The voting technology problems that could trigger panic at the polls
“Any kind of disinformation about election-related technology, even if there is no hack, is cause for concern, because to be effective, all that is required is for the public to perceive a problem — whether real or not,” said Eddie Perez, director of technology development and open standards at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, an election technology advocacy organization.
Federal and state officials recognize these risks and have spent months warning people not to be too quick to believe alarming claims about hacked elections, saying not every technological glitch is evidence of a cyberattack. “Bad things sometimes happen,” Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said at a recent conference — adding in a subsequent statement that voters should not “overreact to claims that exaggerate the importance of insignificant events.”
“This jump to ‘cyberattack’ — we can’t fall into that trap,” Krebs said.
His statement reflects the twofold challenge facing election officials: making sure their equipment works properly and preventing isolated problems from seeding doubt that undermines the entire process.
Georgia: Total reliance on risky machines
The technological situation is especially fraught this year in Georgia, where Joe Biden narrowly led President Donald Trump in some recent polls. The state updated its electronic voting machines in 2019 and is using them in a presidential election for the first time.
Georgia used to be one of several states that relied entirely on insecure paperless machines, which offered no way to conduct reliable recounts in close or questionable elections. But while those systems are a thing of the past in the state, people who study voting technology remain concerned about their replacements.
The new machines, known as ballot-marking devices, are essentially touchscreen computers that produce a paper, bar-coded ballot. The danger, security researchers say: Errors or tampering could cause the bar codes to differ from what the voter selected, making them less secure than paper ballots that voters mark by hand.
Ballot-marking devices, or BMDs, have emerged as the dominant voting method for Americans with disabilities, many of whom cannot hold pens or read the small text on paper ballots. But Georgia chose to deploy them for all voters, regardless of need.
Georgia officials downplay the risk of hacking or malfunctions, saying voters can verify that their vote was recorded correctly by checking the paper printout. But multiple studies have found that most voters do not do so. Signs explaining the process and instructions for poll workers seem to help, according to one study, but it is unclear how common such warnings are in the real world.
“There is no way to deter, contain, or correct computer hacking in BMDs,” wrote leading voting security experts Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Richard DeMillo of Georgia Tech and Philip Stark of the University of California, Berkeley. “These are the essential security flaws of BMDs.”
Hacking aside, the machines remain prone to glitches, configuration errors and other malfunctions, especially when poll workers have rarely used them before. This perfect storm of complexity and inexperience caused chaos during Georgia’s June primary, when ballot-marking devices failed to boot up, election staffers struggled to activate them and polling places ran out of the provisional ballots that provide a fallback option for voters. Precinct workers reported receiving only minimal training that did not cover technical troubleshooting for the new machines.
These kinds of technological breakdowns are ideal kindling for election discord: During the hours it takes officials to explain the dysfunction, rumors about tampering or hacking can spread and discourage some residents from voting. And small shifts in voter turnout could have enormous impact in a race as close as Georgia’s may be.
“It’s going to be very hard to correct misinformation this year as quickly as the misinformation spreads,” said Matt Blaze, a Georgetown University computer science and law professor who is one of the country’s leading voting security experts.
Pennsylvania: How ballots are counted is what counts
Electronic voting machines also represent a potential trouble spot in Pennsylvania, one of the most important states for both Trump and Biden, because of how some counties plan to use them.
After the 2018 election, Pennsylvania replaced its paperless machines statewide. Most counties bought ballot-marking devices for voters with disabilities and stocked paper ballots for everyone else. The rest bought the electronic devices for everyone, as Georgia did.
But some counties in the latter camp went further, announcing plans to configure their ballot-marking devices in “tabulator mode,” which tallies votes inside the machine rather than giving voters a paper ballot to bring to a scanner.
Eight of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties plan to use their machines in tabulator mode, according to data from the nonprofit group Verified Voting. These include Philadelphia, where problems in 2019 elections included frozen touchscreens and jammed printers, and Northampton County, where configuration errors led to machines wrongly recording zero votes for one 2019 candidate.
When in tabulator mode, ballot-marking devices still generate paper printouts, but after voters review them, they are automatically sent to built-in scanners, which centralizes the risk of hacking or glitches in a single piece of equipment.
Voting machines in tabulator mode also have an “auto-cast” feature that lets voters cast their ballot and send it to the built-in scanner without first reviewing the printout. Security experts have condemned this feature, and Pennsylvania requires counties to disable it, but there is no guarantee that every county and precinct will follow those instructions. With auto-cast enabled, a compromised or merely defective machine could miscast votes even if it displays them correctly on the summary screen.
Even with the auto-cast feature off, the use of tabulator mode in eight counties creates an environment ripe for security fears and false alarms.
In addition to the usual anxieties about machine failures, some Pennsylvanians may find it particularly troubling that they can’t hold their ballots in their hands the way they’re used to doing. Any uncertainty and suspicion is a dangerous thing during an election, and misinformation exploiting these fears could be especially consequential in one of the most vital electoral battlegrounds.
“It's a really bad idea to configure ballot marking devices in tabulator mode,” Blaze said, arguing that the feature places more trust in the machines than they deserve.
A country of soft targets
Voting machine problems grab the most headlines, but the election could also suffer from the failure of other equipment, which is almost entirely unregulated at the state and federal levels:
— Chief among these systems are the electronic poll books that have increasingly replaced paper binders as the primary way of checking in voters. E-poll books are essentially tablet computers loaded with voter data. When connected to the internet to download the data, they are vulnerable to hackers, who can steal or alter registration records. When not connected to the internet, they are still susceptible to crashes, like the widespread outages that fueled hourslong lines in Durham County, N.C., in 2016.
“If those fail, no one can check in to vote, and [they] can't vote except by provisional ballots,” Blaze said. “And again, while they don't affect the integrity of the tally of the votes that got cast, that still can affect the outcome of the election if people weren't able to vote in the first place.” (Some counties have paper voter lists as a fallback option.)
— Voter registration databases are also tempting targets for anyone seeking to sow chaos on Election Day. States have added new protections against tampering since 2016, when Russian operatives breached Illinois’ system, but the mere claim of a successful hack would stoke fears about the reliability of the database.
The federal government is worried about this possibility. In a recent alert, the FBI and CISA warned Americans not to trust claims about vulnerable databases and stolen data. Many states make such data public, sometimes for a fee.
“While cyber actors have in recent years obtained voter registration information,” the agencies said, “the acquisition of this data did not impact the voting process or the integrity of election results.” On Friday, the two agencies disclosed that Iranian hackers had breached one state's voter registration database and used the stolen information in a campaign that involved voter intimidation emails.
— The websites that states and counties use to report unofficial results are practically wide open compared with voter databases. Results websites often lack basic protections and dedicated IT support. Hacking remains a real threat to these sites, researchers say, especially in closely contested jurisdictions.
Short of breaking into a results website, an attacker could blast it with a tsunami of garbage traffic, overwhelming its server and temporarily taking it offline. These so-called distributed denial of service attacks are child’s play for hackers, and only websites with special defensive services can withstand them.
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