Only because I love all you guys, and have been reading too much about this lately, and so feel the need to spread some firsthand knowledge out there. You can rest easy about vote hacking next Tuesday.
Now I’m going to preface all this with the caveat that my information is a dozen years old. However, this is the government we’re talking about here, so I strongly doubt much has changed since 2004 in how this process works. But if you want to believe that either Russia or the global banking cartel plan to hijack voting machines in Wisconsin, I can’t help you. You’re probably, in fact, beyond help.
So in the fall of 2004, I was a bit broke and needed some work to get through the slow end year times, and landed a decent temp gig working for the elections office of Orange County, Florida. That’s the general Orlando metro region. My job was running basic tech support for early voting and then for the various precincts on Election Day. Most days, that meant running around and replugging in USB cords that had come loose.
Now you have to understand how touchy election people were in Florida in 2004. The 2000 Bush/Gore debacle was BAD. Now there were lawyers for all sides at every poll, looking for any little hint of a possible liability that could turn into an irregularity that could play in court if it happened again. The folks who oversee all that – the elections office – are just normal civil servants who want to get through this without CNN shoving a camera in their faces. So to say that they – we – were careful is a dramatic understatement. In fact, we were beyond paranoid about even the slightest glitch.
Now I’ll say that I voted for Kerry, and was bummed that Bush won reelection. But I was happy that the margin in Florida wasn’t too close. I’d rather have the other guy win than have another constitutional crisis. But in the process, I did learn a lot about what would have happened if it had been close.
So here’s how it all works.
First: if you voted absentee/by mail, your ballot goes to the warehouse and gets machine tabulated (sort of like those old Scantron systems they used in high school) on Election Night. Simple and easy. If you did in-person early voting, it’s basically the same process as precinct voting, only less stressful and less chaotic.
So on Election Day:
1. You check in at the poll, verify that you’re registered to vote at that precinct, and go vote. Some states now use a touchscreen system, but in 2004, we were still using normal paper ballots. As I understand it, even the touchscreens in use today (such as in Wisconsin) are only devices for generating paper ballots – it’s the paper ballot that gets counted.
2. You take your ballot to the election worker. They take the ballot and feed it into the tabulating machine. These machines are not connected to the Internet, not networked in any way. They’re isolated devices that read the form and perform an electronic count. The count is recorded on a paper tape. The ballot itself then drops out of the bottom of the tabulator, into a plastic bin.
3. When the plastic bin is full, it is taped shut and sealed. It is loaded on a truck (I was one of the guys that did this) and driven to the elections warehouse. Note that now there are at least two records of these votes: the paper tape, and the ballots. So attempting to tamper with one or the other wouldn’t really get you anywhere, and in any case, would be extremely hard to do without drawing a whole shitload of attention. We’re talking Oceans Eleven movie plot here.
4. Rinse and repeat.
5. On Election Night, the tape tabulations provide the first indications of the election results. The paper ballots do get counted, but especially if the victory margin isn’t close, there’s not a huge amount of pressure to do that quickly. If the vote is close enough to force a recount (as happened in 2000), the paper ballots get counted by hand.
Really, it’s a considerably decentralized system, run by nice government workers who have been doing this for many years and just don’t want to look like incompetent jackasses. Nobody wants to be the poster child for the next hanging chad misadventure. So there’s a lot – a LOT – of pedantic ass covering.
There are a lot of risks this year in vote manipulation. There are reports that groups plan to run intimidation campaigns in urban areas. Gerrymandering. Attempts to make voting in general much harder for people. There’s even a idiot meme floating around the Internet claiming that you can vote online by texting hashtags on Twitter (seriously). If you want to worry about the integrity of our voting process, worry about those things.
But the machines being hacked? No. Too many people involved, too many backup systems, too much risk. If the vote gets ugly, it won’t be because of the machines. It’ll be because of the voters.