No, you’re not crazy. It doesn’t make any sense.
Today the Wisconsin Elections Commission once again took up a voting-machine vendors’ request to market a new product here. Once again, the Commission confined voters to five-minute comments and then invited voting-machine vendors to sit down at the table with them to pitch their products.
Once again, the Commission discussed the voters’ concerns only for the purpose of asking the vendor to refute them.
And then the Commission once again approved a ballot-marking device (BMD) that records our votes as barcodes we cannot read.
The machine in question today is called the ExpressVote. Designed primarily for voters who cannot use a pen, BMDs require voters to use a touchscreen to indicate their votes. The computer then prints a marked paper ballot. Increasingly, BMDs are being promoted to voters without disabilities, particularly early voters.
Some BMDs print ballots that are nearly indistinguishable from hand-marked paper ballots, so that ballots cast by voters with disabilities look just like everyone else’s. Both voters and tabulators look at the same input to read the votes.
Bad BMDs, like the ExpressVote, print ballots that look like large cash-register receipts. On these ballots, votes are recorded as barcodes. This prevents voters from verifying that their votes were printed correctly. In addition, these machines violate voters’ privacy when a polling place has only one or two voters with disabilities. (More about barcoding BMDs here.)
But why?
You might ask (as most people do) why anyone would build such a feature into a machine.
You might ask, but the Wisconsin Elections Commission doesn’t.
Commissioners never asked the vendor: “Why? Why are you offering us a machine with this weird feature, when we know you can manufacture machines that perform all the desirable functions and none of the dicey ones?”
Whatever the answer is, it must not make the barcoding BMDs look good.
The vendor’s defense attorney
At one point, Chair Dean Knudson sympathetically acknowledged that voters who use barcoding BMDs can independently verify their votes only if they bring a barcode reader to the polls. He wisely noted that’s too much to expect of voters.
But beyond that, the commissioners’ questions could all be paraphrased: “How can we refute the voters’ stupid concerns?”
“Motivated reasoning” is the chop-logic that appears when people pick a conclusion first and go looking for reasons to justify it afterwards. For example, commissioners and staff repeatedly reminded each other: “We saw no problems when the barcodes were tested/audited/recounted. Therefore, we conclude the system is safe.”
That’s a textbook case of motivated reasoning. People whose brains are engaged know that hackers don’t avoid a system simply because it worked well during the manufacturer’s demo or the customer’s test, that computers do not earn magical immunity from future problems by working well on a previous occasion.
They know it’s a bad idea to give every questionable voting system one freebie botched election before rejecting it.
Commissioner Mark Thomsen, in particular, took it upon himself to play defense attorney for the vendor. He acted insulted that voters had implied the barcoding BMDs are “hackable.” But that wasn’t the voters’ point. Of course the barcoding BMDs are hackable; all computers are. If Thomsen had been listening to understand rather than listening to refute, he would have understood the issue was not “hack-ability,” but that barcodes remove voters’ and officials’ ability to detect hacking.
Most bizarrely, Thomsen repeatedly reiterated one laughable argument made by the vendor. The argument is this: Because the tabulators read all votes as binary code, voters have no reason to object when the printer makes their votes indecipherable to humans.
Thomsen has more than enough intellect to understand that users need to be careful to feed computers only accurate information, so he understands why voters need to be able to tell whether their intended votes were correctly recorded on their paper ballots.
The voter registration system, like the voting machines, processes information as binary code, but I have no doubt Thomsen would immediately see the problem if anyone suggested that WisVote render each voter’s registration record unreadable to the voter.
But for some reason he pretended he didn’t understand.
Thomsen even went on to argue in favor of another type of BMD that WEC staff had wisely recommended rejecting. This machine combines a ballot-printer and a tabulator in one machine, creating a feature that independent elections-technology experts ridicule as the “permission to cheat” feature. Fortunately, the other commissioners acted as a wise jury, so the notion of overriding the staff recommendation to reject that component went nowhere.
Voters shouldn’t give up.
The commissioners are neither stupid nor crooked, as far as I can tell. For example, when they’re working on security for WisVote (the voter-registration system), they do a fabulous job.
It’s only when the questions involve the tabulation system that they devote their energy to making excuses for security flaws rather than fixing them. They suspend their common sense only when the voting-machine vendors sweet-talk them. But whatever the reason, siding with the voting-machine vendors against the voters is something of a habit.
As voters who want to protect our own votes and our communities’ elections, we’ve got work to do. We need to show up and object every time the Commission considers idiotic equipment. I see too much common sense on that commission to believe they will keep these particular blinders on forever.
The other suggestion on the table is a lawsuit. Wisconsin law requires that voting systems “permit an elector to privately verify the votes selected by the elector before casting his or her ballot.” If the WEC admits the barcodes are the only marks ever counted as votes, they will be admitting that the BMDs don’t comply with the verifiability requirement. On the other hand, if the WEC argues that the voters can verify the human-readable text on each barcoded ballot, they will be stuck with no explanation of why that text is never counted as votes. Therefore, if we can find a lawyer willing to defend election security and voters, we could make an argument that barcoding BMDs are already illegal in Wisconsin. If the Commission wants to build voter confidence and enhance security, it will adopt this line of reasoning even without a lawsuit.