Voters who are familiar with barcode readers would have had no trouble handling the issues in the 2023 Northampton County, Pennsylvania, election, according to testimony heard last week in the Commonwealth Court.  ,  ,
Well, scanners are a collection of traces that are printed on items and scanned at the store checkout. You can read them, ideal? Because in Northampton County in 2023, the only way to find out how many votes the system was counting was by reading the barcode on voting poll receipts.
It is a concern that whistleblowers for election integrity don’t want to see occurring again. PA Fair Elections, Heather Honey, an analyst and vote techniques professional, and Stacey Redfield, a Northampton County downtown vote judge, went to court seeking solutions to make sure it does not. They brought a lawsuit against Northampton County, the Pennsylvania Department of State, and Al Schmidt, the Commonwealth Secretary.
In Pennsylvania, courts are on the vote for a retention voting every 10 years. Voters can choose to vote yes or low when the vote asks if a judge may be elected for an extra term. Easy. Except in 2023, when the poll included two judges ‘ engagement races.
Voters who cast “yes” for one judge in that year were shocked to find that the terms on the report ballot receipt read exactly the opposite of their handheld vote.
Despite the words on the report vote receipt indicating the reverse of the voter’s purpose, the fingerprint had the right information. This way, the results were tallied as citizens intended, said state leaders in courtroom evidence.  ,
How can a voter be sure their vote is being counted properly if the terms on the ticket reflect the incorrect decisions?
Just learn the id.
” The fingerprint can get double checked. The id is just a routine of thin and thick outlines”, Michael Vargo, an attorney representing the Northampton County Elections Commission, told the judge in a Feb. 5 reading. A judge inquired as to how a person could learn the barcode. Vargo responded,” The same way a person can learn … You would have to be taught, just like you had to be taught, at some point, how to learn words and how to read figures. You’d have to be taught what sign meant’ yes’ and what sign meant’ no,’ and then you could examine the barcode, that, this is the barcode for’ yes.’ This is the fingerprint for ‘ little.’ They look unique. They are special. Every poll that voted certainly would have an similar bar code in an identical place because the patterns are distinct for each vote but similar on each ballot.
Northampton is one of three Pennsylvania districts that utilizes the S ExpressVote XL voting system. It functions as both a tabulator and a ballot-cutter in one. Additionally, Cumberland and Philadelphia Counties make use of this device. ES&, S did not respond to a request for comment in this tale.
In a press conference that day, ES&, S Vice President Linda Bennet described the 2023 issues as animal error based on software by a person at ES&, S. Bennett said logic and precision tests missed the problem but it is” something that should have been caught.”
With this system, electors make their choices by machine touchscreen. When done election, the system generates a paper vote ticket, seen through a screen on the voting machine. The paper ballot receipt’s published words are read by the voter to ensure that their votes are correctly recorded. When the system moves the report vote to a holding container and scans the bar code on the paper vote, the electronic poll is recorded.
Because 2023 was not a federal election, federal Help America Vote Act ( HAVA ) laws do not apply. However, it is important to avoid issues that wouldn’t comply with HAVA regulations so they don’t occur during a federal election.
Voting machines must have “manual audit capacity,” that is, paper ballots that are manually counted in an audit, according to HAVA.
Before the permanent paper record is created, the voter must have the option to” change their ballot” or make any corrections. Additionally, HAVA recommends that a paper record be made available as a formal record for a recount.
According to PA Fair Elections Attorney Elizabeth Nielsen, the Northampton machines can produce a printed paper record in a different way than the electronic version, which violates HAVA compliance.
According to Nielsen,” The petitioners ‘ position is that there are alternative electronic voting machine system components that could replace ExpressVote XL, that do not have the capability to even print out a result that is different from the actual vote selection, and that the HAVA requirement for a manually auditable paper record requires that a machine not have that capacity,” according to Nielsen. They must be able to print a copy of the vote, according to the law.
PA Fair Elections also argued that these machines ‘ error rate was too high to meet HAVA requirements.
Countys in PA Fair Elections are advised to switch to another system, but neither the county nor the state would prefer to.
” The appropriate remedy has already been implemented”, Vargo told the court. ” And the appropriate remedy is not the extreme remedy of requiring, not just Northampton County, but also one of the largest counties in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, to get rid of all their voting machines. The best way to fix this error is to modify the testing to make sure it won’t happen. And that’s already been done. So the relief, the most appropriate has already been granted”.
Attorney Gregory Darr from the Department of State claimed that PA Fair Elections actually requests that this voting machine be decertified, but that it actually complies with HAVA.
” They haven’t produced any evidence that disputes that. It can be audited. The voter can verify the candidate’s identity by checking the candidate’s name and voting results, or by checking the candidate’s name in the case of a retention election.
Nielsen reaffirmed to the court that printing on a different type than the voter’s choice is possible.
” A voter in the booth is undoubtedly not trained to read a bar code.” That appears to be something that requires special training, something extraordinary, and not to mention the reliability requirement for manual audits with permanent paper records.” If it does not comply with HAVA, then it should never have been certified in the first place,” it says.
Writing opinions for the Commonwealth Court might take weeks.
Beth Brelje covers The Federalist’s elections coverage. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
