Security concerns over new voting machine technology have not stopped some states from forging ahead as they face pressure to retire their outdated paperless machines before the next presidential race. | David Goldman/AP Photo Cybersecurity State election officials opt for 2020 voting machines vulnerable to hacking The new machines still pose unacceptable risks in an election that U.S. intelligence officials expect to be a prime target for disruption by countries such as Russia and China.

Election officials in some states and cities are planning to replace their insecure voting machines with technology that is still vulnerable to hacking.

The machines that Georgia, Delaware, Philadelphia and perhaps many other jurisdictions will buy before 2020 are an improvement over the totally paperless devices that have generated controversy for more than 15 years, election security experts and voting integrity advocates say. But they warn that these new machines still pose unacceptable risks in an election that U.S. intelligence officials expect to be a prime target for disruption by countries such as Russia and China.


The new machines, like the ones they’re replacing, allow voters to use a touchscreen to select their choices. But they also print out a slip of paper with the vote both displayed in plain text and embedded in a barcode — a hard copy that, in theory, would make it harder for hackers to silently manipulate the results.

Security experts warn, however, that hackers could still manipulate the barcodes without voters noticing. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has also warned against trusting the barcode-based devices without more research, saying they “raise security and verifiability concerns.”

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That hasn’t stopped some states from forging ahead, however, as they face pressure to retire their outdated paperless machines before the next presidential race.

The replacements, known as ballot-marking devices, are “a relatively new and untested technology,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting security expert who teaches at the University of Michigan. “And it’s concerning that jurisdictions are rushing to purchase them before even basic questions have been answered.”

Many states have adopted what experts call a much more secure option — paper ballots that voters mark with a pen or pencil and that are then scanned and tallied. But election officials in Georgia, Delaware and Philadelphia have rejected that option in favor of the barcode devices, saying they are secure enough and better suited for many voters with disabilities.

Philadelphia city commissioners on Feb. 20 selected a barcode system called the ExpressVote XL from the major vendor Election Systems & Software, despite warnings about the risks. So did Delaware, which in September chose the ExpressVote XL as part of a $13 million overhaul of election equipment.

Earlier this week, Georgia lawmakers advanced a bill to approve the barcode devices in a 101-72 vote that split along party lines. Democrats tended to agree with experts who have said the machines are still too vulnerable.

“Right now, we do not have the ability to conduct elections safely and securely and be able to correctly audit them," Democratic Georgia state Rep. Jasmine Clark told POLITICO. "When it comes to people being able to access the democratic and make sure their vote is counted, paper is the way to go.”

Republicans largely hailed the technology. “We can put our voters first in Georgia and bring us into the 21st century,” Republican state Rep. Barry Fleming said after the vote, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Georgia has long been at the center of the debate over insecure voting technology. Election integrity groups unsuccessfully sued to ban the state’s paperless voting machines before then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s 2018 gubernatorial victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams. A judge agreed that the paperless machines posed an unacceptable risk but ruled that it would have been too disruptive to change systems months ahead of the election.

In January, a commission created by Kemp recommended replacing those paperless machines with barcode devices. Election security experts had urged the committee to instead recommend a paper-based system.

States, cities and counties switching to new technology will probably have to live with their choices for years to come, given the expense and difficulty of changing systems.

The dispute over the ballot-marking devices centers on the fact that they use barcodes, which can be read by scanners but not by humans. Though the paper records also display a voter’s choices in plain text, which the voter can double-check, the barcode is the part that gets tallied.

The danger: Hackers who infiltrate a ballot-marking device could modify the barcode so its vote data differs from what’s in the printed text. If this happened, a voter would have no way of spotting it.

“We simply don't know whether BMDs can generate a paper trail that’s sufficiently hard for attackers to manipulate,” Halderman said.

Even so, many state and local officials believe that the ballot-marking devices are a vast improvement over a fully paperless system. Ballot-marking devices also address accessibility concerns about totally paper-based systems.

While election security advocates have suggested precincts use paper-based systems for most voters and a few ballot-marking devices without barcodes for people with disabilities, disability-rights advocates say that setting aside special machines amounts to a discriminatory system.

Given that dispute, ballot-marking devices strike many election officials as a reasonable compromise.

“It's critically important that we make voting easier and equally accessible for all Philadelphians while also considering the need for a secure, resilient voting system,” Al Schmidt, a member of the Philadelphia City Commission, said in a Feb. 20 statement after the group voted to select the ES&S ExpressVote XL. “Every voter in Philadelphia should be confident that their ballots are cast securely, and their votes are counted accurately, and our new, auditable paper ballot system will help ensure that.”

But the barcode-based setup “makes a mockery of the notion that the ballot is ‘voter-verifiable,’” said Duncan Buell, a computer science professor at the University of South Carolina, because “what the voter verifies is not what is tallied.”

“It basically turns the system into one that has all of the well-known problems that paperless … voting machines have,” said Matt Blaze, a computer science and law professor at Georgetown University. “You have to trust the software that’s being used to cast the vote.”

“This bad ballot-marking technology is a really unfortunate development,” he added, “and it’s one that I’m hopeful will not proliferate.”

In a landmark report published last year, the National Academies recommended against voting devices that tally barcodes. “Electronic voting systems that do not produce a human-readable paper ballot of record raise security and verifiability concerns,” it said. “Additional research on ballots produced by BMDs will be necessary to understand the effectiveness of such ballots."

Not every expert agrees. Joe Kiniry, CEO and chief scientist at the election technology firm Free & Fair, said forthcoming voting security guidelines from the federal Election Assistance Commission would require barcode formats to adhere to a publicly defined and verifiable format. (Those guidelines, however, are optional for states to adopt.)

“We will only see barcode-like things that have open formats and are actually useful for realizing trustworthy elections,” Kiniry said.

In a statement to POLITICO, ES&S called the ExpressVote XL “thoroughly tested and proven.”

But Richard DeMillo, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said he worried that Georgia’s and Philadelphia’s ballot-marking devices “will be a step backward” from their current “notoriously insecure and unmanageable” machines.

In addition, research by DeMillo, Marilyn Marks of the activist group the Coalition for Good Governance and Georgia Tech’s Robert Kadel has called into question the basic notion that ballot-marking devices are secure because voters will carefully review their paper records.

After talking to voters during the 2018 Tennessee primaries, they concluded that “voters are disinclined to review paper trails for accuracy” and that “even when attempting to verify ballots, voters cannot accurately recall all prior choices and full ballot contents even if those choices were made only moments before.”

Blaze said he was “puzzled” as to why companies even made ballot-marking devices that relied on barcodes.

“The consensus of experts have been pretty clear and pretty unanimous here,” he said. “The best voting technology that’s available … is hand-marked paper ballots, augmented, where needed, with human-readable ballot-marking technology.”

Christian Vasquez and Jordyn Hermani contributed reporting.

