Diebold Admits Faulty Voting Machine Software

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.

According to an earlier Brad Blog post, dated December 8, 2008, the tendency to delete ballots "was part of a bug [Diebold had] known about for at least four years." The blog reproduced an internal Diebold email about the problem dated 2004.

"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 deleted more than two dozen batches of ballots from their system during the November general election.