Travis approves new voting system
$8.2 million electronic voting system with paper backup will be ready for November 2019 election.
It might not be the first-of-itskind, open-source software voting system that Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir has sought for more than a decade, but the county will have a voting system with a paper trail by the November 2019 election.
Travis County commissioners Tuesday unanimously approved the purchase of about an $8.2 million electronic voting system with paper backup from Election Systems & Software. About $1.5 million in costs for other election day equipment will need to be approved in coming weeks, bringing the total cost to about $9.7 million.
The county will be among the first in the nation to commit to rigorous statistical auditing using that backup.
The new system, which will replace the county’s 17-yearold one, will allow voters to see
paper copies of their selections and verify that those are correct before casting their ballots. It also will create a paper record that can be checked against electronic voting totals during audits or recounts.
This model offers “the best of both worlds,” DeBeauvoir told commissioners, as it offers the speed of an electronic system combined with the reassurance and auditability of a paper trail system.
DeBeauvoir, the county’s chief election official, said a voter will be given an activation card at the polling place to insert into the voting machine. That card will prompt the machine to display the correct ballot for the voter.
Voters will make their selections on a touchscreen before printing out a paper vote record and checking its accuracy. The final step will be to insert the paper record into a sealed machine that scans and records it. Storage devices, similar to flash drives, from those machines then will be put into a reader and tallied.
“Our voters have been asking for it for a long time, and it was not available on the marketplace,” DeBeauvoir added in an interview. “I tried to build it myself. We got a long way down the line, and ... we caused, we influenced the marketplace to come back and do this.”
Since 2009, the county had been working with experts to design a voting system with a paper trail, called STAR-Vote — short for Secure, Transparent, Auditable and Reliable. The plan was for it to be open source, meaning free and available to anyone (or in this case, to a select group of election officials) to study, use and modify.
But in September, DeBeauvoir announced that a 2016 request for proposals from private companies to build the system had fallen flat. The companies just weren’t interested in an open-source approach because it wouldn’t require continual renewal of expensive software licensing agreements, she said.
Open source was central to the STAR-Vote design, however, because it brought down the cost of equipment, DeBeauvoir said. It’s much cheaper to buy tablets in bulk, for example, than pricey proprietary hardware.
Companies only began to develop paper trail systems about three to four years ago, DeBeauvoir said. Certification of a system generally takes up to four years, she said.
“(The marketplace is) not highly innovative because it’s so small and so regulated,” she said, “but these companies are trying to do that now (move to paper trail systems), and a lot of it was because STAR-Vote demanded it. The whole country was looking at STAR-Vote.”
The county’s new system will be paid for with about $3 million previously allocated to STAR-Vote as well as nonvoter approved bonds. The roughly $9 million price tag is lower than STAR-Vote’s, which was expected to cost between $12 million to $16 million.
DeBeauvoir said the county plans to kick off a public education campaign in summer 2019 to familiarize voters with how the new system works. Gavino Fernandez, president of a Central Travis County chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, which has worked with the county clerk’s office on voting issues for 15 years, said he was pleased with the new system.
“Many of the voters ... always wanted to have something to verify that their vote had counted ... and this provides that,” Fernandez said. “We look forward to working with Dana DeBeauvoir’s office and hosting meetings in the community so voters will get familiar with the machines.”
Commissioners, including Jeff Travillion, applauded DeBeauvoir’s long-term efforts to improve election security and voter confidence.
The county also has committed to doing so-called “risk-limiting audits,” a process recommended by cybersecurity experts that involves taking a statistically significant sample of paper ballots, its size dependent on the election outcome’s margin, and comparing them with the electronic record.
Just three states have laws requiring such audits, considered the “gold standard” by some elections experts: Colorado, Rhode Island and Virginia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Election Systems & Software, one of the nation’s largest voting machine vendors, was the lowest bidder, and the other four companies that responded did not meet all the county’s requirements, DeBeauvoir said.
The county will eventually sell its old hardware, which cost about $7 million when the county bought it in the early 2000s, but DeBeauvoir said she will be waiting to recommend doing so until the new system is operating at 100 percent.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally be here,” DeBeauvoir said. “I feel like I have been in the fight of my life to bring voters what they have been asking for.”
‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally be here. I feel like I have been in the fight of my life to bring voters what they have been asking for.’ Dana DeBeauvoir Travis County clerk