Reset the Election…

…is apparently an option in a drop-down menu on the Diebold central tabulators to be used in many states for the US Presidential election! According to this report,

“Black Box Voting on Wednesday demonstrated two quick ways that ‘an unscrupulous person with no computer skills whatsoever’ could sabotage vote totals, according to Associate Director Andy Stephenson.

The entire voting record can be deleted by choosing ‘reset the election’ on a drop-down menu, he said, or a hacker can destroy a tabulator’s ability to recognize ballots by un-selecting three checkboxes on a program control panel.

Once those changes are made, a hacker could cover his tracks by deleting the audit log, as Baxter did.

The Diebold central tabulators use a program called ‘GEMS’ that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program.

GEMS requires users to enter a password to access the vote totals, but Harris showed that the totals can also be opened — and altered — with Access, without ever running GEMS.

Because Access functions are already built in to the Windows operating system, the totals could be altered even if a computer did not have Access installed on it, said Herbert Thompson, a computer security expert who teaches at the Florida Institute of Technology. He demonstrated how to change vote totals with a six-line program in Microsoft notepad, ‘a simple text editor’ that comes with all copies of Windows.”