DEMO IMAGECAST VOTING MACHINE SOFTWARE

Michael Anderson, elections director for Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County, said “voters want it.” The county offers voters both machine- and hand-marked ballots.

They like them because the touchscreens are familiar to voters, looking and feeling like what they have been using for nearly two decades, and officials can use one voting method for everyone. “There are a huge number of reasons to reject today’s ballot-marking devices - except for limited use as assistive devices for those unable to mark a paper ballot themselves,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist who co-authored the voting technology history “Broken Ballots.” ’īut election officials see ballot-marking devices as improvements over paperless touchscreens, which were used by 27 percent of voters in 2018. Voters need more time to cast ballots and the machine’s high costs have prompted election officials to limit how many they purchase. That happened most spectacularly in November when ES&S’s top-of-the-line ExpressVote XL debuted in a Pennsylvania county.Įven without technical troubles, the new machines can lead to longer lines, potentially reducing turnout. Tampering aside, some of the newer ballot-marking machines have stumbled badly in actual votes.

DEMO IMAGECAST VOTING MACHINE SOFTWARE

At last year’s DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas, it took tinkerers at the ‘Voting Village’ not even eight hours to hack two older ballot-marking devices.Ī voter casts a ballot on a new Election Systems & Software ExpressVote XL voting machine, an electronic voting system with a backup paper trail, during a practice demonstration in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2019. The machines’ certification has often been streamlined in the rush to get machines in place for presidential primaries.īallot-marking devices were not conceived as primary vote-casting tools but as accessible options for people with disabilities.Ĭritics see them as vulnerable to hacking. So have counties in much of Texas, as well as California’s Los Angeles County and all of Georgia, Delaware and South Carolina. Pivotal counties in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina have bought ballot-marking machines. voters will be using ballot-marking machines this year, compared with less than 2% in 2018, according to Verified Voting, which tracks voting technology. Spokeswoman Katina Granger said the company’s ballot-marking machines’ accuracy and security “have been proven through thousands of hours of testing and tens of thousands of successful elections.” Dominion declined to comment for this story. A University of Michigan study determined that only 7 percent of participants in a mock election notified poll workers when the names on their printed receipts did not match the candidates they voted for.ĮS&S rejects those scenarios. Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate.Įven on machines that do not use bar codes, voters may not notice if a hack or programming error mangled their choices. That’s a problem, researchers say: Voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices. Some of the most popular ballot-marking machines, made by industry leaders Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot decipher. They have been vigorously promoted by the three voting equipment vendors that control 88 percent of the U.S. The most pricey solution available, they are at least twice as expensive as the hand-marked paper ballot option.

South Carolina voters will use them in Saturday’s primary. Unlike touchscreen-only machines, they print out paper records that are scanned by optical readers. intelligence agencies fear even worse problems.īut instead of choosing simple, hand-marked paper ballots that are most resistant to tampering because paper cannot be hacked, many are opting for pricier technology that computer security experts consider almost as risky as earlier discredited electronic systems.Ĭalled ballot-marking devices, the machines have touchscreens for registering voter choice. presidential race, state and local officials have scrambled to acquire more trustworthy equipment for this year’s election, when U.S. In the rush to replace insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines after Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S.

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