PHILADELPHIA _ Pennsylvania's top elections official told a federal judge Tuesday that chaos would ensue if the court blocked Philadelphia and two other counties from using their new voting machines during the 2020 presidential elections.
"Your honor, I can't overstate ... the chaos that would ensue, frankly," Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar said of the primary election. "The voters who just learned a new machine would have to have something, some ability to vote."
Nor, she said, was she sure it would be feasible for the general election.
Lawyers for 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein are seeking to have those voting machines decertified by the state, arguing they violate a settlement requiring voter-verifiable paper ballots be used by every voter in the state. City and state elections officials disagree, and their lawyers sought Tuesday to demonstrate both that the machines should be allowed under the agreement, and that decertifying them would create massive problems this year.
Counties would have to scramble to select, purchase and implement new machines, she said, a task made more difficult because "everything takes longer, takes more resources, takes more preparation in a presidential year than in any other year."
Boockvar was the main witness Tuesday, fielding questions from lawyers for Stein, the state, and the judge before breaking for lunch in the early afternoon.
A lawyer for Stein argued that counties could replace their voting machines very quickly, citing examples of counties implementing machines in just a few months.
Stein and the Pennsylvania voters joining her as plaintiffs say the counties should replace the machines in question, the ExpressVote XL from vendor Election Systems & Software, because they undermine election security by making it difficult to properly verify votes and ensure they are tallied properly.
The voting machines, they say, violate the settlement by relying on bar codes, not properly allowing voters to confirm their selections, and producing a paper record that is not technically a ballot under Pennsylvania law.
The state, joined by Philadelphia, argues that the machines are secure, that the record produced is a paper ballot and can be properly confirmed by voters before being cast, and that blocking the machines from being used in 2020 would be costly and chaotic.
U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond has no specific timeline for making a decision on whether the case should continue, but the timeline is extremely tight. If he allows the case to move forward and it ultimately leads to the statewide decertification of the ExpressVote XL voting system, Philadelphia and two other counties would need to quickly purchase and implement new voting machines, at a cost of millions of dollars, by November.
That, elections officials worry, would not only be costly but chaotic, confusing voters and elections workers, and ultimately affecting turnout and the ability of people to cast votes.
On the other hand, the plaintiffs say, insecure machines being used to cast votes, especially in a critical battleground state like Pennsylvania in a major presidential election, would also disenfranchise voters by potentially miscounting their votes.
Stein had previously sought a recount of Pennsylvania ballots but was stymied by the state's voting machines: Most voters cast ballots on electronic voting machines that left no paper trail, making a manual recount of individual ballots impossible. She sued the state, joined by a group of Pennsylvania voters.
In 2018, Gov. Tom Wolf ordered all counties in the state to replace their voting machines in time for the 2020 presidential election, with all votes cast leaving paper records that can be audited and recounted by hand. The state then agreed with Stein and the other plaintiffs that following through on that order, so all voters use paper ballots, would settle the lawsuit.
But Stein and other advocates for hand-marked paper ballots say the machine selected by Philadelphia, along with Northampton and Cumberland Counties, violates that agreement.
The ExpressVote XL is a touchscreen system that, after a voter finishes making selections, prints a piece of paper with a series of bar codes and plain text listing of those selections. Voters then submit the paper, casting their ballot, by having the paper fed back into the machine.
The bar codes are immediately read by the machines to tally votes unofficially, though the Pennsylvania Department of State has ordered the plain text listing of vote choices to be the official record of the vote. In theory, if a machine is altered to print the wrong bar codes, or the bar codes are improperly read, that would allow the proper votes to still be counted during an audit or recount.
Critics say the machines are difficult to use and that the paper records they produces often go unchecked by voters before being submitted, undermining their ability to accurately convey voter intent. The machines are also more vulnerable to attack or mishap, critics say, than simpler systems in which voters manually make choices on a paper ballot that is then scanned.
