Secure Ballot Box Paths

Section two provides the effective date.

Justification

The threat of the hacking of the machines that we rely on for free, fair, and democratic elections is very real and requires us to take every reasonable precaution to protect the bedrock of our republic and all our other rights as Americans - our right to vote. A United States Senate Intelligence Committee report released in July 2019 detailed how hackers had likely targeted election systems and machines in all 50 states both in 2016 and in the midterm elections of 2018. Even more alarming, some of those attempts at unauthorized access in Illinois and Florida were successful.

To provide our voters with confidence that their cast ballot will unquestionably and accountably reflect their preference and only their preference, New York has instituted many common sense reforms, like insisting on individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballots as a backup to electronic voting through a machine. However, there are many different types of machines that provide secure electronic voting with a paper backup, and questions have been raised specifically about the security and potential physical flaws of so-called "hybrid" voting machines, which combine a scanner and a ballot-marking device.

The intent of using a hybrid machine is to provide additional opportu- nities for the voter to verify his or her vote. A voter makes their selection on a screen, and then can either cast the vote 4s1S or print out a copy of their ballot to visually inspect it before running it through a scanner. For one such hybrid, the Dominion Imagecast Evolution ("Dominion ICE"), a potential flaw in its physical design has raised the specter that a hacked machine could be programmed to add marks to a cast ballot after it has been inspected by the voter, thereby changing the ballot contrary to the will of the voter. Andrew W. Appel, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, published an online description of the flaw, specifically that in being scanned, the paper ballot passes a second time under the print heads. His concern was shared by Richard A. DeMillo, Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Distinguished Professor of Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who wrote "absent a thorough and convincing design and code review--there is no way to be confident that the system is immune from the ballot stuffing attack he describes." Based on these published concerns, Douglas A. Kellner Co-Chair NYS Board of Elections requested that the Election Operations Unit of the State Board examine again the ImageCast Evolution to consider the vulnerability of the voting system because the printer could be programmed to add marks to ballots without verification by the voter. Dominion sent a letter touting the benefits of its hybrid machines, but did not specifically explain what they had already or would in the future do to make it physically impossible for an election fraud scenario as described by the professors to occur.

In New York State, 14 counties have purchased these specific hybrid machine models. There are approximately 1.3 million eligible voters who potentially could use these hybrid machines.

This bill would add the requirement to Election Law that any voting machine certified by State Board of Elections that utilizes a hybrid function should be constructed so that the paper path into the ballot box is physically separate from the printer path, so that it would be physically impossible for a ballot to go underneath a printer head after it has been cast by a voter.

Since the risk that an electronic voting machine could be hacked through malware or some other means can never be eliminated entirely, the least we can do is guarantee the physical security of paper ballots by ensur- ing it cannot physically be altered once cast by the voter.

Legislative history

New bill.

Fiscal implications

None.

Effective date

Immediately.