From Vote Beat:
Several provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order on elections have run into obstacles in court. But others are quietly moving ahead, at least for now, with big potential implications for state and local election officials and the voting systems they rely on.
In Montgomery County, Ohio, for example, residents can choose to mark their ballots either by hand, or using a ballot-marking device that prints out a paper ballot with a summary of their choices, alongside a machine-readable code reflecting those choices. Voters can verify their selections before submitting their ballots into a tabulator, which scans the code and records the votes.
At least 85% of voters in a typical election choose the option that relies on the machine-readable codes, Jeff Rezabek, the county elections director, estimated….
The executive order instructs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to work the barcode ban into a revision of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, the certification standards that most states rely on for their voting equipment. And the multistep process of altering the standards is already beginning.
An initial step is set for July 2, when the U.S. EAC has called a meeting of its Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group of mainly election officials and technical experts.
The EAC’s meeting notice says the technical committee, which currently has several vacancies, will consider a draft of updated guidelines at that meeting….
EAC Chairman Donald Palmer, in an emailed response to questions from Votebeat, said there have “been security concerns expressed by the Executive Branch, state legislatures, and stakeholders on both sides of the aisle” about the use of barcodes and QR codes, and the July 2 meeting is a required step in the EAC’s regular update process.
“With this review, the EAC is being responsive to election officials’ needs and the evolving security demands of our elections,” he said. “Gathering feedback from our boards and the public is a chance for the community to provide its essential input on those changes.”
Building voting systems to new standards, testing them in federally accredited laboratories, and certifying them takes a long time. The last set of revised guidelines, VVSG 2.0, were adopted in 2021, but no systems certified under those guidelines have yet hit the market, though some are going through the process now….
Election officials have been “assessing the impact” of having to modify or replace more than 31,000 ballot marking devices that are valued at more than $141 million, county elections chief Dean Logan wrote in court filings connected to one of the lawsuits challenging the executive order.
Money is just one consideration.
“Even if the EAC goes forward, changes these standards, and tries to apply them to existing voting systems, the time frame for making that kind of significant change to a voting system … that is usually a multiple year process to do that,” Logan said in an interview with Votebeat. “So part of what is not well-constructed in that order is understanding the timeline.”