Machines have other advantages over paper ballots: they can offer multiple language options, support larger jurisdictions that need thousands of different ballot types, and ensure that voters don’t inadvertently miss a race or make a mistake that disqualifies their ballot. Prior to the law, she says, “we had just sort of been living with systems that essentially disenfranchised large numbers of voters.” The importance of HAVA to the disability vote “can’t be overstated,” says Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager for the National Disability Rights Network, the nation’s largest provider of legal advocacy services for people with disabilities. According to one estimate, the entire industry generates approximately $300 million in revenue annually. Today, the voting machine market is dominated by three major vendors: Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic. Gilbert believes he’s invented his way out of that dilemma. And even if Gilbert’s machine were foolproof, he and others argue that vote hacker culture-one that’s more intent on destroying devices than creating them-makes it unlikely the machine would ever get a fair hearing, let alone be adopted.įor two decades, the rise of voting technology has enabled some of the United States’ loftiest democratic ideals, and also embodied its most visceral political suspicions. But some experts believe that the pursuit is misguided, because no computer could ever be unhackable. Amid these concerns about election technology, a handful of innovators-including Gilbert-have searched for a solution that will silence critics: a voting machine that’s easy to use, based in open-source software, and significantly more difficult to hack than existing models.
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