Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on Friday ordered counties that plan to replace their electronic voting systems to buy machines that leave a paper trail — a safeguard against hacking — but his budget doesn't include any money to fund the replacement of the state's aging, increasingly vulnerable fleet.
The Democrat's administration said the move to require that new systems include a paper backup will increase the security of voting systems and make balloting easier to audit.
"This directive will ensure that the next generation of the commonwealth's voting systems conforms to enhanced standards of resiliency, auditability and security," Acting Secretary of State Robert Torres said in a statement.
The state, however, is not requiring counties to discard their old equipment. The directive only requires them to buy machines with a paper backup if they decide to switch systems. Nor does the Wolf administration's budget plan , released this week, include any new money to help counties replacing their aging systems.
Marybeth Kuznik, the founder and executive director of VotePA, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes paperless electronic voting, said counties don't have the money to buy new machines.
"The General Assembly needs to step up to the plate and budget for this," she said.
Nevertheless, Kuznik, a longtime election judge outside Pittsburgh, called Friday's order "a huge step forward for Pennsylvania, for better elections. Just huge."
Pennsylvania is one of 13 states where most or all voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the vote, according to researchers at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.
So-called direct-recording electronic machines make it almost impossible to know if they've accurately recorded individual votes or if anyone tampered with the count.
Election officials in 41 states plan to use the older machines in the 2018 midterm elections, the Brennan Center said this week. Most election officials surveyed by Brennan Center researchers said they lacked funds to replace machines that are more than a decade old.
The vast majority of Pennsylvania's fleet of more than 20,000 voting machines record votes electronically and leave no paper trail, according to a 2014 tally by state election officials.
In 2006, voters filed suit against Pennsylvania to bar the use of paperless electronic voting machines, contending they were unreliable, lacked adequate safeguards against vote tampering and violated a state law requiring "a permanent physical record" of each vote.
The state Supreme Court dismissed the suit, saying the plaintiffs had not shown that direct-recording electronic machines are more susceptible to fraud or tampering than other kinds of voting systems.
Virginia banned the use of touch-screen voting machines in November's gubernatorial contest over concerns the equipment could be hacked.
The federal government in September told election officials in at least 21 states, including Pennsylvania, that hackers targeted their systems before the 2016 presidential election, but at the time only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its systems.
