A NY Legal Challenge to ExpressVote XL's Barcode Use
Susan Lerner
Voting Village @ DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Voting Village
This talk, presented by Susan Lerner at the Voting Village, delves into a significant legal challenge mounted in New York State against the certification of the **ExpressVote XL** voting machine manufactured by **Election Systems & Software (ES&S)**. The core of the controversy centers on the machine's use of a **barcode** for vote tabulation, rather than the human-readable text on the ballot. This practice, Lerner argues, fundamentally undermines the ability of voters to privately and independently verify their selections, a right explicitly protected under New York election law and consistent with the federal **Help America Vote Act (HAVA)**.
AI review
A well-argued policy and legal case study on a real and underappreciated election integrity problem — barcode-only tabulation is a legitimate audit chain failure, and the ES&S vendor capture story is worth telling. But this is advocacy and litigation narrative, not security research, and the Voting Village audience deserves more than a court docket walkthrough.