DIEBOLD USES WINDOWS CE AND OTHER THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, IT ALSO MODIFIES THE WINDOWS CE Diebold's operating system, while it may be a microsoft product, has been and can be altered by Diebold. Furthermore, a convicted felon did just that to Diebold software, and to the Windows CE operating system used by Diebold (when it was Global Elections Systems). The question is: what software has the means and opportunity to change the contents of vote data? Operating system software, device drivers, application software (like GEMS or the code running on Diebolds in-precint voting machines) all have the means to affect the contents of vote data. Article that explains how Diebold alters the Microsoft operating system: Part of the Voting and Elections web pages by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science  Furthermore, it is emerging that the version of Windows CE used by Diebold is both heavily customized and full of dynamically loaded libraries. As a result, there are strong grounds for the conclusion that the operating system is not unmodified commercial off the shelf software (COTS), and that with this extensive use of dynamic linkage, we cannot even tell if the system being run on a particular voting machine resembles the system that was disclosed in the configuration documents submitted with this system when it went through the FEC/NASED approval process. http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldftp.html Diebold and other ATM vendors say they're "hardening" the installations of Windows they ship with their ATMs by disabling unnecessary services and ports and removing files that support peripherals http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/networking/story/0,10801,89119,00.html Diebold patched the Windows CE operating system in Georgia:"Williams does acknowledge, however, that a month and a half before the November election, he worked with Diebold to apply a patch to the Windows CE operating system. The voting machines run on version 3.0 of Windows CE, he said, and they patched it to correct problems they were having with the system" http://www.votescam.com/Patchelections.php