Author: Rachel Kraus / Source: Mashable
It’s been 18 years and several thousand lifetimes since the contested Bush-Gore presidential elections of 2000. Yet “hanging chads” are still haunting us — but not in the way you might think.
Since states began introducing electronic voting machines and other technology in the voting process, digitizing various aspects of voting has been a boon for democracy in many ways.
Online voter registration has supercharged get-out-the-vote efforts. ID scanning at check-ins helps reduce lines. And, of course, ballots submitted digitally allow for near instantaneous returns.SEE ALSO: Dear white women: Here’s how to step up for women of color
But on Tuesday, there were reports in states across the country that problems with electronic voting machines were causing massive delays.
“There are about a dozen states in which problems have been reported, specifically with electronic voting systems,” said Marian Schneider, president of the elections integrity organization Verified Voting. “The problems we’re seeing are diffuse. They don’t seem to be systemic. But in the localities that they’re happening, they’re impactful.”
Five precincts have experienced issues with machines in GA. 1 without a power cord one that didn’t start with paper ballots, as is protocol, until hours later https://t.co/x7o87QEqzq via @thedailybeast
— Erin Banco (@ErinBanco)
Experts have also found that electronic voting is incredibly vulnerable to hacking. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia attempted to penetrate the voting systems of 21 states in 2016, and were successful in at least one (Illinois).
It also turns out that the recommended way people should vote is with a paper ballot that allows voters to check that they’re casting the ballot the way they intended. That’s known as a “voter-verified paper audit trail” (VVPAT). It means that the most secure and accurate way to vote is through leaving an analog record.
“We need an election system that is resilient to the threats,” voting security expert Richard Schneier writes. “And for many parts of the system, that means paper.”
So why did we turn to electronic voting in the first place?
Every scanner is broken at the Brooklyn Public Library so we’re now using the emergency ballot box. People have been waiting hours apparently. pic.twitter.com/aB6giKEMIQ
— David Weiner (@daweiner)
Testing the system
Voter suppression is a major concern this election. But technical glitches are also stopping people from voting.
In states including New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, malfunctioning voting computers caused problems at the polls. Old computers that broke or wouldn’t start up caused hours-long lines and delays. In South Carolina, calibration issues caused discrepancies between what people intended to select and what they ended up selecting. Some Texas ballots selected the candidate of the opposite party than the voter intended.
“What we’re seeing now across the country are technical issues,” Maurice Turner, the senior technologist of the Center for Democracy & Technology, said. “The strain of using a higher than expected voter turnout, with the combination of old machines that shouldn’t be in service, means it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of coordinated or malicious attempt to interfere. But we’re having machines that are breaking down and can’t handle the voter turnout.”
However, the fact that these are technical problems doesn’t mean they’re not a form of voter suppression. Many of the problems today were caused by obsolete machines. Turner explained that states have not paid to keep their voting equipment up to date. In New York, the Republican-controlled state assembly has refused to pass elections reform legislation or budget for maintenance. The problems today were technical, yes. But the root cause came from problems with how our government has approached — and funded — elections since the year 2000.
How did we get here?
In the 2000 presidential election, Florida ballots with punch tabs that weren’t all the way punched — aka “hanging chads” — caused a start-and-stop election recount and dramatic legal challenges. Essentially, manual voting errors threw the results of the presidential election into disarray.
In response, Congress passed a bill that called for the modernization of voting processes and allocated funding to states to buy new voting technology.
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