Following a vote on Friday by the Virginia State Board of Elections, the state will take decisive action to ensure the integrity of its voting machines…
Following a vote on Friday by the Virginia State Board of Elections, the state will take decisive action to ensure the integrity of its voting machines. Virginia’s election supervisors have instructed 22 localities to abandon their existing machines immediately, citing risks inherent in the way they record votes.
“The Department of Elections believes that the risks presented by using this equipment in the November General Election are sufficiently significant to warrant immediate decertification to ensure the continued integrity of Virginia elections, ” Department of Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortés said in a memo accompanying the decision.
Notably, the Virginia Department of Elections cited security research from the most recent DefCon in its decision:
The central issue is that Virginia’s touchscreen equipment, known as direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, did not produce a paper trail — one of the most robust if old-fashioned safeguards against potential vote tampering. Verified Voting, an organization that monitors voting equipment explains how these machines work:
Because they can’ t be checked against a paper record, these voting systems make it almost impossible to detect suspicious activity. As the description above notes, some DRE machines are paired with an additional device that can record votes to paper, but Virginia’s systems did not have this additional security measure.
The decision comes in time to secure the state’s voting systems before its upcoming state and governor’s races on November 7.
