The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete

Remember when everyone hated hanging chads and wanted computerized voting? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Six days after Memphis voters went to the polls last October to elect a mayor and other city officials, a local computer programmer named Bennie Smith sat on his couch after work to catch up on e-mail.

The vote had gone off about as well as elections usually do in Memphis, which means not well at all. The proceedings were full of the technical mishaps that have plagued Shelby County, where Memphis is the seat, since officials switched to electronic voting machines in 2006. Servers froze, and the results were hours late. But experts at the county election commission assured both candidates and voters that the problems were minor and the final tabulation wasn’t affected. That story might have held up if Smith, a financial software developer and church organist, hadn’t been conducting an election night experiment. In his free time, Smith crunches voter-turnout data with programs he’s written to help local politicians target their direct-mail campaigns. Like Smith, most of his clients are black, and he had bet a friend 10 candy bars that the polling place at Unity Christian Church, a black congregation a mile from Graceland, would have a big turnout. The precinct, No. 77-01, is a Democratic stronghold and has one of the largest concentrations of African American voters in a city known for racially fractured politics. Smith’s guess: 600 votes. When the polls closed at 7 p.m., he was at Unity Christian and snapped some photos with his BlackBerry of the precinct’s poll tape—literally a tally of the votes printed on white paper tape and posted on a church window. Since the printouts come directly from the voting machines at each location, election officials consider it the most trustworthy count. According to the tape, Smith’s guess was close: 546 people had cast ballots. When he got an e-mail a week later with Shelby County’s first breakdown of each precinct’s voting, he ran down the list to the one precinct where he knew the tally for sure. The count for Unity Christian showed only 330 votes. Forty percent of the votes had disappeared. If you’re an election official, losing votes is a very big deal, but it presents a special problem in Tennessee. Most counties in the state don’t keep paper records of ballots, so there are no physical votes locked in a room somewhere, ready to be recounted. When underperforming voting equipment in Florida nearly created a constitutional crisis in the 2000 presidential race, officials at least knew what went wrong. The aging Votomatic machines were supposed to be cleaned regularly, which election officials in several counties failed to do. So when voters choosing between Al Gore and George W. Bush inserted their readable punch-card ballots into the devices, they often created a half-punched piece of chaff rather than a clean cut, and entered the term “hanging chad” into the American political lexicon. Shelby County uses a GEMS tabulator—for Global Election Management System—which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the county’s election headquarters. The tabulator is the brains of the system. It monitors the voting machines, sorts out which machines have delivered data and which haven’t, and tallies the results. As voting machines check in and their votes are included in the official count, each machine’s status turns green on the GEMS master panel. A red light means the upload has failed. At the end of Memphis’s election night in October 2015, there was no indication from the technician running Shelby County’s GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadn’t checked in or that any votes had gone missing, according to election commission e-mails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smith’s poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters. For the members of Congress, who in 2002 provided almost $4 billion to modernize voting technology through the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA—Congress’s response to Bush v. Gore—this probably wasn’t the result they had in mind. But voting by computer has been a technological answer in search of a problem. Those World War II-era pull-lever voting machines may not have been the most elegant of contraptions, but they were easy to use and didn’t crash. Georgia, which in 2002 set out to be an early national model for the transition to computerized voting, shows the unintended consequences. It spent $54 million in HAVA funding to buy 20,000 touchscreen voting machines from Diebold, standardizing its technology across the state. Today, the machines are past their expected life span of 10 years. (With no federal funding in sight, Georgia doesn’t expect to be able to replace those machines until 2020.) The vote tabulators are certified to run only on Windows 2000, which Microsoft stopped supporting six years ago. To support the older operating system, the state had to hire a contractor to custom-build 100 servers—which, of course, are more vulnerable to hacking because they can no longer get current security updates. After California declared almost all of the electronic voting machines in the state unfit for use in 2007 for failing basic security tests, San Diego County put its decertified machines in storage. It has been paying the bill to warehouse them ever since: No one wants to buy them, and county rules prohibit throwing millions of dollars’ worth of machines in the trash bin. This muddle is about to collide head-on with one of the most incendiary presidential campaigns in modern U.S. history, one in which the candidates have already questioned whether votes will be counted properly. Donald Trump warned supporters in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 1 that “we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged.” Hillary Clinton and top Democrats have accused Russia of trying to manipulate the election by hacking. FBI Director James Comey, testifying before Congress on Sept. 28, said that states should be vigilant against online intrusions “because there’s no doubt that some bad actors have been poking around.” The real threat isn’t a thrown election. Nationwide electoral fraud would be extremely difficult to pull off, mostly because votes in the U.S. are tallied by more than 7,000 counties and townships. Hacking enough of them to tip the balance would be a monumental undertaking—and one certain to be detected. (Tabulators are designed not to be connected to the internet at all.) Rather, the risk is a violation of trust: that Election Day mishaps borne of outdated, poorly engineered technology will confirm and amplify the fear pervading this campaign. In Shelby County, multiple lawsuits over the past 10 years have alleged that voting machines and computerized tabulators have been used to steal or suppress votes—deepening the distrust of a system some locals see as stacked against them. Smith was never one of those. His energies went into building data analytics that candidates would need if they wanted to stop complaining and get elected. But after the votes disappeared from Unity Christian last October, something changed. “I kind of knew this would be a place where this could happen, but this morbid feeling came over me—are you serious?” he remembers thinking. “Is this how politics is supposed to work? Is anybody’s vote safe?”

The voting technology business, after a frenetic decade of mergers, acquisitions, and renamings, is dominated by just a few companies: Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, and Dominion Voting Systems are the largest. Neither has much in common with the giants of computing. Apple, Dell, IBM, and HP have all steered clear of the sector, which generates, according to an analysis by Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, about $300 million in annual revenue. For context, Apple generates about $300 million in revenue every 12 hours.

During the dramatic Florida recount, Mark Earley was an election official in Leon County, which is mostly made up of the city of Tallahassee, the state capital. That put Earley at the center of a global spectacle, in charge of counting the 103,000 votes in the county, which were cast on optically scanned ballots, a novelty then. State troopers armed with machine guns stood outside the courthouse, protecting the proceedings from crowds of screaming protesters and international TV crews. Earley knew the controversy would create a big opportunity for voting tech companies, and they began hiring local officials like him. Sandra Mortham, a former Florida secretary of state, was hired by ES&S, based in Omaha. (Mortham also represented the Florida Association of Counties, and before long ES&S was the only voting system endorsed by the association.) Earley took a job at Global Election Systems, a smaller Canadian company that he thought had better products. Global Election Systems, with U.S. offices in McKinney, Texas, was sold to Diebold in 2002, as companies merged to chase the HAVA billions. Earley went to Diebold as well, where he liked the travel and the chance to share what he’d learned with officials in other states. But this was no Silicon Valley, with its stock options and office juice bars. Managers at Diebold’s election division in McKinney went to CiCis Pizza for the all-you-can-eat buffet. “You had to try and go when it was busy—that way they had to keep replacing the food,” Earley says. “Otherwise it got cold and stiff.” By 2006 every state but New York had dumped their pull-lever and punch-card machines in favor of computerized voting. The voting tech vendors rushed systems to market, often without adequate testing, to meet procurement deadlines set by hundreds of counties and states. According to Earley, the systems often had software flaws or too little memory, problems the company’s executives figured could be fixed later. Before Global was sold, Earley says, its executives were frantically trying to solve the problem of recurring revenue. Consumers were willing to replace mobile phones or computers every two or three years to get the latest features, creating big profits and fast innovation cycles. County buyers wanted electronic voting machines to last a decade or more. Earley believes Global ran into trouble because its products were too reliable, so there were too few returning customers. He says the competition solved the revenue problem by focusing less on making equipment and more on long-term contracts. It was an enhancement of the old razors-and-blades strategy: Sell the razors cheap and make money on the blades, and make even more money by making the razors so hard to use that customers pay you to give them a shave. When Allen County, Ohio, replaced its old voting machines in 2005 with equipment from ES&S, officials didn’t realize they’d also be stuck with a service fee of $40,000 per year to help run an election system that handled about 70,000 votes. “When we found out the cost, our jaws just about hit the floor,” says Ken Terry, who was election director there until this year. [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/]