The Future of Voting

we we are from. So a lot of this conversation is really kind of gravitating towards that because that's that's that's our lives, right, especially in an election year, you've got that kind of a spotlight on that. So as we record this, just remember that's where we're coming from. But a lot of the stuff we're gonna talk about applies to pretty much any place where there's a democratic processes.

The question of what is the technology around voting, how does that shape voting, What are some potential changes in the future, what are some of the risks or benefits of that technology? How do people cheat? Yeah, that's gonna be a big one. Specifically, Yeah, we are talking about voting, So maybe what I said was not strictly correct, and that we wouldn't have to be talking about democracy. We could be talking about an oligarchy ruled over by a small elite of people who vote on what happens to

everybody else. Again, as long as long as the voting procedure is somewhere in there, right, Yeah, But but I don't think you can use the movie announcer voice to say, like today, we're talking about the future of oligarchy. Yeah, the same ring as democracy. We're also not going to dive into some of the related topics that we could have explored, but it would have made this episode even longer, things like what about the future of the electoral college?

Will that always be a thing? We're not going to go into that. We're specifically focusing in on the voting ASP act, Yeah, because there's there's way too much to go into. Otherwise, we could do a whole podcast, like, not an episode, but a series about this if we wanted to. Yeah, well, I wanna take you listeners out there to a place you might not usually go with your brains. Okay, so you might participate in some kind

of no, no, no, some kind of electoral process. And you take the voting process for granted, maybe you vote, maybe you don't vote, but you know, you know, voting goes on you. Basically, voting is something that happens. You basically assumed that the elections are fair. I mean hopefully they are. But think about trying to organize a massive democratic election yourself. I mean especially, I mean, like, have

you ever tried to order a pizza for like ten people? Yeah? Yeah, like picture that, but with presidents and how many millions of people of the pizza I would like taff So if you have never yeah, so, so imagine you no infrastructure in place, you've never done this before. You've just got say, well, we'll shrink the number to a very manageable size. You've got ten thousand people and you're trying to get them to vote on something to find out

what they've voted for. How would you do it? If I'm going to sit there and have ten people vote on things, I want to make sure I have a way of distributing uh, ballots of some sort that's fair so that everyone has access to it, that does not appear to have a bias to it, so it doesn't seem to wait one option over another or over several others to share the type of vote that is easy to complete, so that the barrier to actually participating in the voting process is low, and that is easy to tally,

so that I can make certain that I can get the results back at a reasonable amount of time, and is difficult to game the system. It is not a that's not a that's a lot of stuffs and a jug several balls, and just for ten tho people. It would be really really hard, Like I mean, I wouldn't want to start starting from scratch. Yeah, it's a daunting prospect. But imagine a country of three something million, of whom you know a good percentage are of eligible voting age. Yeah, yeah,

that's it's really tough, really tough. And beyond that, in the United States, at least, we don't have a single like approach to this. It's not like there's one methodology that is used throughout the entire country and everyone follows it and therefore it's all exactly the same and you can be certain that if it's if it's not fair, it's at least consistent. That's not the case. You know, fun fact, they vote in Iowa by taking a bite out of a piece of cheese that represents who gets

their vote. Good times. What kind of cheese is? One is a moonster cheese and the other is plot twist head cheese. Oh oh man twist. You've got to really be dedicated to voting, especially if you're lactose intolerant. I don't know, it depends on how hungry you are, but at any rate, yeah, no, there are there are a lot of things that you have to kind of sess out in creating this sort of system. But history has provided us with really quite a lot of examples to

work from. Yes, yes, So going back democracy itself, if you're looking at the representational democracy that we have here in the United States, Uh, there have been some examples that you could argue from from history. So how how would we look at voting from a historical perspective. Let's say that we're going back I don't know, Renaissance time period. What would be the methodology for voting back then? The method the methodology for voting in the Renaissance was actually

taken from the methodology for voting in ancient Greece. So so so this system is is you know a few thousand years old to give a take here and joined you joined the thunderbirds, right, and you do musical numbers. Lauren, please proceed as if he said nothing. Uh. The ancient Greek system was was was tokens. You you take a token representing your your choice of electorate. No, that's the wrong word of of elected official or stuff, and and

you put it in the appropriate box. Um. And and that is where eventually we got the word ballots from, because it derives from the Italian bete, which is a diminutive form of the word ball, so ballot, ball, ballot. Yes, the word ballot was first used in Venice circa the fifteen forties, where indeed small balls were used to cast votes. So you would just place this like you've got your boxes there, you got maybe Candida Day or candidate B. And you think, well, Canada Day is a real stand

that person. I'm going to vote for Canada Day and Canada B. I can go take a long walk off a short pier. I'm gonna put this ball into Canada as box. And then presumably you would just count up all the balls in both boxes, and whoever had the most winds. Alternately, you might have like a like a like a light colored token and a dark colored token given to you, and you can you can put you know, whichever one you want exactly into a box. So I've got a question who invented that type of voting that

looks like it's a bunch of bull to me? Where somebody stands at the front of a room and says, all who agree, say I, and some people say I and then other people say nay, and it's like you didn't actually count you just sound you know, that sounds like more That was their screaming matic yes of the of the longstanding scream a matic claim. Yes, uh no, no. But but voice voting is another form of voting that

goes back quite a long time, especially in American history. Um, it was part of our history up until the eighteen sixties at the very least, which kind of is surprising to me that ballots didn't catch on everywhere earlier than that. But uh yeah. The voice voting is the practice of going to your polling location and calling out your name and your vote to the recording clerk and that's your vote. That sounds cheaper than buying a bunch of balls and boxes.

It also seems to me that it means that everyone knows who you voted for. Yeah, that is extremely true, and it also led to a lot of dishonesty in terms of of pressure from outside sources. Like if you if you knew that your boss was going to be in the polling location and your boss really wanted you to vote for Canada Day, then there's not a good way to get around being like, I'm voting for candidate be like that, it's you know, you're it's shouting. This

is the democracy of shouting. It's the Internet, right, which which could then mean I mean the reason why we one of the reasons why we value privacy when it comes to casting a vote is that it helps you get around being intimid aided into voting for something you don't truly believe in. Right, you aren't you aren't feeling an intense sense of communal pressure to vote a specific

way if your vote is anonymous. But at the same time, if your vote is anonymous in private, that's where you start to introduce the question of is it a legitimate vote or has someone been putting in fake votes? On behalf sure and it was pretty pretty safe in that sense because it was you know, in general, if you have a if you have a person come up and get sworn in by a judge say hey, this is my name, I am allowed to vote and I have

not voted yet. Then the judge goes cool, everyone else in the room goes cool, and then you shout your vote. Uh that that that's a you know, communal effort at keeping everybody honest and making sure that no one is in their voting seventeen times right, But it does still mean that if you feel like I really want Canada Day to win, but if I say Canada Day, those big people in the back of the room are going

to totally roll me as soon as I'll here. Okay, we've got to address something before we proceed in this episode. We can't keep saying candidate d A and candidate B. So from now on we will say kang in kodos. Okay, kang in kodos, don't blame. Moving on to paper ballots,

the amazing technology that is paper. Uh So, originally ballots like this, we're just a slip of paper that you would bring in yourself that you had written out your your candidate choice onto all right, and so it's just a little piece of paper, says Kodos yeah or Kang yeah.

I mean if you if you want to support a king. Eventually, the interested parties, you know, the the National Convention for for Kang, would would begin handing out little pre completed tickets um, saying like like, hey, like like you probably since you're voting for me, you probably want to vote for all these other people. You definitely don't want to vote for any of the Owes other people. So uh and and so so here's Kang and here's all the

Kang approved down ballot names. Yes. And that's where we came up with the word a ticket, like if you're voting Democratic ticket or Republican ticket. That that was the word for the single piece of paper that someone would hand you and go like just drop it in the box.

It'll be great, we'll have some laughs. Um. And the system was pretty private, but it did provide a whole lot of opportunities for for ballot box stuffing so fraud cheating, um, which led to changes like like the boxes being transparent um, which made your vote less private again so hull, especially because now the questioning look in your eye. Maybe what's that dude with a camera outside of our recording studio or it? Maybe why why would why would a transparent

box make a paper ballot less private? And the answer to that is is that a lot of these ticket that parties were handing out were on these very distinctive bits of paper, so that a party official standing in the back of a voting precinct could kind of like

head tally who was voting for their representatives. So so so when you made the boxes transparent, it made everything less anonymous and you get back into that that that that that group of group of goons out there is going to roll me as soon as I get out of the polling box. So this this led to the idea of secret ballots. Secret ballots, Why haven't been We've

been using these all the time. The concept of a government printing a ballot with all of the running parties and providing that piece of paper to every voter who comes in. Uh. It was instituted for the very first time in Victoria, Australia in eight That's crazy. It's hard to imagine, right, yeah, yeah, but but you know it had to do with with like funding and just no one had thought of it before, I guess, or or the very least thought of it hard enough to make

it so. Yeah, Hey, guys, I'm really tired of being beaten up. What if we just made this stuff secret so that you know, they stopped beating me up and and and even even from eighty eight, Um, in the United States, certainly the system was very slow to take hold. Um. Some localities still allowed voters to bring in whatever a little bit of paper they wanted through nineteen forty at the very least, and I'm looking at you, delaware, you're messing stuff up for all of us. Uh so so

so this this system, of course is very private. That's great. Um. And it kind of it kind of shifted the way that people cheat at voting. It shifted it from influencing the voter or or having uh having voter fraud, to having counting fraud. Now, if you want to influence an election, you have to figure out how to influence the counting, which people proceeded to do. Although well we will get

into that a little bit later. But um, but but one more, one more technology that I want to talk about in order to set up how voting works today is the very first concept of a voting machine. UM, which were which were lever devices? Um? And and some of you guys out there may have actually used these pretty recently. UM. Lever Lever voting machines are these geared

devices that first gained popularity in the eighteen nineties. And the way that they work is is there will be a bank of switches with all of the candidates names in there, and you pull switches over your chosen candidate's name, and uh then pull a main lever to cast those votes, which turns all of the chosen gears and then resets all of the switches. UM. The maker of one famous brand of this one Jacob H. Myers of the Myers

Automatic Booth. So that said that the machines were designed to end I quote protect mechanically the voter from rascaldom and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret and loud. This is my favorite. I remember these sorts of machines. Not they haven't been in use in Georgia for quite some time, but I remember you were used until ten Since then, since I'm looking at you now, you know, i'd almost I think I maybe rather use a machine like this than an electronic

voting machine. We'll get into those in a in a little bit. But I I see where you're going with that too. Uh yeah, I remember going into this when um, I was with a relative who was voting and they were showing me how the voting process works. And uh, sadly Cleveland didn't take it. Harrison went back into Uh he took over the president twenty third presidency. Uh, it was. It was a good day though. Other than that, it was really interesting to see how how the voting process works.

Moving on into this this idea, what about what about more current forms of voting, because, like we just said, the lever machines, those finally were phased out of the United States in two we should look at some of the things that we're using now. Sure, because okay, so so as as we have been saying here, uh, there's no one system there. There are many systems that are in use throughout the United States. It it it depends deeply

on what jurisdiction you're in. Fun fact, did you know that under the United States Constitution you do not have an explicit right to vote? Kind of weird you'd think that that would be up there. Yeah, So it's not in the Constitution. There's nowhere it says explicitly that you have a right to vote. Now, it's pretty clear throughout the Constitution that voting is just sort of an assumed behavior.

It's the subtext right. It assumes elected officials. It prohibits certain restrictions on the right to vote in the amendments. The amendments say the right to vote based on race or or sex will not be infringed, or something like that, But there's nowhere in there it just says by the a, you know, adult people in this country can vote. So that's kind of strange. Some legislators have actually proposed constitutional

amendments to fix this, but it hasn't happened yet. So still the US Constitution does not say anywhere that you can vote. I have another fun fact that's a little bit more actually fun. Ye okay, Yeah, Texas passed a law that says that astronauts can and should vote electronically from space if they are in space during an election. That's it really hard to drop a ball from lower thorbit into a box that's in Texas. They originally tried

to do voice voting. That wasn't very good either. There were like mistakes were made, so as as astronauts from Texas can definitely participate in Texas elections from space, good job text. I wonder what that's got to be like, right, Like can you just imagine, like, hey Bill, stop looking over here, my my right to making a private vote here? Like it's crazy. I mean, it obviously makes sense, but it's one of those things where I just didn't occur

to me until until we started doing this episode. So talking about some of the other ways that here in the United States people vote, uh, A lot of states still use paper ballots in some way, shape or form, particularly the upper Midwestern states and New England. Um. They paper ballots can take different forms themselves. It's not like they're all uh, you know, produced by one company and

then shipped off to each state. You've got the optical scan approach, which is kind of similar to standardized tests like the S A T. Where you know, you fill in the circle completely so that a scantron type machine can tell you the votes later, so that a human person doesn't have to sit there and go through all of them, right, although sometimes a human person does, but

that's not the intent. It is to make that automation possibility, and then their punch cards, which if you were paying attention to the elections back in two thousand, you heard a lot about hanging Chad's, especially in Florida. Yep, yep, you this is where you would you use Usually you typically use a little punch hole kind of device thing

to push. It depends on it depends on whether you're in a precinct with a machine where sometimes there will be like a like a button thing that you use, or um, if you're doing a mail in thing, which is what I did in Florida for that election, where they like send you a paper clip with your mail in ballot, and they and the instructions are like unfold this paper clip and punch with it. Yeah, the idea being that you So wait a minute, Lauren, you voted in two thousand in Florida. Do you know if your

vote for Kang was counted? You know, to this day, I'm not sure. It was very confusing the little punch card, Like, I mean, I consider myself like a relatively uh observant human person, and I and I definitely was not positive whether I was voting for Kang or Cronus to be

to be fair. I I consider myself a fairly capable at at at simulating a human being, and I have also I have also found numerous voting devices to be unnecessarily obtuse, like to the point where I'm thinking, like I understand what first of all, when you read a sentence and you think, I understand what each individual word in the sentence means, but when you put them together

and together quite like that? Yeah, oh yeah, Like sometimes in Georgia will have we'll have state referendums on an issue and standing there trying to read this and it has like fourteen negatives in it, the right to not do X when unprivileged with X, you know, will not be infringe And you're like, I'm not I just did a visual gag out of there was a lot of there were a lot of faces being pulled at that moment.

But so the punch cards, you know, obviously, the way you vote is that you punch a hole next to whatever your choice is, right either it's usually a pre perforated type of of ballots, so that you're actually just punching out something that's meant to be punched, as opposed to having to make a hole in that piece of paper. Um. And of course the idea of that is that again

you could have an automatic tally machine. You could feed it through and uh the machine would very quickly be able to determine who you voted for based upon where the holes are. Yeah. And an interesting story about these. They came about in the nineteen sixties when a couple of Berkeley professors adapted IBM s like pre cut punch cards for computers, and they're they're portable punching machine for those cards, um, in order to to make and and

cast ballots. And IBM briefly owned the company um uh the votomatic or the or. Yeah, that's that's the great terminology of the day, right, that's the sixties ist term that I've heard all day and I love it. Um and And actually one of the first tests of this technology was conducted right here in Fulton and Decab counties in Georgia. Those are interesting to the three of us and maybe not to anybody else counties in the metro Atlanta area if you were not aware, if you're not

from Georgia, there's no reason you would be. But but yeah, these these uh, the photo of the photomatic and other similar punch card devices have generally fallen out of fashion, um in a widespread kind of way because of these these issues with with jamming and with less than clean punches, and with the dangling chads chads, Yeah, the chad by the way, that refers to the little piece of paper

that you've punched out, Yeah, perforated. Yeah, they they And you could imagine that these problems with UH processing these punched out pieces of paper, they increase as the age of the machines that tally increase, things just start to break down. Also, you can imagine that if there are more people voting, if you have a greater volume of votes that you have to process, then you have the the potential for more problems happening over time. And that's

not that's not great. That's not a great way of of making sure you have a fair fairly and consistently and and speedily run election process. Then you've got ballot marking devices, and these are usually reserved for people who would have difficulty making marks on paper ballots. UM. It usually involves something like a touchscreen interface and an audio output to help voters navigate the ballot. So if you

have like UH problems with your vision. This might be something that you use so that you can still participate in the voting process and still have a private, you know, a secret ballot, as opposed to having to rely on someone else to put the that in for you, which would necessarily mean that you have to share your it with someone else. Kind of goes against the spirit of the thing. UM and there's votes by mail. A couple of states UH conduct their their votes by mail UM

Washington State, Oregon, and Colorado. Do you you could imagine that any state where you have a pretty UH sparse population or people just tend to live very far apart, it's very difficult to create polling places that are centrally located for enough of the population so that they can actually participate in the process. So that's a that's a possible solution is doing the votes by mail UH and paper ballots, like we said, could be tallied manually or

by machines. So in some cases you actually had people whose job it was was to go through each of those paper ballots and mark down what the various UH votes were for. But various types of scanners have have come out are recently and and lots of different ones like different states use different companies. It's not again, it's not like there's an impartial producer of voting machines and

tallying devices and that's where all of it comes from. No, they're they're companies from across the United States that make either the voting machine or the telling machine or both, and different states by different ones, So you don't have a consistent kind of experience from one state, sometimes not even between one county and another. You can come across

some very different systems and that can be a little. Uh. I don't know if daunting is the right word, because you're not typically going, as an individual, going to encounter more than one system, because you're going to be in

whatever county you you reside in. But it seems perhaps counterintuitive if you're trying to have what if you need to go to the next county to vote again, so you live in So you live in Illinois, So you've been dead for fifty years, and you want to vote as many times in the Chicago elections, you've only got until dawn because they turned to dust. And then we have fun with Chicago, but we love you. Uh. This moves us over into pretty controversial but also extremely common

method of voting. They the last few times I've voted, I've voted on one of these, the direct recording Electronic Voting system. Yeah, the d r E s, these are the the Essentially they're like touch screen computer typically it's like a touch screen computer interface. Uh. In Georgia, that's been the case for a while, and in fact, Georgia is one of the states that happens to have some of the oldest d r E s currently in use. I think the ones that were purchased in Georgia were

purchased before two thousand six. D r E s typically have a ten to fifteen year long lifespan and they have not been replaced purchased. More more on that in a minute. A quick historical note though, Uh, patents for electric ballot machines not electronic quite yet, but but but electric like like tell Graham or telegram telegraph based machines started appearing in eighteen fifty, but nobody ever used them until nineteen. Uh, just just everyone was like electricity, it's

a passing phase. Yeah, it's not as reliable as good old mechanical work. I can just imagine someone over and an office just kind of you know, a clerk with like the little the little visor on his head and he's he's guys chin in his hand. He's just sitting there looking at a little light bulb and then suddenly blinks twice. Another one for for Kang Mark, another one

down for Kan. But but but when we when we did eventually get electric devices, they were like push button kind of things, sort of like sort of like a keyboard or an old phone pad, if anyone ever pushed a phone button in their life. Yeah, and these these are meant to record votes electronically, right, Like, that's the idea is that if you can record your vote electronically,

it's speed of light. I mean, it's really easy to tell you because you put it through a computer program that just sorts the votes on its own, and the user interface is easy, right, And in theory it protects the person's privacy and like that. There are a lot of things that on the surface are very easy to point out as pros uh to be fair, though they're

not all equal. Right. There's some d r E s that generate a hard copy of every single vote that is cast, and this is meant so that you can compare the hard copy against the electronic copy, makes certain that the machines are accurately recording the votes as they

were cast. Uh. In some cases, we would allow even the voter him or herself to see immediately after casting the vote if the paper ballot that is generated reflects what they actually chose, so they can be certain that their vote was recorded the way they wanted it to be recorded. There are other places that have absolutely no hard copy produced, so the only copy is electronic. I just get a little card, stick it in the machine. Vote how I want, take the card out, give the

card to somebody. Yep, And I don't see any It's not a paper card, it's a little it's plastic. Yeah, that's how it works. In Georgia, we do not have a paper copy that gets generated. There's no way to compare a hard copy against the electronic copy and make certain that in fact the votes match up. Uh. And we'll talk more about that in greater detail. But you could see that that creates some that could create some

some controversy at the very least. Yeah. Uh. And but like I said, most of the time, the interfaces for these machines, they typically are touch screens, but you can also find some that are mechanical buttons like you know, the screen tells you which button corresponds with which choice and exactly twigs and k ing Man, I remember that campaign. Uh. And again since twenty ten, we haven't had any mechanical lever voting machines, but those were still in use up

to that point. Um. So in the United States, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in two thousand two to make reforms to the voting process. So it wasn't that long ago. And that act required states to invest money in updating and upgrading voting equipment for because as as this equipment ages, than it has more potential for inserting errors. And when you're talking about voting, obviously the the stakes are very high, right, you don't want there

to be errors in that sort of thing. Uh. The Act was actually drafted in a response to problems people encountered in the two thousand election, and that brings us to a section about problems with voting and voting technology. Uh. One of the big ones is accessibility. Making sure that the system you have designed is accessible by the population at large, and that you're not excluding anyone through the design of your voting system. Yeah, because imagine everyone has

a legal right to vote. But say there's only one building in the entire United States of America where you can vote, and it closes at six pm on voting day, and it's up five flights of stairs. Yeah, the voting places up five ft no elevator. Yeah, So anyone with mobility issues, anyone who can't get to that building. You know, there are a lot of different dolleks. You can you can have somebody granted explicitly the right to vote. Yeah,

the conditions make it such that they really can't. Yeah. Yeah. And and this is sadly a thing that is that is contested in several places in the country. Absolutely. One of one of the one of the other elements of that act I was talking about, had a section in it about how states had to come up with a voter i A D system so that they could prevent

fraud from happening. In other words, you can't just have someone show up and claim that they are eligible to vote in that jurisdiction and then cast a vote and then leave. There has to be some way of of saying, yes, this person does have the right to vote in this jurisdiction.

According to that act. But what if they are eligible to vote and they don't have the appropriate I D. Yeah, that's a and that that is a continuing issue here in the United States and multiple jurisdictions, A very a very challenging problem because there are two very important aspects

at play here. The idea of let's make certain that we don't create a system that allows folks to gain that system, and also, let's make sure we create a system that allows the people who are eligible to participate in it to actually participate in it, that the people who are eligible to actually vote. Yeah, and not than that, right, it's and no one who is intelligible, right, this is right,

no one who's dead or yeah, exactly. Uh. And we could get into voter eligibility stuff too, but that would just be an enormous can of worms, because there are different states that have different definitions of that. Like if you have committed a felony or been convicted of a felony, don't even have to have committed a felony, you just have to be convicted of one. That that could be uh, that could strike you from ever being able to vote again in certain states, not in all of them, but

in some of them, So that's another issue entirely. Then there's problems with tallying votes. This gets back to that hanging chat issue. So that was when in Florida these ballots that had the punchhole variety. That wasn't the only kind. They're also the butterfly ballots that also that had issues. They were related to the punch hoole ones where it wasn't clear which indicator areas were related to which names. Yeah, that was a real issue with the punch hole ones.

Sometimes the paper wouldn't completely tear from the ballot when you get that hanging chat, it's still something, it's still partially attached to the ballot itself, and that could end up creating errors when the when the votes were being tallied by machine. So there was a very close race in the United States in two thousand, I mean it was it was really coming down to Florida, and so

everyone was really paying close attention. And while many were calling for a careful recount of the votes to make certain that the votes that were cast accurately reflected the results that were being posted, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the election over al gore, and that caused its own controversy that lasted for quite

some time. Uh So in the wake of that, that's when that act was drafted, saying we want to make sure that you know, we're not saying that something wrong definitely happened in two thousand, but we want to make sure that that possibility doesn't arise again. Yeah. Well, I mean, even if you're the person who won, it's not fun to be uh entering public office with suspicion hanging over you that you're not actually the people's choice, right, and to say nothing of the person who didn't win and

are wondering if maybe they should have. Right. Yeah, it's it is not healthy for the country as a whole. So then we get to d r s without a paper trail like here in Georgia, the type that we have here in Georgia. The concern here is that there's since there's no physical piece of evidence of a vote and it's all just a file, this could easily be misrepresenting the actual votes of the populace, which we can't check because we don't have anything to check it against.

Right if we even if we had a paper trail, the let's say that's Uh, that's sending out a hard copy printed version. Unless the voter him or herself is able to look at that paper trail and say, yes, this does accurately reflect what I chose. Uh, then the paper trail is kind of meaningless, right, because the paper trail could say the exact same thing that the electronic

results say. Unless you relate it back to the individual voters, there's no way of saying that it is verified or fraudulent because if if I sit there and like, no, no, no, the twenty tho pages of votes I have here exactly match up against the electronic file, but it turns out that if you pull those people and they all voted something else, then you're like, well shucks. You know, there's nothing that links it to the actual intent of the voter.

And it's really challenging to change that without bringing that privacy concern back up and saying, well, unless we're specifically linking very specific votes to a very specific people, how do we verify this? And if we do that, then we remove the privacy from the vote. It's no longer a secret ballot, and that's very important in this process. So, uh, that's been pretty ugly um. And also it's very easy

to lose electronic votes. It's a file. It's not hard to completely disenfranchise an entire population from from any sort of voting process by quote unquote losing on purpose an electronic file. Not that that necessarily even even by accident.

I didn't mean to you don't want votes to be lost, right, Yeah, it's just that it's one of those things that it lends itself to conversations where you start to make cynical assumptions that the parties that are perhaps administering a vote have invested interest in the outcome of that vote, and

therefore they are working toward that purpose. That's not necessarily the case, but this sort of stuff lens ammunition to that kind of argument, right, Like you're like, well, if they can do it, then they must be doing it, and that's the problem. Uh. There's also the question of security. How do you make sure that the votes are actually

coming uh from legitimate SSEs and meanwhile protecting that privacy. Um, all of the systems that are in place according to that act I was mentioning earlier, are supposed to be auditable. But how do you make a system auditable that is

also protecting the identity of the voters. How can you audit an electronic system and say yes, in fact, I know that this is working because Miss Johnson over there voted for Kang, and it's sure comes up as Kang over here, and and Mr Johnson voted for Kodos, and Nick came up as Codas, and that dinner is going to be interesting. But I know for a fact the system is working. That that's It's really hard to do.

But at the same time, you gotta say, well, an auditable system is important because you don't want there to be some sort of bias inherent in the machinery itself. So you start to see where these challenges are coming in. One potential solution to this, or one that people have proposed, is called the voter Verified Paper Trail, which sounds like Oregon Trail to me. It's like we're going on an adventure and we're probably gonna get dysenterry, Like, yeah, Kang

broke your leg and bought three barrels of salt pork. Yeah, I kind of want to play Oregon Trail now. But the very the voter Verified Paper Trail talks about producing a paper ballot that reflects the electronic choices of the voter, and then ideally the voter would be able to compare the paper ballot to the output of the electronic screen and make certain that, in fact it does say exactly

what they intended it to say. But of course, if you were particularly sneaky, you could have the printed ballot reflect what the displayed results are on the screen, but have the recorded but vote be something totally different. So like vote number fifty on the screen, it says this. On the paper ballot it says the same thing. That's exactly what I wanted, Press submit, But when it goes to be saved, all the lets get switched. That's entirely possible.

So it's not a perfect system either, right, And because the electronic approach has the capacity of affecting a very large number of votes with a relatively small amount of effort, that has got a lot of people worried about it. Right, Like, if you wanted to affect paper votes, that takes a lot of effort, especially if assuming that the people running the election are on the up and up. It's hard

to do. You need help, Yeah, if you are capable of of executing an attack upon a vulnerability and an electronic voting system, then you could affect thousands or maybe millions of votes from one single source. And that, I think is where a lot of people are saying, Okay, we really have to read evaluate the approach we're taking.

And then there's that that question of of including a bias in a system, which is not just uh academic discussion in many ways, because this question was very seriously raised in the not too distant past because of the political um involvement of a CEO who was the head of a company that made voting machines. UH specifically talking about the the then CEO of Diebald Incorporated. Back in two thousand three. Die Bald was one of the big

companies producing voting machines they had. Their business was mainly a t M S, but they also did voting machines. And the same ceo wrote fundraising letters on behalf of the Republican Party and included the sentence quote, I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the

president next year. End quote. Now I suppose that could be interpreted in an innocuous way, sure, just saying like I want to help with the system yeah, I am going to advocate for this person and we're gonna get them into off that. That's one way of looking at Another way of looking at it, saying I'm the head of a company that creates voting machines and I could totally make this happen, So at least for people reading that on the outside, introduced suspicion, right. It raised ethical questions.

It was obviously a conflict of interest for someone who is the head of a company that is producing machines that are supposed to be unbiased and not give any weight toward one choice or another, so that you have a a an approach that any voter can come into absolutely with a clean slate and just be confident that their vote will be reflected. And then they're also advocating for a specific party. That is problematic, and it has

raised some pretty tough questions. Now. Of course, one solution that people have discussed to this is that if you know, if you have machines that have software governing the process behind counting votes, that software should be open source. People should be able to see what the code is doing. But of course companies who make those machines probably don't want that no, they take a very proprietary approach. And again it's different systems across the United States, so you have, uh,

you don't have a consistent approach. And according to professors with john hop Johns Hopkins University and Rice University, who did a study on various d r E machines, they said that out of all the d r E machines they looked at, none of them used cryptography correctly and many of them didn't use it at all. So that you have these unencrypted results there that could be altered, they could be it could be stolen, so that someone is getting specific information about specific voters. It's it was

a big mess. Um. So we obviously see that there are some real areas for improvement. Uh, there's some opportunities here. If we were giving if we were giving voting, the voting process a review a performance review. Right now, it's saying we've we've identified some areas, some opportunity areas for us, feel like you're not living up to your full potential and we want to try and fix you. Man, how many of my performance reviews have gone with that specific route.

We want to fix you, get you fixed. Yeah, So one of the big issues facing the United States. Uh, is this aging voting equipment story? Like I said, Georgia's got some of the most ancient of the the d r E systems that are out there. And by the way, as when The Atlantic ran a piece about aging electronic voting systems, had no contention of replacing them, or at

least no plan to do so. Uh. And according to the piece in The Atlantic from it said, the problem of aging voting technology reaches nearly every corner of the United States. Unlike voting machines used in past eras, today's systems were not designed to asked for decades. And this is an issue we see just by going in that high tech route. I mean, if you've bought a computer, you know that after a few years that computer just

doesn't seem to work so well anymore. Well and for them where you're you're gonna especially like I read that, I read that a lot of the systems that are in place there are from the nineteen nineties even And uh. And when you're using equipment that old, you start getting into the issues that you would get into with with any kind of proprietary legacy systems. You know, the vendors eventually stop using that operating system and aren't going to be able to help you, uh fix or update anything

that goes wiggy. So when you do have a situation where let's say a machine goes down in a busy polling place, you may not have any way of addressing that in a in a way that the matters to any of the voters who are in line, and so that process slows down more and more. This in turn, can create a hardship on the people who want to vote. It can it can It can disincentivize I guess that's a terrible that's not even a real word, but it

can use. It disincentivize when I'm when I'm living in suburbian areas as my other terrible flood I've done in the past, that i will never live down, and so I've just adopted it. It will make it will make people less likely to go out and vote, because if they go out there and they see that there's a line that stretches around the block and hasn't moved significantly for the last twenty minutes, then that creates this this barrier to voting, And it is the opposite of that

accessibility we had been talking about. Sure, so okay, so we want to replace these systems, but what kind of technology would it be best to implement. Should we take some off the shelf stuff that would be cheaper and easier to set up and also easier to hack. Yeah, let's just like put some MacBooks on the you know, oh, here's my voting app. Right, And it's easy for us also to to say, hey, you guys should replace those systems. But that costs money. And then you get into the

argument of who pays for this? And this is I bet you know I have a guest who pays for it? Somebody else? Well, ultimately it's the taxpayers who pay for it, right, ultimatelysdiction Right. The question is is it is it coming from county budgets or state budgets those tend to in the United States, that tends to be a pretty hotly contested uh kind of argument about whether should it be the local region that has to pay for those upgrades or should it be a state budgetary concern and uh some.

In fact, the Atlantic report says that like some of the problems here is that it seems like the various parties are essentially waiting until something catastrophic happens in the federal government steps in and says, all right, now we're gonna have to pay for these upgrades. But that's not a great stress to g right. Let's well, I'd like to build up the levy a little more, but I don't have the money for it. So we're just gonna wait for a massive storm to come in wipe out

the levy. Lots of people are going to be harmed, perhaps killed in the process, but afterward we'll have the money to build up that levy again. Or we're going to change public opinion with a John Bonham drum solo also a possibility. So one of the other options we have heard about in the past is the idea of allowing people to vote over the internet. Genius there it is. That's the I mean, I would love to be able

to vote online. I don't know if I'd feel very good about it, but that would be great because the last time I went to the polls, I went there and I you know, I got there and they were like, oh, you're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be at this other place back where your old address was. And I was like, why aren't stirred here. I just want I just want an approach like American Idol, were two different phone numbers pop up and I just have to call one of them. M M, That's what I want.

So the Internet, like you're you know, the idea of having something really convenient and instantaneous and having this ability to to see in real time what election results are going, like who's in the lead and who's behind. That has a certain uh, you know, charm to it, as certain attractiveness to it. You could argue that this would open up access to even more voters. It lowers that barrier of participation even further for people who have access to

a computer. Anyway, that's still not that's non trivial, by the way, like you know, that's that's still that's still a huge assumption. But I mean, there are a lot of people who probably are you know, they worry about

how can I get away from work? Right? You know, they've got stuff to do there for I mean, technically your boss is supposed to let you go vote, but a lot but in practice that's not necessarily going to be how it turns out like And it's not like most of us are equipped to say, oh, well, I was going to vote and then my boss said that I had to come in and so now I'm going to have a civil lawsuit that most of us can't do. That it's not something that we it's not it's not

a realistic approach. So yeah, so that could make it easier in those cases. You can just go to work still and then if you get you get a ten minute break, go vote on your break. Yeah. In fact, that this might end up increasing voter participation, which is something of a weird topic here in the United States too. You may have heard that in the US that voter

participation is particularly low. The Pew Research Center found that voting participation in the US was that um only seventy one percent of the United States citizens who are eligible to vote were even registered. It's been decreasing for fifty years running. I actually saw some figures earlier today that if true. They say that more than half of eligible eighteen to twenty four year olds are unregistered. Yeah, so that's so young people especially don't even get registered. That's

even that's just registering, not that's so that you can vote. Right. Uh. Yeah, so we're we're seeing that the participation on that side is pretty low. But to be fair, to be perfectly fair, some countries that have incredibly high percentages, it's compulsory, like you have no choice in it um and and some some of them you have no choice but to vote as well, like you are you are compelled to vote. So it all depends upon the systems you look at. It's not we can't just assume that all of them

are equivalent to the approach the United States takes. Um. It would be a very different story if in the US you not only had to register to vote, but you had to vote in every election, and then you see the numbers go up if you had like real consequences that could happen to you if you did not participate. So yeah, that's important to keep in mind too. Uh So there's some people say, yes, we should have internet voting.

It would it would mean that more people would partic sipate in the system, that the whomever is voted or whatever measures are past would accurately reflect the majority the desire of the largest number of people within the population who are eligible to vote, and that that would be more fair. So it would be super fast, to be super easy to tell you those votes why not go that way? Well, one would be you remember those old rock the Vote things the future that could be replaced

with hack the Vote. You're killing me that you're calling it the old rock the Vote things that was a voting age when those were up. Come on hack the Vote that that is what you you'd have people like organizing conferences for fun just to try to do things. Absolutely. Yeah, communication over the internet is is pretty much insecure. That's like excluding the people who would have organized nefarious campaigns

trying to sway the election. Right there's there's already been a published paper that contains a no own hack for attacking home WiFi routers in order to tamper with PDF ballots on the way from a voter back to the precinct. Yeah, so that is a thing that exists on the Internet right now, and that's that's that's before you actually see a rollout to a larger population. Like even if you're just doing a little pilot program where you're testing it out, uh,

you you would have hackers target that. A general rule of thumb is the the shinier the target, the more hackers are going to want to attack it. And nothing really gets shinier than the elections of a nation um, and you could see all sorts of ways to disrupt an election, from something as simple as a di DOS attack, that the distributed denial of service attacks, so that that the actual servers that are accepting votes and allowing you

to vote are down, thus you cannot even participate. There's that approach to perhaps infecting computers and having them vote via a bot net to sway results or to deny people their actual chance to vote. There are a lot of ways that they could block a vote so that it looks like you've cast your vote but nothing has

actually happened, or they could make changes to results. I mean, there's so many different avenues to attack that making sure all of them are secure would be a massive undertaking, one that some security experts say is, for for all reality's sake, impossible, Like it's just not it's not within

our capability of producing that. Uh. Obviously, if you were to create that system, it would have a huge target where hackers would have this enormous incentive to try and find vulnerabilities, and it's highly unlikely we will ever produce a system with no vulnerabilities, So it would be a very high stakes game. Ah, so you also have problems

with transparency. How could you be sure that such a system and internet voting syce him is accurately reflecting what is really happening on the voter side of this right right back to the back to the it's digital. How

do we tell exactly? Yeah, unless you're unless you're able as a voter to say, I have cast a vote, I see that the vote recorded is in fact reflective of my choice, and I can see that it has been included in the overall votes, and I can see that in the final results, my vote is among them. Unless you have that assurance somehow, this is a very

difficult approach. Now. Granted, you could argue you don't have that assurance with other methods of voting either, But you could build that into an electronic system if it weren't for the fact that you still have the security issues that don't magically go away. Right. Um, So, yeah, this is something that a lot of people have pushed for, a lot of countries have pushed for at least experimenting with internet voting. But almost every computer security authority I

could find said this is not a practical idea. It is at best misguided and at worst it would be catastrophic. So uh, yikes, Um, what about other ways? What if? Well if what let's go back to my smartphone. So let's say all right, so let's say the calling the

American idle number doesn't work. What about something else? Well? Yeah, other other methods have been proposed for for coming a little bit halfway towards towards getting getting more accessibility for people to vote, making it a little bit easier, like a like a system where people could could download an app on their phone precomplete a ballot, um maybe even scan in QR codes from campaign posters if they so chose, um, and then when you go to the polls, you just

upload it or even video conference yourself in to a polling official and you know, for for like military personnel overseas or sure and uh and and so that up and could make it easier for for not just people who are are incapable for whatever reason that day of getting out to the polls, but but also for for voters with disabilities with with audio or visual disabilities, who who need a better way to to access that information. Yeah. But of course, if you're main concern is increasing voter

turnout or at least accessibility. I think there are arguments that there are other ways to increase voter turnout and accessibility that wouldn't compromise security in the same ways, and maybe it would be better to try those first. So, for example, we might have mentioned this earlier, I think, But one is making voting day of federal holiday. This is a pretty standard proposal. Um, you know it's not so we hold federal elections on Tuesdays in November. Why

do we do that? As we have for a minute, Yeah, so we do that, and I love most people as we always did it that way. That's not a reason most people have to go to work. Work your boss. Your boss is supposed to say it's okay for you to leave work to vote. But you know, bosses are supposed to do a lot of things. It doesn't always

work that way in the real world, right. Um, So if you simply made the day on which the elections occur a federal holiday in which nobody is supposed to be going to work, then then that that should increase voter turnout. It should make it easier. And this has been advocated by a lot of people, among them Bernie Sanders you know, Vermont senator and recent US presidential candidate,

but also universal automatic voter registration. This is a big one because one obstacle to voting is the registration block. So you can't just show up at the polls and say, hey, I'm over eighteen and I'm not a felon time to vote. Yeah, here's my ide, but yeah, you have to be registered, and you have to be registered a certain period of

time before the elections. Yeah. And so an easy way around this would be to say, well, why don't we just have some some system that automatically registers everybody who's eligible to vote. I don't understand why why don't we do that? And that actually is not only proposed, it's approved in five U s States as of last month. So according to the Brennan Center at the n y U School of Law, quote, eligible citizens who interact with government agencies are registered to vote unless they decline, and

agencies transfer voter registration information electronically to election officials. So this means you interact with any agency of state government or federal government. I guess you, uh, you go to the d m V or you do whatever. You know, you interact with the government Uh, they know who you are, and they say, Okay, by the way, I see that you're over eighteen, and you're not a felon. You're registered to vote unless you unless you say I don't want

to be right. That seems like an to me. That seems like a fair way of going about it, especially to remove that that barrier of entry where people who are either unaware of the process of registering to vote, or it's not built into a way that's easy for them to get to or do or whatever, that the barrier is just too high for them to go past it for whatever personal reason there may be. To remove that or as much of that as possible, I think is that's that's a decent thing to do, doesn't It

doesn't even mean that that person has to vote. It just means that they're registered. Right. Well, you know, sometimes I think I hear people making an argument like, oh, you know, how how easy does it have to be? It's not that hard to get registered to vote, but shouldn't be too easy. I mean, think think about your life. You you people have a lot of things going on. Yeah, they have a lot of things to do. They might care a lot about politics, but they're also working very hard.

They're taking their kids, you know. Well, and let's let's let's take I'll take myself as an example, because I I come from an extremely privileged kind of background in that regard, and yet even I would have a certain barrier. Uh you know, I don't I don't drive, for instance, right, so I don't get a driver's license. I do have an I D because I need one for lots of different reasons. So going to get an I D though, that's a that's a pretty that's that's a lot of

work for me to get there. I mean that's before I even get into the point where you enter the d m V and you have, you know, the the whole U Labrinthian line system that you have to go through, and the waiting times and everything before you even get

to that. It's hard for me to get to the place where I'm going to get my I D H if it if it weren't for the fact that voter registration is just immediately lumped into that too, like I can just register to vote as I get my I D. If I had to do something similar to that, I could see it being one of those things where I've got to really, I've got to really be like dude, I it's my responsibility as a citizen to participate in this. I've got to push myself. But it would be pushing myself,

it would not It would not be just so simple. Uh, same thing for participating in the voting process. In my case, very very fortunate in this sense, the polling place that I have to report to happens to be the walking route on the walking route to work. If it weren't, imagine a work day where I have to walk the opposite direction, I'm already walking three miles to get to work. Um, it would be uh more of a hardship. And I

realize I am lucky in that sense. There are thousands of people out there who the situation I am in would seem like a dream to them. Yeah, at the very least you could call an uber or whatever if he really needed to. Not Not everyone is is in that is an that position, right. So again, like you know, making the argument of well, how difficult can it be often comes from such a position of well, yeah, in your situation, it may not be that big of a barrier.

But not everyone is in your situation. But everyone who is eligible to vote should still be capable of going through that process. And I guess we should say, you know, for all the things we've just been talking about, they do simply assume that increasing voter turnout is a goal

we want to achieve. Now, personally, I'm fairly convinced that's a good thing, But I guess somebody can make the argument that as long as everyone has the opportunity to vote, we shouldn't bother enacting measures to try to pump up the turnout. You know, maybe some people just don't care.

You know, maybe I think it's kind of a weak argument against making it easier to vote, because many people may feel they want to vote, but they're unable to because of other pressures on their time or something like that. But as for people who genuinely don't care, I guess that you genuinely don't care, I don't see a good reason to try to pressure you to vote, right, I

think the registering thing makes sense. I think compulsory voting doesn't make sense personally, personally compulsory not so much compulsory, but automatic registration. I'm in favor of compulsory voting, not so much. If you don't care, you should at least not if you haven't formed an educated opinion and don't bothered to read anything. You know, are we really that eager to get you involved? I'm not. I'm not so

worried about so much worried about that. But I'm you know, someone who someone who for whatever reason doesn't feel like they want to participate in that particular uh voting process. I totally get it, and they should not be forced to do so. Well, that's another thing for somebody, whether or not you agree with the wisdom of this. For some people also, they regard not voting as a legitimate

form of protests. So absolutely, yeah, as you were saying, like the people who argue against making voting easier, and I was reminded of the The Bit and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of where the city plans for Arthur Dense's house was being demolished, like it was in a basement in a disused lavatory that had a sign on

it saying beware of the leopard. Right, like to some people the process they have to go through to either register or to vote is while not that exact thing, at least you could empathize with that passage right, and we don't. I think that's the bad way to go personally. That's my personal opinion. Um, this was a really interesting topic and like we said, you know, this just covered the voting aspect, uh and what is the future of voting.

I imagine we're going to see some other uh probably other groups dip their toe into the idea of internet voting. I hope to a level that is done responsibly and with the guidance from real computer security personnel. I don't expect that to become widely adopted because of the vulnerabilities we've already mentioned. You know, if we do, I suspect there will be extreme prank voting hacks that will, like for example, Kang and photos will actually win elections. It

would it would be really odd. It would mean it would mean that it would mean an unprecedented approach, right like the point where a government would have to say the results of this election are not valid because that's a cartoon character. We got to totally do a do over. Guys. It's like, think about any time you've ever seen a corporate identity or brand try to do a voting campaign on social media or something. Every single time, what happens,

it gets hijacked by people trying to make fun of it. Yeah, as soon as you I mean, we've talked about this before to right, Like, as soon as you create a system, people want to see how far you can push the system before it breaks. And when you're talking about something this big and this this important, that has lots of different implications, not just on the voting side, but the privacy side, the security side. If you let me generate my own Coca Cola ads, I'm going to try to

find a way to make one about demons. It's I mean, that's just who Joe is. Alright, guys. Well, that wraps up this discussion about voting. Uh. I am curious to see how this continues for I mean, obviously because it has such a huge impact on millions of people and and uh, not just obviously in the United States but

around the world. Uh. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of Forward Thinking, you get an idea for a topic that you would like us to cover, please send us an email or message on Facebook or Twitter. Our email addresses FW Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. Our Twitter Twitter handle is f W Thinking, or you can search f w thinking on Facebook and our profile will pop up. You can use us a message there

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