Electronic voting in the United States
Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, adjudication machines to allow corrections to improperly filled in items, and web servers to display tallies to the public.
Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government which developed the 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG).
[4] Certification takes two years, costs a million dollars, and is needed again for any equipment update, so election machines are a difficult market.
The voter may mark the paper directly, usually in a specific location for each candidate, then mail it or put it in a ballot box.
[13][14] Some places put a privacy screen over the BMD's display, so voters must be "aggressive" when pressing the touchscreen to register a vote.
In these types of vote tabulators, any defect in the scanning apparatus, such as dirt, scratches on the lens, or chads of paper, may mar the image of the ballot.
Reasons include tears, water damage, folds which prevent feeding through scanners and voters selecting candidates by circling them or other abnormal marks.
The system may also provide a means for communicating with a central location for reporting results and receiving updates,[81] which is an access point for hacks and bugs to arrive.
Email, fax, phone apps, modems, and web portals transmit information through the internet, between computers at both ends, so they are subject to errors and hacks at the origin, destination and in between.
As of 2018–19, election machines are online, to transmit results between precinct scanners and central tabulators, in some counties in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
This "remote access vote by mail" (RAVBM) avoids transmitting votes online, while letting distant voters avoid waiting for a mailed ballot, and letting voters with disabilities use assistive technologies to fill in the ballot privately and independently, such as screen readers, paddles or sip and puff if they already have them on their computer.
[104] States which allow individual voters to submit completed ballots electronically in the United States are:[105] The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) lets overseas citizens and all military and merchant marine voters get ballots electronically (email, fax, or web site).
Seven states allow submission through secure web sites: AL, AZ, CO (if needed), MA, MI,[106] NC, ND, and WV.
These seven and the remaining 25 states have a mix of rules allowing email or fax:[105] AK, CA, DE, DC, FL, HI, IN, IA, KS, LA, ME, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NJ, NM, OK, OR, RI, SC, TX (for danger, combat zones or space[107][108]), UT, and WA.
It only took the hackers, a team of computer scientists, thirty-six hours to find the list of the government's passwords and break into the system.
[132] In the November 2016 general election, rejections ranged from none in Alabama and Puerto Rico, to 6% of ballots returned in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky and New York.
[142][143][144][145] Voters with short names are at a disadvantage, since even experts make more mistakes on signatures with fewer "turning points and intersections".
[147] In 2023 a contractor, WSD Digital, developing a voter registration and e-pollbook system for New Hampshire put in code to link to websites in Russia and used open source software managed by a Russian.
[165] A McAfee expert said decentralization makes defense hard and for "a very determined group, trying to compromise this system, I think it ends up playing more into their favor than against them.
[166] The Brennan Center summarized almost 200 errors in election machines from 2002 to 2008, many of which happened repeatedly in different jurisdictions, which had no clearinghouse to learn from each other.
[73] Vulnerabilities identified at the 2019 DEFCON Las Vegas hackers convention had been previously noted and "included poor physical security protections that could allow undetected tampering; easily guessable hard-coded system credentials; potential for operating system manipulations; and remote attacks that could compromise memory or integrity checks or cause denial of service.
The CEO of Free and Fair, an open source vendor, said the cheapest way to improve security is for each election office to hire a computer student as a white hat hacker to conduct penetration tests.
[176] The companies in question had until the February 2008 California Presidential Primaries to fix their security issues and ensure that election results could be closely audited.
[185]Thus election machines are subject to "class breaks", which are attacks, deliverable by annual updates, against the underlying operating systems and drivers.
Four states reuse the same machines or ballot images as the election, so errors can persist, CT, IL, MD, NV.
[220] In the summer of 2004, the Legislative Affairs Committee of the Association of Information Technology Professionals issued a nine-point proposal for national standards for electronic voting.
The U.S. Senate companion bill version introduced by Senator Bill Nelson from Florida on November 1, 2007, necessitates the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to continue researching and to provide methods of paper ballot voting for those with disabilities, those who do not primarily speak English, and those who do not have a high literacy rating.
Also, it requires states to provide the federal office with audit reports from the hand counting of the voter verified paper ballots.
The bill's provisions include designation of the infrastructure used to administer elections as critical infrastructure; funding for states to upgrade the security of the information technology and cybersecurity elements of election-related IT systems; and requirements for durable, readable paper ballots and manual audits of results of elections.
