Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure

"Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the non-profit California Voter Foundation. "The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems."

"To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security," Alexander said.

Finley said his staff was also shocked to find that two of the logs contained a "clear" button that allowed officials to delete them. Finley said this violated federal voting system standards, which require voting systems to maintain an indestructible archival record of all system activity related to the vote tally and, in particular, any activity involving unusual intervention by an election official.