Despite mounting apprehensions regarding their security and efficiency, touchscreen voting machines, specifically the ExpressVote XL, received certification for use in New York’s federal, state, and local elections.
The New York State Board of Elections endorsed the use of these machines earlier this week.
Though this does not impose their deployment across the state, it does permit county election officials to integrate them into future elections.
These machines, designed by Elections System and Software, present a shift from the customary voter-marked paper ballots to an electronic marking system.
The company has invested $615,000 over the past eight years lobbying state officials, primarily concerning the acquisition of new voting machines, as per campaign finance documentation.
Sarah Goff, deputy director of a prominent good governance group, emphasized, “Paper ballots marked by the voter is the election security gold standard.”
Goff continued to express concerns over diverting taxpayer funds for any alternative system.
In the lead-up to the machine’s certification, several organizations including Common Cause New York expressed skepticism about the machines’ vulnerability.
The core contention is that they fail to leave a verifiable paper trail, thus leaving the voting system exposed to cyber threats.
In their correspondence with the board, the Let New York Vote Coalition noted, “We believe each individual voter — and no one or nothing else — should have control of their own ballot throughout the process of voting.”
They further stressed, “As numerous election security experts have noted these machines are vulnerable and prone to error in a way that voter-marked paper ballots are not.”
Previously, a 2020 report by Common Cause NY highlighted the potential pitfalls of these systems.
The study mentioned cyber security evaluations which discovered a multitude of vulnerabilities within the machines.
The same report also shed light on the lobbying expenditures of Elections System and Software in New York.
Susan Lerner, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause, told Capital Tonight that New York already has the best kind of voting machines there are, naemly voter-marked paper ballots read by scanners.
Common Cause is also worried that ExpressVote XL uses Windows 10, which may become less secure as Microsoft is planning to end software updates for the operating system in two years’ time, according to Spectrum News 1.
“Number one, (ExpressVote XL) is very expensive,” she said. “It’s going to cause a real increase in the lines and the time that people would have to take to vote. It’s insecure. The voter can’t really check and control their own vote. You’re at the mercy of the machine.”
