Following up on the latest monumental failure by Diebold/Premier --- whose voting system was recently found by a citizens' transparency project to have lost hundreds of ballots in a single precinct in Humboldt County, CA --- Wired's Kim Zetter covered the issue earlier this week.

Her article touched on a number of technical issues involved in the failure of the Diebold GEMS central tabulator which, though we hadn't noted them in our own coverage, are nonetheless important, even if somewhat down in the weeds, and perhaps most of note to technical election integrity geeks only.

As quoted below in some detail from Zetter's report, she advances the story by noting:

• The problem, which Diebold admits has been in its system for years, likely wouldn't have been noticed at all were it not for the unique, experimental, citizen-led "Humboldt Transparency Project." Even CA's required 1% random post-election "audit" wouldn't have uncovered the problem, since absentee ballots are not included in that audit.
• The chances of the problem occurring, which resulted in ballots being deleted without notice by the Diebold GEMS tabulator, are rather high, even if chances of discovery of the error by election officials are very low.
• Diebold's explanation for the failure may or may not be legitimate.
• The GEMS internal "audit logs" (the GEMS system was used in 34 states around the nation last November) aren't actually audit logs at all, and may not actually note the complete set of events which occurred on the voting system, even if anyone is allowed to review those logs in the first place.

Let's take a look at the details...

Thanks to the unique oversight program allowed by Humboldt County's election chief Carolyn Crnich, the deck of some 200 absentee ballots scanned, but then deleted from the totals without notice by the Diebold/Premier GEMS tabulator, was discovered and the previously-certified results had to be corrected and re-certified.

The special project used open-source software, written locally, and off-the-shelf scanners to scan the same paper ballots that were scanned and tabulated by the Diebold op-scan system. However, had it not been for that parallel counting project, using alternate hardware and software, the previously-certified results --- which did not include the ballots deleted by Diebold --- would have stood, and the lost ballots would likely never have been found, as Zetter notes:

But while the chances of the problem that occurred in Humboldt are actually very high, the chances of discovering the failure are low, unless the ballots are rescanned or recounted by an alternate system that actually works, like the one created by citizens, for free, on open-source software in Humboldt...

That last graf, noting that no indication of the error is given to officials, is both troubling and reminiscent of Diebold's other recent admission that its GEMS central tabulator --- on both the paper ballot systems and touch-screen systems --- routinely drops thousands of ballots when they are uploaded to the central GEMS server, but without giving any indication of that failure to the system administrator, who is left believing that all votes were properly recorded.

Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is currently suing Diebold/Premier over that particular failure, as she and I discussed in an exclusive interview late in the Summer, though no other state --- including California --- is currently suing Diebold/Premier to our knowledge. That, even though the same GEMS system is currently used in some 34 states around the nation.

With all of this, however, it's not even certain that the reason Diebold offers for the deletion of those ballots was actually the reason for the deletion, as noted by Zetter:

And, as if all of that is not bad enough, as they say on Late-Night TV: But wait! There's more! And, ultimately, it could be the worse flaw of all!

As it turns out, the GEMS system's internal audit logs, used (when election officials and/or courts will allow it) to look back and determine what operations were actually carried out by the system and when, doesn't appear to be a real "audit log" at all!

Rather, as Parke Bostrom, one of the Humboldt citizens who worked on the project described it, the audit log is actually a "'re-imagining' of what GEMS would like the audit log to be, based on whatever information GEMS happens to remember at the end of the vote counting process."

Zetter didn't offer the link to Bostrom's blog post, but it's right here. He notes, in addition to the points mentioned by Zetter above, what appears to be a contradiction to her reported information on the other two "deck 0" batches --- for provisional ballots and for mail-ballot-precincts (those precincts that are too small and remote to have actual physical precincts, so they are all done as vote-by-mail).

While Zetter notes that the other two "deck 0" batches did show up as having been scanned in the "audit log," in fact Bostrom notes that they "do not appear in the audit log, but apparently their votes are included in the final report."

Not sure whether it's Bostrom or Zetter who has that point correct, and I've been on the road and out-of-pocket for weeks, so don't have the time for the moment to find out. But, suffice it to say, if we're talking about "audit logs" that are made at the end of the process, instead of concurrently, as events occur, then they are worthless for purposes of auditing, no matter what.

Bostrom adds one other point of note in his blog item which illustrates just how difficult it is to audit the job that Diebold's GEMS system --- again, it's used in 34 states! --- has done in scanning ballots, even if (and that's a big "if"!) officials and/or courts allow regular citizens to examine the system at all:

As we noted in our Monday coverageof this story, this entire sorry affair reveals yet again the enormous scam behind the entire federal e-voting legislation contained in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, allocating some $3.9 billion for states to hand over to private voting machine corporations like Diebold for their proprietary trade secret-protected voting systems which don't work.

In the meantime, on the other hand, a handful of citizens in Humboldt County, using fully open source code, developed at no cost to the county, with off-the-shelf commercial scanners, have created a system in a number of months that did a better job of counting ballots than Diebold, even with all of their millions/billions of tax-payer dollars, hundreds of programmers, secret hardware and software, and enormously expensive long-term maintenance contracts.

HAVA also created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) which was supposed to have served as a "clearinghouse" for voting system problems such as the one that hit Humboldt. The flaw in Diebold's system has been known since 2004, but the EAC failed to notify anybody about it, and has failed to set up any useful clearinghouse system at all, in the 6 years since HAVA was signed into law.

Given all of those failures, every jurisdiction in the country which insists on using optical-scanners should immediately look at moving over to the software and hardware developed by the citizens in Humboldt. Diebold/Premier should be dumped, sued for fraud, malfeasance, and gross negligence and be put out of business --- at least the elections business --- once and for all.

As to what should happen to the EAC, we'll leave that for now, for another day...

                 

Article Categories: Diebold/Premier, Election Irregularities, California, Election Reform, HAVA, Election 2008, EAC, Accountability, Humboldt County