and level of security training for elections personnel.
SAIC concluded that with the management and operational procedures currently in use, the risk of system compromise is high. SAIC indicated however that these vulnerabilities can be mitigated, if not eliminated, by adequate security planning and administration.

Redacted Report as Submitted:

Completely Omitted

Original Unredacted SAIC Report:

2.1.8 Controls are not implemented to detect unauthorized transaction attempts by authorized and/or unauthorized users
There is no documentation that describes security controls for detecting unauthorized transaction attempts by authorized or unauthorized users. Therefore, the application of security controls may be applied inconsistently, incorrectly or incompletely.

Since a threat source is more likely to exploit a system if the evidence of his/her actions cannot be gathered or will go undetected, failure to have controls for detection increases the likelihood of system attacks, and consequently, of system compromise:

Redacted Report as Submitted:

Completely Omitted

It goes on and on. So once again I feel compelled to say: let’s not count our chickens, ok? I’m sure MD election officials responsible for the redacted report didn’t get a phone call from Rove, aren’t trying to guarantee totally incomplete and unreliable election results, and haven’t taken any money or junkets or gifts from Diebold. That’s crazy talk. But I am sure that your everyday, typical government worker incompetence and desire to protect their own little corner of the bureauracrcy has a lot to do with reports like this. Lamone got so flustered by Team BradBlog’s questions she ripped off her mike and walked out without finishing the interview, it’ll be up at their place later. Once upon a time we could’ve counted upon the mainstream press to do this kind of work; no longer. So share it with your friends, this or any one of a boatload of pieces easily found on the net.

Here, use this one:

George Bush’s own appointee to the Chair of the EAC, the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, Rev. DeForest Soaries, quit that post, stating, rather dramatically that, “There is no prototype. There are no standards. There is no scientific research that would guarantee any election district that there’s a machine that can be used to answer these very serious questions. And so, my sense is that the politicians in Washington have concluded that the system can’t be all that bad because, after all, it produced them. And as long as an elected official is an elected official, then whatever machine was used, whatever device was used to elect him or her, seems to be adequate. But there’s an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use and if we were another country being analyzed by America, we would conclude that this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud.”

I don’t think anyone can argue with that.