These bills would ban all Ohio voting machines – and make our elections less safe | Opinion

Ohio has one of the lowest rates of voter fraud in the country. But you might not know that if you listened to Republicans at the Statehouse who are ready to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist. And even worse, their supposed fix could make this November’s election needlessly burdensome by banning all voting machines and forcing ballots to be counted by hand.

That’s the chaos that could ensue if lawmakers pass House Bill 472 and Senate Bill 274, which propose a host of changes to Ohio’s voter ID and election cybersecurity laws.

Voter fraud and the need to fix our “rigged” election system have been prevailing GOP talking points since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact no credible evidence of widespread fraud has ever been proven. In fact, a record-setting six million votes were cast in Ohio for the 2020 presidential election and only 27 were found to be fraudulent. In case you’re having trouble with the math, that’s 0.0005% of the statewide vote.

When I see that incredibly low number, I think about how hard it is to cheat in Ohio and the exceptionalism of our elections system − one secured by repeated logic and accuracy testing, rigorous employee training, auditing and federal and state certifications. When Republican lawmakers see that same number, they think of an existential crisis that demands millions of your hard-earned tax dollars to avoid.

Ohio isn’t Belarus, Russia, Myanmar or Somalia, where ballot box manipulation and voter intimidation are rampant. The state GOP needs to stop acting like we are.

Republicans beholden to Trump have been spreading this narrative about election insecurity for the past four years. This fearmongering has resulted in only 22% of Republicans having high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC for Public Affairs Research poll. This has allowed Republicans to pass policies like HB 458 − one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country −that sound helpful, but in actuality do nothing and are costly to taxpayers. Decade-long studies have shown that voter ID laws have no affect on voter fraud.

This year, Ohio Republicans are once again trying to sell election security bills that aren’t merely ineffective at deterring fraud, they might actually be detrimental to security measures already in place.

SB 274 would make Ohio elections less secure

Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, a sponsor of SB 274, said in a press release the new cybersecurity regulations contained in the bill are designed to stop “bad actors” (who she didn’t define) from interfering in U.S. elections. The only problem? These regulations fundamentally misunderstand how cybersecurity actually works.

Take, for instance, the bill’s requirement for all voting machines to have blockchain ledgers. If a “blockchain ledger” sounds like jargon to you, that’s because it is.

“There is no blockchain voting system on the market today, and the systems that we do already have do the things that the folks who are concerned about this want the blockchain to do,” Hamilton County Board of Elections Deputy Director Alex Linzer said.

The bill also would require any Ohio voting machine to be VVSG 2.0 compliant, a standard set at the federal level for the next generation of voting machines.

“There are no voting machines in this country that comply with this standard,” Linzer said. “If this bill were passed, every voting machine in the state of Ohio would be decertified.”

That means Ohio’s 88 counties would have to abandon $114 million worth of voting machines − ones that have never been breached by a cyberattack and have been used in dozens of safe, secure elections. It would also mean these counties would have no choice but to hand count over six million votes, three times each, without a single computer to back up the count.

That doesn’t sound secure to me. It sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Bad actors manipulate the voter, not the vote

Since it’s clear the bill’s authors don’t understand how cybersecurity works, I thought I’d talk to some experts in the field. Dr. Richard Harknett, director of University of Cincinnati’s School of Public Affairs and Co-Director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute, said while hackers could hypothetically influence an election by manipulating a vote count, it’s “really, really hard to do,” and there is no evidence this has happened in the U.S.

Because all 88 Ohio counties use different voter registration, voting machine, and electronic poll vendors, our state has a decentralized voting system of offline voting machines designed to keep hackers from breaching a voting machine.

“There are foreign actors that don’t particularly like our form of democracy, and they don’t really care who necessarily wins or loses, but they want to break down our ability to function as a society,” Harknett said.

Instead of manipulating the vote, foreign actors opt for the easier route: manipulating the voter.

“If you’re an adversary, and your strategy is to create more division and undermine trust, you don’t actually have to affect the vote − you just have to appear that you affected the vote,” he said.

Through divisiveness campaigns, foreign actors use bots on different internet platforms to repeat polarizing rhetoric designed to undermine Americans’ confidence in the electoral system. So when Ohio Republicans like Jim Jordan and Bob Gibbs propagate myths and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, they are furthering the destructive work of the “bad actors” they claim to want to stop.

And there’s more. The bill’s requirements to publicize information about Ohio voting machines − including contracts, software information, and livestreams of vote receptacles − could help malicious actors gain intelligence.

“If we do good cybersecurity practices and then make that information public, we’re doing our adversaries’ homework for them,” Harknett said.

No one is suggesting we shouldn’t remain vigilant about our election security or that voter fraud doesn’t exist. But spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a problem that only affects 0.0005% of the vote is a blatant waste of money. Especially when there are so many other areas − such as affordable housing and education − where our state government could be spending those dollars to improve people’s lives.

The County Commissioners of Ohio and the Ohio Association of Elected Officials, both bipartisan organizations, think the bills are a bad idea. I do, too.

The real election security threat isn’t at the ballot box; it’s on the internet and in the Statehouse, where both foreign adversaries and Ohio Republicans are sowing seeds of untruth and mistrust in our elections system.

(Editor’s note: Cybersecurity analysis from Dr. Harknett is for informational purposes only and is not endorsement or opposition of any pending legislation.)

Meredith Perkins is an intern on the Opinion team at the Enquirer and currently attends Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, studying English and diplomacy. She is a native of Independence, Ky.