Richard Vogel/AP Photo
Early voters cast their ballots at the new electronic voting machines in Los Angeles, March 2, 2020.
“It was beyond a disgrace!” shouted one commenter at a March 10 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting. “This is undermining our democracy,” said another. A third put it even more bluntly: “Dude, you fucked up.”
The aforementioned dude is registrar-recorder and county clerk Dean Logan, the chief election official for the largest county by population in America. Logan presided over a colossal failure with a brand-new $300 million voting system on Super Tuesday. Insufficient training and staffing of poll workers, technical malfunctions that shut down many of the machines and blocked connection to the state’s voter registration database, and other miseries compelled Angelenos to wait in lines for up to four hours to vote.
The county had promoted the new system as a way to increase voter participation and convenience. Now, the county has promised an investigation, many have called for Logan’s resignation, and state officials want every county voter to get a mail ballot in November, though Logan’s office has not fully embraced that.
The Super Tuesday debacle was foreseen by a small group of election security experts and advocates, who have long warned about unreliable, unverifiable “ballot marking devices,” to say nothing of the intricacies of introducing such machines along with new places to vote, in a county larger than 41 states. “Election concerns aside, you have tens of thousands of pieces of equipment that have to be connected by cables that work, software across all the machines that’s not buggy,” says Richard DeMillo, a computer scientist and professor of computing and management at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “A seasoned IT organization for a large corporation would have difficulty swallowing this large a project.”
The failure in Los Angeles, despite a massive budget and ten years of pre-planning, may not be not isolated; similar machines will be rolled out in Georgia, a critical general-election state. With the coronavirus already threatening smooth-functioning elections, and states like Georgia postponing in-person balloting, added strains from shaky voting systems have led activists to demand the most reliable alternative: hand-marked paper ballots. As DeMillo points out, “It’s tough to hack a magic marker.”
THE SEEDS of the Los Angeles disaster go back to 2009, when the county determined that its “Ink-a-Vote” ballot scanning systems were no longer usable. The county intended to build a publicly-owned system from scratch, what would eventually be called “Voting Solutions for All People” (VSAP). The initial idea appeared to be to build VSAP as an asset, an election solution that could be sold to other counties and states.
Some election security advocates viewed the announcement with skepticism. “I was invited ten years ago to the first meeting of the VSAP system and never invited back,” says Brad Friedman, a radio host and election security advocate. “I was pointing out all of the things that went wrong ten years later.” But the county earned support from—some would say co-opted—notable election stalwarts like Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and actress and activist Mimi Kennedy.
The system was beset with difficulties from the the first day of early voting, and technical problems, including paper jams, on Election Day only magnified the difficulties.
In 2017, the county paid $282 million to SmartMatic, a multinational firm founded by Venezuelans that specializes in voting systems, to build a fleet of ballot marking devices (BMDs) that would be accessible for everyone, including the disabled and visually impaired. A year earlier, California had passed the Voter Choice Act, which encourages counties to mail all voters a ballot, expand in-person early voting, and allow voters access to any voting center they choose within their county. Fifteen counties in California have embraced the Voter Choice Act’s options.
Los Angeles County went with the early voting and the voting centers, but mysteriously got exempted from the Voter Choice Act’s all-mail mandate, which increased reliance on in-person systems. And in addition to eliminating all its pre-existing precincts in favor of dramatically fewer vote centers (about 1,000, as opposed to 5,000 precincts), the county also decided that Super Tuesday’s presidential election would be the time it rolled out the 22,000 BMDs.
The BMD system uses a touchscreen that voters mark as they move through the ballot, then prints out a paper record that has to be fed back into the machine.
Jeff Martin/AP Photo
Similar machines will be rolled out in Georgia, a critical general-election state.
The state certified the new system just one month before the election, despite finding widespread security flaws. Testers found 40 discrete problems with the machines, including that hackers could gain unauthorized access to the system, acquire machine data through a USB port, and add or remove ballots without detection. It also cited paper jams from feeding the paper ballot into the machines at a rate five times higher than the allowable standard. Secretary of State Alex Padilla conditionally approved the system anyway. The condition was that the county needed to devise a plan to correct the paper-jam problem within five months—well after the primary.
“This was in January that he certified for the March election,” says Friedman. “They had been working on it for ten years!” The state previously had a law requiring the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to certify voting machines, but that provision was repealed in a 2013 bill written by then-state senator Alex Padilla, now the same person who certified the machine on his own authority. Meanwhile despite promised transparency and open source code, not a single line of code was released before the election.
Even if the machines work perfectly, election experts warn that BMDs aren’t verifiable, and voters are unlikely to detect any vote-flipping. A study from researchers at the University of Michigan and the Harker School found that even though BMDs produce a paper record of the vote, people are highly likely to overlook any misprinting of their actual vote. In a mock election of 241 voters where every ballot included one changed vote, only 40 percent of sample voters reviewed their paper record at all, and only 6.6 percent reported any misprinting error to a poll worker. That makes the ultimate intent of the voter virtually unknowable.
“Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that voters will not effectively verify ballots beyond a couple choices,” says DeMillo, a former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard. “The California ballot goes on for pages and pages. Then you’re in real trouble with vote-flipping.”
As if this weren’t enough, though, the problems in Los Angeles went well beyond the threatened integrity of the vote.
IN MANY WAYS it was a perfect storm. First, the public education challenge of informing a county of over ten million residents with more than 100 spoken languages that their entire voting system had changed was always going to depress pre-Election Day turnout, since Angelenos had never before had the option of in-person voting before Election Day.
The Prospect visited several open voting centers prior to Election Day and never saw one live voter. One site had only “five or ten” voters show up on an entire Sunday, according to poll workers. “It’s great that the county wants to get people to vote when other places are shrinking that opportunity,” said one poll worker. “But people need to know about it.”
On top of that, Californians, with new leverage in the presidential primary, were not voting early, the better to see who would actually still be in the race by Super Tuesday. This concentrated in-person voters on Election Day, when there were only about one-fifth as many voting locations as a normal precinct-based election.
The system was beset with difficulties from the first day of early voting, and technical problems, including paper jams, on Election Day only magnified the difficulties. “Technology has progressed but not to the point of preventing paper jams,” says Los Angeles city councilman Mike Bonin. The jams knocked out numerous voting machines, thereby funneling voters into fewer and longer lines. “The first machine I saw, the Sunday before Super Tuesday, the paper jammed,” says Brad Friedman. The county registrar’s office, in response to queries, would not “confidently” say that paper jams were a major issue, preferring to wait for a fuller analysis.
Some voters were unaware that they had to feed the paper record back into the machine, or that they had to hit a button on the touchscreen afterward to complete the voting process. In addition, the display only showed four candidates at a time for each office, forcing voters to hit “More” on the screen to find the rest. If they hit “Next” instead of “More,” the display moved on to the next office on the ballot. This created further confusion.
Perhaps the biggest disaster involved the e-poll books, which were supposed to connect to a central database in Sacramento, so poll workers could find a voter’s file and give them the correct ballot. (In the new system, Angelenos could vote in any voting center in the county; previously, they’d voted in the precinct where they were registered.) With parts of 18 Congressional districts and 24 state assembly districts in Los Angeles County, this was a critical step; you could not run the election without it. And the system malfunctioned, not just in L.A. but the other counties that had abandoned precinct-only voting, too. Delays in checking-in voters produced longer and longer lines. The county registrar’s office cited the check-in process as the source of “the main issues that occurred on Election Day.”
Numerous voters told the Prospect about the obstacles they’d encountered on Election Day, including long lines, short-staffing, and confusion about the process. One voter waited four-plus hours in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley. Other polling places were swifter, but a county hotline intended to provide information for staffers, who could have informed voters of better options, also was non-functional for much of the day.
Logan, the county registrar, laid low for the first several days after the election, then released a statement last week that his office was “fully committed to listening to and addressing concerns of last week’s implementation of the new voting model in Los Angeles County.” The county board of supervisors, which oversees Logan’s office, voted unanimously to open an investigation that would report back in 45 days. They had harsh words for Logan’s performance. “I’m sorry to say I’ve lost confidence,” said Supervisor and former congresswoman Janice Hahn. In a statement, Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said, “It’s clear that major improvements will need to be made prior to November.”
None of the supervisors added firing Dean Logan to the list of improvements, though many members of the public called for his resignation in public comments. Logan, while contrite and apologetic at the board meeting, also stated the election “was a good experience” for many voters, citing an exit poll from Loyola Marymount University.
“In any other circumstance, he would be removed immediately,” says Friedman, who cited the short window before the general election as one reason why the supervisors appear to be keeping Logan on. “He keeps talking about the ‘voting experience,’ he’s been using that for ten years. Nobody cares about the voting experience, they want to go vote!”
Secretary of State Padilla, for his part, urged a closure of the county’s exemption from making mail-in ballots available to all 5.4 million registered voters. About 3.4 million get ballots currently. Logan initially said that he would have to analyze the costs involved. “We are looking into the possibility and feasibility of mailing all registered voters a vote-by-mail ballot and how/if mailing those ballots would address the issues seen in this election,” a spokesperson for the registrar told the Prospect.
It’s only been two weeks since Super Tuesday, but it may seem like a millennium in this new age of the coronavirus. With states postponing primaries, and activists calling for vote by mail for everyone, pressure will bear on Los Angeles County to make the switch.
The same issues are now coming up in Georgia, a state with an almost identical BMD system—on top of a history of suppressing minority votes. The state’s primary has now been tentatively rescheduled for May 19, and fears about the new voting machines are rampant within the election security community. “They’re different machines, different manufacturers, but the same vulnerabilities,” says Georgia Tech’s Richard DeMillo. On top of the cybersecurity concerns, the BMD screens in Georgia are so large they can be seen easily across a room, sacrificing ballot secrecy.
County-election officials can ditch the Georgia system if they consider it impracticable, and move to hand-marked paper ballots. One county, Athens-Clarke, opted to switch to paper, but the Secretary of State in Georgia set the state election board loose on them, investigating whether the move violates the law. The election board voted unanimously to require Athens-Clarke County to use the new machines. “It’s part of a long-running effort to disenfranchise voters in Georgia,” DeMillo says.
Friedman worries that Georgia, already ground zero for voter suppression, got a new tool with BMDs to make mischief. “One of my fears,” he says, “is that Georgia will finally flip to blue, is the state that gives the Democrats the White House, and Trump would say these are unverifiable and you have to throw out the election. And I’d have to agree with him, because he would be absolutely right.”
While ballot marking devices were initially intended to (and still can) assist voters with disabilities in marking their ballots, expanding them to the full population puts a piece of computerized machinery between the voter and the expression of their intent. Combining that in Los Angeles County with an entirely new system for voting was just asking for trouble.
“You don’t start this in a presidential year, especially when you got a ten-year lead to do it right,” says Friedman. “Logan has said he knew there would be potential problems with the deadline and resources. The deadline was ten years, and the resources were $300 million. None of it is justifiable.”
