A California court has issued a preliminary ruling overturning a 2004 election result because of problems stemming from the (mis)use of electronic voting machines.

The case concerns the November 2004 elections in Alameda County, which featured a vote on the medical marijuana referendum "Measure R." When all the votes were finally counted, the initiative lost by less than 200 votes, and backers of the measure wanted a recount. When they looked into the election results, questions were raised about the electronic voting machines that the county used, and a lawsuit against the county was filed.

Instead of doing the obvious thing—hanging onto the voting machines in question—county officials shipped them back to Diebold, and the devices ended up in a Texas warehouse. Members of the plaintiff's legal team (which included the EFF), flew to Texas in an attempt to find the original audit logs still stored on the devices, but when they arrived at the warehouse, they found that most of the machines had already been wiped.

"Without examining the redundant data, audit logs, and chain-of-custody records, no one can confirm whether any of the reported malfunctions were ever resolved or whether vote data was manipulated or lost," said EFF staff attorney Matt Zimmerman in a statement. "As a result, no one can ever confirm whether the vote result announced by the county was correct."

The judge agreed and issued a tentative ruling against the county, indicating that a revote would need to be held and that plaintiffs would need to be compensated for the cost of their trip to Texas. In the tentative ruling, the judge said, "The evidence necessary to determine whether Petitioners' election contest is meritorious has been lost or destroyed due to Respondents' failure to fulfill its obligation to preserve the information that was reasonable available to them at the time of the recount, and at the time of the filing of this litigation. Therefore, sanctions the equivalent of issue or terminating sanctions are appropriate."

Those sanctions will be finalized at a hearing this morning, but results for Measure R have been nullified, and it appears likely that the county will be forced to put the measure to a vote in the next election.

Diebold, which made the voting machines, was famously sued by California's Attorney General a couple of months before the 2004 election and ended up paying the state cash to fix various problems with security and training. Earlier this year, the company contemplated leaving the e-voting business over fiascoes like this, which have harmed its reputation. In the wake of such problems, California has stepped up its standards for e-voting security.