California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs Wired News (10/22/09) Zetter, Kim
as it appeared in the October 26, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews.
California is engaged in a lengthy probe of the audit logs inside its electronic voting systems following reports of major defects, including the ability for parties to delete votes without being traced. Secretary of State Debra Bowen says the investigation focuses on what the audit logs record and whether they can be easily modified or erased. In January, investigators discovered that the tabulation software used with Premier Election Solutions' e-voting systems did not record critical events, including the deletion of votes from the system. Furthermore, the logs failed to record who conducted an action on the system and listed some events with the incorrect date and timestamps. A Premiere representative admitted at a March hearing that none of the logs in its Global Election Management System (GEMS) records significant events, and California verified the problems in a later report in which it also found that some versions of the GEMS software had a button that permits anyone with access to the system to indelibly erase certain audit logs "that would be essential to reconstruct operator actions during the vote-tallying process." The new version of the GEMS tabulation software records vote deletion and similar events, while also featuring other security measures that would block the system from operating if the event log was deactivated, according to a testing lab that examined the software for the federal government. View Full Article
