BRISTOL — Voters at Bristol’s March 16 Town Meeting soundly defeated a petitioned warrant article that would have required the town to go back to counting ballots by hand. In a bit of irony, the 34-113 vote was administered on paper yes-no ballots that were hand-counted.
During the hour-long debate on the matter, petitioners spoke of the inherent vulnerabilities of machine ballot tabulation, either through equipment failure, hacking of the units, or purposeful manipulation of the software to obtain a desired election result.
Those arguing for the status quo cited the number of tests conducted before and after each election to ensure accurate counts. Bristol’s ballot machine is not connected to the internet, precluding hackers’ ability to access the unit, and officials said they have no intention of getting internet-connected machines in the future.
John Sellers argued that it is important to have human eyes counting the ballots for each race. While Bristol uses paper ballots and officials tally those against the number of ballots the machine says were cast, as well as against the number of voters the supervisors check off when handing out ballots, Sellers said that does not pick up errors in the count for individual races.
“Sometimes you need to have physical eyes on the ballot because the intent of the voter — you can see that they wanted to mark something or they meant to or they did but they maybe didn’t color it dark enough so the machine didn’t read it,” he said.
Sellers also argued that, even if ballot machines have not yet been hacked, they may be hacked in the future, if not through internet access then by embedding programs in the computer chips. He noted that the new machines being tested by the Secretary of State’s Office in Concord will not be certified as accurate until 2026, and Bristol is looking to replace its ballot-counter in the near future because the machine is no longer manufactured and replacement parts are unavailable.
Don Milbrand said he has been involved in several recounts over the years as a town official and he has found that the machines are highly accurate. The machine has never been off by more than one vote, while a recount that also involved Bridgewater, where the ballots are hand-counted, revealed a 40-vote discrepancy from people transcribing the tally.
“I would not ever vote for a machine in the future that was hooked up to the internet or had any kind of program,” Milbrand said. “I’m only for a pure counting machine.”
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