Saturday, March 28, 2009

Premier Election Systems' electronic voting machines have an erase button!


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From:
Progressive States Network

Recent revelations about electronic voting machines highlight the maddening lack of security in paperless elections, and emphasize why paper ballot voting with robust post-election audits are a basic requirement for secure elections.

The Premier "Delete" Button, Discarding Votes Made Easy: The California Secretary of State's Office recently completed their investigation on the cause of almost 200 lost votes in the 2008 general election in Humboldt County. Faulty software from Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) was to blame, as it was in Ohio. Both California and Ohio are suing Premier over the botched product. Premier originally denied there were any flaws in its software, alternately blaming the issue on user error and anti-virus software, but has now acknowledged they are at fault.

The investigation, however, uncovered an even more troubling problem - the machines used in Humboldt County and elsewhere had an erase button that allowed the machine's audit logs to be "zeroed out" with the touch of a button. Not only does such a capability fatally undermine the security of these machines, they were built in such a way that votes could be deleted without election workers noticing they had done so. Premier was even made aware of the insanity of including such a function in their machines. An e-mail from one of the system's developers stated that "adding a Clear button is easy, but there are too many reasons why doing that is a bad idea."

The report on this fiasco by the Sec. of State sums up the scope and depth of the problem this way: "The Clear buttons ... allow inadvertent or malicious destruction of critical audit trail records in all Gems version 1.18.19 jurisdictions, risking the accuracy and integrity of elections conducted using this voting system. Five years after the company recognized the need to remove the Clear buttons from the GEMS audit log screens, not only Humboldt, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties in California but jurisdictions in other parts of the country, including several counties in Texas and Florida, continue to use Gems version 1.18.19...."


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