The Future of Voting Machines: A Decision Between Legacy Vendors and Nonprofit Software

Sunday - March 10 2024, 23:21 UTC - 1 year ago

Election officials in New Hampshire face a decision between sticking with a legacy vendor for their outdated voting machines or taking a chance on a small nonprofit with an open-source approach. The debate highlights a larger nationwide push for increased transparency and trust in voting technology.

While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room g­­asped. They whispered, "No way." They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner weigh? Are any of its parts made in China? Does it use the JSON data format? .

The answers weren’t trivial. Based in part on these presentations, many would be making a once-in-a-decade decision.

These New Hampshire officials currently use AccuVote machines, which were made by a company that’s now part of Dominion Voting Systems. First introduced in 1989, they run on an operating system no longer supported by Microsoft, and some have suffered extreme malfunctions; in 2022, the same model of AccuVote partially melted during an especially warm summer election in Connecticut.

Many towns in New Hampshire want to replace the AccuVote. But with what? Based on past history, the new machines would likely have to last decades — while also being secure enough to satisfy the state’s election skeptics. Outside the event, those skeptics held signs like "Ban Voting Machines." Though they were relatively small in number that day, they’re part of a nationwide movement to eliminate voting technology and instead hand count every ballot — an option election administrators say is simply not feasible.

Against this backdrop, more than 130 election officials packed into the conference rooms on the second floor of Concord’s Legislative Office Building. Ultimately, they faced a choice between two radically different futures.

The first was to continue with a legacy vendor. Three companies — Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic — control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public.

The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.

At the Concord event, a representative for ES&S suggested that this open-source approach could be dangerous. "If the FBI was building a new building, they're not going to put the blueprints out online," he said. But VotingWorks co-founder Ben Adida says it’s fundamental to rebuilding trust in voting equipment and combatting the nationwide push to hand count ballots. "An open-source voting system is one where there are no secrets about how this works," Adida told the audience. "All the source code is public for the world to see, because why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software at all?" .

Others agree. Ten states currently use VotingWorks’ open-source audit software, including Georgia during its hand count audit in 2020. Other groups are e­­y­eing openness more broadly. Lawmakers in 15 states have introduced bills or lesgislation in 2023.