In the recent lawsuit involving the Secretary of the Commonwealth over problems gathering ballot signatures during this pandemic, the written opinions of the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court contained severe criticism of the technological abilities of Bill Galvin’s office, in light of his statements to the court that his processes could not even handle email attachments of signed nomination papers. It is the latest example of many serious technology problems in the secretary’s office that must be mitigated before the fall elections.
In the ballot signatures case, the justices wanted electronic signatures as a potential remedy, but Galvin was unable to comply.
Here is a sample of their criticism:
“Specifically, the Secretary contends that individual municipalities may not be able to open large e-mail attachments containing voter signatures, and may be unable to access online file storage sites due to cybersecurity concerns. Why this remains so difficult in the modern era is somewhat inexplicable. Why a simple e-mail attestation that includes the name, address, and party registration of the voter is insufficient is also not obvious.” (Pages 35,36 of the SJC decision.)
And another:
“In this ‘high tech’ era, and in the midst of a global pandemic that severely restricts close personal contact, the failure to be able to solve manageable technological problems on the eve of an election is confounding and distressing. At a time when we need to be fundamentally rethinking what must be done in person and what can instead be done electronically, our electoral process seems dangerously unequipped to adapt to a new paradigm.” (Page 38 of the SJC decision.)
In a time when my wife and I are emailing many photos of our children’s homework to their public elementary school every week without any problems, it is ridiculous and unacceptable that Galvin cannot handle a digital, two-page signature form. As the public is already concerned about how we are handling campaigns and elections during the pandemic, they should be worried about what our Supreme Court justices have written.
The inability to handle electronic signatures is one more example in a long-running series of serious and solvable technology problems that Galvin has ignored for many years.
For example, even though Governor Baker released a massive overhaul of the main state government website in 2017, Galvin’s own website for his organization’s many services remains many years out of date, and is increasingly unusable. When Baker announced the new state site, he pointed out that the web is where most people’s interactions with state government begin, and it was essential that people be able to succeed with important transactions. Galvin should have listened, and used their work as a model to overhaul his site. He did nothing.
Galvin’s website is crucial for state elections, as it is where people can register to vote, look up their representatives at all levels, and find their polling place. It is unacceptable that his website is not accessible to many handicapped users, and that registering to vote and finding your polling place is only easy to use on a desktop computer, and not on a phone, which accounts for the majority of web traffic now, and is the only option for many low-income voters. (The technical name for this problem is that it is not ‘responsive’, which means the site can adjust to different kinds of devices. Go to Mass.gov on a phone, or shrink your desktop browser window to be very narrow, and you will see how this works. Galvin’s site requires awkward pinching and zooming for entering information on crucial pages.)
[The above, critical pages are difficult to use on smartphones.]
His site has many problems, but the worst one is probably that it won’t work for blind people who use screen readers to navigate the web. Anyone can put these pages through accessibility tools to see the list of problems, but you can try the site yourself using the types of accessibility tools that blind people use, such as VoiceOver, which comes with a Mac; or Narrator, that comes with Microsoft Windows. You won’t get far, as most of the site lacks the standard, widely-used mechanisms that these tools use for navigation.
Tellingly, on the site itself, the accessibility page says Galvin’s office is working on meeting accessibility standards in… August of 2016? That is not acceptable for 2020 elections. (The ancient site is not even in compliance with the standards back in 2016.)
While a much-needed overhaul of his entire site would take many months, the accessibility and smartphone layout problems on the election-related pages could be solved in a matter of days by any software developer with experience in accessibility and mobile site design.
The technological ineptness of Galvin’s office produced a lighthearted story in early 2019, when it was discovered that they had lost track of the only publicly-available copy of the state’s official polka song, having merely linked to a website that disappeared years ago. Only an investigation by Jennifer Smith of the Dorchester Reporter (though done for The Horse Race podcast) forced his office to obtain their own digital copy of the song and put it on their website, which is what they should have done to begin with.
It isn’t that Galvin doesn’t know what good technology looks like. His PD43 election statistics site has received many accolades. But he purchased that as a finished product in 2013 from voting reform advocate Adam Friedman, and it was not a reflection of his office’s internal capabilities.
All these examples — from silly to serious — show that Galvin’s office is not fulfilling his responsibilities to a public that requires useful tools and technological competence. He must enact temporary fixes in the near term, and then begin a much larger technology overhaul of all operations.
We are in a pandemic, and online tools are more important than ever for the millions of people in the Commonwealth who are staying at home and concerned about our campaigns and elections. The SJC’s blistering criticism of Galvin’s office should be the last straw. It’s time he gets serious about technology, and implements reforms.
Ed Lyons is a political writer and a computer programmer
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