Voting Machines: Overview

Introduction

The use of electronic voting machines in the United States rose sharply in the early twenty-first century, due in part to both controversy over paper ballots in the 2000 presidential election and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. Two of the most popular types of voting machines are direct-recording electronic machines (DREs) and optical scan computers. They offer many potential benefits over previous voting methods, including faster calculation and reporting of results, ease of use, and reduction of ambiguous votes. However, they—especially DREs—have also been heavily criticized, including for vulnerability to tampering; problems with verification, recounts, and audits; and the influence of the private companies that manufacture the machines.

The controversy over voting machines became a major public debate in 2003 when investigations revealed significant security flaws in the software, hardware, and election procedures involving many DRE machines, including those manufactured by Diebold Inc. The issue escalated further when Diebold and other electronic voting machine suppliers were revealed to have ties to the Republican Party, leading to accusations of potential election fraud. Many voting rights advocates called for strict anti-tampering measures, including independent testing of machines and the creation of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs). Over two dozen states enacted regulations that required some kind of VVPAT program in place for the 2008 presidential election. Officials, scientists, and politicians, however, disagree about the usefulness of VVPATs in light of the significant cost involved, as well as potential problems caused by power failures or jammed printers.

Debate over the security of voting machines returned to the headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign. As the scandal over Russian tampering in the election unfolded, experts began to raise the possibility of an attack on voting machines directly impacting voting results. After Republican nominee Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by over two million votes, many activists called for an investigation. While substantial evidence emerged that Russian-backed hackers did attempt to influence the election, no proof was found that direct hacks of voting machines were made. Still, given the aging machines used by several states and ongoing cybersecurity fears involving paperless voting machines, calls for replacement and reform continued. The issue drew much attention in the lead up to both the 2018 and 2020 national elections.

Understanding the Discussion

Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines: Also known as "E-voting machines," these computers record votes using touch screens, buttons, or keyboards. Votes are stored in memory and DRE machines are not networked. Individual memory cards are removed and put into another computer for final tallying.

Help America Vote Act (HAVA): Legislation enacted in 2002 to provide funds to states for the replacement of punch card voting systems, among other election mandates.

Lever voting machines: A mechanical system in which a lever is assigned to each candidate's name, and when pulled, registers a vote that is tallied by the machine.

Optical scan voting machines: Also known as "marksense," a type of electronic voting system in which voters first record their choices on a paper ballot and then feed the ballot into a scanner that reads the marks and tabulates the results. The system has been used for testing in educational institutions for decades.

Punch card voting system: A voting system featuring a paper ballot placed inside a holder so that the candidates' names are aligned next to holes; to select a candidate the voter punches a hole through the ballot. The piece of paper removed by the punch is known as a "chad." In the 2000 US presidential election, "hanging chads" (incomplete chads still hanging onto the ballot from one corner), "pregnant chads" (incomplete chads attached on all sides), and "dimpled chads" (chads that show an indentation but are firmly attached) were evidence of the drawbacks of this type of voting system.

Undervotes: Votes that are cast but not recorded; also votes not cast for a particular office on an otherwise completed ballot.

Vote flipping: Also called "vote switching," a computer glitch that has been recorded in several states, in which a DRE records a different candidate than the one selected by the voter.

Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPAT): Official term for printer-generated paper records that can be verified by independent organizations and provide a means for auditing election results.

History

The use of voting machines in US elections began in the late nineteenth century, after a history of voice voting followed by paper ballots that were tallied by hand. Machines could tabulate votes faster and more accurately than humans, and so were adopted in most urban areas. By the mid-twentieth century, more than half of American voters were using lever machines. During the 1980s, manufacturers stopped making the machines and by the 1996 election, only 20 percent of voters used them.

Punch card systems became available during the 1960s. While many rural counties with smaller populations and budgets preferred punch card systems, they were also used in some urban areas, including Los Angeles. In 1996, nearly 40 percent of voters used a punch card system.

Regardless of the method, elections have always been vulnerable to fraud, human error, and/or malfunction of equipment. However, the extremely close 2000 presidential election illustrated the real consequences of these problems, and left many Americans with a lack of confidence in the voting system.

In Georgia, over 94,000 paper ballots went uncounted during the 2000 election. In Arkansas, a few hundred absentee votes were "misplaced." In Florida, the state that would ultimately decide the election, several embarrassing glitches occurred that eventually influenced the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The first fiasco occurred in Volusia County, Florida, where a glitch in electronic voting machines resulted in a 16,000-vote deduction for Al Gore. Television news stations responded by declaring George W. Bush the winner, until the glitch was uncovered and the lead went to Gore. Investigators later determined that the problem was caused by an improperly loaded memory card in computers manufactured by Global Election Systems.

Attention was also centered in Palm Beach County, Florida, where a punch card ballot referred to as the "butterfly ballot" may have confused some voters who then punched the wrong hole. Officials in that county and others also dealt with a high percentage of "hanging chads," "pregnant chads," and "dimpled chads," that would invalidate ballots. When the final tally was announced, Al Gore had lost Florida, and so the national election, by roughly 1,200 votes. In response to the multiple voting problems, Gore requested a recount in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties, areas that are strongly Democratic. The recount brought Gore several hundred votes, but he still lost Florida by just 327 votes.

In 2002, the Bush administration passed the Help America Vote Act, which provided funds to states to replace punch card systems and lever machines with DRE machines, then widely thought to be infallible. However, there were subsequently several incidents resulting in miscalculations and vote flipping on DRE machines. Such problems ignited debate over voting machines, especially paperless systems.

Controversy erupted in 2003 when journalist Beverly Harris located an unencrypted FTP (file transfer protocol) site from which voting software designed by Diebold, Inc. could be downloaded. An investigation by computer scientists provided additional security flaws in the software, hardware, and election procedures involving Diebold's DRE machines.

Some Democrats saw the potential for election fraud when the press obtained a letter attributed to Walden O'Dell, then the chief executive officer for Diebold and a top Republican fundraiser. In this letter he stated his commitment to reelecting President George W. Bush in 2004. Some of the other companies that supply electronic voting machines were also linked to the Republican Party. Democrats subsequently drove the debate by insisting upon anti-tampering guarantees that would include testing conducted by independent groups and a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) produced by computer printers.

After the Diebold allegations surfaced, computer experts from Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and other universities presented research that corroborated previous findings. A report prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a government agency asked to conduct research in conjunction with the Help America Vote Act, also found security flaws in electronic voting systems. The NIST offered many guidelines for setting up, validating, and distributing electronic voting machine software, as well as suggestions for detecting fraud.

Diebold was the target of lawsuits in California, Ohio, and Connecticut. In July 2006, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a lawsuit against Diebold in US District Court alleging that the company misrepresented their voting machines as being secure to state and federal governments. Lawsuits were also filed in Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York, Colorado, and New Mexico to prevent the use of DRE machines in future elections. Some of the lawsuits were filed prior to the 2006 election, but states that already owned electronic voting machines used them despite additional statements by some politicians that voters should use absentee ballots instead. There were glitches noted in a dozen states, but no major events of fraudulent activity were reported during the 2006 election.

However, Democrats investigated a fluke in Sarasota County, Florida, where Republican Vern Buchanan won a United States House of Representative race over Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes. Suspecting that either voter fraud or malfunction could play a role in explaining why as many as 18,000 votes may not have been recorded, Democrats asked for a revote in that county. It was during Christine Jennings' challenge to the results that a letter of support for George W. Bush from the chair of Diebold came under public scrutiny, and added to questions about the legitimacy of the voting machines.

On Election Day in November 2012, voters across the nation experienced an array of problems with electronic-voting machines. One of the most common issues was an error known as "flipping," wherein a vote is flipped to another candidate due to a voting machine that is not adjusted properly. In Pennsylvania, for example, a video documented a touch screen machine that automatically transferred a vote for President Obama to Mitt Romney. Other incidents of flipping were reported in Nevada, Texas, Colorado, and North Carolina.

In addition to calibration errors, machine breakdowns in Virginia created wait times of more than five hours. In Toledo, Ohio, it was reported that machines were having problems counting ballots. These issues generated further debate over the accuracy and fairness of voting machines.

Voting Machines Today

The 2016 presidential election would once again bring concerns over voting machines to the forefront. One of the critical issues in the campaign between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump was the allegation that numerous hacks of email servers and information leaks targeting Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were the work of hackers sponsored by the Russian government. Late in the campaign, substantial evidence suggested Russia indeed used numerous methods to attempt to sway the election in favor of Trump. This raised fears that voting machines, especially antiquated systems with no VVPATs still in use in some states, could be easily hacked and directly impact the results of the election. Trump dismissed such worries, though like other Republicans he stoked fears that in-person voter fraud would be widespread (despite statistical evidence that such fraud is virtually nonexistent).

When Trump won the election in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote—just as Bush had won the 2000 election—calls for an investigation of voter machine hacking increased. Green Party candidate Jill Stein led efforts to impose a recount in some states, though these largely failed. Experts noted that in several states, such as Pennsylvania, the continued use of machines with no paper trails made a recount essentially impossible anyway. Evidence continued to mount that Russia influenced the election, but US intelligence agencies found no proof that voting machines were directly targeted to produce tampered ballots. Still, analysts from both ends of the political spectrum suggested that, given the apparent ease with which Russia pressured the election process, the aging and problematic system of voting machines remained a major vulnerability for free and fair elections.

Concerns over election security were noted in the 2018 Congressional elections, during which fourteen states—including the key swing state of Pennsylvania—used at least some paperless DREs. In twelve other states, some voters used originally paperless machines retrofitted to produce a paper trail. Several states enacted or planned efforts to fully or partially replace outdated voting machines with paper-based systems before the 2020 presidential election. However, according to a study by Politico published in 2019, many jurisdictions had no plans to replace their vulnerable voting machines. Estimates of the cost of fully replacing vulnerable voting machines ranged from nearly $600 million to over $3 billion, while partisan politics posed another major roadblock. Intelligence experts noted that the 2020 election would likely see further attempts at foreign interference, heightening the need for cybersecurity measures around voting machines. In light of such concerns, in June 2019 the US House of Representatives passed the Securing America's Federal Elections (SAFE) Act, legislation that would require the use of voter-marked paper ballots in federal elections and prohibit voting machines or ballot scanners from being connected to the internet, among other stipulations related to election security. The bill was subsequently introduced to the US Senate, where it was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration.

States responded to the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic by implementing measures to make voting safer and easier for elections held in 2020, including the presidential elections. That year, Joe Biden, a Democrat, beat incumbent president Donald Trump, a Republican, in the presidential election, prompting Trump and his supporters to allege that Democrats had stolen the election through fraud. At the center of the debate was controversy over the use of voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems, a private company that provides voting technology to jurisdictions across the US and which Trump and his legal advisers accused of deleting votes. Though all of Trump's allegations were disproven in multiple court cases, by February 2022 Republican-dominated legislatures in nineteen states passed voting laws that reversed voting practices put in place during the pandemic and/or instituted new provisions. The unfounded claims also caused many experts to look more closely at private companies like Dominion that play a significant role in running US elections.

Co-Author

Chuck Goodwin holds a Master of Arts degree in Political Science with a focus on International Relations from Governors State University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from St. Ambrose University. For over a decade he has been teaching a variety of history and political science courses throughout various Illinois community colleges, including Moraine Valley, Black Hawk and Illinois Valley Community Colleges. His interests are primarily in US Government, International Relations, History of Central Asia, History of the Middle East, Military History, and US and British History.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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