Who's Watching Your Voting Machine?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Hackers have looted data at Target, JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. government (and, yes, the University of Maryland). So how safe are the paperless voting machines that some states will use in the 2016 presidential election? “Voters as well as the poll workers and election officials have no way to verify that their ballots are recorded, transmitted and tabulated properly,” says Rebecca Mercuri, who spoke Wednesday at a cybersecurity forum sponsored by Smith and the School of Public Policy.

Mercuri, founder and CEO of Notable Software, has been pushing for election reform since Bush v. Gore in 2000. Her gripe against paperless systems is that they are self-auditing — they don't allow for independent verification. “It's all a trade secret,” she says.

Most states either use paper ballots or print receipts that voters can inspect before walking out the door. Maryland will join the crowd, scrapping its touch-screen machines for the April 26 primary — after years of delays — but 15 states will continue to produce no independent record of votes cast (see footnote 1 for the list). New Jersey lawmakers ordered the change in 2005, but not much has happened since then except legal wrangling.

Voting machine companies cite several challenges involved in creating paper audit trails, but Mercuri doesn’t buy the excuses. She says ATMs do it, and so do lottery systems. “They’re printing these out by the billions,” Mercuri says. "But they say, 'No, we can't print out paper ballots."