"... voters are slowly losing access to their voting rights."

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Why Voting Machines Are About To Wreak Havoc On Another Election
By Lauren C. Williams, September 26, 2014

In 2012, hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. waited, at first patiently and then with growing frustration, in lines that ventured out the doors and wrapped around street corners. They weren’t waiting more than seven hours in line to buy the new iPhone — they were waiting to vote on an electronic touch-screen machine.

Technology has made life easier, simplifying common tasks such as banking, publishing a book, talking to friends and paying for things online. But when it comes to voting, technology is stuck in 2002. And with the decade-old electronic voting machines that states use falling apart — creating long lines that cause some not vote at all — voters are slowly losing access to their voting rights.

There’s been renewed emphasis on voting rights in the last year, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled that voter discrimination wasn’t rampant enough to support a law restricting Southern states from implementing new voting policies. Since then, states, particularly Republican-run states, have been fighting for voting restrictions like reduced early voting times and voter ID laws, laws that previously would have been blocked by the federal government.

Civil rights advocates contend that such laws, especially those requiring all voters to present government identification, could potentially disenfranchise the poor and people of color and reduce voter turnout.

Where a voter lives can dictate whether or not he or she can quickly go to the polls before work or spend the better part of the day waiting in line to cast a ballot. City voters, who tend to be Democrats, are more likely to encounter long lines due to voting restrictions, according to a 2012 report from The New York Times. And the poorer voters are, the more likely they are to stand in long lines to exercise their voting rights.

But even without ID laws, voters face obstacles at polling centers having to wait hours to vote in some regions partly because of outdated and too few electronic voting machines.

“More affluent counties and cities are able to spend more on election administration. And so they have more staff, they have better machines,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “And places with lower incomes and a weaker tax base just don’t have the funds to replace the equipment and hire the staff they might like…So voters end up getting served differentially, you know, depending on where they live.”

According to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, Black and Latino voters had to wait the longest to vote and had fewer machines to vote on. The study, which looks at voter access in Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, found that too few poll workers and electronic voting machines contributed to long lines and delays. For example, in South Carolina, there were almost twice as many voters per voting machine or poll worker in some counties than allowed by state law.

Lines are longest when waiting for electronic voting machines in part because only one voter can use them at a time and it takes everyone a few moments to figure out how they work, said voting rights activist Rebecca Wilson.

“Besides the fact that a lot of states are left in the lurch with equipment that’s breaking down, that’s unreliable — [Maryland] had to pull machines out of circulation in the middle of an election because the test screen goes out of calibration,” Wilson said. That means the screen would register a voter’s touch about an inch below the candidate he or she selected, potentially casting a vote for the wrong candidate. “And there’s no telling what’s getting reported,” she said.

Barbara Simons, former IBM programmer and voting technology expert, added that voters are then left with machines with faulty software that are prone to crashes, and are otherwise “physically falling apart” because they are so old, contributing to long lines.

During the 2012 presidential election, Florida also suffered from long wait times — up to six hours in some polling places — that disproportionately affected the state’s large Latino population. But the state and its voting practices have been swirling in controversy before.

Fourteen years ago, it took an entire month for Americans to find out who they had elected to succeed then-President Bill Clinton (D-AR). The ballots in Florida had to be recounted during the 2000 presidential election largely due to failed voting technology that caused votes to not get counted, or incorrect votes.

One of the main culprits was the punch card machine, which registered votes by poking a hole through the paper ballot. But the machines failed to make a clean hole, and votes weren’t registered by ballot readers. The butterfly ballot also complicated the 2000 election, causing voters to pick the wrong candidate because of its overwhelming two-page design.

That election controversially put George W. Bush into the presidency, who lost the popular vote to former Vice President Al Gore. And Florida’s votes were key, not only because it was a swing state, but because the unreliable voting technology it used.

“The 2000 [presidential] election in Florida spotlighted all kinds of problems with voting technology: The design of ballots, the way ballots are counted, the problems with things like punch card ballots, which got all of the attention then,” Burden said.

As a result, President Bush enacted a wave a reforms including the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which required states to upgrade their voting equipment from the punch cards and lever machines that plagued the 2000 election. States then “went on a spending spree” with millions of federal dollars, buying state-of-the-art touch screen voting machines, also known as DREs (direct-recording electronic voting machines), Burden said. States also bought optical scan machines, where voters mark their paper ballot choices by filling out a bubble or connecting arrows. The results are read by a machine, similar to how SAT tests are processed.

“But that was ten years ago, over ten years ago,” Burden said. “And I think anybody who has a personal computer knows that after 10 years it’s time to move on.”

There’s nothing to move on to. Most states are in the midst of a budget crises and can’t afford to upgrade machines, points out Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.

“It’s difficult to replace them. The main issue is money. They bought them with federal money, and that money is not coming back. In some cases the states pay for but it’s usually the county that pays for it,” Underhill said. “They have to go to their accounting commissioners and argue that it’s a priority but it’s sometimes hard to make the case when you’re up against school needs and [buildings damaged by] fires, etc.”

Voters will certainly have some kind of equipment to cast their votes come Election Day in November, Underhill assured. But while the aging equipment will be ready to use, voters may simply decide it’s not worth the wait. During the last federal election, in 2012, about 201,000 Floridians decided not to vote because of the long lines, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis.

Even without budget constraints, states looking to replace the crumbling machines can’t. “Unfortunately a lot of the vendors for those machines have gone out of business,” Burden said. Now, there are only a few big vendors, “and many of them are not servicing or offering the type of equipment that states currently have,” because they want states to spend millions to buy the newer models, he said.

So the aging machines get pulled out for Election Day and, if they break down or become untrustworthy, poll workers will shove them back in storage. States make do with what they have, pulling old equipment such as the questionable lever voting machines. “They know how to refurbish equipment, bring it in from other locations, cannibalize equipment,” Underhill said.

There’s also an outstanding question as to whether electronic machines are trustworthy in the first place. Voting technology experts aren’t keen on letting voters use systems that have even the slightest possibility of being compromised. To ensure people are able to exercise their voting rights, Simons said, there must be a way to check over each entry because the electronic machines can have bugs or bad lines of code just like a personal laptop.

All major tech companies, such as Apple, frequently send out bug fixes, most of which are security patches. “So the idea that someone is going to produce a voting machine that won’t have software bugs, that won’t be able to be hacked — there’s no way,” Simons said.

[major, major snippage]
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