Scans vs. Scams

Late in the afternoon of November 7, not even forty hours after polls closed on the presidential election of 2024, a kind of calm seemed to be settling over Chip Trowbridge ’90. It didn’t owe to the result of the vote so much as it did to the decisive Electoral College margin by which Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris to become the 47^th president of the United States. There would not be, it seemed apparent, a repeat of the 2020 aftermath, when Trump cast aspersions on the election process, charged widespread voter fraud, and questioned the integrity of poll workers, all without substantive evidence. His refusal to accept the results of the vote set off a wild chain of events that began with dozens of unsuccessful courtroom challenges and culminated two months later with a violent, unprecedented attempt at the Capitol to halt the certification of the election results.

It also cost Fox News $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems after several of the network’s hosts broadcast false statements about Dominion machines having been rigged to steal the election for Joe Biden. So, for Trowbridge, the chief technology officer at Clear Ballot Group Inc., his relief derived from the idea that his industry — voting systems — and the hundreds of thousands of poll workers and election officials they support would be spared the lawsuits, harassment, and even death threats they previously endured. And that, he says, nodding to the obvious, is good.

“The fact that it was decisive helps,” he says, “because … I think there is a much less chance or a lower chance that there will be continued litigation through November, December, into January, like what we have seen.”

Into late winter, Trowbridge’s estimation has proven correct. Though the nation’s political divide remains deep, Trowbridge can testify to the reliability of voting in the United States and the fantastical chances of any widespread scheme to corrupt it. He takes you through the many layers of security checks and redundancies in the voting process, including physical security measures, ballot design and verification, and the separation of ballots from identifying information. He’s just as quick to underscore the commitment to integrity by the officials and staffers who run the elections on the local level.

“Election officials take their jobs seriously,” Trowbridge says. “And part of that seriousness is — whether they may have some sort of partisan affiliation as a person — you never see it. And everyone that I work with, they really just want to make sure that they count everyone’s vote accurately.”

Trowbridge’s observation includes the civic-minded poll workers who volunteer their time to support the voters in a given district.

“More than anything, they just want to be done by 11 p.m. and not show up in the news,” he says. “I mean, really, we’re talking underfunded, understaffed, overworked people.”

Clear Ballot’s machines are certified in fourteen — both “red” and “blue” ones — to record the choices of some 40 million registered voters. What began as a small election-auditing outfit just over a decade ago is now the fourth-largest vote-tabulation company in the nation. Clear Ballot’s ClearCastGo machines allow paper ballots to be scanned quickly and efficiently; its accessible ClearMark machines produce an identical paper ballot that is verifiable and auditable. Clear Ballot was founded and staffed by former engineers from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Endeca Technologies, which is where Trowbridge had spent his career in technology and software before joining them in 2022.

“You probably used my software if you ever shopped online at Lowe’s, Walmart, Home Depot, J. Crew, or L.L. Bean,” he says. “We invented the search system where you filter by brand, category, color, size, but then we added merchandising stuff on top of it. That was my background.”

Clear Ballot is part of a trend that is in some ways doing a technological about-face, returning the industry to the more analog, paper-based ways of the past, but with modern security ideals in mind. From Colonial times, when voters were sworn in and declared their choice of candidate by speaking it aloud, the methods of recording votes have advanced through drop-in ballot boxes to lever-style devices that could successfully punch a hole next to a candidate’s name on a ballot. This style reached its zenith in the mid-1960s, when the smaller, less expensive, and more accurate Votomatic became the standard.

Those were not perfect, however. The 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was muddled by “hanging chads” — the perforated squares that line up with the names of candidates — in Florida, and the matter wasn’t decided for Bush until a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The surrounding fiasco prompted the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which calls for minimum standards in each state for election administration. States were required to upgrade their voting equipment to mitigate questions about voter intent and improve accessibility for voters with physical disabilities. Direct Recording Devices, or DREs, which record votes electronically, came from this, but they do not produce a paper record and their use today is limited.

“The bulk of our ballots in the U.S. are paper-based now,” Trowbridge says of the move toward optical scanners that produce a voter-verified paper audit trail. “And what’s cool about it is: Great, [suppose] the technology is hacked. Guess what. You still have the paper record of the electorate’s choices, so if you have to, you can count the paper. The paper is the ultimate fail-safe.”

Ah, but that word: hacked. It was central to the “Stop the Steal” movement. Is hacking these machines even possible? Here, Trowbridge points to an article that ran in the January 1990 issue of Spy magazine titled “Is There a Santa Claus?” In it, Richard Waller examined the logistics of Santa’s around-the-world Christmas Eve mission and enumerated in five points how the physics would render the task utterly impossible. Though its ultimate conclusion wasn’t exactly revelatory, the tongue-in-cheek piece did illustrate just how wide the chasm is between childlike naïveté and the ability to absorb the realistic limitations of what’s conceivable, even when granting such magical possibilities as flying reindeer.

The conviction that it is possible to perpetrate widespread fraud on paper-based voting machines requires a similar suspension of disbelief, according to Trowbridge. ClearCast machines are not connected to the internet — there is only an electrical cord running from the back, no different from a vacuum cleaner’s — so tampering cannot be perpetrated via a remote server; it would have to occur at the voting site.

Even before they are shipped from their manufacturing facility in New Hampshire to voting precincts, ClearCast machines are tested and packed with a taped seal indicating an inventory number. Each unit has three seals on the case, and three on the devices inside the case. If a scanner needs to be cleaned, a team of Republican and Democratic monitors from the precinct will watch Trowbridge or a colleague closely “to make sure that I’m not doing anything bad.” If a seal needs to be broken, the monitors will ensure the inventory number matches the one they have in their log book.

“And then, when I’m done doing the servicing,” he says, “they’ll close it back up and they’ll reseal it with a new seal, and in their log book, they’ll put the new inventory control number for that.”

Once ballots are fed into the machine to be scanned, data is stored on three redundant drives, including two fixed USBs. Anything done on the devices by a poll worker is logged by a recording device not unlike the black box on a jet.

In Cleveland, where Trowbridge spent the final days of the campaign, about 1,200 Clear Ballot devices are employed, with each of those used by anywhere from 500 to 2,000 voters, with their votes tabulated and reported as election night results. But even as vote totals are being reported, those paper ballots are sent to a heavily secured central office to be retabulated on high-volume scanners with completely different hardware from different manufacturers, running different software.

“They’re rescanning every ballot,’ says Trowbridge, adding that these will become the official results of that district’s election. So, even if a malefactor somehow managed to corrupt the ClearCast scanner — and again, Trowbridge cannot underscore just how unlikely this is — it’s just one machine that cannot “talk” to any others. Unless the hypothetical wrongdoer could also somehow manage to hack the central count system, the discrepancy will be obvious. And all of this is before any auditing takes place.

“They’ll know that because they’ll be able to compare the results from what happened at the precinct with what happened in the central tabulation,” he explains, adding that random samples are also reviewed by hand to avoid incongruities with the electronic outcomes. “And that’s just the start of it. The amount of checks in the system, it’s just astounding.”

It’s important to remember that even if a malefactor somehow managed to hack a scanner, it would alter the results of just a solitary voting machine out of the thousands some districts use. It’s not the sort of fraud anyone could reasonably call “widespread.”

Trowbridge says small-scale abuses — filling out a ballot and casting a vote for a recently deceased spouse, for instance — are easily spotted because of monitors at drop boxes. Larger plots, such as ballot-stuffing, also fail because even if precinct monitors implausibly do not spot the offense in progress, the vote counts will not be reconcilable. Even then, all Election Day ballots are coded as such. Vote-by-mail ballots carry a different code recognizable by poll workers and the scanners.

“Someone would have to take a ballot out of that location that day, take it off to a printer, get it printed, and then run back, and then stuff the ballots in,” he explains. “So, you couldn’t take an online sample ballot or an absentee ballot that got mailed to you and make photocopies of it. That just wouldn’t work.”

His work with Clear Ballot has taken Trowbridge from the Pacific Northwest to his old middle school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — on his very first site visit — and it all assures him that the integrity of America’s most cherished institution remains intact.

“I would never say anything is absolutely perfect, but we use the Swiss cheese metaphor,” he says. “If you have one layer of Swiss cheese, yeah, it has holes in it, but if you put another piece of Swiss cheese on, the holes don’t line up. And when you add fifty pieces of Swiss cheese, it’s like a wall.”