Voting in peril without paper trail of ballots

Bill Knight column for Oct. 8, 9 or 10, 2018

As this column reported two weeks ago, the real danger in U.S. voting rights may be coming less from Russian hackers or people casting ballots illegally than “all-American” extremists tampering with access to polls and jeopardizing the electronic apparatus used in most states.

Shown in a couple of recent incidents, the question for voters demanding legitimate elections may be: “Do we want results fast or accurate?

In the last month, the Democratic National Committee reported an attempt to hack into its data base, and U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) both said that their campaigns had been penetrated or compromised by computerized interference.

However, in Texas, Laura Pressley – a former Independent candidate for the Austin City Council who lost her race and afterward said the results were tainted – successfully supported the platform committee of the Republican Party of Texas during its recent state convention to retain a pro-paper ballot plank originally adopted in 2016.

Pressley – who also sued, alleging that Texas’ election practices are unaccountable and illegal and violate the state’s election code and its constitution – said, “There were no legal ballots for a recount, and no results tapes to document and verify what the results were.”

The Texas GOP plank could mean disaster for makers of electronic voting machine whose machines are used in about 90 percent of U.S. voting precincts. One example is costly equipment manufactured by Hart InterCivic, models of which lack paper backup unless government entities invest millions of dollars more for a model with a backup option.

More than 90 percent of the state Republican convention delegates reaffirmed “the strongest election-security platform plank in the country,” Pressley said. Their plank has five points:

* ensure ballot integrity,

* require printing of results tapes for electronic voting for early voting and Election Day at polling locations after the polls close for all counties,

* increase scrutiny and security in balloting by mail,

* prohibit internet voting and any electronic voting lacking a verifiable paper trail, and

* prosecute election fraud with jail sentences.

“We support all means of protecting the integrity of our elections, including the optional use of paper ballots,” the platform states.

Meanwhile, a troubling activity at the 26th Def Con convention of hackers in Las Vegas in August demonstrated how vulnerable electronic voting machines are. During Def Con conventions – of ‘white hat” hackers who break into protected systems to show how security should be improved (as opposed to “black hat” hackers who break into systems for malicious reasons) – “Voting Village” workshops are held to demonstrate weakness in systems.

“By the end of the [2017] conference, every piece of equipment in the Voting Village was effectively breached in some manner,” reported Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla., and a Fellow at the Brennam Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources were quite capable of undermining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems.”

At this year’s conference, the Voting Village exhibition was even more distressing.

“It took one 11-year-old all of 10 minutes to hack into a web site akin to a Secretary of State’s that would report official election results,” Torres-Spelliscy said. “The actual vote totals weren’t changed, but the reported results were. If this isn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what is. As another hacker — who won’t be eligible to vote until 2025 — remarked, “We should have [these systems] way secure because the Russians [are] out there, people.”

In Washington, Congress this spring appropriated $380 million to assist states in updating voting technology, and $344 million has been distributed. However, the money wasn’t targeted to states that need it most, she said – those that use only electronic voting machines that don’t print a paper record of votes. The consequence is that there’s no paper trail of votes and therefore no way to check whether machines recorded votes accurately.

“What is remarkable is that even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the vulnerability of the nation’s election infrastructure, Congress is dead-set against doing any more,” Torres-Spelliscy said. “Less than a week after [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s exquisitely detailed indictment, the House refused to spend more money on election security.”