Back to the Old Days
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia: the election integrity in each of these states has been questioned. In Wisconsin, two people working in a strip mall in Minnesota control the voting machines for forty counties.
In Georgia, statistical analysis of the Congressional Special Election shows huge discrepancies between the first round and the final runoff. The voting database was left online and unprotected for several months before the election, and that same database was erased soon after the election destroying any evidence of tampering.
In Michigan, there were multiple voting machines failures in Wayne County (Detroit) during the Presidential election, failures that clearly reduced the Democratic vote total in a state where Donald Trump won by only 10,704 votes out of over 5 million.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump vote was exactly the same percentage (to the tenth decimal place) in at least 3 precincts. In North Carolina and Florida thousands of voters were removed from the voting lists illegally prior to the election (see https://www.unhackthevote.com for more information.)
Since the 2000 election, the United States has moved to increasingly automated voting systems. We did this for several reasons:
– the absolute convenience of knowing the vote totals within hours of the votes being cast instead of waiting for hours and sometimes days;
– the cost effectiveness of electronic counting, with a higher original capital cost but low maintenance and functional cost;
– the perception that “computers” are error free, and;
– the belief that the “computers” can’t be influenced, bought, or fixed.
And because we remember the Florida voting for President in 2000, an election outcome so close that the Presidency came down to several hundred votes, within the “margin of error.” Weeks of counters checking ballots, hanging “chads,” lawyers hovering, shouting, and disrupting, and finally court intervention and the Supreme Court, voting along party lines, determining that the counting must stop and Bush was President.
Currently, many states use totally electronic balloting. In these states there is no “paper trail,” no cross check to make sure the “computer” is accurate. These states are COMPLETELY vulnerable to computer hacking since there is no way to go back and discover any discrepancies. And even in states where there is a paper trail, partisan election officials refused to allow them to be recounted (Wisconsin.)
There is a “middle ground.” Optical readers and graphite readers work from an actual ballot (not an electronic ballot). After the physical count, those ballots still exist, giving a fallback position should something go wrong. The margin of error with these ballots is higher, as both of these ballots depend on the voter to mark the voting selections with a pencil. If the voter doesn’t “fill in the circle” correctly, then it is possible the vote won’t be tabulated correctly. It also takes longer to count, as these ballots must be physically delivered to the counting machine and counted, unlike the electronic tallies, where the “tally box” is delivered and plugged into the final counting device.
It takes time, but is much less vulnerable to hacking. But this is only the first step.
The next step is to safeguard the voter registration roles from hacking. Anecdotally, in North Carolina voters would show up at the polling location and find they had been removed from the rolls. In that state it was a voter suppression tactic by the state election authority, purging voters in heavily Democratic areas that did not return a postcard. However, this could also be used as an election “disruption” technique: simply changing the address of a registered voter so they do not show up in the correct precinct list, and therefore aren’t allowed to vote.
This can happen accidentally, as occurred in a local school levy election in Licking County a year ago, when addresses were assigned to the wrong school district for voting purposes – but it could also occur through a determined hacking effort to change the vote.
Currently the “safeguarding” of the United States electoral system is by the “diversity” of the voting systems. Each state, and even each county, has different voting systems, making a nationwide “hack” near impossible. But as the Presidential election of 2016 shows, it doesn’t take a nationwide hack. It takes a few targeted precincts, a few thousand votes here and there, and the course of history is completely changed.
Here’s the issue: no one had confidence in the Virginia polling prior to the vote, and it turned out to be pretty accurate. Everyone had confidence in the National polling prior to the 2016 Presidential election, it turned out to be dramatically wrong. Was it the polling, or was it the vote counting process? We need to know that answer. We need to believe that our systems while not impervious to attack, can identify and prevent changes. We need to have confidence that our votes count. And, if necessary, we need to go back to the “good old days” and wait for the results, so that we can believe in them.
