In a State hearing Premier Election Solutions admitted that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software can miss significant events such as the act of someone deleting votes on election day.
The company also admitted that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.
This problem was uncovered by Threat Level in January, and reiterated in a report released two weeks ago by the California secretary of state's office. The Discovery has widespread implications for election jurisdictions around the country that uses the company's Global Election Management System software to calculate votes. The software is used in over 1400 election districts and in 31 states. These findings raised questions about the integrity of elections conducted with the system.
President of California Voter Foundatio Kim Alexander said, "Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears. The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems. They and the jurisdictions that have used paperless voting machines have repeatedly pointed to the audit logs as the primary security mechanism and 'fail-safe' for any glitch that might occur on machines. To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security,"
It was also discovered in the investigation that two of the logs contained a "clear" button that allowed officials to delete them; this violates federal voting system standards that require voting systems to maintain an indestructible record of all system activity related to voting The button was removed from a later versions of the software, but several counties still use the older version containing this button.
