Scientific Voting, American Style

What a left-leaning publication said about machine voting before the 2020 election.

In my last column, Curing Joe’s Vote, I detailed how the “sausage” of our ostensibly democratic republic elects its officials in my locale. Use of the electronic voting tabulators and EMS (election management system) was briefly critiqued. Ballot Marking Devices, the actual machines that can be used to vote in person on Election Day, were only mentioned. Vulnerabilities of both were treated in greater detail by two different experts in computer science in articles published in that paragon of scientific authority, clarity, and consensus, Scientific American. For many decades this magazine had been the Gibraltar upon which the public’s understanding of a broad array of scientific inquiry was based. Indeed, they also published a well-regarded, constantly updated textbook of medicine for many years. However I deserted my long-term subscription years ago due to the clear progressive liberal bias of its editor. Under that editor’s guidance much under investigation or discussion was now indisputable fact with strong political implications. That editor has recently left the publication, and hopefully Scientific American can return to its strenuous efforts at unbiased reporting of science. That period of rampant leftism makes its two short reviews of the severe problems with electronic and machine voting even more remarkable.

In November, 2018, after the supposedly Russian-contro lled election of 2016 and before the hotly debated election of 2020, Jen Schwartz interviewed one computer scientist for her article, “The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines”. She notes J. Alex Halderman brought an electronic voting machine into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and demonstrated an easy quick hack of election results. Schwartz noted his conclusion that “Without a paper trail of each vote, neither the voters nor a human auditor could check for discrepancies.” Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computing and Society, is not a partisan conspiracy theorist. He had studied electronic voting technology since obtaining a voting machine in 2006, and by 2018 had come to the conclusion that “Now that there have been major academic studies there is scientific consensus that here will be vulnerabilities in polling place equipment.” Given the experience of 2016 wherein clear evidence existed that Russian “hacking” groups had deeply infiltrate one party’s internal communications and nationwide many states’ voter registration systems, Halderman’s findings and concerns were no longer hypothetical. As he noted in the interview, “To my knowledge, no state has done any kind of rigorous forensics on their voting machines to see whether they had been compromised.” As of 2024, in California, that is still the case. Critical aspects of the software of the “approved” electronic voting systems in California remains proprietary and therefore opaque not only to public view but also to that of the state authorities. For Election Management Systems the vulnerability is at its centralized origins. As Schwartz wrote of Halderman’s findings, “There’s a programming process by which the design of the ballot--gets produced, and then gets copied to every individual voting machine. Election officials usually copy it on memory cards or USB sticks for the election machines….You can infiltrate their computers, which are connected to the internet..” As noted in Curing Joe’s Vote, although the local EMS system, during the election cycle, was ostensibly no longer connected to the internet, election workers were observed using USB drives to either import or export data from the central EMS computer. Schwartz and Halderman readily agree that subtle manipulations can occur, especially in close elections (or a few critical counties in a few critical states?) that could result in the wrong candidate winning, with a low likelihood that the manipulation would be detected. In close elections, a post-election audit of paper ballots in a random sample, whose size depends on the number of ballots and the closeness of the election for statistical authority, would be the sine qua non of quality control. In 2018 only 79% of votes in the U.S.A. were recorded on paper, without which a dependable audit is impossible. Locally, our “audit” is composed of reviewing the machine results of a machine-chosen, random 1% of the electronically-recorded vote, which may or may not be statistically valid. For close races, a contesting candidate must pay the very large cost of a true paper audit. That is why, in 2018, “The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report in September that urged all states to adopt paper ballots before 2020. “

As we know, the opposite occurred, with many more states adopting the more convenient, expensive, time-consuming, and vulnerable methods of electronic voting and tabulation. In another Scientific American article from November 3, 2020, Sophie Bushwick sought to reassure the voting public about this new technology in “An Expert on Voting Machines Explains How They Work”. She noted the great variance from state to state and even by county in the machines and methods used. Nonetheless, “… it remains vulnerable to both malicious and unintentional errors.” Her source was Douglas Jones, a computer scientist from University of Iowa. He noted that getting the correct results from this technology meant that “… doing it right means having genuinely auditable technology—with ballots where the average voter knows that the marks they made on their ballot express their real intent.” Bushwick notes that, although some vote counting technology was introduced as far back as the 1960’s or 70’s, including optical scanners as used in school testing and direct-recording electronic voting machines, the real expansion of these came with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. As an aside, many have argued that this act is unconstitutional, given the Constitution’s clear mandate that only states will determine the time and manner of elections beyond the federal requirement of a particular Election Day (not election weeks, etc.). Bushwick notes Jones’ assessment that these machines “…were extraordinarily problematic for security reasons..... end up being completely impossible to audit.” Jones does opine that the biggest threat is not malicious actors but simple errors by well-intended election workers. As detailed in Curing Joe’s Vote, many such opportunities, both benign and malign, have been observed. This especially is true of the Ballot Marking Devices, direct voting machines that record the ballot for electronic tabulation as a QR code, unreadable and unauditable by anyone save the proprietary software purveyor. And, returning full circle to those very inaccurate (by public audit) and very vulnerable (as shown by Russian hacking in 2016) voter rolls, the validity of all votes however cast rests finally on the voter’s signature. Douglas Jones’ final concern is “…none of our laws really govern how we check signatures. It turns out that the mathematics of signature acceptance and rejection ends up being horrible.”

Modern technology is wonderful, and often expands our abilities and productivity. Yet it also presents intrinsic risks and problems too often unrecognized or unrealized. Jobs may be displaced or exported. Lives may be sacrificed to social media addiction. Public opinion may be falsely manufactured by expert psyops and propaganda. Complex algorithms, ultimately created by all-too-fallible humans, may run amok in financial markets. The new frontier of Artificial Intelligence, again ultimately based on intrinsic human biases and frailties, may gradually reinvent itself without human control, as already seen in its frequent hallucinatory presentations of newly manufactured “realities”. Yet we cannot, in all our technological hubris, seek to become transhuman and replace all our personal endeavors with computational commiseration. An emoji is not truly a human emotion directly expressed to another. Some human activities are too important to defer to bits and bytes. In our Constitutional democratic republic, we the people who choose to accept our responsibility to exercise our authority over the government designed so long ago to serve us, not rule us, must be sure our desires for who and how we are to be served are unequivocally expressed and recorded. That is best accomplished by confirming your identity to a local precinct worker, voting a paper ballot with a handheld writing implement, depositing your ballot under witness to a secure container, and then having all those precinct votes counted and reported by that precinct and delivered to the central election office for physical confirmation. Some old schools are still the best schools.