By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Any aware person who’s been following United States elections since, oh, the year 2000 should have a chronic, low-grade worry about the legitimacy of the election results. I’m not talking about gerrymandering, or voter roll “purges,” or ballot gaming, or discriminatory voter ID requirements, or even the electoral college, but rather that, for any given voter, it is not necessarily certain the ballot as cast is ballot as counted. The United States has a rich history of election fraud, and it has nothing whatever to do with “meddling” by foreigners; we can steal elections all on our own, right here. (See the Presidential elections of 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio); the Democrat Texas Caucus in 2008[1]; the Democrat 2016 California primary; and doubtless other examples that readers will suggest. Note that the list just given is bipartisan, as are presumably the election fraudsters[2] responsible). In this post I will do two things: Bring us all up to date on the continuing “ballot marking devices” (BMD) debacle — because BMDs make election fraud undetectable — and raise the issue of what will happen if a the 2020 election result is challenged on the ground of foreign interference; Adam Schiff’s recent tweet on that topic, posted in Links today, chilled my blood, and it’s why I thought to write this post today.

The State of Play for Ballot Marking Devices

As my first step, I thought I’d try to get a handle on where digital devices, including BMDs, where being used; surely there would be a map! This proved surprisingly difficult. The best map I could find was Ronald Rivest in 2018:

This map goes down to the county level; however, voting technology decisions can vary by municipality. The map, although it gives a sense of the variety of voting systems employed across the country (there’s your neoliberal “choice,” right there) is also obsolete; being from 2018, it misses the surge in BMDs. Here, from Verified Voting, is a putative map of the prevalence of BMDs:

Verified Voting also gives a putative list of states that use BMDs, conforming to the map:

States Using BMDs Statewide Alabama, Connecticut, District of Colombia, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Virginia. States Using BMDs in Some Counties Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Unfortunately, the map and the list are wrong. The very first state in the “BMDs Statewide” category is Alabama. BallotPedia says Alabama (as of 2018) uses paper ballots. Here is a sample paper ballot for the 2020 election from the Alabama Secretary of State, so that’s still going on. Mobile and Baldwin Counties are using BMDs[3], but that’s not “statewide.” This is unfortunate, since Verified Voting’s data is replicated in a lot of places.[3]

So I guess we have to fall back on prose. The Washington Post says that “at least 18 percent of the country’s districts will use as their default voting machines in November.” Jennifer Cohn, “How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy“:

Note that BMDs are most likely to be used in the “most populous” counties. This is extremely important, since BMDs are inherently insecure, that is to say inherently permit election fraud[4]. Again from the Washington Post: