Wot?

Apparently, Diebold's much ballyhooed voting system uses a marvellously and eminently unprotected database system for its central tallies--and editing it is about as hard as opening an Access .mdb:

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

-- see Common Dreams, Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked

... wait, it looks like that's actually because all you're doing is opening an Access .mdb...

Yikes. And take a good look at the probabilities on those optical scanners too...

See also this link on the reality that there is no audit trail... and the appearance that this is intentional...

Access for the back-end DB? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

See also Bob Harris' page... and this rather intriguing set of results.

This paid commercial software guy (who has, incidently, done some database work, in Access and in real databases like Oracle and MySQL) hereby declares: they shoulda gone open source with paper trails. They really, really shoulda. I don't like the looks of this.