Republicans these days are very concerned about election certainty. Partly fueled by the ‘Big Lie’, the unfounded allegation that there was widespread fraud in last year’s election, Republican lawmakers across the country have been pushing aggressively to enact new laws to prevent what they see as a considered nightmare scenario, would happen again. While the motivation to improve election certainty is false, the apparent goal is not – everyone agrees that a safe election is important for democracy. Experts believe that there is one very effective way for state legislators to make the voting process safer: pass legislation to update voting machines. But instead of prioritizing this effort, many Republicans are more focused on restricting access to voters.
“It would be great to see that the focus on election security leads to more investment in better, more reliable systems,” said Mark Lindeman, co-director of Verified Voting, a non-partisan electoral security organization.
According to security experts, the gold standard for securing the ballot papers has been marked by hand. This is because a paper letter eliminates the risk of technical problems or certain types of malicious acts (think of burglary) that can alter or destroy your voice, and deal with any issues with a version. As a result, most states currently use hand-marked paper ballots or have voting machines that generate paper records to verify.
But in six states – Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas – some or all voters still vote according to machines that have no paper record, according to data from Verified Voting. Although there is no evidence that these machines were hacked during an election, it is technically possible, and it is also prone to all sorts of undesirable functions, including the loss of votes. There is no paper backing to audit, and these machines are the kind of election security liability that politicians are invested in correcting.
But according to FiveThirtyEight’s previous reporting and additional calls I made for this story, there has been little or no attempt in the past six months to prioritize the update machines with a system that contains a paper record.
- In Indiana, where 34.2 percent of registered voters live in a jurisdiction that uses machines without a paper record, a bill has been introduced that prohibits voting machines from being connected to the Internet. When a Democratic state legislator introduced an amendment that also requires the machines to have paper backup by July 2021, it was voted down.
- No recent bills are in Louisiana, which uses exclusively paperless voice machines, to require a change to paper records. Louisiana’s Secretary of State twice tried to start the process of updating the state’s systems, and twice he was prevented. The state recently resisted collaboration with Dominion Voting Systems, the firm that was among unfounded right-wing allegations that its machines changed votes to favor then-candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election.
- There have been no recent legislative efforts to update Mississippi’s outdated, paperless voting system, which leaves 56.8 percent of registered voters voting on machines without a paper record.
- New jersey more than a decade ago first passed a required paper record for all voting machines, but has never set a deadline for provinces to upgrade equipment. So most do not: only seven provinces use a system with any kind of paper record. Bills introduced this year include a ban on voting machines manufactured abroad, but nothing on the release of funds and the setting of a deadline to meet the required paper backing.
- A bill has been introduced this year Tennessee, where 58.8 percent of registered voters use paperless machines, voting machines would be banned altogether (possibly a problem for disabled access), but it was withdrawn two weeks later. In another bill, provinces would have to make sure that future machines purchased had a paper trail, but that did not fail in committee.
- Texas is the exception, with two separate bills – one passed by the state Senate and the other by a House committee – requiring voting machines to have a paper record. It will update the equipment for more than 20 percent of voters who still use machines without any paper trail. The Senate version even provides a funding plan, something that other bills aimed at electoral infrastructure are lacking.
Other ways to improve election security, such as requiring paper backups for electronic voting books, have also been largely ignored since 2020. Instead, state lawmakers flooded the bag with bills related to the duration of early voting periods, the placement of the ballot paper. boxes and or volunteers voters standing in line can give a bottle of water. Meanwhile, only a handful of equipment upgrade bills – often without funding – have slipped in, only to lose momentum and die before a committee is reached. And experts have argued that many of the bills is to gain traction will actually impair electoral certainty by limiting the opportunity to vote, which puts the existing system under pressure. If the majority of voters are forced to vote in one way, in one place and during a very limited window, a malicious actor only needs to direct the place to disrupt thousands of ballots.
Efforts are underway outside the state capitals to make upgrading election machines a priority. At the federal level, the extensive House-passed ballot bill requires universal use of paper ballots, while some jurisdictions such as Harris County in Texas at the local level have the responsibility to update machines to include a paper trail. But amid great concern for the security of U.S. elections, there was little political will to make some of the most influential changes.
“Unfortunately, I think the idea of security was basically an excuse to restrict access,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the Brennan Center’s election reform program. “If we really want to ensure that our elections are reliable and transparent, we can do so without restricting access.”