SAN ANTONIO — The Texas Legislature is correcting an issue that could have cost Texas counties up to $116 million dollars in 2026, and even more down the road.
In 2021, lawmakers passed a variety of election security changes in a special session, via Senate Bill 1. It was a lengthy piece of legislation, but one change is having unintended consequences.
The bill required election officers to buy new voting machine systems with hard drives that couldn't be rewritten, meaning any data on the drive would be permanent.
In theory, it would have made certain voting machines not already connected to the internet even more difficult to hack.
In practice, however, it meant election officials might've needed to purchase a new hard drive for every county polling location after every election.
That’s a lot of hard drives. And it's a scenario UTSA Political Science Chair Jon Taylor said county officials weren't happy about.
“They put pressure on the state senator that wrote the legislation and said, 'You're kidding us right? You're going to cost us $100 million, potentially every year, replacing voting machines because you are concerned that somehow someone is going to hack in?'"
There was also a secondary issue. At the time of this article, there is no known voting machine system that uses non-rewritable hard drives. The system that election administrators would've needed to buy doesn't actually exist.
Taylor said non-rewritable technology does technically exist, if you can remember what a CD-ROM is. But that's not something current systems use.
Currently, election systems use "ballot scanners" that scan paper ballots into a completely offline machine. The machine has a detachable hard drive that cannot be accessed by the internet, and elections officials must physically take that hard drive to an election office to deliver voting results. The hard drives are, or course, reusable.
Fortunately, state lawmakers listened. The latest version of Senate Bill 1661 would take out language requiring ballot scanners to have “a storage device, such as a flash drive, that can only be used once.”
Instead, it states: “Once a cast vote record is written, it is incapable of being modified without automatic detection of the modification and without rejection of the cast vote record.”
It might sound technical, but it means that Texas election officials would no longer need to buy entirely new systems – which, against, don’t yet exist – to comply with state law. It also means state offices don’t need to pay another $37 million every two years to keep buying new hard drives for that system.
Taylor said there's no proof that the non-rewritable hard drives were needed in the first place.
"We see zero evidence that somebody has hacked into electronic voting systems in Bexar County, Harris County or anywhere else, and somehow changed votes," Taylor said.
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