A
new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University School of Law institute, concludes that what nearly two years ago was determined to be an "impending crisis" caused by the use of worn-out voting machines has not gotten any better. Written by Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti, the 40-page report points out that come 2016, there will be 43 states using voting machines that are 10 years old or older. Election officials in 22 states told the researchers that they would like to buy new machines, but don't know where they
would get the money:
"We’re at a point where these machines need to be replaced, but at the same time the message doesn’t seem to have gotten through to anybody who is responsible for funding the machines, and that’s what’s scary," said Norden, who is the deputy director of the center's Democracy Program.
Just how bad is the situation? From the report:
As systems age, the commercially produced parts that support them, like memory storage devices, printer ribbons, and modems for transmitting election results, go out of production. Several election officials told us they have used eBay to find these parts. Mark Earley, voting systems manager in Leon County, Florida, told us his old voting system used an analog modem that he could only find on eBay. “The biggest problem was finding modems for our old machines. I had to buy a modem model called the Zoom Pocket Modem on eBay because they weren’t available elsewhere.”85 Earley told us that the Zoom Pocket Modem can transmit data at just kilobytes per second, making it utterly obsolete by today’s standards.
Ken Terry, from Allen County, Ohio, told us that he feels like he is living in a technological time warp. When he ordered “Zip Disks” for his central tabulator, the package included literature that was more than a decade old. “When we purchased new Zip Disks in 2012, they had a coupon in the package that expired in 1999.”
One problem is that newer software-based machines, those introduced since 2000, are more accurate but tend to be less durable than older models that were designed to last for decades. The expected lifespan of today's machines is 10 to 20 years, but many experts say it's closer to 10. Moreover, while the machines may have been bought 12 or 15 years ago, they are based on technology that's older than that:
Older machines can also have serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today. For example, Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data[.]”
Smaller problems can also shake public confidence. Several election officials mentioned “flipped votes” on touch screen machines, where a voter touches the name of one candidate, but the machine registers it as a selection for another.
There's more analysis below the fold.
Solving the matter is mostly about money. The Brennan researchers estimate new equipment would run at least a billion dollars, quite probably more. The federal government provided more than $2 billion in 2002 for new voting machines. That was a good thing, but in doing so, "Congress committed the United States to a more sophisticated infrastructure that has many benefits for voters, but that also brings with it an ongoing financial commitment that did not exist in the days of lever machines and punch card ballots." And Congress made no promises that there would be an additional infusion of money to ensure the viability of that more sophisticated infrastructure.
Today, while affluent counties have the funds to buy new equipment or even design some of their own, those counties on the lower end of the economic scale are in a serious bind. Purchasing new voting machines just is not a priority. As
reported by Samantha Lachmann:
"We don’t ask the fire department to wait until the truck breaks down before they can think about a replacement cycle for machines," said Eduardo Cortes, the commissioner of Virginia's department of elections.
And while cost of equipment itself is a big enough expenditure, it's less than the maintenance and other costs associated with operating that equipment. Jurisdictions have often tied themselves into expensive long-term contracts in this regard.
Officials in many locations would prefer to buy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, iPads or Android tablets, as a “digital ballot-marking device.” Combining these touch-screen products with COTS printers, voters could generate paper ballots they could review, then put this “paper ballot” in a scanner that would both count and store an image of the ballot.
Such a system would have many advantages. First, commercial tablets and printers are far cheaper than current voting machines. Mass-produced commercial products can be easily and cheaply replaced. Election officials and voters would have the added benefit of paper records to verify vote totals, without the expense of specially printed paper.
This type of voting system could offer increased flexibility to election officials. Voting on a tablet would make it easier to implement changes to election law at minimal cost. Tablets could easily provide the multiple ballot styles required by vote centers, and could accommodate early voting and ranked choice voting.
But while technological options exist that would make systems more reliable and cheaper to replace in the future, getting the money now to make such a switch is the chief obstacle. Since a major change in attitude would be required for Congress to come up with that money, states and counties will have to do it on their own.
Until that day comes, the Brennan researchers make a series of precautionary recommendations for patching things up to reduce potential damage to the voting process, and thus democracy itself.