CityState: Reporter
Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea says
Rhode Island’s elections are secure — and
if foreign actors tried to breach the state’s
system, she has not been informed. In 2016,
Rhode Island modernized its voting
hardware. Voters have been feeding paper
ballots into optical scanners since 1997,
when then-Secretary of State Jim Langevin
replaced lever-style machines. Twenty
years later, as those cutting-edge machines
were on the verge of breakdown, the state
will spend $9.28 million to maintain and
lease 590 new machines over eight years,
with an option to buy.
The election result, says Gorbea, is protected
by four layers of security. At the end
of the evening when a machine is closed,
a double-encrypted, unofficial total is wirelessly
transferred to the Board of Elections.
In addition, thumb and back-up drives in
the custody of an election official store the
data for each precinct. Canvassers match
the election night tapes to the results sent
to the state Board of Elections to ensure
they match. “We have moments that flag
questionable votes, and we have paper
ballots. That’s why I sleep well at night,”
Gorbea says. “We can check the machine
tallies versus number of votes cast.”
In addition, the state has been cleaning
up its bloated voter rolls. In the early 2000s,
the cities’ and towns’ thirty-nine separate
databases of voters — some still in spreadsheets
— were replaced by a centralized,
computerized voter registration system,
which helped to flag duplicate registrations
within the state.
In 2015, Rhode Island joined the Electronic
Registration Information Center
(ERIC). ERIC, with thirty member states
and the District of Columbia, cross-matches
data sets, such as voter registration and
DMV records, to clean the rolls of voters
who are deceased, moved within the state
or to another ERIC state. And in June of
2016, Rhode Island began automatically
registering or updating voter registration
address information in any interaction
with the Department of Motor Vehicles,
allowing the Secretary of State and local
Board of Canvassers to better catch and
eliminate in-state duplicate registrations.
The state maintains a system that
is labor intensive and technologically
designed to make it difficult for anyone to
make bulk changes. Every change to the
voter registration database relies on
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