Hello, and welcome to Data Nation, a podcast from MIT's Institute for Data Systems and Society. I'm Liberty Vittert. And I'm here with my co-host, Munther Dahleh, the head of MIT's Institute for Data Systems and Society. In this episode, we chat with Dr. Charles Stewart. Charles is a distinguished professor of political science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
With election chatter for 2024 starting to begin, we take a deep dive into what happened in 2020, if there is any evidence of the election being stolen, and how we could prevent any upset for future elections, including the idea of voting electronically from home as technology advances. Charles, I got to start with the biggest question first, which maybe isn't fair. But I'm going to dive in with this biggest question. You are an expert in elections.
And we hear, every election cycle, about the minor or major inconsistencies, oversights, election fraud. These are buzzwords we hear all the time. And is it true that this either fraud, intentional or accidental errors, have a widespread effect on American elections? Has there been an election stolen in the United States? Or could you really steal an election in our democracy as it is? Well, yeah. So that's not a big question. That's big questions.
So let me pick it apart, and we can go where we want to go with that. And actually, unfortunately, I'll start as a professor. But I think it's the important place to start. Elections form two functions in society where these issues of accuracy and fraud and stealing, mistakes, et cetera, kind of come to a head. And the two functions are expressive. We, as citizens, want to express our opinions about things that were mad or happy. We like this. We don't like that.
And we want to choose elected officials. And by the rules of majority rule in this country, we want to make sure we pick the person who got the most votes. And those are two different things. Voters and the people who run elections focus on different things. So as voters, we know, from experience and from the political science literature, that voters are mostly motivated by the expressive side of voting. Think about Massachusetts.
We had record turnout in the 2020 election, one of the highest turnouts of any state in the country, to go vote for Joe Biden, in which there was no question in the world that Joe Biden would win. No question about that. So why go to vote in Massachusetts? Your vote-- one vote never counts anyway, on the margin. And in Massachusetts, millions of votes might not count on the margin. But people go and vote. And that's the expressive part of voting. And people care about deeply about politics.
And we see sometimes, in America, for better or worse-- usually worse, we see in the rest of the world-- sometimes, people will give their lives to express their politics. Here, we get to express our politics mostly through the ballot box. And that's a really important thing in a democracy. On the election official side and on the legal side, elections are ways of choosing leaders by a particular rule, which is most commonly the majority rule.
And there, if you win by one vote, if you win by 2 million votes, you still win. And so keep those two things there. You have enormously impassioned people on one side. And then you have people and all sorts of complications in the United States trying just to determine who got more votes than somebody else.
And you can solve that problem under most circumstances by making some mistakes by not quite getting it right, by letting some things slide, by emphasizing one set of rules and not another set of rules. And 999 times out of 1,000, you'll get the right answer even with those mistakes. And what I think we're seeing right now is a particular political movement at the moment that is obsessed with small errors. And they are guaranteed to happen in any election.
And so you take small errors, a particular mindset obsessed with small errors that's aligned with the political party, and you get something that looks not just the normal give and take grumbling about election returns, but gets to be something that's weaponized and can actually be quite dangerous. Short answer to your two questions, yeah, there's mistakes. Can you steal elections in the United States? Yes. Elections have been stolen, but not recently.
You want to see stolen elections, let's think about the stories that are periodically told about North Carolina in the 1890s and 1900s where there was a coalition in North Carolina of progressive white Democrats and African-Americans that were able to take control of particular cities. Legislative districts in which there were, at times, mobs that would go in and murder and terrorize African-American leaders, drive them out of town, and whites would take over the town regardless of the election.
So yes, there have been stolen elections in the United States. But that's what a stolen election in the United States normally looks like. There are some minor cases that come up. There is a little town in LA County that was discovered several years ago-- had like 23 voters. And basically, it was a family kind of paid a bunch of people, and they got to run the town. So yeah, you see things like that. You don't see this in large elections, state elections, city-wide elections. That's really rare.
Sometimes found, but really, really, really rare. This is great, actually, Charles. And I think this division is illuminating. But let me challenge this a little bit and say that there's I error, which is a natural error, whether it's actually fraudulent or systemic error in the process.
And then there is the actual vote that could be naturally very close in the sense that if you have a divided group of people, and it's almost 50/50 that we're going right and left, well, then this I error becomes larger than the other one. And so if the error margin of winning is within the error margin of the systemic problem, then we have an issue of making a decision.
And this is where the confidence of the voter comes into the picture because then a small fraudulent error becomes a huge deal in expressing my opinion about the vote. So I don't know if this is actually a reasonable concern or not. Well, again, I mean, there's two ways of parsing out this question about a small fraudulent error. So consider two things.
One, I think we would agree with-- certainly falls within the classification of small fraudulent error or actually, a small fraudulent vote, not even an error in some ways where you get paid to vote for somebody when you wouldn't have voted for them, otherwise. Maybe you've stuffed a ballot box. You've done things that everyone would recognize as being fraudulent. So that's one thing. In normal times, I don't think anyone would doubt that was fraudulent.
And I would also say that the types of controls we have on elections right now are geared toward discovering those sorts of frauds. And for better or worse-- and I think, for worse-- have in mind models of fraud that were common in the 1880s and 1890s. And in Massachusetts, in fact, we still have some vestiges of that to this day.
The other thing that we're discovering in our public opinion, research around fraud and how people think about this is think about another case during a global pandemic where citizens are either locked in or discouraged from leaving their homes or discouraged from gathering in large groups. There's emergency legislation that makes it easier to vote by mail. And a presidential candidate, for whatever reason, begins to talk about this is how the opposition is going to stuff ballots.
And now, let us say that the other party wins by a small margin. And a reasonable argument could be made that had this accommodation not been made on an emergency basis, that the other party would have won. Is that fraud or not? That actually is where a lot of the argument in the United States right now is.
If you listen-- and I don't think we're listening carefully to the forces on the right, mostly, who are saying that elections in the US are fraudulent because they're saying many, many different things. And about half of them, and probably the smartest, are saying-- actually, I heard Newt Gingrich say this the other day when he was pressed on an NPR interview on whether Joe Biden was the legitimate president, whether he actually won the election.
And Gingrich said, I agree that Biden won by the rules in place in 2020. But I think the rules were changed in an illegitimate way. Now, I could go back and say, OK, changed or not, that didn't matter. But nonetheless, that's the framing. And that's where I think that the difference between what you and I, computer scientists, somebody who hangs out with computer scientists, how we would think this through doesn't necessarily map on to how the public thinks about these things. Interesting.
I read something that you said, actually, where you were talking about the states that do only mail-in. And there's three states that do all mail-in. And as you said, it took them decades to get to that point of being mail-in ballot places. And so to have, all of a sudden, all of these states go boom, we're doing mail-in ballots is a huge amount of our vote, that there would be way more error in something like that, given how quickly they implemented it.
Is that possible to that framing that you just put? Yeah. And that's a more sophisticated way of thinking these things through and, I think, the right way of thinking these things through. I think the wrong way, which we saw in 2020, was just to say they're letting everything happen. But that was the narrative that you heard and the framing that you heard among, I would say, serious people. In fact, I think I'm a serious guy. And in 2020, I was cautioning two things.
And one was to point out that it was harder than you think to run an all mail election. And secondly, you want to distinguish between what you do in an emergency and what you do in normal times because you might be willing-- and I think we were during 2020. There was a lot of forbearance, especially in the early part of the pandemic, people trying to go about their lives and people trying to figure this out. There might be mistakes and actually there were a lot of mistakes in the primary period.
But once the emergency goes away, then the forbearance also goes away. And this attention to detail was honored more in some places than in others. But the final thing I will say related to 2020 is that we were able to work out a lot of the bugs in the primary off-season and that the general election learned a lot by what happened in the primary season. Mail-in elections are complex in different ways than in-person elections.
When you increase the complexity, if the administrative reaction isn't sufficiently sophisticated, then you can really get mistakes that are really bad. But if the administrative capacity increases in parallel, then maybe it won't be so bad. And to the degree that we've measured this in 2020, it looks like, maybe counterintuitively, the administrative challenges more than met the increase in mail in ballots. So the places that already had a lot of mail-in ballots, they had fewer errors.
They had fewer rejected ballots. You just got to go down the line. And in states that expanded out their voting by mail, they did not go off the charts in terms of rejections, returned, spoiled, all sorts of things that we measured. They didn't have proportional increases in those things. And so we know by the measures, by talking to people, that there was an administrative response. But that's an unusual administrative response. I mean, this was all hands on deck for the 2020 election.
So I think in theory, yes. You've got to worry about that. I think in the particular case of 2020, if you were to do cases that you would say, yeah, almost everywhere, the administrative response was at the appropriate level, and then well. So let me piggy back on this and also reference, I think, an interview I heard that you gave at CSL a while back. Basically, and I'm paraphrasing, you argued for a distributed election system.
Basically, the idea is that different states, different people, different costs, different comfort levels, they should have their own system in place. And we've got 50 states and potentially, a lot of districts within these states. This adds to the complexity in terms of a viewer that looks at the holistic system.
So how do we manage this tradeoff between having such variability, trying to keep everything consistent, managing this complexity and, at the same, time actually working in a distributed way, which we also know from computer science, to be an effective way of getting the job done? Yeah. And let's leave COVID out of it because that was a big discontinuous change that we're still working through.
But the history of voting systems and the use of the systems has been to basically to slowly work out technological or management complexity. Just take the case of voting by mail. It's not a coincidence that the places where all vote by mail got adopted was in the Western states with great distances like Colorado. Think about how many houses were built in Colorado in the 1920s by mailing a check to Sears Roebuck in Chicago. And they would ship a house out to you, and you would build it.
So you have a long, long history of doing important things by mail. And so if you look at the adoption of voting by mail, what you see is a gradual-- gradually moving in that direction. Society becomes adapted to it, its expectations. There's a strong autocorrelation in terms of what you did last time, you do this time. You become more comfortable with it.
To the point where now, in America, without disruptions, people feel very comfortable with how they vote and very uncomfortable with how other people vote because you just kind of learn that way. A second big movement starting in the 1960s, there started being greater and greater premium on convenience, time saving, doing things on my own time. And elections in the United States are very much traditionally constrained to one time a few hours, one day every few years.
Well, citizens started agitating for more flexibility, more access to maybe mail. I want to do this before election day. Well, out in the West, they pioneered not sending ballots to everybody, but allowing anybody to vote by mail if they wanted to.
In the Southern part of the country where there's greater, I would say, skepticism, ideology is less attuned to letting 1,000 flowers bloom and letting things happen over there and actually, maybe even a little bit of less trust because we conservative ideologies is also associated with less trust. So on the one hand, less trust by the prevailing ideologies, but a desire to accommodate desires for more complex voting.
Well, what they did in the South, they said, OK, you can vote before election day, but you have to do it in person. But what we see over a 20-year period is a sliding of states from in-person election day voting in one of two paths. One path is to expand out mail voting. The other path is to expand out early in-person voting. And one of the things that does is allows you to innovate gradually and get people comfortable.
One of the ways of characterizing this is have a regular way of voting, and you have a backup way of voting. And so you just develop the backup way, and you hold on to the way you've always done it. And that becomes administratively manageable. Up before 2020, only one state had roughly equal amounts of early in-person voting, election day voting, and mail voting. And that was Florida. They were running three elections on election day. Everybody else was basically running two.
And by and large, there were controversies about elections in states. But they were usually not about election day voting versus mail, et cetera. They were more like voter ID and access to being able to vote at all. They weren't these sorts of where do you vote, and do we trust that the right people are voting, and that sort of thing.
And so I think that the disruption, the technological, innovative disruption that was COVID, forced many states that used to run two elections, to run three elections. And the thing is about running an election is that when you, in the past, have been running a mail and an election day operation, well, if you're going to add an in-person early voting component, these first two components, you can't give them up. You've got to keep them going pretty much at the same level as you did before.
And now, you're adding something else in an environment in which elections are considered to be underfunded to begin with. In a normal time, you would have liked the states to innovate more slowly because the trust of voters comes from seeing the regular thing happen all the time and for innovation to be slow. The accuracy of the process comes from election officials to be able to adapt incrementally on the side. And when you get massive disruptions, then administratively, you have problems.
And you naturally should be asking questions about the ability of the system to adapt. And then if you have other political reasons to mix the pot a bit, then you can get into the situation that we're in right now. Charles, I can't help but note two of the things you discussed about how different ideologies tend to lean one way or the other on what they may think is fraud or what issue they choose to harp on, or how if there's political motivations, they can kind of stir the pot.
And just as I've heard some people talking about the 2020 election being stolen, I've also heard the other side talk about the 2000 election being stolen. And is there something more to it than just, oh, my guy didn't win, so I'm going to say the election was stolen? Is there sort of an analysis on why one ideology says mail-in voting is bad and another ideology says something else is bad? You mentioned trust. Is there an analysis of that, of why really, besides just my guy didn't win?
Yeah, I mean, there is. And actually, I'm doing some of that research. So in terms of the historic markers that you're laying out, 2000 versus 2020, the first thing I would say is there was the 2000 election. And then there was the 2004 election where, in Ohio, there was a controversy in Ohio. And a bunch of Democrats claim that Diebold had stolen the election for Bush in 2004. So there were precursors back then.
I classify that in terms of traditional, what we political scientists call winners and losers effects. And there are winners and losers effects among the voters. And there's winners and losers effects among candidates. And this has been noted going back into the 1960s where, for instance, candidates when they win, they take all the credit. And when they lose, they blame somebody else.
And their followers who don't know anything about, really, the details of election administrations, they cue off of what their admired and trusted political leaders say. So you get these kind of things that we just by following politics in the United States. You get these stories. Oh, in Chicago, they have dead people voting. And just kind of the things that get to be said and people understand this.
And some people in some places like in Illinois, people downstate continue to hold grudges whenever the Democrats would win because, well, maybe that was because of fraud up in Chicago, even after Chicago had cleaned up pretty much everything. So that's kind of normal politics in the United States. And that goes back to the founding. And I suspect that's a common part of politics everywhere in democratic nations. You kind of grumble about losing. You have stories about why you lose.
And you particularly have stories why you lose there because of somebody else doing something. 2020, there's a couple of differences here. One is I would just note that in 2004, when Democrats in Ohio said that Diebold stole the election for Bush, you didn't have Democrats storming the Capitol building in Columbus. So there's a degree of anger that has been added to the current debate. Where does that anger come from? And that's where some of the research that I'm doing is beginning to dip into.
The best we can tell right now-- the running hypothesis is that there are psychological movements that we see that have arisen alongside of populism in the United States. Christian nationalism is one of them. The great replacement theory or conspiracy, which we're seeing a lot of in Europe, is coming to the US, the QAnon conspiracy.
These sorts of conspiracies, which, altogether, energize people who believe that there once was a white Christian nation that's being overthrown by non-Christians and non-whites. And so it's not just that, ah, these white Democrats are beating up on these white Republicans. In the view of some people-- and I very quickly say this is not the majority of Republicans.
But there are people aligned with the Republican Party who are terrified that they are living through a moment in which, if not them, then their children will be imperiled because of this movement. And it's that dynamic, I think, that's changing how all of us who work in this area do our work and change the sorts of things we're doing research in.
And it matters, by the way, finally, to understand these movements, because we do want to assure people who can be assured that the elections are honest and not fraudulent. And until we understand these new currents of public opinion, we're not going to understand who can be convinced, who can't be convinced, and what are going to be the convincing arguments and methods. This is truly fascinating, Charles.
But I do want to maybe take it a slightly different angle and just conclude in a different note. And that is, in all the conversation about evolving the elections, we're changing things incrementally. And the verification process is complex. And as we introduce a new system, a new thing pops up and so forth. But at the same time, technology has evolved so rapidly, we run millions of financial transactions a day without even people understanding that plumbing system and how it works.
And we trust the fact that we're going to have our money in the bank tomorrow, that no one has actually taken them. There's probably an evolving private encryption system that can help us run an election in a completely different way, transformative way. So why aren't we there? Why are we thinking of the incremental ways that we have adopted from more than a century ago?
Well, I mean, the first thing, I think, is we should be asking your colleagues in computer science why that is because the loudest voices and the greatest skeptics, up until very, very recently, like the last couple of months, were the computer science community and some of them at MIT who have been leaders in this. What they tell me-- again, I'm not going to pretend to be a political scientist. But the secret ballot ends up being the problem.
And it's the adherence to a sacrosanct secret ballot that, in their view, means that you need something independent of the technology in order to verify at some point, that the technology had operated properly. And practically speaking, that kind of folk technology that ends up being the ground truth is a piece of paper. Here's a problem I've been having conversations with election officials for the last couple of days about this.
There are cryptographic schemes that one can adopt to make greater use of either technology or the information available in the vote. There are new methods of auditing statistical techniques that were actually adopted during the first and Second World War for quality control that you could adopt into elections so that you could verify that the vote was right, not by recounting thousands of ballots but maybe under certain circumstances, counting 15, doing widespread verification very cheaply.
There's new ways of doing this. But all of these new ways involve greater complexity that is hard to explain to my grandmother if she were still alive or to the regular election official. So there's the matter of in elections, two things then. One is that we're told that we can't trust the technology. We need a backup in paper. Let's now think about the better technology. In order to get it accepted, you need a very high level of literacy in this level to gain trust.
And my observation is that level of literacy is higher than you would ever expect a regular citizen to have if they weren't running a computer system. And I think that's the challenge. I'm hoping we can work on that. The auditing techniques are the area where I think that there's the greater opportunities. There's also greater opportunities in, I would say, overseas voting for technological developments because right now, think about this.
So yes, there are concerns about computers and networks, et cetera, and voting remotely. We can't verify that the voter is who the voter is. The voter can't verify definitively that the vote is actually going to the election department. And neither side can verify definitively that there's not a man in the middle. So that's the basic problem over there.
But right now, in the United States, there's a federal law which states, if you are an overseas voter, your state has to accept from you an emailed or faxed ballot. Well, you want to talk about-- OK. And this is where I've tried to engage the computer science skeptics. OK, yes. Let's take as given your skepticism about this normally. But right now, there are people transmitting, in the open, ballots from overseas.
And there are efforts to use cryptographic techniques and others that probably get you 99.9% of the way there. And why isn't that a better solution than a fax machine or an email? And so I think if there's going to be developments-- and there already are developments. West Virginia is using a computerized system for their overseas voters. So I think that's where it's going to be. But as my friend, Ron Rivest, keeps arguing that the elections industry is a small industry.
And in his view-- I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I will. This cryptographic problem in elections is the hardest problem he knows of. And it's not going to be the small elections industry that solves it. It's probably going to be somebody else who solves it. And if it's solved in another industry, then there's hope for it in elections. Thank you for listening to this month's episode of Data Nation.
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