As Glenn Reynolds points out, November 2nd was the last day you could report this without being labeled a conspiracist
/
You voted, but for whom?
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, or DREs, 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.
(-Snip)
“The whole community of computer scientists is mystified why election officials will not listen to experts about technology but will listen to the vendors (selling and maintaining it),” said Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who examined that state's system.
Reynolds has been arguing for paper ballots for at least as long as I’ve been reading him, which was in 2001. Now, or at least until this year’s election results were tallied, “experts” finally agree:
Paper is new gold standard for voting
DRE systems have been manufactured by different companies, and just as with any digital product, all have revised and upgraded their DREs over the years. Security patches have been added and machinery locks strengthened. Critics, though, have never been convinced that the technology can be brought to the accuracy and security standards an election demands.
To start with, the new gold standard for voting is paper.
Voters hand-marking their own paper ballots can verify their selection before the vote is counted by a machine. If the election is close or challenged, or if software fails, a paper ballot can be used to audit results. In 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine declared that elections should be using human-readable paper ballots by this year – and voting equipment without such ballots should be removed as soon as possible.
Without paper, the voter is completely dependent on the machine technology to count accurately. The vast majority of DREs flunk the paper test, according to data collected by Verified Voting.
“The real problem with DREs is that you cannot recover (vote results), even if you are lucky enough to detect that there is an error or it has been tampered with,” said Marian Schneider, former president of Verified Voting.
Through November 2nd, concerns about inaccurate vote counting and outright fraud used Georgia’s 𝚕̷𝚘̷𝚜̷𝚒̷𝚗̷𝚐̷ 𝚌̷𝚊̷𝚗̷𝚍̷𝚒̷𝚍̷𝚊̷𝚝̷𝚎̷ Governor Stacey Abrams to illustrate the point, as this article does. That concern ended on November 3rd.
