Electronic voting under scrutiny
Some states fighting for paper backups
Once about as newsworthy as water meters, the voting machines and computers used to record and tally the nation’s ballots are suddenly a hot-button issue because of mounting evidence Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. There’s no evidence of votes changed.
But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference before the midterm elections in November 2018.
Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can’t be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s.
A week ago, Virginia announced it would no longer use touch-screen voting machines after a hack-a-thon in Las Vegas showed how easily they could be breached.
States with electronic-only voting machines want to add a paper-ballot backup that would require, for every electronic ballot cast, creation of a paper ballot that could be counted, and presumably, not easily altered.
Rhode Island is set to vote on a measure Tuesday that would require an audit of voters’ paper ballots after each election.
Georgia is fighting a suit by voters that, among other claims, alleges the state needs to switch to a paper-ballots-
The state of Virginia has announced it will no longer use touch-screen voting machines after a hack-a-thon in Las Vegas showed how easily the machines could be breached.
based voting system because it now uses touch-screen voting machines that do not meet the requirements of state law because of their age and vulnerability to hacking.
The U.S. voting machine industry is dominated by three privately-held companies, Election Systems & Software in Omaha, Dominion Voting Systems in Toronto and HartInterCivic in Austin. A wholesale refitting of the nation’s voting machine infrastructure would represent a sizable sales opportunity for them. But there’s little money in the system to make that happen, experts say.
Too often, voting officials lack the resources necessary to protect and upgrade election infrastructures, said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and author of a report in June called Securing Elections from Foreign Interference.
“The federal government says it’s up to the states to fund it, the states often put it down to the counties, and the counties say they have no money. So we need some shared responsibility for funding elections and making sure they’re free and fair,” he said.
Even so, some states are moving to overhaul their voting apparatus to be more secure. Last week, Virginia’s Board of Elections voted to replace touchscreen-only voting machines used in 22 localities in the state to those that have paper backups.
“The step we took today to decertify paperless voting systems is necessary to ensure the integrity of Virginia’s elections,” James Alcorn, chair of the State Board of Elections, said in a statement.
Dean Logan, head of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and also the registrar-recorder for Los Angeles County, said some of his workers attended DefCon. Hackers’ ability to break into voting machines was a fresh reminder that agencies needed to make the process more secure.
“My staff came back with pretty eye-popping stories about when people have physical access to the voting equipment, that they can do things, and they can do them pretty quickly,” he said.
In California, an obscure court case over what ballots should be included in a 52-year-old audit requirement became newsworthy because voting activists argued that an amendment was weakening the law.
The state requires that 1% of counties each election be randomly chosen for a hand count of votes, to ensure that the machines that record and tally them are working correctly. The language in the election law doesn’t make clear whether all votes, or only those available Election Day, must be manually tallied.
After a lawsuit in San Diego county over the issue, the legislature wanted to clarify the ambiguity.
Logan says the required audit is meant to test the accuracy and efficacy of the equipment used to count votes, not to actually verify the outcome of the election.