By Dan Bartley

Despite what you may hear, from certain quarters in this country, your voting systems in Pennsylvania are secure, stable, and sustainable, due to the hard work and systematic protection of our election infrastructure by state, and county election professionals, no matter their personal party affiliation.

Before every election, the equipment is tested.

I had the opportunity this week to be an observer of the process called Logic & Accuracy (L&A) testing, at the Pike County Board of Elections offices in Milford. This process occurs at every Board of Elections (or equivalent office), in each of the over 1600 entities that use the Dominion Voting System (DVS) equipment processes throughout the USA, and some of its territories.  

It is a required step in maintaining and testing this equipment, mandated by Pennsylvania, with guidance and standards provided by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It should be noted that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased in late-2025 and renamed Liberty Vote. The pre-existing equipment remains in use, servicing more than 70 million voters.

Your vote happens on paper.

When you walk into your local polling spot in a PA township you first go through an identification step that validates your right to vote in that location. Upon completion of that step, you receive a paper ballot that is unique to your township due to the local offices that differ from township to township. This is when YOU do the voting.

It is after this step that the DVS equipment comes into play. YOU take your ballot to a station that looks like a big, black box. The box is mostly just that. Much of what you see is simply a secure container that holds the paper ballots after they have been scanned. The device that sits secured on the top of the box is the optical scanner, known as an ICP in the DVS terminology. This device reads and records the mark on YOUR ballot, and unless you have submitted a blank ballot, or made more than one selection for a specific office, YOUR ballot immediately drops into the secure box below. If your ballot fails to be read, it will be rejected and returned to you by the poll worker for repair, or replacement.

Accessible voting still produces a paper record.

If a PA voter has a disability such as blindness, or deafness, they will be directed to an area that houses a Ballot Marking Device (BMD) that offers hearing assistance and visual aids, with a push button console that enables these voters to determine their desired choices and displays them on the screen. Once this step is finished, the attached dedicated printer creates YOUR paper ballot, and the voter takes that ballot to the optical scanner or ICP.

Tested, sealed and secured.

These two pieces of equipment are the primary focus of Logic & Accuracy testing. The Board of Elections owns enough of this equipment to supply 17 townships, which are kept in a locked storage room in the Administration Building. Before each election date, each ICP and BMD is tested with a set of sample ballots for each township. The equipment is removed from storage, security tags that were placed on the equipment after the prior election are removed, and the test deck is run through each machine. Test ballot choices are recorded on a removable SD storage card, along with a paper tape record, and these two records are compared for accuracy and agreement. After this testing shows accuracy, each device is zeroed out, shutdown, and returned to storage with new security tags applied to prevent tampering. When an election is due, the tagged devices are transported to each township, along with new, empty SD cards, to be installed by township poll workers.

And no internet connection.

It is important to state that all of these devices are maintained in an “air gapped” status, which means they are never connected to the internet, to insure that there can be no tampering. These devices never vote. YOU do.

For further info please visit the PA.GOV website and watch the short video on Election Security.