Diebold Admits Audit Logs in ALL Versions of Their Software Fail to Record Ballot Deletions

 

Startling admission made during public hearing in CA to consider decertification of the company's voting and tabulation software...

Guest Blogged by Mitch Trachtenberg, with Brad Friedman

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

The problems may lead to decertification of the company's voting systems, as well as an examination of voting systems made by other companies to determine if they too may have been able to sneak such violations past both federal and state testers...

Today's hearing was a response to the startling discovery last December, by a volunteer group in Humboldt County that, under fairly common circumstances, the older version of GEMS used by the county, and several others in the state, dropped all votes from the ballots in the first deck of ballots run through GEMS. (See BRAD BLOG coverage: here, here and here.)

The Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, using the free and open source software program Ballot Browser, found that Diebold's GEMS system had eliminated all votes from 197 vote-by-mail ballots cast in a single precinct in Eureka, CA during last November's general election. [DISCLOSURE: Mitch Trachtenberg, author of this article, was one of the HTP volunteers. He developed Ballot Browser, for use by the project.]

The revelations were made just after Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich had certified the election results with the state, forcing her to recertify with new numbers after the discovery. Crnich, who helped found the Transparency Project, was present at today's hearing.

Following the discovery of Diebold's dropped votes, and the equally disturbing revelation that Diebold had been aware of the problem for years, CA's Secretary of State Debra Bowen, initiated an investigation which confirmed [PDF] that, under common circumstances, the GEMS software would drop all votes from the first scanned deck of ballots, the so-called "deck zero."

The investigation also revealed that the problems went far beyond the dropping of votes. GEMS v1.18.19, the version used in Humboldt County --- as well as versions 1.18.20, 1.18.21, 1.18.22 and 1.18.23 --- were discovered to have defective audit logs.

In addition, the software was discovered to have a "Clear" button which, when pressed, would actually delete the contents of an audit log without even asking for confirmation from the user.

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