On Election Security

Last Thursday an Interim Study was conducted at the Capitol in Lincoln on LR357. According to Sen. Rick Holdcroft of Bellevue, the sponsor of the legislation, the purpose of the study was "to determine to what extent, if any, there is a necessity to bolster election security in the State of Nebraska." To be sure, Nebraskans need to have confidence that their elections are secure and that the vote counting process accurately reflects the will of the people.

The two recent assassination attempts on the life of former president, Donald J. Trump, have settled the question once and for all as to whether individuals exist who are trying to interfere in our elections. Taking the life of a presidential candidate represents the most extreme form of election interference, and anyone who is so brazen to overtly attempt the assassination of the former president of the United States certainly does not lack the audacity to try to interfere covertly with the results of an election or to tamper with our vote counting machines.

The Interim Study focused on several potential problems with election security. The first problem arose during the days of the coronavirus outbreak. COVID-19 affected the elections of 2020 and 2022 by significantly increasing the number of early voting and mail-in ballots across the State. More than 50 percent of voters in Douglas County, for example, now vote early or by mail. The increase of early voting and voting by mail has increased the potential for voter fraud by illegally stuffing the ballot box.

Voting with a photo ID is also troublesome. Ever since voters passed Initiative 432 in 2022, which requires voters to show a photo ID when voting, validating mail-in ballots and ballots placed in drop boxes has become an issue. While state law currently requires voters to show a photo ID when they register to vote and to record their driver's license number on their early voting or mail-in ballot, this process skirts the requirement to show a photo ID at the actual time of voting and opens the door for anyone who illicitly obtains driver's license numbers to cast mail-in ballots for other registered voters.

Another problem relates to the advancement of election software and tabulating machines. For example, a skilled hacker might want to cheat in the election by changing the data contained in voter rolls stored by the software and counted in the tabulating machines. Because this data eventually gets stored onto a military grade thumb drive before it gets sent to the Nebraska Secretary of State to be certified, the possibility for interference exists at this point in the process. For example, a fraudster would merely have to replace the military grade thumb drive with one of his own in order to change the outcome of an election.

Finally, the potential for election fraud exists with the ballot counting machines themselves. While the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) ballot counting machines used in Nebraska never come with modems already installed, the worry is that one could be secretly installed shortly before an election, giving online access to nefarious groups or even to foreign agents. Because the ES&S contract forbids the Nebraska Secretary of State from opening up the machines and inspecting them for himself without authorized personnel being present from ES&S, this has caused suspicion about the use of such ballot counting machines. However, both Wayne Bena, the Assistant Secretary of State, and Chris Wlaschin of ES&S, agreed at the public hearing that such an inspection could be arranged.

I share these things with you today, not to cause anxiety about our elections, but to show you how the Legislature has been taking positive steps forward to protect the integrity of our elections. Last year I had introduced two bills that would have solved these problems, LB 228 and LB230, but neither bill advanced out of the Government, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. When it comes to elections, the time to act is before we have a problem.