Capitol News

The 2020 presidential elections have led to more questions about the software used for voting machines and unearthed stories that prove historical problems surrounding national elections.

Dominion Voting Systems, which supplies 30 percent of the country with voting machines, has received criticism for the voting irregularities caused by their machines and questionable activity by some election staff.

The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Michigan claiming that a glitch in Atrium County caused 6,000 votes that were cast for Trump to go to Biden instead. The glitch was discovered after the historically Republican county turned blue, prompting a call for an investigation.

But some of the reported issues have had more to do with election staff than the software.

In Georgia, Trump called for the state to recount its votes after the GOP alleged that votes were counted after polls closed. 

Jim Bleck, who designed the very first computer voting machine, and built 100,000 voting machines for Sequoia Systems which was later sold to Dominion Voting Systems, said there was always concern of the possibility of “mischief” happening. 

“I think what happened was when we first designed them, I said election people, they knew mischief could happen. So they’d tell stories about the old lever action machines and the cams would wear out so they would put the other party where the cams were worn out,” he said. “There was all kinds of stuff that I heard stories about. And so there was a great deal of sensitivity, security like for us doing that, we had huge stacks of very big specifications from the FEC of things we had to pass.”

Bleck began designing voting machines in the 1980s and said he has heard concerning stories over the years.

“At the time, we were the business people who were trying to keep the business super clean but I'd heard stories from people who had been in for 50 years in the 1950s and '60s and there was just a lot of a lot of stuff going on,” he said.

Bleck said due in part to the problem with voter machines at the time the first machine was designed there was a call to replace the original lever action machines in New York City, for which his firm completed an award-winning design. However, since then, Bleck – who is no longer designing voting machines – said many companies have scrambled to create machines that are easier to build, which can compromise security. 

“There's been companies out there trying to use tablets,” he said. “There's companies out there trying to do all kinds of things that are fast and simple to bring everything together, but the security starts at the end point.”

Bleck said another thing people should remember is that despite the supposed security of any system, the voting process is only as secure as those who are running it. 

There are opportunities for fraud to occur when voting machines are left unattended after being delivered to facilities on election day, Bleck said. 

“The day of the election: so at 4-o'clock in the morning, think a thousand machines in a warehouse and then they go on trucks and off,” he said. “When you think about an election and the mischief that can happen, you realize that you need to think through all the logistics. You can't leave stuff laying around if it's unsecured.”