Who voted for the voting machines?

Talking Iowa headaches and election security with the director of “I Voted?”

“Why can’t they do things the old-fashioned way?” is not a sentence I thought I’d find myself muttering at age 31.

And yet. I can’t be the only person who felt like a Luddite watching the botched reporting of Monday’s Iowa Democratic Caucus results.

“We feel really terrible about that,” said Gerard Niemira, CEO of the hilariously named political tech company Shadow Inc., in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg News.

In case you missed the news, the Iowa Democratic Party bought a new smartphone app this year to collect caucus results from precinct captains across the state and transmit them to a central data warehouse. Due to a bug in the app, the data failed to transmit properly.

As I hard-refreshed the Des Moines Register homepage Tuesday, my mind drifted to one of the great unsolved electoral mysteries in my own state of South Carolina.

In June 2010, a man named Alvin Greene managed to win the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat without campaigning, creating a website, or even putting up yard signs. He took home 59% of the vote against a relatively well-known county councilman from Charleston.

Greene had no political background and no apparent connections. He had been discharged from the military and was unemployed, living with his father in the small town of Manning. My friend Corey Hutchins, writing for the Free Times in Columbia, broke the story wide open and popularized the nickname “The Manning-churian Candidate.”

A filmmaker from California named Jason Grant Smith got so intrigued by the story that he flew across the country and started making a documentary. His project took a turn when he realized it was impossible to verify every vote in the primary — because there wasn’t a paper trail.

The end result was a documentary called I Voted? I had the pleasure of hosting an early screening and discussion of footage from the film in 2013, when Smith made this enticing pitch for the project:

One thing I do want to stress about this project is that it is non-conspiracy-based and non-partisan. I make no allegations of elections being rigged or stolen.

I found Smith to be a thoughtful, analytical guy. When the news broke in Iowa this week, I thought it would be a good time to catch up with him. I called him in Los Angeles Tuesday night, and we chatted about the modern high-tech voting machine, a solution in search of a problem.

(A quick plug: The full 2016 release of “I Voted?” is now available to stream via Amazon and the documentary’s website, ivotedmovie.com. I highly recommend checking it out.)

Jason started by catching me up to speed on a news story from my own state: In June 2019, the state of South Carolina awarded a $51 million contract to the company Election Systems & Software (ES&S) to replace its existing iVotronic voting machines with 13,500 new ExpressVote XL machines.

The new machines are a digital-paper hybrid. The voter makes selections on a touchscreen, and then the machine prints off a paper ballot. The voter gets to review the paper before feeding it into a scanner.

The State newspaper made hay out of the fact that the head of the State Election Commission went to a ritzy conference in Las Vegas on ES&S’ dime. Jason’s concerns were more technical in nature. We’ll pick up the conversation there.

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Jason Grant Smith: So here’s what the system does: You can see who it is that you selected — it’s a touchscreen system, it’s like the iVotronic where you make your selections — and then a printed paper comes out where you can see who you voted for. However, the actual vote of record and what is counted by a scanner is encrypted. It’s like a QR code, it’s a barcode. It’s encrypted using proprietary software that cannot be publicly examined.

Brutal South: Wow.

JGS: You could call it the DRE [direct-recording electronic] 2.0 in some ways because it’s impossible for the voter to know their intentions are what become the record of choice on the ballot. They can’t know that because it’s proprietary software. So now these are the systems that are being floated, certainly by ES&S, and I don’t know if the other vendors are floating these same systems ...

BS: It’s like someone heard, “We need paper ballots,” but they didn’t understand why. They’re printing out paper ballots, but they’re not serving the cause of transparency.

JGS: They’re not transparent, and that’s the big hiccup. If you are forced to use proprietary software that can’t even be publicly examined, well I mean isn’t that the same as the iVotronic and the digital vote? I don’t know what the difference is. Having said that, I don’t know what an audit of that system would look like ...

I was trying to push this in South Carolina. I was working with [Democratic House Minority Leader] Todd Rutherford on this, and I was really pushing for this hand-marked ballot.

BS: Using a pencil or pen?

JGS: Well yeah, the voter himself or herself is actually marking the ballot so that voter intent is easily discernible, everyone knows, the voter knows, and the voter can see, “Here’s my ballot and here’s how I marked it. I am actually selecting my choices, not a computer.”

BS: When I talk about paper ballots around the breakroom, over coffee, as one does, I think the most common response I get is, “Well yeah, but remember hanging chads?” Paper ballots aren’t perfect; they were a big part of what screwed up in Florida that one time. I’m sure you’ve encountered that a few times. How do you respond to that? 

JGS: So the chad thing was flawed equipment. I mean it was really flawed paper. If the chad isn’t easily punched, well then there’s a flaw in the paper, don’t use that, don’t use chads. Just have the voter mark the ballot. It’s so not that complicated.

BS: The lack of complication seems relevant here. One thing that strikes me about Iowa’s caucus and this phone app that messed up so badly is I can’t figure out what problem the app was supposed to solve. People seemed to be doing just fine calling in results over the telephone as they had for decades and decades. The only thing an app like that does is make some company and some web developer a good deal of money. Broadly speaking, when you look at election machines and varying election technologies, is the profit motive often what’s mucking up the democratic process?

JGS: Well, I’ll give you an explanation and you can tell me whether or not you think it’s the profit motive. 

There are three main vendors in the election space in the United States. There’s ES&S, Election Systems & Software, what you guys bought your equipment from. They made the iVotronic and they also made the [ExpressVote XL] … They’re the biggest, they command a huge share of the market.

And then the second biggest company is Hart InterCivic, and that company got a bit of press back in 2012 because Tagg Romney had done an investment with a company that was invested in Hart InterCivic. It was basically about as guilty as “You have a mother and I have a mother, so we must be brothers …”

The third company is a company called Dominion. Between these three vendors, you’re talking about probably over 98% of the elections in the United States. So now I’m including Diebold within that, because there are places that use Diebold equipment, but Dominion bought Diebold.

So you were asking about profit motive. So election equipment is in theory designed to last for a period of time, so the vendors are somewhat limited in their ability to make a buck because these municipalities and states are not buying their equipment that often. It’s not too dissimilar to printers or razors. Blades cost money, ink costs money. So the vendors in the election space are making their money on maintenance agreements, licensing agreements, sometimes they have to buy their ink, they have to buy their paper, or it’s out of warranty and it won’t work.

The other thing I wanted to add was that for this equipment to become legally certified in a state, depending on the state, it can be prohibitively expensive. In California, I could be wrong about this, but in California I believe it costs over $1 million for a vendor to pass certification.

BS: So there’s a barrier to entry.

JGS: A huge, huge barrier to entry, which is really unfortunate because it prevents innovation ...

We outsource this stuff to these kind of midsized companies. These are not huge multi-billion-dollar corporations by any stretch, and they’re entitled to make a buck. So to some degree we actually hamstring them from making a buck. But at the end of the day I don’t know why this isn’t taken on by the government. I don’t know why. I mean we pay for things like national parks, we pay for our military. Why aren’t we paying to design competent election equipment to handle the needs of the states and municipalities? I don’t understand it.

BS: You’ve been on this issue for a while; for you it really goes back to 2010 with the whole Alvin Greene thing. Election security broadly became a more visible issue nationally in 2016 and the aftermath when it turned out people really were trying, at least, to interfere with elections. And yet, there was an AP report last year you probably saw where the percentage of votes cast on paperless machines was going down, but at last check it was still about 12% of votes nationwide. And some of the machines were still on Windows 7, stunningly. What’s the hold up? As you’ve been on this path, what are the obstacles that you’re seeing to secure, transparent elections? 

JGS: I think there are a few things. Maybe the No. 1 reason is everybody assumes somebody is already doing this. Everybody assumes somebody must be looking out for this because we’re the United States of America and we’ve been kicking ass since 1776. So somebody must be looking out over all this.

I can assure you that’s not happening.

And it’s so odd to me that Congress doesn’t really care, state legislators don’t really care, and few people really understand this issue at a granular level. It’s so important that we have people that do understand this at a granular level. If we don’t, then somebody else that understands this will make our decisions for us. Which may already be happening.

BS: What the [Iowa] state party is saying at this point is, “We’re going to have an accurate count at some point; you just have to wait a few days.” Taking them at their word for a minute, people expected a result Monday night, and when that didn’t come, there was a little bit of chaos. Buttigieg came out and gave sort of a victory speech, and Sanders came out and had their conflicting numbers. What happens there is an epistemic destabilization, where it’s harder to get at the truth, especially as just a layperson at home.

JGS: You just hit something on the head: Democracy works when we think it works … Let’s say hypothetically an election takes place, and every vote is recorded accurately and reflects voter intent, but the public doesn’t believe the outcome? That’s when you have blood in the streets. So it really is essential that the public believes that the outcome is fair and accurate …

I do want to go back to one of your other points, Paul, where you were asking about the profit motive for these companies. That becomes a huge challenge for them, how to make a buck in a system that’s really a crappy business. It’s really easy to paint a target on these vendors, and they get blasted in the press every now and then, and they get blasted by Congress every now and then. However, the fault rests with We the People. The fault rests by looking in the mirror, because we don’t really pay attention to this stuff.

You were asking about the challenges, why people don’t pay attention to this: People lead busy lives. They’ve gotta do their taxes, they’ve gotta pick up their kids from soccer practice, they’ve gotta take the call from their boss. They’re not waking up in the morning saying, “Wait a minute, did we remember to secure our democracy?” … Nobody’s thinking in those terms. 

There’s nothing sexy about election integrity. Nothing. It’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. Now, when things do go south, that’s very exciting. We saw that in Iowa. Last night was very exciting, that was all really exciting. It didn’t have to be.

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A few stray notes:

If you’re nostalgic or curious about the Alvin Greene saga in South Carolina, Corey Hutchins’ book The Accidental Candidate is as comprehensive an accounting as you are likely to find. It also features some great illustrations by Blue Delliquanti.

I signed up for my college friend Melanie’s newsletter this week after reading her account of how book-publishing giant Macmillan is screwing public libraries with a change to its ebook selling policy. Melanie is a librarian, so she writes from a place of righteous anger, and I’m here for it.

It's been a while since a metal song brought me to tears. I was absolutely wrecked this week when I heard “Rune’s Heart” by Panopticon, a recording of two parents' anger and helplessness while watching their child undergo heart surgery. Give it a listen if you are a parent who appreciates black metal.

Images used this week:

“Suffragettes with flag.” Bain News Service, ca. 1910-1915. Library of Congress, LCCN 2014690979.

“Man Counts Controversial Palm Beach County punch card ballot.” Mark T. Foley, 2000. State Library and Archives of Florida (public domain)