*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 in the files we examined, which were created by Diebold employees and/or county officials, we learned that the Diebold program used another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it made yet a third vote ledger with another copy.*
*Apparently, 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, and ledger 2 can be altered so it may or may not match ledger 1.*
*Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up only the actual votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2. Official reports come from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1. If one asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, the report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.”*
Auditing
[Again from Bev Harris](https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm) provided all this information on a share-as-widely-as-possible basis. The audit trail is what is supposed to guarantee election security. Harris went to the same Diebold/Dominion website and downloaded a GEMS (General Election Management System) audit report.
*“Note that a user by the name of “Evildoer” was added. Evildoer performed various functions, including running reports to check his vote-rigging work, but only some of his activities showed up on the audit log.*
*It was a simple matter to eliminate Evildoer. First, we opened the election database in Access, where we opened the audit table: Then, we deleted all the references to Evildoer and, because we noticed that the audit log never noticed when the admin closed the GEMS program before, we tidily added an entry for that.*
*Access encourages those who create audit logs to use auto-numbering so that every logged entry has an uneditable log number. Then, if one deletes audit entries, a gap in the numbering sequence will appear. However, we found that this feature was disabled, allowing us to write in our own log numbers. We were able to add and delete from the audit without leaving a trace. Going back into GEMS, we ran another audit log to see if Evildoer had been purged:*
*As you can see, the audit log appears pristine.*
*In fact, when using Access to adjust the vote tallies we found that tampering never made it to the audit log at all.” – Bev Harris*
An election (after the fact) using the real files on the real system was changed for research purposes with no elaborate hacking necessary.
The Dominion software and source code was originally developed by a company called Premier Election Solutions. The founder was Bob Urosevich.
• In 1997 Global Election Systems acquired Premier. The company representatives were Bob Urosevich and Barry Herron
• In 2001, Diebold purchased Global. The company representatives were Bob Urosevich and Barry Herron.
• In 2009, Diebold Sells U.S. Elections Systems Business to ES&S. The company representatives were Bob Urosevich and Barry Herron
• In September 2009, ES&S acquired Premier, without any objections from the DOJ.
