Over three-fourths of NC counties use voter-marked paper ballots and optical scan tabulators for counting votes. The rest use touch-screen electronic voting machines (aka DREs) which also produce a voter-verified paper tape ballot, with Mecklenburg County having the greatest number of voters using these machines. The election law requires that after every election, a random sample of two voting machines in each county will be audited, wherein the paper ballots for these machines will be hand-counted and such counts for a given election race will be compared to the machine counts. This is the only way to determine if these electronic voting machines tabulated the votes as the voters intended.
I’ve has been following electronic voting machines issues since 2004, which was the first year that most NC votes were cast on such machines. I learned in December 2016 that the NC State Board of Elections permitted those counties with DREs to conduct post-election audits in a way which was contrary to the election law and which would fail to detect any vote-counting errors, so it was impossible to know for sure that the 35% of NC voters who voted on these DREs really intended to vote for the eventual winner of the presidential election. After consulting with a non-partisan expert on DREs, I convinced the Executive Director of the State Board of Elections to reverse this policy in January 2018, and these machines have been properly audited since then.
The General Assembly passed a law in 2017 which requires that all DREs shall be replaced with more secure election systems for the 2020 elections, and the State Board of Elections has been deciding what voting machines to certify to replace these old machines. Many scientists and computer security experts have determined that the most secure voting systems are voter-marked paper ballots and optical scan tabulators, like we use in Orange County.
However, on August 23, 2019, the State Board voted to certify a new electronic voting machine called a Ballot Marking Device (BMD) after their having received countless letters and public testimony from experts urging them to reject this machine in favor of voter-marked paper ballots. These BMDs are subject to covert hacking, like all electronic voting machines are, but they fail to produce a suitable voter-verified paper ballot which can be used for thorough post-election audits.
I need your help. I am working with a network of election security experts and activists who are attempting to get Governor Cooper to meet with his Democratic Party appointees to the State Board of Elections and to convince them to reverse their 8/23 decision on BMDs.
Tom Henkel
Chapel Hill
You can help in this effort by contacting our local members of the General Assembly, Senator Vivian Foushee and Representatives Verla Insko and Greg Meyer, as well as Governor Cooper to urge them to ensure that the Board only certifies voter-marked paper ballots and optical scan tabulators in North Carolina.