Premier Election Solutions

Premier Election Solutions   (Company)
Interest of	Athan Gibbs

Premier Election Solutions, formerly named Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI), was a major US elections vendor who was sold after multiple leaks and charges that their voting software was insecure.

History

Founded as Global Election Systems (GES), they were acquired by Diebold Inc., a banking and security corporation, in 2002. Bad press led Diebold to change the name of its election division to Premier, and eventually sell it to ES&S. However, the Justice Department recognized this as a monopoly and forced ES&S to sell Premier in 2010; it was acquired by Dominion.

Princeton University Exposes Diebold Flaws

Leaks

2003

Sometime in the spring of 2003 an unknown hacker broke into Diebold computers and obtained a large portion of their email archives, which was posted online. The source code to their voting machines was also leaked. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University published a damning critique of the products, based on an analysis of the software. They stated 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 Princeton analysis

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. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses and 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. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

2006

Another leak occurred in 2006.

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