Taiwan just held an election using hand-marked paper ballots. They’re so far ahead of us.

In August 2008, Crain’s Detroit Business published a tongue-in-cheek obituary for voting machines.

“Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machine, beloved stepchild of the 2000 Presidential Election and loving father of Insecurity, Confusion, and Delay, peacefully went home to be with his maker in 2007. There will be no memorial services. Interment will be in various warehouses around America,” wrote Alan Baker.

After Florida’s “hanging chad” problem in the very close Bush-Gore contest, a great deal of money was spent nationally buying electronic voting machines to replace paper ballots. “Voting machine problems soon followed,” the obituary noted, “vanishing votes, breakdowns, malfunctions and increasing evidence that the devices were vulnerable to hackers.” Beginning in 2007, California, Ohio and Florida “abruptly ordered election officials to mothball their electronic machines,” Baker wrote.

By 2020, however, election officials had found a way to spend your money to buy machines again. The hook this time was that the machines would generate paper ballots. “You can’t hack a paper ballot,” then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the editorial board of this newspaper.

One such system is in use in Los Angeles County, designed and manufactured by Smartmatic to the custom specifications of Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The machine is a “ballot-marking device.” After the voter makes choices on the touchscreen, the device prints out a ballot with human-readable text and a machine-readable QR code. The voter can check the text for accuracy, but it’s the QR code that is read by scanners and contains the vote data that is actually tallied.

In the state of Georgia, a trial is underway over the accuracy of similar devices manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The plaintiffs in the case, described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “liberal-leaning Georgia voters and activists,” argued to U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg that she should order the state to abandon the use of the machines and switch to paper ballots instead.

Back in November, Judge Totenberg suggested a compromise to avoid this trial. She recommended eliminating the QR codes and adding more election audits and cybersecurity measures. But the plaintiffs said the court had essentially confirmed that “Georgia’s status quo is far too risky” and insisted on hand-marked paper ballots. The executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said, “We look forward to prevailing at trial as we demonstrate why touchscreen BMDs (ballot-marking devices) cannot be used safely.”

And that’s exactly what their expert witness, University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman, proceeded to do in the courtroom. Right in front of the judge he used an ordinary pen to press a reset button on the touchscreen device that allowed him to change the results of a hypothetical election over Sunday alcohol sales. He programmed a fake voter card to flip the winner of an election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. He used a $100 USB device and a cable connected to a printer to reprogram the machine to print out as many paper ballots as he wanted.

In response, Georgia election officials gave the judge their assurances that this did not actually happen in a Georgia election.

Is that the best they can do?

In all procedures related to voting, it’s critical to prevent vulnerabilities before someone exploits them to cheat in an election. After the election, it’s too late. Court challenges are slow, and the winners are certified fast.