Secretary of the State: CT needs to replace ‘unreliable and unserviceable’ voting machines

During the August 2022 primary, as scorching heat prompted the governor to issue an extreme hot weather protocol, a number of Connecticut’s decades-old electronic ballot tabulators began to melt down at the polls — literally.

Middletown Republican Registrar George Souto said a third of the city’s voting machines went down that day. The event highlighted just how fragile the state’s aging tabulators are, and the glaring need for new technology.

“There is a great need to replace these tabulators before we start having major issues during these elections,” Souto said. “Those major issues are inevitable and they’re coming if we don’t replace them.”

This week, Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas requested $25 million in bonding that, if approved, would bring a fleet of 3,000 new tabulators to Connecticut’s 750 polling locations in time for the 2024 general election.

On Monday, before the General Obligation Bonding Subcommittee, Thomas said that Connecticut’s current voting machines have become “unreliable and unserviceable.”

With new machines, Thomas said the state would avoid malfunctions, from jamming due moisture on paper ballots to melting machine parts on hot days, that have become somewhat commonplace in Connecticut’s elections over the last five years. It would also open opportunities for election reform.

“All the new models on the market can do all of the more sophisticated tasks that I think the election space is moving in, whether it’s ranked choice voting or risk-limiting audits or even faster election-night results,” Thomas said.

Thomas said the purchase of 40 high and medium speed tabulators for absentee ballot processing would hasten election-night counts. Under the current system, poll workers must hand-feed absentee ballots into the tabulators one by one and hand count any folded ballots that the machine might reject. Whether ballots are creased or not, the new machines can handle stacks at a time.

According to the Secretary of the State’s office, producers put the lifespan of their tabulators within the 10 to 15 year range. At 20 years old, Thomas said Connecticut’s machines are “well beyond that window of useful life.”

“We are the only state still using these machines,” Thomas said “These machines are failing at a regular clip in different ways just because of how long they’ve been in use, … The current machines are literally on their last legs. … I think they have a life at the scrapyard next.”

The biggest issue is that the machines and their parts are no longer commercially available.

“The company who produced these machines has gone out of business so it’s impossible for us to source any new replacement parts,” Thomas said. “We have been as a state trying to buy old machines from other places. We’ve even gone so far as to be on eBay trying to bid on all the machines — they just don’t exist anymore and the parts don’t exist anymore. There really is no useful life to keep any of these machines in use because a backup is only a backup if it’s reliable.”

“This is no way for us to run our elections.”

Souto said Middletown was able to nurse its broken machines back to life in time for the general election through replacement parts and temperature-controlled storage, but the fear of another systemwide disruption is ever present. In a situation where electronic tabulator machines and their backups fail, Souto said it could take days past election night for cities to hand-count each ballot.

“I think everyone wants to know what the election results are as soon as possible,” Souto said. “The way for that to happen is to make sure that we have equipment that is functional during elections and primaries and right now that’s at risk without replacing the tabulators.”

Hartford’s Democratic Registrar Giselle Feliciano said that even with rigorous rounds of tabulator testing and maintenance before every election, at least two to three machines malfunction on voting day, requiring a backup replacement.

While some may gape at the $25 million price tag, Feliciano said Thomas’ proposal is a crucial step towards improving Connecticut’s election process.

“It’s not an easy position to be in and request all of that, because many people don’t think of the day to day operations that registrars along with town clerks have to go through to make an election happen,” Feliciano said. “The state of Connecticut, we’re not accustomed to change, but we need to make certain changes in order for things to occur the correct way and make it a more reliable service for the voters out there.”

For years government officials have warned of the declining performance of Connecticut’s aging tabulators.

In 2019, then-Secretary of the State Denise Merrill cautioned that the voting machines were “coming to the end of their useful life.”

Kathryn Wall, the president of the Connecticut Town Clerks Association, said that town clerks and registrars have advocated for new tabulators ever since problems with reliability and spare part sourcing started cropping up years ago.

“Anytime anything kind of goes wrong, even if it’s a little thing, you kind of go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s make sure we do everything right,’ because we want accurate elections and we want them to go smoothly,” Wall said. “We recognize that the registrars have done a yeoman’s job in working with the older tabulators to make sure that they still get accurate results.”

Wall said that the CTCA is in full support of bringing new tabulating technology to Connecticut’s elections.

“Anyone who’s ever had an iPhone, iPad or computer, they know that the technology that was available 20 years ago is not the same as it is now,” Wall said. “We want to continue to run elections smoothly, with integrity and correctly, and also we want to get the results out to the people as soon as possible. Hopefully, these new machines will allow us to do all those things.”

At the University of Connecticut Center for Voting Technology Research, also known as the UConn VoTeR Center, Director Alex Russell said that the ballot handling aspects of the counting process have improved dramatically with modern technology.

“The modern machines that I have seen, their ability to handle crumpled and folded ballots, is really quite remarkable,” Russell said. “I’ve seen demonstrations where someone takes a ballot, crumples it up into a ball and then flattens it on a piece of paper and runs it through a machine. So in terms of ballot processing, I think the machines probably will provide significantly better performance than what we currently have.”

In addition to enhanced performance, Russell said the new machines can strengthen election security and integrity.

“The number one thing that you can do to help secure an election is to insist that you have paper ballots,” Russell said. “Any new machine that Connecticut adopts will insist on that…Connecticut in a sense is in a quite favorable position right now because they have the luxury of shopping for voting machines that can provide better support for post-election audits.”

Russel said over the years, voters have started paying more attention to election security and democratic threats.

“It’s very important that people understand and believe that they’re secure. Part of running a good election is not just actually maintaining good security, but it’s also imparting confidence in the election,” Russell said. “There’s been a lot of discussion in the media over the last five years about election security and in particular, suspicion of voting machines and of tabulation and of other aspects of elections. And one really important mechanism that really should be baked into an election from the start is what’s known in the literature as a post-election audit.”

Russell said that as Connecticut lawmakers consider audit requirements in new legislation, the state could soon find itself as a leader in election security.

“This would just be an extremely exciting and important development in Connecticut,” Russell said. “If Connecticut were able to simultaneously land machines that can support strong post-election audits and put into law risk limiting audits, Connecticut would really be at the very forefront of election security across the states right now and be able to serve as a really powerful example for other states.”