Yesterday, Kim Zetter at Wired News reported an amazing e-voting story about lost ballots and the public advocates who found them.
Here’s a summary: Humboldt County, California has an innovative program to put on the Internet scanned images of all the optical-scan ballots cast in the county. In the online archive, citizens found 197 ballots that were not included in the official results of the November election. Investigation revealed that the ballots disappeared from the official count due to a programming error in central tabulation software supplied by Premier (formerly known as Diebold), the county’s e-voting vendor.
The details of the programming error are jaw-dropping. Here is Zetter’s deadpan description:
Premier explained that due to a programming problem, the first “deck” or batch of ballots that are counted by the GEMS software sometimes gets randomly deleted if any subsequent deck is intentionally deleted. The GEMS system names the first deck of ballots “deck 0”, with subsequent batches called “deck 1,” “deck 2,” etc. For some reason “deck 0” is sometimes erased from the system if any other deck is erased. Since it’s common for officials to intentionally erase a deck in the normal counting process if they’ve made an error and want to rescan a deck, the chance that a GEMS system containing this flaw will delete a batch of ballots is pretty high.
The system never provides any indication to election officials when it’s deleting a batch of ballots in this manner. The problem occurs with version 1.18.19 of the GEMS software, though it’s possible that other versions have the problem as well. [County election director Carolyn] Crnich said an official in the California secretary of state’s office told her the problem was still prevalent in version 1.18.22 of Premier’s software and wasn’t fixed until version 1.18.24.
Neither Premier nor the secretary of state’s office, which certifies voting systems for use in the state, has returned calls for comment about this.
After examining Humboldt’s database, Premier determined that the “deck 0” in Humboldt was deleted at some point in between processing decks 131 and 135, but so far Crnich has been unable to determine what caused the deletion. She said she did at one point abort deck 132, instead of deleting it, when she made a mistake with it, but that occurred before election day, and the “deck 0” batch of ballots was still in the system on November 23rd, after she’d aborted deck 132. She couldn’t recall deleting any other deck after election night or after the 23rd that might have caused “deck 0” to disappear in the manner Premier described.
The deletion of “deck 0” wasn’t the only problem with the GEMS system. As I mentioned previously, the audit log not only didn’t show that “deck 0” had been deleted, it never showed that the deck existed in the first place.
The system creates a “deck 0” for each ballot type that is scanned. This means, the system should have three “deck 0” entries in the log — one for vote-by-mail ballots, one for provisional ballots, and one for regular ballots cast at the precinct. Crnich found that the log did show a “deck 0” for provisional ballots and precinct-cast ballots but none for vote-by-mail ballots, even though the machine had printed a receipt at the time that an election worker had scanned the ballots into the machine. In fact, the regular audit log provides no record of any files that were deleted, including deck 132, which she intentionally deleted. She said she had to go back to a backup of the log, created before the election, to find any indication that “deck 0” had ever been created.
I don’t know which is more alarming: that the vendor failed to treat as an emergency a programming error that silently deletes ballots, or that the tabulator’s “audit log” looks more like an after the fact reconstruction of what-must-have-happened rather than a log of what actually did happen.
The good news here is that Humboldt County’s opening of election records to the public paid off, when members of the public found important facts in the records that officials and the vendor had missed. If other jurisdictions opened their records, how many more errors would we find and fix?
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