Mississippi messed up when it went largely with touchscreen voting machines as the best way to upgrade its old lever-style equipment.
It messed up again when it allowed counties to disconnect the external printers attached to those touchscreen machines.
It’s now going for strike three by not taking seriously enough the warnings from computer and election experts that touchscreen machines are vulnerable to fraud and malfunction.
Early this month came the latest words of caution, this time from an expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences. It said that the kinds of voting machines used in Leflore and Carroll counties — as well as most of the rest of this state — need to be replaced, and quickly.
“All local, state and federal elections should be conducted using human-readable paper ballots by the 2020 presidential election,” the authors of the report said.
Election integrity has taken on a new urgency with the revelation that Russians tried to tamper with the 2016 presidential election and successfully got into the election systems in at least a couple of states. Although there’s no evidence that any votes were switched or stolen, it’s probably not for lack of trying.
Such hacking attempts are going to continue, whether from bad actors internationally or domestically, and the touchscreen machines are going to be the easiest prey.
All one needs is access to a voting machine for a couple of hours to install a vote-stealing device. Even more probable is to infect one touchscreen machine with a vote-stealing virus on its memory card, and use that one breach to infect all the other voting machines.
Which brings us to another vulnerability with Mississippi’s election systems.
This state has been operating under the fallacy that its voting machines aren’t susceptible to hacking because they are not connected to the Internet. A computer doesn’t have to be connected to the Internet, though, to become infected. It can pick up a virus the low-tech way via a memory card that’s been tampered with.
Those information storage devices are taken out of the voting machines and into a central computer when ballots are being downloaded onto them and again when vote totals are being uploaded from them. Infect one memory card and every memory card inserted into the central computer afterward could be infected.
To reduce the risk, the National Academy of Sciences report says, the computers and software used to prepare the ballots should not be the same as the computes and software to count them. With Mississippi’s touchscreen system, the same computers are used for both.
It might sound old-school to rely on paper, but it’s the only way currently to ensure that a vote actually was registered for the candidate the voter selected, and not for his opponent or erased.
County election officials didn’t like the external printers because they were poorly designed and prone to hanging up. When they took the printers off, though, they also took away not only the most reliable way for the voter to verify the accuracy of his ballot before it is cast but more importantly a means to audit a close or suspicious election or reconstruct the vote if a voting machine crashes.
Mississippi needs to acknowledge its mistake wholesale and get busy replacing all of its touchscreen machines with optical-scanning systems. With these, the voters mark their choices on a paper ballot, which is then scanned to quickly tabulate the results. Optical-scanning systems are already used in a handful of the state’s counties.
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who continues to say, incorrectly, that Mississippi’s election system is secure, has about $5 million in mostly federal funding that counties can apply for to replace their voting machines. It’s not enough money, and Hosemann himself is not pushing the upgrades very hard.
There’s a reason, though, that Mississippi is one of only 13 states that still rely fully or partially on touchscreen machines.
It’s not because we know something the majority of states don’t. It’s because we aren’t listening. Touchscreen machines are a stolen or botched election waiting to happen.
Tim Kalich is editor and publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth. Reach him at (662) 581-7243.
