By Austin Carr
Photographs by Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

Chip Trowbridge is confident his voting machines are secure, but he’ll run the thought experiment with you. An assortment of the machines are resting on a counter at the downtown Boston office of Clear Ballot Group Inc., and Trowbridge, the company’s chief technology officer, is facetiously pointing out the bonkers number of steps a bad actor would need to take to compromise one of its ClearCast computer scanners.

Any tampering would have to take place on-site, because the ClearCast systems aren’t connected to the internet. Most arrive at county voting precincts in fastened containers or locked cages. “There’s one 120-volt plug out the back, and that’s it—no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no Ethernet, no nothing,” Trowbridge says. Republican and Democratic officials are supposed to set them up together by tearing security seals with identifying serial numbers and entering unique passwords after booting them up. Data is stored on three redundant drives, including two locked-in USB sticks, and any poll worker inputs on the devices (such as removing one of the sticks) are logged by the equivalent of an airplane’s black box.

 Then there’s the paper trail. On Election Day, voters feed their handmarked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed. The scanners are tested with sample votes beforehand, and often afterward, to ensure there are no discrepancies between digital counts and physical entries.
 
Read the full article from Bloomberg Businessweek here.