From Morons Dot Org: There are 1,000 of these machines, the so-called central tabulators, each of which can handle up to 2 million votes at a time. They are used in more than 30 states, tabulating something
like 50% of the vote. And they can be manipulated.
Basically the way it works is this. These machines store the votes in a ledger based on Microsoft Access. The problem begins with each machine having three seperate sets, only one of which is viewable. All it takes is the entering of a two-digit code (in a so-called “secret location”, which is nowhere near security enough) to uncouple these three books, and then one can easily be edited. Spot-checks will not show anything unusual; the system used one set of data for the detailed reports viewable by election officials, and another for the official election results.
The program itself is all-but unprotected. Passwords are spread pell-mell among elections workers, city or county database people, Diebold employees, temps, and Diebold subcontractors. The audit log is all but useless, as the only way to change log-ins is to restart the program, and with votes pouring in from all over, few people are going to be willing to do that. So, the audit log shows a whole lot of transactions by “admin”, and no one else.
“We found that you can melt down an election in six seconds, simply by using the menu items in GEMS. You can destroy all data with two mouse clicks, and with four mouse clicks, you can destroy the configuration of the election making it very difficult to reload the original data.”
Apparently the database structure that Diebold created becomes unstable at high volume, which (and this is according to Diebold) resulted in thousands of votes being given to the wrong candidate in San Diego County in March of this year.
Read the Black Box Voting Report