A new article by Andrew Appel reminds us: Magical thinking about Ballot-Marking-Device contingency plans <read>
The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published a report, “No Simple Answers: A Primer on Ballot Marking Device Security”, by William T. Adler. Overall, it’s well-informed, clearly presents the problems as of 2022, and it’s definitely worth reading. After explaining the issues and controversies, the report presents recommendations, most of which make a lot of sense, and indeed the states should act upon them. But there’s one key recommendation in which Dr. Adler tries to provide a simple answer, and unfortunately his answer invokes a bit of magical thinking. This seriously compromises the conclusions of his report. By asking but not answering the question of “what should an election official do if there are reports of BMDs printing wrong votes?”, Dr. Adler avoids having to make the inevitable conclusion that BMDs-for-all-voters is a hopelessly flawed, insecurable method of voting. Because the answer to that question is, unfortunately, there’s nothing that election officials could usefully do in that case…
This the magical thinking: “election officials should have a contingency plan.” The problem is, when you try to write down such a plan, there’s nothing that actually works! Suppose the election officials rely on voter reports (or on the rate of spoiled ballots); suppose the “contingency plan” says (for example) says “if x percent of the voters report malfunctioning BMDs, or y percent of voters spoil their ballots, then we will . . .” Then we will what? Remove those BMDs from service in the middle of the day? But then all the votes already cast on those BMDs will have been affected by the hack; that could be thousands of votes. Or what else? Discard all the paper ballots that were cast on those BMDs? Clearly you can’t do that without holding an entirely new election. And what if those x% or y% of voters were fraudulently reporting BMD malfunction or fraudulently spoiling their ballots to trigger the contingency plan? There’s no plan that actually works.
Fortunately Connecticut uses Hand Marked Paper Ballots except that it allows the IVS BMD to serve those with disabilities.
