National: Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure? | Sue Halpern/The New Yorker
Near the end of last year, I met Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft, in a conference room in Building 99 on the company’s sprawling campus, in Redmond, Washington, to talk about a fundamental problem with American elections. When we vote, we take it on faith that our ballots have been recorded—and recorded correctly. This is not always the case. In 2015, in Shelby County, Tennessee, hundreds of votes that were cast in predominantly African-American precincts disappeared somewhere between the polling place and the final tally. Where they had gone, and why, remains a mystery, because the ballots were cast on a touch-screen voting machine that did not provide a paper record. In 2018, three thousand votes went missing during a Florida recount. The next year, eight hundred uncounted ballots were found in a storage closet in Midland, Texas, after a hotly contested school-bond vote. To prevent these types of errors, Benaloh said, “You could, in theory, sign your name on your ballot and watch it go through the system.” In actual elections, however, that is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Our ballots are secret; after we drop them in the ballot box, they are, literally, out of our hands.