Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day.
The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.
The revelation confirmed that a problem uncovered by Threat Level in January, and reiterated in a report released two weeks ago by the California secretary of state's office, has widespread implications for election jurisdictions around the country that use any version of the company's Global Election Management System (GEMS) software to tabulate votes. The GEMS software is used to tabulate votes cast on every Premier/Diebold touch-screen or optical-scan machine, and is used in more than 1,400 election districts in 31 states. Maryland and Georgia use Premier/Diebold systems exclusively, therefore the GEMS software counts every vote statewide.
"Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the non-profit California Voter Foundation. "The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems. They and the jurisdictions that have used paperless voting machines have repeatedly pointed to the audit logs as the primary security mechanism and 'fail-safe' for any glitch that might occur on machines.
"To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security," Alexander said.
Following a public records request of GEMS logs, Threat Level previously reported that the Premier/Diebold logs did not indicate when election officials in Humboldt County, California, intentionally deleted more than two dozen batches of ballots from their system during the November general election.
The finding raised questions about the integrity of elections conducted with the system, but it was unknown at the time whether the problem with the audit log existed with other versions of the GEMS software used in other counties in California and across the country. Premier/Diebold didn't respond to phone calls seeking information at the time.
The secretary of state's report (.pdf) discussed the same problem with the logs but also did not indicate whether the problem existed with every version of the GEMS software.
A Premier/Diebold representative confirmed at the hearing that none of its logs records such events.
When asked by a member of the California secretary of state's staff if the company had done anything to address the problem, Justin Bales, general service manager for Premier/Diebold's western region said, "No, not yet."