Diebold admits election machines aren't properly audited

One of the most important parts of the systems I have worked on in the past are the audit logs. These logs track user and system activities, and often provide the ONLY reliable window into the true inner workings of your system. When something goes wrong, there is NOTHING better than being able to go back to the logs and see every step, in order, and see where it went wrong.

Unfortunately, Diebold's electronic election machines do not record everything. Adding to the long history of concerns about reliability, researchers have discovered that it is possible to delete votes from an election on a Diebold machine and nothing shows in the audit log. This means even if electoral fraud/manipulation were suspected, it could never be proven/detected by the system.

It is time for a truly open-source approach to this problem. The saying is "light disinfects". The more eyes on a piece of software, the harder it becomes to hide bugs like this.