MIT snared in dispute over voting machines

Firm: Students posted stolen Diebold files

Hiawatha Bray
Boston Globe Staff
10/30/2003

Two students have embroiled the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a nationwide controversy about the reliability of a company's high-tech voting machines.

Diebold Inc., of North Canton, Ohio, on Tuesday sent letters to MIT demanding that the school cut off Internet access to data files posted by C. Scott Ananian, a graduate student in computer science, and sophomore mathematics student David Meyer. The files, thousands of pages of Diebold internal documents, were stolen in March when someone broke into the Diebold computer network. They have been widely distributed on the Internet by political activists, who say the documents reveal serious flaws in Diebold's line of computerized voting machines.

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Publishing the documents online has become a crusade for many Internet activists, who say Diebold is trying to conceal the truth about its voting machines.

"There's a lot of stuff here that's important to be known," Ananian said. The documents include internal e-mail messages that suggest Diebold workers were aware of serious problems with the voting machines, even as they were being used in elections.

Meyer said that even if the documents were stolen, they contain information the public needs. Diebold "should not be allowed to hide behind copyright law," he said.

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