Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At a public hearing in California, Diebold's western region manager has admitted that 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 — fails to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. 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."

Comments

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[c41rn]

I don't know if you were going for sarcasm or missed it in the article, but the machines in question (the flawed machines in Humboldt County) ARE optical scan machines. They are made by Diebold and they have software flaws that cause errors in how the votes are tabulated. For example, their software was in some cases dropping the entire first batch of scanned ballots (batch 0).

However, it is precisely because they are optical scan ballots - with a paper trail - that led to the flaw being found. Mitch Trachtenberg, a volunteer AFAIK, was able to scan all of the ballots post-election and tabulate them using his own open-source software. The discrepancy between his results and the official results is what led to the discovery of the flaw in Diebold's software.

I'm glad that they were using optical-scan ballots and that they saved the paper copies (and made them accessible), but it's still vulnerable to software flaws, "errors", etc., even if it is optical scan.