The NC Board of Elections stumbled. Does that mean the 2020 elections are less secure?

Will North Carolina’s elections be less than secure in 2020? We don’t believe so, but the State Board of Elections is making it a little harder lately to defend reasonable decisions it’s made regarding election security.

The Board is scheduled to hold a hearing Friday to discuss the voting machines that will be used next year in many N.C. counties. While some counties, including Wake, use paper ballots that are then read by scanners, others including Mecklenburg use machines where voters registered their vote on a screen. N.C. law now requires machines to provide voters with a paper record of their choices, so in August the Board met and approved machines from three vendors, including Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. The decision came with some controversy because the ES&S machines are ballot-marking devices (BMDs), which generate paper ballots with bar codes that some security experts believe may be vulnerable to hacking.

Now, the Elections Board has a new non-technical glitch to overcome. Last month, ES&S told the state it has just one-sixth of the equipment needed to match demand for the 2020 elections, according to a report from Carolina Public Press. ES&S would like the Board on Friday to give an administrative approval to newer versions of the machines instead of subjecting them to the more lengthy certification process. Similar waivers have been granted by the Board on ten occasions since 2008.

The inventory stumble is embarrassing. ES&S should have alerted the board long ago — during the certification process would have been helpful — and the Board should have required proof of inventory early on. To make things slightly worse, Friday’s Board hearing will be conducted by phone, with public comments required to be submitted beforehand instead of in person. Neither is terribly unusual, but the board regularly holds in-person meetings with public comment, and that certainly would have been preferable this week for a body whose mission is to instill full public confidence in North Carolina’s elections.

Some election security advocates and experts have similar concerns about the new ES&S machines, including that computers could potentially be hacked to manipulate barcode scanners and change vote counts. Critics also point to Pennsylvania, where some votes were not correctly tabulated by ES&S machines and where ES&S also apparently failed to make critical disclosures when applying for a contract in Philadelphia.

Now the company has another mess on its hands in North Carolina. Does that mean ES&S machines are unsafe? No. The Pennsylvania tabulation errors were apparently not related to voting security, and elections officials in North Carolina and across the country have confidence in the hundreds of thousands of ES&S machines they’ve used, tested and audited. It’s not unreasonable for N.C. officials to give counties a choice to use them.

This editorial board prefers paper ballots that can be read by scanners. It’s efficient and easy to audit, and it’s the safest method counties can use. (State law does require that each precinct must have one voting machine that accommodates disabled voters.) We hope Mecklenburg and others in North Carolina eventually choose that paper path.

Elections officials can give voters more confidence, however, with a more thorough certification process and by making hearings consistently as transparent as possible. These decisions are being made against the backdrop of election security worries across the country heading into 2020. N.C. voters should feel assured that their vote not only counts, but is being counted correctly.

This story was originally published December 12, 2019 at 4:14 PM with the headline "The NC Board of Elections stumbled. Does that mean the 2020 elections are less secure?."