Team,

I have some very good news to share. We all know that 2020 may be a close election and that foreign actors will try to interfere. Pennsylvania may turn out to be one of the states that decides the election but, as of now, they use some of the most insecure voting machines in the country. Many PA counties use vulnerable touch screen machines with no paper trail ⁠— an alluring target for hackers and a recipe for a potential crisis. 

Not anymore! After two years of work by Protect Democracy and our allies, especially our key partner Verified Voting, Governor Wolf signed into law yesterday a bill that will ensure that in 2020 all Pennsylvanians cast their votes using systems that retain a voter-marked paper ballot for recounts and audits!

This is a huge win and I want to provide some background into how it happened.

For years, advocates in Pennsylvania have been pushing the state to purchase new, more secure voting machines. Beginning in 2017, we canvassed the landscape to understand how we could help PA secure its elections by Election Day 2020. Though several groups shared this objective, there was no one running a concentrated campaign of legislative advocacy. We thought that was the key ingredient to get this done, so along with some partners, we launched a plan to do so. 

Together with Verified Voting, we hired former Republican Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge’s lobbying firm and got to work talking to legislators in the Republican-controlled General Assembly about the technical mechanics of vulnerable direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines versus more secure machines. 

We brought in national security experts with conservative credentials like Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer (Ret.) to brief legislators and Wolf administration officials on the full scope of the looming threat.

We organized county officials⁠—who actually administer elections and would normally bear the full costs of procuring new voting systems⁠—to encourage their state lawmakers to provide counties funding to address this critical infrastructure need.  

We authored op-eds, held press conferences, and ensured the threat posed by not changing machines was not just well understood, but was a steady part of the political news diet that those with the power to fix this consumed.

We directly engaged with key lawmakers and Wolf administration officials at crucial stages of the legislative process to ensure bipartisan support for an election reform package that included funding for new voting systems.

In July of 2019, the Republican-led General Assembly passed a bill providing $90 million for new machines, but attached to it a provision eliminating straight-ticket voting that Democrats opposed. We lobbied the Governor to sign the bill anyway, arguing that if the entire election system was insecure, that would be a greater threat to all voters, including those impacted by a bar on straight-ticket voting, but he vetoed the bill.

Undeterred, we scrambled to work with the Governor’s Office to find another pathway to get new machines for 2020. Our welcome pressure on the Governor’s staff led the Governor to announce a plan directing a state economic development authority to issue bonds to pay for new machines. 

This looked initially like a win, pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but we had two concerns about it. 

First, the legal authority for the Governor to order the economic development authority to do so was not 100 percent guaranteed. While the Governor concluded that he had the legal authority to do this, there was a nonzero risk someone could challenge the bond issue in court and, even if they didn’t win, they could slow the process down in court long enough to delay the purchase of new machines past 2020. 

And second, even if Governor Wolf’s order were legally permissible, we were uncomfortable defending a Governor ordering money to be spent after vetoing a legislative appropriation to do so at the same time we’re suing Donald Trump for trying to use executive appropriations as an end run around Congress to fund his border wall. We believe in the principle that our democracy needs to follow the democratic process.

So we pushed Governor Wolf to go back to the legislature to get authority to issue the bonds. And, to his immense credit, he did. Governor Wolf and Republican legislators negotiated a compromise election reform bill that will as a whole make it easier for Pennsylvanians to vote and provides $90 million for new secure machines.

Yesterday, Gov. Wolf signed that bill.

Gov. Wolf deserves enormous credit for his tireless efforts to defend democracy in Pennsylvania, as do his Republican partners in the General Assembly. This truly was a bipartisan effort.

Pennsylvanians across the state will now vote on secure machines in 2020. And one more risk to our democracy has been shored up!  

This isn’t the only state in which we’ve done this.

In South Carolina, which experts have long agreed had one of the most insecure voting machines in the whole country, we brought a lawsuit on behalf of a Democrat and a Republican arguing that the state’s machines were so bad as to deprive them of their right to have their votes securely counted. Although the lawsuit did not succeed in the courtroom, the attention it generated, with multiple cover stories in local papers, combined with advocacy on the ground and Protect Democracy’s advocacy in the state legislature to push South Carolina to purchase new machines before the 2020 election. Those new machines have now been delivered across the state, and the system we challenged has been removed.

In North Carolina, after we learned the state legislature might authorize the Board of Elections to allow counties to continue using insecure machines for in 2020, we sent them a letter threatening to sue them and ran a story in the local paper reiterating our threat. Within hours of sending our letter, we got a call from the attorney for the Board of Elections. He wanted to work with us to find a solution. We're still intensively engaged in advocacy to make sure that the insecure digital voting machines ⁠— which as recently as 2018 served one-third of the state's voters ⁠— will be retired by Election Day 2020. And we're seeing it bear fruit: an op-ed by a member of our team was literally circulated on the state house floor by a member of the legislature to her colleagues, and counties across the state are actively moving to replace their paperless machines before next year. 

The situation is fluid and not resolved yet. If you have relationships in NC state or county government, please raise the concern to them that they must retire their old electronic voting machines in time for the March primaries. You can also amplify our op-ed here.

And in Georgia, we have provided support to our allies at The Coalition for Good Government in their lawsuit to force Georgia to upgrade its voting machines to more secure ones. They've already won a critical legal ruling that forces Georgia to retire its insecure paperless machines before 2020, but there's more work to do in surviving the Georgia government's challenges to that effort.

But it hasn’t all been wine and roses. In Texas, we spent almost two years trying to get a bill through that would ensure all Texas counties used secure machines in 2020. Although we persuaded the Secretary of State’s Office and two key Republican chairs to back the effort, at the end of the day our legislation failed by one vote. But we refuse to give up. Since the Texas legislature doesn’t meet again until 2021, last week we sent a letter with the ACLU of Texas and Public Citizen to the 29 counties in Texas who are slated to use insecure machines in 2020. The letter explained the shortcomings of those systems, emphasized the potential legal liability for continuing to use them, and also offered ourselves and our network of experts to assist them in making a transition before the 2020 election. 

We will follow up and push and push and push to protect Texas’s elections, and America’s.

This is our democracy and we formed this organization to protect it. 

We are fighting in courts, in legislatures, in state capital buildings, and on the airwaves to protect our democracy. And as this story I think illustrates, we will be relentless, creative, principled, and strategic, but at the end of the day, we won’t stop until we get the job done.

This moment is a moment for celebrating, as we should savor our wins, but right after sending this email, we’ll be back at it. 

What this story shows, what everyone receiving this email shows with everything we do every day to strengthen this nation, is that we can protect our democracy for the next generation when we set about to do it. 

Onwards,
Ian, Justin, Jamila, Nanya, Ahmed and the whole Protect Democracy team