I doubt anyone is seriously looking forward to a return to the madness that wound up engulfing the 2020 elections, but in at least one rural Pennsylvania district, it may be unavoidable. In Northampton County, the new touchscreen voting machines they installed in 2019 wound up “glitching” badly enough to render the results of the vote unverifiable in the opinion of some. But residents were assured that the problems had since been ironed out. That proved not to be the case earlier this month when yet another “glitch” rendered flawed results. Now people are speaking out and demanding answers before we head into the 2024 presidential contest. Local officials insist that the system is on track and this year’s irregularities were caused by “human error” and not faulty software. (Politico)

Voters in the swing county of Northampton, Pennsylvania, mostly moved on after their new touchscreen voting machines glitched during a down-ballot judge’s race in 2019.

But when a similar issue cropped up earlier this month, it triggered a backlash within the county — one that has left state and local election officials in this key swing state racing to restore voter confidence ahead of what could be another contentious presidential election.

“We’re at the peak of mistrust of one another, but until that subsides, counties like ours need to be nearly perfect, and I think this system allows us to do that,” County Executive Lamont McClure told POLITICO before Northampton certified the vote on Tuesday, arguing the glitch resulted from human error.

Even if we take these election officials at their word and assume that a human error led to the glitch, that’s not very much comfort. There are still going to be human beings involved in the loop next November. What’s to stop yet another human error from fouling the waters when the chips are really on the line? That’s particularly important in a state as closely divided as Pennsylvania which Joe Biden only carried by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020, assuming he actually did.

There are things that could still be done between now and then if these people are truly interested in holding fair, honest, transparent elections next year. First of all, they should be recruiting more election workers now and holding rigorous training sessions to minimize the chance of another “human error.” Then outside experts should be brought in to conduct independent testing on the voting machines with the process and the results being immediately shown to the media and the public. Some efforts along those lines might go quite a way toward restoring public faith in the system.

Of course, even then the voters need to have faith that the people operating the system are doing so honestly and impartially. Look no further for proof than the disaster that’s currently unfolding in the Bridgeport, Connecticut mayoral election. They’re about to hold their third and possibly fourth election for the same position. It didn’t really matter whether the voting machines were working properly or not. People were caught on video stuffing ballots into boxes and they included campaign workers and election workers. If it can happen in Bridgeport, it can happen and very likely is happening elsewhere.

Whether or not the system works is not nearly as important as whether people believe that the system works. The most reliable voting machines on the planet aren’t going to maintain order if most people simply assume that the election was either rigged or the interface was so broken that there is no way to verify who won. I will remind you yet again of what happened in the election in New York’s 22nd Congressional District in 2020. That race wasn’t called until weeks after Congress was seated and the number of irregularities and procedural errors involved, along with some fully proven voter fraud, meant that we will never know who actually won. Why would anyone have confidence in such a result? And without the confidence of the voters, the system implodes.