'Glitch' affects touchscreen voting machines in swing Pennsylvania county: 'Peak of mistrust'

Election officials in Northampton County, Pennsylvania — which went for Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 — are scrambling to address issues with touchscreen voting machines ahead of the 2024 election.

Politico reports that the machines, which were manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and used for the first time in 2019, have been recently plagued by a "programming glitch" that officials say was caused by human error. In a 2019 judicial race, that glitch caused the machines to "significantly undercount" votes for the Democratic candidate.

The glitch reappeared this year, when voters who cast ballots in local and state legislative elections on November 7 noticed that the results on the printed record didn't match their choices they submitted when voting electronically for a down-ballot judicial race. Both election officials and ES&S employees said the glitch was attributed to a "one-off" human error made during the programming process and maintained that the machines are "highly reliable and not to blame."

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“We’re at the peak of mistrust of one another, but until that subsides, counties like ours need to be nearly perfect, and I think this system allows us to do that,” Northampton County executive Lamont McClure told Politico.

ES&S' ExpressVote XL machines, which Northampton County uses, prints out both a barcode used to officially tabulate a voter's choice, along with a text record so voters can ensure their choices were recorded properly. However, in the two down-ballot judicial races on November 7, voters' choices were swapped in the text section — but not the barcode — on the question of whether to keep or retain a judge.

"We are sure and positive that the voter selections are actually being captured," said Linda Bennett, who is ES&S' senior vice president of account management. She added that because the barcode portion remained the same, voters' choices were still accurately reflected in the official counting of ballots and that the error didn't affect the outcome of the election.

Still, McClure vowed that the Northampton County would "endeavor mightily" to make sure the error doesn't happen again, particularly in one of the most hard-fought counties in one of the most pivotal swing states whose 19 electoral college votes helped decide both the 2016 and 2020 elections.

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"The broader concern is that an incident like this would be misused to undermine confidence in our electoral process," Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told Politico.

"Since 2019, the theory has been well, that was a big mistake, but we caught it and we’ve implemented new processes to make sure nothing like that would ever happen again," Northampton County Democratic Party chair Matthew Munsey told the publication. He added that after the recent glitch, he "[doesn't] know how we can restore trust with these machines."