Election Integrity and Electronic Voting Machines in 2018 Georgia, USA

Abstract

Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems have been shown time and time again to be vulnerable to hacking and malfunctioning. Despite mounting evidence that DREs are unfit for use, some states in the U.S. continue to use them for local, state, and federal elections. Georgia uses DREs exclusively, among many practices that have made its elections unfair and insecure. We give a brief history of election security and integrity in Georgia from the early 2000s to the 2018 election. Nonparametric permutation tests give strong evidence that something caused DREs not to record a substantial number of votes in this election. The undervote rate in the Lieutenant Governor’s race was far higher for voters who used DREs than for voters who used paper ballots. Undervote rates were strongly associated with ethnicity, with higher undervote rates in precincts where the percentage of Black voters was higher. There is specific evidence of DRE malfunction, too: one of the seven DREs in the Winterville Train Depot polling place had results that appear to be “flipped” along party lines. None of these associations or anomalies can reasonably be ascribed to chance.

Keywords: permutation testing, anomaly detection, DREs