Proposed Solution for the Security of

States’ Voting Systems

June 8th, 2020

Prepared by:
IT 468 – Projects in Database Online
Brandon Moloso
Rachel Espinoza
Danny Price
 Table of Contents
Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………3
Intro………………………………………………………………………………….3-4
Current Voting Practice……………………………………………………………...4
Attacks on Electoral Systems………………………………………………………..5-6
Should the United States Federal Government Conduct Elections?...........................6-8
Strengths and Weaknesses of Paper Ballots…………………………………………8-10
Strengths and Weaknesses of Online Voting………………………………………..10-13
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...13
References…………………………………………………………………………...14-16

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Executive Summary
The security and integrity of the United States voting systems have been tested by

multiple entities in an attempt to skew results for a variety of political agendas. These infiltrating

methods have been investigated and preventative plans have been constructed to protect the

voting systems through protocol and technology. Furthermore, as technology becomes more

complex voting systems have been updated, but there are still security holes that get exposed.

Methods which individuals should use to vote have changed. Paper ballots are proven to help

mitigate these holes by providing a paper trail. On the other hand, there are still weaknesses

when using paper ballots. Through attacks on states’ voting systems, it has allowed states to

investigate their weaknesses and apply effective mitigation strategies.

Intro
Since the 2016 election, the security of the voting systems in America is in question.

Voters have started questioning the integrity of the results of the elections and have voiced their

opinions on what states must do to secure them.

Our voting systems still require stronger security for the benefit of whom sits in our

government. As such solutions to solve any security issues must be taken seriously by the states.

“The times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be

prescribed in each state…. but the congress may at any time …alter regulation.”

This constitutes that government should not be involved in voting system regulation.

Furthermore, according to the Brennan Center for Justice New York University school of

law, the use of outdated voting equipment across the United States has presented some serious

obstacles. Regardless, the United States voting systems have been updated with improved secure

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voting technology. Even so, there is still much more we can do with today's technology to boost

and improve the accuracy and security of our voting systems. The smallest attacks in any state’s

voting system may cause a big impact on their elections. Similarly, with the infiltrations to skew

our voting systems, voter's information may also be at risk. As the next election is quickly

approaching, security and integrity has been in high priority.

Current Voting Practice

Voting rights have come a long way since the birth of America. Originally under the

Constitution, only white male citizens over the age of 21 were allowed to vote. These limitations

have been reformed multiple times over the history of the United States to get us to where we are

now. Today, citizens over the age of 18 cannot be denied the right to vote regardless of race,

religion, sex, disability, or sexual orientation.

The United States Constitution sets parameters for the election of federal officials,

however, voting is not federalized. This means all elections—federal, state, and local—are

administered by the individual states (White House, 2020). For example, in Washington State all

counties conduct elections using “vote-by-mail,” also known as absentee ballots (Wyman, 2020).

However, in states such as Florida, the voter must go to a poll in person between 7:00 AM to

7:00 PM, provide a photo ID, and vote at a polling station in person on the day of the election

(Florida Department of State, 2020).

Furthermore, in every state, except for North Dakota, citizens must register to vote in

order to participate (White House, 2020). Just like voting itself, laws regarding the registration

process vary by state.

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Attacks on our Electoral System

As technology evolves, so do the attacks on the integrity of our electoral system. For

example, in early 2018, the popular social media website Facebook admitted to mishandling

improperly obtained data from over 50 million (now believed to be in the range of 87 million

(Alexandra Ma, 2019)) Facebook users via the political data-analytics firm Cambridge

Analytica. The firm gathered data from a personality quiz called “thisisyourdigitallife” which

also managed to gather data from the quiz takers friends’ profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the

data they gathered to build psychological profiles on the Facebook users (Alexandra Ma, 2019).

Former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie said in an interview with The New

York Times “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles and built models to

exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Donald Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 to help target

advertisements using the data they had obtained. In other words, Cambridge Analytica developed

a method of using improperly obtained data to figure out what triggered individual users and

then sent those users specific political advertisements based on that information. Facebook was

eventually fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 as a direct response to

Cambridge Analytica’s actions (Alexandra Ma, 2019).

While the previous example is definitely very technologically advanced and isn’t

something someone could just do on a whim, there have been other attacks on our electoral

system that could be done by pretty much anyone with an internet connection. One popular

example of this was a campaign started by internet trolls who began circulating certain images,

such as these:

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The images were shared around through Twitter and were directed towards Hillary Clinton

supporters. The images state that you can avoid the lines at the polls by texting ‘Hillary’ to

59925 in order to cast your vote for Hillary Clinton (Lapowsky, 2016). After this campaign,

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a post saying that Twitter has changed their terms of service to

try to prevent this type of thing from happening again.

Another way our electoral system has been compromised was by the infiltration of voter

registration databases. In 2016, Russian hackers gained access to the state of Illinois’ voter

database, where as many as 90,000 records were ultimately compromised (Michael Riley, 2017).

Investigators found evidence that the intruders tried delete or alter voter data. Additionally, it is

believed Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states.

Should the United States Federal Government Conduct Elections?

Even though elections are administered through individual states, there does exist some

federal regulations. However, most of these regulations are centered toward guaranteeing

people’s right to vote and catering to people with special needs. Some of these regulations

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include voter accessibility laws. These laws ensure that people with disabilities or language

barriers are able to vote (USA gov, 2020).

A major argument for a federalized voting system revolves around some of the voting

practices currently in place in certain states/counties. In some jurisdictions, voters use machines

that create electronic tallies. This means there is no tangible evidence that the voter’s choices

were honored and makes recounts virtually impossible (Gillmor, 2017). Additionally, because

there is no federal budget for elections, the cost of elections is put on state and local

governments. This has led to people fearing that some areas don’t have the proper funding to do

all that they can to preserve the integrity of elections, and they are not willing to allocate

resources towards improving their election systems (Gillmor, 2017).

On the other side of the debate, one major argument is the possibility of corruption if

voting becomes federalized. There are numerous examples of this in countries ran by dictators

whose elections are conducted by the highest levels of their governments. Fidel Castro and his

brother Raul Castro have both been reelected numerous times after receiving “99%” of the vote

(Keating, 2012). While it would be very difficult to get away with something like that in the

United States, we have seen corrupt voting laws in the past. In Alabama in 1964, voters had to

pass a literacy test in order to vote. The purpose of this test was to exclude people with minimal

literacy; in particular, poor African Americans, from voting (Iowa Department of Cultural

Affairs, 2020). Many people believe that the Republican legislature in Georgia that passed what

they call an “exact match law” in 2017 is corrupt. The law requires that information on a voting

registration application must precisely match the information on government databases. An

examination by the Associated Press found that out of 53,000 denied applications, 70% of them

belonged to African Americans (Lynch, 2018).

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 Others have questioned how standardization would be decided and have concerns over

how difficult it would be to change if the process was considered to be ineffective. Additional

concerns arise when considering the dangers of having one system compared to 50 disparate

systems (Zahn, 2020). If there’s one single entity conducting the election and a mistake occurs or

that entity is attacked, the possibility of an entire national election going entirely up in flames is

much higher. Also, many state constitutions have voting guidelines written in them. In order to

federalize voting, those constitutions would have to be changed, which can be a very difficult

task, and that’s assuming all these states would agree to have their constitution changed in the

first place.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Paper Ballots

First off, there is no paper audit trail if voting is solely done electronically. Broadly

speaking, there are three classes of voting machines used in the United States. The most common

are optical scan machines (Raj Karan Gambhir, 2019). These devices involve voters marking on

paper ballots their selection(s). Poll workers then scan the ballots and the results are stored

electronically. A less common type of machine has voters make selections on an electronic

screen. When they are finished, the machine prints a paper ballot that is then either hand counted

or scanned by a machine. The final type of machine is called a direct-recording electronic (DRE)

machine. When using DREs, voters select their choices on an electronic screen. The selections

are transmitted directly into the machine’s memory. Some of them will record the votes on

paper, but most of them do not. Even though they are less common than optical scan machines,

DREs are still widely used by many voting districts (Raj Karan Gambhir, 2019). The biggest

concern with these machines is that without a paper audit trail, it can be difficult to detect errors

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or breaches in the voting machine’s hardware. Even if an error is found, trying to recover votes

and/or ensuring their accuracy can be difficult or impossible.

Second, in polling stations that have paper ballots that the voter fills out and submits, it’s

often quicker for the voter compared to waiting for an electronic machine to become available.

Anita Heygster of Pasadena claims that when Anny Arundel County had electronic voting

machines, she had to wait in line for 50 minutes and observed others becoming frustrated and

walking out without casting a vote. But, when they switched back to paper, voters were able to

walk right up to the table, pick up a ballot, go sit down somewhere in the large cafeteria, then

submit the ballot when finished. They were “in and out in minutes.” (Haygster, 2014).

One of the big disadvantages to paper ballots have been found in the design of the ballots.

A popular example of this was during the 2000 Presidential Election, where Palm Beach County

used what was referred to as “butterfly ballots.” Pictured here:

These confusing looking ballots led many voters who intended to vote for Al Gore to vote for Pat

Buchanan instead (Tognazzini, 2001). Another infamous incident from the same election and the

same state involved the use of punch card ballots. These ballots required the voter to punch out a

perforated hole in the paper ballot. Some of the punched ballots left a hanging chad, meaning

they hadn’t been punched all the way through, which caused the scanning machines to not

register the vote.

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 Another disadvantage to paper ballots is that they often are not available in braille, or

some other form that would allow blind persons to vote without the use of an interpreter (Steele,

2015). In this case, the voter must rely on the interpreter to accurately record their vote.

Additionally, it is very easy to destroy a paper ballot. There have been elections in

Mexico where voting stations were taken over and boxes full of ballots were burned in the streets

(Steele, 2015). Also, ballots often require transportation, often through the mail. This means

we’re relying on mail carriers to appropriately deliver ballots so they can be counted. Everyone

has had something lost in the mail at least once in their lifetime. If this happens to your ballot, or

if someone destroys your ballot, there’s no way for you to confirm that your ballot was ever

counted. Even if you did discover your ballot was lost or destroyed, by the time you found this

out, the odds are it would be too late to cast another vote.

Finally, even if your paper ballot doesn’t need to be transferred you are still relying on

other people to accurately record your vote. Let’s say the place where you fill out and submit

your paper ballot is the same place where it will be counted, or if it was transferred, let’s assume

it definitively made it to its proper destination, the odds are these votes are going to be hand

counted or hand processed into a counting machine. This means you’re still relying on total

stranger to accurately record your vote. On the other hand, let’s say you were able to see a live

vote count for your district, and voting is done electronically, and as soon as you cast your vote

you were able to see the vote count rise up by one for your candidate. Would that not be more

reassuring compared to sending your paper ballot out into the void in hopes that someone is

going to record it?

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Strengths and Weaknesses of Online Voting

The biggest, and possibly most important, strength to online voting is that it will greatly

increase the ease of access to voting, which in turn will also lead to more people voting (Steele,

2015). As of 2019, 90% of adults in America use the internet, either irregularly or frequently

(Pew Research Center, 2019). With the advance of technology, more people than ever have

access to the internet, whether it’s through their smartphone, personal computer, or at their local

library. If Americans were able to vote online, they wouldn’t have to worry about things such as

waiting in long lines at polling stations and/or taking time off work just to get there while they

are open. They wouldn’t have to worry about dropping their mail in ballots into a mailbox, and it

would be much easier for special needs voters to cast a vote.

Lori Steele mentions in her TEDx presentation that “We live in extraordinary times.

Think about DNA sequencing. You can determine if years from now, you’re going to get an

illness. Think about self-driving cars. Ten years ago, we sent a robot 150 million miles away and

it landed within a football field of where we wanted to. You would think every mission critical

industry in the world is using modern technology to make sure what they’re doing is as good as it

could be.” This is in reference to the fact that Abraham Lincoln invented mail in technology 150

years ago so soldiers fighting in the Civil War could vote. He did this because that was the best

technology available. Today, soldiers in Afghanistan vote using that same technology. By the

time a lot of these absentee ballots make it to the United States, the election is already over

(Steele, 2015). Online voting would make sure this does not happen.

Furthermore, online voting would be inexpensive. Across the United States there have

been many instances where polling stations in minority neighborhoods had their locations change

from election to election, have been kept understaffed, inaccessible, or ill-equipped, which can
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cause voters to stand in line for hours, or not be able to vote at all (Tapscott, 2018). Finding

accessible locations to hold elections and coming up with enough staff to run them would no

longer be an issue if voters could vote online.

While the benefits to online voting sound fantastic, there are huge concerns over security

and accountability. If you vote online, you might receive something like an email notification

saying your vote has been received, but that still may not ease your mind in case there is a bug in

the technology, or the database recording your vote is attacked.

Another area of concern with online voting is fraud. If people are allowed to register to

vote online and then also cast votes online, many are scared this could lead to fraud. Let’s say

you wish to register to vote online and to do so you must enter your name, date of birth, address,

social security number, and a driver’s license number. If you were one of the 140 million

Americans whose personal information was stolen during the 2017 Equifax data breach, there is

a chance that there are people with access to all of that information of yours, and everyone else’s

who had their information stolen (Shepardson, 2017). Additionally, let’s say you are already

registered to vote, but to vote online you need verify you are who you say you are. One of the

most common ways to do so is to enter your social security number. Well, there’s still someone

who potentially has access to 140 million American’s social security numbers. Both of those are

scary thoughts.

While there is a large concern over the possibility of online elections being hacked, there

are some who argue it is possible to use modern block chain technology to ensure that does not

happen. A blockchain is a peer-to-peer network for exchanging anything of value. In a

blockchain-based system, the public trust in the voting process could be realized because it

would not be up to one institution. Instead, through cryptography, code, and the collaboration of

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citizens, government agencies, and other stakeholders, a secure blockchain voting system could

be achieved (Tapscott, 2018).

Conclusion
Paper ballots, electronic voting machines, and online voting all have their strengths and

weaknesses. Paper ballots make people comfortable because they know there is a physical record

of their vote. However, paper ballots force voters to have to rely on others. They have to rely on

the mail carrier to deliver their ballot on time to the correct location. They have to rely on the

person counting their vote to record their submission accurately. If they need an interpreter, they

have to rely on the interpreter to mark down their selection accurately.

Electronic voting machines may be easier for special need voters to cast a vote. However,

many of them are outdated and to access one, voters often have to take time off work, travel to a

polling station, and wait in long lines. These inconveniences lead to less voter turnout.

Additionally, if there is a bug in the electronic voting machine, it can be hard to detect, and votes

can be difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Online voting is the future. It may not happen this election cycle, or the next, but it will

happen eventually. As technologies such as the block chain become more mainstream and people

understand them better, doubt over the security of voting online will diminish. The benefits to

online voting are too extreme to ignore. Americans have done amazing things with technology.

It’s only a matter of time before an online voting system is created that will give convenient,

affordable, and secure voting access to all Americans.

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