A Wisconsin judge on Monday is expected to consider whether to allow people with disabilities to vote electronically from home in the swing state this fall.
Disability Rights Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters and four disabled people filed a lawsuit in April demanding disabled people be allowed to cast absentee ballots electronically from home.
They asked Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell to issue a temporary injunction before the lawsuit is resolved granting the accommodation in the state’s Aug. 13 primary and November presidential election. Mitchell scheduled a Monday hearing on the injunction.
Questions over who can cast absentee ballots and where they can do it have become a political flashpoint in Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point….
They also point out that military and overseas voters are permitted to cast absentee ballots electronically in Wisconsin elections. People with disabilities must be afforded the same opportunity under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the federal Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits all organizations that receive financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of disability, they argue.
Category Archives: voting technology
“Documents detail Republican push to force hand counts in Arizona election”
A Guardian report about the press for hand counts, the product of election denialism that led to criminal charges when supervisors refused to certify results.
I’m old enough to remember when it was the hand counting that was causing the dispute.
“Texas election laws allow certain ballots to be traced back to voters, official says”
CBS report noting what purport to be decoded ballots of some prominent Texas officials, though I’m not sure whether the culprit is Texas “election laws” or the outer limits of the scope of public records responses. The controversy seems to be related to the ballot number generated at check-in for voters who vote in-person in certain Texas counties (and doesn’t affect mail-in votes at all), and is related (of course) to an ongoing lawsuit.
And now the public records requests have themselves become the subject of a letter from a coalition of nonprofits to the DOJ, asking the DOJ to step in to protect the chain of custody to ensure that election officials can comply with federal records retention laws, and to ensure that records requests don’t amount to intimidation or a conspiracy against the right to a secret ballot.
“Voting machine contract under scrutiny following discrepancies in Puerto Rico’s primaries”
And also, this is a pretty good and exceedingly timely reminder to wait for the real analysis to figure out what happened and why, before jumping to conclusions.
“Rows and Columns, the County Line, and the ExpressVote XL”
Andrew Appel for Freedom to Tinker:
The judge ruled that the county line “thumb on the scale” is illegal, and in March 2024 ordered New Jersey counties to use an office-block layout in the June primary election. (Fortunately, the ExpressVote XL doesn’t require county lines, and can be configured to office-block ballots.)
But how and why did New Jersey counties decide in 2002 to use the AVC Advantage, and in 2019 to use the ExpressVote XL? For over 20 years I’ve been studying voting machine security, voting-machine design, election procedures, and New Jersey elections. I had been mystified why New Jersey county commissions clung so tightly to their rows-and-columns voting machines, when those machines are much more expensive and much less secure. It wasn’t until the Kim v. Hanlon lawsuit that I finally understood the picture.
The County Commissioners who decide on voting machines are elected officials, Democrat and Republican, who are generally members of their county political organizations and endorsed by those political machines. The members of County Boards of Elections, that make recommendations to the County Commissions, are selected by the political parties. The “county line” helps county political bosses gain influence over elected officials, because those officials don’t want to be in “Ballot Siberia” in their next elections.
The ExpressVote XL, with its large 32-inch screen, facilitates a rows-and-columns ballot layout. The rows-and-columns layout allows a “county line,” where the party-machine-endorsed candidates are in favored position and the outsider candidates are in Ballot Siberia. Maybe that’s the reason that New Jersey counties fought so hard to keep using full-face touchscreen voting machines, 22 years ago when they chose to purchase the AVC Advantage and 5 years ago when they chose the ExpressVote XL. To preserve that thumb on the scale, they were willing to spend much more money on less secure voting machines.
“Push grows to mandate paper ballots as N.Y. counties eye touch-screen voting”
Truly Bizarre Story in Mediaite About Texas Voting Technology Making It Possible to Figure Out How People Voted, and FEC Commissioner Trey Trainor Taunting Republican Leader for Voting for DeSantis Rather than Trump
The eyes of Texas were upon the ballots cast by several high-profile Texas politicians on Wednesday, after documents were leaked related to a stunning lawsuit accusing state election officials of failing to properly protect ballot secrecy. The leak included the purported ballot for the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) — catching him in a lie about how he voted in the presidential primary.
The 77-page complaint was filed by an elections security researcher who lives in Williamson County, Texas and four other Texas voters, two of whom also live in Williamson County, one from Bell County, and one from Llano County. Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, Director of the Division of Elections Christina Adkins, and the county election administrators for Williamson, Bell, and Llano Counties are named as defendants, accused of “willful and systematic disregard of election laws” that put at risk the secrecy of potentially millions of ballots cast by Texans in recent elections.
The complaint describes the plaintiffs as all “consistent voters” who “voted in the most recent Texas elections in November 2023 and March 2024,” but either do not qualify to vote by mail under Texas law or prefer to vote in person….
The actual method used to cross-reference the unique identifier ballot numbers with the voter names and the results from individual ballots were originally filed in redacted form with the complaint (a redacted presentation by a Texas A&M University computer scientist regarding the methodology available for download here), according to our source. Rumors have been flying around Texas political circles in recent weeks about the method mentioned in the lawsuit and whether or not Texans’ ballots were really at risk of exposure.
And then on Wednesday, Texas-based website Current Revolt published documents that were produced using the methodology deployed in the investigation for the lawsuit – specifically, Rinaldi’s ballot.
Rinaldi voted in person in Dallas County for the Texas GOP presidential primary in March. He had publicly endorsed former President Donald Trump, said he voted for him, and even continued to insist earlier this week that he had cast his vote for Trump.
That’s not what the ballot and cast vote record images (below) show. Instead, Rinaldi allegedly voted for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose campaign collapsed in an embarrassing sputter in Iowa months earlier.
Why is FEC Commissioner Trainer even asking someone if they will be “in a #MAGA hat at” the Republican convention?
I expect we are going to hear much more about both aspects of the story, especially the potential loss of a secret ballot in Texas. If this pans out, just wow.
“Georgia bill to strip QR codes from ballots would cost tens of millions of dollars”
Tucked inside a massive elections bill passed last month by Georgia’s legislature is a provision that requires the state to spend millions of dollars to overhaul the state’s existing voting system, or to purchase a new one before 2026.
Election officials and experts say it’s an impossible timeline, and that the vague language of the bill may prevent the use of electronic tabulators altogether. Lawmakers allocated no money for the change, which would remove computer-readable QR codes and other barcodes that the state’s voting system relies on to accurately tabulate ballots.
“We’re talking about an expense of about $25-to-$26 million, to about $300 million, depending on how you want to do it,” Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, told the House Governmental Affairs Committee on March 20, eight days before the bill passed the House. If lawmakers wanted to proceed, Sterling told them, they should write the legislation to make the changes contingent on appropriating enough money to pay for them, and move the effective date back to give election officials more time.
Lawmakers have already pushed the effective date back two years — from 2024 to 2026 — but did not make the change contingent on providing funding. So if the governor signs the bill now, it’s not clear where election officials will get the money.
The ban on computer-readable codes made headlines when the bill passed, but the cost — which legislators have known about for months — has not been previously reported.
The legislation would make the state’s current voting system, put in place in 2020 at a cost of more than $100 million, impossible for the state to use. Sterling says that if the governor signs it, Georgia will spend millions of dollars “to achieve absolutely nothing.”…
“Barcodes on paper ballots: the good, the bad, and the stealth”
“Suggested Principles for State Statutes Regarding Ballot Marking and Vote Tabulation”
This letter, signed by 20 election cybersecurity experts, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State Senate Committee on Government in response to a request for policy advice, but it applies in any state — especially those that use Ballot Marking Devices for all in-person voters: Georgia and South Carolina; most counties in Arkansas, New Jersey, and West Virginia; some counties in Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nevada, and California.
Executive Summary
We believe that the goal of laws, regulations and directives relating to elections must be focused on fairness, security, transparency, and accessibility. Each state should strive to approach the gold standard in every category, so that no reasonable candidate or party may have grounds to object that the process was unfair, insecure, or compromised. The process must be transparent, so the public may be assured the winners won and the losers lost.
We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the uncertainty introduced by use of electronic machinery and the ability of bad actors to exploit electronic vulnerabilities to remotely alter the results. However, some portion of voters mistakenly mark paper ballots in a manner that will not be counted in the way the voter intended, or which even voids the ballot. Hand-counts delay timely reporting of results, and introduce the possibility for human error, bias, or misinterpretation.
Technology introduces the means of efficient tabulation, but also introduces a manifold increase in complexity and sophistication of the process. This places the understanding of the process beyond the average person’s understanding, which can foster distrust. It also opens the door to human or machine error, as well as exploitation by sophisticated and malicious actors.
Rather than assert that each component of the process can be made perfectly secure on its own, we believe the goal of each component of the elections process is to validate every other component.
Consequently, we believe that the hallmarks of a reliable and optimal election process are hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned, separately and securely stored, and rigorously audited after the election but before certification. We recommend state legislators adopt policies consistent with these guiding principles, which are further developed below….
“Costs for Replacing Voting Equipment in 2024”
“Ban on counting votes from computer codes passes Georgia Senate”
The Georgia Senate voted along party lines Tuesdayto abandon the use of bar codes on ballots. Instead, ballots would be counted from the printed text or filled-in ovals next to candidate names.
Republicans supporting the bill said it would improve election security and reduce the risk of hacks or tampering that could flip votes. There’s no indication that Georgia’s voting machines have been breached during an election.
It’s unlikely that the change could be made in time for this year’s presidential election.
“The biggest challenge that a voter has is knowing that their vote was correctly recorded,” said Sen. Max Burns, a Republican from Sylvania. “Let’s eliminate QR codes. Let’s make sure that electors can read the ballot and be clear about how they voted.”
Democrats critical of the proposal said it would be expensive and impractical to implement before this November’s presidential election.
“‘Serious consequences’: Company warns Johnson County sheriff over election investigation”
The election software company at the center of Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s long-running elections investigation hit back on Monday, warning the sheriff that a baseless investigation results in “serious consequences.”
“I fully recognize that Sheriff Hayden has placed himself and his department in the awkward position of conducting a baseless investigation for the past several years into nonexistent election fraud in Johnson County,” attorney Rick Guinn, representing the company Konnech Inc. and its CEO Eugene Yu, wrote in a Jan. 29 letter to Hayden obtained by The Star.
“Sheriff Hayden should be very careful about making public statements concerning Konnech and Mr. Yu to somehow justify his obvious waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Guinn sent the letter to Hayden less than a week after Los Angeles County agreed to pay $5 million to Yu, who sued over civil rights violations after he was arrested there in 2022 on accusations that he illegally stored poll worker data in China. The case was dropped a few weeks later, with the district attorney citing “potential bias” in the investigation.
The attorney wrote in Monday’s letter that the multi-million settlement “should send a strong message to Sheriff Hayden of the serious consequences that result from a baseless investigation into nonexistent election fraud.”
Through his office’s spokesperson, Hayden declined to comment on Monday.
Hayden, a Republican, faces re-election this year if he chooses to run. He has so far not filed for reelection but his office has indicated he plans to do so. He would face a primary challenge from Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff, in the race that so far has drawn one Democratic candidate, Prairie Village Police Chief Byron Roberson.
Yu, the Chinese-American founder of the Michigan-based company, sued L.A. County and its district attorney’s office in September. His lawyers said in a news release that Yu was subjected to a wrongful, “politically motivated arrest” that was “based solely on utterly false conspiracy theories about Chinese election interference espoused by discredited, far-right extremists.”
Yu’s arrest in Los Angeles fueled right-wing conspiracies of election fraud across the country. And it propelled Hayden’s ongoing elections investigation in Johnson County, which afterward stopped using Konnech in 2022. Johnson County had used the software only to help manage election workers; the program had nothing to do with voting or voting information.
“Trump allies seek to co-opt coming election-security case to bolster 2020 lie”
Mike Lindell, the flamboyant pillow magnate, has spent millions promoting the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump — a claim that has been roundly rejected by cybersecurity experts, government officials and numerous courts. But late last year, Lindell crowed that a federal judge had vindicated him at last.
“I get to take off my tin foil hat!” he said on a podcast hosted by former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, removing a baseball cap covered in aluminum foil that he had worn as a prop. “You know, that’s what that judge said, we’re not a conspiracy theory guy anymore! Praise the Lord.”
The judge had said no such thing. She had not mentioned Lindell at all — or the outlandish election-fraud claims he and other Trump allies have advanced.
The people U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg declared to be not “conspiracy theorists of any variety” are the largely left-leaning plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was filed in Georgia long before the 2020 election and that is slated to go to trial this week. They argue that voting machines there present security risks that state officials are constitutionally obligated to address — and they have the backing, Totenberg wrote, of “some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity experts and computer scientists.”
A favorable outcome for the plaintiffs would have extraordinary implications: Georgia, one of the swing states that decided the last presidential election, could head into the 2024 cycle with machines that a federal judge has deemed dangerously vulnerable to security breaches, at least as currently operated. Though it would be aimed at ensuring a more secure voting system, such a ruling could have unpredictable implications for the public understanding of election integrity, particularly if it is mischaracterized by those seeking to sow doubt about past and future elections.
Lindell and other MAGA-world personalities — including Trump — have long sought to harness the case to bolster the false claim that voting machines were rigged to help Joe Biden win. Now, with the trial set to begin in Atlanta, Trump allies are positioning themselves to leverage political advantage from any finding that the machines are not secure.
“It saddens me to say it, but it’s likely that any legal ruling that affirms vulnerabilities in voting technology — even in support of prudent goals, like mitigating risk — will be cynically exploited to undermine voter confidence in elections, for purely political ends,” said Edward Perez, former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member for the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for transparent open-source election technology. (Two of the plaintiffs’ experts serve on the nonprofit’s board of advisers.)
The plaintiffs in the case, known as Curling v. Raffensperger, argue that the touch-screen computers on which Georgians cast their votes are vulnerable to malicious attack and human error.They do not argue that the alleged vulnerabilities have actually been exploited — in fact, they say there is no evidence that has occurred.
Further, the plaintiffs argue that the secret copying of voting software in rural Coffee County in 2021 by Trump allies — an episode that the plaintiffs unearthed and that has since become part of the criminal indictment against Trump and others in Fulton County — exacerbated the risk to future elections by giving unauthorized individuals a virtual road map to hack into machines and manipulate results.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs, said Georgia must acknowledge and deal with the alleged problems with its voting system, regardless of the efforts by some to mischaracterize the case. “We cannot back down from what must be done based on what Trump or any other politician says about it,” she said in an interview….