Public trust demands open-source voting systems

But that's not the truth though. Open source software is not easy to tweak when it's deterministically compiled using reproducible builds and there are provisions for on-demand inspection of executables and hardware.

I've only worked a couple elections in a single US county, so I don't claim to be an expert. But the projects described by the company align with each of the devices we use in elections today. Using their software would be the equivalent of moving from MS Office to LibreOffice for operating the government. It won't solve everything, could have bugs, but there are some significant long term advantages, like not depending on a company that could go out of business for security patches.

The first device voters encounter is people working the electronic poll books. We still have a paper backup available, but prefer the electronic versions. First, they can scan the barcode on the drivers license for a quick check-in (usually). When person shows up at the wrong location, we immediately know without spending a couple minutes looking through the paper list. We can even tell them where their voting location is rather than "you're not on the list, we don't know why". When someone needs to vote from their car, we can take a poll book with us and check them in curbside, no extra back and forth. And anyone can check-in at any poll book, rather than splitting the list up by last name. If there is ever a hack of the poll book, changing the list of voters, that could have also been done with the paper backup, and that's why there's a provisional voting process.

After that, over 99% of voters get a paper ballot. They mark their oval with a pen, and take it over to the scanner. This is where the security happens. There's a paper audit of the vote, and the vote is anonymous, your name is not on the ballot.

Less than 1% of the voters ask to use a ballot marking device. They are there for ADA requirements, allowing people that have difficulty marking a ballot by hand to vote. They have headphones to read the choices if needed for the blind. When finished, their choices are printed on their paper ballot, human readable and verifiable, and taken to the same scanner used by other voters. Most people don't even realize ballot marking devices exist, I didn't before I started working the election, and I've yet to see anyone request to use it.

The next step is where people get suspicious. The paper ballots are run through a scanner at the precinct, by the voter. These are monitored by an election worker to ensure the voter scans their ballot, but we stand so we can't see the ballot choices for voter privacy/secret ballots. These machines output a tally in multiple forms at the end of the election, including multiple paper copies and USB drives. The various copies get split up and separately delivered, each by a team of workers, for both redundancy and to ensure no one person is ever alone with the results.

A very important process happening throughout the day is counting the votes. The number of voters that register in the poll books is compared with the number of ballots given out (when ballots are unwrapped, they are counted, and what remains at the end of the day is counted again), and also the number that went through the scanner. Things get complicated (I assume reports are made after an extensive search is done) if we are ever off by one ballot in those counts.

The common fear that someone could stuff the ballot box, even by an insider, doesn't match my experience. In addition to the counts above, multiple workers, from multiple parties, are assigned to each precinct. We don't leave the ballots at any stage unattended at any time.

At the end of the day, the tallied ballots are sealed in a box. All equipment is locked back up. And lots of items (tallies, USB disks, sealed ballot boxes, provisional ballots, etc) are returned by a team of people that night to the county government building. From there, initial counts are released and then the election needs to get certified. That's where my personal experience ends.

The certification process includes deciding which provisional ballots to accept, and then counting them. But it also includes audits of the equipment. And those audits are supposed to take some boxes of ballots from select precincts and run them through a different a scanner to verify the tally is the same. The precinct scanners are also audited before we receive them, which is visible because a permanent count is tracked on the machine that's never zero for us, even when it's a new machine that's never been used in a previous year's election. In addition to all those electronic counts on different equipment, some percentage of ballots is likely hand counted. This certification process all happens over the course of days, if not weeks, but the initial count is usually out in a few hours when a first team of workers brings back one of the two USB disks (along with other items).

There are ways to hack an election, but these electronic machines are at the bottom of my list. Someone would have to alter the counts from the scanners without adding or removing votes, in a way that doesn't get caught in an electronic or hand audit in the future on independent equipment, and doesn't get detected in an audit of the machine before it is placed in service. And the whole process is constantly watched by workers from more than one party affiliation.

Instead, if you wanted to hack the election, you'd first become a billionaire, and buy all the media companies to ensure the population only sees one opinion. Then you'd gerrymander the election districts so most elections aren't really contested. And in locations where it might be close, you fill it with ads and social media misinformation so that voters don't know what to believe and they follow the loudest voices that repeated the most. Not only is that a lot more likely to work, but there's no chance of any consequences if you get caught since it's not illegal.

It reminds me of a youtube channel explaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly using monkeys and bananas. It doesn't perfectly fit, but works surprisingly well for such a subject.