The Voting Technologies I’ll Be Keeping An Eye On
Some Americans today will be voting on touch screen machines. Others will vote by marking a paper ballot and feeding it into a scanner. Others still will have a paper ballot, but then feed that into a touch screen machine to mark it. America's election system is a patchwork of different pieces of technology, with each jurisdiction combining its own elements. Naturally, some things might go wrong.
This is somewhat unavoidable and happens to some extent in every election: including electronic pollbooks crashing, touchscreens registering the wrong vote, or optical scan devices — which are used to tally votes — dropping ballots. The vast majority of polling stations won’t have any issues, but the ones that do could end up with long lines and lengthy waits to cast a ballot.
A few places I have my eye on are jurisdictions that have introduced new technology in recent months; when poll workers and voters are less familiar with equipment, it can lead to hiccups. Georgia, for example, replaced all of its direct-reporting machines (which create a digital ballot record) with machines that mark paper ballots last year. Some voters have already used them: Six counties used the machines during local elections last fall, and the state used the machines for its primaries, but both of those pilots had some equipment malfunctions, and many Georgians have yet to use the machines. The same is true for Pennsylvania in many regions, including Philadelphia, which had a rocky rollout of its new ballot-marking devices. Don’t be surprised if a few of the long line reports we’re likely to get come from the Peach or Keystone state.
Again, some election administration mishaps are part of every election and are not, by themselves, evidence of a “botched” election. The question, as the nation votes amid a pandemic, is how many issues crop up and what is their impact.