America’s voting systems are getting old.
Take Louisiana, for instance, where many Gen Z and millennial voters cast primary ballots this month using machines that were older than they were.
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Election officials there talk about having to “cannibalize” parts from dead machines to service others.
“Replacement parts are no longer manufactured,” Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry told a state Senate committee earlier this year. “Simply put, the [election] system has reached the end of its life cycle.”
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A new report out Friday shows the state is not alone in that regard.
If not replaced, by the next presidential election the average age of voting equipment in the U.S. will be 9.3 years, according to research by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and shared exclusively with NPR ahead of its release.
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Historically, jurisdictions replace their equipment right around that age, which could be good timing as voting machine manufacturers have just begun to offer systems that conform with the most recent federal election security guidelines.
Getting counties and states to purchase machines certified to those up-to-date standards is a clear priority for President Trump, who noted the guidelines in his executive order on elections last year.
But in reality, unless Congress makes a massive financial commitment, the new BPC report finds it could take decades before tabulators and other machines adhering to the new standards are the norm in American elections.
“It’s just really slow to make change in the elections industry,” said Will Adler, an elections expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center who co-wrote the report.
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The new standards — known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 (VVSG 2.0) — are widely accepted as best practice and include numerous new security requirements, including requiring all systems to include auditable paper records. That practice has already become the norm in recent years, but it is now mandated.
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But U.S. elections are decentralized, meaning states and local governments run their own elections and also purchase their own equipment on their own budget timelines. That’s how a state like Louisiana can be using certain 30-year-old voting equipment, while voters just a couple of driving hours away in Georgia are voting on equipment that’s only seen a few election cycles.
To replace the entire country’s voting systems with equipment certified to VVSG 2.0 would cost roughly $2.71 billion, according to BPC’s estimate based on historical pricing and manufacturer projections.
Because of that hefty price tag, BPC estimates it could be the 2040s before the standards are ubiquitous in American voting.
“So that’s a long time,” Adler said. “But the good news is that since funding is the main obstacle, if Congress wanted to speed up that transition … it could be much faster.”
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After the contested 2000 presidential election, for instance, Congress allocated more than $3 billion for election infrastructure.
But in more recent years, despite broad concerns from voters about election security, funding support from the federal government has been slowing down. Over the past two years combined, Congress appropriated just $60 million to support elections, more than $800 million leading up to 2020.
Adler hopes that will change, as lawmakers — and their constituents — see the benefits to replacing old equipment.
“Just think about all the benefits you get when you get a new phone or you get a new computer; it runs faster, it’s easier to use, it’s more secure,” Adler said. “So when you upgrade new voting equipment, voters feel those benefits.”
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