Supervisor reaffirms security of voting systems

This week, local Supervisor of Elections, Vicky Oakes, a member of the board of directors of Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, forwarded an open letter to Historic City News certifying the security of the state’s voting systems.

The letter, from association president Chris H. Chambless, said at the core of the security of Florida voting systems is the fact that we are a “paper ballot state”, meaning that we can always refer to the paper ballot in the event of a disruption.

“We’d like to reaffirm to Florida voters that the security of our voting systems is always a top priority for election professionals across the State of Florida,” Chambless wrote. “Recent enhancements to Florida voting systems have dramatically reduced exposures to any possible hacking of elections.”

Electronic voting systems, including touchscreens for voters with disabilities, are not Internet-based and do not connect to each other online, Oakes told local Historic City News reporters.

The following key excerpts from the letter emphasize the steps being taken to ensure the integrity of Florida’s voting systems:

• “Prior to each election, a public Logic and Accuracy test is conducted of each voting tabulator and tabulation system to ensure that they are working and tabulating properly.”

• “Precinct tabulated results are transmitted to our office in brief encrypted burst. Outside attackers would need to overcome multiple layers of encryption which, if successful, would result in corrupting, slowing or stopping the transmission of unofficial results to our office.”

• “The final accumulations that are transmitted to the State as our unofficial results are then written to yet another memory device that are finally uploaded and transmitted to the Division of Elections on another completely separate system and network via a secure upload system which makes the likelihood that an outside attacker to subvert this process even more remote.”

• “The final step to securing the voting process is the fact that within a week of the election, a precinct by precinct review is performed where the precinct totals tape is compared to the unofficial results transmitted on election night to verify a match and any deviations are researched and noted. Once this is completed the official result is reported.”

The Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections is a professional membership organization representing the Supervisors of Elections of Florida’s 67 counties. Our goal is to support fair, honest and accurate elections in the state of Florida. FSASE was founded in 1964.

Visit: MyFloridaElections.com for more information.