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. That, despite repeated federal and state testing and certification of the software which failed to notice the egregious programming flaws in violation of federal voting system standards requiring indestructible logs to track all system events.
The flaws should have kept the systems from receiving certification at all.
“In terms of being able to track down the precise mechanism by which the problem had occurred in [the Humboldt] election, critical information was simply never recorded,” in the audit logs, Deputy Sec. of State Lowell Finley said at today’s hearing which was made available to the public via one-way audio teleconference.
Today’s hearing was meant to help determine whether or not GEMS v. 1.18.19, as used in Humboldt County, should now be decertified by the state. However, in response to a question, Premier representative Justin Bales admitted that even the most recent versions of GEMS, used in a number of other states, such as FL and TX, as well as CA, still fail to record the deletion of ballots in their audit logs.
For a decade or more, e-vote system vendors have pointed to the audit logs as a way of ensuring that every operation performed by their software would be available for inspection in post-election examinations. As a result of today’s hearing, it has become clear that even the most recent versions of Diebold/Premier’s vote counting software do not actually record all system events.
Bales admitted that his company had “not yet” corrected the problem, which was first implemented in the company’s software more than a decade ago.
Wired’s Kim Zetter quotes Bales as noting “We never, again, intended for any malicious intent and not to log certain activities. … It was just not in the initial program, but now we’re taking a serious look at that.”
CA SoS Bowen described the Diebold audit logs as “useless”.
According to the Secretary of State’s report, the four year old bug in Diebold/Premier’s software triggered a problem in Humboldt’s election as a result of a personnel change. Diebold had sent a memo, back in 2004, to elections managers still using GEMS 1.18.19. This memo, without going into details of the software bug, instructed elections officials to begin their elections by creating and deleting an empty “deck zero.”
However, Diebold never sent similar instructions to the federal body that had certified their software, never notified the California Secretary of State of the problem, and never modified their instruction manuals. In Humboldt County, the previous election manager left the county without alerting his successor or his superiors of Diebold’s suggested “workaround”, sent out as a single notice, via email, back in 2004 (their terse email is posted here.)
Although the California Secretary of State’s report indicated that the problem was Premier’s responsibility, Premier’s representative attempted to tell the hearing that the blame should be shared, suggesting that Crnich, the Humboldt Registrar, should have somehow known to delete “deck zero” before using GEMS to count ballots, despite her having access to no such instructions.
Crnich responded that she was “offended” by Diebold’s attempt to shift blame, adding “if you are saying that your system needs to be checked every damn time you turn it on, then I agree with you.”
Tom Pinto, a staffer at Humboldt County’s District Attorney’s office and a volunteer with the Transparency Project, urged that the approach used in Humboldt — independently scanning ballots with separately developed open source software and off-the-shelf hardware — be expanded statewide. Pinto stated that the project had demonstrated the need for “100% audits.”
The question of whether similar problems exist in the audit logs of systems certified by other companies was also raised at today’s hearing by both Election Integrity advocates during the public comment period, and afterwards by Bowen herself.
“Clearly, we’re going to have to look at this,” she told Wired. “That’s one of the obvious next steps.”
A transcript of today’s hearing will be posted at this CA SoS webpage.
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Mitch Trachtenberg is a member of the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, and the author of Ballot Browser, free and open source ballot counting software. He is also a partner in Trachtenberg Election Verification Systems (TEVSystems), which provides support for Ballot Browser.
CLARIFICATION: Our original headline was somewhat clumsily worded as: “Diebold Admits ALL Versions of Their Software Delete Ballots Without Notice”. In fact, while ballots can be deleted by administrators, from all versions, without being noted in the audit logs, at this time we’re only aware of versions 1.18.19, 1.18.20, 1.18.21, 1.18.22 and 1.18.23 doing so automatically (the “deck zero” bug described in the story). All versions of the GEMS software allow the deletion of ballots, which are not necessarily recorded in the audit logs. Though we don’t know if, in fact, the software itself deletes those ballots, as we know that it does in the versions mentioned above. We apologize for any unintended confusion to readers.
Brad, have you seen this? New evidence in Ray Lemme’s case?
http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/government/fraud/us_government/news.php?q=1236371758
[Ed Note: That comes from Wayne Madsen, Carol. He’s a paranoid, anti-Semitic, fraudster who makes things up. Suffice to say, barring the production of any actual independently verifiable evidence from him, his claims on that (or anything for that matter) are anything but legit. Sorry. – BF]
Carol, AIG is a Government funded protection racket for the States smaller work comp carriers.
Has been since its inception to protect the smaller insurance companies and employers liabilities by illegally screwing over the injured worker and actually hiding records of said injured so they cannot see what’s wrong with themselves.
But its not illegal if the Government does it, right?
BS
I’m sure Coleman’s people are very happy to hear this.
Can you say ‘revote’?
… Tim Foil said…
Actually, if this news was to be taken into consideration by the courts it would pretty much kill Coleman’s chance of a revote… because his purported reason for the revote is that the hand recount disagrees with the original machine counts and that the court did not defer to the machines.
So if someone wanted to design and build a voting system expressly for the purpose of voter fraud…..then diebold hit the jackpot!
… D Dearborn said…
Correction: Electoral fraud.
The term used does matter because of the status of “voter fraud” as the (actually almost non-existent) Republican bogeyman of voters committing fraud.
This stuff, electoral fraud, is a case of the voters being defrauded. And it’s been happening a lot since these machines appeared.
I provided the similar information to SOS Bowen’s office -with examples and attorney certified notification that the San diego ROV did not test all the machines and memory cards as per the ‘Procedures for Usage’- via an ‘election complaint’ with documented proof of the GEMS audit log discrepancies and Bowen’s SOS office did nothing but send Evan Goldberg down to schmooze the ROV and send me a letter suggesting I read the ‘Procedures for Use’.
Even after writing -pleading with- Lowell Finley to get the audit logs I was referencing, NOTHING was done.
EXCEPT to no longer publish the ‘Procedures for Use’ on the SOS website.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the actions taken by myself were in 2006.
…yet no raids on diebold’s offices, per nevada ACORN, for possible voter fraud/tampering ???
… Carol Thanks
Anyone know of any first world Democracies that aren’t cocked full of vile leaders that use paper ballots that I can move to?
I’ve been thinking New Zealand.. but I’m not sure yet. I was tossing around Iceland, but then they collapsed their economy because they were too tied to our corrupted American Banking System.
I just don’t hold a hope that enough citizens are smart enough, or care enough, to do anything about this. Even in highly educated people, I’m finding a disturbing lack of ability and willingness to think and discuss. Just too many people and too much noise.
Suggestions?
Savanster
NZ is great but don’t plan on staying there longer than about 6 months. It is very hard to get any residency status. The country is beautiful and I can’t blame them for wanting to keep expats out.
Try Belize or Costa Rica. Belize is my choice.
Belize would be my choice too if it were not so hot and humid that it saps every ounce of one’s strength if one fails to consume less than five gallons of water a day.
They say it is different out on the Cayes, but I’ve only been on the mainland, mostly Punta Gorda. Belize City, unless they’ve finally done something about it, has an open canal sewage system that like to incinerate your nostril hairs, dudes, so you want to avoid that action to the greatest extent possible.
Not sure I want to be in Central America, though.. Hot, humid, poor, and right in the middle of a zone that when Global Warming is ramping up to full speed, is going to start to wither.
NZ has the same population density as Belize but has a much more first world feel to it overall (or so it seems from what I’ve found so far).
Sure, one could live in Belize on a pittance, but how long before that place isn’t all that great to be around? How long before it is square in the middle of land wars, water wars, food wars, etc.. NZ is pretty isolated, I like that.
I want to “get away”, not disappear 😀
Savanster try NZ ,its my new home for the last 25 years .I don’t think you will have a problem with getting residency status.I think you have IT skills ,yes?
Great place to bring up kids …my three are world shakers and all in top 1 % academically world wide.All three currently at University .Insulated against the crap that hitting the northern hemisphere as a result of a multi term labour government (recently changed).
We have amazing world class industries ,I work with Superconductors ,our company is number one in the world.
We wouldn’t know about this at all if not for the Internet revolution. The stealing of every election since 2000 has not gone unnoticed by millions of concerned citizens in the US, and not thanks to network television. This will continue to have an effect on the future honesty of elections, government, and the media itself. I knew about the delete-easy audit logs in Diebold equipment since Bev Harris put up blackboxvoting.com back in 2000.
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i copied the above info from the gbs website…it is the central tabulation system my county uses after they use the diebold counters @ the precincts,,,does anyone have info on them?
The CEO of Diebold was a Republican who promised Bush a win.
Now we know why .
@savantster:
Canada. Speaks English (mostly), votes on paper with pencil. Currently vile leader making serious ass of himself and will be voted out the moment Canadians find someone they can agree is less vile.
What is needed to put Premier Election Systems/Diebold out of business? Their corporate charter must be revoked.
I would be willing to join in a class action suit in federal court against them. Lawyers?
What Bruce (# 7) discovered after the 2006 election was a deletion of a specific entry that was proving problematic for the county. In the original audit log he obtained through a PRA the entry was present, showing the central server connecting to a server in Washington State. When he raised the alarm with the SoS staff they obtained another copy of the audit log, and the entry was no longer there.
That means that not only can the audit logs be deleted as a whole, they also can have selected entries deleted. Bev Harris has been reporting the ability of the GEMS logs to be edited (including individual deletions, altering of the date and/ or time, etc.)
None of this is new information. These alarms have been sounding for years now.
These voting systems have never met the requirements of California’s Election Code, and the Secretary’s own Top-to-Bottom review proved that. Yet they keep being used, the companies are given more “chances”, and the Secretary does not fulfill her Constitutional duty; to ensure that the voting systems meet the requirements of federal and state laws, including the adopted federal standards, and are safe from fraud and manipulation.
It is not an acceptable position taken by the Secretary that the companies only be required to report their problems. Corporate America has never been known to comply willingly or in practice with self-policing.
They have knowingly sold defective products that were not designed for the purpose for which they were sold, saddled the taxpayer with the costs for constant upgrading and maintenance on these defective products, and knowingly incorporated “features” into these voting systems to allow the willful and untraceable manipulation of elections.
It is 20 months until the next major federal elections. It is time to de-certify all the current electronic voting systems, both DRE and optical scan, and the central election management systems that run them, and sue the manufacturers for misrepresentation and fraud.
It is time that Secretary Bowen enforced the Election Code, and uphold the California constitutional requirement that every voters’ vote shall be counted.
She has the evidence, she has the authority, and she has the duty! Does she have the political courage?
This is probably new evidence that Al Gore should have become President in 2000. Then, perhaps, no 9 11, surely no ban on stem cell research, a much healthier U.S. economy and no war on Irak.
Those Diebold machines (so much used in FL or TX) are indeed devilish.
“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. That, despite repeated federal and state testing and certification of the software which failed to notice the egregious programming flaws in violation of federal voting system standards requiring indestructible logs to track all system events. The flaws should have kept the systems from receiving certification at all.” … how did we end up using this crap?!@ We had two stolen elections and one that was such a massive landslide that even voter fraud on the part of DieBold couldn’t stem the tide … this needs to be fixed long before the next Congressional election in 2010, and that will only happen if stories like this continue to be pushed to the top of discussion …
POOR Mike Connell .
He could have BLOW the LID off this .
Do you have any evidence for calling Madsen an anti-semitic fraudster Brad? Or are you just referring to the kind of anti-semitic that thinks maybe we shouldn’t have Israeli spies pulling strings throughout our government? Once again I find myself disappointed in this blogs descent into perception control. It seems that questioning Israel is becoming taboo on the left, that there are two choices for a progressive in regards to Israel: unquestioning loyalty or…being a horrible anti-semite that wants to see all jews gassed.
By what you report on Brad it seems your happily in the former camp, or is it just a coincidence you miss stories like these:
http://mondediplo.com/2009/03/03warcrimes
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/18/18579025.php
Quit holding your hat in front of the camera Brad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9nb8k5eIaA
Oh, and by the way if you get a chance, you should watch Jon Stewart’s interview with Nandan Nilekani, the Bill Gates of India. If you watch closely you’ll notice Stewart NOT BLINKING A FUCKING EYE when Nilekani says that India’s democracy is sound, modern, and reliable because they use ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES. I guess it doesn’t matter how Israel gets India’s support against Pakistan so long as they get it amirite? At least that’s my suspicion…I do so hope it’s not anti-semitic.
Thanks Jody(#21) but if the SOS staff EVER got a copy of the audit log they didn’t tell me NOR did they contact ANY of the witnesses associated with other infractions of the Election Code or Procedures for Use NOR did Bowen’s office EVER contact the attorney who witnessed the confession by the SD ROV IT head that he didn’t test all the machines and memory cards as proscribed by the Procedures.
And the SD ROV gave differing stories about the entry that appeared to be a connection to WA State’s Diebold(Premier) offices. One story was that the ROV staff was running a program(running a program in the GEMS DB after starting the tabulation process?); another was that they gave me -per the public records request- NOT the audit log itself but a ‘transcripted’ version; another was that the audit log entry was a user -ROV staff- signon to the DB.
And it should also be mentioned that all documents went thru the San Diego County Counsel who -when the discrepancies were pointed out- that what I received from the public records request WAS -in fact- the GEMS audit log, thereby making the ROV personnel liars to the SOS.
And I haven’t mentioned the fact that the reconciliation documents had multiple errors in them.
So people, it’s just not the machines or the SOS office-except for the SOS office being more concerned with appeasing election officials than doing what’s right by citizen’s- but the whole ‘election complex’,including the EAC and Congress.
Gos
Did I miss Brad calling Madsen names? While, personally, I have never felt Madsen is a reliable enough source, I don’t recall seeing anyone calling him “an anti-semitic fraudster”…. Did I miss something? Did I forget something? That doesn’t sound at all like His Bradness to me, Gos.
I question Israel and the Israel Lobby all the time and he’s never called me “an anti-semitic fraudster”, never.
Is this even on topic? Did I miss something in the post?
Uh, 99… Brad replied inline, editor-style, to Carol’s comment so you have the following by Brad in comment #1:
So a response to that is indeed appropriate.
Further this affiant sayeth naught 🙂
Thank you, Zap. I totally missed that. Didn’t even think to scan through the comments again for such an outburst. Obviously, he snuck it in behind my back, the churlish so and so. So, I guess he has an even lower opinion of Madsen than many… and ain’t afraid of expressing it.
Anyway, Gos, notwithstanding Brad’s expressed opinion which you correctly cited, I don’t think he makes a habit of calling questioners of Israeli or Israel-related policies “anti-semitic” — in fact, I know he doesn’t, because he’s heard me yelling to move Israel to the South Pole over the latest Gaza extermination campaign — and since I don’t read Madsen, I can’t say if I agree with Brad’s assessment there, but I do agree that people ought always to independently verify whatever they get from Madsen, because I have had several people cite stuff of his to me that turned out to be balderdash.
If you want to duck around in the archives from the Summer of 2006, when Israel was bombing the snot out of Lebanon, I think you will see very plainly that Brad does not go off accusing people of anti-Semitism for hotly wishing the State of Israel would stop slaughtering people wholesale instead of conforming with UN resolutions and peace agreements and, well, just basic decent global citizenship. There is a difference between reviling the warmongering of Israel and its supporters, and reviling, blanketly, Jews, or suspecting anyone of perfidies uncountable simply because they are Jewish.
ref “…but I do agree that people ought always to independently verify whatever they get from Madsen, because I have had several people cite stuff of his to me that turned out to be balderdash.”
please furnish specific examples.
No, Mobert, I have no wish to review the last few years’ worth of comments for the specifics. If you want to believe everything Madsen says, go right ahead.
the worst part is NOBODY CARES except us.
went to my local south bend tribune message board and got no real response. even tried to get the right wingers into it by claiming obama’s landslide win was suspect. those who were aware of this said it was old news. nothing to see here. its so sad.
Allow yourself ten minuts to be discouraged, and then find out if Diebold GEMS is in use in your jurisdiction. If it is, why not go to your newspaper and/or registrar, and request that all elections conducted using GEMS be recounted by hand, at Diebold’s expense. If you’ve had any elections decided by small margins, find the defeated candidate and talk with them.
There will be a lot of laughter and “no way”‘s, but sooner or later you’ll hit someone who is both wide awake and interested.