Election Reality Check: How does SLO County test and secure its Dominion voting machines?
With Election Day a week away, a national resurgence of voting conspiracy theories and misinformation is fanning local concerns about election integrity across the country — including in San Luis Obispo County.
Concerned community members have spoken before the SLO County Board of Supervisors on numerous occasions to share their doubts about voting technology — claiming that machines are faulty, can be hacked and have miscounted ballots and reversed votes in the past.
County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano has regularly denied these claims, confirming that the machines go through rigorous testing before ballot counting begins and are impossible to hack because they are not connected to the internet.
The county contracts with Dominion Voting Systems — one of the largest and most widely used voting machine suppliers in the United States — to scan ballots and count votes during elections.
Dominion has long been in the center of election rumors in America. Last year, the election tech company won nearly $800 million in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News for broadcasting false statements that Dominion’s machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 presidential election from then-president Donald Trump.
Despite the national settlement, concerns about the security of the machines still echo nationally and locally.
North County Supervisor Debbie Arnold has repeatedly asked for a report on the security of Dominion’s machines and requested that the county “open up the machines” and show how they work, according to Cano.
Tampering with a voting machine is a felony crime, Cano said.
“You are asking me to break the law,” she told The Tribune. “You are asking me to commit a felony.”
She also said it would be unnecessary because technical experts at the state and federal level rigorously test the machines before they even arrive at the county’s election center.
But what tests does SLO County election technology go through exactly?
As part of it’s Reality Check series, The Tribune conducted a step-by-step breakdown of how the county’s Dominion voting machines are repeatedly tested and kept secure before, during and after voting.
What certifications do California’s voting systems go through at the state and federal level?
All of Dominion’s products have been tested and accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a nonpartisan federal agency that sets safety and accuracy standards through its Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines.
Independent labs, accredited by the commission, then rigorously test the equipment against hundreds of scenarios, including physical interference, technological tampering, penetration testing that involves experts trying to “break into” the voting system, and even extreme hot and cold weather scenarios. Only then are voting systems given the EAC’s federal stamp of approval.
However, the EAC’s optional guidelines are just that — optional — and states have flexibility in how they follow the federal standards.
“Each state runs elections slightly different,” EAC Chairman Ben Hovland told The Tribune. “A number of states will use the (Voluntary Voting System Guidelines) as a baseline, but maybe they add additional requirements on top of that.”
For example, in California, federal qualification is not required, but only because the state’s requirements for election security meets and exceeds the EAC’s, according to a California Secretary of State voting technology staff member.
“California has one of the most strenuous voting system testing and certification programs in the country,” the Secretary of State staffer said.
The California Secretary of State’s Office of Voting Systems Technology Assessment (OVSTA) was created in 2005 to test and certify all voting systems against the California Voting System Standards (CVSS), the California Elections Code and the California Code of Regulations before they can be sold and used in the state.
SLO County uses Dominion’s Democracy Suite 5.10A encrypted software, which was approved for use in California on July 9, 2020, at an EAC test laboratory.
How are the machines tested and kept secure locally?
After the rigorous testing that takes place on the national and statewide level, the county is actually forbidden from conducting any further testing that would require them to “open up the machines,” said Cano.
Instead, the county conducts other tests before and after voting to ensure the machines are working properly, but they do not tamper with the machines’ internal parts.
The first round of local security checks is logic and accuracy testing conducted by the Clerk-Recorder’s Office well before ballot counting starts. This process, which was open to the public to observe at the start of October, ensures that the tabulators are reading ballots and counting votes correctly.
Over the course of a few days from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4, sets of pre-filled sample ballots are run through every ballot-counting machine, and the results are compared to the expected outcome.
During the testing, every type of ballot is run on every tabulator, said Cano. The county has four Dominion ballot-counting machines, including three smaller Imagecast Central scanners and a new, larger volume HiPro Scanner, which counts three times as quickly as the older models, she said.
Each machine is hooked up to its own computer that tabulates ballots, making cross counting impossible.
Cano said the results of this year’s testing was “100% what it was supposed to be,” meaning that every ballot was accurately counted.
The test ballots intentionally had one mistake in them, which the voting machines caught, identified and recounted accurately when removed — exactly as was meant to happen, Cano said.
After the logic and accuracy testing was completed, the final results were presented to the Secretary of State to approve the machines before voting began. After that point, the ballot-counting room is locked down as election-ready and not touched again before counting begins.
Cano said that all ballots are counted on those machines in that secure room.
“We do not have anything out at the precincts,” she said. “There is no counting that goes on out at the polling places at all. None.”
After voting is complete, the Clerk-Recorder’s Office also does a 1% manual tally to retroactively test the accuracy of the ballot counts, a process that’s also open to the public.
In this manual tally, the Clerk-Recorder’s Office randomly selects and hand-counts a representative 1% of the vote-by-mail and poll ballot batches counted before Election Day and compares those results to the machine-tabulated votes to ensure they match.
The results of the tally are then sent to the Secretary of State’s Office for review.
More often than not, however, inaccuracies in the manual tally are due to human error rather than machine miscounts, which is why SLO County no longer counts all of its votes by hand — and why it has no interest in doing so, even if it were an option under state law, which it is not.
“We can see through the minimum 1% annual tally that humans make a lot more errors,” Clausen said.
Cano pointed out that it is illegal for a county of San Luis Obispo’s size to conduct hand counts for its elections unless a recount has been called.
As far as the security of the machines, Cano said there is no opportunity for them to be tampered with because they are never left alone with just one person.
“There is always two people near the machines in the server room at all times, there’s two or three surveillance cameras that are in there at that time,” she said. “We would know.”
In order to manipulate election results, Cano said, someone would have to gain access to the remote ballot printers to print extra ballots, get into the server room with multi-factor authentication and “horrendous” security codes, then access the the tabulator machines through a secured sign-in to run the fake ballots and publish the results — and they would have to do this all without getting caught.
“None of those steps are possible, let alone all of those” without anyone knowing, Clerk-Recorder’s Office Public Information Officer Erin Clausen said.
For starters, the office compares the number of ballots that were printed to the number they have yet to count at the end of every day, so they would know immediately if false ballots were printed, she said.
Cano said that people are concerned about this happening because, well, it’s happened before in other places. In Colorado, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters allowed an unauthorized person access to the county’s voting machines to manipulate votes.
But as Cano pointed out, it was an internal job, and Peters was caught. She was sentenced to nine years in prison earlier this month.
“What I hear from this is, ‘If it happened in Colorado, tell me, why can’t it happen here?’” Cano said. “For me personally, it is because I take my oath of office just as seriously as I take my role as being a mother, and I would never, ever, ever jeopardize my actions to violate the law or anything that would destroy our democracy.”
Moreover, she pointed out that “every state is different,” and Colorado’s election codes and security measures are not the same as California’s.
Cano made a similar point about a study Supervisor Arnold has referenced multiple times during board meetings that found Dominion voting machines used in Georgia were vulnerable to security breaches. Georgia uses a different version of Dominion software than the one approved for use in California.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the way we are regulated in California,“ she said. “It was a different version.”
Cano also said that the machines cannot be tampered with by hackers — a common concern — because they are not connected to the internet, making them inaccessible remotely.
“Voting systems are designed & certified by the U.S. government to be closed systems that do not rely on Internet connectivity for use,” according to the Dominion’s website. “Remote access does not exist.”
Another concern Cano hears frequently is the amount of time it takes to certify election results, but this is not an indicator of voting fraud, she said.
During the ballot-counting process, any ballots that are not filled out correctly or have distinguishing marks outside the dedicated bubbles are flagged by the machines, and those votes are adjudicated by teams of two election workers with a supervisor to break ties.
“If we don’t know, we don’t change it,” said Cano, but other times the mistake is obvious, like with over-votes, when two bubbles are filled out in a vote for one but the voter clearly crossed out the error.
This adjudication process contributes to the delay in releasing election results.
The Clerk-Recorder’s Office adjudicates about 3% to 5% of the ballots, Cano said. With more than 180,000 registered voters in SLO county, this can easily add up to thousands of ballots in any given election, especially a presidential cycle when voter turnout tends to be higher than usual.
“Lower your expectations,” she said of the necessary wait for results. “If you think I’m counting all 40,000 (ballots) in eight hours, it’s not going to happen. We’ve got to verify signatures, and we’ve got to make sure that these people haven’t voted in other counties. I mean, there’s so many things.”
All of those things are examples of system’s robust security threshold, not vulnerabilities or signs of misconduct.
Election officials have 30 days to certify the election, but Cano said they typically have the final results well within that time frame, even with adjudications.
Cano added that some of the voters’ concerns are simply out of her hands, for example, the lack of legal identification required at polling places and ballot harvesting, which are both dictated by state law, not the Clerk-Recorder’s Office.
“Whether I agree or disagree with the people that have these security concerns, it’s beyond my control,” Cano said.
Voting by mail and ballot drop-offs began on Oct. 8 and end on 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5. Mail-in ballots must be postmarked on or before Nov. 5 and be received by the Clerk-Recorder’s Office no later than seven days after election day.
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
