old voting machines

By: Matthew Woodward

While the 2016 presidential election may have cast light on foreign interference in US elections, the general election of 2018 highlighted an additional, albeit more homegrown, threat: broken and outdated voting machines.

In 2018, as reported by the AP, 41 states used voting machines that were more than a decade old and, perhaps even more alarming, 43 states used voting machines that are no longer in production. One state, South Carolina, offers an unfortunate example of this trend. The bulk of the state’s current voting machines were purchased in 2004, making them nearly 15 years old at the time of the 2018 election. Some context—2004 was also the year of such technological feats as the birth of Facebook, the arrival of Skype, and the earliest introduction of cell-phone cameras.

By: Katie Teeters

In September of 2015, the Brennan Center for Justice published a report based on ten months of research, which looked at problems arising from aging voting machines. First, the report found that a majority of election districts in forty-three states are using ten-year old machines. There are fourteen states with machines fifteen-years or older. Considering the rapid pace of technology in the past fifteen years, these election machines are truly relics of the past. To illustrate how ancient these machines are; in 2000 Wikipedia nor iTunes existed. Many of the voting machines have minimal memory, such as in Allen County where the machine’s memory cards can contain only 250 megabytes of data. Samsung’s new basic Galaxy S6 smartphone can hold up to 32 gigabytes of data, which is approximately 128 times more memory than those machines.

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