In the past two weeks, three reporters have asked me to comment on Russian interference in US elections. Do I believe the Russians interfered with the 2016 election? Do I think they will try in 2020? And my least favorite: Do I think Russians are the worst threat to the voting machines?
I’ll answer the ‘worst’ question first: What the hell does it matter? All threats are threats. Will it be a boring news story if our election is stolen by a Canadian anarchist living in his grandmother’s basement, or by a random computer glitch?
I’ll tell you what the worst threat is. It’s the threat that is literally the sum total of all other threats. Wisconsin county clerks are STILL not using the only safeguard effective against every voting-machine threat including the Russians: Using our paper ballots in prompt, routine, hand-counted audits that verify the correct winners.
The simple truth should be obvious. It is ridiculous to allow any computers to make any big decision unless you have a reliable way to detect and correct serious computer errors.
Can you think of any other government agency that relies on computers and doesn’t have some way to notice if the computer screws up a big operation? No, you cannot. There isn’t one. Only election officials trust their computers that blindly, and demand our trust, too.
When Wisconsin’s county clerks declare election results final without verifying the correct winners, they are allowing computer programmers to pick the candidates who will govern us.1 They don’t supervise these programmers. They don’t know even know who or where they are.2
As to the other questions: I don’t know whether the Russians or anyone else tampered with the voting machines in 2016 and 2018. No one does because no one checks.3 How is that not scandal enough?
Wisconsin’s election officials just seal our paper ballots on Election Night and leave them sealed until it’s time to destroy them two years later. No one ever knows if the paper ballots tell a different story than the computer tapes.
And I don’t know whether Russian criminals are planning to mess with the voting machines in 2020. I do know it is wise to assume they are. Most importantly, I know it will be criminally negligent if our county clerks make no effort to detect and correct any hacks that might get by the security system.
Call your Wisconsin County Clerk today and say: “Surely you understand that you cannot guarantee the security of our voting machines. Too much is outside your control. The only thing you can secure is the election results, and you can do that only by using our paper ballots in hand-counted audits during the county canvass to make sure you certify only the correct winners. Get busy now on developing audit procedures for the 2020 elections.”
– – –
1 A few Wisconsin county officials claim they “program their own voting machines” and imply that provides security. They don’t, and it doesn’t.
The county clerks ‘program’ the machines only in the sense that you ‘program’
2 Example: In 2016, election-security advocates noticed that Dominion—the nation’s second-largest voting machine company, which counts many Wisconsin votes—was recruiting programmers in Serbia. The company’s official response was: “Like many of America’s largest technology companies, which develop some of the software for their products in places like Asia, India, Ireland and the Mideast, some of our software development is undertaken outside the U.S. and Canada, specifically, in Serbia, where we have conducted operations for 10 years.”
3 In the 2016 recount, half of Wisconsin’s presidential votes were “recounted” only by running the ballots back through voting machines programmed by the same people who programmed them for Election Day. These were the ballots in the state’s largest counties (except Dane)–the counties most at risk of hacking.
In the half that was hand-recounted, the recount found that more than 1 in every 170 votes had originally been
But notice this: even when that many votes had been miscounted — up to 30% in some individual wards — county clerks did not notice it in their regular canvass. They detected the incorrect vote totals only when forced to check their work with a recount. Unless our county clerks adopt routine audits, the same will happen when hackers put the Election-Night results outside Wisconsin’s microscopic recount threshold (0.25%). There won’t be a recount and the hackers will have successfully pulled off their crime.