Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday 25 February 2020
Reliability of pricey new voting machines questioned

By FRANK BAJAK in a judge's race from reg-
AP Technology Writer istering in the bar codes
Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. voters will used to count the vote.
cast ballots this year on Only absentee ballot votes
devices that look and feel registered electronically
like the discredited paper- for the candidate. A man-
less voting machines they ual recount of the paper
once used, yet leave a pa- voting records settled the
per record of the vote. But election. The other prob-
computer security experts lem: miscalibrated touch-
are warning that these so- screens on about a third of
called ballot-marking de- the county's 320 machines.
vices still pose too much of One poll judge called the
a risk. touchscreens "garbage,"
Ballot-marking machines and some voters who reg-
were initially developed istered complaints in emails
not as primary vote-casting obtained by The Associ-
tools but as "accessible" al- ated Press in a public re-
ternatives for the disabled. cords request said their
They print out paper re- votes were assigned to the
cords that are scanned by wrong candidates — an er-
optical readers that tabu- ror known as "vote-flipping."
late the vote. Others worried about fu-
They cost at least twice as ture malfunctions triggering
much as hand-marked pa- long lines.
per ballots, which comput- According to state certifi-
er scientists prefer because In this Aug. 16, 2019, file photo, a digital voting machine sits on a table in Raleigh, N.C. cation documents, voters
Associated Press
paper can't be hacked. require triple the amount
That's an important consid- aware have bought ballot- Spokeswoman Katina in November. It is a stance of time on average to
eration as U.S. intelligence marking machines. So has Granger said the com- also shared by Colorado, a navigate ES&S ballot-
officials warn that mali- South Carolina, which will pany's ballot-marking ma- national leader in election marking machines when
cious meddling in this year's use them in Saturday's pri- chines' accuracy and se- security. The state is ban- compared with filling out
presidential contest could maries. curity "have been proven ning bar codes from ballot- hand-marked ballots and
be worse than in 2016. Some of the most popular through thousands of hours marking voting machines running them through opti-
The machines have been such devices, from Election of testing and tens of thou- beginning in 2021. cal scanners. ES&S blamed
vigorously promoted by the Systems & Software and sands of successful elec- But some election officials the Northampton County
trio of privately held voting Dominion Voting Systems, tions." Dominion declined see ballot-marking devic- debacle on human error.
equipment vendors that register votes in bar codes comment for this story. es as improvements over Proper pre-election log-
control 88 percent of the that the human eye can't Even on machines that paperless touchscreens, ic and accuracy testing
U.S. market and are nearly decipher. That means don't use bar codes, voters which were used by 27 would have easily caught
unregulated at the federal skilled hackers could alter may not notice if a hack or percent of voters in 2018. both problems, said Daniel
level. They are expected to outcomes without detec- programming error man- They like them because the Lopresti, a Lehigh University
be used by some 40 million tion, gaming bar codes gles their choices. A Uni- touchscreens are familiar computer scientist on the
eligible voters more than in while keeping voters' in- versity of Michigan study to voters, looking and feel- county election commis-
the 2018 midterm elections. tended choices on the determined that only 7 ing like what they've been sion.
Key counties in the crucial human-readable portion percent of participants in a using for nearly two de- "What we worry is, what
swing states of Pennsylva- of the ballot printout, com- mock election notified poll cades, and they can use happens the next time if
nia, Ohio and North Caro- puter scientists have found. workers when the names one voting method for ev- there's a programming bug
lina, much of Texas, Cali- ES&S claims such tamper- on their printed receipts eryone. — or a hack or whatever —
fornia's Los Angeles County ing is "a practical impossi- didn't match the candi- Michael Anderson, elec- and it's done in a way that's
and all of Georgia and Del- bility." dates they voted for. tions director for Pennsylva- not obvious?"
"There are a huge number nia's Lebanon County, said At last year's DefCon hack-
of reasons to reject today's "voters want it." The county er convention in Las Ve-
ballot-marking devices — offers all voters both ma- gas, it took tinkerers less
except for limited use as as- chine- and hand-marked than eight hours to hack
sistive devices for those un- ballots. two older ballot-marking
able to mark a paper bal- "When we give them a pa- devices that organizers
lot themselves," says Doug per ballot, the very first thing obtained. But New York
Jones, a University of Iowa they say to us is, 'We're go- State election commission
election security expert. ing back in time,'" he said. co-chair, Douglas Kellner,
Critics say currently avail- Northampton County, on an early critic of paper-
able ballot-marking devic- Pennsylvania's eastern less electronic voting ma-
es undermine the very idea edge, became ground chines, said he's confident
of retaining a paper record. zero last November in the in a ballot-marking device,
It's an idea supported by a debate over ballot-mark- the ImageCast Evolution
2018 National Academies ing devices when its newly by Dominion, certified for
of Sciences report that fa- purchased ES&S Express- use in his state.
vors hand-marked ballots Vote XLs failed in two differ- He said safeguards built into
tallied by optical scanners, ent ways. the machines and security
which 70 percent of U.S. First, a ballot programming protocols make a hack of
voters used in 2016 and error prevented votes cast the Image Evolution "ex-
2018 and will again rely on for one of three candidates traordinarily unlikely."q