California has now become an all-paper state. Secretary of State Alex Padilla recently decertified all the old DRE touchscreen machines that came from the 2002 Help America Vote Act. They will be replaced in time for the 2020 presidential election with digital scanners and some BMDs.
But LA's source code is one of the few to open to public scrutiny. Few other counties in 2020 will have machines as advanced and transparent as the ones likely to be used in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, there's (of course) another glitch: some states and counties simply do not want to preserve the ballot images.
Debbie Sumner of New Hampshire reports that "the legislature is removing ballot images from public records law. [It] doesn't need a LEGITIMATE reason to remove a document. Any old reason will do."
This borders on the absurd. A 1962 civil rights law requires that all materials from any federal balloting be preserved at least 22 months, i.e., to within two months of the next Congressional election.
These ballot images have become a cornerstone of our democracy. But some election officials say they can't be bothered to flip the switch that "produces the ballot images."
But that's an impossibility. Virtually none of these new machines will operate at all without producing the images (which makes them a matter of public record the instant they're created).
What in fact the officials want is the"right" to trash the images after they're produced.
It actually takes more work to discard these digital images than to preserve them. But election protection activist John Brakey and his group AUDIT just lost a legal skirmish in their crusade to stop this from happening.
A federal judge in Florida ruled that AUDIT's six Florida plaintiffs had no standing to demand the preservation of the digital images. Only the Justice Department, he said, has that right: "...while the Court is sympathetic to the plaintiff's claim ... 52 U.S.C. 20701 does not confer a private right of action of plaintiff."
Says Brakey: "We lost on a technicality and we will have to find a new way federally to get into the system, not only in Florida but in North Carolina, Michigan, and many other states."
Steven Rosenfeld, who reports on election issues at Voting Booth, says "Florida may pass a bill this spring that would allow its counties to use audit systems using digital images of paper ballots (hand and machine marked) for recounts."
In November 2016, about 1.3 million Florida votes were trashed because two counties (Broward and Palm Beach, with 714,000 and 584,000 votes respectively) failed to file their official recounts in time, potentially changing the outcome of bitterly disputed races for both governor and US Senate. Both Broward and Palm Beach go about 70% Democrat; the trashing of these ballots could well have affected both the governor's race and that for US Senate, both of which were "won" by Republicans.
There were many reasons for missing those deadlines, says Rosenfeld. But this new bill might "bring new transparency and accountability to the most contested elections, including possibly 2020's presidential, to help legitimize results whatever they are."
"It would also affirm the role of using a mix of the best of paper and digital records to try to account for every vote cast before winners become official."
So (ironically) Florida might become one of the most transparent states in the US. Other states following a parallel path could help us get a more credible vote count in 2020.
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