The Sconi

For elections analyst Karen McKim, the counting side of the voting process should be the primary focus of election reform.

“Most local election officials know little about high tech, so they have to rely on what the voting machine salesmen tell them and the software they sell them,” McKim, one of the founders of Wisconsin Election Integrity, told The Sconi. “They wouldn’t know if something went wrong or how to fix it if they did.”

She cites a 2019 WisPolitics.com story that reported that Wisconsin voting machines had been connected to the Internet, with officials unaware of it.

“Vital election equipment in at least seven Wisconsin counties has been connected to the internet,” wrote Patrick Poblete of WisPolitics. “In some cases for nearly a year at a time, despite Wisconsin elections officials and voting machine vendors repeatedly saying the devices cannot be hacked because they are not connected to the web.”

Election security expert Doug Jones, a computer science expert at the University of Iowa, told WisPolitics that “this could give a run-of-the-mill hacker complete control of the reported outcome.”

Jones said that securing the voting system should have been the Wisconsin Elections Commission's (WEC) top priority. Instead a WEC spokesman told WisPolitics that the commission was “dealing with a number of issues” at the time and was “not sure that this was the most pressing."

McKim said the sure-fire way to ensure that the machines are working properly and haven’t been hacked is through post-election audits.

“Businesses have audits usually every year to ensure their machines are working correctly and nothing nefarious is going on,” she said. “There is no good reason not to do this for the Wisconsin elections. Certifying bad election results doesn’t turn them into good results.

In late July the chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Monomonee Falls), announced that the committee would be requesting additional election materials to conduct a deeper review of the results of the 2020 general elections.

And recently retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who is leading the investigation into the elections, has threatened local officials with subpoenas if they don’t comply.

In related news, a recent poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen and commissioned by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty shows significant bipartisan support for election law safeguards elections in the Badger State. One existing safeguard, requiring voters to show identification, was supported by 84% of respondents.

The same poll showed that 65% of voters support a ban on third party collection of mail ballots, or ballot harvesting, an initiative recently vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. In the poll, 86% of Republicans, 81% of independent voters, and 52% of Democrats favored a ban. 

“Ballot collectors can supervise the voters while they are completing their ballots to dictate, coerce, intimidate, or pay them,” according to the Wisconsin Election Integrity Organization.

Evers also vetoed five other voting-related bills.