"The ballots created by the ballot-marking device were included in our audit," Charlson said. When asked about fears that a hacker could fabricate votes that would bypass the ballot summary card, she said their audit would have detected that inconsistency.
"My response to that [vote theft scenario] is that in our audit we have included those ballots and a human is looking at the human-readable text on those ballots to assign a vote," she said. "So when you aggregate everything, if the voting system was in fact reading the bar code incorrectly, this audit would pick it up."
No voting system is flawless. But instead of striving to make new systems better, critics are resurrecting a narrative that most everything computerized in voting is untrustworthy. In doing so, they are overlooking what is now possible and would have been seen as an achievement after DREs emerged in the early 2000s: double-checking unofficial results before officially declaring who won the election.
"Just think about how this works," said David Becker, Center for Election Innovation and Research founder and executive director. "As long as you have an artifact [a legal record] that was viewed by the voter, that you can go back to after the voter has left, i.e., a piece of paper, you can audit it. And, in fact, not only can you audit it; you should audit it. That's true whether you have hand-marked paper ballots or machine-marked ballots. And it is true whether you have a bar code or no bar code."
Progress in Florida?Maryland is not the only state seeking more granular tools to verify its election results. Florida, which had three simultaneous statewide recounts last November, may adopt legislation this spring giving its counties the option of using ballot image audit systems for its recounts. (Those are triggered when the margin between the top two candidates is less than .5 percent.)
For the first time, the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections has endorsed this approach and is lobbying for its passage, said Mark Earley, association treasurer and supervisor of elections in Leon County, where the state capital is located. Leon County helped to develop and pilot the Clear Ballot system.
"The holy grail, and it is very doable with [Clear Ballot's] Clear Audit, is to be able to do a pre-certification audit instead of a post-certification audit," said Earley. "We are talking about doing the recounts with this. I would personally prefer to just show the Clear Audit results every time as a validation [of the results], whether you want to call that an audit or a recount or whatever. And do it as soon as you can, right after the election."
Intriguingly, if passed, Florida's recounts might even be more granular than Maryland's audit, he said, because the legislation would allow counties to separately rescan of all of their paper ballots (ink-marked, computer-printed or both) to produce a second separate tabulation. That analysis would then be compared to the initially reported results, and discrepancies would be investigated and reconciled.
"Hopefully, at some point, we will be able to do that in Florida," Earley said. "The hope there is they [counties using BMDs] will be able to scan in the bar code on the summary ballots" to decode them and add that into the overall vote for that polling place or what have you. And still validate or not the election results."
Earley said some county election officials are not yet fully on board because they see more work with double-checking results. Indeed, some Florida counties are fighting a federal lawsuit brought by activists seeking to preserve digital ballot images as official election records. That lawsuit is slowly proceeding even though the state Association of Supervisors of Elections is lobbying its legislature to use ballot images in recounts.
That litigation is an example of where current election laws were written in an era that came long before the widespread use of digital technologies. The federal law requiring voting records be preserved for 22 months after Election Day was passed in 1960 to protect minority voters in the heat of the mid-20th century's civil rights movement.
Whether Florida counties use ink-marked paper or ballot-marking devices, Earley sees ballot image analytics as providing viewable evidence that vote counts are accurate and voters can have more confidence in the outcome of the closest contests. He is not alone. In Broward County, which saw protests during 2018's recounts, this audit technology which it had on hand but was not certified for use in last fall's recounts could have provided fast answers to partisan accusations of hijacked elections.
"If we could have used that system, it wouldn't have been five days of 24-hour operation to meet the [Florida recount] deadline. It would have been a couple of days, worst-case scenario," Jorge Nunez, the IT director for Broward's election office, told the Miami Herald. "Once we push that button, it could take 30 minutes."
In other words, in the contentious and often-fraught world of election administration, there are advances that can make the process more transparent and verifiable before the winners are officially declared. Critics of the latest ballot-marking devices may see DREs with paper trails and assert that nothing involving computers can be trusted in voting. But they are overlooking that remarkably granular and accounting-like methods to verify vote counts have emerged practices that, if encouraged and widely adopted, would only benefit the public, but could be in place for 2020's elections.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
