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Iranian Election Controversy Connected To Diebold

By: David Hinz (Diary)  |  June 15th, 2009 at 11:53 AM  | 

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Originally Published at The Minority Report

from Lord Vegas

by Ima Tuele
Misinformation Service New York Times

The controversy surrounding the Iranian election results that have declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victor can be traced back to the purchase in 2008 of 10,000 touch screen voting machines by the Iranian government from Premier Election Solutions, previously known as Diebold.

The touch screen Accu-Vote TS machines, which are wildly acknowledged by all of the left conspiracists to have selected not elected President George W Bush as US president in Ohio in 2004, leave no paper trail, and therefore rely entirely upon electronic records in achieving vote accuracy.

“It’s not who votes that counts, but all in who counts the votes,” said an Iranian official who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Premier Election Solutions sold the machines to the Iranian government after they found their market for electronic voting machines depressed in the United States. “State of the art voting machinery has taken a back seat to verifiability,” said a disappointed PES CEO David Boies.

According to an entirely unbiased website:

Quote:

The AccuVote-TS is likely the widest-deployed of all of Diebold’s voting systems. It is a smart-card activated multilingual touchscreen system that records votes on internal flash memory. Voters insert a “smart-card” into the machine and then make their choices by touching an area on a computer screen, much in the same way that modern ATMs work. The votes are then recorded to internal electronic memory. When polls close, the votes for a particular machine are written to a “PCMCIA card” which is removed from the system and either physically transported to election headquarters or their contents transmitted via computer network.

The purchase of the Accu-Vote TS machines allowed the Iranian government to post election results within seconds of the end of voting, a process that has, in the past, taken hours to achieve.

The nearly two to one margin of victory by Ahmadinejad over his rival, reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, mirrored perfectly the paper ballot results of the last 62 UAW elections in the United States, a fact of little consequence, but interesting nonetheless.

Mousavi, perhaps taking his cue from recent American elections in Florida and Minnesota, declared himself the winner, claiming his own 2-1 majority victory, and promising to fight the election results all the way to the US Supreme Court if necessary.

“I won’t surrender to this manipulation,” Mousavi posted on his website. “The outcome of what we’ve seen from the performance of officials … is nothing but shaking the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s sacred system and governance of lies and dictatorship.”

Dissatisfied with the election fraud, Iranian citizens have taken to the streets rioting and confronting police. Setting fires to trashcans and tires, smoke is rising in thousands of locations throughout the capital city of Tehran. In retaliation against the charges, the Iranian government has shut down power to internet websites and shut off cell phone power.

“The majority of Iranians are certain that the fraud is widespread,” said elections expert and analyst Albert Gore, Jr. “It’s like taking 10 million votes away from Mousavi and giving them to Ahmadinejad.”

“The same thing happened to me in 2000,” he added. In commenting on government attempts to squash the dissent, Gore was critical of Ahmadinejad. “HE BETRAYED THIS COUNTRY!” he shouted, “He played on our fears.”

Former President Jimmy Carter, commenting on the election from a Habitat for Humanity house he is building in Nepal, said, “While I am disappointed that the Iranian government did not allow me to come to Tehran to monitor the election results, I feel certain that the will of the people has been served, and the election was fair and honest.”

The former president went on to say that he has long known the Iranian people, as well as the leaders of the Iranian government, and has full confidence in their honesty.

“I have overseen free and fair elections in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua and feel certain that the Iranian vote was every bit as honest as any that I oversaw and certified.”

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  • dave_in_atl

    Yea yea I know you are poking fun at those idiot liberals that think the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen, but I just have to say you sir are a completely delusional if you think that computer voting machines are even close to secure. Yes there is a big difference between if they can be hacked and if they _have_ been hacked, but all that should matter is they _can_ be hacked, and they _can_ be hacked in a way that would hide all evidence that it ever happened. That should be enough to make everyone want to burn every single one of these machines.

    Maybe you should read this: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf

    “Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection.
    The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting
    machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have
    constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.”

    or

    “AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses?computer viruses that can spread
    malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and
    post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing
    our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.”

    If that does not scare the crap out of you its because you are completely computer illiterate and need to go back to computers 101 at your local high school.

    • http://theminorityreportblog.com David Hinz

      looking_at_your_posting_history — I really, really am disinterested in your opinion.

      period!

      • bk

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

        Of course all the proven vote fraud, intimidation, etc. seemed to come from the left.

        • DONTREADONME
          • dave_in_atl

            A computer system that decides the final vote totals (with no explanation at all how it arrived at those totals) is superior!

            I mean damn then we would not have to worry about recounts… “Oh you want a recount? ok… [click and 1 sec later]… yep same as before”

            sure makes things simple i guess. Who needs the ability to audit the vote totals for irregularities…. every vote from now on will be 100% accurate 100% of the time.

          • DONTREADONME
          • dave_in_atl

            I am glad you are so confident in your voting machine. I on the other hand will continue to push for more open standards and a mandatory paper trail. Some people are happy to believe whatever they are told though and that is fine this is the land of the free after all.

            And for the record I don’t think the elections in 2000/2004 were stolen, and while I would be more than willing to accept that no election has been stolen so far I would have to do so on faith alone.

          • DONTREADONME

            let us know how that works out for ya, MMMK? We don’t need you to really begin to believe that there are invisible black silent helicopters above your head. Wow you are wound tight, take a breath and relax, I did not call you stupid or anything, conspiracy prone? slightly probable, cautious? definitely and there is nothing wrong with that.

            IMO-E-Voting is no more fraud prone then paper ballots, besides it seems to have worked out rather nicely in VA for the last two election cycles. Once again, another dose of anecdotal evidence.

      • dave_in_atl

        Let me break it down into little chunks so you can process it…

        - The Accu-Vote TS is not so different from the computer that sits at your desk.
        - Computers run complex software created by humans (like myself). The software running on these Diebold machines are closed source (meaning you have no right to view the source code)
        - At least here in Georgia where I vote we use the Accu-Vote TS… in every instance I have used one there has been zero paper trail (this is not the case for every voting machine)

        therefore…

        Part of the voting process is essentially a black box. People vote, the black box does its thing, and then tells us who won.

        so what can go wrong here…

        beyond virus, Trojans, mall ware, root kits you have the possibility of coding errors with the voting calculation. Buffer overflows/underuns etc. It may never save your vote, your vote might count towards another candidate, the touch screen calibration might be off and register your vote for another candidate etc.

        now explain to me why any of those things listed above that could go wrong will never happen? Oh yea because you cant.

        Now lets assume a really close election… a margin of 100 votes, but we know one of the electronic voting machines had a corrupted memory card and therefore all the votes were lost. We also know that more than 100 people have voted on that very machine.

        Do we know who won?

        Being disinterested in protecting the security of the voting process shows your ignorance over the situation.

        Republicans have by and large claimed this as a liberal issue because some democrats wined about the Bush elections. While the democrats were likely wrong to cry wolf it does not mean there is not a real threat.