# Election Management System An **election management system (EMS)** is the computer a county election office uses to build an election and to accumulate its results. It is the single most consequential machine in American election administration and the one the public almost never hears named. Before the election, the EMS defines the ballot — contests, candidates, rotation, precinct splits — and generates the programming files loaded onto every tabulator and ballot-marking device in the jurisdiction. After polls close, it reads each precinct's memory device, adds the precinct totals to a running county total, and merges them with the central-count piles the precincts never handled: early vote, mail, and later the provisional and cured ballots. The unofficial results file a county publishes is an **export** from the EMS, not the EMS itself. Two properties matter. First, the EMS is ordinarily **air-gapped** from the internet by policy, which is why publishing results requires a deliberate export rather than a connection — and why the question of what is or is not connected to it is the central question in voting-system security argument. Second, the merge it performs is the stage at which the published number stops corresponding to any single physical artifact: no tape, no batch and no device holds the county total, which exists only as the EMS's arithmetic. ## The rule, and where it has been broken - **The standard.** [[Voluntary Voting System Guidelines]] 2.0, adopted February 10, 2021, "requires systems to be air-gapped from other networks and disallows the use of wireless technologies." Most equipment in service is certified to the older 1.0 and 1.1 standards. See [[How a Voting System Is Certified and Decertified]]. - **Exposed online, 2019.** A team led by Kevin Skoglund found about **35** [[Election Systems & Software]] systems in 10 states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, reachable from the internet. Some were the systems used to program machines, and "some jurisdictions were not aware that their systems were online." ES&S said there was "zero evidence" of compromise. - **Copied, 2021.** On January 7, 2021, technicians from SullivanStrickler copied the Coffee County, Georgia [[Dominion Voting Systems]] EMS server and other components, then billed [[Sidney Powell]] $26,000. In 2023 Powell and Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges tied to the breach. It is the clearest case of an EMS image leaving official custody; see [[Election Denialism]]. The two cases fail in opposite ways. The first is an EMS exposed by negligence; the second is one taken on purpose by people who rejected the count it produced. ## See Also - [[How Election Results Are Transmitted and Reported]] — stage 4, the accumulation - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] · [[How a Voting System Is Certified and Decertified]] - [[Logic and Accuracy Testing]] · [[Risk-Limiting Audit]] - [[Liberty Vote]] · [[Election Systems & Software]] · [[Hart InterCivic]] · [[Civix]] - [[Voluntary Voting System Guidelines]] · [[Election Assistance Commission]]