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Whereas the distributors pitched their newest voting machines in Harmony, New Hampshire, this previous August, the election officers within the room gasped. They whispered, “No approach.” They nodded their heads and stuffed out the scorecards of their laps. Interrupting in the event that they needed to, they requested each form of query: How a lot does the brand new scanner weigh? Are any of its components made in China? Does it use the JSON information format?
The solutions weren’t trivial. Primarily based partially on these shows, many could be making a once-in-a-decade determination.
These New Hampshire officers at present use AccuVote machines, which had been made by an organization that’s now a part of Dominion Voting Techniques. First launched in 1989, they run on an working system not supported by Microsoft, and a few have suffered excessive malfunctions; in 2022, the identical mannequin of AccuVote partially melted throughout an particularly heat summer season election in Connecticut.
Many cities in New Hampshire wish to substitute the AccuVote. However with what? Primarily based on previous historical past, the brand new machines would possible should final many years—whereas additionally being safe sufficient to fulfill the state’s election skeptics. Outdoors the occasion, these skeptics held indicators like “Ban Voting Machines.” Although they had been comparatively small in quantity that day, they’re a part of a nationwide motion to get rid of voting expertise and as a substitute hand depend each poll—an choice election directors say is solely not possible.
In opposition to this backdrop, greater than 130 election officers packed into the convention rooms on the second flooring of Harmony’s Legislative Workplace Constructing. Finally, they confronted a alternative between two radically completely different futures.
The primary was to proceed with a legacy vendor. Three corporations—Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic—management roughly 90 % of the U.S. voting expertise market. All three are privately held, which means they’re required to disclose little about their monetary workings and so they’re additionally dedicated to retaining their supply code from changing into totally public.
The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with solely 17 workers and voting machine contracts in simply 5 small counties, all in Mississippi. The corporate has taken the other method to the Massive Three. Its monetary statements are posted on its web site, and each line of code powering its machines is printed on GitHub, accessible for anybody to examine.
On the Harmony occasion, a consultant for ES&S recommended that this open-source method could possibly be harmful. “If the FBI was constructing a brand new constructing, they’re not going to place the blueprints out on-line,” he mentioned. However VotingWorks cofounder Ben Adida says it’s basic to rebuilding belief in voting tools and combatting the nationwide push at hand depend ballots. “An open-source voting system is one the place there aren’t any secrets and techniques about how this works,” Adida advised the viewers. “All of the supply code is public for the world to see, as a result of why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software program in any respect?”
Others agree. Ten states at present use VotingWorks’s open-source audit software program, together with Georgia throughout its hand depend audit in 2020. Different teams are exploring open-source voting expertise, together with Microsoft, which not too long ago piloted voting software program in Franklin County, Idaho. Payments requiring or permitting for open-source voting expertise have not too long ago been launched in at the very least six states; a invoice has additionally been launched on the federal level to check the difficulty additional. In New Hampshire, the thought has assist from election officers, the secretary of state, and even diehard machine skeptics.
VotingWorks is on the forefront of the motion to make elections extra clear. “Though the voting tools that we’ve been utilizing for the final 20, 30 years will not be accountable for this disaster,” Adida mentioned, “it’s additionally not the tools that’s going to get us out of this disaster.” However can an idealist nonprofit actually unseat business juggernauts—and restore religion in democracy alongside the best way?
For years, officers have feared that America’s voting machines are susceptible to assault. In the course of the 2016 election, Russian hackers focused election techniques in all 50 states, in keeping with the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee discovered no proof that any votes had been modified, however it did counsel that Russia could possibly be cataloging choices “to be used at a later date.”
In 2017, the Division of Homeland Safety designated election infrastructure as “vital infrastructure,” noting that “unhealthy cyber actors—starting from nation states, cybercriminals, and hacktivists—have gotten extra subtle and harmful.”
Some conservative activists have recommended merely avoiding machines altogether and hand counting ballots. However doing so is prohibitively sluggish and costly, to not point out extra error-prone. Final yr, for instance, one county in Arizona estimated that counting all 105,000 ballots from the 2020 election would require at the very least 245 folks working day by day, together with holidays, for nearly three weeks.
That leaves election directors depending on machines to tally up votes. That August day in Harmony, VotingWorks and two of the legacy distributors, Dominion and ES&S, had been providing the identical form of product: an optical scanner, which is basically only a counting machine.
After a New Hampshire voter fills in a paper poll by hand, it’s almost definitely inserted into an optical scanner, which interprets and tallies the marks. This course of is how roughly two-thirds of the nation votes.
1 / 4 of voters mark their ballots utilizing machines (aptly named “ballot-marking units”), that are then fed into an optical scanner as effectively.
About 5 % use direct recording digital techniques, or DREs, which permits votes to be solid and saved straight on the machine.
Solely 0.2 % of voters have their ballots counted by hand.
For the reason that 2020 election, the businesses that make these machines have been the topic of intense scrutiny from individuals who deny the election outcomes. These corporations have additionally come under fire for what critics on each side of the political aisle describe as their secrecy, lack of innovation, and obstructionist tendencies.
Not one of the three corporations publicly disclose primary info, together with their traders and their monetary well being. It will also be tough to even get the costs of their machines. Typically, jurisdictions come to depend upon these companies. Two-thirds of the business’s income comes from assist, upkeep, and companies for the machines.
Legacy distributors additionally struggle to keep up their market share. In 2017, Hart InterCivic sued Texas to forestall counties from changing its machines, which don’t produce a paper path, with machines that did.
“For a vendor to sue to forestall auditable paper data from being utilized in voting exhibits that market dynamics might be starkly misaligned with the general public curiosity,” concluded a report by researchers on the College of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Verified Voting, a nonprofit that, in keeping with its mission statement, works to advertise “the accountable use of expertise in elections.”
The businesses inform a unique story, declaring that they do disclose their code to sure entities, together with third-party companies and unbiased labs that work on behalf of the federal authorities to check for vulnerabilities within the software program that could possibly be exploited by hackers.
In a press release to Undark, ES&S additionally mentioned it discloses sure monetary info to jurisdictions “when requested” and the corporate shared approximate costs for its voting machines, though it famous that ultimate pricing depends upon “particular person buyer necessities.”
In Harmony, officers from some small cities the place ballots are nonetheless hand counted had been contemplating switching to machines. Others had been contemplating whether or not to stay with Dominion and LHS—the New Hampshire-based firm that companies the machines—or swap to VotingWorks. It might possible be one of the costly, consequential selections of their careers.
All through his pitch, the consultant for LHS emphasised the continuity between the outdated AccuVote machines and the brand new Dominion scanner. Carrying a blazer and a gown shirt unbuttoned on the collar, Jeff Silvestro knew the gang effectively. LHS is the one approved service supplier for the complete state’s AccuVote machines, and it’s accountable for providing coaching for the cities’ workers, delivering reminiscence playing cards for every election, and weathering a blizzard to return to their ballot web site and repair a damaged scanner.
Don’t fear, Silvestro reassured the gang: The voter expertise is similar. “Similarities,” Silvestro advised the gang. “That’s what we’re in search of.”
Simply down the corridor from Silvestro, Ben Adida laid out a unique imaginative and prescient of what voting expertise could possibly be. He opened by addressing the “elephant within the room”: the substantial quantity of people that mistrust the elections.
VotingWorks might deal with that mistrust head-on, he mentioned, by providing three issues: safety, simplicity, and transparency.
Adida first began engaged on election expertise in 1997, as a pc science undergraduate at MIT, the place he constructed a voting system for pupil council elections.
After incomes a PhD from MIT in 2006, with a specialty in cryptography and knowledge safety, he did just a few extra years of election work as a postdoc at Harvard College after which transitioned to information safety and privateness for medical information. Later, he served as director of engineering at Mozilla and Sq. and vp of engineering at Intelligent, a digital studying platform for Okay-12 faculties.
In 2016, Adida thought-about leaving Intelligent to do election work once more, and he adopted the progress of STAR-Vote, an open-source election system proposed by Travis County, Texas, that finally didn’t transfer ahead. He determined to remain put, however he couldn’t shake the considered voting expertise. Adida knew it was uncommon for somebody to have his background in each product design and election safety. “That is form of a calling,” he mentioned.
Adida launched VotingWorks in December 2018, with some funding from people and startup accelerator Y Combinator. The nonprofit is now distinctive among the many legacy voting expertise distributors: The group has disclosed the whole lot, from its donors to the costs of its machines. VotingWorks machines are comprised of off-the-shelf electronics, and within the long-run, in keeping with Adida, are cheaper than their opponents.
The day of the Harmony occasion, Adida wore a T-shirt tucked into his khakis, and sported a thick brown mustache. When he began discussing the specs of his machine, he spoke rapidly, bounding across the room and even tripping on an errant wire. At one level, he confirmed off his machine’s end-of-night election report, printed on an 8 ½ by 11 piece of paper, a far cry from the lengthy strips of paper which can be at present used. That means, you don’t should have what he referred to as “these lengthy CVS receipts.” The room laughed.
Adida and his group are staking out a place in a debate that stretches again to the early days of computing: Is the path to laptop safety by secrecy, or by complete transparency?
A few of the most generally used software program at present is open-source software program, or OSS, which means anybody can learn, modify, and reuse the code. OSS has powered widespread merchandise just like the working system Linux and the web browser Firefox from Mozilla. It’s additionally used extensively by the Division of Protection.
Proponents of OSS provide three important arguments for why it’s safer than a locked field mannequin. First, publicly accessible supply code might be scrutinized by anybody, not only a comparatively small group of engineers inside an organization, growing the possibilities of catching flaws. Second, as a result of coders know that they are often scrutinized by anybody, they’re incentivized to provide higher work and to elucidate their method. “You may go and take a look at precisely why it’s being performed this fashion, who wrote it, who authorized it, and all of that,” mentioned Adida.
Third, OSS proponents say that attempting to cover supply code will finally fail, as a result of attackers can purchase it from the provider or reverse engineer it themselves. Hackers don’t want good supply code, simply sufficient to research for patterns that will counsel a vulnerability. Breaking is less complicated than constructing.
Already, there are indications that unhealthy actors have acquired proprietary voting machine code. In 2021, an election official in Colorado allegedly allowed a conspiracy theorist to entry county machines, copy delicate information, and {photograph} system passwords—the form of insider assault that, specialists warn, might compromise the safety of the approaching presidential election.
Not everyone seems to be satisfied that open-source code alone is sufficient to guarantee a safe voting machine. “You could possibly have had open-source software program, and also you won’t have discovered all the issues or errors or points,” mentioned Pamela Smith, the president of Verified Voting, citing the quite a few traces of code that might have to be examined in a restricted period of time.
Adida doesn’t count on anybody to undergo the a whole lot of hundreds of traces of code on the VotingWorks GitHub. But when they’re interested in a particular facet—like how the scanner handles paper that’s askew—it’s way more manageable: just a few hundred traces of code.
Already, a small variety of coders from exterior the corporate have made options on easy methods to enhance the software program, a few of which have been accepted. Then, to completely guard in opposition to vulnerabilities, the corporate depends by itself procedures, third-party opinions, and certification testing on the federal stage, mentioned Adida.
Along with safety, any new machine additionally must be simple for ballot staff to function—and in a position to carry out reliably underneath the high-stakes circumstances of an election day.
In interviews, election officers who use the expertise in Mississippi raved about its ease of use. Some additionally love how responsive the corporate is to suggestions.
“They arrive to us and say, ‘Inform us within the discipline what’s occurring,’” mentioned Sara Dionne, chairman of the election fee in Warren County, Mississippi, which began utilizing VotingWorks in 2020. “We actually by no means had that form of dialog with ES&S ever.”
To develop VotingWorks’s attain, although, Adida should pitch it in locations like New Hampshire, the place election officers are navigating tight budgets, fallout from the 2020 election, and misperceptions about voting expertise.
New Hampshire is a swing state, and, after the 2020 election, it has a small however vocal faction of election deniers. On the identical time, Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan has performed little to marshal assets for brand new machines.
Final yr, Scanlan opposed a invoice that might have allowed New Hampshire cities and cities to use for funding from a $12 million federal grant for brand new voting machines; Republicans within the legislature killed the invoice. (Requested what cash-strapped jurisdictions ought to do if they will’t afford new scanners, Scanlan advised Undark they may cannibalize components from outdated AccuVote machines.)
Some critics additionally say Scanlan has performed little to dispel some conservative activists’ beliefs that New Hampshire can dispense with machines altogether. On the Harmony occasion, a lady advised Undark that Manchester, a metropolis with 68,000 registered voters, might hand depend all of its ballots in simply 4 hours. Talking with Undark, Scanlan acknowledged that this estimate wasn’t appropriate, and that hand counting is much less correct than machines. Nonetheless, his workplace hasn’t communicated this message to the general public in any formal approach.
“I positively assume that he’s complicit in permitting [misinformation] to proceed to flourish,” mentioned Liz Wester, cofounder of 603 Ahead, which inspires civic participation within the state.
The VotingWorks mannequin gained over some machine skeptics on the Harmony occasion, like Tim Cahill, a Republican within the New Hampshire Home of Representatives. Cahill mentioned he’d desire that each one ballots within the state be hand counted however would select VotingWorks over the opposite distributors.
“Why would you belief one thing you may’t put your eyes on?” he advised Undark. “Now we have lots of sensible folks on this nation and folks need open supply, they need transparency.”
Open supply has discovered followers in different states, too. Kevin Cavanaugh is a county supervisor in Pinal, Arizona’s third most populous county. He says he began to doubt voting machines after watching a documentary, funded by the election denier Mike Lindell, claiming that the units have unauthorized software program that would change vote totals with out detection.
In November 2022, Cavanaugh launched a movement to extend the variety of ballots counted by hand within the county, and he advised Undark he’d like a full hand depend. “However, if we’re utilizing machines,” he added, “then I believe it’s necessary that the supply code is on the market for inspection to specialists.”
Again in Harmony, Adida seemed to be persuasive to the general public at giant — or at the very least these invested sufficient to attend the occasion. Of the 201 attendees who stuffed out a scorecard, VotingWorks was the most well-liked first alternative. However amongst election officers, the clear choice was Dominion. Some officers had been skeptical that open-source expertise would imply a lot to folks of their cities.
“Your common voter doesn’t care about open supply,” mentioned one city clerk.
Nonetheless, 5 cities in New Hampshire have already bought VotingWorks machines, a few of which will probably be utilized in upcoming March native elections.
Two important elements decide whether or not somebody has religion in an election, mentioned Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at MIT who has written extensively about belief in elections. The primary, which impacts roughly 5 to 10 % of voters, is a adverse private expertise on the polls, like lengthy traces, impolite ballot staff, and issues with machines, which may make the general public much less keen to belief an election’s consequence.
The second, extra influential issue affecting belief is that if a voter’s candidate gained. That makes it supremely tough to revive confidence, mentioned Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County and the present CEO for applications on the Nationwide Affiliation of Election Officers.
“The reply on election administration—it’s advanced, it’s wonky, it’s not pithy,” she mentioned in a latest press convention. “It’s laborious to return again to these emotional pleas with what the truth is.”
Adida agrees with Stewart that VotingWorks alone isn’t going to get rid of election denialism—nor, he mentioned, is that his aim. As an alternative, he hopes to succeed in the people who find themselves inclined to misinformation however haven’t essentially made up their minds but, a gaggle he describes because the “center 80 %.”
Even when they by no means go to the corporate’s GitHub, he says, “the truth that we’re placing all of it out within the open builds belief.” And when somebody says one thing patently false in regards to the firm, Adida can at the very least ask them to establish the incriminating traces of supply code.
Are these two issues—rhetorical energy and a dedication to transparency—actually a match for the disinformation equipment pushing lies throughout the nation? Adida talked about the myths about legacy distributors’ machines being misprogrammed or incorrectly counting ballots throughout the 2020 election.
“What was the counterpoint to that?” he requested. “It was, ‘Belief us. These machines have been examined.’ I need the counterpoint to be, ‘Hey of us, all of the supply code is open.’”
Spenser Mestel is a ballot employee and unbiased journalist. His bylines embrace The New York Occasions, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Intercept.
This text was initially printed on Undark. Learn the original article.
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