Pivotal counties in the crucial states of
Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina have
bought ballot-marking machines. So have
counties in much of Texas, as well as California’s
Los Angeles County and all of Georgia, Delaware
and South Carolina. The machines’ certification
has often been streamlined in the rush to get
machines in place for presidential primaries.
Ballot-marking devices were not conceived as
primary vote-casting tools but as accessible
options for people with disabilities.
Critics see them as vulnerable to hacking. 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.
Tampering aside, some of the newer
ballot-marking machines have stumbled
badly in actual votes. That happened most
spectacularly in November when ES&S’s
top-of-the-line ExpressVote XL debuted in a
Pennsylvania county.
Even without technical troubles, the new
machines can lead to longer lines, potentially
reducing turnout. Voters need more time to
cast ballots and the machine’s high costs have
prompted election officials to limit how many
they purchase.
“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.”