With the US presidential election just around the corner, conspiracy theories about electronic voting equipment abound.
On Tuesday, voting will close in one of the most divisive US elections in history, and Americans will decide whether to make Kamala Harris or Donald Trump the next president. Many polls show the election is close to a close call, meaning a low voter turnout could be the difference between a Democratic victory for Harris or a Republican victory for Trump in several key states.
With the US presidential election too close to call, conspiracy theories about electronic election infrastructure abound
The narrow margins involved in the White House race mean that the focus will be on the machines and digital equipment connected to many states to record and count votes. These machines are in the middle of the anger from Trump and his team after the 2020 election, when it was falsely said that millions of votes were spent by Trump, giving Joe Biden a clear victory.
Although there is no evidence to support these wild claims, it is unlikely that it will stop the MAGA Trump army from pointing to this technology if their man does not win the election for the second time. For providers of this technology, in the United States and around the world, proving that their machines are safe and reliable remains one of the biggest challenges.
The United States and the voting machine: a complex relationship
The number of technicalities involved in the American voting process varies from state to state. According to data from Voting Verified, which monitors the use of technology in American elections, 70% of citizens who vote in the presidential election will do so with good old-fashioned pen and paper. These ballots are now counted, usually using optical character recognition (OCR) machines, although some states still count ballots manually. Five percent of voters cast their ballots using a direct electronic recording (DRE) system, where votes are recorded and counted on a single device. DREs are viewed as an important type of voting machine and a potential problem for voting. After the 2000 presidential election, when controversy over lost and inaccurate ballots in Florida called the results into question, the US government provided $4.1 billion in federal funding for voting technology through the Help America Vote Act. Most of the money spent on the DRE was because it was the only voting machine on the market at the time that allowed citizens with disabilities to vote independently, which was required by law. law in all states. The machines became commonplace, and at their peak in 2006, DRE systems were used to count about 38 percent of votes in the United States, according to information from the Election Data Service. But since then, state governments have begun to forget about the DRE. “With the DRE, there is no software-based verification method,” says Warren Stewart, a researcher at Verified Voting. “The accuracy of election results depends entirely on the accuracy of the equipment. Voting is a “black box” situation where we cannot know who voted after they leave the polling place, so it has no meaning, and therefore is not fully auditable. »
The problem with the system came to a head in 2006 in Florida (again), when 18,000 votes were lost in the Sarasota County primary due to a glitch in the DRE machine. The election was decided by a margin of less than 500.
As the DRE’s popularity waned, new types of machines were introduced for disabled voters. The Ballot Marking Device (BMD) allows voters to select a candidate on screen and print a report that can be read by OCR or by hand. This published report can be used for analysis and verification of results. The first such machine to campaign was ES&S’s AutoMARK, which quickly discovered that its devices could also be used by non-disabled voters.
ES&S had an epiphany and realized that it would be a good idea to replace the DRE with a ballot marking device,” Stewart says. “The surprising thing is that in 2018, only 1.5% of Americans live in the area using BMD.
“In 2020, this number was 20%, but today it is more than a quarter, which is a big change that happened in a short time. » In fact, 25.1% of voters go The election next week will be done with BMD machines, according to data from Voting.
Today, many vendors sell BMD to US state governments. After the 2020 US presidential election, conspiracy theories circulated around Dominion’s BMD, an election technology specialist (no relation to Dominion Energy).
Smartmatic works with election management bodies in 36 countries and says its machines have helped election commissions process 3.6 billion votes since 2000.
While the company itself relies on cloud services from AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as a data center located in one of its offices, to support its internal work, Smartmatic CTO Eduardo Correia told DCD that the infrastructure used by its customers varies from country to country. Country. He explains that while voting machines typically have their own built-in storage, the company’s back-end applications “are configured to work with a variety of data center environments.”
“With elections projects, the responsibility for deciding the type of data center falls on the customer,” Correia says. “Customers typically retain ownership of their data and, as such, dictate their own management protocols.”
Correia adds that Smartmatic offers its customers “the autonomy to build their own dedicated data centers, contract services from third-party providers, or use cloud-based solutions.”
Its DRE voting machine features built-in removable storage drives that store encrypted votes, Correia says. These can be removed and physically transported to the counting site for decryption. The data can also be transmitted over secure networks, although the CTO is careful to stress that the machines are isolated and not connected to any network – or to each other – while the votes are cast and recorded. “Each machine has a unique set of keys and encryption certificates, and those protocols are changed on each machine for each election,” Correia says.
The Future of the Voting Machine
The United States isn’t the only country implementing digital infrastructure to facilitate the voting process. “Biometric ID systems are being deployed in Africa along with biometric capabilities to strengthen voter authentication and reduce identity theft, one of the oldest types of electoral irregularities,” says Smartmatic’s Correia.
Interest in online voting has also increased, with countries such as Germany, Canada, and Mexico experimenting with ways to allow voters to cast their votes online, although this can pose security and voter verification challenges. Correia expects AI to play a major role in future election technology, describing it as an area with “a lot of potential.” He says, “From combating election misinformation and generating actionable data to improving the efficiency of election administration, AI has numerous applications that can significantly increase election integrity.”
In the short term, Correia knows the challenge for technology providers is convincing voters that their technology is accurate and secure, noting that Smartmatic devices have been independently audited by firms including EY and PwC. But he says the “information ecosystem” plays a major role in shaping public perception. Stewart doesn’t expect any single voting machine technology to dominate the U.S. because of the fragmented nature of state governments. “It’s not just about technology,” he says. “All the rules about things like voter ID and when people can vote vary from state to state.
“In any case, you could argue that having so many different methods in different jurisdictions is more secure. Even when different states use the same machine, they often have different versions of the equipment with different firmware that goes through different verification processes. Many would argue that this makes it harder for widespread fraud to occur.”
He believes vendors go to great lengths to explain the security of their technology, but convincing the public that nothing fishy is going on is an “uphill battle.”
“Voting machine manufacturers have become more willing to demonstrate how to verify the results of their machines,” he says. “And now they have equipment that they can legitimately claim to be transparent because they can show everyone how it works.
“The vendors are doing a great job right now, but it’s almost impossible to break through the wall of misinformation: It’s much more exciting to talk about conspiracy theories than it is to talk about audits or tests of logic and accuracy.”
Despite the stories emerging from the darker corners of the internet, Stewart says the current mix of digital and manual vote verification is helping to ensure that an accurate result is reached when Americans go to the polls. “Votes are recorded primarily on ballots, and in most states there is an audit process that can be done in a way that wasn’t possible 20 years ago,” he says. “Regardless of what people may think, this will be the most transparent and accurate election in history.
