Governor Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order 35 to assure voting security in the state of Virginia. The summary and the Order itself are worth a read. While some of it talks about existing procedures, together it’s an excellent foundation for assuring election integrity. The procedures include effective voting list maintenance, ballot security and machine testing, using only paper ballots. If all states adhered to this standard, our elections would be more secure than they are.
The biggest vulnerability remains the numerous local voting machines (ballot counters), supporting computers and officials. In this post, I describe the intense feelings some local officials have and their motivation to alter the election results. I propose a solution that eliminates all the propriety hardware with its attendant vulnerability to administrative corruption. Such a system cannot be built in time for this year’s elections. However, there are measures that can be taken this year that will address the vulnerabilities for corruption by local officials that are unaddressed by Executive Order 35.
The issue is the ballot counting machines are proprietary computer-based devices produced in small quantities by specialized companies to meet widely varied state-by-state requirements. In addition, they need to be coordinated with the design of the ballots, which cover not only national and state-wide voting, but also county-wide and often local elections on a single ballot. Each design needs to be coordinated with the ballot machines that will be fed the filled-out ballots. A ballot machine’s administrator sets it up for reading a specific ballot design, with a specific list of candidates and questions. Having the machine certified in general by bureaucrats is useless. What matters is whether the machine has been set up to read the specific ballot types it will be fed, and its ability to do so accurately. Then it matters if the machine is able to recognize that it has been fed the wrong type of ballot and refuse to process it. How are the results stored and given out for totalling? Is it on a display that a human enters into a computer? If so, using what program? How are the numerous ballot types and thus vote totals handled. And how is this able to be displayed along with the voter registrations, as called for in the EO? What computer using what software coordinates with all the local voting place computers to track totals?
I hope that the total transformation of local voting I have proposed happens in time for the next election cycle. Gov Youngkin’s EO handles most of the key issues of voter list maintenance and paper ballot handling and tracking. Paying some attention to the remaining vulnerabilities in the administration of the ballot counting machines and associated data handling would cure the largest remaining vulnerability short of eliminating the proprietary machines altogether.
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