The most pricey solution available, they are at
least twice as expensive as the hand-marked
paper ballot option. They have been vigorously
promoted by the three voting equipment vendors
that control 88 percent of the U.S. market.
Some of the most popular ballot-marking
machines, made by industry leaders Election
Systems & Software and Dominion Voting
Systems, register votes in bar codes that the
human eye cannot decipher. That’s a problem,
researchers say: Voters could end up with
printouts that accurately spell out the names of
the candidates they picked, but, because of a
hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices.
Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated,
voters would never know that their ballots
benefited another candidate.
Even on machines that do not use bar codes,
voters may not notice if a hack or programming
error mangled their choices. A University of
Michigan study determined that only 7 percent
of participants in a mock election notified
poll workers when the names on their printed
receipts did not match the candidates they
voted for.
ES&S rejects those scenarios. Spokeswoman
Katina Granger said the company’s ballot-
marking machines’ accuracy and security “have
been proven through thousands of hours of
testing and tens of thousands of successful
elections.” Dominion declined to comment for
this story.
Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. voters will be using ballot-
marking machines this year, compared with less
than 2% in 2018, according to Verified Voting,
which tracks voting technology.