Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI), was a subsidiary of Diebold that made and sold voting machines.
A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally. Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.
Bev Harris is an American writer, activist, and founder of Black Box Voting, a national, nonpartisan elections watchdog group. She helped popularize the term "black box voting", while authoring a book of that title.
Black box voting signifies voting on voting machines which do not disclose how they operate such as with closed source or proprietary operations. If a voting machine does not provide a tangible record of individual votes cast then it can be described as black box voting.
An electronic voting machine is a voting machine based on electronics. Two main technologies exist: optical scanning and direct recording (DRE).
Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is called canvassing.
Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verified paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters who use an electronic voting system. A VVPAT allows voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name and party affiliation of candidates for whom the vote has been cast. While VVPAT has gained in use in the United States compared with ballotless voting systems without it, hand-marked ballots are used by a greater proportion of jurisdictions.
Election Systems & Software is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, DRE voting machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, ballot on demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.
A DRE voting machine, or direct-recording electronic voting machine, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. These are typically buttons or a touchscreen; and they process data using a computer program to record voting data and ballot images in memory components. After the election, it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored in a removable memory component and as printed copy. The system may also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from precincts at the central location. The device started to be massively used in 1996 in Brazil where 100% of the elections voting system is carried out using machines.
The Volusia error was an incident that occurred during the 2000 United States presidential election in Florida.
Ion Voltaire Sancho was an elected official who served Leon County, Florida, as Supervisor of Elections for 28 years, from 1989 to 2017. During his time in office, he was admired for his integrity as a voter advocate and elections expert, and became nationally known for his role in the Florida presidential election recount of 2000. He was also known for his appearance in the 2006 investigative documentary Hacking Democracy.
Hacking Democracy is a 2006 Emmy nominated documentary film broadcast on HBO and created by producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone, with producer Robert Carrillo Cohen, and executive producers Sarah Teale, Sian Edwards & Earl Katz. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the United States, especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.
An optical scan voting system is an electronic voting system and uses an optical scanner to read marked paper ballots and tally the results.
Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson is a computer security expert, an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and the Chief Technology Officer of NortonLifeLock. He is also the Chairman of RSA Conference the world's largest information security conference with over 25,000 attendees annually. Thompson is the co-author of a book on human achievement titled The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success published by Penguin in 2013 and has co-authored three books on information security including, How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing published by Addison-Wesley, and The Software Vulnerability Guide published by Charles River 2005. He is known for his role in exposing electronic voting machine vulnerabilities as part of the HBO Documentary Hacking Democracy. He was named one of the "Top 5 Most Influential Thinkers in IT Security" by SC Magazine and has been referred to by the Financial Times as "One of the world’s foremost cryptology and internet security experts."
Harri Harras Hursti is a Finnish computer programmer and former chairman of the board and co-founder of ROMmon, where he supervised in the development of the world's smallest 2-gigabit traffic analysis product that was later acquired by F-Secure Corporation.
Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a North American company that produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States. The company's headquarters are in Toronto, Ontario, where it was founded, and Denver, Colorado. It develops software in offices in the United States, Canada, and Serbia. Dominion produces electronic voting machines, which allow voters to cast their votes electronically, and optical scanning devices used to tabulate paper ballots. Dominion voting machines have been used in countries around the world, primarily in Canada and the United States. Dominion systems are employed in Canada's major party leadership elections, and across the nation in local and municipal elections.
Election cybersecurity or election security refers to the protection of elections and voting infrastructure from cyberattack or cyber threat – including the tampering with or infiltration of voting machines and equipment, election office networks and practices, and voter registration databases.
Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, and web servers to display tallies to the public. Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections is an American television documentary film produced by Ish Entertainment, Blumhouse Productions and HBO Films. The film examines the American election system and its vulnerabilities to foreign cyberwarfare operations and 2016 presidential election interference. The film also features hackers at the conference DEF CON in their attempts to test the security of electronic voting machines.
Sarah Teale is a British-American documentary film producer and director, known for her Emmy nominated HBO documentaries Hacking Democracy, Dealing Dogs, The Weight of the Nation and Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections.
