Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Made with Flourish

How Louisiana ended up as this year’s election security outlier

Made with Flourish
Made with Flourish

The moment of truth for voting system reliability remains nearly nine months off, but already Louisiana has earned itself a troublesome and unique footnote in the story of the 2020 presidential election.

It will surely be the only state running totally afoul of the new world of balloting best practices, which says creating and keeping a paper record is the only way to assure every vote is counted accurately (and recounted if need be) and properly reflects the will of the voter.

There won't be a single sheet of paper involved in tabulating the results in Louisiana on Election Day — unlike any of the other 49 states, according to a comprehensive study by Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that promotes the integrity of elections. All 3,934 polling places will use entirely electronic voting machines that are at least 15 years old, and which do not generate printouts of anything as a fail-safe if something goes wrong.


Louisiana's new distinction as a voting security outsider adds to its longstanding reputation for unique electoral behavior — which extends from its renown for colorful if ethically challenged candidates to its use of a peculiar election timetable that often results in December runoffs for the top posts.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The state's standout position is all the more notable now, after a string of cyberattacks in the past couple of years against the government in Baton Rouge and local governments crippled the work of several agencies that deal with the public, costing millions of dollars and making the public keenly aware of cyber vulnerabilities.

And obstinance is not the reason the state is sticking with its voting booths Nov. 3, even as the overwhelming majority of the country will have reverted by then to the sort of hand-marked paper ballots that were ubiquitous through the 1990s.

Instead, a multimillion-dollar contract to replace the state's entire inventory of 10,000 machines — with equipment generating a paper trail of each vote — was scrapped in 2018 because, Louisiana's chief procurement officer ruled, the secretary of state's office failed to follow the rules for picking a winning vendor.

A new contract has not been awarded, and bidders are permitted to phase in the equipment over three years. This will leave the state in the unenviable position of sacrificing more and more of the machines it bought in 2005 or earlier, so it can harvest them for spare parts to keep a critical mass of the old equipment in good working order on Election Day.

This suggests the loss of thousands of votes due to the failures of the aging machinery — which uses pushbuttons for making choices next to a display screen of candidate names — probably poses a more immediate threat to a successful Louisiana election than hacking.

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, the state's chief elections official, has insisted there is no risk of foreign intrusion because the machines are never connected to the internet — and are programmed by state employees at the capital before each election using computers that are not supposed to have been connected to the internet, either.

It's impossible to eliminate the threat of malware entirely, though, because some of the programming laptops may have gone online at some point and because the state's election machine warehouses are not impervious to breaking and entering.

"It's never slipped through the cracks because you have to test every machine with the local election board," Ardoin told the Baton Rouge Advocate. "They would figure out if there's a problem with a machine right away. And second of all we've never had that kind of a problem. It doesn't exist."

In fact, a hack could remain imperceptible in altering this year's results. Donald Trump carried Louisiana's 8 electoral votes by 20 points (almost 400,000 votes) last time, making him the fifth straight Republican winner. And none of the congressional races this year looms as remotely competitive, with five GOP incumbents and one Democratic incumbent looking to cruise to new terms.

Absentee votes are still cast on paper sheets, and early voting is done in the 64 parishes (or counties) on rented machinery that generates a paper trail. Louisiana is one of relatively few states that provide all election hardware to the localities that administer the voting.

In the world of voting, Louisiana's machines are known as DREs, for direct recording electronic voting. They were the wave of the future after 2000, when confusing paper ballot designs and imprecise punch cards fueled the dispute over the razor-thin margin of George W. Bush's decisive win in Florida.

Since 2016, with the help of hundreds of millions in federal grants, DREs have largely disappeared. New Jersey, Tennessee, Alabama and Indiana are the only other places where most, but not all machines in use this fall will be electronic without any paper backup.

"Aging voting equipment, particularly voting machines that had no paper record of votes, were vulnerable to exploitation by a committed adversary," the Senate Intelligence Committee said in the first of its series of bipartisan reports on the Russian interference campaign in the last presidential contest. "Despite the focus on this issue since 2016, some of these vulnerabilities remain."

Made with Flourish

Read More

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

An illustration of hands putting together a puzzle.

Getty Images, cienpies

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

The concept of the common good in American society has undergone a remarkable transformation since the nation's founding. What began as a clear, if contested, vision of collective welfare has splintered into something far more complex and individualistic. This shift reflects changing times and a fundamental reimagining of what we owe each other as citizens and human beings.

The nation’s progenitors wrestled with this very question. They drew heavily from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the social contract as a sacred covenant between citizens and their government. But they also pulled from deeper wells—the Puritan concept of the covenant community, the classical Republican tradition of civic virtue, and the Christian ideal of serving one's neighbor. These threads wove into something uniquely American: a vision of the common good that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.

Keep ReadingShow less
We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

Students in a classroom.

Getty Images, Maskot

We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

“If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men.” - W.E.B. Du Bois

The current state of public education has many confused, anxious, and even fearful. Depending on the day, I feel any combination of the above, among other less-than-ideal adjectives. Simply, the future is uncertain. Schools are simultaneously cutting budgets and trying to remain relevant, all during an increasingly tense political climate.

Keep ReadingShow less
Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

An oversized gavel surrounded by people.

Getty Images, J Studios

Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

In a recent post we quoted a journalist describing the Republican Party as anti-immigration. Many of our readers wrote back angrily to say that the Republican party is only opposed to immigrants who are present illegally.

But that's not true. And we're not shy of telling it like it is.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Importance of Respecting Court Orders
brown wooden chess piece on brown book

The Importance of Respecting Court Orders

The most important question in American politics today is whether Donald Trump will respect court orders. Judges have repeatedly ruled against his administration.

But will he listen?

Keep ReadingShow less