The policy and strategy director of a voter advocacy group suggested that the voting machines could be called “primitive technology”.
American voters will be casting their ballots on Tuesday in the New Hampshire primaries. There’s just a small problem: the ballot scanners being used are at least 15 years old, and some may even date back to the Bill Clinton administration, claimed a recent report.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies have encouraged conspiracy theories that attack the validity of voting machines in the US following his election loss in 2020 to US President Joe Biden. After about two years of investigating, there has been no evidence that the voting machines were tampered with.
But it isn’t manipulation that is affecting the health of the machines—it’s the fact that they are too old. The AccuVote ballot tabulators in use across approximately half of the US states’ towns and cities are just too old to perform their job without the risk of a breakdown. And the supply of replacement parts for those breakdowns is dwindling.
“You could say it’s primitive technology. You could say it’s simple and reliable technology. Both of those things can be true,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director of Coalition for Open Democracy.
Typically, when these machines do malfunction the ballots must be counted by hand. This process creates a headache for local election officials and can delay the results’ reports. This pause in the reporting would be enough time to make conspiracy theorists suspicious and lead to doubts about the results, a voting advocacy group member said.
“We have three machines and three polling places. That’s it, no backup,” said Olivia Zink, a member of the Franklin City Council and the executive director of Coalition for Open Democracy. “If one goes down, we hand count.”
Zink adds that if the weather is poor, a damp ballot could cause the ballot scanner to malfunction.
“If it’s a sunny, beautiful day, we’re in great shape,” Zink said.
