Voting rights advocates filed a motion Friday asking the North Carolina Supreme Court to review a superior court decision which denied them a preliminary injunction in a critical voting rights case.
At issue is the decision by some counties in North Carolina to use ExpressVote voting machines for the November election. The plaintiffs in the case, the North Carolina Conference of the NAACP and four individual North Carolina voters, allege that the machines present an imminent risk to the security of the election. They claim that the machines “are vulnerable to hacking, programming error, and malfunction.” In addition, voters are unable to verify their votes, because the machines print out a barcode that is then scanned by a tabulator to count their vote. The barcode is not human readable, leaving the individual voter “no way of knowing if the vote cast matches what is recorded in the barcode.”
The suit was originally filed in April after several counties decided to adopt the ExpressVote machines for the upcoming election. The suit alleged that, because of the machines’ security flaws and the unverifiability of the printed barcodes, North Carolina voters’ constitutional guarantees of free and fair elections and equal protection were at risk. The court denied the request for a preliminary injunction against the machines, leading plaintiffs to take the step of appealing directly to the state supreme court for relief.
The suit also alleges that, because the ExpressVote machines use touchscreens as opposed to individual paper ballots, they will cause a heightened risk of Covid-19 transmission. Large numbers of voters will have to use a limited number of machines, leading to increased exposure, as well as increased delays in voting. Plaintiffs allege that the increased exposure risk and delays represent a further burden upon their voting rights. They urge the court that it “is in the public interest to expedite a decision, so that voters can have clarity regarding the November 2020 general election, be assured that their votes will be secure and verifiable, and be assured that they will be able to cast those votes without putting their health on the line.”
