Premier Election Solutions admitted at a recent California state hearing that significant events, such as someone erasing votes on election day, are missed by the audit logs generated by its tabulation software, and this problem is endemic to all versions of the software. “The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems,” said California Voter Foundation president Kim Alexander. “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.” Premier’s Global Election Management System (GEMS) software is used to tabulate votes cast on the company’s touch-screen and optical-scan machines. It is used in more than 1,400 election districts in 31 states. The initial investigation was set off by an incident in Humboldt County in which a Premier system lost nearly 200 ballots during the U.S. presidential election in November. The company said the deletion was caused by a programming flaw in the GEMS software. Scrutiny of the audit logs by state officials revealed that the logs did not record critical information, making the tracing of the specific mechanism behind the deletion impossible. Furthermore, two of the logs featured a “clear” button that allowed officials to delete them, and although the button was eliminated in a later iteration of the GEMS software, three California counties still used the version with the button. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen described the audit logs as “useless” and pledged to conduct a deeper probe of the issue.
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