Diebold voting system sported 'delete' button

[RamboLiberal]

Election observers already distrustful of the electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold will have more reason to be wary now.

"Following three months of investigation, California's secretary of state has released a report examining why a voting system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems) lost about 200 ballots in Humboldt County during the November presidential election," Kim Zetter reports for Wired.

Zetter continues, "But the most startling information in the state's 13-page report (.pdf) is not about why the system lost votes, which Threat Level previously covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold's vote tabulation system, known as the Global Election Management System (GEMS), include a button that allows someone to delete audit logs from the system."

As for the missing ballots, Wayne Hanson at govtech.com notes that the report indicates a "Deck Zero software error -- which can delete the first group of optically scanned ballots under certain circumstances -- caused 197 ballots to be inadvertently deleted from Humboldt County's initial results in the November 4, 2008, General Election. The results were corrected when the error was discovered."

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Diebold_voting_system_sported_delete_button_0304.html

Wired article: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/ca-report-finds.html

CA Report: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/sos-humboldt-report-to-eac-03-02-09.pdf

[havocmom]

1. Gee, 'Machine Politicians' and Humbolt votes disappeared...

Move along, nothing to see here.

They just don't want free thinking people to get a vote, do they?

[SoCalDem]

2. "...inadvertently deleted..." speaks volumes

:grr:

[Hubert Flottz]

3. "The results were corrected when the error was discovered."

How many times and places was the error not discovered and the results not corrected?

[havocmom]

4. How do they 'correct' deleted votes?

?