Howsecure are our elections?
As the United States nervously awaited this presidential election to be decided, we were awash in discussions of the fine points of voting security — and I had been dying to talk with Dan Wallach.
For around 20 years, ever since Wallach landed at Rice University’s computer science department, he’s been raising hell about voting security. He’s waved a votingmachine memory card in front of City Hall; he’s testified before committees of the Texas Senate and the Congress; and now, with a nonprofit group called VotingWorks, he’s making and promoting better voting systems. We spoke late Thursday afternoon.
Q: If I’m aiming to steal an election, what’s the best way to go about it? Are mail-in ballots the easiest?
A: If your goal is to steal an election, there are so many different things you could do. Really the question is, are you trying to be stealthy about it? Or are you perfectly OK with making a giant public mess? Because if you don’t mind making a mess, the easiest way to steal an election is to
break the voter registration system — to cause long lines, to cause voters to give up and walk away.
But it would be totally obvious if that had happened. And at least as far as we know, it hasn’t happened. The other obvious way that you can break an election is, of course, with misinformation. If you can convince the voters to vote in a way different than they were originally planning — because of a conspiracy theory or
whatever — that’s also an excellent way of manipulating the outcome of an election.
Manipulating voting machines in the tabulation process is actually a lot more work, especially if you want to do it subtly. And at least so far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Q: Are mail-in ballots inherently less reliable than votes counted on Election Day?
A: Once we have paper ballots, whether they’re paper ballots that are cast in person or paper ballots that are returned through the mail, the security of that systemis actually pretty good. I’m not as worried about ballotbox stuffing and things like that. The things that concern me more are when you have a system with no paper at all — which, of course, is how we vote here in Harris County.
This is probably the last year that Harris County will be using that electronic paperless voting system. We’ll see.
Probably the place where we’re seeing the most excitement with tight elections now is in Georgia. The state of Georgia used to use a paperless electronic systemthat would have been relatively straightforward to manipulate, if that was what you wanted to do.
But they’ve replaced it. The whole state of Georgia now votes using a “ballot marking device,” where you touch the screen, select your preferences and then it prints a paper ballot. As long as Georgia voters actually bother to look at it, and say, “Yep, that’s who I was planning to vote for,” the risk of undetected tampering goes down significantly.
Q: So if I wanted to steal an election in Georgia, four years ago I could have sneaked in, hacked the systemand nobodywould have known? I would have left no trail?
A:
I’m not going to say it would have been easy. But with Georgia’s previous electronic voting system— which is similar in some respects to howwe vote here in Houston — it would have been easier than it is today.
Now Georgia has upgraded its really old system to a much newer one. And in the process, its security posture improved a lot.
Q: Let’s talk about other kinds of voting that have been in question. Here in Harris County, because of COVID, this year we began doing drive-thru voting. Basically you pull into a parking space, they check your ID through your car window and then they hand you a standard tablet to vote on — the same kind of machine you’d use in a voting booth. Is that anymore open to vote tampering than voting in a voting booth? Was that why it was being challenged in court?
A: The challenges were primarily based not on security concerns; the challenges were based on whether our county clerk had exceeded his authority under law.
But is it less secure than voting in a voting booth? Themain difference is that when you’re in your car, you might have tools. Youmight have computers and things that in the comfort and privacy of your car would allow you to tamper with that voting machine.
That would be a really big deal if I thought we were going to be using these machines again in future elections. But because these machines are in their final tour of duty, I’m less concerned than I otherwise would have been.
Q: What are your general thoughts on the election this year?
A: Honestly, this election has been remarkably smooth. We are seeing a process taking place where votes are being counted, results are being announced, and everything is happening exactly the way that election experts said it would happen: Some states were going to report on election night, and many states were not.
Sure, it would be nice to have an answer sooner rather than later. But nonetheless, the procedure is continuing. And within the next couple of days, we should know something.
Q: What do you think of Harris County’s performance?
A: I’m really impressed with Harris County this year. COVID all by itself is an incredible challenge for an election official. You have to ask: How can I change up my game? How can I make sure that we still preserve voter turnout?
They came out with some very creative solutions to the COVID problem. For example, I voted at the Rice football stadium. They set up the voting machines under the bleachers. It felt very safe: I waited outdoors, and the voting machines were under the bleachers, but nonetheless still exposed to the outside air. It was great.
Or look at drive-thru voting: More than 120,000 voters took advantage of it. It allowed them to feel safe, and it allowed them to cast their ballots in private. I am all in favor of that.
I think our county clerk has also done incredibly great stuff on socialmedia. Whoever thought that a county clerk’s Twitter feed would be fun? They really did an excellent job of being visible and giving good information to voters.
And Harris County has had great turnout numbers.
Q: How should we handle future elections? Those eSlate machines have got to go. But what else, for American elections’ sake, do we need to do?
A: Let’s start with Harris County. Harris County is using a type of voting machine that they first purchased in the early 2000s. They had a warehouse fire in 2010, so all of our machines are actually quite a bit newer than that, because after the fire, they had to buy newones.
Q: Those are new versions of ancient tech? My adult kids voted for the first time in Harris County this year, and they were both astounded by what they called “1990s technology.” Those clunky dials! It’s like using a Blackberry in 2020.
A: It’s exactly like using a Blackberry in 2020. It’s time for these machines to be retired. Our previous county clerk, Diane Trautman, had said that was her plan, and she’d started the process — vendors doing dog-andpony shows, members of the community invited to show up and watch presentations. All of that was in process when COVID hit.
(Trautman resigned because of health problems, and Chris Hollins was an interim replacement.) Now we are going to have an appointed election administrator, Isabel Longoria, who handles voter registration and manages elections. So Longoria is going to be responsible for picking up where this all left off. I don’t know their timeline. I don’t know their plans. But definitely it’s time to move on from the eSlates.
I expect that they will be very interested in having a bigger vote-by-mail solution. The state may ormay not make it easier for voters to vote bymail. That’s an unfortunately partisan process, even though it shouldn’t be. All Washington state, Oregon and Colorado vote bymail — 100 percent of the vote.
But Texas doesn’t believe in no-excuse vote bymail, so I expect that we’re also going to see new voting machines of some kind. Every new voting machine that’s worth buying prints a paper ballot of some sort. That is likely the direction that we’re headed.
Q: Is there anything else I ought to ask you? Anything else you want people to think about?
A: Do you want to talk about redistricting and gerrymandering, or is that a whole other game?
Q: Does that have to do with voting security? I guess it does affect the outcome of the vote. SoOK, tell me about redistricting.
A: The interesting thing that’s about to happen in Texas, and all across the union, is that it will be the once-every-decade redistricting. We’ll get back the results from the census, and Texas will possibly gain two or three seats in Congress.
There are five votes on the committee that does Texas redistricting, and it looks like they will all be in Republican hands.
So Texas is currently very much gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. If the number of Republicans and Democrats we send to Congress reflected the number of Texans who vote for a Republican or a Democrat, Texas would have four, maybe five, more Democrats in Congress than we do. That’s purely a result of the way that they’ve drawn the maps in Texas.
Will they continue to draw heavily gerrymandered districts in Texas? I don’t know. To me, it’s the height of unethical, immoral behavior, where the politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around.
This isn’t a partisan issue. Maps should be fair, they should be competitive, and they should be compact. And Texas is none of those things.
Q: So that’s another way to steal an election, even before anyone votes?
A: Right. When you’re talking about election security, it’s completely reasonable to broaden the scope of the discussion to ask who gets to vote for whom and if their vote has been manipulated before they ever walked into the booth. Gerrymandering is in the same bucket as misinformation: Before the voters even show up, you’ve already tilted the playing field.