How E-voting Works

United States November. Uh not Thanksgiving? No, I mean that was gonna happen in November, but that's not the one we're talking about. Is there something else happening? Yeah, we're talking about the elections here. That election, yes, and of course since we're the Tech channel, we're gonna talk about how the Internet relates to elections, particularly this election. That's true.

You know, a few months ago when I was working with someone else, um that would be Josh Clark and you may know for stuff you should know, we actually put together a series of political articles on how Barack Obama works, how Hillary Clinton works, how John McCain works. They were, you know, the principles in the election, and one of the things I noticed from that was that there's just so much more interest in the elections. And

we were talking about ideas for podcasts. Uh I told Jonathan, I thought that we should do one about how the Internet has really profoundly affected this election, because so many more people are involved in in the outcome of this. They're just really, you know, personally invested in there. They want to see what happens. Uh, you know, from both sides, from the conservative side and the liberal side, and you

know everywhere in between. Um. And in fact, as I was doing research was I saw a report from the Pew Charitable trusts UM, which always makes me think of a certain cartoon Skunk. But aside from that, they didn't report in June and said that of adults are using the Internet or some kind of electronic means for political purposes, to share information, for fundraising, uh, to keep up with things.

And that's that's amazing. I mean of the population, you know, that's that's a significant amount considering the number of people who are wired, because not everybody uses the internet. That's true even still and uh, I actually read in a in a report over from our friends across the pond, over over from the BBC News that people under twenty four trust online media more than they trust television as

a source of political news. Seriously, Yeah, that's crazy. I mean it's crazy in the sense that, uh that that it shifted so quickly, right, I mean, comparatively speaking, the internet is still a pretty young thing, and the web is even more young than that. The web hit the hit the scene in the early nineties, uh, came available

to the general public around then. The Internet has played a role in in earlier elections, but really, this year, two thousand eight, it really seems like this is the year the Internet has come into its own as a political vehicle. Um. Not just for the media reporting on this or or citizens who are blogging about it or reading about it, but also for the politicians themselves. Um. Barack Obama seems to have really grasped this. He has his own Twitter account. He's actually in the top ten

Twitter users for people who follow Twitter. Um. And not only that, but his Twitter account follows back anyone who follows him. So if you follow Barack Obama, Barack Obama follows you. Know. We should probably mentioned that it's very unlikely that Obama himself is the one twittering you don't really see him at the Yeah, you don't really see him at debates, like with his you know, looking down below the podium with his thumbs going crazy as he's

hitting his BlackBerry. Um, although that would be great. Uh yeah, hold on, hold on, I'm not going to talk about the economy here. I got a Twitter to finish. Hold on one second, I'll be right with you. Right. But but whoever is on the staff who's doing this, is uh really keeping the followers up to date. I mean, every time that Obama is going to uh to speak live in front of an audience, there's a link in a in a tweet from Barack Obama saying, Hey, you

could watch the speech right now as it happens. You don't have to wait for the news tonight. And uh. And that's a powerful tool, that's true. Uh. In fact, he's been so adapt at fundraising using his website that he's been able to you know, there was all over the news not too long ago that he was giving up public financing for his election campaign for the general election because he was able to raise money through private means.

And of course, the McCain campaign hit back at him saying, you know, saying that he had flip flop that he had already agreed to use public money. UM. But you know he's He's not the only one because Ron Paul, the candidate for the in the Republican race, was able to uh fundraise substantial amounts using you know, grassroots internetwork and uh, you know they're they're basically all the campaigns this year used it as a fundamental part of their strategy.

Now you know they're having various degrees of success with it, um, but you know that it's it's been a serious part in the campaign itself from the candidates and and one of the largest uh uh initiatives would have to be through email. Um. You see a lot of blogs, you see a lot of things like the neat little Twitter posts and stuff, but really email lists are where are emails still how the candidates are are getting their message

across uh primarily when they're using the Internet as a vehicle. UM. I mean, they have their websites and everything like that, But if you have ever signed on to any any politics Asian's website, I guarantee you're receiving email from uh everyone connected to that campaign. Um, and you may be receiving multiple ones in a single day, and and most of the time it's for fundraising opportunities things of that nature. Um, but yeah, it's emails a big thing with candidates, which

is interesting because I thought email was dead. That's why I keep hearing anyway. Yeah, yeah, well it's certainly not dead. When it comes to putting down candidates or trying to spread disinformation. There will be a lot of a lot of people on again all sides of the campaign who are uh perfectly willing to spread rumors to anyone and everyone. Um yeah, not just about the candidates, but about their

significant others as well. Despicable. Um. You know. As a matter of fact, it's gone so far that St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly have put together a website and an email but I subscribe to called PolitiFact. It's available at PolitiFact dot com. And it's kind of cool because they have a truth ometer. So what happens is that it's like one of those old needle gauges that you see on on audio recording equipment or in a TV studio. And basically what they'll do and they and they are

very even handed about it. They take all the different candidates or even some of the uh, the third parties that make claims about things that they say in ads and they'll say, you know, uh, for example, Barack Obama is a Muslim, and they'll say, you know, they'll actually investigate the claim, break it out piece by piece, interview people and break it down, and they'll list it on the truth ometer as being anywhere from you know, patently true to pants on fire which actually has little flames

in the in the gauge, which saying you know, this is absolutely not true and this is why. And they'll break it down in the different things. So it's kind of interesting because the email takes it and breaks it, each one of these claims down, and it takes you know, it plays no favorites, it takes all of them as they come. That's that's uh. That's pretty interesting because there's a lot of disinformation out there and and it might

not even be intentional, but it's definitely there. And uh, Barack Obama too had to start a website of his own called fight the Smears dot com where he addresses each of those uh you know, basically, it's the email chain that's coming back and each of these claims he's taking and explaining you know why people say this about him and then why it's not true. So it's uh, you know when when you actually have to take a website, you know that just to do do that, it shows

how prolific these emails have gotten. Right and and to go beyond the whole email realm, we can look at other aspects of the Internet that have been very important in this election process like YouTube. Um, the YouTube debates that were held during the primary season. Uh, that was huge, and it gave viewers the chance to actually ask questions of the candidates. It really set a new precedent for

voter politician interact. I mean that. I think that's one of the reasons why the Internet is playing such a huge role in this election. It gives people more of a sense of connection to the people who are running for office. You're no longer looking at someone who's on the back of a train, you know, making a speech before the train goes off to its next destination destination. Now you're actually interacting with the people who may very well end up being president. I mean, it's it's it's

a it's a powerful tool. Yeah, and you think as powerful as it is, that it would allow us to uh, to not have to stand in lines on you know, the second Tuesday in November. Right, you know, at this point, E voting, you know, voting from the comfort or your own home where in your jammy's and your bunny slippers, doesn't look like it's going to be here anytime soon. You know, there's, um, there's some big problems with E voting. Uh.

We have some aspects of the voting already. The chances are uh, most of us, i'm sure have have seen a direct recording electron voting machine d r E. That's one of those where you go in and it's a little computer monitor and you touch the screen and you make your choices and then at the end it says is this correct, shows you the ballot, and you say

yes or no and um, and you move on from there. Uh. And there's been a lot of controversy about these machines, whether they're safe, whether people can hack into them, whether or not they have a paper trail, because without a

paper trail, can you really trust the electronic trail. Basically that you take your card, you put it in your vote, and then you're supposed to put the smart card in a box and you don't know whether anything is being done with that, whether anything has been actually recorded on the card. I mean right, it's it's um, it's there's a whole can of worms there. And when you when

you extend that to the internet, it gets even more complicated. Um. One of the biggest problems is guaranteeing that your vote is counting. And the issue here is between privacy and accountability, because they can't. You you can't link of vote to a specific individual. That violates your whole right to privacy. Uh. You know, some people they don't care if you know that they're voting for one person versus another. But that's you can't you can't make a judgment across the board

based on those people. You have to ensure privacy. So if you're ensuring privacy, that means you can't necessarily link back one vote to one person. How can you then be sure that every vote that's in your electronic system is accurate and valid. What if someone has hacked in and has put in a thousand votes for someone and these people never even really existed. Is there really a

way you can be sure that that has not happened. Well, the government's the US government has tried to experiment with this. In two thousand, the Federal Voting Assistance Program tried voting over the Internet UM initiative, and it was deemed successful. It had a very secure UH set in place. It was only a very small sample size though, so it's it really wasn't a true test of the Internet's capability

of being a voting system. So in two thousand one, Congress UH gave the go ahead for an initiative called the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment or SERVE, and by two thousand four they canceled it because the the security concerns were so great there was no way to tell at that time whether or not such a system would ever be feasible based on the technology we had, and they said, we're pretty much gonna have to wait until we changed some standards and the technology catches up,

and then we'll move on from there. Yeah, you know, it's funny to think that we went from you know, the uh, you know, possibility of ballot stuffing with paper ballots and hanging chads with butterfly ballots, to the bright new future of electronic voting, which is completely hackable and corruptible and nobody trusts right. Well, if you'd like to learn more about some of the topics we talked about, you can check out how Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or

John McCaine work. Those are all individual articles, and we also have how e voting works and those are all online right now at how stuff works dot com. Vote early, vote often. Yes, Thanks for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you