Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

For both optical scans and touch screens operating using Diebold election systems, the voting system works like this:

Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.

After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.

At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS.

GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy.

The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.

And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1.


Rest of the article:

www.scoop.co.nz...

This has a really moronic flaw.

Which is the Election supervisor is looking at Nevada: 100,000 democrat//1,350,000 republican but is listening to "Democrats Win Nevada" on the tv screen.

No, if they were to fool the Election officer, they'd have to change the original ledger, not the copies.

I hope Bev can tie her own shoes...