How To Spot a Bad Voting Machine

One that "can add, delete, or change votes on individual ballots."

“… let me explain it for you. The ExpressVote XL, if hacked, can add, delete, or change votes on individual ballots — and no voting machine is immune from hacking … And let me explain some more: The ExpressVote XL, if adopted, will deteriorate our security and our ability to have confidence in our elections, and indeed it is a bad voting machine. And expensive, too!”

-Dr. Andrew Appel, Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University

Why Do We Use Voting Machines?

The short answer to this is that we use voting machines in the U.S. because people were cheating so often during hand counts of elections that reformers wanted a more neutral way to count votes.

“The Count. Probably no part of election administration is conducted so poorly as the count of the ballots. Election contests always bring to light glaring mistakes and irregularities, to say nothing of downright frauds … Recounts in Chicago and Philadelphia have indicated such wide variations that apparently the precinct officers did not take the trouble to count the ballots at all.”

-Dr. Joseph P. Harris, Election Administration in the United States; 1934, The Brookings Institution

The American Democracy Myth

When you study democracy in school, they really don’t give you the full picture. They tell you about the three branches of government, how a bill is made, and that America is the birthplace of democracy and we do it the best.

However, U.S. elections have been horribly corrupt from the very beginning. This has fortunately been documented meticulously by a couple academics to whom we owe a great debt. One is Tracy Campbell, the pulitzer-prize nominated historian who wrote, “Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, An American Political Tradition —1742 - 2004.

Here are a few selections from Dr. Campbell’s introduction:

“… by that time, I had come to know something about American politics that most people were not prepared to accept as an ongoing reality: namely, that the process itself was deeply corrupted and had been so for over two hundred years.”

-Dr. Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote, 2005

I strongly encourage you to read Dr. Campbell’s entire book. It is eye-opening, to say the least. It is out of print, so a new copy is hard to come by. You can read it for free through the internet archive here. You can buy it used here.

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

For the first ten years or so I spent researching and investigating the issue of election security I was banging my head against a metaphorical wall over and over again.

1. Weren’t these beginner-level issues security lapses that could be readily patched if someone set out to improve them?

2. Was it possible it was actually getting worse over time?

3. Why, why, why were the voting machines so insecure?

The answer to these questions is:

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

3. It’s a feature, not a bug (in my opinion).

I don’t agonize over it much anymore.

It is my opinion that the deeply troubling security issues that we see repeated year after year, iteration after iteration, in the election technology provided by the largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., are a series of deliberate backdoors that make it relatively easy for someone with a certain level of technical skill to change election results, particularly if they have inside access.

How Is This Possible?

It is baffling that this system could persist fairly smoothly for two decades, despite being called out rather openly on several occasions. A notable example is Clint Curtis’ 2004 testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that he was hired by Congressman Tom Feeney to build a program to change election results.

“Question: Mr Curtis are there programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?

Curtis: Yes.

Question: How do you know that to be the case?

Curtis: Because in October of 2000 I wrote a prototype for present Congressman Tom Feeney … that did just that.

Question: And would that program that you designed be something that elections officials could detect?

Curtis: They'd never see it.”

-December 13, 2004, U.S. House Judiciary Committee, from the documentary film: Uncounted

Buy-in From All Players

One possibility is that both of the major political parties are actively purchasing access to these backdoors, and therefore they are in too deep to have it investigated. That is the business model that makes the most sense. It would work like this:

Voting machine vendors can’t make a lot of money on voting equipment. It’s expensive to make, costs a fortune to get certified, and voting machines only have to be purchased every 10 - 15 years, making it hard to get a continuous income stream. You could go broke rapidly with a business model like that.

Elections are just the opposite. They happen every year, sometimes multiple times a year with primaries and special elections. And there is a flood of cash during elections. People are pulling money out of every orifice to win these elections. If you could sell elections, in addition to election technology you could make a killing.

And people would be willing to pay. From high-stakes national elections to local referendums. Every election is usually important to someone. That’s a lot of potential clients if you’re selling elections, and not just election technology.

On a side note, this could help explain why elections are so expensive. Where does all that money go anyway? I mean, how much pizza can campaign workers really eat?

Circling back to the business model: if the vendor already has a financial relationship with election officials from selling them voting machines, then there’s no “money trail” for nosy “follow the money” people to investigate. Payments for the elections get rolled into payments for the election technology and no one is any the wiser.

Those technology payments might be a little inflated though. They might even be double what the technology is supposed to cost.

Below is an excerpt from an article by Susan Greenhalgh, Suffolk County resident and Senior Advisor for Election Security at Free Speech for People. Her article explores why Suffolk County is paying twice what it needs to, for a voting machine that has a “terrible record of failures, malfunctions and causing long lines.”

Why Pay Double?

Exactly. Why is Suffolk County, New York paying $35 million for a voting system that experts say is bad. Why is it spending $18 million dollars more than it needs to on voting machines and that experts say "can add, delete, or change votes on individual ballots”? Yes. Why?

Because (in my opinion) it’s a feature, not a bug. They are clearly paying more for an insecure system. Does the price include someone accessing that insecure system?

Why might you be particularly concerned about Suffolk County buying an insecure system? Because there are not one, but two, swing Congressional districts in Suffolk County, and they could help determine who has the balance of power in Congress after the midterms.

What Can You Do?

Actually you can do something literally right now. Today. Right this minute.

We have a call rally to the NY legislature today, Monday 4/28 and Wednesday 4/30.

We are asking the New York legislature to ban the type of overpriced, insecure voting machines that Suffolk County, New York is trying to buy.

You can spend 5 minutes and help. It’s not hard. We tell you exactly who to call and what to say.

Not quite ready to call? Want to learn more?

Or do the deep dive with our Legislative Partner SMART Legislation.

Not only are these voting machines more expensive, voters have no way of verifying who they voted for, because the machine encodes the votes in a bar code. Hmmmn. A machine that makes cheating easy and simultaneously makes it hard to check who you voted for? Convenient.

And a special bonus: this type of voting machine contributes to longer lines to vote. Because everyone has to vote on a touchscreen, everyone waits longer to get access to the machine.

We’ll keep you posted on what happens with our legislation, called VIVA New York, (The Voting Integrity & Verification Act of New York) and what the next steps are.

Please Donate & Subscribe

We are making tremendous progress understanding what happened in the 2024 election, as we lay the groundwork for improved U.S. elections long term. If you find our work valuable, please subscribe and make a tax-deductible donation as well! All donations are tax-deductible.

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

~ Henry David Thoreau

---