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Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs
Report: Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs
By Kim Zetter EmailMarch 03, 2009 | 7:30:17 PMCategories: E-Voting

Diebold_clear_button

After three months of investigation, California's secretary of state 
has released a report examining why a voting system made by Premier 
Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold) lost about 200 ballots 
in Humboldt County during November's presidential election.

But the most startling information in the state's 13-page report 
(.pdf) is not  why the system lost votes, which Wired.com previously 
covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold's vote tabulation 
system, known as the Global Election Management System (Gems), include 
a button that allows someone to delete audit logs from the system.

Auditing logs are required under the federal voting-system guidelines, 
which are used to test and qualify voting systems for use in 
elections. The logs record changes and other events that occur on 
voting systems to ensure the integrity of elections and help determine 
what occurred in a system when something goes wrong.

"Deleting a log is something that you would only do in de- commissioning a system you're no longer using or perhaps in a testing 
scenario," said Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten, who 
has studied voting systems extensively. "But in normal operation, the 
log should always be kept."

Yet the Diebold system in Humboldt County, which uses version 1.18.19 
of Gems, has a button labeled Clear, that "permits deletion of certain 
audit logs that contain

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