After problems with their brand-new touchscreen voting devices plagued a judge’s race in 2019, Northampton County, Pennsylvania swing voters largely moved on.
State and municipal election authorities in this critical swing state are hurrying to rebuild voter faith in front of what might be another contentious presidential election after a similar issue sparked a reaction earlier this month.
County Executive Lamont McClure told AWN before Northampton certified the vote on Tuesday that the glitch was the result of human error and that until mistrust of one another subsides, counties like ours need to be nearly perfect and I think this system allows us to do that.
Local election officials across the country, like those in Northampton, are still dealing with fallout from Donald Trump’s allegations of widespread vote-counting irregularities in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. With Trump a current contender for the Republican nomination, that scepticism could only rise.
Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes and is widely considered to be a key swing state in the upcoming presidential election, raising the stakes considerably. About 220,000 people in Northampton are eligible to vote. Trump’s 2016 victory margin in the state was only 44,000. About 80,000 votes separated him from victory four years later.
It is clear from the Northampton case that there is a fine line between researching serious concerns and giving fuel to conspiracy theories.
“The broader concern is that an incident like this would be misused to undermine confidence in our electoral process,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, told AWN on Wednesday morning, hours after Northampton decided to certify the results.
In the 2019 election, Northampton utilised Election Systems & Software’s touchscreen voting equipment for the first time. That year, a programming fault caused the ES&S machines to dramatically undercount the votes for the Democratic candidate in a local judges’ race. Then, on November 7 of this year, voters in Northampton discovered that printouts from the same devices didn’t correspond with the votes they had digitally entered for two down-ballot judges elections.
The contests at issue were non-competitive, yes/no votes to retain state judges, and county authorities and ES&S have maintained the mistakes did not effect any votes or change the outcome, just as they did in 2019. They claim the fault sprang from an isolated programming oversight rather than the machines themselves, which are inherently safe and trustworthy.
In light of what happened in ’19 and ’23, I can now say that the devices at our disposal have many failsafes,” McClure explained.
However, election officials, election security monitors, and members of both local political parties argue that the hiccups significantly slowed down the voting process on Election Day this year. Due to the proximity of this problem to the next 2020 election, many people are beginning to wonder if it is too risky to use ES&S’s machines to tally votes in a highly disputed county in the centre of a pivotal swing state.
“Since 2019, the theory has been well, that was a big mistake, but we caught it and we’ve implemented new processes to make sure nothing like that would ever happen again,” Northampton County Democratic Party chair Matthew Munsey told AWN.
“I don’t know how we can restore trust with these machines,” he remarked following the latest incident.
Critics like Munsey assert that the ExpressVote XL’s fundamental design is at the heart of the issue.
A paper printout, complete with a barcode for tabulation purposes and associated text for voters to check their choices, is spewed out by the machine.
In the two races on Nov. 7, however, the computers changed voters’ choices in the textual area of the ballot — but not the barcode — if they voted “yes” to retain one judge and “no” for the other.
Officials from ES&S and Northampton agreed that the problem should have been uncovered during pre-election software testing. They believe the problem was initially introduced by an ES&S employee during routine programming designed to ready the devices for Election Day.
We truly regret what has occurred today,” Linda Bennett, senior vice president of account management at ES&S, stated at a press conference on Election Day. But, she stressed, “We are sure and positive that the voter selections are actually being captured” because the issue only affected the written section.
McClure stated this week that he has requested that ES&S terminate the worker who made the mistake. The human element to these mistakes was emphasised, and he promised that the county will “endeavour mightily” to prevent a recurrence in 2024. “It wasn’t a computer glitch,” he declared.
Many Northampton residents, however, find the error particularly alarming because it forced them to disbelieve the one component of the ballot they had been instructed to trust four years ago.