PinkOnBrown Webzine

Software included on Premier Election Solutions’ (previously known as Diebold) voting machines has recently been revealed to contain a “Delete Logs” button. This allows a user to delete any of the voting logs in the machine with no backups or way to trace the original logs.

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 — or should contain — records that would be essential to reconstruct operator actions during the vote-tallying process,” according to the California report. (note: emphasis added)

More information over at The Register. Not that it matters anymore, but did someone say recount? (via Metafilter)