This voting machine is called a WINvote.
It was used in American elections
between 2004 and 2014.
In 2017, it took hackers just a few hours to play
Rick Astley on one of these at a cybersecurity conference.
Although the WINvote was out of use by then, the stunt pointed to a real problem:
In most of the US, voting machines are over a decade old.
In 2016 voters in these
counties were using machines bought in 2008 or even earlier.
At that time this was
America's most popular cell phone.
Fast-forward to 2018 and the greatest
threat to these machines probably isn't hacking.
They're not even connected to
the internet, so remote large-scale meddling would be almost impossible.
The biggest problem is that they're so old, some of them may not be working right.
For over a decade there have been reports of apparent vote-flipping,
machine errors, and hardware breaking down across the country, but even though
this happens every election very few machines have been replaced.
And to understand why so many machines are failing now,
you have to look back at the
2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore.
And the lead story at this hour is the State of Florida is too close to call.
A nation waits.
Election officials decided to count all of the ballots by hand.
Punch hole is called a
"chad", pierced but still attached.
Hanging chad and whether it's an allowable vote.
What ballots count and what ballots don't count?
A hanging chad is the
partially torn piece of paper left on a ballot that isn't fully punched out.
When the 2000 election went to a recount Florida officials had to figure out
whether hanging chads represented a vote or not.
Clearly punched their ballot
correctly and there's a hanging Chad in the back it may read one time as no vote
and then the second time as a vote.
After the recount, frustrated officials started
replacing their old machines with new electronic ones.
Typically, state and
local officials would pay for this on their own, but after the 2000 election
fiasco the federal government passed the help America Vote Act,
which provided several billion dollars to pay for new equipment.
Congress has
made a vital contribution to the democratic process.
Now it's my honor to
sign into law the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
The electronic machines got rid
of hanging chads, but they also introduced new problems.
Officials without security training sometimes chose weak passwords.
The software
requires regular security updates and some machines don't have paper backups
that can be used to audit voting.
A recent report on election security says
that conducting elections with paper-based voting systems is one of the
most important steps states can take to improve election security.
The Help America Vote Act was the first time the federal government provided funding for
voting equipment.
Now that money is running out and many machines are failing.
Without federal funding some states like New Mexico and Rhode Island
have provided money for new machines, but in other states like New Jersey,
officials continue to work with aging equipment.
And there's a problem with
relying on local funding.
It can give an unfair advantage to larger counties.
In Texas for example, two neighboring counties have different budgets for
their voting systems.
Travis County is home to about a million people.
In 2017
their election administration budget was close to two million dollars.
Next door,
rural Blanco County budgeted only 46 thousand.
The problem with this is that state and local officials are expected to pay for
new equipment on their own, but that's rarely a priority in the budgets they're given.
On the other hand, the federal government has a much larger budget.
For now, Congress has approved $380 million dollars to improve
the country's election infrastructure.
Whether that money will be used to
replace all of America's aging voting machines remains to be seen.