BEATRICE – In recent election cycles, voters have heard repeatedly about election security and the need to protect against fraud. Former President Donald Trump has alleged widespread fraud, declining to acknowledge his loss of the 2020 Presidential election.  Despite that, little if any evidence has been found of fraud in how elections are run or in their outcome.


Even so, a Nebraska State lawmaker has proposed a legislative study resolution to examine election integrity. Senator Rick Holdcroft’s proposal would focus on three things…the voter registration process….the growing popularity of mail-in voting…..and post-election audits.


"The number of mail-in ballots have exploded in some counties, largely due to the relaxation during Covid of who can vote by mail-in ballot. Elections officials obviously lose control of ballots from the time they are mailed, until the time they are returned...a period of time when they are most vulnerable, to election fraud. Voting by mail is a privilege....not a right. I think we should take a hard look at reducing the list of individuals who vote by mail."


One of those testifying before a Legislature Government Committee hearing Thursday, was Adam Friedman…a software engineer who founded Massachusetts-based Civera. The firm provides election scanning software that can spot anomalies that might indicate problems.


"We're in a time where election administrators, as you've been hearing, are getting hammered by public records requests. They're getting harassed. There's two paths that administrators could go. One is to lock things down even more...batton down the hatches and say we're not going to enable the skeptics, enable the theorists. And, there's another path you can go. You can embrace what the public is asking for...and you can actually knock the wind out of the sails of the worst of the skeptics and bring over the reasonable middle...that will see the system works actually exceedingly well, in almost all cases."


Friedman says ensuring voter privacy should be a top concern…along with whether anyone can manipulate the voting process….and examining the potential threat of vote-buying. He says modern systems can address all three. Friedman said in the financial industry, there are several checks on processes….but nothing in elections using statistics to point out deviations.


"A fraud is much harder and harder and harder to pull off as you get higher and higher, because there's too many hands on it...too easy for somebody to leak what's happening. But when you get lower down the ballot, there's two things that make it very tempting...very low visibility on those races...not a lot of journalism happening...and very low vote counts in order to flip the outcome. So, it wouldn't take as much to get over the threshold to change the result and win, unfairly."


Omaha-based Election Systems and Software provides equipment for about half of the election jurisdictions in the United States. Chris Wlaschin is a Vice President and the Chief Security Officer with the company.


"E-S-and-S and me personally...I support the L-R being discussed today and additional, reasonable security measures that allow for the validation of the election results. We are already doing that in other states, who have asked us to support rigorous, pre-election logic and accuracy testing and rigorous post-election audits in many different formats. We support that, because those processes compare the paper ballots to the performance and the results tabulated by the machine. Through that rigorous post-election process, the public can be assured that their vote was counted, as cast."


Wlaschin said county clerks are the real heroes that make Nebraska’s election process run smoothly.  "There's not been much turnover in the clerks of the 93 counties here and I'm very grateful for that. Other states are suffering terrible losses of experienced election clerks because of threats to them...and other reasons, But, Nebraska is stable....and we do elections right...here in the state."


Wlaschin said since his company began manufacturing electronic voting machines in 2007, there have been no documented attacks on voting systems in Nebraska affecting the outcome of any election. The now third-generation technology used in Nebraska involves stand-alone equipment…. isolated from WiFi, Bluetooth or modems.


The Legislature's Government Committee Thursday afternoon was scheduled to hold discussion on the use and possible dangers of artificial intelligence in elections and political campaigns.