Experts sound warnings on voting machines
States relying on aging and flawed systems, according to officials
Millions of voters going to the polls Tuesday will cast their ballots on machines blasted as unreliable and inaccurate for two decades by computer scientists from Princeton University to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Toyed with by white-hat hackers and targeted for scathing reviews from secretaries of state in California and Ohio, Direct Recording Electronic voting systems have startled Illinois voters by flashing the word “Republican” at the top of a ballot and forgotten what day it was in South Carolina. They were questioned in the disappearance of 12,000 votes in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, in 2002 and 18,000 votes in Sarasota County, Florida, in 2006.
“Antiquated, seriously flawed and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination and attack,” U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote of Georgia’s aging DRE system before ordering the state to replace it in 2019.
“No one is using a computer they purchased in the 1990s,” said Warren Stewart, senior editor and data specialist for Verified Voting, a nonprofit advocacy group tracking election systems. But voters in more than 300 counties and 12,000 precincts will be casting ballots using DRE technology already aging in the 1990s, when flash drives were bleeding-edge tech and Netscape Navigator was the next new thing.
DRES aren’t the only problematic voting systems. As late as July, more than 1,200 jurisdictions were planning to count absentees on scanners so old they are no longer manufactured, and it’s not clear how many, if any, updated their equipment since then.
New technology also has its share of criticism. Internet voting has been roundly panned by computer experts citing wide-open opportunities for hacking. Georgia’s replacement system for DRES had been rejected by Texas and is the subject of a court battle over accuracy.
All election systems are for the most part black boxes: proprietary software and hardware jealously guarded by the handful of companies selling them. But state reviews and court cases opening up DRE systems of all makes and models for examination have for years flagged problems.
In New Jersey in 2008, Princeton computer scientist Andrew Appel and a five-member team got a rare look under the hood of an AVC Advantage DRE, part of a lawsuit alleging DRES could not reliably count votes.
Among the findings: The system sometimes only seemed to record a vote. It sometimes did record a vote but seemed not to. It would take one screwdriver and seven minutes to insert a vote-stealing program. That kind of hack would probably be invisible, Appel concluded.
More than a decade later, Appel is still talking about DRE vulnerabilities. And although the New Jersey governor, citing COVID-19, has created a nearly all-mail election, 19 New Jersey counties still have their DRE equipment on hand for the next contest, according to state records.
Nationally, if the surge in absentee ballots had not decreased inperson voting, more than 14 million registered voters would be going Tuesday to polls that are equipped with DRES.