A misogynistic joke—and the resignation it triggered last week—may have saved a last-minute update to State Board of Elections requirements for voting systems that blocked machines from the controversial vendor Elections Systems and Software, or ES&S.

Last Monday, just before the SBE was set to certify three voting systems for the 2020 election, Stella Anderson, one of three Democrats on the five-member board, offered a motion to add a new certification requirement—the production and tabulation of “human-readable marks on a paper ballot”—that would ultimately keep ES&S’s new voting machines out of North Carolina. It passed, 3–2, and not along party lines. The motion required a second meeting and vote to take effect, but the voting security activists in the audience cheered: “We won.”

As it turns out, not quite.

David Black, a Republican board member who voted with the majority, quickly announced he wanted to reconsider. He said he was confused. He thought the motion would affect future equipment certifications, not the three current vendors the SBE was considering. When he realized his error, the SBE scheduled a second meeting for Thursday, at which it would rescind its previous vote and give ES&S the green light.

And then news broke about SBE chairman Robert Cordle’s sense of humor.

As WRAL first reported last Wednesday, Cordle—appointed by Governor Cooper—opened morning meetings at a conference for state election officials with a joke comparing a cow that didn’t want to breed with a wife who didn’t want to copulate. He resigned by day’s end. Because he’d voted with the minority, the now-four-member SBE didn’t have the votes to overturn the motion it had accidentally passed three days earlier.

WIth the board deadlocked, Thursday’s meeting was short and uneventful.

“What we really need, and what voters need, is for somebody to be able to step in at this critical time with full knowledge of elections, voting systems, voting procedures, election law, and that sort of thing and be able to fulfill this critical function at this juncture,” Anderson said Thursday.

Whatever the SBE decides, it needs to do so quickly.

Cooper will receive a list of suggestions for Cordle’s replacement from legislative Democrats. [Clarification: Cooper will receive two nominees from the Democratic state party chair, Wayne Goodman.] (Republican leaders have recommended former General Assembly special counsel Gerry Cohen, a Democrat who currently serves on the Wake County Board of Elections.) Cooper’s choice could determine what voting method much of the state uses—and, activists say, whether elections using voting machines are susceptible to hackers and other forms of foul play.

The SBE is scheduled to decide the issue when it next meets on August 23.

The underlying problem is that many of North Carolina’s voting machines are outdated. Twenty-three counties, including Alamance, Guilford, and Mecklenburg, need to replace all of their machines. Six more use touchscreen machines for early voting and as the federally mandated voting machines for voters with disabilities, though most of their ballots are still cast on hand-marked paper ballots. Per state law, those old machines, called direct-recording electronic voting machines, will be decertified on December 1.

But a lot needs to happen before new systems can be put in place for 2020. Counties need to do their own certifications and issue public notices. Then, they need to run the systems in a test election, the October 2019 municipal elections. To do that, they need to start building the ballots for all their precincts in September. That’s why the August 23 meeting is likely making some election officials nervous.

What could be important enough to delay certification? Public trust.

If Anderson’s motion passes, it would be the first of its kind in the nation and would follow best-practice guidelines from election security experts. Not only would ES&S’s voting machines be removed from consideration, but it would make North Carolina an entirely hand-marked paper ballot state (with the exception of voting machines for voters with certain disabilities).

It would also mean that North Carolina would be one of just three states using systems in which there is no difference in format between voters using hand-marked paper ballots and voters using touchscreens, a good thing for people concerned about the privacy of the vote for people with disabilities.

Josh Lawson, who was the SBE’s general counsel until June, says moving toward hand-marked paper ballots is essential.

“My immediate and short-term concern is voter confidence,” Lawson says. “I think that the barcode ballot process does not support or instill voter confidence to the same degree as hand-marked paper ballots. Secondarily, I have a long-term concern about the maintenance of these over a life cycle that we know to be about a decade or fifteen years.”

The last round of purchasing came in 2006, and counties have been stuck with the same machines ever since. Over that timeframe, computer quality degrades significantly.

In addition, Lawson says, the use of touchscreens causes other problems. The cost is higher, it’s more difficult to conduct audits, and a shortage of voting machines—through misallocation, machine failure, or by purchasing too few machines—can lead to long lines that effectively disenfranchise voters.

The security of voting machines is an important slice of North Carolina’s election system, but it isn’t the whole pone of democracy cornbread. There is the overarching state elections information management system to consider, the voter registration database, the election night reporting of results, electronic poll books that help check voters in at the polls, processing mail-in ballots, and a host of other concerns.

“It’s not just about security,” Lawson says. “There are pressing concerns about perceived integrity of the elections process, perceived security of those systems, in addition to all the other stuff about costs and lines.”

This is especially true in light of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report indicating that Russian operatives tried to access voting systems in all fifty states in 2016, part of a multifaceted interference effort designed to benefit President Trump. During his recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former special counsel Robert Mueller said that Russians are continuing their attempts to interfere in American elections.

The decision facing the SBE—and Governor Cooper—isn’t partisan. The Republican-led legislature voted to decertify the touchscreen machines in 2013 (that decertification was delayed several times), and Democrats have come out strongly for election security measures since 2016.

The question is which stakeholders the board will favor—concerned voters or voting machine vendors?

Anderson’s stance aligns with extensive public comments and the cries of activists. Black takes the position that the voting machine vendors have been working for two years to get their systems certified—all while waiting for the SBE to sort out its legal troubles. Those troubles began after the Republican-led legislature overhauled the board’s composition in a special session following Cooper’s 2016 victory, after which Cooper successfully challenged that change in court. It wouldn’t be fair to them to change the certification requirements at the last minute, Black argues.

For one election security advocate, the decision is a no-brainer.

In her previous career, Lynn Bernstein was an aerospace test engineer. She spent a few years raising a family. Three years ago, when Bernstein was looking to go back to work, a friend told her that voting machines were not secure.

“I think most people are like I am, where I just assumed that somebody’s really looking into this and checking it,” Bernstein says. “It turns out that people weren’t. I guess I found my passion in this.”

She took an online class from a leading computer security and elections expert and became dedicated to the cause of improving elections systems.

For her, winning the fight to get North Carolina to only count votes using the human-readable sections of ballots is a big step, and it sets up her next mission for the state: risk-limiting audits.

Risk-limiting audits use statistically significant samples of paper ballots to ensure that computers are interpreting results correctly—in other words, that the computers tabulating the results haven’t been hacked. They’re considered the gold standard.

But they only work if voting machines leave a paper record that humans can read.

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