In a preemptive strike to discourage further negative publicity, Diebold Election Systems has demanded that voting activist site BlackBoxVoting.org remove internal memos which admit that Diebold's high tech voting machines are easily susceptible to vote fraud.

Dated Oct. 2001, the memo by Diebold's principal engineer Ken Clark concedes that it is quite simple to do an "end run" around the Diebold GEMS voting software, used in both touch screen and optical scan voting machines, and that this "back door" has already been used in elections. Diebold states that the memos are authentic, but claims copyright protection.

According to Black Box Voting.com's Bev Harris, this is what Clark has written --

CLARK: "Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new."

CLARK: "Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .