Attention Please: "Impending Crisis" in Voting Technology Makes USA TODAY

[Image courtesy of shirtaday]

A while back, I made the observation that one important function of the President’s Commission on Election Administration would be to highlight the kind of “un-sexy” issues that would nonetheless be important to the future of the field.

We are starting to see the value of that as issues that have been hot button topics here are starting to get attention in place where many, many more people pay attention. The latest example is a story from USA Today entitled “Digital voting machines are aging out of use“:

Lori Edwards needs a new voting system for Polk County, Fla., where she is the supervisor of elections for 360,000 registered voters. She has just two problems: There is no money in the budget, and there is nothing she wants to buy.

Edwards faces what a bipartisan federal commission has identified as an “impending crisis” in American elections. After a decade of use, a generation of electronic voting equipment is about to wear out and will cost tens of millions to replace. Though voters can pay for coffee with an iPhone, technology for casting their ballots is stuck in the pre-smartphone era — because of a breakdown in federal standard-setting.

Polk County exemplifies the problem. The county’s 180 Accu-Vote optical scanner voting machines are 13 years old. Each weighs about as much as a microwave oven, Edwards says, and they occasionally get dropped. Sometimes, when poll workers are setting up for an election at 6 a.m., one of the machines won’t turn on — so Edwards has a backup machine for every 10 voting locations. She has been buying additional machines — used ones are $6,000 each — to have more backups available.

Presidential candidates have yet to declare themselves for the 2016 election, but Edwards is already thinking about how to make sure Polk County’s balloting goes smoothly. “I worry about ’16. I worry about 2014. It’s something I’m kind of facing every day,” she says. “The equipment is going to start breaking down. I feel like I’m driving around in a 10-year-old Ford Taurus and it’s fine and it’s getting the job done, but one of these days it’s not going to wake up.”

Notwithstanding the high-profile endorsements of online voter registration and early voting, the PCEA’s “impending crisis” language on voting technology (p.4) could be the most significant because it involves an issue that will require the most action – and spending! to address the problem:

The 2000 presidential election recount resulted in an outpouring of $3 billion in federal funds for states, counties and municipalities to buy new voting equipment, through the Help America Vote Act of 2002. A decade later, “machines that were purchased in 2003 are now starting to break down, and (election) jurisdictions are concerned that this will become more frequent,” says Nate Persily, research director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, created by President Obama after 10 million voters waited more than half an hour to vote in 2012.

The commission sounded the alarm partly because election officials may be reluctant to, Persily says. “People don’t want to broadcast there’s potentially an election debacle on the horizon, for the same reason that nobody who could potentially could get sued in an election wants to explain the danger coming. So they do what they can with what they have.”

Edwards says the problem isn’t something voters can do anything about. “If I thought people’s attention would help the problem, I might be making more of a stir down that avenue,” she says. “Just by instinct, election officials know it’s a big part of their job to maintain confidence.”

Just as importantly, though, the article notes how election officials have been doing everything they can to extend the life cycle of their voting machines:

In Orange County, Calif., Neal Kelley addressed a rising failure rate in his county’s voting system four years ago by replacing cable connections with military-grade hardware on the county’s 11,000 electronic voting machines. The 10-year-old machines run on Windows 2000 software. Kelley estimates it would cost $20 million to replace the county’s voting system. “If we did nothing to continue ongoing maintenance with the system, realistically, we shouldn’t be fielding it in the 2016 cycle,” he says. The county is also buying up extra voting machines to cannibalize for parts. “By doing that, we can probably extend our life cycle to 2018.”

The piece also highlights how pioneers like Los Angeles County are moving to address the obstacles in the field:

[U]nsatisfying choice[s have] driven one of the biggest voting jurisdictions in the country, Los Angeles County, to decide to build its own voting system from scratch — at a cost of at least $42 million. For now, the county’s 4.8 million voters — who use ballots in 10 different languages — mark their choices with ink on retrofitted punch-card voting booths that date to 1968; ballots are counted with IBM card-counting machines, and the system uses an obsolete programming language.

By the 2018 midterm elections, County Clerk Dean Logan says, voters will use tablet computers to vote (with paper backup) and may even be able to mark ballots on their own mobile devices, then print them at polling places using the same technology airlines use to scan boarding passes on smartphones.

“We know we’re getting to the end of the lifespan of what we’ve got now. What’s available is not sufficient to meet our needs, and we know it’s not sufficient to meet the voters needs,” Logan says. “We want to have a system that uses today’s technology and has the ability to adapt to future technological development.”

Logan wants voting technology to shift from a closed, proprietary software system to an open system that uses commonly available components such as iPads and printers. That would mean other jurisdictions could adapt Los Angeles’ system and make election jurisdictions less reliant on voting system vendors, he says.

“Whatever they design, they’re going to design with profit in mind, and we want to design with the voter in mind,” Logan says. “The voting process is arguably one of the most public acts we participate in, and the systems and infrastructure ought to be public as well.”

There are big happenings on the horizon in voting technology; thanks to the PCEA for highlighting the problem and getting the nation’s voting systems into the public eye.