The great Iowa caucus meltdown of 2020 may be triggering anguish, anger and, on the Republican side of the political fence, expressions of unalloyed glee; but for one Miami lawyer and voting rights activist it is also bringing back vivid memories of another high-profile primary contest that fell victim to untested new technology and administrative incompetence.
The year was 2002, and the race was a hotly contested Florida gubernatorial election in which Janet Reno, the former US attorney general, was vying for the Democratic party nomination against a prominent lawyer from Tampa. A politically connected company called Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S) was rolling out new touchscreen technology to replace the punch card machines that were widely blamed for the meltdown in the presidential election two years earlier between George W Bush and Al Gore.
ES&S, though, was very far from ready for prime time.
Many of the machines in Miami-Dade county took so long to boot up that polling stations could not open before lunchtime. When a freak storm caused power blackouts, the battery backup on many machines failed. One Miami precinct reported 900% turnout; another showed just one ballot cast. The governor declared a state of emergency, and Reno – who was trailing narrowly – demanded a re-examination of the ballots, only to realize that the new technology made recounts impossible.
‘Not even prepared with basic technology’
At the time, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the Miami-Dade Electoral Reform Coalition raged that the voters were being treated as guinea pigs for a system that was no better than a prototype. Eighteen years later, she can only look back and marvel at how little has changed.
“It is striking that these technology issues are back, and back with a vengeance,” she told the Guardian. “The technology we use on a daily basis may be incredibly advanced and sophisticated … but voting has been left to bottom-feeding companies that have not adhered to the highest standards and have often gotten to where they are because of political connections, not the quality of their product.”
Rodriguez-Taseff, a commercial lawyer still deeply involved in elections work, was particularly stunned to learn that even after the new app introduced to report results in Iowa failed, the backup phone lines went down.
“The fact that these counties are not even prepared with basic technology from the 1960s to report results in a timely basis using a backup hard line is shocking,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s even an issue. Every election I work, the first thing we do is test our land lines.”
While it is far from clear what exactly caused the breakdown in Iowa, early reporting suggests that the new app, developed by a technology firm with close ties to the Democratic party named Shadow, was not tested adequately ahead of time.
A history of technical difficulties
It’s a story that sounds maddeningly familiar to veterans of America’s never-ending wars over voting rules, ballot access and voting technology. It’s hard to look back, in fact, without concluding that election day meltdowns of inadequately tested or inadequately monitored machinery are as American as apple pie.
When punch cards were the hot new thing, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they failed repeatedly. In one primary election in Los Angeles in 1970, ballot cards jammed, candidates’ names were found to be misaligned or missing and computer malfunctions prevented any vote count at all in more than 500 precincts.
When a competitor to ES&S introduced touchscreens in Riverside county, California, in the early 2000s, it led to at least two instances – one a school board race and the other a county supervisor contest – where the count had to be halted on election night and the result mysteriously changed once the machines were fired up again.
Yet another competitor whose name became briefly synonymous with election machine dysfunction – Diebold Election Systems – mangled its rollout in Georgia in 2002 so badly that questions still linger about the reliability of the results in closely fought general election races for the Senate and for the governorship. The company then wreaked havoc in California presidential primary season two years later, in part because of battery drainage problems that knocked machines out of service even before the polls opened. “We did not realize,” the company’s chief executive later told a state oversight panel, “that when we have an off button on this machine, that it does not turn the system off.”
More recently, the problems inherent in poorly designed voting machines have been compounded by their age. Election officials in Georgia have been entirely unable to explain why, in 2018, tens of thousands of voters who cast a ballot for governor and for every other statewide race mysteriously omitted to mark a choice for lieutenant governor. In one precinct, the votes collected on some machines showed the Democrats winning every statewide race, while a different machine showed Republicans winning every statewide race.
Where elections generally can be vulnerable to either incompetence, corruption or both, the problem can sometimes be magnified when it comes to party primaries because they are subject to lower scrutiny from state officials – and sometimes no scrutiny at all. The Utah Republican caucus in 2016 raised few eyebrows because it produced a clear winner in Ted Cruz, but an online registration system intended to make it easier for eligible voters to participate failed dramatically, and it is unclear whether the party was ever able to issue a complete results tally.
‘Technology does not eliminate incompetence’
Again and again, going back to the 1890s, America’s loosely regulated election officials have been dazzled by the promise of new technology without understanding that the key to clean, accurate and transparent elections lies with competent, honest managers much more than the machines they use.
“Technology alone does not eliminate the possibility of corruption and incompetence in elections,” the elections expert and computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri wrote in 1993. “It merely changes the platform on which they may occur.”
While many jurisdictions across the country are competently run, the country’s history is littered with colorful and alarming examples of the opposite: the corrupt elections supervisor in Tampa, Florida, who in the early 1970s used a giant lever voting machine to smoke fish in his backyard, the uncounted paper ballots in San Francisco that had to be dried off in microwave ovens in 1997 after they were left unsecured in the rain, or the other uncounted paper ballots in San Francisco that, a few years later, were found dumped in a garbage can.
For years, the Brennan Center for Justice and others have warned that ageing, poorly programmed machines constitute a serious security risk, particularly in an age where the fear of foreign hackers and other forms of outside interference has changed from a theoretical possibility into a documented reality.
While there is no indication that the integrity of the Iowa caucus results has been compromised or otherwise corrupted, the episode nevertheless illustrates the shoddiness with which many election officials across many jurisdictions go about their business. More rigid oversight could potentially solve the problem overnight, but the United States is notorious for its failure to establish any central electoral authority with real teeth and its preference to leave election management in the hands of thousands of state and county offices, each subject to its own political pressures and competence problems.
“Election supervisors generally rely on their vendors,” Rodriguez-Taseff said. “They do not have the knowledge they need and in many cases are not even given access to the software so they can learn the technology, know how to operate it and develop their own fixes.”
Since the disastrous rollout of electronic touch screen machines in the early 2000s – largely financed by a federal law that was cobbled together at high speed in response to the Florida primary debacle of 2002 – many election supervisors have understood that low-tech voting systems are the easiest, cheapest and most reliable to operate.
That, however, has not stopped some states including Georgia from ordering expensive new systems that raise more questions than they answer – or to yield to the temptations of online voting, despite repeated warnings from computer scientists of major, insurmountable security concerns.
Even before Monday’s caucuses, Politico described Iowa as the “first election security test” of an anxiety-ridden 2020 election season. And it is now apparent it has failed the test.