Voting Machine Sticks
Earlier this week, elections were held in a number of states, including Pennsylvania. On Tuesday, of course, like all American elections. Votebeat reports that, in Allegheny County, some precinct results had still not been reported midday Wednesday. The explanation:
poll workers forgot to remove the data sticks containing vote data from the precincts’ voting machines and return them to the county at the end of the night.
🤔 What does this mean, exactly?
Across the US, when voters vote in person, they fill out a paper ballot and cast it into a precinct tabulator. Some people call that tabulator a voting machine. The tabulator's job is to scan that paper ballot, interpret it, and store it securely in an attached ballot box.
At the end of the night, the tabulator prints a tally of all scanned ballots, usually on a narrow receipt-style strip of paper. That printed tally is then signed by the poll workers and posted on a wall for citizens, the press, and any other observers to see. A separate physical copy is printer for county records. And a digital copy of the ballots, often images and interpretations of those images together known as the cast vote records (CVRs), is automatically stored on a memory stick / flash drive / USB drive connected and sealed into the tabulator. At the end of election day, those memory sticks are supposed to be collected at the county so they can be loaded onto the election management system that then produces the combined tallies of all precincts.
It's not surprising that some poll workers may forget the memory stick sealed inside the tabulator. After all, they've closed the polls, printed the tally report, and posted it on the wall. And it's not a big concern either: the precinct tally reports are posted and often reported on by the local press on election night as an immediate audit trail. And of course, if somehow that tally and memory stick both go missing, then the paper ballots are still there for re-scanning or hand audits.
Voting systems are built with lots of redundancy, because many humans are involved in election day, and sometimes humans make mistakes. The voting system overall, however, remains robust.
