Voting machine trouble in Pennsylvania county triggers alarm ahead of 2024

Voters in the swing county of Northampton, Pennsylvania, mostly moved on after their new touchscreen voting machines glitched during a down-ballot judge’s race in 2019.

But when a similar issue cropped up earlier this month, it triggered a backlash within the county — one that has left state and local election officials in this key swing state racing to restore voter confidence ahead of what could be another contentious presidential election.

“We’re at the peak of mistrust of one another, but until that subsides, counties like ours need to be nearly perfect, and I think this system allows us to do that,” County Executive Lamont McClure told POLITICO before Northampton certified the vote on Tuesday, arguing the glitch resulted from human error.

The debate playing out in Northampton comes as election officials across the country are still contending with the consequences of Donald Trump’s 2020 fraud claims, which often centered around how votes are counted at the local level. With Trump a current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, that skepticism could only mount.

The stakes are particularly high in Pennsylvania, which boasts 19 electoral votes and is expected to be a top battleground next year. Northampton is home to roughly 220,000 registered voters. Trump won the state by just 44,000 votes in 2016. He lost it by roughly 80,000 votes four years later.

Northampton’s case also underscores the delicate balance politicians and election officials say they must strike when investigating legitimate problems, without providing fodder to conspiracy theorists.

“The broader concern is that an incident like this would be misused to undermine confidence in our electoral process,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, told POLITICO Wednesday, the morning after Northampton voted to certify the results.

The 2019 election was the first time Northampton used the touchscreen voting machines from Election Systems & Software. That year, a programming glitch caused the ES&S machines to significantly undercount the votes for the Democratic candidate in a local judges’ race. Then on Nov. 7 this year, Northampton residents who showed up at their local polling station found that printouts from the same devices didn’t match the votes they had submitted digitally for two down-ballot judges contests.

Like in 2019, county officials and ES&S have said the errors did not affect any votes or alter the outcome of the races — both uncompetitive, up-down votes on whether to retain state judges. They argue the machines themselves are highly reliable and not to blame, saying the problem was caused by a one-off human error in the programming.

“One of the things I've learned through ‘19 and ‘23 is that the machines that we have have a great deal of redundancy built in,” McClure said.

But poll workers, election security watchers and members of both local political parties counter that the glitches caused significant confusion on Election Day this year, even if they didn’t swing the two judges’ races. And following so soon after 2019, the latest issue has triggered a growing backlash against ES&S — with many now questioning whether it is too risky to let the company’s machines tabulate votes in a closely contested county in the heart of a critical swing state.

“Since 2019, the theory has been well, that was a big mistake, but we caught it and we've implemented new processes to make sure nothing like that would ever happen again,” Matthew Munsey, chair of the Northampton County Democratic Party, told POLITICO.

But after the latest incident, “I don't know how we can restore trust with these machines,” he said.

Skeptics like Munsey say the root of the problem ties back to the basic design of the devices, called the ExpressVote XL.

The machine spits out a paper print-out that records voters’ choices in two ways: a barcode that is used to tabulate their vote and corresponding text so they can verify it was input correctly.

In the two races on Nov. 7, however, the machines swapped voters’ choices in the written section of the ballot — but not the barcode — if they voted “yes” to retain one judge and “no” for the other.

ES&S and Northampton officials acknowledged that pre-election software testing, which is conducted jointly, should have caught that problem. They say an ES&S employee first introduced the error during regular programming meant to prepare the machines for Election Day.

“We deeply regret what has occurred today,” Linda Bennett, senior vice president of account management at ES&S, said during a press conference held on Election Day this year. But, she cautioned, “We are sure and positive that the voter selections are actually being captured” because the error only affected the written portion.

McClure said this week he has asked ES&S to fire the employee responsible for the error. He also said the county would “endeavor mightily” to avoid a repeat in 2024 of any similar flubs, which he emphasized was caused by humans. “It wasn’t a machine error,” he said.

But many in Northampton regard the glitch as especially troubling because it required voters to disregard the only part of the ballot they were told to trust four years ago.

At that time, another issue the county said was introduced by a human programmer caused the ExpressVote XL to mistally the vote for a candidate in a judge’s race. The paper printouts helped county officials determine the true count.

“In 2019, when the issues came up with the touchscreens, we were told, ‘Don't worry about it. The cards are recording the votes,’” Northampton County Republican Committee Chair Glenn Geissinger told POLITICO. “OK, you're telling me now, in 2023, ‘Don't worry about what's printed on the card?’”

ES&S argues the paper trail was still beneficial in Northampton because it gave voters and poll workers a chance to identify the problem quickly. “This double-checking adds additional safeguards and voter confidence into the voting process,” Katina Granger, an ES&S spokesperson, wrote in an email.

In the Election Day press conference this year, McClure said the county began receiving reports of the problem just 15 minutes after polls opened.

Text messages sent by county officials that day and reviewed by POLITICO confirm they quickly diagnosed the nature and scope of the problem.

At 8:31 a.m., the county sent text messages to election workers, warning them there was an issue with the judicial retention vote and they should use emergency paper ballots. Roughly 45 minutes later, having studied the problem further, they updated that guidance in a second text.

Because the glitch only applied to the written text — which would not actually be counted — officials directed election workers to go back to the ExpressVote XL machines. While the county had not yet fixed the issue, poll workers were told to inform voters that selections for the judges race could “show up in reverse but will be counted correctly,” the text message reads.

Even though that guidance was technically accurate, it left people like John Walker, a Northampton poll worker, highly uncomfortable.

“They were saying, ‘Don't trust the thing that’s supposed to validate your ballot,’” said Walker, “That doesn’t instill confidence in the system at a time when it has never been more important to do so.”

Some of the issues that cropped up on Nov. 7 stemmed from a second error, unrelated to the machines, McClure argued when talking to POLITICO.

In guidance sent to poll workers throughout the day, the county twice directed them to lean on emergency paper ballots: once in the 8:31 a.m. text and later in a 4:09 p.m. message. In the latter case, the county relayed a court order to advise voters they could cancel their vote and revert to paper if the machines printed their selection incorrectly.

But the county distributed just 25 emergency paper ballots to each polling station, a figure that McClure now acknowledges was too low.

The county’s advice “created a hell of a backup,” said Tom Bruno, a second Northampton poll worker.

Six Pennsylvania voting rights groups issued a statement earlier this month accusing the county of failing to prepare a proper contingency plan and urging greater transparency around what went wrong.

Some are pressuring the county to take more extreme measures.

Both Munsey, the Democrat, and Geissinger, the Republican, said they believe the county should replace its ES&S machines entirely before 2024. Northampton’s contract with the company is not up for renewal until 2025.

“This was a municipal election with 32 percent turnout countywide, and there were people who had to stand in line for over an hour to vote because of this fiasco,” said Geissinger.

A senior elections official from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the federal agency charged with supporting state and local elections officials — cautioned that elections are “messy” and errors are inevitable no matter what type of machine voters use.

The key for election administrators, said the official, is ensuring some form of paper back-up and implementing contingency plans if any issues turn up — just as Northampton did earlier this month.

“I think there are some really good news stories coming out of Northampton,” said the official, who was granted anonymity as a condition of speaking on the matter.

For now, McClure said he is strongly leaning against the idea of canceling the ES&S contract.

He argued that more rigorous pre-Election Day testing, more paper ballots and better communication could prevent the errors in 2019 and 2023. He pointed out that the ExpressVote XL machines worked flawlessly in the intervening elections — including 2020 — and that training poll workers and election officials on an entirely new system in the next 12 months would be risky.

But that doesn’t mean he’s committed to renewing the contract after it expires in 2025. “ES&S has to deliver in 2024 the way they did in 2020, that’s for sure,” he said.

The events of Nov. 7 could carry lessons well beyond Northampton.

Electronic voting machines that use barcodes and paper printouts just like the ExpressVote XL — known as ballot-marking devices — now represent the principal Election Day voting system in roughly a fifth of the country, up from less than 1 percent nine years ago, according to data collected by election security nonprofit Verified Voting.

Security experts have long warned that the printout and barcode on those devices could diverge due to manipulation or error, creating enormous confusion in counties where election officials do not have robust contingency plans in place.

But until Northampton, no one seemed to listen, said Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist of Citizens for Better Elections, a Pennsylvania-based election rights nonprofit.

“Our concerns kept getting dismissed by people saying, ‘Well, of course they're gonna match,’” said Skoglund, who wrote a report on the events in Northampton earlier this month. “But here we are.”

Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, said that while the state is still looking into the incident in Northampton, every sign indicates that the problems there should not be taken as a reason to distrust the ExpressVote XL, or systems like it.

“No voting system is immune to human error,” he said.