As concern over the risk of hacking voting machines increases, so too does pressure for Pennsylvania to modernize its voting machines.
Computer security expert J. Alex Halderman has seen just how vulnerable many of the nation's voting machines are to sabotage. Pennsylvania is among the most susceptible.
A decade ago, he was part of the first academic team to conduct a comprehensive security analysis of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, which are widely used throughout the state, including Bucks County.
"What we found was disturbing," Halderman said in a June 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. "We could reprogram the machine to invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine-to-machine like a computer virus, and silently change the election outcome."
A Bucks County native and professor and director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan, Halderman said cybersecurity is critical in the fight to protect American elections, "the bedrock of our democracy."
Prompted by concern at the highest levels of government that Russian hackers attempted to hack into voting machine databases and software systems during the 2016 presidential election, many states, including Pennsylvania, are telling county officials new machines must be in place by the end of 2019. The new machines, with a voter-verifiable paper record, are designed to turn the country's voting away from computer software to paper ballots.
The risks plaguing many of the country's voting machines arise from several sources. The great majority of Americans cast their votes on one of two computerized systems. One, used by most states and voters, said Halderman, is the optical scan ballot, where voters fill out a paper ballot that is scanned and counted by a computer. The other, DRE machines, voters cast their ballot on a touch screen and records of the vote are stored in the computer's memory.
Both are computers and both function on antiquated technology, "sometimes decades out of date," said Halderman, who graduated from Council Rock High School North in Newtown.
"The operating systems they are running on are so outdated that support for those systems will soon end," said Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman with the Pennsylvania Department of State, in an email. "Some of the HAVA-era (Help America Vote Act of 2002) systems do not allow for voter-verified paper ballots, nor for improvements in post-election audits." New systems, Murren added, "offer greatly enhanced capabilities for security, auditability, accessibility and resiliency."
Most DRE machines run an old version of Windows and can be fairly easily hacked by tampering with the memory card, said Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a Philadelphia-based non-governmental nonprofit.
"Malware could be put in and the machine could miscount (the vote) when tabulating," said Liz Howard, counsel with the Brennan Justice Center's Democracy Program.
That kind of tampering would be difficult to detect, Schneider said.
"No paper ballot means there's no means to track (a vote) if there's a question on the election or a particular vote," Howard said.
Fifty of the state's 67 counties, including Bucks, have voting machines that leave no paper trail. "Pennsylvania is an outlier," Halderman said. The state, he noted, "would get an F," when it comes to safe voting. As one of only about a dozen states using machines that have no paper record, the professor said, "Pennsylvania is holding back the whole country and putting it at risk."
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee although her department is "prioritizing election efforts ... over all other critical infrastructure sectors ... the threat of interference remains and we recognize that the 2018 mid-term and future elections are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts."
Nieslon, like Halderman and numerous other experts in cybersecurity, stress that voters must feel their ballots are secure. “The American public’s confidence that their vote counts — and is counted correctly — relies on secure election infrastructure," the secretary said.
A sophisticated cyber attack is possible, Halderman said, that could change election results in Pennsylvania. He pointed out that in the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump won by fewer than 45,000 votes.
With the stated purpose of "safeguarding elections in the digital age," Verified Voting advocates for machines where computers count the votes and paper ballots are used to cast a vote and then retained in the event a tally is questioned or an audit is needed. "It's common sense," said Schneider, a former adviser to Gov. Tom Wolf on election policy and deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of State.
"Before 2016, people didn't think about hacking, but the threat model has changed ... a nation state or bad actor has unlimited resources" to impact software programming. The goal, she noted, is to become "software independent."
In an effort to modernize Pennsylvania's voting machines, Acting Secretary of State Robert Torres notified counties earlier this month that they must have "voter-verifiable paper record voting systems" selected by Dec. 31, 2019 — and preferably in place by the November 2019 general election.
"We have been planning for some time to bring Pennsylvania's voting machines up to 21st century standards of security, auditability and resiliency," Torres said, in a statement.
On Thursday, the state held a demonstration in Harrisburg of various new voting systems on the market. County and state officials and the public had an opportunity to see what's available. So far, one machine has been certified and several others will be this summer and fall, according to the state department. Counties will be able to choose from among those certified in the coming months.
Torres said his office will provide support to counties and voters to "ensure a smooth transition" to the new systems.
Murren, with the department of state, estimated the cost to purchase updated machines throughout the commonwealth would be between $93 million and $153 million. In the early 2000s, when voting systems were last replaced statewide with financial assistance from the Help America Vote Act, the cost in Pennsylvania was $147 million.
This time around, the federal government has appropriated $380 million for election security across the country. Pennsylvania's piece is $13.5 million, with a required 5 percent state match, according to a statement from the state department. That brings Pennsylvania's funding to $14.15 million, a fraction of the estimated cost.
Other states and counties have used low-interest loans, grants, bonds and appropriations to foot the bill. Murren said Pennsylvania is committed to looking at all funding possibilities, including partnerships, state, federal and local contributions and more.
"We're going to have to find a way to pay for it, before it's too late," said Halderman.