JB: That's seems like quite a clear, in-your-face conflict of interest to me. Are there any good choices out there, Allegra? It seems we get deeper and deeper into systems that are opaque, expensive, impossible to verify, and very vulnerable to hacking by parties unknown.
AD: The New York State Board of Elections might not ever certify the ExpressVote XL. Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton wrote in September that there was a serious design flaw in the ESS ExpressVote touchscreen which he called a "permission to cheat" button.
At the urging of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, to their credit, the State Board is also reexamining the previously certified Dominion Imagecast Evolution ("ICE") which has a similar design flaw.
The ballot scanner system we are currently using in New York is an acceptable system. There is no reason to jump into new technology for early voting. Voters hand mark their ballots and then feed them through ballot scanners that are not connected to printers or the internet.
JB: Is there much public awareness about this issue? Are we in the election integrity movement living in a bubble with everyone else blithely going about their business assuming all is well? And if so, what can we do about it?
AD: There is more public awareness than ever, due to the front-page attention to election interference by the Russians in 2016. There's awareness that everything is vulnerable to hacking and it is extremely difficult to block. Currently, Jeff Bezos's phone was hacked by the Saudis, hackers are attacking Amazon users. Equifax. CiSony. Marriott.
Despite the raised awareness, the people that have the power to protect our elections are largely complacent. New York has put good cybersecurity provisions in place, but the best cybersecurity in the world didn't protect the CIA that had its hacking tools stolen. The CIA now keeps its most critical secrets on paper.
JB: Yikes! Are we supposed to find that reassuring?
AD: Election officials are reassured by the vendors that their machines are secure, but there is no independent assessment of that. Much like Boeing's influence on the FAA, with tragic consequences when two of their planes crashed, regulation of voting machines is heavily influenced by the vendors.
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