Portage County enhances election security before Ohio primary, voters fear hacking
The Portage County Democratic Party office is cluttered with endorsement posters and pins. Rainy weather doesn’t stop a member of their women’s group from dropping off a poster she would like hung up in the window.
Brad Cromes, the Second Vice Chair of the Portage County Democratic Party, laid the sign out to dry.
Cromes strongly believes in the voting system, including its security.
“People should feel confident in our systems.” he said, “We’ve got good people in place that are doing good work.”
He went on to explain the efforts put into place to make sure elections are safe.
“There are a lot of very smart people who are putting time and energy and effort into making sure that our election system is secure, and a lot more that are also making sure as many people as possible can participate in that system,” Cromes said.
Election security has recently been jeopardized.
With hacking interference in 2016, there is an obvious push for higher security measures for the 2020 primaries and general election. 67 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans are concerned that the country’s voting system might be vulnerable to hackers, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in June 2019.
Cromes believes having a paper trail is one of the safest ways to help regulate an election.
“Having something that is voter-verifiable, that people can go and look at before they turn it in and say in fact I voted for X, Y and Z candidate,” he said, “and then after the fact be able to refer to that paper record and say yes, in fact, our election did turn out the way we thought it was going to.”
Having a verifiable paper trail, Cromes said, is one of the most effective ways one can rely on election results.
“It’s not more efficient, and that’s okay,” he said.
Although paper ballots do seem to have more voter reliability, they do not exist without flaws.
In 1964, Georgia counties were the first to use punch-card ballots and computer tally machines. Fulton and DeKalb counties used these systems for the primary and November presidential election.
They were later joined by Lane county in Oregon and San Joaquin and Monterey Counties in California. This was the start of the punch card used in U.S elections.
February 19, 1974, the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine was patented.
A DRE voting machine “is designed to allow a direct vote on the machine by the manual touch of a screen, monitor, wheel, or other device,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Punch ballots and DRE machines became the new wave of voting in the U.S, but in 1988 reports warned of problems with pre-scored punch cards.
Independent election policy consultant, Roy Saltman, stated in “Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying” that “the use of pre-scored punch cards contributes to the inaccuracy and to the lack of confidence. It is generally not possible to exactly duplicate a count obtained on pre-scored punch cards, given the inherent physical characteristics of these ballots and variability in the ballot-punching performance of real voters. It is recommended that the use of pre-scored punch card ballots be ended.”
The use of punch-card ballots was not ended after the report, and a direct consequence was the November 7, 2000, presidential election.
Particularly in Florida, the ballots had an unclear design. Some voters misunderstood the ballots, leading to them punching the wrong option. These “hanging chads” led to questions about the voter’s intent.
After this particular election, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
On October 29, 2002, the act established “a program to provide funds to States to replace punch-card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections, and for other purposes.”
Later, in the same year, Georgia was the first to use DRE voting machines statewide.
Just as studies arose with concern for punch-card voting, DRE voting machines raised different concerns.
Avi Rubin and Dan Wallach, two computer science experts, evaluated the security of a particular model of DREs based on source codes they found on the Internet. Several vulnerabilities were revealed after their analysis.
This was the first independent security analysis to raise DRE concerns.
Cybersecurity is now the main objective in elections today.
Mike Kiec, owner of the local IT firm Adventures in Automation, teaches cybersecurity courses at Kent State University.
He described hacking as “people getting information through electronic devices that they shouldn’t have.”
In terms of “tampering” with an election, Kiec explained that to have influence, hackers must select certain swing states to have an impact.
“When they say tampering, it’s not like every voting machine across the country is being targeted because they’re not,” he said, “what’s being targeted are the specific swing pieces that are identified, I know Ohio in the last election was one of those places.”
Kiec agreed that having a paper trail is the safest way to protect elections.
“It’s like when you take the SAT test, it’s a black mark on a paper, you feed it into a machine, and it converts it, but you still have that piece of paper and it is stored in that machine,” he said.
Having a saved paper trail is the easiest way to fact check elections, even though results might not be immediate.
“Paper ballots take forever to count. It’s just the way they are. And people don’t necessarily want that. But to keep it secure and keep it from being tampered with, it’s probably the best way to go,” Kiec said.
Despite other states’ security issues, Ohio does have its own paper trail.
Terrie Nielsen, Portage County Deputy Director of Board of Elections, explained the county’s way of knowing if elections have been interfered with.
“We have an idea as far as what we should be getting as votes, so if we’re looking at our results, and there seems to be a huge disparity between what’s trending with other candidate votes or other issue votes, or maybe one in particular, that will be a red flag for us,” she said.
Nielsen insured that Portage County’s elections are kept as secure as they could be.
“Obviously nothing is impossible, but we have so many checks and balances,” she said.
