Source code to Diebold Election Systems voting machines has been leaked once again.
On Wednesday, former Maryland state legislator Cheryl C. Kagan was anonymously given disks containing source code to Diebold’s BallotStation and Global Election Management System (GEMS) tabulation software used in the 2004 elections. Kagan, a well-known critic of electronic voting, is executive director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Olney, Md.
The disks were created and distributed by two federal voting machine testing labs run by Ciber and Wyle Laboratories. They had been testing systems on behalf of the state of Maryland, Diebold said in a statement.
This is not the first time that Diebold source code has been leaked. In early 2003, Diebold critic Bev Harris uncovered similar source code while conducting research using Google’s search engine.
Soon after, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University published a damning critique of Diebold’s products, based on an analysis of the software.
They found, for example, that it would be easy to program a counterfeit voting card to work with the machines and then use it to cast multiple votes inside the voting booth.
Diebold says it has since introduced security enhancements to its products, but the fact that the company’s sensitive source code has again leaked out is not a good sign, according to Avi Rubin, a computer science professor with Johns Hopkins and one of the authors of the 2003 report.
