Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry  (CA)

Kim Zetter    Wired    18 March 2009

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 d 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."

Bales went on to say that the GEMS logs have been the same since the software was first created more than a decade ago.

"We never, again, intended for any malicious intent and not to log certain activities," Bales said. "It was just not in the initial program, but now we're taking a serious look at that."

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen called the audit logs "useless" and vowed to investigate the issue further. She told Threat Level after the hearing that an examination of audit logs in other voting systems was also merited in light of these revelations. "Clearly, we're going to have to look at this," Bowen said. "That's one of the obvious next steps."

The secretary of state's office was holding a hearing to discuss a report it released two weeks ago examining what occurred on a Premier/Diebold system in Humboldt County that "lost almost 200 ballots during the November presidential election. Premier/Diebold has stated that a programming flaw in version 1.18.19 of its GEMS software caused the ballots to be d but has said the problem was fixed in a later version of the software.

To investigate the issue, California officials turned to the GEMS audit logs to see what occurred in the system when the votes were d. But they quickly discovered that the logs could provide them with no clues about what went wrong.

"In terms of being able to track down the precise mechanism by which the problem had occurred in this election, critical information was simply never recorded," said Lowell Finley, deputy secretary of state for voting systems technology and policy, who testified at the hearing.

Finley said his staff was also shocked to find that two of the logs contained a "clear" button that allowed officials to them. Finley said this violated federal voting system standards, which require voting systems to maintain an indestructible archival record of all system activity related to the vote tally and, in particular, any activity involving unusual intervention by an election official.

The "clear" button was removed from a later version of the GEMS software, but Finley said three counties in California still used the 1.18.19 version containing the button, as do jurisdictions in Texas and Florida.

Bales explained that the "clear" button was installed in the software to aid a few counties that used the GEMS database as a template "for creating subsequent elections." The clear button was included to allow them to erase a log after copying the template.

"With the benefit of hindsight, we saw that as definitely not the best avenue to do," he said. "It was in there with no malicious intent."

Bowen's office is evaluating whether it will de-certify GEMS version 1.18.19. Bales said Premier/Diebold fully supported de-certifying this version in California. He did not address whether his company would make the same recommendation to other states using the software.

But even if that version is de-certified, voting activists who testified at the hearing said the systematic issue with the GEMS audit logs points to a fundamental problem that won't go away.

"I believe the quality of this product has proven to be highly questionable, and the voters are sick and tired of this kind of abuse of the vote count," said Gail Work, chair of the election integrity committee for the San Mateo County Democratic Central Committee.

Software for the Premier/Diebold voting machines was first written more than a decade ago by a company named I-Mark, which was bought by a company named Global Election Systems. Diebold bought Global Election Systems in 2002 to launch its election division, Diebold Election Systems. In 2007, in the wake of bad publicity, Diebold changed the name of its election division to Premier Election Solutions.