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The Kansas Secretary of State’s office has announced it will indefinitely suspend the use of controversial technology meant to identify voter fraud after concerns were raised about security risks.
The technology had been heralded by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who in recent years has been one of the most prominent promoters of the alleged menace of voter fraud across the country. The computer program, known as CrossCheck, matched various state voter rolls against each other, identifying duplicate voters by first name, last name and birthdate. Critics called the program a cynical effort meant to suppress the vote among people of color.
The ACLU of Kansas sued the state over the use of the program, asserting it was a security disaster that wound up making the voter rolls vulnerable to hacking, and the announcement this week abandoning the program is one element of a settlement of that lawsuit.
Joe Hall, the former chief technologist for the Center for Democracy & Technology, had called the problems with the program “complete operational security incompetence.” Other experts had also alleged that the program had an extraordinarily high false positive rate, meaning supposed examples of people being registered in multiple states were often wrong.
In November 2017, reporting by ProPublica and Gizmodo showed that the program was run on insecure servers and that its administrators regularly exchanged passwords by email. Lauren Bonds, the legal director for the ACLU o ..
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