Averting a voting-machine disaster
Imagine spending millions of taxpayer dollars for brand-new voting technology. Then imagine the first time the machines are used in an election, they fail catastrophically. That’s what happened this month across the state line in one Pennsylvania county. How bad was it? Widespread and alarming were failures of this machine, an Election Systems & Software (ES&S) product called ExpressVote XL. Hypersensitive touchscreens picked candidates without voters actually touching the screens. Tickmarks next to selected candidates randomly disappeared. Some machines were unable to tabulate “yes/no” questions at all.
In some races, there were “severe undercounts,” including one judicial candidate who received an implausible zero votes, according to the machine’s false reporting. Another candidate won by roughly 1,000 votes, but the ExpressVote XL machine reported 15 votes cast total.
Amid the chaos that ensued in this low-turnout election, poll workers were forced to physically pry open the machines, pull out ballot papers and wait for scanners to arrive from outside the state to recount the votes.
Weeks later, ES&S has still “has not determined root cause” of the malfunctions, and now reports indicate that lawsuits are likely to be filed against the company and the county.
If this sounds like a nightmarish but distant scenario with no practical relevance to us, think again.
In fact, if New York City Board of Elections Executive Director Mike Ryan gets his way, the voting technology that catastrophically failed in Pennsylvania will be heading to polling places in the five boroughs for next year’s presidential elections, when turnout will be through the roof.
Even before this latest disaster, Ryan pressured the state to get fast-track approval for this controversial machine. Relatedly, the machine is produced by a company that retained him as an adviser and financed his travel and other perks, including luxury dinners in Omaha, events in Ft. Lauderdale and Las Vegas, and hotel stays in Manhattan, despite the fact that Ryan lives minutes away on Staten Island.
Time after time, Ryan has shamelessly promoted the ExpressVoteXL machine while ignoring the strong opposition to this product by numerous good government groups and noted election experts.
Security experts agree that the most secure, reliable and hack-proof option for voting is by having voters fill out paper ballots on which they color in their choices by hand, then insert them into scanners. This is similar to the current system in New York, only with more advanced machines that don’t malfunction when it rains. (Incidentally, the machines that melted down in 2018 were also produced by the same company behind the ExpressVote XL.)
Unlike the optical-scan ballots most New Yorkers are accustomed to, the ExpressVote XL system transmits voter selections for tabulation via a machinegenerated barcode. So even if a voter is given a paper receipt that appears to reflect the choices they have made, it may not match the information transmitted on the barcode. And it is the information on the barcode, not the paper receipt the voter sees, that is sent to the Board of Elections and used to determine vote totals.
This is an invitation to disaster. Using a paper ballot that displays the actual marks made by a voter is a far superior way to ensure that a voter’s choices are accurately recorded and that a recount can be conducted with confidence.
On the heels of Gov. Cuomo’s formation of a Cyber Security Advisory Board to bolster the integrity of the 2020 elections, it is imperative that the city and the state reject a machine like ExpressVote XL, which is vulnerable to hacking and other failures that threaten election security. The system serving the largest voting population in the state should not be stuck with the least secure election technology on the market.
Put simply, we cannot bring these fatally flawed machines to New York City — period. Incompetence and technological malfunctions may have undermined the last high turnout election in New York City, but there is still time to protect the integrity of the next one.
Torres, who represents the Central Bronx in the City Council, is running for U.S. Congress in the 15th District.