What’s happening?
Following a number of citizen comments at the beginning of the meeting, commissioners questioned whether a new update to the county’s election machine system on Aug. 10 would provide additional tech support for the current systems used by the county in elections.
The main concern shared by residents was whether the systems could be hacked and lead to any level of tampering with votes and election results.
“We spent over $11 million trying to make this county voting system work properly for each and every one of us,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Robert Walker said. “I know that every computer can be hacked, and that's honestly, that's way over my head ... we can't not proceed [with the election]. I mean, I don't understand what the answer is. I heard no answers, but we don't have them either.”
Suzie Harvey, election administrator for the county, said many election staff had already been trained on the new software, and with only 50 days until the election, there was no time to switch to a new system and meet all federal and state election requirements.
Quotes of note
“A lot of that counts on an insecure network and saying voting is going across open internet; this is not going over open internet. It is behind a secured network, which, obviously we take large measures to make sure that stays that way, and it's also encrypted information moving across,” said Daniel Kinard, informational technology operations manager for Montgomery County.
“The actual voting machines only plug into electrical outlets, they don't connect to any network,” said Harvey. “The record of each vote is saved into a memory device that's contained in those scanning devices that the ballots are scanned into, and they're secured every night ... with locks and numbered seals.”
The outcome
Commissioners voted to use the same election system for the Nov. 5 election as the previous year, but they requested additional information regarding potential issues in the county’s election system.
County Attorney BD Griffin also informed commissioners a lawsuit regarding the Hart InterCivic voting system data was ongoing in Travis County between the company and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, but could not share more details at the time.
