On Tuesday, voting will close in one of the most divisive US elections in history, and Americans will have decided whether to make Kamala Harris or Donald Trump their next president.

Most polls say the election is too close to call, meaning it is likely that small numbers of votes will be the difference between Democrat candidate Harris or the Republican Party’s Trump taking victory across a number of key battleground states.

The narrow margins involved in the race for the White House means the spotlight will likely fall on the machines and associated digital infrastructure used in many states to record and count votes. Such machines were the focus of much ire from Trump and his allies following the 2020 election, when it was falsely claimed that millions of Trump votes were lost, effectively handing victory to Joe Biden.

Though no evidence ever emerged to support these wild claims, this is unlikely to stop Trump’s MAGA army from pointing the finger at the technology if their man fails to win the election for a second time. For providers of this technology - in the US and around the world - proving that their machines are safe and reliable remains one of the biggest challenges.

The US and the voting machine: a complicated relationship

The amount of technology involved in the voting process for Americans varies from state to state.

According to data from Verified Voting, which monitors the use of technology in US elections, 70 percent of citizens casting their votes in the presidential election will do so using a good old-fashioned pencil and paper. These votes are then totted up, normally using an optical character recognition (OCR) machine, although some states still count ballots by hand.

Five percent vote using Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems, where votes are logged and counted on the same device. DRE was once seen as the premier type of voting machine and a potential panacea to problems with vote counting, and following the 2000 presidential election, when controversy over lost and unclear paper ballots in Florida threw the result into question, the US government committed $4.1 billion in federal funding to election technology via the Help America Vote act.

Most of the cash was spent on DRE because they were the only voting machine on the market at the time that enabled disabled citizens to cast their ballots independently and privately, something it became mandatory for all states to provide under the act. The machines became commonplace, and at their peak usage in 2006, DRE systems were being used to count some 38 percent of votes in the US, according to information from Election Data Services.

But since then, state governments have started to forget about DRE. “With DRE, there is no software-independent means of verification,” says Warren Stewart, an analyst with Verified Voting. “The correctness of election results is entirely dependent on the correctness of the software. Voting is a ‘black box’ situation, you can’t track who has voted for which candidate after they leave the voting booth, so there was no trail and as such the results are completely unverifiable.”

Problems with the system came to a head in 2006 in Florida (again), when 18,000 votes were lost in a Congressional election in Sarasota County due to an error with DRE machines. The election was decided by a margin of less than 500 votes.

As the popularity of DRE dwindled, a new type of machine was brought to market for disabled voters. Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) allow voters to choose a candidate on screen and a print-out is produced which can be counted via OCR or by hand. This print-out can be used for auditing and verification of results. The first of this type of machine to make a splash was the AutoMARK from ES&S, which soon noticed its device could be used by non-disabled voters too.

“ES&S had a lightbulb moment and realized it would be good to convince DRE jurisdictions to replace DREs with ballot marking devices,” Stewart says. “The incredible thing is that, in 2018, only 1.5 percent of Americans were living in jurisdictions using BMDs.

"By 2020 this was 20 percent, and now it’s over a quarter, so that’s an enormous change which has happened in a short space of time.” Indeed, 25.1 percent of voters going to the polls next week will do so using BMD machines, Verified Voting data says.

Now multiple vendors are selling BMDs to US state governments. After the 2020 US presidential election, conspiracy theories swirled around BMDs provided by Dominion, an election technology specialist (unrelated to utility Dominion Energy).

Trump claimed on X, the platform then known as Twitter, that Dominion devices deleted 2.7 million of his votes. The claim was found to be baseless, and Dominion agreed a $787 million settlement with Fox News after taking the news network to court because it broadcast claims that the company helped rig the election against Trump. X CEO Elon Musk appears to still be pushing the narrative. Dominion declined the opportunity to take part in this article

How digital voting infrastructure works

Another company that got caught up in the 2020 vote rigging controversy was Smartmatic, which, like Dominion, has developed an array of election technologies.

Founded in the US but now headquartered in the UK, in September, it won undisclosed damages from cable TV station Newsmax over claims of vote rigging involving its machines at the 2020 US Presidential election.

Smartmatic works with election management bodies in 36 countries, and claims its machines have helped election commissions process 3.6 billion votes since 2000.

While the company itself relies on cloud services from AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as a data center located at one of its offices, to support its work internally, Smartmatic CTO Eduardo Correia told DCD that the infrastructure used by its clients varies from country to country.

He explains that while voting machines usually incorporate their own storage, the company’s back-end applications “are configured to interface with various types of data center environments.”

“For election projects, the responsibility for deciding the type of data center rests with the client,” Correia says. “Clients generally retain ownership of their data and, as such, dictate its management protocols.”

Correia adds that Smartmatic gives its clients “the autonomy to establish their own dedicated data centers, contract services from third-party providers, or utilize cloud-based solutions.”

Its DRE voting machine has built-in removable memory units that store encrypted votes, Correia explains. These can be removed and physically transported to the count site to be decrypted. Data can also be transmitted via secure networks, though the CTO is at pains to point out that the machines are all air-gapped and not connected to any network - or each other - while the votes are being cast and logged.

“Every machine has a unique set of encryption keys and certificates, and these protocols are changed on every machine with every election,” Correia says.

The future of the voting machine

The US isn’t the only country deploying digital infrastructure to help with the voting process.

“In Africa, BMD are being implemented alongside biometric capabilities to bolster voter authentication and reduce voter impersonation, one of the oldest types of election irregularities,” Smartmatic’s Correia says.

Interest in online voting has also increased, with countries including Germany, Canada, and Mexico experimenting with methods of allowing voters to have their say over the Internet, though this is potentially fraught with security and voter verification difficulties.

Correia expects AI to play a significant role in the election technology of the future, describing it as an area with “great potential.” He says: “From combating election disinformation and generating actionable data to improve the efficiency of election administration, AI has numerous applications that can significantly boost election integrity.”

In the short-term, Correia knows that the challenge for technology vendors is to convince voters that their technology is accurate and secure, and points out that Smartmatic’s devices have been independently audited by the likes of EY and PwC. But he says the “information ecosystem” plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions.

Stewart does not expect a single voting machine technology to become dominant across the US because of the fragmented nature of state governments. “It’s not just the technology,” he says. “All the rules about things like voter ID and when people can vote vary from state to state.

“In any case, you can argue that having so many different methods across jurisdictions is safer. Even where different states are using the same machine, they often have different versions of equipment with different firmware that goes through different verification process. Many would say this makes it more difficult to commit widespread fraud.”

He believes the vendors are making great efforts to explain the safety of their technology, but that convincing the public nothing underhand is going on is an “uphill battle.”

“Voting machine manufacturers have become more forthcoming in demonstrating how the results from their machines can be verified,” he says. “And they now have equipment where they can legitimately say they are being transparent because they can show everyone how it works.

“The vendors are doing a really good job at this point, but it’s nearly impossible to get through the wall of misinformation - it’s far more exciting to talk about conspiracy theories than it is to discuss audits or logic and accuracy testing.”

Despite the stories that emerge from the darker corners of the Internet, Stewart says the current combination of digital and manual vote verification is helping ensure that an accurate result will be reached when Americans go to the polls.

“Votes are recorded primarily on paper ballots, and in most states there’s an audit process in place that can be carried out in a way that just wasn’t possible 20 years ago,” he says. “Whatever people may think, this will be the most transparent and accurate election ever.”