ArgumentHow New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy

The United States has a disturbing habit of investing in unvetted new touchscreen voting machines that later prove disastrous. Jennifer Cohn writes in the New York Review of Books that as we barrel toward what is set to be the most important election in a generation, Congress appears poised to fund another generation of risky touchscreen voting machines called universal use Ballot Marking Devices (or BMDs), which function as electronic pens, marking your selections on paper on your behalf. “Although vendors, election officials, and others often refer to this paper as a ‘paper ballot,’ it differs from a traditional hand-marked paper ballot in that it is marked by a machine, which can be hacked without detection in a manual recount or audit,” she writes. “These pricey and unnecessary systems are sold by opaquely financed vendors who use donations and other gifts to entice election officials to buy them.”

She adds:

Most leading election security experts instead recommend hand-marked paper ballots as a primary voting system, with an exception for voters with disabilities. These experts include Professor Rich DeMillo of Georgia Tech, Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Professor Philip Stark of the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Duncan Buell of the University of South Carolina, Professor Alex J. Halderman of the University of Michigan, and Harri Hursti, who is “considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic of electronic voting security” and is “famously known for his successful attempt to demonstrate how the Diebold Election Systems’ voting machines could be hacked.” These scholars warn that even a robust manual audit, known as a Risk Limiting Audit, cannot detect whether a BMD-marked paper ballot has been hacked. BMDs instead put the burden on voters themselves to detect whether such ballots include fraudulent or erroneous machine marks or omissions—even though studies already show that many voters won’t notice.