Votebeat

Issues with modem-based systems held up election results reporting in two Wisconsin counties

2026-08-20T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Systems used to transmit unofficial election-night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results.

The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin.

Much of the concern about sending results over modems has related to cybersecurity. But experts say there are additional reasons to avoid the use of modems, and the recent issues in Wisconsin are one example. There’s no indication that the Election Day issues in Green and Winnebago counties, which both use Liberty Vote election technology, had anything to do with a hack.

Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them.

A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election-night operations and consume significant staff time.

“It matters because it’s a time suck for the county, and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.

In a statement, a Liberty Vote spokesperson said they have “every confidence these isolated issues will not occur in future elections.”

Green County changing results reporting process for November

The results transmission failure caused the most significant delay in Green County, where officials did not fully shift to a backup method for collecting results from municipalities until the next morning.

Officials there and their vendor, Liberty Vote, are still trying to understand what went wrong after county staff were unable to process the results that municipalities sent over via fax modems, Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli told Votebeat.

When municipalities in Green County send their unofficial results to the county clerk’s office, they appear as encrypted files on a so-called listener server set up to receive the transmissions, said Voegeli, a Democrat. Normally, a different software called a results workstation pulls those files and uploads the results to the county’s unofficial results reporting system, but that process broke down on Election Day, she said.

County staff tried to troubleshoot the issue with Liberty Vote after discovering the issue at 9 p.m. on election night but couldn’t find a solution. That meant they had to turn to alternative methods to get the results from municipalities, and didn’t have them all until the next morning — far later than most counties.

Voegeli said she consulted with the Wisconsin Elections Commission at the time to discuss what to do. The commission, she said, encouraged her to get municipal results as quickly as possible.

“Their recommendation was, at that point, to do my due diligence and do the best I can with trying to contact people [that] night to get those results in,” she said.

She opted not to use sheriff’s deputies to wake clerks that night, she said. Instead, she called all 24 of them; most didn’t return her call until early the following morning, but the few who responded delivered results over the phone. She got back to work at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday to finish processing results as municipal officials either came in person to deliver the unofficial results or told Voegeli the results over the phone. All the results were uploaded by 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Had it been November, she said, she would have employed sheriff’s deputies to wake up clerks. She opted not to do it this time around, Voegeli said, in part because the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t give hard guidance, and she didn’t feel she’d save meaningful time by waking them.

As of Monday, she said, officials still had not determined what caused the failure. But Green County is changing its approach for the November election.

Voegeli said nearby municipalities will drive to the county office to physically deliver unofficial results, and the faraway ones will verbally transmit results via telephone.

“Even if we determine what the cause of this issue is, I think we’re still going to plan on that for the general election,” she said. “We really want to make sure that we’re getting those results out in a timely manner.”

Winnebago County shifted gears on Election Day

Winnebago County, which also uses Liberty Vote systems, also had trouble transmitting unofficial results by modem, but officials there shifted to a backup plan that same night.

After polls closed, municipal clerks were initially unable to send unofficial election results over a cellular modem. County officials and Liberty Vote are still trying to understand what went wrong, County Clerk Julie Barthels said. After noticing the error, Barthels instructed municipal clerks in the county to drive in the results and hand them over physically. The last one arrived around 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.

The city resolved the results-reporting issue by 9 p.m., said Barthels, a Republican. But by then, municipal officials were already on their way to the county and Barthels said she didn’t want to turn the municipal officials around again to deliver them via modem.

Winnebago County isn’t planning for any shift in results-reporting for November. But she said she’ll work with Liberty Vote, to understand what went wrong.

“They’ve promised me this will not happen in November,” Barthels said about Liberty Vote. “We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. I so trust our system. But it’s like any other computer. One day it works, and the next day it doesn’t.”

Some election security experts warn against modeming results

Smith, the Verified Voting CEO, said any method that requires election equipment to communicate with other devices — whether that’s through a secure cellular network or a physical phone line — introduces additional vulnerabilities.

“It’d be great if they would move towards a safer operation of not not having that connectivity,” she said

But Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said transmitting unofficial results via modem does not pose a major technical risk as long as the official results are protected through testing and audits of paper ballots. Every method for transmitting results has trade-offs, he said: Driving a USB stick for an hour may have fewer vulnerabilities than an internet-connected method, but it also takes far longer.

The more important safeguard, Hale said, is for election officials to stay involved throughout the process, validating results and checking for errors — especially when verifying the official count. Hale previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In this case, he said, Winnebago and Green County responded appropriately by having backup plans in case their initial systems failed.

“This one doesn’t concern me quite as much as some other things I’ve seen,” he said.

Noah Praetz, president of Ready For Tuesday and a longtime election administration and security consultant, said jurisdictions embraced reporting results via modems in the 2000s and 2010s.

That momentum stalled around 2016, he said, amid Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections and after Ukraine’s results reporting system in 2014 was successfully hacked. After that, Praetz said, following responses from the FBI and CISA, and the designation of elections as critical infrastructure by the Secretary of Homeland Security, election officials began recognizing that results in transit over modems posed a risk, even if the results were unofficial.

But a major benefit of using modems is speed, and Praetz emphasized the downsides of slower alternatives, as delays in reporting results can create openings for bad actors — including foreign governments — to sow distrust.

“People want to get results out of their hands,” he said. “They want to satisfy their voters.”

That was evident in Milwaukee on Aug. 11, when a human error in exporting results caused a 90-minute delay that exasperated election watchers and prompted widespread conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

An election night error overshadowed Milwaukee’s improvements at processing absentee ballots

2026-08-12T16:59:27+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Milwaukee election officials spent Tuesday trying to prove they had a better way to count absentee ballots — faster, smoother, and with less reason for anyone to doubt the process.

Then, after 15 hours of nearly flawless work, a few minutes of human error blew up the plan.

At around 11:10 p.m. on Tuesday night, city officials left their central count facility without exporting results from five of its nine tabulators, forcing them to race back under police escort and delaying Milwaukee’s results by about 90 minutes. It was the third time in recent years that a significant tabulator-related mistake had disrupted the city’s heavily scrutinized absentee-ballot operation.

So, right around midnight, chief Milwaukee election official Paulina Gutiérrez and other city officials climbed into a white van under police escort and headed back along the Milwaukee River to the central count facility they thought they had shut down about an hour earlier.

There was ample evidence of what had gone wrong — and no evidence of tampering or any sign the results were affected.

“We’re all human, and humans can make errors,” Gutiérrez told Votebeat, just past 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, after she and several other city officials shuffled from tabulator to tabulator to export the results they had failed to retrieve the first time.

By then, the warehouse-like room was largely empty. Temporary workers had gone home. Election observers, believing the night was over, had left too. Gutiérrez, wearing a white blazer and pants and maintaining an even-keeled expression as reporters surrounded her, said the results were secure, and that the city would determine how the error occurred and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

City of Milwaukee Election Commision executive director Paulina Gutiérrez speaks to the media on election night. She assured reporters later in the night that the city error didn't jeopardize ballot security.

Her explanation did little to slow the criticism.

Within minutes, Dan Eastman, a right-wing lawyer who has filed election-related cases in Wisconsin, wrote on social media that there was no way central count could work for Milwaukee. Loomer Unleashed, a podcast hosted by right-wing pundit Laura Loomer, was more explicit: “Yeah, they cheated!”

Others, including Democrats, criticized the city without alleging wrongdoing.

“What an inauspicious ending to an otherwise quiet day,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a regular observer at the city’s absentee ballot counting operation.

Mistakes add up for the state’s most scrutinized election operation

In November 2020, after arriving at the county clerk’s office to transmit Milwaukee’s election results, then-city election chief Claire Woodall realized that she forgot one of the facility’s 12 flash drives containing vote results at central count, a mistake some conservatives seized on as a flagrant oversight. That led her to create a checklist that the city has since used to avoid similar errors, outlining over two dozen steps for extracting, securing, and transmitting election results.

Four years later, at the next presidential election, Milwaukee election officials made the extraordinary decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again because some staff didn’t lock tabulator doors in the early morning. Those panel doors, which cover the on/off switch and sometimes a slot for USB drives, were supposed to have been locked during counting.

The process Woodall created to prevent future such errors included a single official extracting results from each tabulator while accompanied by other staff. Officials appeared to have followed that process in November 2024, but not this time. Instead, different staff members downloaded the files from different tabulators and did so inconsistently, not realizing that results were not properly exported from five of the tabulators.

At the time, it appeared to take officials around 10 minutes to extract results from some tabulators, and only three minutes from others. In hindsight, the mistake was clear to Gutiérrez: Downloading results from tabulators takes more than three minutes, she told Votebeat.

“The fact that this happened five times seems more like a training issue,” Woodall told Votebeat. “Was this person trained on how to export results? Are they familiar with the machines and how you export results?”

But she also cautioned people not to get too carried away by a human error that wasn’t indicative of any fraud or fatal flaw in the election system.

Just after 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson stood beneath the bright fluorescent lights outside his courthouse office, facing roughly a dozen reporters who had stayed well past midnight waiting for the city’s results. Nearly two hours had passed since Christenson first expected those results to arrive.

Now, with the mistake finally corrected and the long election night stretching on, he told the assembled media that Milwaukee operates under constant scrutiny — and that people make mistakes.

“At the end of the day,” he continued, “what’s important is that we’re transparent, that the results are secure, and that we’re open and honest. And that’s what the City of Milwaukee election director did. She came up here and she explained it, went back, got the results, brought it back to us, and we got everything right.”

Errors undermine city efforts to build trust, lobby for policy change

Milwaukee officials have long argued that state law and limited resources make the city’s massive absentee-ballot operation harder than it needs to be. But the string of high-profile mistakes at Milwaukee’s central count operation has complicated their efforts to persuade lawmakers to give them more flexibility.

Wisconsin law prohibits municipalities from processing ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. That leaves Milwaukee — home to the biggest central count operation in the state — to open envelopes, verify signatures and witness addresses, and prepare tens of thousands of ballots for counting in a single day.

For years, election officials have pushed for legislation allowing municipalities to begin that process before election day. The proposal has been repeatedly stalled by the Republican-controlled legislature, largely on the basis that Milwaukee cannot be trusted with additional time. That’s despite state Rep. Scott Krug, a high-ranking Republican, having spent years behind the scenes trying to gather support for the policy.

As liberals on Tuesday suggested the pre-processing law would have helped stave off mistakes, Krug said that the city wasn’t helping its cause.

“Complete incompetence at the facility isn’t helping anything here,” he said on social media. “This was human error that could have easily been double checked before leaving the facility. More than one answer to the problem not one silver bullet.”

How officials, experts think central count operation can improve

Allowing Milwaukee to start processing absentee ballots earlier would relieve some of the pressure on Election Day. But election experts say it would not solve all the other weaknesses in an operation handling more absentee ballots than any other in the state.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of the Elections Group, said a successful central count operation depends on three things: experienced staff, a space designed for the work, and the right equipment. Milwaukee, she said, falls short in each area compared with similarly sized cities that have invested more heavily in election administration.

The city election commission never had enough full-time staff to begin with, Morrell said, and currently has a small handful of vacancies. While central count relies on temporary employees, she added, it still needs enough experienced full-time staff to run an operation of that size.

The city also has no permanent home for its central count, meaning officials must adapt the operation to spaces that were not necessarily designed for processing tens of thousands of absentee ballots. Morrell also said the city lacks equipment that other cities of similar sizes have invested in, like a mail sorting machine. That means Milwaukee election workers sort tens of thousands of mail ballots — sometimes more than 100,000 — by hand. Madison’s sorting machine, by comparison, allows the city to sort hundreds of ballots in minutes.

Gretchen Macht, the founder of the Engineering for Democracy Institute and an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Rhode Island, has spent the past few years assisting Gutiérrez to find more efficient ways to conduct its central count. In an interview with Votebeat, Macht invoked an old saying in both election administration and engineering: You can have something fast, accurate, or cheap, but you can only pick two.

For Milwaukee officials, sacrificing accuracy is an obvious nonstarter.

“Our number one priority is efficiency and accuracy,” Gutiérrez said, adding that she’ll never sacrifice election operations just to improve speed.

But without more money or changes to state law, there is only so much faster the city can go.

Just before midnight on Tuesday, that consequence was playing out on national television.

With more than 90% of the state’s unofficial results in and Milwaukee’s absentee ballots poised to determine the outcome of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, NBC News election analyst Steve Kornacki was waiting for the city’s numbers to arrive.

He stood flabbergasted — hands on his knees, mouth agape, eyebrows raised — in his studio as he learned about the snafu with the USB sticks.

“Are you serious?” he said.

“We’re kind of indefinitely waiting for them to get their act together here,” he said. “We waited 90 minutes for them. They did this whole procession, and then we find out there’s nothing on the sticks.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Trump rehashes claims of election vulnerabilities, foreign interference, and fraud in primetime speech

2026-07-17T05:02:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed.

Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan.

In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, alleging that current election systems fall “catastrophically short of that standard.”

As he spoke, many secretaries of state from around the country were at dinner in South Dakota, closing out the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Many did not watch the address, convinced after years of Trump’s election-related allegations that he was unlikely to say anything he hadn’t said before — though many staff members attending the conference did watch, and some secretaries issued statements later.

Trump concluded the speech by again calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would impose photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters nationwide.

“The kids playing wizard in the park have a firmer grip on reality than any of this,” one Republican staff member said as he entered Mount Rushmore.

NASS bussed conference participants to the monument on Thursday night, shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, as part of a preplanned event on a day when red, white, and blue was the recommended dress code. Secretaries and their staff filtered past state flags into five reserved rows of seats as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played and the sun set.

Election officials, experts respond to Trump’s election speech

Not all secretaries of state were in South Dakota, and some did watch the speech. “I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years, and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”

Election experts said the voting equipment vulnerabilities Trump appeared to be referring to in his speech have long been publicly known. “Everyone in this space knows that technology is vulnerable and works to put in safeguards and controls to secure it anyway,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Hale said he was still reviewing the documents released by the White House, but pointed out that nearly all Americans vote on systems that require a voter-verifiable paper ballot, to ensure a paper backup that can’t be hacked.

One declassified document, quoted by Trump in his speech, stated, “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, noted that some components of election infrastructure — such as public-facing election websites — are more vulnerable than others — such as voting machines. “There was a lot of conflation, it seemed to me, of different types of technology, the vast majority of which doesn’t actually affect election outcomes,” she said.

According to Trump, China also illicitly acquired the data of 220 million U.S. voters. However, voter data is widely publicly available, and it wasn’t clear from Trump’s speech whether he was alleging that voter registration databases were breached. Trump did allege that “members of the deep state” tried to downplay China’s acquisition of the data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”

Election officials from various states were quick to clarify that their data was secure. “I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Fontes told Votebeat.

The Chinese government didn’t steal any Wisconsin election data either, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said on X. “If they bought our voter data, that is public data and they are allowed to buy it. So can you! So can anyone!”

Trump makes new claims about noncitizen voters

One new, or at least more specific, claim made by Trump in the speech is that there are 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. According to a Department of Homeland Security memo released after the speech, that number appears to mostly be derived from a review of public voter files in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said his office hasn’t heard from the Department of Homeland Security. “We don’t even understand how they calculated those numbers,” he said, adding that Trump “truly does not understand elections, not even at the basic level.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement that the state follows all laws and requires voters to take steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot, adding that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

“We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said.

The president and his allies have long alleged that voting by noncitizens is widespread, but election officials, audits, investigations, and academic research have found it to be extremely rare, and noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties and deportation.

Multiple states have audited their voter rolls and found tiny numbers of noncitizens registered, most of whom have never cast a ballot. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made the search for noncitizen voters a driving force behind its election agenda. Last year, the administration revamped a Department of Homeland Security data tool, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, and encouraged states to use it to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.

States that did so reported finding relatively small numbers of potential noncitizens, and at least some of those flagged voters were later determined to be citizens, prompting many experts and election officials to warn that the SAVE program was unreliable.

For example, in Texas, officials flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens, some of whom county officials have determined are citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many. They’ve also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file. In April, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy in a letter to federal officials.

In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights.

A Michigan case of suspected voter registration fraud

The president also spotlighted a six-year-old fraud allegation in Michigan as an example of election misconduct being “buried and covered up.”

Police reports showed that in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a woman working for a Tennessee-based company, GBI Strategies, submitted thousands of voter applications to the city clerk of Muskegon, a largely Democratic city. Most were legitimate, but the clerk identified irregularities with several hundred of them. The suspicious registrations were caught in time for the election.

The matter was initially investigated by Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, but the investigation was turned over to the FBI in March 2021. The story made headlines at the time, but it was largely ignored on a broader scale until 2023, when a conservative news site amplified old reports about it, and it has been an occasional Republican talking point in the state since.

Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday night that the incident provided a “perfect example of the system working exactly as it should,” meaning the clerk noticed suspected fraud and flagged it before anyone could vote improperly.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state who is now running for governor, emphasized in a statement after the speech that the state’s elections are “secure and safe.”

“This was the case in 2020, 2022, 2024 and will be again in 2026,” she said in a release. “Because in every election, over 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers ensure that the law is followed and that every valid vote counts.”

Trump teases ‘very big announcement’ about elections, but it’s unclear what it will be

2026-07-16T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Election watchers are buzzing about President Donald Trump’s speech to the nation on Thursday night — but so far, no one has any concrete idea what he’s going to say.

The White House has scheduled a rare primetime address for Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said the address would touch on multiple subjects but include a “very big announcement” about election security. “It’s really, really big news,” he said. “Without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”

Trump, of course, has said many things about the integrity of U.S. elections, few of them true. He has claimed repeatedly that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the 2020 election, despite numerous investigations and audits that have found no evidence of that.

Nevertheless, since Trump retook office last year, his administration has reopened investigations into that election on several fronts: The FBI seized ballots from an election office in Fulton County, Georgia; subpoenaed records from a partisan audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona; and has questioned election officials in Wisconsin. FBI Director Kash Patel said in April that the bureau would “soon” be making arrests in connection with the 2020 election, but those have yet to materialize.

The Department of Homeland Security is also investigating potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in Michigan, Texas, and other states. The Department of Justice recently sent letters to all 50 states warning election officials could be prosecuted if they knowingly keep noncitizens on the rolls.

The administration has also launched investigations into the security of voting machines. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence last year procured voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for security risks. Reuters reported the resulting report found vulnerabilities, such as machines running outdated software, but did not find evidence of vote manipulation.

Some reporting suggests Trump’s speech will focus on those alleged vulnerabilities. Reuters and MS NOW have reported that Trump will present newly declassified intelligence about voting machines and attempts at foreign interference in U.S. elections. A 2021 report from the Justice and Homeland Security departments found “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes” in the 2020 election.

A National Intelligence Council report declassified in 2021 also found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

The speech also comes exactly one week after Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the agency responsible for certifying voting machines to voluntary federal guidelines that most states rely on. Reuters subsequently reported that Trump administration officials were frustrated with the commissioners’ inaction on voting machines and had been looking for ways to circumvent the agency for months.

For now, the White House is staying tight-lipped. “As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”

One key question is whether Trump will actually announce a new policy or action. Preparations for the 2026 midterms are already well underway, and election officials would likely not be able to implement any major new policies in time.

Even if Trump does announce a new policy, he may not have the legal authority to order it. He has already issued two executive orders attempting to overhaul U.S. election procedures, including one last year that ordered the EAC to ban voting machines that use barcodes or QR codes for counting, with limited exceptions for voters with disabilities. But courts have blocked all their major provisions on the grounds that the president does not have the authority to unilaterally change election law. Instead, the Constitution delegates election rule-making to state legislatures and Congress.

Trump has repeatedly pressured Congress to enact his preferred election policies by passing the SAVE America Act and similar legislation, but they do not have enough support in the Senate to pass. It’s possible that a goal of Trump’s speech is primarily to ratchet up that pressure. When Newsmax asked him to give a preview of the speech in an interview on Monday, Trump responded by saying, “We gotta have voter ID, we gotta have proof of citizenship” — two provisions of the SAVE America Act — “and we have to do something about the mail-in ballots, which are just corrupt, crooked, and should not be allowed.”

Even if Trump does not try to use the speech to unveil new election policies, he could still use it to undermine the 2026 elections by sowing doubt about the legitimacy of U.S. elections in general. Election experts have decried Trump’s fearmongering around elections as attempts to intimidate election officials and lay the groundwork for challenging an unfavorable result.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Mohave County will debut new ballot paper with added security measures in July primary

2026-07-02T13:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Officials in Mohave County, Arizona, walked into a public meeting last year with bad news for their bosses.

The rural, bright-red county wanted to adopt a type of ballot paper with watermarks, embedded fibers, microprinting, and other security features for future elections. Its elected supervisors had previously voted to approve a new contract for such paper with Runbeck Election Services, a voting materials company in Phoenix, because they firmly believed the change would improve voter confidence.

But election officials had recently tested the paper, called Ballot Guard, with the county’s vote-tabulating machines and found that it wasn’t performing as hoped.

A team of staffers took the podium to lay out the situation. The paper, they said, caused the tabulators to pull multiple pages at once, leading to paper jams and other errors that required rerunning ballots. ES&S, the company that manufactured the county’s tabulators, had done its own tests and seen similar results.

Elections Director Allen Tempert warned that using the paper in a live election could significantly slow results and increase the possibility of inaccurate tallies. He urged the county’s all-Republican board of supervisors to consider another type of paper that included watermarks and had already worked successfully elsewhere.

The board appeared open to considering the alternative. But months later, another round of testing returned improved results. In January, with election officials’ blessing, supervisors voted unanimously to use Ballot Guard in upcoming elections.

“It works well,” Tempert told Votebeat, adding that he was “comfortable” with county supervisors’ decision.

Now, the stage is set for a make-or-break moment in the state’s northwest corner — starting with the state primary, scheduled for July 21. A successful debut could inspire other counties to pick up the paper. But if the paper causes problems, it could lead to an election night mess — and deal a major blow to Republicans’ longstanding efforts to encourage such security features on ballots across the state.

From bamboo to Ballot Guard: How election security concerns inspired new ballot paper

In Arizona, the push to put security marks on ballots began with a widespread conspiracy.

After the 2020 presidential election, false claims began circulating that someone had flown fake ballots from Asia to Maricopa County to rig the race for President Joe Biden. That prompted auditors assisting with a GOP-led review of the county’s election results to shine blacklights on ballots in search of bamboo fibers or watermarks.

No bamboo ballots were ever found. Arizona has a plethora of checks to ensure only ballots cast by registered voters are counted. There’s no evidence that counterfeit ballots have ever found their way into the state’s elections.

But since that episode, some GOP state lawmakers — including then-state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, who now serves on the Mohave County Board of Supervisors — have repeatedly tried, and failed, to pass legislation requiring security features on ballots.

Nationally, California has long used ballot paper with watermarks. In recent years, the push for such paper has also caught on some swing states. Georgia now requires watermarks on its ballots. In Michigan, some counties have chosen to do the same.

But Mohave County would be the first in the country to use Ballot Guard specifically. In recent elections, leaders there have also considered hand-counting ballots and voting against certifying vote tallies.

Board Chair Travis Lingenfelter, a Republican, told Votebeat that his constituents were deeply concerned about election integrity and hesitant to trust election results. He believes the new paper can help assuage those fears — particularly if other jurisdictions are inspired to pick it up, too.

Mohave County Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter, pictured at a Nov. 20, 2023 meeting, told Votebeat that his constituents were hesitant to trust election results. He and other county leaders believe using a new type of ballot paper with anti-counterfeiting measures will improve voter confidence.

Lingenfelter said the county’s contract with Runbeck was purposefully structured as a cooperative one. A number of counties — including Maricopa, the state’s most populous county and a key swing region — use it to procure their own voting materials, and any of them could opt to use Ballot Guard in the future.

A spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department said it currently had no plans to use the paper. Still, Lingenfelter said he hoped other counties might follow Mohave’s lead if it proves the paper can be used successfully.

“I feel like Mohave County is contributing positively to this big overarching issue of voter confidence and election integrity,” he said, adding that his county was “proud” to serve as a trailblazer.

Ballot Guard won’t cost Mohave County any money — for now

While legislation to require security features on Arizona ballots never passed, the state did greenlight a $1 million grant program in 2022 that offered counties a chance to test out ballot paper with specialized security features.

Former Cochise County Recorder David Stevens signed up for that program, but he didn’t anticipate how long it would take to get up and running. He missed the grant’s deadline, and county officials decided to scrap the project.

But Stevens had already used grant funding to pay Runbeck to order 10 tons of ballot paper and commission a giant watermarking machine. The county’s decision left that paper sitting unused on the floor of the company’s warehouse in Phoenix.

Since then, the county had been grappling with what to do with it. Cochise County Recorder Billy Cloud urged local leaders to give it away, noting that the paper wasn’t of use to the county anymore. So in May, Cochise chose to transfer its paper to Mohave County, free of charge.

Mohave will now use that same exact paper to print its ballots for upcoming elections. Tempert and Interim Elections Director Karina Sumner — who is set to replace Tempert when he retires on July 4 — said the paper should get the county through the state primary and general election.

“For 2026, it’s a wash,” Tempert said. “We ain’t paying no more money in 2026.”

But the county could see increased election costs in 2028. Tempert said Ballot Guard costs up to 15 cents more per ballot than the county’s usual paper. There are approximately 150,000 registered voters in the county, so that could add up to an extra $22,500 per general election.

That represents a tiny fraction of Mohave County’s $600 million budget. Still, the county has long faced revenue challenges. In recent years, it has at times needed to institute temporary hiring and employee travel freezes to stave off budget deficits.

Nonetheless, officials appeared undeterred. Lingenfelter said that because his county had coordinated a cooperative contract with Runbeck, it gets a small revenue kickback if other counties sign on. He said that should help the county offset its costs.

Officials say paper is working well, despite mixed test results

In initial tests, the difference between Mohave County’s typical ballot paper and Ballot Guard was stark.

Officials found that the new paper was prone to so-called “multi-feed” and “pick” errors, both of which occur when a tabulator accidentally grabs more than one ballot at a time. On average, 3.6% of ballots printed on the new paper saw multi-feed errors and about 0.8% saw pick errors — far higher error rates than that of the county’s usual ballot paper.

In 2024, about 111,000 voters cast ballots in the county. Officials estimated it would have taken up to six hours longer to count those ballots if they were printed on the new paper, a notable timesuck for a department with just a handful of full-time employees.

“In conclusion, though the Ballot Guard paper properly tabulates every time, we would not recommend its use,” officials wrote in a testing report that they presented on Sept. 15. “The process is significantly slowed by multifeeds and pick errors, which would not happen on original Runbeck paper stock. The security added by the paper is irrelevant when counterfeit votes would never make it to the ballot tabulators in the first place.”

Later, Sumner said Runbeck hypothesized that the errors may have been the result of static electricity in the stacks of testing paper. Static causes ballots to stick together, but the issue could be solved by letting the paper sit out for a day or two.

In December, the company sent the county more paper — this time, letting it rest before shipping it out. When election officials tested ballots with that batch of paper, Sumner said, they saw dramatically improved results. On average, just 0.7% of the ballots were met with multi-feed errors, and another 0.7% with pick error messages.

That’s still more than the 0.3% and 0.0% error rates that the county’s regular paper encountered in initial testing, on average. But Sumner noted that multi-feed and pick errors happen in live elections no matter what type of paper is being used. The error rates seen with the new paper, she said, shouldn’t slow officials down too much in the counting process.

As a result, election officials say they are now on board with Ballot Guard. “The limited multi-feed and pick error rates are deemed acceptable for ballot feed errors with ballot tabulation,” a January test report read.

Katina Granger, a spokesperson for ES&S, said the company still doesn’t recommend the paper for use with its tabulators. Ballot Guard does not meet the same specifications as its recommended paper stock, she said.

“We’ve identified several differences in physical characteristics, like surface texture, thickness, stiffness, coating, and fiber composition, which can impact how ballots move through the equipment and are scanned,” Granger said, adding that ES&S had communicated “potential performance risks” to Mohave County. “We recommend jurisdictions use paper with specifications within the recommended parameters to guarantee performance.”

But Sumner said the paper has also been tested during pre-election audits and ran smoothly. She said she was confident that the paper will work well in upcoming elections.

“It’s not going to affect the tabulation or the results at all,” she said. “It’s all going to be fine.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Here’s how Pennsylvania’s primary has been going so far

2026-05-15T19:10:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Just days remain before Pennsylvania’s May 19 primary, when voters will select nominees for state and federal elections this November.

The governorship, congressional seats, and control of the state House and Senate are all on the ballot.

Some counties have already experienced issues with mail ballots, potentially affecting voters’ ability to easily cast them. Others are looking to Tuesday’s election as a chance to learn how they can make operations run more smoothly.

Here’s what’s happened so far.

Some counties stumble on mail ballots

In almost every election, at least one county encounters some administrative issue that impacts voters. Whether it was Chester County leaving thousands of voters out of its poll books last November or the Department of State sending the wrong voter file to Fayette County in 2025, human error almost inevitably causes a hiccup somewhere.

This year is no exception: Several counties have had issues already with their mail ballots.

The highest-profile case so far involves ballots being sent to an outdated list of voters in Lehigh County, where there is a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination for the 7th Congressional District.

The county mistakenly used a voter file from last year to send out this year’s mail ballots. While many of last year’s mail voters had also requested mailed ballots this year, which minimized the impact, the mixup still meant more than 4,000 voters either got a ballot they didn’t request or failed to receive one they were expecting. The county responded by issuing new ballots to affected voters, canceling invalid ballots, and contacting voters to explain their voting options.

Lehigh County isn’t alone. In Butler County, near Pittsburgh, roughly 50 mail ballot return envelopes were printed without the county election office’s return address, making it more difficult for voters to return them. In York County, the county’s mail ballot vendor mistakenly sent 237 voters ballots for the wrong district. In those counties, election officials are working with USPS to deliver the ballots or reissuing correct ballots, respectively.

Earlier this year, Votebeat and Spotlight PA also reported that Chester County sent out mail ballot applications with voters’ first and last names reversed, though the county and state said the applications were still valid to use.

Counties looking to make improvements

Luzerne County is switching to hand-marked paper ballots and away from the touch-screen ballot-marking devices it has used since 2020. The county experienced issues with its previous voting machine vendor — such as misspellings on ballots and test ballots being left in unofficial results — and in 2025 decided to make the switch. At the time, the election director said the switch would give the county more in-house control over designing and testing ballots.

Chester County, which has had multiple issues in the last year, is bringing in an outside consultant to assess the county’s election operations. A spokesperson for the county confirmed that The Elections Group, a consulting firm, will be onsite after the election “to meet with staff and observe post-election activities.”

“Our goal is to use their input to support the implementation of our Voter Services Action Plan,” county spokesperson Andrew Kreider said via email, referring to the plan developed to address issues in the election department.

The state was also planning a test — this one for internet-connected e-pollbooks — but postponed the experiment until at least next year because of unresolved technical questions and low county participation in the pilot program. Election directors say the devices, already widely used in the state without internet connections, can help quickly address Election Day issues and monitor turnout.

What election officials are thinking about

With no marquee race at the top of the ticket this primary election as both gubernatorial candidates are uncontested, election officials are expecting low turnout — and potentially a smoother Election Day.

During the 2022 midterm, the Republican primary races for the U.S. Senate and governor were contested, providing a draw for voters.

“This one I think is going to be a lot like last year’s primary,” said Thad Hall, the Mercer County elections director. “I think my county and a lot of counties are going to be lucky to get 25% turnout.”

Weather is his biggest concern right now, Hall said, as it is for many elections. Election Day could see temperatures in the 90s, with the chance for storms in parts of the state. Those factors can both depress turnout as well as present logistical challenges, such as if power goes out at a polling place.

Dauphin County Election Director Chris Spackman said right now he is working on getting the county’s pollbooks finalized and putting together the materials his poll workers will need on Election Day.

There are always things election officials can’t predict that could pop up, he said, such as if a judge of elections gets sick and they need a last minute replacement.

“I don’t like to predict turnout because I want 100 percent,” he said. “But realistically looking at historical numbers in gubernatorial primaries, the turnout is going to be lower than the general election.”

But ideally, Spackman said, it will be a day of high turnout and wide margins.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania won’t test internet-connected e-pollbooks in 2026 primary

2026-05-12T15:21:51+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

The Pennsylvania Department of State is postponing a pilot program to connect electronic pollbooks — the devices election workers use to check voters in at the polls — to the internet.

Counties were slated to test the function in the May 19 primary, but the department said last week that unresolved technical questions and low interest from counties led them to delay the pilot until at least next year.

Only Philadelphia, Lebanon, and Delaware counties had signed up for the pilot, the department confirmed.

“While the anticipated pilots are being postponed, the feedback and collaborative discussions have helped identify key technical and operational considerations that will support more informed decision-making in the future as DOS plans a more comprehensive feasibility review of full connectivity after the 2026 General Election,” said Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson for the department.

A majority of counties already use electronic pollbooks, but unlike some other states, Pennsylvania currently doesn’t allow them to be connected to the internet. The pilot, which Votebeat and Spotlight PA first reported on in February, would have enabled a few preapproved counties to assess the pros and cons of doing so.

Proponents of the pilot had been looking forward to testing some of the e-pollbooks’ capabilities that are only unlocked with an internet connection.

“It’s a shame because it will be a great step forward when we do it,” Sean Drasher, the Lebanon County elections director, said. He was planning to test connectivity in two precincts during the primary.

Internet-connected e-pollbooks have various benefits, such as enabling election officials to monitor turnout in real time so that they know where to deploy more resources. They would also allow some Election Day issues to be more quickly resolved. For instance, if a precinct was given the wrong pollbook with the wrong list of voters, an update could be sent instantly and prevent any voting delays.

Last fall, Chester County misprinted its paper pollbooks, excluding independent and third party voters. The error left the county rushing to print supplemental pollbooks on Election Day and forced thousands of voters to cast provisional ballots, which carry an additional risk of rejection.

With internet-connected e-pollbooks, “you could address that in minutes; it would not be a mad scramble,” said Jim Allen, the Delaware County election director. “We’ve seen in a few cases now the extreme problems with using paper pollbooks, which is like turning back the clock and using a phone book.”

Allen said he “absolutely” hopes he will be using internet-connected e-pollbooks for the 2028 presidential election. He thinks part of the reason the state hasn’t seen more counties adopt e-pollbooks is because, without an internet connection, they aren’t operating to their full potential.

He conducted a test demonstration of internet-connected e-pollbooks in a mock election last September, he said, and found a lot of value in being able to resolve issues fast, monitor turnout, and quickly upload voter histories once the polls closed.

“It’s been secure and proven as a valuable asset in numerous other jurisdictions across the U.S.,” he said. “This was an opportunity to test this at a low-key, lower-pressure election, and now it’s going to be pushed back until at least 2027.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on cast vote records creates uncertainty for counties

2026-05-11T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

In a rare unanimous decision last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the public should have access to super-granular election results data, making it easier for researchers to analyze electoral patterns and for those concerned about voter fraud to inspect the results.

But it’s unclear how many counties will be able to release the data due to unanswered technological questions and concern about keeping ballots secret in some jurisdictions.

The data, known as a cast vote record or CVR, is essentially a log of each ballot cast in an election and what candidates it voted for. It does not reveal the names of the voters who cast those ballots (election officials don’t even keep that data), but it does include the precinct where the vote was cast.

“Disclosure of CVRs allows the public to ‘check the math’ of [Lycoming County] Voter Services to ensure the number of reported votes match the number of recorded votes,” Justice Daniel McCaffery wrote for the majority. “Such disclosure promotes fair, honest, and transparent elections, which strikes to the heart of ‘trust but verify.’”

In October 2021, conservative activist Heather Honey, who is now the Trump administration’s deputy assistant secretary of homeland security for election integrity, requested Lycoming County’s cast vote record for the 2020 election. The county initially denied her request — a decision upheld by the state’s Office of Open Records. But a local court overturned that ruling, only to be overturned itself by the state’s Commonwealth Court, a decision that was then overturned by the state Supreme Court in late April.

Court case hinged on technology, ballot secrecy

The disagreement in the case stemmed from whether a cast vote record counts as the “contents of ballot boxes and voting machines,” which are exempt from disclosure under state law.

While the Commonwealth Court ruled that cast vote records, and the ballot tabulation machines that create them, are the equivalent of physical ballots in ballot boxes and voting machines, the Supreme Court disagreed.

“CVRs are spreadsheets of raw data pulled from the cast ballots. They are not the physical ballots contained in the ballot box,” McCaffery wrote. “Here, Lycoming County’s scanners constitute voting devices but not voting machines. Similarly, Lycoming County’s tabulators (which no party disputes are responsible for generating the CVRs) are automatic tabulating equipment.”

The justices faulted the legislature for the confusion, noting the state’s election code was written in 1937, long before spreadsheets or electronic voting equipment were ever envisioned.

“Citizens should be entitled to expect their legislators to address and account for advances in voting technologies more frequently than on a centennial basis,” Justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.

The other issue the case dealt with is ballot secrecy.

Under Pennsylvania law, voters are entitled to have their votes kept secret. Lycoming County expressed concern that, if a cast vote record is made public, it could be analyzed in conjunction with other public documents to identify how specific people voted.

To prevent this, Lycoming County’s equipment randomizes the order of the ballot data in the cast vote record, so that the order of the ballots in the spreadsheet is not the same as the order in which they were cast.

The technique is not foolproof. Individual voters’ choices could still be divulged if, say, everyone in a precinct votes the same way in a given race. But the court pointed out that uncommon scenarios like that already jeopardize ballot secrecy even in the absence of cast vote records. The court argued that voters’ right to a secret ballot needed to be balanced with the public’s right to transparent data.

How the cast vote record decision will affect Pennsylvania counties

The decision means Lycoming County will now have to release its cast vote record.

“The court has made its decision that the CVR is a public record and anyone who requests it, we will provide it,” Lycoming County Elections Director Forrest Lehman said.

It’s unclear, however, how many other counties will have to release cast vote records as a result of the ruling. That’s because the randomization process that protects secrecy in Lycoming County is specific to tabulation machines manufactured by the company Clear Ballot, which is used by only seven other counties in the state.

“We acknowledge Voter Service’s concern that not all counties may follow the same randomization procedures that are established on this record,” McCaffery wrote. “We recognize that, under certain circumstances, it is possible that a county’s method of generating CVRs may violate the secrecy mandate. But that is a question to be addressed on a case-by-case basis.”

A Votebeat and Spotlight PA review of the voting equipment used by Pennsylvania’s other 59 counties found that most are capable of randomizing the data in cast vote records, but some may not be. The most recent software certifications for the equipment used throughout the state don’t mention randomization, and the Department of State did not answer a question about whether all of the state’s vendors randomize their data.

It’s also unclear whether the specific randomization processes used by machines other than Clear Ballot’s would pass the court’s test.

“The Pennsylvania Department of State is reviewing the court’s decision and is working with our county partners to provide appropriate guidance,” a spokesperson for the department said in a statement.

Most Pennsylvania counties, including Philadelphia and Allegheny, use tabulation machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software. A spokesperson for ES&S told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that the CVR data is randomized twice, eliminating any connection to the voter.

At least two less commonly used companies are also capable of randomization. Margia Hansen, the Warren County election director, said Liberty Vote, which serves Warren and 11 other counties, told her that their equipment does randomize the data.

And Jim Allen, the Delaware County election director, said his county’s Hart equipment — which is used by three other counties — generates randomized cast vote records as well. He plans to make Delaware County’s cast vote records available once he gets official guidance from the Department of State.

Allen applauded the Supreme Court’s decision as a win for transparency.

“I think it’s an excellent ruling in terms of setting the record straight and in terms of transparency and giving voters one more way of verifying election results,” he said. “As long as we can randomize them sufficiently to make it impossible to associate a ballot with one individual, this is stuff we should get out there.”

Allen, as well as the court’s opinion, noted that some places, such as counties in Colorado and Wisconsin, have been releasing cast vote records for years.

Some election officials still have privacy concerns about cast vote records

However, some smaller counties might not even have cast vote records to provide. Matthew Repasky, the Columbia County elections director, said his county opted not to buy additional software that would generate cast vote records for its Unisyn equipment because they didn’t feel it was a worthwhile expense.

He also worried that there was no way to protect the secrecy of voters in especially small jurisdictions, such as Centralia, which has only four voters.

“How do you randomize that?” he asked.

Even in more populous precincts, an election with low turnout, like a primary, could make it easier to identify voters. As a result, election directors may not release the cast vote records for precincts with low turnout so as to not violate secrecy requirements.

“You’re not going to be able to give those out, and people are going to be angry,” Repasky said.

Sean Drasher, the Lebanon County elections director, also raised the possibility that a person could theoretically bribe or threaten someone else to vote a certain way, and then use the cast vote record to confirm they voted that way.

The cast vote record might also contain information other than votes, he said, such as machine-testing records that could look confusing to viewers if they’re presented without explanation — or even images of ballots, which could raise new legal questions about being “contents of ballot boxes.”

“When these decisions come down, you have to be really careful to look at every word in every paragraph to see what is the fallout,” Drasher said, adding that he will be consulting closely with the Department of State and his county attorney before releasing any cast vote records.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania has spent $1.4 million updating its voter registration system — but won’t provide progress reports

2026-04-28T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania’s latest effort to upgrade its two-decade-old voter registration system has already cost nearly $1.4 million, according to records obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. Officials hope the updated system will be ready for the 2027 elections. However, the state isn’t saying much about where the project stands.

That’s a departure for the Pennsylvania Department of State. This is the second time the department has attempted to update the aging Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE system.

During the last project — which was canceled in late 2023 due to what the department said was the inability of the previous contractor to meet timetables and standards — a detailed timeline was available online as part of the public contract. It showed specific dates for each project milestone. The new contract does not contain a similar outline.

This time around, the Department of State has declined to share the project’s specific timeline, monthly progress reports, or reports of any issues that may have arisen so far.

The department said these records reflect internal deliberations of the agency and releasing them could pose a security risk.

Pennsylvania officials announced last March that the Department of State had signed a $10.6 million contract with Louisiana-based technology company Civix to upgrade the SURE system.

SURE is a statewide database that is central to running elections. Counties use it to register voters and maintain their records, print pollbooks, process mail ballot applications, and carry out other administrative functions.

The current system was built in the early 2000s and wasn’t designed to handle the way elections are run now, particularly with mail voting. According to local election officials, it is also sometimes prone to crashes.

The upgrade is intended to address these issues, as well as to integrate the system with other tools such as the state’s lobbying disclosure system and campaign finance database, which have also faced complaints for not being user-friendly.

At a budget hearing in the state House last month, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt received questions from lawmakers about the status of the project, but he didn’t provide much insight into where the project stood.

“We put out a [request for proposals] and less than a year ago signed it with a new vendor, and we’ve been working with that vendor, informed by our county partners, on a replacement system,” Schmidt said in response to one such question.

In response to questions about the project, Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Department of State, said so far the department has been “gathering requirements” for the project’s five aspects: voter registration, election administration preparation, election management, election night reporting, and campaign finance and lobbying disclosure. Once that is completed, data from the current system will be converted and brought into the new version.

She added that the department is working closely with counties on the project to ensure that the system functions well for them once it is in full operation.

County election directors who spoke with Votebeat and Spotlight PA didn’t have any more insight on where the project stands.

As for a timeline, Gulli said the department does not want to prioritize meeting a deadline over delivering a high-quality system, but that ideally the system will launch for counties to use in next year’s municipal election.

“As Secretary Schmidt has said before, as a former county election official, he would never launch a new system to be used for the first time in a presidential election,” Gulli said.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

New voting requirements? Troops at the polls? We asked 37 election experts what could disrupt the 2026 elections.

2026-04-17T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

A California sheriff seized ballots, testing the limits of local power over elections

2026-04-13T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

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Over the past few weeks, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — who is also a Republican candidate for governor of California — has taken the unusual step of seizing ballots from a recent election, launching his own recount, and opening a criminal investigation into how the election was run.

“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported,” Bianco said during a press conference after he and his deputies seized the ballots last month.

The premise of Bianco’s investigation is sharply disputed. Bianco has pointed to the claims of a conservative citizens’ activist group that says it found an apparent discrepancy of tens of thousands of ballots — a figure election officials and independent experts say stems from a misreading of preliminary vote data, not an actual gap between ballots cast and ballots counted.

California’s attorney general moved to stop the investigation, which is now on pause. Bianco seized more ballots, anyway, and says the effort to stop his recount is “politically motivated.” Courts this week ordered the unsealing of the warrants used to justify the seizures, which showed a yearslong relationship between Bianco’s office and the conservative activist group. On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court also ordered a halt to Bianco’s investigation.

And the ripples may be spreading beyond California. Bianco told USA Today last week that the publicity has prompted law enforcement officials around the country to contact him because they’re interested in conducting similar election investigations.

Local law enforcement has a clearer path to investigate elections

As the president has called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting,” a lot of people right now are worried about the possibility of federal intervention in the midterm elections — in no small part due to the administration’s efforts to seize election materials from across the country. But Blanco’s efforts raise different questions.

Local actions like those in Riverside can move with a speed and force that federal interventions rarely match, and their consequences can cut closer to the machinery of elections itself.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Bianco, for example, used a standard criminal process. After opening a fraud investigation, his office got search warrants from a local judge and sent his own deputies to the county registrar to take custody of the ballots, just as they would in seizing evidence for any other criminal case. Within weeks of a complaint, hundreds of thousands of ballots were in law enforcement hands, and the same law enforcement agents began a recount.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said those differences can sometimes cut the other way — as they have, at least in part, in California. There, the attorney general has been able to intervene quickly, ordering Bianco to halt his investigation and filing multiple legal challenges that prompted Bianco to pause the effort while courts sort out whether it was lawful. In California, Levitt said, the attorney general has more authority over local law enforcement than you might find elsewhere.

Still, that’s a different path than federal officials followed when they seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, in January. Federal authorities had to build a case, coordinate with prosecutors, and get approval through several layers of Justice Department and judicial review before initiating the seizure. While critics of the Trump administration say review has become a formality, it’s a formality that still takes a lot of time. And while Bianco got right to work on a recount, it’s still unclear exactly what the DOJ intends to do with Fulton County’s ballots.

Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky specializing in election law, said that despite Riverside’s presence in the news, interference by local law enforcement in local election administration remains rare. Even in Northern California’s Shasta County, which has been consumed by fights over election administration for years, the sheriff has remained completely uninvolved.

“In the routine aspect of election administration,” Douglas said, law enforcement would only be involved “after the fact, when there were specific allegations of wrongdoing at the polls” by those qualified to make such assessments. In Riverside, by contrast, Bianco has pointed to disputed claims about vote totals — raised by a citizens group and rejected by election officials — rather than any verified evidence or specific allegation of criminal conduct to justify opening an investigation.Some law enforcement offices have fraud hotlines, which have been popular for decades, but rarely turn up anything. Other times they’ll investigate after specifically being asked to by the elections office or the local district attorney. Typically, Douglas said, that’s “good for confidence in the system — because most often something is investigated because of an accusation, but nothing nefarious actually happened.” The investigation in Riverside, he notes, is proceeding on a fundamentally different track. And while that’s concerning, he doesn’t expect that other law enforcement offices will act in the same way.

The political implications of the investigation are murky

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

But the political upside he appeared to be chasing has proven more limited than it first seemed.

Former President Donald Trump, whose backing could have consolidated Republican support behind Bianco, instead endorsed his opponent, Steve Hilton — a move that reshapes the dynamics of the race and undercuts the idea that Bianco’s high-profile investigation translated into political momentum.

Bianco will now have to reckon, in court and in the political arena, with his decision to seize more than half a million ballots, breaking the chain of custody. Sensitive voter data — signatures, addresses, voting records — could be put at risk.

How that plays out now could shape the risk of similar interventions by local law enforcement elsewhere — a potential threat to the safe, free, and fair conduct of elections that experts say is worth as much attention as any other.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

One of Michigan’s most populous counties will post all ballots online

2026-03-06T15:51:31+00:00

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Macomb County has begun to post online an image of every ballot cast in the pivotal swing county.

The county, Michigan’s third most populous, is using a program called “Ballot Verifier” to upload scans of every ballot cast for anyone to see. More than 80,000 ballots from the November 2025 election are already online, as is the “cast vote record,” which shows how tabulators read each ballot.

Images of cast ballots — which do not include a voter’s name, address, party affiliation, or other identifying information — are already public record and can be requested through local officials. Putting them online simply improves transparency, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini said.

“We all wonder, when we put our ballot in, ‘did it score it the right way?’” Forlini told Votebeat. “This takes a little bit of the mystery out of it and adds a little bit of accountability for all of us.”

The premise is simple: Let voters see the ballots, and they can judge the results for themselves. Since Michigan votes on paper ballots, that means anyone can see the sometimes wacky ways people fill in bubbles by hand — an X where a bubble should be, a rant scrawled next to a candidate’s name — right alongside write-in candidates, undervotes, and all the other markings that show the full range of voter intent.

Macomb County plans to post images going back through the November 2024 election and will include future elections in the program as well, Forlini said. He is running for secretary of state as a Republican.

Ballot Verifier caught his attention about a year ago, he said, after he saw how it worked. It’s been used in a few counties around the country in the past few years. In Ada County, Idaho, which adopted it about two years ago, elections director Saul Seyler said the program “has helped build public confidence.”

The program helped address election distrust at the roots, Seyler said. Ada County — Idaho’s most populous county and home to Boise — has worked to improve trust for years, including offering constant livestreams of the facilities where ballots are handled and adding more windows when remodeling their offices.

Ballot Verifier, he said, offered the chance for voters to ensure that the machines had counted their ballots correctly. Officials brought out some of the department’s “harshest critics” to provide feedback on the tool, Seyler said, and even they found it useful.

“Realistically, probably 95% of the public won’t ever use the tool, but there is something to the fact that it’s available,” he said. “There’s a confidence that gets built just by knowing it’s there.”

It has required some minor tweaks to protocol to ensure voters don’t accidentally violate their own right to a secret ballot. The county changed their ballot language, for instance, to make clear that ballots are public records and that voters shouldn’t leave identifying marks.

Voter privacy is one of the greatest concerns about such programs. Michigan voters have a right to a secret ballot. Maintaining that is key, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, because ballot secrecy laws exist to protect voters from coercion or vote buying. Stray marks or seemingly random write-in choices can still tie a ballot directly to a voter, he said.

He pointed to the 2008 Minnesota Senate election recount, where a ballot that included several write-in spaces marked with “Lizard People” was not counted because canvassers agreed with a challenge characterizing it as an identifying mark, which goes against Minnesota’s laws.

Election officials need to find a “transparent way” to reject the ballots images that are “most blatantly potentially identifiable,” Lindeman said, which can look different depending on the ballot and an election’s circumstances.

In Ada County, officials tried to address the potential issue by working with Civera, the company that produces Ballot Verifier, to ensure that voters are “masked” if something about their ballot would identify them, meaning it won’t be made publicly available. It’s not unheard of for only a single voter in a precinct to get a specific combination of taxing districts on their ballot, for example, and officials wanted to make sure that ballot would still remain private.

That and other workflow changes can add yet another step to “an already kind of chaotic time,” Seyler said, but he believes the change has already saved Ada County money: he said the published ballot images and cast vote records have prevented at least two recounts by allowing potential challengers to review records without having to file for one.

“This can not only be a resource to help build trust, but it can also just help you operationally,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Cochise County asks feds to investigate disputed claims about voting machine testing — again

2026-03-03T19:19:13+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Four years after a conservative southeastern Arizona county tried to defy election laws, it may be gearing up to do so again.

The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted on Feb. 24 to send a letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asking her to investigate whether the laboratories charged with testing voting machines nationwide were properly accredited ahead of recent elections.

Cochise County officials have doubted the laboratories for years, despite the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s reassurances that they were properly accredited. Those doubts were part of what prompted two of the county’s supervisors to vote to delay the certification of its election results past the legal deadline in November 2022.

A judge ultimately ordered the supervisors to certify the midterm election results, but their doubts about the laboratories — and the voting machines they test — have apparently persisted. The board sent an identical message to the U.S. Department of Justice less than six months ago.

The letters asked federal officials to review the Election Assistance Commission’s processes for accrediting testing facilities that ensure tabulators and other voting machines meet federal standards, to determine whether the county’s equipment remains properly certified, and to advise supervisors on “the proper interpretation of federal and state requirements regarding voting system compliance and lawful ballot tabulation.”

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi never responded to the county’s initial inquiry — and it’s unclear whether Gabbard will, either. A spokesperson for her office did not comment when contacted by Votebeat.

Still, Supervisor Tom Crosby, a Republican, said that the board decided to send the letter to Gabbard after she appeared at the unprecedented federal raid of an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, last month. Gabbard later said in a letter to the U.S. Congress that President Donald Trump had requested her presence at the scene and that she had “broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence related to election security.”

Crosby said the document established her as the “grand poobah of elections” in Washington, D.C. — so he and Board of Supervisors Chair Frank Antenori both voted to send their letter her way.

The county’s board has three members, all of whom are Republicans. Supervisor Kathleen Gomez was absent from the Feb. 24 meeting, but previously voted with her colleagues to send the same request to Bondi.

Crosby and Antenori framed their vote to reup their request as a simple inquiry designed to increase confidence in election equipment.

“It’s one tiny little piece of trying to restore integrity and confidence in the election system,” Antenori said. “That’s all this is. Nobody is doing any fishing expeditions.”

But Allison Morse, a county resident who has long voiced opposition to the supervisors’ actions in 2022 and the lone public speaker on the item, wasn’t convinced. She slammed the letter as “another futile attempt to uncover some dubious shred of evidence that there is, or was, something wrong with our voting machines.”

“Your relentless quest to find fault as a way to justify a criminal act is extraordinary,” she told the supervisors. “I don’t think you, or Ms. Gabbard, will find what you’re looking for.”

Cochise County officials continue to fight battles from 2022

The letters to the federal government are not the only signs that Cochise County officials are laying the groundwork for election challenges similar to that of 2022.

After voting to delay the certification of the election, Crosby and former Supervisor Peggy Judd were indicted on felony election interference and conspiracy charges in 2023.

Judd did not seek reelection to her seat and later took a plea deal. But Crosby pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the case. He has repeatedly attempted to get his charges dismissed and has unsuccessfully asked higher courts to review the criminal case against him.

Crosby’s new colleagues on the board appear sympathetic to his case. Over the past year, they have repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked the Arizona Counties Insurance Pool to cover his legal bills.

When appointing a new county recorder in early 2025, Antenori also said that he wanted a candidate who could handle the “political” parts of the job and was willing to “fight” for the county’s elections. And in an August 2025 meeting, the supervisors expressed an interest in re-testing Arizona’s laws regarding voting machines and election certification.

Meanwhile, Crosby’s trial has been pushed back several times — most recently because an internal report on a lead investigator for the prosecution found that he had falsified timecards and a police report unrelated to Crosby’s case.

Now, Crosby may not stand before a jury until after the midterms. In legal filings, his attorneys suggested postponing trial dates to early 2027, noting that key witnesses for both the prosecution and defense won’t be available until then.

But that delay could jeopardize Crosby’s prosecution. The case against him is being brought by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat. However, she is up for reelection in 2026, and her most prominent Republican opponent — Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen — says he would drop the case if he were to win the seat.

“This flies in the face of the theory of legislative immunity,” he told Votebeat, referencing a legal privilege that is designed to insulate legislators from punitive efforts by the executive or judicial branches of government. Crosby’s attorneys have repeatedly referenced legislative immunity while attempting to get the case against him dismissed, but judges have so far shot down the argument.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

What’s next for Liberty Vote, the company formerly known as Dominion?

2026-02-12T20:47:21+00:00

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CONCORD, N.H. — On a freezing December day, Liberty Vote executive Robert Giles sat before the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission to answer questions about a familiar company operating under an unfamiliar name.

Until October, the company had been Dominion Voting Systems — one of just two vendors certified to sell voting systems in the state. Then, it was sold to a former election official named Scott Leiendecker and rebranded as Liberty Vote. State regulators required to sign off on changes wanted to know more about who and what, exactly, they were signing off on.

As one ballot law commission member pointed out, in New Hampshire, “when we give somebody a liquor license for a little restaurant, they have to go through quite a bit of a background check before we’re able to provide that. So I think we’d like to know a little bit more.”

Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, said he and others had “some really hard questions” for the company. A commission member had a fundamental one.

“Why did he acquire this company?” he asked, referring to Leiendecker.

“You would have to ask him that question,” Giles replied.

They would hardly be the first. Election officials have been wrestling with that question since the announcement that Leiendecker — who previously had founded a major electronic pollbook company — had purchased Dominion. The purchase immediately vaulted the former Republican election official from St. Louis, little known to the public, into one of the most powerful players in American elections. Whether he can stabilize a company that provides voting systems to roughly a quarter of the country — and has been battling conspiracy theories since 2020 — is an open question.

‘I felt I needed to do something about it’

In a January interview with Votebeat, Leiendecker said Dominion had a good product, employees, and customer base but needed a new owner who understood and cared about election technology and elections — an area where he has a long track record. “I felt I needed to do something about it. So, you know, here we are.”

He also said that he wondered, “if not me, then who would?”

That’s a good question, too. Dominion came with considerable baggage. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump and his allies alleged Dominion systems deleted or switched votes, but no evidence emerged to support that. The claims were repeatedly debunked, including by Republican officials. Fox News, Newsmax, and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani settled defamation claims brought by the company, in Fox News’ case for $787 million.

But the false allegations hurt business, the company said, and some places canceled or rescinded contracts and selected other vendors. In 2023, after the Fox settlement, Dominion’s former CEO told Time that the allegations had “basically put us into a death spiral” and said a customer had described it “as the most demonized brand in the United States.”

Dominion was a distressed business, Leiendecker acknowledged in December to the St. Louis Business Journal. But in the interview with Votebeat, he stressed that he believes there’s a path forward, despite the challenges. “Can we turn this around? And I believe that we can,” he said, adding that he’s received a lot of encouragement from election officials.

There are big challenges, as well as signs Trump administration officials continue to focus on election equipment in general and Dominion specifically. Since returning to the White House, Trump has continued to rage against voting machines. In addition, officials reportedly contacted local officials in Colorado and Missouri, unsuccessfully asking to examine Dominion equipment used in the 2020 election. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took custody of voting equipment in Puerto Rico last year. And the White House has said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is expected to deliver a report on the cybersecurity of voting systems.

Leiendecker said Liberty Vote has not directly heard from officials with the departments of Justice or Homeland Security regarding the planned cybersecurity report or any requests to review the company’s equipment.

He’s happy to answer questions from people with concerns, he says, but he hopes that if election officials and others prove the system is secure, people will listen. “Our election officials do a great job. They know what they’re doing,” he said. He said he hopes the public will be reassured by learning more about the checks in place, such as, for example, paper ballots that can be audited and checked against machine counts to ensure they are accurate, and also said the election process needs to be as transparent as possible.

As for Trump’s views, Leiendecker chooses his words carefully. “The president, you know, has an opinion, and he has a very big opinion when it comes to it, right?” he said. “His views need to be heard, obviously, but I hope that he listens to” election officials.

‘Can we turn this around?’

Dominion was hardly the first election technology company to get consolidated into another one, including after controversy. In 2003, for example, Diebold’s CEO, a fundraiser for former President George W. Bush, said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,” sparking worries about whether the machines could be trusted; he later called his comments a “huge mistake.”

There was ultimately no evidence of wrongdoing in connection with the company’s equipment, but that and other issues prompted it to sell its voting machine division. Many of those Diebold assets ultimately went to Dominion.

“Now we jump ahead to Trump’s time, and now the Republicans think that the same system that was created by Diebold that was then sold to Dominion is now going to rig votes against them and for Democrats,” said Terry Burton, the co-director of the Wood County Board of Elections in Ohio.

“And now that it’s been sold again, now we’re starting to see the first vestiges of the swing back.”

Burton was referring to the focus on Leiendecker’s Republican background after he acquired Dominion. The press release announcing the company’s sale described it as “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America” and echoed language used by Trump and other conservatives, including calls for hand-marked paper ballots.

The announcement — managed by a Republican-aligned communications firm and hastily put together (Leiendecker had expected to have more time) — sparked full-throated fears that the company was now an arm of the Republican Party. As a result, some expressed concern that the left would start embracing conspiracy theories about the company previously pushed by the far right.

At the time, Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, told Votebeat that clerks were initially “very upset” about the announcement’s tone and the initial uncertainty about what might change. Some Colorado clerks issued public statements, and Crane arranged a meeting for clerks to talk through the changeover with Leiendecker. Since then, Leiendecker has followed up individually with many of them, and tensions have “calmed down,” Crane said.

Leiendecker says he hadn’t expected the response and doesn’t think of himself as partisan. He stressed his long track record in the election technology business and as a former election official, pointing out he understands and has worked to meet the challenges of the profession. He also stressed the positive responses he’s gotten as he’s spoken to election officials.

People in the industry said the launch complicated an already fraught and closely watched sale. Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that tracks voting equipment use, said he was also distressed to see news coverage around the sale of Dominion focus on Leiendecker’s partisan background.

“Our judgments should not be based on our gut feelings about the politics of anyone involved in the companies. It’s just not a reasonable way to go,” he said. “We have to look at performance. So that’s why we have voting system certification, that’s why we have pre-election testing. That’s why we have post-election audits, right? I hate to see this continued swerve into partisan speculation.”

Leiendecker says existing wells of trust from his long track record in elections and past work helped him recover from the rocky rollout: His other company, KNOWiNK, is the country’s leading manufacturer of electronic pollbooks, the systems used to check in voters at polling places, and the company’s pollbook was the first to be certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

As of the November 2024 election, Dominion provided election equipment to more than a quarter of registered voters in the U.S., according to Verified Voting — more than all but one other vendor, Election Systems and Software. Together, Leiendecker’s two companies provide election equipment to thousands of jurisdictions led by officials from both parties.

Among those publicly vouching for him: Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who said Leiendecker was responsive and attentive as the head of KNOWiNK when Nevada transitioned to a new voter registration management system.

Leiendecker says election officials seem relieved to know Liberty Vote has a new, committed owner and encouraging about its plans for the future, though he’s assured them that little or nothing is changing immediately. In 2026, Liberty Vote’s focus is making sure the midterms run smoothly for clients, he said.

Plans include federal certification for new voting system

Leiendecker is slowly settling in and figuring out ways to streamline the work his companies are doing.

Liberty Vote is still headquartered in Denver, where Dominion was based. KNOWiNK is headquartered in Leiendecker’s home base of St. Louis and will remain a separate company, Leiendecker said, though he said technology staff members at the two companies will be looking for ways to make the products work more seamlessly together.

Liberty Vote recently hired former Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican who was also a senior election security adviser at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to handle government affairs. It also hired a firm with strong Missouri ties earlier this month to lobby the federal government on election security, federal lobbying disclosures show; a Liberty Vote spokesman said it “will support our ongoing work to serve election officials nationwide and advance the future of American elections.”

In late November, Liberty Vote submitted a system, called Frontier 1.0, to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission for certification under the latest set of voluntary voting system guidelines approved by the agency, a set of standards widely referred to as VVSG 2.0. The submitted system is a version of Dominion equipment currently in use, but updated to meet the criteria of the newer guidelines, company officials said.

The submission is an important benchmark for the company, since many jurisdictions planning to purchase new equipment will want it to meet the most recent set of federal guidelines, or be in the process of getting certified under those guidelines (the company is also one of six competing for the biggest available contract at the moment, from Louisiana). So far, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has certified systems from only two manufacturers as meeting the VVSG 2.0 guidelines, and others are still in the testing process.

At a December meeting, members of the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission asked Liberty Vote's Robert Giles, left, pictured from the back, questions about the sale of the company formerly known as Dominion, now called Liberty Vote.

Dominion’s existing agreement with New Hampshire, which Liberty Vote has now inherited, calls for the company’s system to receive certification under VVSG 2.0 by the end of 2026. At the December meeting, Giles told the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission that after discussions with the testing laboratory, the company believes it can finish the process in about eight to nine months; New Hampshire officials later said the laboratory confirmed that certification this year is a reasonable expectation.

The New Hampshire commission must sign off on any changes to the technology currently certified for use in New Hampshire. And each state has different requirements for voting machines to be approved for use in the state, though many require either federal certification or testing in federally approved laboratories.

Among the changes in the system submitted for certification: Liberty Vote, and just about every other manufacturer, is moving away from using barcodes or quick-response codes in ballot tabulation, something Trump sought to prohibit in his March executive order on elections.

Election officials, too, are worried about how to rebuild public trust in elections and election technology. As New Hampshire’s Scanlan points out, voting equipment is one area where it’s hard to be transparent. At some level, people have to trust that the voting machines in use to allow local election officials to quickly and reliably tally large numbers of ballots and report results quickly are doing so correctly.

Pre-election testing and post-election audits, including hand-count audits, are part of how election officials provide evidence that tallies are correct, he said.

“If they question whether the machine is counting votes accurately, it’s not an easy thing for any election official to explain,” Scanlan said, other than to stress, “we have these safeguards in place: testing, audits and just other ways to verify the accuracy of the results.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania plans to test out internet-connected pollbooks in 2026 primary

2026-02-12T19:08:26+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

UPDATE Feb. 12, 2026 4:45 P.M.: This article has been updated with additional comments from the Department of State.

The Pennsylvania Department of State is launching a pilot program to try out the use of internet-connected electronic pollbooks, and the devices would be deployed as early as the May primary election.

More than half of Pennsylvania counties are already using or have tested out electronic pollbooks, or e-pollbooks. But the state doesn’t currently allow those systems to be connected to the internet, limiting their utility, proponents say, and some county election officials have been petitioning the state to change that.

Proponents point out that internet-connected pollbooks could reduce administrative burdens and allow counties to check results more quickly. But some county officials are concerned that connecting them to the internet could compromise election security.

Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Department of State, said that on Jan. 28, the department informed e-pollbook vendors about how to to apply to participate in the pilot program, which is still in the early stages, and “will assess whether internet-connected EPBs allow county election officials to respond to polling place issues faster and more efficiently.”

Gulli emphasized that voting machines and ballot tabulators will still not be connected to the internet. The e-pollbooks would be disconnected from the internet before they are used to transfer data on who voted into the state’s voter management system.

Some states, such as Arizona and New Mexico, allow e-pollbooks to be connected to the internet.

Devices could ease election administration

Thad Hall, Mercer County’s election director, previously oversaw elections in Arizona, and said he has been pushing Pennsylvania since 2021 to update its guidance. Mercer County uses the KNOWiNK Poll Pad, the most widely used e-pollbook in the state. While he said other factors will prevent him from participating in the pilot, he does hope to use connected pollbooks in the future, as he did in Arizona.

Hall said the internet connection would allow counties to more easily provide their polling place workers with updated lists of who is eligible to vote.

Pennsylvania’s deadlines for registering to vote and requesting a ballot leave a tight turnaround time for printing pollbooks in time for Election Day. Even when a county uses an e-pollbook, the devices can’t be updated as quickly as if they had an internet connection, so the county still needs to print paper pollbooks as a backup and sometimes force poll workers to flip between the two sources to find the voter.

Connected pollbooks also would allow election directors to easily see which precincts are opening on time in the morning and monitor turnout throughout the day, allowing counties to see in real-time whether they need to deploy more resources to overburdened precincts.

After the polls close, the devices could also help election officials more quickly check the accuracy of their results, Hall said. Typically, the data showing who voted on Election Day is not uploaded to the state’s voter rolls until the days after the election, but internet-connected e-pollbooks would allow that data could be uploaded nearly instantaneously, meaning administrators could verify on election night whether the number of cast ballots matches the number of voters recorded checking in for a given precinct.

Finally, he pointed out that the new devices could help mitigate problems with paper pollbooks on Election Day.

In 2025, Chester County mistakenly printed paper pollbooks that excluded independent and third-party voters, forcing thousands of them to vote provisionally until supplemental pollbooks could be printed and deployed to the polls. With internet-connected e-pollbooks, an updated file could have been pushed out far more quickly.

Some concerned about security

Not all counties are greeting the pilot program with excitement, though. Joe Kantz, a county commissioner in Snyder County and president of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said he is concerned about security and the perceptions this will create about the state’s elections.

Unclear sections of the law have resulted in a wide array of election policies across the state, and internet-connected e-pollbooks could become another difference between counties, he said, inviting further criticism of the state for non-uniform election administration.

Beyond that, he is also concerned about the security of the devices.

If a bad-faith actor was to hack a precinct’s e-pollbook and take it offline, Kantz said, voters could be prevented from voting. “I’m not against progress, but I’m concerned about the security aspect of networking anything related to elections,” he said.

Jerry Feaser, a former Dauphin County elections director who now works for e-pollbook vendor KNOWiNK, said the devices can’t be used to directly add voters to the state’s voter rolls, as even in states which allow same day registration at the polls using e-pollbooks, registration needs to be approved by an election official. Conversely, voters can only be added to the e-pollbooks from the voter rolls if their registration has been approved by an election official.

Hall also pointed out that even if someone were to get access to an e-pollbook and try to fraudulently add voters, counties would be able to detect that though other methods, such as by checking the numbered list of voters who come into a precinct on Election Day or through the original copy of the voter file.

After publication, the Department of State said counties are required to have paper pollbooks in all precincts, regardless of if they are using e-pollbooks, in case any issues arise. Hall also noted that in Arizona, precincts used secured WiFi hotspots.

One Pennsylvania county, Delaware, partnered with KNOWiNK in September to run a mock election using internet-connected e-pollbooks, which Feaser said went “swimmingly.” Other KNOWiNK counties have already expressed interest in participating in the state’s pilot program, he said.

Gulli, the Department of State spokesperson, said applications from the vendors are due Feb. 28, and it is still unclear how many counties will participate in the pilot.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Republicans introduce sweeping election legislation, but it’s unlikely to become law

2026-01-30T18:19:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Congressional Republicans on Thursday redoubled their efforts to regulate elections nationwide, introducing two new bills that draw heavily from President Donald Trump’s agenda.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the chair of the House Administration Committee, unveiled the Make Elections Great Again Act, a bill that would overhaul several aspects of how elections are run, from limiting the use of mail voting to setting a national photo ID requirement for voting.

Later in the day, Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Chip Roy introduced the SAVE America Act, which combines a photo ID requirement for voters with the SAVE Act, a bill passed by the House last year to require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote.

Both the MEGA Act and SAVE America Act face long odds of becoming law anytime soon. Although the measures could pass the Republican-controlled House, they would almost certainly fail in the Senate, where the filibuster effectively means that legislation needs 60 votes to pass. (Republicans control the Senate only 53-47.) Given that both bills go farther than the SAVE Act, which has languished in the upper chamber for almost a year, there’s little reason to expect they would have any more luck in the Senate.

Trump and his allies have for years been intent on changing the way U.S. elections are run, building on their false assertions of widespread fraud. In recent days, billionaire Elon Musk has used his social-media site X to pressure senators to pass the SAVE Act, which may explain the timing of the two new bills.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has also attempted to exercise extraordinary power over election administration, suing 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not sharing comprehensive data on their registered voters and issuing a sweeping executive order on elections last year. The bills also come the same week that the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, in search of evidence of malfeasance.

So far, however, key provisions of Trump’s executive order have been struck down in court, and in recent months, he’s repeatedly called on Congress to pass legislation enacting his election-related priorities. The two proposals contain several policies from Trump’s 2025 executive order.

In November, the White House press secretary said the White House was working on a second executive order on elections, but one has yet to materialize.

What the Republican election bills would do

Should they ever pass, the SAVE America Act and especially the MEGA Act would represent the most transformative federal law aimed at reshaping national election administration in decades.

Both bills would:

Require Americans to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship (such as a passport) when registering to vote. Currently, new registrants must attest that they are a U.S. citizen, but most people aren’t required to provide documentation to prove it. According to Ballotpedia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wyoming are the only states that currently require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Require voters to provide photo ID. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 23 states ask voters to provide photo IDs; in 13 states, non-photo IDs are acceptable, while 14 states plus Washington, D.C., don’t ask voters for ID. Notably, the ID requirement would apply not only to in-person voters, but also to mail voters, who would have to provide photocopies of their IDs (although the MEGA Act allows voters to provide unique identifying numbers, such as the last four digits of their Social Security number, instead). Currently, only Arkansas and North Carolina require mail voters to enclose copies of their IDs.
Require states to regularly check their voter rolls for noncitizens. For example, the MEGA Act would require states to compare their voter lists against the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database, known as SAVE, on at least a monthly basis. The Trump administration upgraded SAVE last year to make it easier to use for large-scale searches, and the department said in November that 26 states are now using it for voter verification.

The MEGA Act also includes a host of other provisions, such as:

Banning universal vote-by-mail. In other words, the eight states (plus Washington, D.C.) that automatically mail ballots to every voter would no longer be allowed to do so.
Prohibiting states from accepting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Currently, 14 states and Washington, D.C., do this, as long as the ballots are postmarked on time. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of this practice later this year.
Barring anyone except the voter, an immediate family member, or caregiver from possessing the voter’s ballot. Each state has different rules about who (if anyone) can return a mail voter’s ballot for them, but several have laws broad enough that allow third parties, such as campaign operatives, to do so — a practice Republicans have described as “ballot harvesting.”
Requiring states to provide hand-marked paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, nearly 70% of registered voters already live in a jurisdiction that uses hand-marked paper ballots. Most of the remaining jurisdictions use ballot-marking devices, which would be still legal under the bill, but they would need to provide voters with the option to hand-mark their ballots as well.
Outlawing ranked-choice voting. This would affect only a few jurisdictions. Alaska, Maine, and Washington, D.C., are the only places that use ranked-choice voting in federal elections in the regular course of business. However, Georgia also uses it for military and overseas voters, and Hawaii uses it for special elections.

The provisions in both bills would only apply to federal elections, forcing states to choose between changing their state election laws to match and administering federal and state elections differently. Either way, the bill would likely create more work for election officials. Given how many states would have to change their voting procedures, the enactment of either of these bills would send officials scrambling to adapt to unfamiliar requirements.

And if officials fail to live up to the law, they could be held liable in new ways. The MEGA Act explicitly allows the attorney general, and even private citizens, to file civil lawsuits against election officials for noncompliance.

Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat, said that this type of broad mandate from the federal government “not only potentially disenfranchises voters, but it also ignores how under-resourced elections and secretaries of state are in general.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Correction, Feb. 6, 2026, 10:09 a.m.: This story has been corrected to reflect that Washington, D.C., will use ranked-choice voting starting in 2026 and that Georgia and Hawaii also use ranked-choice voting in some circumstances. It has also been corrected to reflect that the Department of Justice has sued 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not handing over their voter rolls, not 23 states.

Chester County pollbook mishap resulted from human error and flawed systems, report finds

2026-01-23T21:48:55+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

UPDATE, Jan. 26, 11 a.m.: This article has been updated with additional comments about SURE from a Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson.

Human error was the primary cause of a pollbook printing issue that forced thousands of voters in Chester County, Pennsylvania, to cast provisional ballots in the 2025 municipal election, according to a report by outside investigators.

Early on on Nov. 4, 2025, voters and election officials realized that the pollbooks — the printed voter lists used to check people in at polling places — didn’t include the names of Chester County’s more than 75,000 unaffiliated and third-party voters. Those voters had to either wait for supplemental pollbooks to be delivered or use a provisional ballot, an option used when there is some question about a voter’s eligibility.

According to the report — from West Chester-based law firm Fleck Eckert Klein McGarry LLC and released Thursday by the county — the “two inexperienced employees” who generated the pollbook files mistakenly selected the option to include “only voters from the major parties.” The report said the employees had “limited election experience, no formal SURE system training, and no direct supervision during a critical task performed under compressed statutory deadlines.” SURE, or the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, is Pennsylvania’s voter registration database.

As a result of the error, about 12,600 provisional ballots were cast in the county, accounting for roughly 6.4% of the county’s total vote, more than in any other election in the county’s recent history. The vast majority of the provisional ballots were counted after the county confirmed the voters’ eligibility.

Report cites other gaps in the system

The report said there was no evidence of intentional wrongdoing. While the report primarily blamed human error, it said that other factors also contributed to the issue.

First, it noted that the SURE system allows a pollbook with only major-party voters — meant for use in the state’s closed partisan primaries — to be generated without any confirmation or warning screens. The report also said the state’s training did not sufficiently guide employees through the settings needed to generate a general-election pollbook versus one for primaries. Finally, the report said “no policy or procedure was in place” to check the files generated from SURE for accuracy before the pollbooks were printed.

Poll workers previously told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that in years past they had the ability to check pollbooks before Election Day, but the county recently began sealing those materials.

Asked if it would be updating the SURE system, the Pennsylvania Department of State highlighted the ongoing effort to replace it with a more modern voter management system.

“The new system will have validation and quality assurance built in around our business logic — meaning, for example, that a county user will not be able to select ‘only major parties’ for their general election poll books,” the department said in a statement.

After this article was first published, Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the department told Votebeat that the default setting for the SURE system is to include all voters.

“In this instance, a county employee overrode that default when generating the county’s poll books for the November 2025 election,” Gulli said.

Gulli also noted that counties have been generating pollbooks through SURE since 2010, and in the 15 general elections since then, no other county has had this issue.

The report also said high staff turnover at the county’s election office in recent years “has increased operational risk.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in December that dozens of employees have left the office since its director, Karen Barsoum, took over in 2021. Some former employees described a toxic work environment under Barsoum.

While the pollbook report acknowledged complaints about Barsoum’s leadership and management style, it said the turnover trend was “not necessarily reflective of a cultural or managerial deficiency” and attributed it to recent high-pressure election cycles and better pay in surrounding counties.

What the investigators recommended

The report recommended several changes to avoid similar failures in the future. Among them, it said the county should ask the Department of State to implement safeguards in SURE that would alert users when they are about to export pollbooks that exclude some voters, as well as ask the state to revise its pollbook training guide.

The county itself should implement a procedure to double-check that pollbooks are accurate prior to Election Day, the report suggested.

“At least two trained staff members, including a supervisor, should independently verify SURE Poll Book generation selections prior to finalization,” the report said. “Before transmitting files to the print vendor, staff should also be required to complete a mandatory audit checklist certifying to the commission that randomly selected precincts have been spot-checked and that Poll Book files include all required data and all required voter categories.”

Allegheny County, in western Pennsylvania, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA in November that it performs such spot checks for accuracy.

The report said Chester County should also more thoroughly document its procedures, as well as who is responsible for performing what steps, and any action that could affect the entire electorate, such as printing pollbooks, should require signatures from a supervisor and administrator.

In a statement responding to the report, the county said that while it believes some sections could benefit from additional context, it otherwise “fully supports and plans to implement the report’s recommendations.”

The county said it has developed an action plan to address all the recommendations. The county board of elections will hold a meeting at the Chester County Judicial Center on Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. to discuss the report and the action plan. If the judicial center is closed that day because of weather, the meeting will be moved to Feb. 3 at 7 p.m.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin town will use accessible voting machines after federal lawsuit

2025-12-19T19:10:45+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

A small Wisconsin town whose leaders chose not to use federally required accessible voting machines in two federal elections in 2024 has agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice to use that equipment going forward, the agency announced on Dec. 12.

The town board of Thornapple, a town of 700 people in northern Wisconsin’s Rusk County, made the decision in 2023 but previously declined to elaborate on the reasons behind the decision. Distrust of voting machines, which has grown on the right following false claims about the 2020 election, has fueled a movement to ban them. The Thornapple case, however, shows that municipalities still have obligations under federal law to allow voters with disabilities to cast ballots on electronic machines.

The Justice Department, under then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, sued the town in September 2024, arguing that its decision violated the Help America Vote Act. The law requires accessible machines be available in every precinct, allowing voters with disabilities to hear the options on the ballot and use a touch-sensitive device to mark it.

The town initially fought the case, arguing that it wasn’t subject to the federal law’s accessibility provision because its use of paper ballots didn’t constitute a “voting system.”

Thornapple officials lost an appeal in July, after the court heard testimony from Thornapple Chief Inspector Suzanne Pinnow about a blind woman who relied on her daughter’s assistance to fill out a ballot, and from a man who had a stroke and who needed Pinnow to guide his hand so he could mark a ballot.

The town settled the case by agreeing to use an accessible voting machine in every federal election. The town also agreed to certify to Justice Department officials after each election that it continues to follow the settlement agreement.

Since President Donald Trump, a Republican, took office in January, the DOJ has withdrawn from multiple voting-related cases and shifted its priorities to suing states, including Wisconsin, for access to unredacted versions of their voter lists, which it has said it needs to ensure compliance with federal law. The department remained in the Thornapple case, however.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

What does the sale of Dominion Voting Systems mean? For now, not much.

2025-10-17T18:18:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The sale of Dominion Voting Systems — the election technology company that Trump allies aggressively targeted with false claims about the 2020 election — took state and local election officials by surprise last week.

An announcement from the new owner, led by former Republican election official Scott Leiendecker, described the acquisition as “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America.” It echoed language used by President Donald Trump and other conservatives who have questioned the security of elections and voting machines, including calls for hand-marked paper ballots.

But for now, the sale appears to be more of a rebranding than a revolution. Dominion is operating under the name of its new owner, called Liberty Vote. State election officials say they have now been told no staff changes, contract terminations, or product overhauls are expected.

“Once we took a step back and took a deep breath, we realized not much was changing,” said Matt Crane, director of the Colorado Clerks Association, who organized a call between Leiendecker and the state’s many election officials to address their concerns.

Election officials caught off guard

The announcement’s tone and lack of notice initially alarmed at least some officials who rely on Dominion’s systems. Jurisdictions in 27 states use some Dominion equipment, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, according to Verified Voting, which tracks that data.

Robert Sinners, spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, said the office found out only a few hours before the news became public last week, and clerks in his state weren’t initially sure how, if at all, their contracts would be affected.

“The clerks were very upset about this,” said Crane, from Colorado. But the call assuaged their worry, leaving clerks cautiously optimistic, and at least one more has taken place since.

“He’s saying all the right things,” Crane said.

A Liberty Vote official told Votebeat in an email that there was “an intensive effort to inform existing customers as quickly as possible following the acquisition and formal meetings occurred immediately following the public announcement.”

Many customers were informed by their existing support staff, who will continue to provide service under the new name. “With respect to staffing and contracting, there are no plans for any changes at this time,” the Liberty Vote official said.

Leiendecker has been involved in elections for a long time. A former elections director in St. Louis, he founded the company Knowink in 2011, and it has since become the nation’s most widely used vendor for electronic pollbooks, the systems used to check in voters at polling places.

Liberty Vote is a separate company that he created to acquire Dominion. Leiendecker told clerks in Colorado he is the sole owner, and a representative told Wired magazine that Leiendecker privately financed the acquisition.

Leiendecker sees no change for Colorado

Liberty Vote’s announcement last week said its goal was to “restore public confidence in the electoral process through transparent, secure, and trustworthy voting systems, including the use of hand-marked paper ballots.”

The statement referenced Donald Trump’s executive order from March that would require the use of paper ballots and ban the use of QR codes on ballots for tabulation purposes. Several provisions of the order are being challenged in court.

In the call with clerks in Colorado, Leiendecker said that the machines in that state would be unaffected. Colorado’s machines, which use hand-marked paper ballots and do not use QR or bar codes for tabulation, already comply with those provisions in Trump’s executive order.

Clerks in Georgia use voting machines that print a QR code on the ballot for vote tabulation. Sinners said that all communication from the new company has reinforced that nothing is changing, at least for now.

The Liberty Vote official confirmed that “all of the current Liberty Vote systems comply with existing federal, state and local laws and regulations,” and said the company will continue to work to improve systems in coordination with state and local officials.

Early voting for a statewide Nov. 4 election begins Tuesday, and Sinners said Dominion’s contract with Georgia, now managed by Liberty Vote, does not expire until 2029. Any changes would be negotiated at that point.

Dominion fought to defend its reputation

Dominion has been among the most scrutinized companies in the country since the 2020 election, when false claims about vote manipulation spread widely among supporters of Trump’s reelection campaign. But Dominion’s systems were repeatedly validated by audits and election officials across the country.

Dominion spent years seeking to clear its name through the courts. In 2023, it settled a defamation lawsuit against Fox News for $787 million, after accusing the network of knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion had rigged the election for Joe Biden. In recent weeks, Dominion also reportedly reached undisclosed settlements with former Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani in separate defamation cases.

Despite these legal victories, even election officials who never believed the conspiracy theories found it politically difficult to contract with a company so publicly vilified. Counties like Shasta County, California, and Rio Grande, Colorado, either canceled or rescinded contracts with the company. Four county clerks have told Votebeat they declined to consider bids from Dominion because they were concerned about potential blowback.

Despite the initial shock of the sale, some, like Georgia’s Sinners, see the move as a welcome chance to move past years of controversy.

“Honestly, I’m just excited not to talk about Dominion every day anymore,” he said. “If this helps us move on, great.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Fact-checking Trump’s latest claims about mail ballots and voting machines

2025-08-18T22:23:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump returned to social media Monday with another barrage of unsubstantiated statements about the integrity of elections, following a meeting in which Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that U.S. elections were “rigged” because of mail‑in voting.

Seizing on that assertion — despite there being no credible evidence to support it — Trump promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement” to phase out mail‑in ballots and voting machines, and promote “watermark paper.” He suggested he would implement these changes with an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The post contains many other false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements about the use of mail ballots, including claims Trump and his allies have made before — even as more Republican officials have tried to encourage voting by mail.

His claims notwithstanding, courts have repeatedly rejected allegations of widespread fraud tied to mail ballots, and many democracies around the world use them. And under the Constitution, he has no explicit authority over the “time, place and manner” of elections. Experts say that an executive order like the one Trump describes in his post would be immediately challenged in court and unlikely to take effect.

Beyond that, any major change to voting by mail before the 2026 midterms would be a logistical nightmare for election administrators, and it would disproportionately affect voters who rely on it most, including overseas service members, veterans, and people with disabilities.,

Here’s a fact check of some of the key claims in his post.

What Trump said:

“States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Fact:

Trump’s claim that states are “merely an agent” of the federal government in elections is false, and contrary to decades of Republican orthodoxy on this point.

The Constitution gives power to Congress and the states — not the president — to the states to regulate the time, manner, and place of elections.

Meanwhile, Republicans for decades have framed states’ rights as a fundamental principle. This stretches back to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, through Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on “federalism,” and into recent decades where GOP leaders have framed decentralization of power as protection against “big government.”

Voting has been a primary example for that very point.

For example, after the contentious 2000 presidential election, Republicans fiercely defended Florida’s right to set its own recount rules. GOP leaders and state attorneys general argued in the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that federal oversight of state election laws was unconstitutional. Over the last decade, Republicans in Congress have opposed Democratic efforts to pass federal voting-rights legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, arguing they represented “federal takeovers” of elections. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2019 called the legislation “a one-size-fits-all partisan rewrite by one side here in Washington.”

In 2020, when Democrats proposed federal requirements to expand mail voting due to COVID-19, Republicans fought them off. And when Trump floated the idea of delaying the November election, Republican senators like McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio reminded him that Congress and the states control election timing and procedures.

What Trump said:

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED”

Fact:

Many democracies use mail voting, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. Some use it more extensively than the U.S. No country has “given it up” because of widespread fraud. Fraud is rare in countries that use vote by mail, as it is here.

Germany has been using vote by mail since the 1950s; in its 2021 federal election, about half of German voters cast their ballots through the mail. In Switzerland, nearly all voters receive their ballots by mail, and more than 70% of voters return them in the same way. The United Kingdom allows any voters to request a mailed ballot, and about 20% of voters take advantage of the policy. The vast majority of European countries allow at least some form of mail voting, especially for citizens living abroad or for those with disabilities.

What Trump said:

Voting machines are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial” and “cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Fact:

Paper ballots still have to be counted — either by hand (which is slow and error-prone) or by machine. That’s why nearly every state that uses paper ballots still relies on scanners to tally them quickly and accurately.

Existing federal law also requires the use of at least one voting machine in every single precinct in the country, for use by voters who have disabilities that make casting a paper ballot difficult. Trump cannot invalidate federal law through an executive order, so voting machines aren’t going anywhere.

Watermarks are not a standard or proven safeguard, though some states do have them (or something like them). The places that use them still use machines to count these ballots.

What Trump said:

“Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

Fact:

There is no evidence that one party “cheats” with mail ballots. Voting by mail is used by Republicans and Democrats alike, and in jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats. In fact, Republican voters are often more likely to use mail voting, especially in states like Arizona and Florida, where Republicans championed the practice until recently. In fact, there’s no evidence that vote by mail benefits either party over the other — multiple academic studies have reached this conclusion.

What Trump said:

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”

Fact:

Mail‑in voting has consistently been shown to operate extremely securely due to robust safeguards. In states like Pennsylvania, counties that offer ballot curing — the ability to correct errors like missing signatures — report significantly lower rejection rates, demonstrating that the system isn’t rigged, but rather is responsive and adaptable.

Votebeat’s coverage highlights what research studies have shown repeatedly: Instances of fraud in mail-in voting remain exceedingly rare. Even when ballots get rejected, that’s typically due to procedural mistakes — not attempts at manipulation or deceit. Election administrators across the country work under strict, bipartisan protocols, including signature checks and secure handling procedures, to protect integrity. Courts and election officials routinely affirm the reliability of mail ballots when these protocols are followed. In both routine practice and under close scrutiny, mail-in voting stands out as both secure and trustworthy.

What Trump said:

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS…by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Fact:

Courts have ruled that Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally change federal election rules, as they consider several lawsuits challenging his March executive order.

In halting some provisions of that executive order, for example, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in April that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” That ruling blocked Trump’s direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require voters to prove citizenship when registering to vote.

A federal judge in Massachusetts later blocked the same provision of the order, writing that Trump exceeded his authority. That judge also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day.

Nothing stops Trump from leading an informal movement, however. He’s arguably been doing that for years already, and while it has had some impact on policy, voters haven’t really changed their habits much.

Jen Fifield contributed reporting.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Machine malfunctions rarely get in the way of voting, Pennsylvania reports show

2025-08-04T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania voters encountered only scattered voting-machine malfunctions that rarely affected their ability to cast ballots in recent elections, according to a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of problems reported to the state.

Counties reported a smattering of common problems with machines at polling places, such as paper jams and error messages. They typically got such issues fixed quickly by having technicians on call or simply replacing the machine.

For election officials, sending out a technician or staffer to a polling place is usually easier and more efficient than trying to walk a poll worker through a fix over the phone, said Forrest Lehman, election director in Lycoming County. Officials refer to these traveling helpers as rovers or roamers.

“Often you don’t know for sure what’s going on without sending someone out there,” Lehman said. His rovers are prepared with a “Swiss Army knife” of supplies to address any issue they may encounter, he said, and often the biggest delay is just the time it takes a rover to drive to the polling place.

Pennsylvania appears to be the only state to require counties to report voting system malfunctions after each election. The requirement is the result of an August 2023 legal settlement between the Department of State and a coalition of election security groups. Votebeat and Spotlight PA analyzed the reports for three elections since the requirement took effect: the November 2023 municipal election, the 2024 primary and the 2024 general election. The 2025 primary election reports haven’t yet been published.

The reports reviewed by Votebeat and Spotlight PA showed:

The most common problems were ballots getting jammed in a machine, issues with scanning ballots, or the machine displaying some kind of error message.
Many of the problems didn’t affect voters’ ability to cast ballots, because workers were often able to direct them to other available machines. Of those that did interfere with voting, the most common types of problems were scanning issues and jams.
Across the three elections, a total of 1,673 voters were delayed or prevented from casting a ballot due to equipment malfunctions, which represents 0.014% of the votes cast in those elections.

See a compilation of the reports.

The most common resolution involved replacing equipment, but election officials also solved problems by resetting a machine or switching to a second machine for the rest of the day.

The quickest resolutions, those that took 30 minutes or less, typically involved having a trained county worker go to the polling place and fix the issue.

The state doesn’t require counties to have roving technicians, but Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Department of State, said most at least have extra staff at the election office who can be dispatched as needed.

Karen Barsoum, Chester County’s election director, said her county uses two separate teams of workers — one of traveling technicians and another of roaming staffers to solve issues that can’t be resolved by poll workers.

Barsoum said the roamers serve as liaisons between her office and the precincts, providing the poll workers with extra supplies or just an extra set of hands if needed.

The technicians are available for more serious issues. They have the county divided into 10 zones, with one traveling technician stationed in each zone on Election Day with tools to repair, clean, or replace malfunctioning equipment.

Barsoum said the new requirement to fill out the malfunction reports helped Chester County more clearly see how poll workers should handle issues when they arise. The county developed its own form for poll workers at each precinct to fill out when machines malfunction, which includes step-by-step instructions and an explicit reminder not to let the issue prevent or delay voting. She then uses those precinct-level sheets to fill out the state reports.

“Poll workers cannot say, ‘Oh the machine is down. Please come back later,’” she said. “Now that’s not an option. Now it’s in writing — this is what you do.”

The reports show that the most consequential issues are typically due to human error — often one that should have been discovered through pre-election machine testing.

Northampton County’s 2023 ballot tabulation issue, which made it appear as if votes were being changed to candidates not chosen by the voter, and Cambria County’s issue with ballot printing during the 2024 presidential election were both problems that could have been discovered and fixed through proper logic and accuracy testing. But the counties failed to catch those issues in time.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Thornapple, Wisconsin, loses federal appeal over its ban on electronic voting machines

2025-07-16T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

What happened?

A federal appeals court ruled Monday against a Wisconsin town that disavowed electronic voting machines, siding with the U.S. Justice Department’s argument that this would unfairly harm voters with disabilities.

What’s the dispute?

Leaders of Thornapple, a town of 700 people in northern Wisconsin’s Rusk County, voted in 2023 to stop using electronic voting machines, in favor of allowing only hand-marked ballots. They did without the machines for two elections in a row, in April and August 2024.

The DOJ, under the Biden administration, sued the town in September 2024, arguing that its decision violated the Help America Vote Act, which requires every “voting system” to be accessible for voters with disabilities. Accessible voting machines allow voters with disabilities to hear the options on the ballot and use a touch-sensitive device to mark it.

The town argued that it wasn’t subject to the federal law’s accessibility provision because its use of paper ballots didn’t constitute a “voting system.”

A district court judge rejected the town’s argument last September, and ordered it to use electronic voting machines for the November presidential election. The town appealed that order, but did use a machine in November.

On Monday, a three-judge panel on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower-court order, finding that “individuals with disabilities would lack the opportunity to vote privately and independently if they only had access to a paper ballot.”

The court based that finding partially on Thornapple Chief Inspector Suzanne Pinnow’s testimony about a blind woman who relied on her daughter’s assistance to fill out a ballot, and a man who had a stroke and who needed Pinnow to guide his hand so he could mark a ballot.

Who are the parties?

The DOJ had sued two northern Wisconsin towns and their officials in September after both decided not to use electronic voting equipment for at least one federal election. One of the towns, Lawrence, immediately settled with the Justice Department, vowing to use accessible voting machines in the future.

Thornapple officials decided to fight the case. They’re currently represented by an attorney with the America First Policy Institute, a group aligned with President Donald Trump.

Why does it matter?

The case reaffirms what has long been election practice in Wisconsin: Every polling place must have an electronic voting machine that anybody can use but is especially beneficial for voters with disabilities.

Distrust of voting machines, which has grown on the right following misinformation about the 2020 election, has led to a movement to ban them across Wisconsin. But the Thornapple case shows that for now, municipalities still have obligations under federal law to allow voters to cast ballots on electronic machines.

The case is relevant nationally, too. Since Trump took office in January, the U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn from multiple voting-related cases. But the Justice Department forged ahead in this lawsuit, signaling that, at least for now, it is not backing the movement to forgo electronic voting equipment entirely.

What happens now?

Thornapple is “considering our options,” said Nick Wanic of the America First Policy Institute. The case could get appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court or proceed in the lower federal court.

Although the order that required Thornapple to use accessible voting machines applied only to the November 2024 election, at this point, two federal courts in this case have ruled that towns must have accessible voting machines for people with disabilities.

“Voters with disabilities already face many barriers in the electoral process, and making sure they have access to a voting system which allows for basic voting rights to be met is a minimum — and legal — standard that they should not be worried about when exercising their right to vote,” said Lisa Hassenstab, public policy manager at Disability Rights Wisconsin.

Read more of Votebeat’s recent coverage about the dispute over electronic voting machines in Wisconsin:

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Can VotingWorks’ publicly viewable software code help restore faith in voting machines?

2025-03-03T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

At a recent gathering of election officials in Washington, D.C., a technology vendor called VotingWorks demonstrated the systems that it has submitted for federal certification this year.

VotingWorks set up test voting stations in a room, with a tabulation machine off to one side awaiting sample ballots (races on the ballot included best Election Day food). On another side, a crepe station.

It all looked like typical stuff for a vendor presentation to the National Association of Secretaries of State. But VotingWorks wasn’t a typical vendor. While the U.S. voting machine market is dominated by three for-profit companies that guard their technology closely, VotingWorks is a nonprofit and makes its code available online.

The group says its mission is to make voting equipment everyone can trust “through transparency, simplicity, and demonstrable security.” It’s the first technology company to seek federal certification for a voting system relying on publicly available code.

“I think it’s a big deal,” said Pamela Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, who sees the election technology industry moving toward more transparency. “I think it’s a good step forward.”

Ben Adida, founder and executive director of VotingWorks, demonstrates a voting machine during the National Association of Secretaries of State conference on Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington.

Transparency could be a critical selling point following years of unfounded conspiracy theories about the accuracy and security of voting machines. The machine manufacturers, fighting off false accusations, have won settlements in the hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation cases. But they continue to face skepticism and demands from activists seeking to know more about how the systems work.

The VotingWorks setup is one of three systems that have been accepted so far to undergo testing against an updated set of voting system guidelines that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission approved in 2021. The testing takes a long time, and the first certified systems aren’t expected to hit the market until this spring.

There’s an important difference between the VotingWorks system and the others: All of its computer code is available online for public review. Other voting machine manufacturers disclose their code for testing, but don’t post it publicly, because they’re concerned about disclosing vulnerabilities.

VotingWorks’ founder and executive director, Ben Adida, says he believes disclosing the code is more secure than hiding it, because others can point out any potential security flaws, and the flaws can be fixed.

He also believes such disclosure builds voter trust in a time of increased scrutiny of how voting machines work.“ Vendors have to meet the moment of this public scrutiny,” he said.

Adida said one goal of VotingWorks’ approach is to push all election technology manufacturers to innovate in ways that shore up that public trust. He hopes VotingWorks will have an impact similar to Firefox, the open source web browser that was made by a nonprofit.

“Firefox market share has peaked and gone down over time,” Adida said. “But they changed the market, they changed how web browsers work, and the world will never go back.”

Adida said anyone can review the VotingWorks code and suggest changes or fixes, but only someone from VotingWorks could modify the code. And any changes would have to go back to the EAC for review or approval before they could be implemented by VotingWorks customers. That said, VotingWorks makes its code freely available for others to use as a basis for their own designs, too.

VotingWorks launched the first pilot of its system in Mississippi in 2019. Amy Burdine, the circuit clerk in Choctaw County, said the machines are user-friendly, and VotingWorks has made modifications based on suggestions from voters and election officials there.

The group now has contracts with five Mississippi counties and at least 40 towns and two cities in New Hampshire, where, Adida says, about a quarter of the state’s voters will cast ballots on the latest version of the system this year.

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, said he sees the publicly disclosed code as a good thing. “Election integrity and being transparent and having an observable process is important,” he said. What’s more, he said, election officials “just like the way the device operates.”

Election technology tends to change slowly. Since 2016, Congress has approved millions of dollars in federal grants to help jurisdictions upgrade voting machines. But a Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that tens of millions of voters live in jurisdictions using systems put in place more than a decade ago.

Many states require jurisdictions to use voting systems that have received federal certification, been tested to federal standards, or been tested in a federally accredited laboratory. When federal standards are updated, communities can typically continue to use the systems certified to meet previous versions of EAC guidelines, but local election officials interested in upgrading will soon want machines certified to the most recent standards. In New Hampshire, VotingWorks’ certification is contingent on receiving federal certification by the end of 2026.

Rodney Phillips, the town moderator in Loudon, New Hampshire, and a retired software engineer, said that when he looked at the options to replace his town’s aging AccuVote machines, he wanted something as forward-looking as possible. He liked that VotingWorks posts its code on GitHub, which he’d used in the past.

Phillips, who describes himself as a “die-hard conservative,” said it pains him to hear fellow conservatives repeat theories about the reliability of voting machines that he knows to be untrue. At one town meeting, he said, during a debate over whether to stop using tabulators in elections, he stepped down as the meeting’s moderator “so I could speak passionately.” The initiative to eliminate tabulators was voted down.

The fact that VotingWorks discloses the code publicly, he said, “won over some detractors.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Missing voting machine documents raise concern about Pa. county’s testing processes

2024-04-18T19:27:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

When Northampton County voters cast their ballots in an election last November, it became clear to them very quickly that something was wrong.

On the printed records that are meant to show them how they voted, the votes they cast in one judge’s election were appearing under another judge’s name.

“It’s a joke,” one frustrated voter told Lehigh Valley News on Election Day. “We don’t even have faith in the electoral system, then this happens?”

The mixup — the result of an error in programming voting machines — didn’t result in any votes being counted incorrectly, because the machines don’t rely on the text of that printed record to tabulate results. Nonetheless, it was the kind of error that should have been caught and demonstrates the importance of putting voting machines through robust pre-election testing. And in Northampton County’s case, it was part of a larger pattern of testing flaws that went beyond an undetected programming error.

A Votebeat and Spotlight PA investigation into the county’s preparation for last November’s election found that its testing documentation was incomplete, inconsistent, and in more than 150 cases missing entirely, making it difficult to prove that it tested its machines correctly.

“Obviously, it’s not the way it is supposed to happen,” said Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist of the Pennsylvania-based Citizens for Better Elections who has studied the model of machine Northampton County uses. “Imagine if you took your car in to get your brakes checked, and then something went wrong and you went back and they couldn’t prove what they’d done.”

The county’s lapses don’t point to any malfunction or malfeasance with the voting machines, and the Votebeat and Spotlight PA review didn’t find any. But even benign errors threaten to undermine voters’ confidence in election administration and feed conspiracy theories about fraud, as Northampton experienced last year. That’s partly why the state requires counties to document the testing of every machine they use ahead of each election.

In response to Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s findings, Northampton County has made efforts to correct its procedures. But its original lapses do raise questions about how faithfully counties around the state are following requirements for testing their machines and documenting what they’re doing. Some outside observers, including state legislators, are wondering whether a legislative fix is needed.

State Sen. Jarrett Coleman, a Republican from neighboring Lehigh County who has been skeptical of Northampton’'s testing process, is working on such a bill. “Northampton County’s neglect to properly test election equipment and document it is abhorrent,” he said after seeing the Votebeat and Spotlight PA findings.

How pre-election machine testing is supposed to work

Before each election, counties are required by law, and directives from the Pennsylvania Department of State, to test the election equipment they will use to ensure it is working properly. This is known as “logic and accuracy” testing.

The testing looks for problems that could arise during voting or tabulation, such as machines being unable to read ballots, miscalibrated touch screens, and incorrect vote totals.

The testing is “intended to ensure that ballots, scanners, ballot-marking devices, and all components of a county’s certified voting system are properly configured and in good working order prior to being used in an election,” according to a Pennsylvania Department of State directive on machine testing.

Typically, a county or its vendor — representatives of the voting machine manufacturer — will first design and print a “test deck”: a set of mock ballots that simulate different combinations of votes that could be cast by voters.

For example, in a county commissioner’s race where voters can select two of three candidates, a test deck would include ballots that would account for the different combinations.

But before any of the test ballots are put through the tabulator, inspectors print out a “zero tape” from the tabulator machine. The zero tape — a strip of paper that’s like a receipt from a cash register — serves as proof that the machine doesn’t have any votes already recorded.

After the test ballots are run through the machine, inspectors print out another strip of paper, the results tape, which shows what the vote totals are for each candidate or question on the ballot. They then compare the ballots in the test deck and the results tape to ensure that the vote totals match.

The exact process can vary depending on the types of machines the counties use — some have voters make selections on a touch screen — but no matter what, the testing protocols are intended to ensure that a tabulating machine generates results that accurately reflect voters’ choices.

The inspector also reviews various functions on the machine and uses a checklist to record each step. This includes things such as whether the machine’s date and time are correct, if the machine can read the ballot without error, and if vote totals were cleared from the machine after the test deck is run through the tabulator, so that the machine is ready to use for the actual election.

The process is important not only because it helps ensure a smooth election and the state requires it, but also because it generates a paper trail — proof for county officials that they completed the testing and that the system worked.

“Hypothetically speaking, if there are people that are saying something is incorrect, we would obviously do a full investigation on the matter, and that starts with this paperwork,” said Karen Barsoum, election director for Chester County.

If a machine doesn’t go through the testing, she said, it’s not used at the polls, because there’s otherwise no way to show it was functioning properly.

How one voting machine error slipped through

Northampton’s voting machine, the ExpressVote XL, is an all-in-one “ballot marking device.” Voters insert a ballot card into the machine, make their selections on a touch screen, and the machine prints those selections onto the ballot card, in text form and in a barcode. The machine then reads the barcode to tabulate the results and stores the paper ballot card in an internal hopper, to be retained for post-election audits or recounts.

This means that for pre-election testing, inspectors handle the test deck differently. They replicate the votes shown on the test deck by entering the selections on the machine’s touch screen. The machine prints those votes onto a ballot card, displays them to the inspector, and then tabulates them internally.

In the November election that went wrong, two state judges were running in retention elections, where voters had to choose, with a yes or no vote, whether to keep them on the bench.

But in the run-up to that election, an employee of the county’s election machine vendor, Election Systems & Software, incorrectly programmed the machines in a way that produced an incorrect text record on the printed ballot card.

Why Votebeat thinks spotlighting flaws in elections actually helps increase voter confidence

A voter wouldn’t notice the misprint unless they had split their votes, voting “yes” for one judge and “no” for the other. If a voter voted this way, they would see that the text on their printed ballot would display their “yes” or “no” vote under the opposite judge’s race than they had intended.

The error didn’t affect the way the machines recorded the election results. That’s because the ExpressVote XL uses the barcode on the ballot card — not the printed text — to tabulate voting results, and the barcodes were printed correctly, county and ES&S officials said.

The programming error went undetected during the test run in October, because Northampton did not check this specific scenario with its test deck — a ballot where a voter voted “yes” on one of the judges and “no” on the other one.

But the error was enough to create confusion on Election Day.

Additional problems Votebeat and Spotlight PA discovered

The county’s issues went further than simply not testing enough permutations. Records show a disorganized, incomplete process, with no evidence of machine inspectors’ work being double-checked for accuracy.

A Votebeat and Spotlight PA reporter spent nearly 14 hours over six days going through the county’s logic and accuracy testing documents from October 2023. The reporter also inspected a box of documents and spoke to an official from another county to compare the way records were maintained.

The Northampton documents — test decks, zero tapes, results tapes, checklists, and test ballots printed out from the ExpressVote XL — were stored in four file boxes. A reporter was allowed to access and make copies of the documents following a public records request.

What stood out immediately was a lack of organization. Northampton County Election Director Christopher Commini said that after the test was performed in October, bags containing each machine’s testing documents were dumped into the file boxes. This left them in no discernible order, and testing documents for a single machine were often split across multiple boxes.

Mixed in with these documents were also a zero tape and checklist from the 2023 primary, while many checklists had no date on them at all, raising questions about whether they were from the right election.

Chester County stores its logic and accuracy testing documents in neatly filed boxes. Northampton did not allow photography of its storage boxes.

By contrast, in Chester County, Barsoum keeps her documentation neatly organized. Each machine’s test deck, tapes, checklist, and other documents are neatly folded and placed in clear, resealable envelopes and kept in file boxes indicating which election they are for. The sealing end of the envelopes are even staggered in the box, to keep the stacks orderly.

In Northampton, Commini downplayed the misfiled documents, noting that it was only two items out of four filing boxes and not indicative of a widespread issue, but he acknowledges the county’s organization is lacking.

“We recognize that in the past, there was no process to keep these documents in order,” he said. “We are aware now that we need to create a new filing process for this information, and we are going to take steps to do so.”

The checklists in Northampton’s boxes weren’t just misfiled. Large numbers of them were incomplete or inconsistent. More than 200 did not have the back filled out, which includes steps like removing mock ballots from the machine after testing. Some inspectors completed some questions that others skipped. And in some cases, the same inspector would fill out the same checklist differently for two precincts’ machines. None of the checklists had the line for supervisor’s initials filled out to indicate the inspector’s work had been checked.

(Story continues below graphic)

The testing was performed by a mix of county employees — some from outside the elections department — and ES&S employees, with ES&S providing the training. Commini said while there are supervisors from the elections office and ES&S overseeing the process, those employees did not examine the inspectors’ checklists to ensure they were complete.

The checklists also lacked serial numbers that would indicate which machine they were for, so in most cases they couldn’t be linked afterward to a particular machine or its zero and results tapes. Not a single checklist had a serial number written on it, according to Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s review.

One particular checklist that turned up in the review illustrates why this lapse is problematic. On that document, the inspector had checked “no” for all the questions related to that machine. That would indicate that the machine had several problems: that its tabulated results did not match the test deck, for instance, and that it did not prevent a voter from selecting more candidates than they were allowed to vote for.

Whether this was an error by the inspector in completing the checklist, or an indication that the machine was actually malfunctioning during testing, is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. Since the inspector did not record the machine’s serial number, or its assigned precinct, on the checklist, his answers cannot be checked against the corresponding tapes and test deck. This also means the paperwork can’t prove that a malfunctioning machine wasn’t deployed in the November election.

Commini said this inspector’s services “were not retained.”

Commini said that while the checklists are “useful” in indicating the functions of the machine were checked, they’re not critical in proving the machines were functioning properly.

He said it’s safe to assume, based on the election outcome, that a malfunctioning machine wasn’t put in service on Election Day.

“The public can be assured, because if a machine is not working, it is not deployed,” he added. “We can prove the machines worked properly by the information counted during the official canvass. This is when we go through the machines’ tapes and match them to the results we are reporting.”

Indeed, a machine’s proper functioning could be verified after the test with the zero tapes, results tapes, and test decks. But Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s review found that many of those documents were missing from the boxes.

In total, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified over 150 documents or sets of documents — including checklists, zero and results tapes, and test decks — that were missing from the four boxes. Votebeat and Spotlight PA sent a list of these missing documents to county spokesperson Brittney Waylen and Commini, who initially said that there were other boxes in the warehouse that “may contain those items.”

But Waylen later said that after three trips to the Elections Warehouse, “Chris and his team could not find the boxes with the majority of the missing items.”

The county was able to find three of the documents that were missing.

Reforms in the works

In response to Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s review, the county made several changes to its process, and a reporter watched inspectors following that process during testing on April 8 for the upcoming primary. Each machine now has its own dedicated checklist with the precinct prewritten at the top.

The field for the machine serial number is on the front of the form, rather than the back, and testers are being specifically instructed to fill it out. The front also now has an arrow at the bottom to indicate that the back contains new sections to be filled out by a supervisor.

One page of Northampton County's new voting machine testing checklist.

The county says it is also working on a better filing system.

“We definitely have to get better on a lot of the things we did,” Commini said. “These are major changes that need to be done.”

Other officials were troubled by Northampton’s problems and are interested in refining the logic and accuracy testing.

In a joint letter to the Senate State Government Committee, the Northampton County Democratic and Republican party chairs pointed out that the machines the county uses also had a calibration error in 2019, which was not caught by pre-election testing.

Matthew Munsey, chair of the Northampton County Democratic Party, said the testing that year was “awful” because the county used a feature built into the ExpressVote XL that automatically generated test ballots and ran them through the machine, rather than having test decks entered manually as the county does now.

He’s happy Commini made that switch, but still, the disorganization makes finding paperwork like looking for “a needle in a haystack,” and he has noticed over the years that the checklists were not being filed out, because as he was told: “There’s no need for them to be.”

“Sometimes people just put their initials down,” he said. “But it’s critical when you have a problem that you want to see what was done. … Failing to fill out the paperwork doesn’t show due diligence.”

Northampton’s lapses have also prompted state legislators to step in, seeking to make sure all counties are using best practices for testing.

Coleman, the Republican state senator representing neighboring Bucks and Lehigh counties and chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, said in an interview that he is working on a bill to tighten up the testing procedures.

“It shouldn’t take a [records request] and 14 hours of research to determine if your county tested equipment properly,” he said

He is working with the Department of State on a bill that would codify recent directives from the department on testing procedures. He said Pennsylvanians who buy gasoline can see right on the pump that the equipment was properly inspected, and he thinks voting equipment should be similar.

“The fact of the matter is it may have to be a state law for counties to follow the procedures,” he said. “This is insanity and at some point, the adults have to step in and say, ‘You didn’t listen to the Department of State, so the legislature has to step in and standardize the testing.’”

It’s unclear if other counties have the kinds of flaws and disorganization in their testing documentation that Northampton does. The Department of State said all counties provided certification that they had completed testing, although Coleman said he is still waiting to see the details of those certifications to know exactly how thoroughly counties are complying with the testing. But the granular documentation — test decks, results tapes — would only be available at the county level through records requests.

State Sen. Cris Dush, a Republican from Jefferson who chairs the Senate State Government Committee, said he will be co-sponsoring the legislation. Dush’s Democratic counterpart on the committee, Sen. Amanda Cappelletti, also said she was working with a Republican colleague to codify the Department of State’s directive, without mentioning Coleman’s bill directly.

Codifying the department’s recent directive would give the agency monitoring and enforcement authority, which would help prevent errors, Cappelletti said.

“These additional checks and balances will bolster Pennsylvanians’ confidence that our elections are being conducted appropriately,” she said.

The Department of State recently updated its directive on preelection machine testing to clarify what voting patterns must be used when testing to avoid problems like only testing “yes” “yes,” and “no” “no.” The department also offered new training sessions on how to perform the testing.

Jerry Feaser, a former Dauphin County election director with 10 years of experience, said during his tests a separate county election office employee would check that documentation was filled out properly. He thinks much of a county’s proficiency in the practice comes down to training.

Northampton’s 2023 documentation may have been more complete if a supervisor had signed off on each inspector’s work.

“This is one of these things where experience matters,” Feaser said.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about Pennsylvania’s voting machines, how the state keeps them secure, and more

2024-02-27T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

During what is likely to be another contentious presidential election in Pennsylvania, you may hear contradictory, confusing, or downright false claims about voting machines.

Politicians in the past few elections have promoted fabricated claims about how they work or taken advantage of routine problems to cast doubt on their security and accuracy.

In Pennsylvania, all voting systems produce paper ballots that can be audited. This allows election officials to verify the accuracy of the outcome long after voting has concluded.

These systems are tested twice, once at the federal and once at the state level, before going into service. Before each election, each machine that will be used is tested again to ensure it works properly.

Despite these security measures, politicians have seized on human error or completely invented information to cast doubt on election results.

In November 2020, former President Donald Trump amplified false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines switched 221,000 votes from himself to Joe Biden in Pennsylvania. He made numerous such claims as part of a larger, concerted effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.

Ahead of the 2024 election, Spotlight PA and Votebeat spoke with state officials about the status of Pennsylvania’s voting machines, how the devices are certified, and how counties select them.

The types of voting machines used in Pennsylvania

Following the 2016 presidential election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein sued Pennsylvania over its voting systems, claiming they were susceptible to hacking.

A 2018 settlement in that case forced all counties to purchase new machines that produce a “voter-verifiable paper ballot” that could be audited. Previously, some counties had used machines with touch screens that produce no paper ballot, devices known as direct recording equipment.

“This is the most important security feature that voting systems can have, is that there is a paper record of every single vote cast,” said Derek Tisler, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program who recently co-authored a report on how to secure the 2024 election.

“Having that paper means you don’t need to trust [technology] to get it right,” he said. “You can use voting machines to count the ballots and then check a sample of those paper ballots to make sure everything was working as it should.”

In Pennsylvania, counties make most election decisions. This includes what machines to purchase.

Verified Voting, a nonpartisan elections technology organization, tracks machines used nationwide. According to its database, 70% of Pennsylvania counties primarily have voters mark a paper ballot by hand, then they feed the ballots to a tabulator that scans, tallies, and stores the votes. The ballots are retained in a ballot box in case of audit or recount.

The other 30% use “ballot marking devices.” Those machines have voters make selections on a screen, then the device prints out a ballot with those selections. Many counties also offer this type of machine for voters with disabilities.

Pennsylvania uses voting machines from five companies: Clear Ballot, Dominion, ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Unisyn. More than half of counties use ES&S machines.

The most popular system is the ES&S DS200, a tabulator that scans hand-marked paper ballots, according to Verified Voting.

Despite the security and redundancies in place, minor malfunctions with Pennsylvania’s voting equipment or administration happen. These often garner outsized scrutiny due to the state’s importance in national elections.

Philadelphia experienced touch-screen issues, paper jams, and panels being opened inadvertently — exposing electronic controls — in 2019, the first year the city used ExpressVote XL machines, a Reuters investigation found. That same year, in Northampton County — which uses the same machines — voters experienced touch screens responding erratically and ballot printouts that were hard to read.

Northampton County had issues again in November 2023 when voting machines made ballots appear as though votes in two judicial retention races had been improperly recorded. ES&S and the county blamed a data entry error.

People who question election integrity quickly jumped on the problem to mock the idea that elections are secure.

“One of the lessons I felt that came out of Northampton County last year was just how critical it is for the county and those involved to understand what is happening before they start disseminating information,” said Jeff Greenburg, a senior advisor on election administration for the good-government group Committee of Seventy. He previously ran elections in Mercer County.

Northampton County officials had said early in the day that votes appeared to come out flipped by the equipment, a loaded phrase that suggested the vote recorded was the opposite of what the voter intended.

In actuality, votes were being recorded properly, but the machine mislabeled the ballot printout and made it appear as if a voter’s selections had gotten mixed up.

Reactionaries quickly took to social media and ran with the narrative.

Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, the state’s top election official, has repeatedly warned that “bad actors” will use incidents like these to undermine faith in elections.

Moving forward, the public will have a more complete picture of the machine problems counties experience and how often they occur.

Under a settlement reached in a case that resulted from the 2019 issues with the ExpressVote XL, counties now track and report malfunctions to the Pennsylvania Department of State. The agency then publishes the reports on its website within 105 days of the election.

How Pennsylvania picks, tests, and secures voting machines

The Pennsylvania Department of State plays an important role in how counties select voting machines.

The state’s Election Code requires the department’s secretary to examine and certify any voting machine before counties are allowed to purchase it. This happens on top of the certification already done by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“All of the voting equipment is required to be certified by both the federal and state government, so there are two layers of certification that equipment must go through,” said Greenburg. “That’s a good thing.”

According to a directive from the Pennsylvania Department of State, the certification process:

Ensures machines are not connected to the internet;
Uses various methods to detect if the machines have been tampered with;
And confirms that the machines have measures to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information, such as vote data and passwords.

The department most recently certified the machines in use in 2018 and 2019. Certification documentation can be found on the Pennsylvania Department of State’s website.

Jess Myers, a certification expert with Pennsylvania and federal experience, said that when the commonwealth certified its machines, it did so to a higher technical standard than was required at the time.

“Testing at the state level includes everything from testing the functionality, from making sure you can lay out a ballot and make your selections, that the printing is accurate, that it’s reading those hand marks or machine marks accurately,” she said. “That’s sort of the basics, then there’s additional security inspection done.”

Before each election, counties test each machine to be used to ensure it properly functions. This is called “logic and accuracy” testing.

Typically, counties will first ensure that none of the data storage devices in the machines contain votes from the last election. Once that is done, for tests of tabulators, mock ballots are fed through the machine to simulate the election. In the case of ballot marking devices, the machines are checked to ensure they properly record the tester’s on-screen selections onto the printed-out paper ballot. The results recorded by the machine are then compared against the ballots to ensure the machine correctly records votes.

The Pennsylvania Department of State outlines how the testing should be done on its website. This testing is open to the public to observe.

“I think the key is there are many opportunities for citizens to view the steps in this process,” Greenburg said.

Occasionally, this testing is insufficient. Part of the issue in Northampton County in 2023 was that the mock ballots only contained tests for “yes-yes” and “no-no” votes in two judicial retention races. A test of a “yes-no” combination of votes would have detected the programming issue.

After testing is done, the machines are closed and secured with a tamper-evident seal to ensure no access occurs before election day.

Greenburg said voters who have doubts about voting machine security should learn more about how the devices work by reaching out to their county election officials, observing testing, and consuming local media.

“The best thing a voter can do is educate themselves about the process in their county,” he said. “If your only source of media are national media outlets, more than likely you’re not going to understand the rules in Pennsylvania.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pa. will track voting machine malfunctions under new settlement with election security groups

2023-08-18T20:05:16+00:00

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Thanks to a new settlement between Pennsylvania and a coalition of election security groups, the commonwealth’s Department of State will soon require counties to publicly report voting machine malfunctions — a measure that election experts say could be the first of its kind.

Counties are still awaiting details on what the program — which begins with this November’s municipal election — will look like. But experts say the new reports, which must be posted publicly, could present a unique opportunity to improve efficiency while combating the kind of election misinformation that has become routine in recent cycles.

The settlement caps a longstanding lawsuit, in which the election groups sued the state after a few counties adopted new voting machines that the groups argued were flawed.

“As fringe conspiracy theories and false claims about election results abound in our civil discourse, this case is a win-win for voters and for election officials who wish to protect both the transparency and the credibility of election results,” said Ben-Zion Ptashnik, president of the bipartisan National Election Defense Coalition, one of the plaintiffs. “It allows future elections to be safer from manipulations, and inoculates election technology from those wishing to undermine the credibility of our democratic institutions.”

Along with having the state direct counties to report malfunctions, the settlement agreement requires the department to give the public better opportunities to witness its voting equipment examination process and requires that the three counties using the voting machine, called the ExpressVote XL, upgrade to its latest software.

Along with the National Election Defense Coalition, the groups involved in the suit against the Department of State include the Pennsylvania-based Citizens for Better Elections, the election equality nonprofit Free Speech for People, and a cohort of several Pennsylvania voters.

Their dispute with Pennsylvania began in July 2019, following Philadelphia’s controversial selection of the ExpressVote XL as its voting system of choice.

The groups petitioned then-Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar to reexamine the machine and consider decertifying it for use in Pennsylvania elections, claiming the machines had a number of deficiencies affecting ballot security, voting secrecy, and disability access.

Manufactured by ES&S, the ExpressVote XL is a touch-screen voting machine known as a ballot-marking device. As an all-in-one voting system, it allows voters to select their choices, print those choices on a ballot, and have their votes counted through the use of a single machine, as opposed to a separate ballot scanner for tabulation.

Northampton and Cumberland counties also opted to buy the machines in 2019. That November, voters in Northampton County experienced touch-screen glitches as well as improper set-up of the machines by ES&S that led to incorrect vote tallies. Touch-screen problems and other issues also arose in Philadelphia.

The election groups then sued the Pa. Department of State in December 2019, arguing that the state should not have certified the machines in the first place. The groups’ objections included the allegation that the ExpressVote XL’s administrative access panel was insecure and frequently unlocked; the machine required poll workers to enter voting booths to help spoil ballots if a voter made a mistake; and the machine stored ballots in chronological order, thus compromising their secrecy.

As part of the agreement reached last week, the secretary of state will instruct all counties using the ExpressVote XL — Cumberland, Northampton, and Philadelphia — to upgrade to the latest software version to address some of these issues.

Citizens for Better Elections’ President Kevin Skoglund, who spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs, said he was unsure how many of their complaints would be resolved by the machine upgrade, though he added that ES&S had resolved several of the issues the group sued over during the course of the litigation.

A spokesperson for ES&S confirmed that the upgrade addresses at least one of the concerns: the need for a poll worker to assist in spoiling a ballot. Voters can now spoil their ballot without the need for a poll worker to intervene.

Philadelphia confirmed it had already upgraded to the latest version of the software earlier this year, before the May primary. A Cumberland County spokesperson said the county is currently upgrading its machines to the latest software that the state has certified. Northampton county did not respond to requests for comment.

But the much more wide-ranging part of the settlement is the new requirement that counties submit malfunction reports. This rule applies to all counties, regardless of the voting machines they use.

The settlement says the secretary will direct all counties to submit reports of malfunctions — or declarations of no malfunctions — to his office within the 60 days following an election. The reports will then be posted to the department’s website within the next 45 days, with the secretary being allowed to make redactions for security, to protect proprietary information, or to exclude information that would “mislead the public.”

The settlement agreement says that a reportable “malfunction” would be a problem that prevents or delays a voter from casting a ballot or the votes from being tabulated.

As the administrator of the new program, the Department of State will be in charge of more clearly defining what exactly will count as a malfunction. Asked by Votebeat and Spotlight PA to explain what the definition would be and whether common issues such as paper jams would qualify, a spokesperson did not answer the question.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former election director, said she was concerned with the provision that allows anyone, not just election officials, to report malfunctions.

“Just because someone says [they saw] something doesn’t always mean it is an issue,” she said.

She was also concerned that reports being publicized without proper context could lead to them being used in misinformation, and that a good model for such disclosures would be the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration’s coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, which identifies, analyzes, and seeks to fix issues before they are publicly disclosed.

The settlement says counties should report whether a malfunction was fixed and how it was fixed, but does not bar disclosing that malfunction until it is fixed.

“Pennsylvanians can feel confident that their votes are accurately and securely counted, and this agreement will provide additional public transparency into the electronic voting systems used in the Commonwealth,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said in a statement.

Skoglund said the purpose of the malfunction reporting was to see how well voting equipment is working in the field.

“What gets measured gets managed, and we want to have the ability to measure,” he said. “This gives us the ability to see if there are problems that need to be addressed. Those don’t have to be malicious, they could be just product defects.”

Skoglund gave examples of malfunctions he thinks the settlement requires officials to report: machines running out of ink frequently, experiencing paper jams, or ballots falling out of machines and onto the floor, something he said Philadelphia has experienced.

Skoglund said while the possibility exists that someone looking to sow doubt in election results could use this malfunction report database as a way to do so, the goal is to make voting equipment as secure and well-functioning as it can be.

“I think you can’t stop people from using good information for bad purposes, and I don’t think that’s a reason to not do quality control,” he said.

Nick Custodio, deputy city commissioner for Philadelphia, said the city is still reviewing the agreement’s provision on malfunction reports, but that “anything that can be used out of context to sow distrust in elections is always a concern.”

David Levine, a former elections director and now the senior elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said he was not aware of any similar malfunction reporting programs around the country, and he feels it is a “significant development” which gives Pennsylvania the opportunity to be a leader on the issue.

“I think the secretary recognizes that we need to not only fight back false information, but to not back away from legitimate issues and sweep them under the rug,” he said. “I think Al [Schmidt] is one of the best I know at being able to do that, walk and chew gum at same time.”

Schmidt, a former Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner who was appointed by Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro as Secretary of the Commonwealth, is well-known for his work both proving and disproving claims of election fraud.

Levine said that while there may be people who try to “weaponize” good work on election integrity to “delegitimize elections,” that does not mean legitimate issues of concern can be ignored.

“This agreement does not mean Pennsylvania elections lack integrity, in fact I would say quite the contrary,” he said. “This is what good election officials who recognize their systems are good but imperfect do to move the needle forward.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Election activists are seeking the “cast vote record” from 2020. Here’s what it is and why they want it.

2022-09-07T20:41:27+00:00

Elections departments across the country are getting tons of near-identical requests for an obscure document generated by ballot-counting machines, spurred by people who insist this record could help detect fraudulent voting patterns that show former President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election. It is the latest example of the endless, fruitless quest for a smoking gun that has so far yielded no proof of wrongdoing affecting the election results.

But the document, called a “cast vote record,” can’t be used to detect these kinds of patterns, nor is it particularly useful to people who aren’t researchers or auditors, experts say. And the sheer number of requests is overwhelming elections offices as they prepare for this year’s general election.

“The remarkable thing is that there’s really a lot less here than it might seem in both directions. It’s way less ominous than it could be, but it’s also way less useful,” said Max Hailperin, a retired computer science professor who has researched election technology.

Put simply, a cast vote record is the electronic representation of how voters voted. These lines of data appear in a spreadsheet full of zeros and ones to indicate the votes an anonymous ballot contained.

Whether the resulting records can be made public varies around the country, and the exact definition and appearance of what’s included in a cast vote record also varies, depending on the jurisdiction and the voting technology it uses.

But requesters, spurred on by recent instructions from people known for promoting baseless theories about election fraud, are bombarding elections offices with cut-and-paste requests for them.

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, known for promoting baseless theories of election fraud, together with a man named Jeff O’Donnell, who uses the moniker “The Lone Raccoon” online, and another far-right internet personality named Lady Draza, are urging people to file the requests and collect the records in a repository for eventual analysis. They also ask requesters to report back if officials deny their requests, to generate a list of potential lawsuits.

At an event in late August, Lindell touted the need for listeners to request cast vote records, and counties immediately saw a spate of requests. In Colorado, for instance, counties saw dozens of requests after the summit, with one local official comparing the identical requests to a “denial of service” attack that prevents them from doing their jobs, according to Colorado Newsline.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, the elections department has seen a massive influx of requests for the records. In 2021, 11 requests came in for the cast vote record, elections department spokeswoman Megan Gilbertson said. In 2022, up through Aug. 25, the county has gotten more than 90, with more coming in every day.

Experts say the records can’t be used in the way Lindell and others are suggesting they can.

“I suspect many of the people that are requesting them don’t know what any of it is. They’re just the mules, to borrow that term,” Hailperin said.

What’s a cast vote record?

Depending on how large the county or town is, the files can be massive. A layperson, using the files alone, would have little understanding of what they’re looking at or how it could be used.

The cast vote record can be tallied to get an unofficial, election night result, but not the final, canvassed vote. The canvassed vote, considered the official results, includes ballots that were provisional or needed adjudication.

Sometimes, ballot images are included as part of the cast vote record. The ballot images can be matched to a given line of data in a cast vote record spreadsheet. That can help an auditor see how a ballot was adjudicated if there were questions about whether a person’s intent was to vote one way or another.

The records can be a useful tool for researchers and auditors. They can find larger trends, like how many people split their ticket, how precincts moved toward a given party over time, or how the method of voting (mail vs. in person) changes. When combined with ballot images, the cast vote record can provide a way to audit an election, though the paper ballots would be a better tool.

“The real gold standard for auditing would be to actually go back to the paper ballot itself and not just a digital image of it. But certainly, you get a little bit of extra confidence if you’re looking at the image and cast vote record,” Hailperin said.

You can’t find your own name, or any voter names, in these records. Ballots are by law private, meaning voters’ names are not on them.

Some who are seeking these records believe they will be able to find fraud based on the sequence in which ballots were scanned, Hailperin said. For example, they would flag whether a large number of consecutive ballots came in for one candidate. But, in the case of ballots cast by mail, the order in which ballots are scanned doesn’t always correlate with when the ballots arrived. And citing ballot sequences as proof of fraud is a flawed premise: Different people, with different political affiliations, tend to vote using different methods because of their trust in early voting or other factors.

“They’re not going to tell the story that you want them to tell. If the story you want to tell is that, clearly, this was fraudulent, you’re not gonna get that,” said Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University who studies election security.

Getting a cast vote record can be easy or impossible

There’s no uniform law around the country that dictates whether cast vote records and corresponding ballot images are public records.

Some jurisdictions make the records readily available online, alongside ballot images, that allow anyone to check the work of an election. Some respond to these records requests with a cast vote record, but won’t release ballot images. Others won’t release either. Others have never received requests for these records until now, so they’re trying to understand how to respond. And still others don’t have a cast vote record because of the technology they use.

Elections departments guard against revealing information that could identify individual voters’ ballots, especially in small places that have only a few voters assigned to each precinct. And they’re sometimes contending with state laws or codes that are unclear as to whether the cast vote record and ballot images should be publicly released. Lawsuits in multiple places, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, are now grappling with these questions.

The release of ballot images tends to be more contentious than the cast vote record spreadsheet.

“There’s sort of a separate question of, is a CVR, legally, a ballot,” Wallach said. “The whole term CVR happened because when you call something a ballot, then a whole bunch of laws kick into place.”

John Brakey, a Democratic activist who co-founded AUDIT USA and was a liaison for the Arizona Senate’s ballot review in Maricopa County, has sued multiple jurisdictions to access ballot images and cast vote records in an effort separate from Lindell’s. Brakey does not believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. But he contends that both records should be combined to provide the next-best option for auditing outside of the hand-marked paper ballots themselves.

“We should be able to use it to build confidence in our election system in this country, to offer people, to prove to them that elections are real,” he said. “In my book, elections are no good unless they’re transparent, trackable and publicly verified with a ballot library system.”*

Providing both the images and spreadsheets will help improve confidence and transparency in elections, he said.

“The actual act of voting is the secret process. Counting is a public process. And anything less than that, then we do not have elections that we really can trust,” Brakey said.

In Arizona, Brakey has run into trouble accessing the ballot images and cast vote records. In Maricopa County, AUDIT USA sued for access to ballot images and lost — a court ruled that the images were not disclosable public records. The judge pointed to state law that requires electronic data or digital images from ballots be treated “at least as protective as those prescribed for paper ballots.” Paper ballots, the judge noted, must be placed in a secure facility “unopened and unaltered” for 24 months for federal office elections, or six months for other elections. That case is on appeal.

In Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the county took the unusual step of seeking a judgment from a court last month over whether the cast vote record, which it had turned over in the past, was a public record. In court filings, the county said it believed it would be sued by Brakey, so the court should weigh in on the question of whether the records were public. (Brakey said he didn’t intend to sue Santa Cruz County.) The county said requests for the cast vote record violate secrecy of ballots and conflict with state law.

Precinct cast vote records in sequential order or with timestamps raise the possibility that an individual voter could be identified, but randomizing the records and removing the timestamps before publicly releasing the record helps negate that threat, Hailperin said.

Dane County, Wisconsin, posts both the cast vote records and ballot images on its website underneath the heading “Do It Yourself Audit.” The county randomly sorted the records, which don’t contain identifying information. And a few locations’ cast vote records or images weren’t included because of some specific reasons, like saving errors and hand-counts, the website notes.

Ballot images, on the other hand, could possibly be connected with a person, should that person have a distinctive handwriting or place a specific mark on their ballot. And that leads to not only privacy concerns, but potential for vote-buying, Wallach said.

A voter could mark their ballot in a particular way, or even vote in a particular pattern in down-ballot races, as proof to the person who paid for their vote that the voter held up their side of the bargain, Wallach said.

Still other parts of the country don’t have cast vote records at all. Connecticut, for example, uses tabulators that don’t create them, said Gabe Rosenberg, chief of staff to the Connecticut secretary of state. That hasn’t stopped the office from getting requests, though. Some of the requests mirror the Lindell language, while others seem to have originated from a local Facebook group. Rosenberg has responded to the requests by explaining there are no such records that meet the request.

For the individuals filing the requests, Rosenberg doesn’t think they’re doing it maliciously to waste his time. But for those coordinating the requests nationwide, he thinks “part of the benefit for them is that it takes up the entire day.”

*Correction, Sept. 9: A previous version of this story misquoted John Brakey as referring to a “valid library.” He said “ballot library.”

Rachel Leingang is a freelancer for Votebeat and co-founder of the Arizona Agenda. Contact Rachel at rleingang@votebeat.org.