BradBlog Surfaces ‘Pentagon Papers’ of E-Voting

Posted on Nov 6, 2006

From AP

A Diebold e-voting machine

Our co-Truthdigger of the week, Brad Friedman, has obtained a copy of the “Risk Assessment Report” of Diebold’s e-voting machine, which was commissioned by the state of Maryland but never released in full, and which details a huge number of security flaws in the voting system.

(Kudos to Bradlog freelancer Rebecca Abrahams for surfacing the report.)

BradBlog:

On Friday night, we broke Rebecca Abrahams’ exclusive story concerning the long-sought yet never-released complete “Risk Assessment Report” of Diebold’s electronic voting systems as commissioned by the state of Maryland from the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 2003.

Tonight, The BRAD BLOG is releasing that report exclusively in full as given to us by Abrahams, who says she obtained it from a source described to us as “a patriotic high-level state official.” She says the source is “someone very close to this situation” in the Maryland government.

The original, never-before-released SAIC report was nearly 200 pages in all, and details a number of extraordinary security vulnerabilities found in Diebold’s AccuVote-TS (touch-screen) voting systems as deployed by the state of Maryland initially in 2002. The version of the SAIC report that was eventually released to the public, after extreme redaction, was a mere 38 pages long.

It was reported by Abrahams that neither the full Maryland State Board of Elections, nor even the governor himself, was ever allowed to see the full report.

Regarded by many in the computer science, security and election integrity community as “The Pentagon Papers of E-Voting,” the report as released by Maryland’s state election administrator, Linda Lamone, was edited, changed, and, of course, highly redacted by someone.

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