Time to bring back paper ballots? A bipartisan group of senators led by James Lankford, R-Okla., is sponsoring a bill that would encourage states to abandon paperless voting machines and adopt rigorous post-election audits—moves that could significantly strengthen the security of American elections.

After the extremely close 2000 presidential vote and its tedious recount familiarized Americans with terms such as “hanging chad” and “butterfly ballot,” Congress set aside billions of dollars to fix what it believed were outdated voting systems. The solution seemed to be paperless touchscreen voting machines. But over the last decade, computer security experts have found such machines to be dangerously inadequate.

“In every single case, when a machine was brought into the lab and studied by qualified researchers, the result was the discovery of significant vulnerabilities,” Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, told tech website Ars Technica. “[Those vulnerabilities] could allow the machines to be compromised with malicious software that could potentially steal votes.”

The proposed bill would provide grants to states willing to phase out paperless voting machines and replace them with more secure systems, such as optically scanned paper ballot machines.

The bill would encourage states to conduct statistically rigorous post-election audits. Current recount procedures often pick a fixed percentage of precincts to audit. But election experts believe the size of the audit sample should vary based on the margin of victory.

“An audit isn’t necessarily a recount if an election result is not particularly close,” Halderman told Ars Technica. “You don’t have to look at that many ballots in order to audit it to high confidence. But if an election result turns on one vote, obviously you do need to look at every ballot to know that for sure.”

Congress would have to move quickly in order to implement some of the legislation’s recommendations before the 2018 elections and to have new voting systems in place by November 2020.

The bill’s supporters are also concerned about foreign intervention. Democratic co-sponsor Sen. Kamala Harris of California said, “With the 2018 elections just around the corner, Russia will be back to interfere again.”

(Appolition.us)

Get out of jail free

Much of the nation’s jail population consists of those who are awaiting trial but can’t scrape together enough money for bail. A new smartphone app aims to release many of these people by converting spare change into bail money.

The app, called “Appolition,” links to a user’s bank account. Whenever the user makes a purchase on a credit or debit card, the purchase price is rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference is donated to National Bail Out, a network of groups that post bail for those who can’t afford it.

On any given day, about 450,000 people are held in city or county jails because they can’t afford bail, according to civil rights groups. This sets up what some see as a “two-tiered” system of justice, in which those who can afford bail, regardless of the seriousness of their offense, can walk free pending trial, while those who can’t remain incarcerated for weeks or months.

Kortney Ryan Ziegler, Appolition’s co-creator, got inspiration for the app after hearing about National Bail Out’s efforts to raise funds for jailed black mothers, according to Wired magazine. Ziegler launched Appolition in mid-November, and after a month the app had raised more than $8,000 in spare change from 6,000 users. —M.C.