Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day.
The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.

But the most startling information in the state's 13-page report (.pdf) is not about why the system lost votes, which Threat Level previously covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold's vote tabulation system,

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is considering withdrawing the state's approval of the flawed Premier Elections Solutions software that resulted in almost 200 ballots disappearing from Humboldt County's final November election results.

Here are the major findings of the analysis:
• After nearly 40 years of decline, the percentage of registered Californians casting ballots has increased in each of the last three presidential elections. On Nov. 4, 79.4 percent of registered voters cast ballots, the highest turnout since 1976.

The commission chairwoman, Rosemary Rodriguez, said she received a letter from North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson, D-St.

Crnich said almost 200 ballots were inexplicably dropped from the final election results. The error did not change the outcome of any of the races, Crnich said.

Thousands of Los Angeles County voters may not receive their mail-in ballots in time to actually mail them in, county officials said Wednesday.

Clerks were racing to process about 13,000 last-minute vote-by-mail applications while also handling 55,000 remaining voter registrations, said Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan.
 

An estimated 49,500 votes were cast incorrectly in Los Angeles County by nonpartisan voters in the presidential primaries and cannot be counted because the voters' intentions are unclear, acting Registrar Dean Logan said Monday.

The mismarked ballots were the result of a confusing ballot design and poor education of poll workers and the public, Logan said. That left many decline-to-state voters unaware of the need to fill in a bubble indicating whether they were voting in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primary.

Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries.

Fearing a "Florida in Los Angeles County" fiasco is brewing over the confusing "double bubble" voter ballot, election experts said today they are concerned a ballot design flaw could prevent hundreds of thousands of non-partisan votes for president from counting.