New Voting Systems for Hays County
OP-ED
Sometime in May the County will be selecting our new voting equipment. Two systems are under consideration: the ExpressVote from ES&S and the Verity Duo from Hart InterCivic. There are some differences between them, but either would be an acceptable solution and a big improvement over our current, aging equipment. This article will walk through some of the differences, but it will not recommend one over the other.
When you check in to vote, the “poll book” system determines which ballot you should receive. Your ballot style identifier is printed on a paper tape, and that tape will be read with a handheld scanner. That scanner is connected to the first component of the new voting system.
With the ES&S system, the device connected to the scanner prints a sheet of paper that will actually become your vote record. Your ballot style identifier is carried forward onto that sheet as a barcode. You feed that sheet into the voting machine, which then displays the proper ballot on the screen.
With the Hart system, the scanner connects to a controller that prints out a small piece of paper with an access code. You enter the access code on the voting machine, which then displays your ballot on the screen. This part of the process should seem familiar – it is what we do now, except that you will enter the access code on a touch screen. After entering the access code, you may discard the piece of paper it was printed on. The voting machine contains the paper stock that will become your vote record.
The Hart voting machines are wired in “daisy-chain” fashion to each other and to their controller. The voting machine sends your access code back to the controller, and the controller sends the proper ballot image to the voting machine. Daisy-chain connectors have been a point of failure in our current voting systems; however, the new Hart system uses an improved connector that should have a longer lifetime. The need to chain all the devices together does put some constraints on how you can arrange the devices in the polling place.
The ES&S system does not have any cables going to the voting machines. Each voting machine contains the entire database of ballot styles, and the paper you feed into it has your ballot style identifier. This eliminates the need to connect back to a controller, but it means that administrators must configure each voting machine with the ballot style definitions before sending them to the polling places. In the Hart system, they just have to configure the ballot styles into the controllers.
With the Hart system, you reach over the printer tray to use the touch screen. Some voters might find this awkward. With either system, you make your selections and cast your vote on the touch screen, and then the voting machine gives you a paper record of your vote. This record only shows your choices, not the entire ballot that you saw on the screen. The ES&S machine prints your selections as barcodes as well as human-readable text. The Hart machine only prints your selections as text. (The Hart vote record does contain a QR code, but it is just your ballot style identifier.)
After reviewing your vote record, you walk over and feed it into a scanner. (Neither system gives you a takehome receipt.) The Hart scanner uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read your selections from the text on the vote record. The ES&S scanner reads your selections from the barcodes on the vote record. Some people worry that a compromised ES&S voting machine could print the correct vote in the text but modify the data in the barcode. This would be a poor way to change a vote. Every vote you changed would create an unambiguous, printed proof of fraud. (If you had the ability to modify the software in the polling place equipment, the scanner would be a much better target. In that case, the OCR/barcode distinction would not make a difference.)
After you have fed your vote record into the scanner, your vote is recorded in electronic memory in the scanner, and the paper record drops into a secure bin. The official tally comes from the electronic memory in the scanner, and the paper records are available for audits and recounts.
The paper path is one of the most failure-prone parts of any document processing system. The vendors do not provide data on paper path reliability, but there is a difference in the number of opportunities for jamming. In the Hart system, each vote record passes through one print cycle and one hand-fed scan cycle. In the ES&S system, each record goes through two print cycles and two hand-fed scan cycles.
If you follow the news about voting machines, it is important to know that the ExpressVote system we are considering is not the “XL” variant. The XL uses the scanner in the voting machine itself to tabulate votes, rather than having you walk over to a separate scanner. Many people have expressed concerns over that feature, but it is not in the ExpressVote model that we might use.
Voting systems in Texas must be certified first by the federal government and then by the Texas Secretary of State before they can be used in public elections. The ES&S system has completed both certifications. The Hart system has completed federal certification but is still undergoing the Texas evaluation. While certification cannot be guaranteed, it is likely that the new Hart system will receive its state certification by mid-August. The County is very aware of this exposure and what our cutoff date and backup plans must be if they want to deploy the Hart system in the November election.
There are other differences that do not directly impact the voter but affect the effort required to administer an election. These factors include cost, the size and weight of the equipment and the learning curve for the new system. Two learning curve considerations are worth noting. The Hart software is just a new version of the software we are already using. On the other hand, Travis County has recently adopted the ES&S system. Travis County officials have been generous with their time and support in the past, and we could leverage their experience in implementing a new, paper-based voting system. The primary selection criteria should be security and a good voter experience; however, if there is no clear winner on those grounds, it would be entirely proper to factor ease of administration into the decision.
Hays County badly needs new voting equipment. If you have a preference for one system over the other, you can send your opinion to our Elections Administrator. But in any event, please contact your County Commissioner to urge the adoption of whichever system is recommended.
Robert Smith was formerly on the committee charged by the Hays County Commissioners Court with assessing the changes necessary for voting locally. The committee has since finished its work and there fore has been disbanded.