Chambana Sun

Champaign County Recorder of Deeds Mark Shelden says he knows voting machine tabulations are open to mistakes, manipulation and in the wrong hands, outright fraud.

In his 14 years as Champaign County Clerk, Shelden oversaw more than 20 elections as well as the purchase of voting machines from Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software (E S & S), the largest player in the industry. 

“I think ES & S's equipment is excellent, but in the wrong hands, it's subject to fraud,” Shelden told the Chambana Sun. 

Shelden said there are ways to alter user logs within voting machines, enabling bad actors to potentially change an election’s outcome undetected.  

“All of the systems are like virtually any kind of computer system out there,” he said. “It has a back door for users to go in and make changes to the data outside of the normal pattern, the normal way the data comes in.” 

Shelden said the so-called “back door” is rarely spoken about by elections officials. 

“This is a little known fact,” he said. “I've Googled it and haven't been able to find people who have really talked about it. I've talked to other election officials who really don't like to talk about it because they don't want people to have less confidence in the system.” 

Shelden, a Republican, said that during one election, he and the Champaign County Democratic Party chairman worked to manually enter the vote results into one of their E S & S machines. 

Shelden said they did so to ensure all ballots were counted, after a glitch prevented them from loading in precinct results tape, as is customary.

This manual entry is logged by the E S & S system, Shelden said, so an auditor could theoretically examine it at a later date to determine if there was tampering. But he said the user log could be tampered with itself, allowing someone intent on committing voter fraud to cover their tracks.

An unencrypted text file logging all user and voter actions is maintained within the ballot tabulating machine. That file, which is sent to state election authorities who use it to certify results, would be reviewed in any audit the of the entire vote tabulation process. 

However, Shelden said that with a simple word processor, a bad actor could open the file, change its contents, delete the original file and upload a new one, undetected without a forensic audit.

“Theoretically, if somebody went in and changed the results, these actions would show up in that audit file," Shelden said. “But the person who did it could just go and clean up the audit file and take out the incriminating information."

Poll watchers are protection against fraud

Shelden said that while he does not have direct evidence that election systems have been manipulated to perpetrate fraud, he has had suspicions over years. 

“The poll watchers, the people looking at that system and trying to make sure that it is indeed done honestly, they need to get that audit file and make sure it is created and presented to them immediately and make sure that it's not tampered with,” he said. 

Shelden said legislators should address the issue to ensure audits are standardized in some form or fashion. 

“That to me is a super critical thing,” he said. “I think the law should require that. But it doesn't. In terms of ballot integrity, are laws are designed by attorneys and not by election administrators who actually know how these systems work.”

The elections space as a whole, including election machines such as those produced by E S & S, is largely unregulated, left up to local officials free to use their own discretion.

“There's not a whole lot of oversight,” Shelden said. “And there's not a lot of guidance given. And hopefully after this there's going to be an effort to provide more guidance and more transparency to this process because we need transparency.” 

While Shelden was mostly complimentary of E S & S itself, plenty of others have been critical. 

E S & S has more than half of the market share in the voting machine industry. This means half of all Americans casting presidential elections last week did so on E S & S machines.

The company has received attention in the past, when errors have been revealed in elections using its machines.

In 2019, the company’s machines did not record more than 150,000 votes in Georgia Lt. Governor race. 

Last December, E S & S machines malfunctioned, resulting in the wrong candidates being selected on ballots during an election held in Northampton County, Penn. 

Those same machines were used for the Nov. 3 presidential election. 

The company is known to employ former election officials as lobbyists across the country. 

E S & S has used litigation to keep its market share. In 2018, ES&S filed suit against Cook County after it lost a $30 million contract.  

The company’s machines can be found in 42 states, 4,500 local governments as well as in two U.S. territories.

ES&S is owned by Omaha-based McCarthy Capital. 

Last year, a contingent of U.S. Senate Democrats sent letters to the three largest voting machine companies, including E S & S, seeking to better understand how they operate.