Systems used to transmit unofficial election-night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results.
The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin.
Much of the concern about sending results over modems has related to cybersecurity. But experts say there are additional reasons to avoid the use of modems, and the recent issues in Wisconsin are one example. There’s no indication that the Election Day issues in Green and Winnebago counties, which both use Liberty Vote election technology, had anything to do with a hack.
Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them.
A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election-night operations and consume significant staff time.
“It matters because it’s a time suck for the county, and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.
In a statement, a Liberty Vote spokesperson said they have “every confidence these isolated issues will not occur in future elections.”
Green County changing results reporting process for November
The results transmission failure caused the most significant delay in Green County, where officials did not fully shift to a backup method for collecting results from municipalities until the next morning.
Officials there and their vendor, Liberty Vote, are still trying to understand what went wrong after county staff were unable to process the results that municipalities sent over via fax modems, Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli told Votebeat.
When municipalities in Green County send their unofficial results to the county clerk’s office, they appear as encrypted files on a so-called listener server set up to receive the transmissions, said Voegeli, a Democrat. Normally, a different software called a results workstation pulls those files and uploads the results to the county’s unofficial results reporting system, but that process broke down on Election Day, she said.
County staff tried to troubleshoot the issue with Liberty Vote after discovering the issue at 9 p.m. on election night but couldn’t find a solution. That meant they had to turn to alternative methods to get the results from municipalities, and didn’t have them all until the next morning — far later than most counties.
Voegeli said she consulted with the Wisconsin Elections Commission at the time to discuss what to do. The commission, she said, encouraged her to get municipal results as quickly as possible.
“Their recommendation was, at that point, to do my due diligence and do the best I can with trying to contact people [that] night to get those results in,” she said.
She opted not to use sheriff’s deputies to wake clerks that night, she said. Instead, she called all 24 of them; most didn’t return her call until early the following morning, but the few who responded delivered results over the phone. She got back to work at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday to finish processing results as municipal officials either came in person to deliver the unofficial results or told Voegeli the results over the phone. All the results were uploaded by 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
Had it been November, she said, she would have employed sheriff’s deputies to wake up clerks. She opted not to do it this time around, Voegeli said, in part because the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t give hard guidance, and she didn’t feel she’d save meaningful time by waking them.
As of Monday, she said, officials still had not determined what caused the failure. But Green County is changing its approach for the November election.
Voegeli said nearby municipalities will drive to the county office to physically deliver unofficial results, and the faraway ones will verbally transmit results via telephone.
“Even if we determine what the cause of this issue is, I think we’re still going to plan on that for the general election,” she said. “We really want to make sure that we’re getting those results out in a timely manner.”
Winnebago County shifted gears on Election Day
Winnebago County, which also uses Liberty Vote systems, also had trouble transmitting unofficial results by modem, but officials there shifted to a backup plan that same night.
After polls closed, municipal clerks were initially unable to send unofficial election results over a cellular modem. County officials and Liberty Vote are still trying to understand what went wrong, County Clerk Julie Barthels said. After noticing the error, Barthels instructed municipal clerks in the county to drive in the results and hand them over physically. The last one arrived around 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.
The city resolved the results-reporting issue by 9 p.m., said Barthels, a Republican. But by then, municipal officials were already on their way to the county and Barthels said she didn’t want to turn the municipal officials around again to deliver them via modem.
Winnebago County isn’t planning for any shift in results-reporting for November. But she said she’ll work with Liberty Vote, to understand what went wrong.
“They’ve promised me this will not happen in November,” Barthels said about Liberty Vote. “We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. I so trust our system. But it’s like any other computer. One day it works, and the next day it doesn’t.”
Some election security experts warn against modeming results
Smith, the Verified Voting CEO, said any method that requires election equipment to communicate with other devices — whether that’s through a secure cellular network or a physical phone line — introduces additional vulnerabilities.
“It’d be great if they would move towards a safer operation of not not having that connectivity,” she said
But Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said transmitting unofficial results via modem does not pose a major technical risk as long as the official results are protected through testing and audits of paper ballots. Every method for transmitting results has trade-offs, he said: Driving a USB stick for an hour may have fewer vulnerabilities than an internet-connected method, but it also takes far longer.
The more important safeguard, Hale said, is for election officials to stay involved throughout the process, validating results and checking for errors — especially when verifying the official count. Hale previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
In this case, he said, Winnebago and Green County responded appropriately by having backup plans in case their initial systems failed.
“This one doesn’t concern me quite as much as some other things I’ve seen,” he said.
Noah Praetz, president of Ready For Tuesday and a longtime election administration and security consultant, said jurisdictions embraced reporting results via modems in the 2000s and 2010s.
That momentum stalled around 2016, he said, amid Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections and after Ukraine’s results reporting system in 2014 was successfully hacked. After that, Praetz said, following responses from the FBI and CISA, and the designation of elections as critical infrastructure by the Secretary of Homeland Security, election officials began recognizing that results in transit over modems posed a risk, even if the results were unofficial.
But a major benefit of using modems is speed, and Praetz emphasized the downsides of slower alternatives, as delays in reporting results can create openings for bad actors — including foreign governments — to sow distrust.
“People want to get results out of their hands,” he said. “They want to satisfy their voters.”
That was evident in Milwaukee on Aug. 11, when a human error in exporting results caused a 90-minute delay that exasperated election watchers and prompted widespread conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
