A Humboldt County voting booth

The disturbing revelations brought about through the Humboldt Transparency Project may be going viral.  A story posted today on Threat Level, a politics and crime blog on Wired magazine's blog network, describes in painstaking detail how the curtain was pulled back on the voting machines created by the wizards of Premier Elections Solutions (formerly Deibold) to reveal nothing but an incoherently babbling gaggle of audit logs. Pay no attention!

Not only did the Global Elections Management System software (the GEMS of Premier's Emerald City) lose 197 votes, but the logs that are supposed to explain why and how look like "'Greek' to anyone other than a computer programmer," according to Deputy Secretary of State Lowell Finley.

A computer scientist at the University of Iowa calls the voting system "totally nuts" and says it contains "lots and lots of different logs" that appear to have been "independently designed by people who didn't talk to each other." One of those logs incorrectly states that some batches of votes weren't loaded into the system until some three weeks after election day.

Just reading about this system makes your head spin. The state continues to investigate the matter, but if you'd like to take a stab at it, here's a link to the GEMS audit log. Good luck with that.