When reports began circulating last week that voting machines in Texas were flipping ballots cast for Beto O’Rourke over to Ted Cruz, and machines in Georgia were changing votes for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to those for her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, it would not have been unreasonable to suppose that those machines had been hacked. After all, their vulnerabilities have been known for nearly two decades. In September, J. Alex Halderman, a computer-science professor at the University of Michigan, demonstrated to members of Congress precisely how easy it is to surreptitiously manipulate the AccuVote TS, a variant of the direct-recording electronic (D.R.E.) voting machines used in Georgia. In addition, Halderman noted, it is impossible to verify that the votes cast were not the votes intended, since the AccuVote does not provide a physical record of the transaction.

Election-security experts, meanwhile, used the opportunity to remind the public—yet again—how susceptible touch-screen voting machines are to error, especially because they often rely on outdated and unsupported software. As the Brennan Center for Justice cautioned back in 2008, typically machines flip votes because they aren’t properly calibrated. This can happen, and does happen, to candidates from any party. But none of that was what we were hearing from election officials themselves. “The machines do not have glitches,” Stan Stanart, the county clerk in Harris County, Texas, which uses a system called the Hart InterCivic eSlate, told a local television station. He blamed mistakes on the voters themselves.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

The irony here is that these particular vote-flipping machines were deployed across the country in response to the monumental failure of punch-card voting machines during the 2000 Presidential election, when so-called hanging chads very likely resulted in the wrong man winning. The crisis that ensued inspired a bipartisan Congress, in 2002, to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Among other things, HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission, which it then deputized to test and certify voting machines. The act also allocated millions of dollars for election-infrastructure upgrades, much of which was used to replace traditional voting machines with computerized machines like eSlate and the AccuVoteTS. Georgia, in fact, was the first state to adopt D.R.E. touch screens statewide.

Those machines are still in service, despite their well-documented problems. A lawsuit to compel Georgia to use paper ballots in the November midterms fell short in September, when Judge Amy Totenberg, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, ruled that there was not enough time to get a paper-ballot system up and running. But she also wrote that the plaintiffs had shown that Georgia’s voting machines posed “a concrete risk of alteration of ballot counts that would impact their own votes.” Totenberg added that “given the absence of an independent paper audit trail of the vote, the scope of this threat is difficult to quantify, though even a minor alteration of votes in close electoral races can make a material difference in the outcome.”

This is especially troublesome because Kemp, the Georgia secretary of state, is overseeing his own election. If the state’s voting machines—which he has resisted replacing—are flipping in his favor, there will be no way to prove it. On October 22nd, the former President Jimmy Carter, a lifelong Georgian and veteran international-election observer, called on Kemp to resign as secretary of state to eliminate this conflict of interest. Kemp did not respond. Earlier this year, after purging more than half a million voters—more than three hundred thousand of them erroneously—and sidelining fifty-three thousand voter-registration applications in this election cycle, most of them from African-Americans (Abrams is black), Kemp said, “For anyone to think there’s a way to manipulate the process because you’re secretary of state is outrageous.”

The voting machines purchased back in the early two-thousands were never meant to last this long. They have a shelf life of ten, maybe fifteen years. Many are no longer made, or the companies that manufactured them have gone out of business, or both. To get spare parts, election officials have had to scour eBay and Craigslist, looking for old machines that other municipalities have discarded. Those municipalities have the funds to buy new voting equipment. Under-resourced communities do not. What we’re getting, as the Brennan Center has pointed out, is a “two-tiered” electoral system, bound to larger economic and social inequalities. Decrepit and broken machines result in long lines, and long lines result in people walking away without voting. This is not voter suppression—it’s voter depression, but the consequences are the same. In 2012, for instance, somewhere between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand people were shut out of voting by long wait times. And long lines, according to researchers at the Caltech/M.I.T. Voting Technology Project, undermine public confidence in the election system, “even when individuals do not experience the long lines themselves.”

HAVA also introduced the provisional ballot, a fail-safe mechanism created to enable citizens to vote even if they encounter obstacles on Election Day, such as faulty voting machines, eligibility challenges by poll workers, or discrepancies in the voting records. Once they are cast, provisional ballots are put aside until their authenticity can be verified. But the law has left it to the states to decide how these ballots are counted—or not—and when. This could be a couple of days after an election, a week later, or never. They become crucial in close elections but marginal otherwise; about twenty per cent of provisional ballots are not counted in midterm elections, and about thirty per cent in Presidential elections.

When paired with the restrictive voter-I.D. laws that Republican-controlled states have been passing since 2005, ostensibly to prevent voter fraud—which has repeatedly been shown to be all but nonexistent—provisional ballots, intended to protect voters, become yet another instrument of disenfranchisement. A provisional ballot cast in Indiana, the first state to implement restrictive voter-I.D. laws, will be rejected for the very same reason that it was cast provisionally in the first place: because the voter does not have a state-issued I.D. In Georgia, a provisional voter with the wrong I.D. or no I.D. is given three days to bring the documents to a county registrar’s office, which may be open only during working hours.

According to the N.A.A.C.P., which recently lost a challenge to Alabama’s voter-I.D. law, an estimated hundred thousand Alabamians are effectively prevented from voting because they don’t have acceptable I.D.s. The judge’s rationale in the case—that the voter-I.D. law is not discriminatory, because it applies to all citizens equally—echoes the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, which upheld Indiana’s restrictive voter-I.D. laws. In the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote a concurring opinion in the case, the Indiana law was “a generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation.” But even he acknowledged that a law applied universally is not the same as a law experienced equally, writing that the “the Indiana law affects different voters differently.” Of course, this fact, which Scalia deemed “irrelevant,” has been proved true in state after state since. In Wisconsin, in 2016, for instance, African-Americans were more than three times more likely to be deterred from voting by that state’s voter-I.D. law.