Electronic Voting Machines and the Election

Thomas Cooley, Ben Griffy, and Peter Rupert (not endorsing or questioning -- but seems worth noting):

Electronic Voting Machines and the Election: Three states are facing or currently undergoing a recount of votes cast, after a number of computer scientists reported some evidence of problems with the electronic voting. This finding was heavily disputed in the media, and seemingly little evidence was produced to support the conclusion that there was malfeasance in counties with electronic voting. Indeed, following the initial media response, the lead computer scientist backed down from initial reports, saying that there are flaws in electronic voting that could be easily exploited, and that an audit is important, but there isn’t direct evidence. We use our data to explore the claim that counties with electronic voting exhibited different voting patterns than their paper peers. What we find is definitely troubling: in some of the swing states, and specifically in states that were projected to vote Democratic at the top of the ticket, those with electronic voting had a decrease in the percent of the total vote going for the Clinton-Kaine campaign, and an increase for the Trump-Pence campaign. We try to determine if this is spurious by checking for patterns in other places with electronic voting, as well as during the 2012 election. We only find this correlation for swing states during the 2016 election. ...

Their conclusion:

... It’s tough to draw precise conclusions as to what these correlations mean. It’s still possible that there are other factors driving our results, other than electronic voting. But, what we do know is that results in key swing states differ in counties with electronic voting. Further, the patterns in these counties are not exhibited by other similar but not electorally important counties across the country. Additionally, electronic voting had no impact in swing states during the 2012 election. Taken together, it seems tough to dismiss the correlations that we have found in the data. While we don’t know how to interpret the findings practically, it certainly lends credence to the efforts to initiate recounts in several of the swing states.