The report states that the inclusion of the button violated the federal voting-system standards under which the Premier/Diebold system qualified to be used in elections. The standards require that voting-system software automatically creates and permanently retains electronic audit logs of important system events that occur on the machine.
Premier/Diebold did not respond to a request for comment.
Kim Zetter reporting in Wired on the inclusion of a "Clear" button, equivalent to "Delete", that allows any user to delete voter audit logs in Diebold's vote tabulation system, known as the Global Election Management System (Gems).
Compounding the problem: The position of the button makes it likely that the user might select it in error when attempting to save the audit log, and the user is not presented with an interstitial dialog that might give them an opportunity to back out of the "clear" action once that button is selected.
Once "clear" has been selected the log evaporates. According to Wired: "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."
