The Allegheny County Board of Elections will meet Friday morning to discuss a report outlining the pros and cons of potential voting machine systems that was submitted by the county’s voting machine search committee this month.
The board, composed of Common Pleas Judge Kathryn Hans-Greco, county Councilman Tom Baker and County Council President John DeFazio, is not expected to make its selection Friday; it has another meeting scheduled for Sept. 9.
In its report, the search committee evaluated nine potential voting systems, from four vendors: Election Systems & Software, Clear Ballot, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion Voting. The search committee includes Elections Division Manager David Voye, Chief Purchasing Officer Frank Alessio and Deputy County Manager Stephen Pilarski.
New voting machines are required for compliance with state requirements that there be voter-verifiable paper ballots statewide, as part of a settlement following a lawsuit demanding a recount by 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. They also must be compliant with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. To fulfill the latter requirement, all nine systems include ballot-marking machines as an option.
Election integrity advocates have praised the committee’s detailed report, particular in comparison to Philadelphia, where there was no such report and the selection of an ES&S system was followed, months later, by reports of undisclosed lobbying on behalf of the company.
“I really do appreciate that in Allegheny County, they published a serious comparison of the different systems, which never happened in Philadelphia,” said Rich Garella, a founder of Protect Our Vote Philly.
The evaluations reflect a number of the recommendations made by experts at a board of elections public hearing held in June, including a desire for ADA-accessible ballots to look like other ballots and for voters’ choices to be represented as a ballot rather than a bar code that they cannot verify. It does not include a clear preference for hand-marked ballots, which experts told the elections board tend to be both cheaper and more secure.
The report also evaluates the system on ease of election administration. (Given the county’s 130 municipalities and 43 school districts, “The selected system in Allegheny County must be capable of supporting an election of up to 10,000 candidate positions and 7,000 contests,” the report noted.)
Only ES&S, the country’s largest vendor and the supplier of Allegheny County’s current systems, said it had experience with the number of ballot positions required. The other three said they had tested or could test a 10,000 candidate position election. All systems had some pros and cons for administration, but ES&S, which is already integrated with the county’s elections systems, had the fewest cons.
No system was given a uniform thumbs-up from the search committee. While ES&S is the only vendor with experience with the county’s complexity, it uses bar codes for ballot-marking device selections, the report notes. So does Dominion, which has the cheapest system. Clear Ballot was most popular among demonstration attendees, but is only certified for up to 3,200 candidate positions, versus the 10,000 requested.
Appendices include a cost summary and a tally of first choice selections from people who attended public demonstrations held around the county. Clear Ballot led, with 81 of 201 first-choice picks.
In cost, the systems ranged from $9.257 million for Dominion Voting’s hand-marked paper ballot system to $22.825 million for Hart InterCivic’s system that has all voters make their selections on a touch screen. Both companies offer both types of system, as does ES&S. Clear Ballot offered only one system, where most voters use hand-marked paper ballots. Across the board, the hand-marked paper ballot systems were cheaper.
A couple of systems got dinged for ADA-related reasons. In ES&S’ primarily hand-marked configuration, the ballots look different from the ADA-required ballot-marking device ballots, which could affect voter privacy, while the other three vendors’ ballot-marking devices raised usability concerns.
At Aug. 20’s county council meeting, Paul O’Hanlon, chairman of the Allegheny County-City of Pittsburgh Task Force on Disabilities, said that the report did not reflect enough input from people with disabilities. While there was a demonstration held specifically for testing by people with disabilities, it was hard to access, he said.
Elections integrity advocates raised other issues with the report. Mr. Garella raised an issue with ES&S’ ExpressVote XL — that ballots pass through the printer after the last time voters see them. “After the last chance the voter gets to look at the ballot card, the card passes by the printer again, which means that if there has been any hacking or malware, your vote could be changed and you would never know it.”
This concern is raised in the search committee report regarding another ES&S system — the “ExpressVote with Tabulator ”— but not the XL.
Ron Bandes, the president of VoteAllegheny, an election integrity group, said there are a couple of security questions that the report does not address, such as whether ballots could be easily matched up with voters.
Christopher Huffaker: 412-263-1724, chuffaker@post-gazette.com, or @huffakingit on Twitter.
First Published: August 29, 2019, 9:44 p.m.
