News Clips

"Right now we're focusing on making sure that no voter is disenfranchised during this health crisis," Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the nonpartisan pro-democracy group Common Cause, said on a call with reporters.

“Technology is a tool not a process. This recount concept is not ready for prime time,” said Liza McClenaghan, Common Cause Florida state board chair. Both Common Cause and the League of Women Voters say the technology offers promise as a way to give supervisors of elections another tool to store and track paper ballots, but they say the state’s rush to encourage counties to start using digital images of ballots for recounts is a mistake. “The proposal that the digital image generated by the software is trustworthy while the paper ‘may’ be consulted is ludicrous,’’ McClenaghan of Common Cause said.

The very high-profile failure of a new app that was supposed to help report Iowa Caucus results has generated some important lessons. Even though the New Hampshire primary was not plagued by the same kinds of gross technical failures, it would be a mistake to just quickly move on and forget the lessons of the first debacle. As the Nevada Caucus approaches, it’s clear some lessons have been learned, but not all.

Hacked machines. Undercounted elections. Broken touchscreens. Impatient voters. Sound like a nightmare? It could be a reality for millions of New York voters as early as April. For years, the voting machine company ES&S has spent more than $600,000 lobbying New York officials to purchase certain machines, including ExpressVote XL, and soon they might get the green light. The machine provides a touchscreen allowing voters to mark their ballot electronically instead of on the traditional paper ballots. It then tabulates votes.

Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the activist group Common Cause, says McConnell’s decision to support funding is a “step in the right direction”, but that the funding “still falls far short” of what is needed to solve the problem. “Election systems across the country have been breached by Russian intelligence assets and those attacks continue to this day,” she adds. “These attacks and those of other hostile foreign powers will continue to ramp up as we approach the 2020 elections, and cash-strapped local elections officials desperately need significant federal assistance. The federal government must step in to provide the resources and the expertise to help states and local governments secure the integrity of their election systems against sophisticated foreign cyber attacks.”

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, said that far more is needed to secure the election system. "Providing $250 million in additional election security funding is like asking an army to go fight a war with horses and bayonets," Scherb said. The House passed a bill that would give states nearly three times more — $600 million.