TechStuff Flashback: The Scary World of EVMs Part One

e v ms. I voted this morning in Georgia and had to go through and use an e v M. Now, unlike what the situation was back in when this episode you're about to hear originally published, Georgia has changed slightly. Back in, the voting machines did not produce any sort of paper record, so there was no sort of receipt to show that the vote you were casting on the electronic machine was being reflected as the vote that was

actually being recorded. Georgia has since changed that. Now when you go through and you make your selections, it sends a paper ballot to be printed on a machine, which you then can look at verify that in fact the information that you put on the electronics display is reflected on that paper ballot. But then you bring that paper ballot over to another machine and you scan the paper ballot in So now you have a scanning machine that takes the paper from the electronic machine and scans that,

which arguably just creates a different point of failure. But no system is perfect. The question we have to ask ourselves is does this system provide more confidence in the overall process of voting than the preview system. I would say yes, because at least there was that physical copy, not that you've got to keep it. You actually could not leave with your paper ballot, so that's something you didn't get a copy of it or anything like that. Um,

but I think it is a step in the right direction. However, I have a much deeper conversation with Mr Ben Bolan of stuff they don't want you to know and ridiculous history and many other things, and so we sat down to talk about the scary world of e v ms. This one is part one, and in our next episode on Monday, we will listen to part two. And I hope all of you are well. I hope you're all doing what you can to make the world a better place.

And uh, yeah, I'll see you on the other side. Hey, Jonathan, thanks for having me on the show, and hello tech stuff audience. I was really excited when you brought up this topic and asked if I if I want to hang out with you on it. However, before we go any further, I've got to ask, are you okay man? It's been a long week. Then it's been a long week, and it's been a weird day. This this day did not unfold the way we first imagined it would, or

at least not for me. Uh. And Also I figured that I needed to be really like up and upbeat and excited and happy before we go into this topic, because I guarantee you it cannot sustain itself as we talk about this. Also, you're gonna hear some papers being shuffled around, folks, And that's because my computer decided that it was no longer going to connect to the wireless network once I took it away from my docking station.

I think I figured out what the sequence of events was that caused it to do yeah, which largely involves being docked, removing the wire WiFi, turning the WiFi adapter off because I was getting blips and then removing it from the docking station without enacting you know, without enabling the WiFi again, and now it won't do anything. So I just turned the computer off and I'm using paper notes,

which I understand are a thing. And sometimes how apropos, my friend, because sometimes people will argue that, uh, using paper based documentation is more efficient or at least less prone to error than electronic documentation, such as you know, notes we might share on a laptop. Well, it's certainly, uh fixes things in a more permanent form, right, because with electronic files. I don't know if you know this, Ben,

but you can sometimes go in and change stuff. What but if you've printed something on a piece of paper, it's a lot harder to change the thing. You print it on the piece of paper without it being noticeable. Now you can change it in electronic format and print a new thing. Yeah, I don't wish to bamboos all you.

I am no flim flam man. So yeah, today we're specifically talking and you know from the title of the podcast, we're talking about voting machines today, electronic voting machines specifically, and what it is about electronic voting machines that have certain people kind of talking about security, transparency, that kind

of stuff. And here in the US we are hurtling towards an election, uh, kicking and screaming all the way, as is typical every few years in the US, I mean, especially when it's a presidential election, which we have every four years. And so I thought it was really important for us to kind of talk about this, and of course ben as a host of stuff they don't want you to know. There are a lot of conspiracy theories that surround voting in general, not just electronic voting machines,

but the whole process. Yeah, yeah, it's true. There are a they're quite a few things that would be called conspiracy theories. There are also quite a few very valu lid criticisms or observation about the nature of the voting system, everything from the nuts and bolts of the technology, to the way technology disrupts existing legislative systems, to just the

organizational stuff. You know, the the question that a lot of a lot of you guys probably have out their ladies and gentlemen is stuff like why was Ross Perro the last third party candidate to make it to the you know, the big kids table of debates, right, actually

and actually getting put onto ballots on most states. Or another great question that I hear all the time is why the heck do we still have an electoral college if we've if we've evolved beyond the point where a bunch of very wealthy white landowners have decided that really we shouldn't give complete control to the HOI ploy when it comes to picking our leaders. We should have a protective layer in between the dirty masses is and the

enlightened leaders. The quote titian can't even appreciate a cool man, Julie, that's true. Yes, uh, hear about recognize the esteemed representative from the state of Virginia. Um, yeah, that's a. That's okay.

So that's a that's a great point. And before we get too far into it, one of the most salient or applicable quote unquote conspiracy theories about elections revolves around the idea that elections have been fixed retroactively or miscounted, whether intentionally or accidental, by a machine or the people

in charge of the software running the machine. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, these are our big questions, and we're gonna talk about all of those and in order to really get a full understanding of where we are today, I think it always helps to have a quick rundown of how we got to where we are, right. I love to do this on tech stuff, where even if I'm going to talk about specific technology, I tend to go back and say, well, here's here's how we got there historically.

Um So, voting has been around for a really long time, whether whether you're talking about like from an official capacity, like you go back to like the Greeks and they're they're voting, or you just talk about you know, small groups deciding where they're gonna you know, what animal were we going to kill for tonight's meal? We had? We

had mastadon last night. Come on, let's let's branch out. Um. But well before Survivor ever took to the airwaves, we've had voting, and for a long time we would tabulate these votes manually. You just have someone who would either just count up all the votes, if you did some sort of voting like through stones like the White Stone or the Black Stone to vote on something, or very often voting was done in public where you didn't it

was no secret ballot. You declared your vote in front of people, which yeah, and that um, I mean it clearly has some advantages in the sense that you have verifiable votes, right, it has some disadvantages in that if you hold an unpopular opinion in your particular region, you might find yourself ostracized from the larger community because you've

voiced that you may become a target. Yes. Yes, I actually had a conversation with someone this morning about how uh they they had suggested we moved to h a time where we would be able to assigned votes to specific people so that for verification purposes, and I said, that's a terrible idea. And the reason it's terrible is

because it favors the majority and it punishes the minority. Right, if you are in the minority opinion and you vote your conscience, like you, you are not going to be cowed into voting the majority just because all these other people want you to. Then you stand, you know, victim. You're you're vulnerable to the majority who may punish you for your your choice to uh to vote your conscience, and or you might just feel pressured to change your vote so that you keep your you, yourself and your

family safe. So secret ballots I think are really important. They actually came officially to the scene pretty late, especially when you're talking about standardized ballots. Those didn't become a thing until the mid nineteenth century. So eighteen fifty six was when we saw the first standardized ballots, meaning ballots issued by the government with the candidates arranged in whatever

order they had deemed was appropriate. I don't know if they went alphabetically or how they arranged it, but the government had come to a decision on here's how we're going to present the ballot. Um it's standard for everybody. And that government was Australia, so it wasn't the UK. Of course, it wasn't the U S which a lot

of people would assume. Yeah, now there had been secret ballots in both the UK and the US, but this was a standardized approach, which, yeah, this is where you're saying, everyone's getting the same sheet of paper to vote on, as opposed to if you went into a voting precinct to one part of the United States for let's say the presidential election, and then went to a voting precinct in a totally different state, the ballots could look dramatically

different from one another and have a have completely different presentation. Like you could just imagine, let's say that you're going through a corrupt precinct and the candidate that they all want to win is a nice, big, bold print, and then the other candidates are in teeny tiny print and you can barely see them. Like that would be unfair. Obviously, you would say, like, I detect a sense of bias.

So this was Australia in the mid nineteen century, and I guess then the best way to organize the candidates would be by their crime, right, I'm so sorry. As always, As always we love to poke fund at Australia for getting its start as a as a as a penal colony. Well, I mean, clearly the Aborigines have been there forever. But but you know, from the European standpoint, Hey, but before we get too cocky, Ben, we live in Georgia, a

state that was a penal colony. Do we get a pass for that because we because because Georgia was a debtor's prison essentially. If you've ever been in Georgia you can understand how how when Europeans got here they first thought, yeah, this is where we want to put bad people. So so the the Australian state would create these out of

I guess taxpayer money. Yeah, yeah, it was, and that was a big deal, right, like the decision that because anything the government does, you know, any product that they're going to make, any anything they produce, the money for that comes from taxes. That's where governments get their money. So you know, you're not going to the Australian government of shop and buying a whole bunch of T shirts and that money goes to making making ballots. But once

this was established, then it quickly caught Uh. I was gonna say caught fire, but that's hard to talk about when you're talking about paper ballots. They got popular, um I was adopted throughout the world. And so by the late nineteenth century, so late eighteen hundreds, inventors yeah, just a couple of decades later, inventors were already beginning to experiment with ways to create machines for voting, things like using punch cards so that you could tabulate the data

really quickly. And you know, because especially as populations grow and as you open up the vote to more eligible voters, as you make more people eligible, you know, keep in mind, this is the same period where we start to see uh, various minority populations end up getting the right to vote. That increases your voting population. We see women get the right to vote, That increases your voting pop relation. Being able to count those votes quickly becomes really important because

you don't want to hold up like. You don't want to everyone waiting, Like we voted three weeks ago. When are we going to find out who won? You don't want that to happen. So there were a lot of experiments in ways to tabulate votes more quickly. And also the idea was that this would be more reliable than a human, like, less likely to make an error, less prone to uh, less prone to a user error or or fraud or fraud. You know, you can't bribe a

tabulation machine to give you incorrect results. You could program it to do that, but we'll get into that later. Um. Now, even though people were working on it in the late eighteen hundreds, it would be another half century before you actually started to see some of these punch card systems make their way into voting booths. Uh, it just wasn't ready yet. Um. And then we get into the first actual voting machines and we get to a man by the name of Henry W. Sprat. He sounds like a

like a LIMI he is or he was. Can I say limey on the air? Is that okay? I mean we can beep it out. It's just gonna sound like I said something worse. The English Blackguard. Um. He was an Englishman and he received a U. S. Patent for a push button voting machine back in eighteen seventy five. And so imagine that you have a column of buttons, okay, and each button corresponds to a choice for a vote for a single vote. Now it's just a column, or it could be arranged as a row. It depends on

how you built it. But it's a single row or a single column. And you might have three buttons that are activated because you have three choices that you could choose from. You would choose and then that's it. You only had that one that one option because uh, it only had the one row or the one column. Okay. So so like in other words, like when we go in for an election, frequently we have multiple uh positions

or or um issues that we're voting on. Not just the president or maybe a state rep or a state senator, but also uh controller uh well and ann and people in the actual House of Representatives in the U. S. Senate. So you've have multiple positions that could be open, well, you would need to have multiple rows or multiple columns so that you could make that kind of vote. And in fact we did see those follow but in eighteen seventy five we saw that first push button patent um

that in several variations that follow. We're all purely mechanical devices, so no electricity here. These are all working from like levers and joints and hinges, and so it's actual just pure mechanical action, which is great, um, but also problematic because things can break down, things can jam. Like if you've ever used an old typewriter sometimes you know the

keys can jam. Same sort of thing could happen. I mean, especially with the more complex voting machines, more moving parts creates just simply more opportunities for something to go wrong, exactly, more points of failure. Yeah, and so one of my favorite inventions that came out fairly early was a lever that you would pull in order to close the curtain behind you. Not Ben, I didn't even ask you this, but uh have you for all of your voting experiences.

Have you only used the direct recording type the computer monitor types, or have you ever used a voting booth like I had used a booth very very early in my political career. Yeah, and I think voting will count as my political careers. I said, before you burnt all the bridges, and before I had burned the bridges and became an inspiration for several characters in the House of Cards. Yeah, uh yeah, I I was in the very early days before this was institute. I did get to experience like

the older paper based voting I I did. Um, I did the old lever voting machine used to be that used to be in Georgia before two thousand two. I'll talk about that more in a second. But um, the way that they that they typically would work. Because this once this innovation was introduced, it was adopted pretty much universally. Uh. You would have a lever that you would use to close the curtain behind you, and only then would the other levers become active where you would be able to

cast your vote. So it was great because it meant that you were pretty confident that your vote would be done secretly. No one's going to look in on you, because before you could even get started, you had to close the curtain. You didn't have an option to vote with the curtain open. And uh, typically the way it would work is that there'd be a mechanism that would just lock all the other levers in place until that curtain lever was activated. And yeah, it was really ingenious.

It was again pretty simple. Even when you get to electro mechanical voting boosts later on, it's still followed the same principle. And I thought that was really neat. Now, those voting booths were and incredibly heavy, uh and complex, and like I said, they would break down occasionally, which obviously that's a big problem. They sound positively Stephen punk if we're being honest. Yeah, if you were to ever like look in the back of one, you would be

pretty impressed. It would look kind of like a piano got in the fight with you know, like a copper store or something. It was pretty cool. That is such a beautiful description. That might be your best writing this week. Well, like a piano with story. Yeah, and then you that's you. You got a lever action voting machine. In eighteen eighty one, Anthony C. Baroneck received a U S patent for a push button voting machine that was more suited for American elections.

This one had the multiple rows and column so it was more advanced than than sprats. And then in eighteen eighty nine, Jacob H. Myers patented the first lever voting machine also known as a direct recording vote machine, which use mechanical lever syndicate. Votes and results were counted by the machine itself and then what would happen is he would record the results. A human being would record the results from each machine for it to be uh tabulated

in the grand totals. Um and Myers had said that the approach had major advantages over older methods and that it could prevent ballot stuffing because each person could only use the machine once before it had to be reset, so you couldn't vote and then just go ahead and vote again, and vote again and and then just keep on creating uh you know, false votes for whatever candidate

you chose. You can only do it the one time and then it would have to be reset for the next voter, which meant that, you know, it was a little labor intensive because you had to have someone there to reset the machine. But at the same time, it kept the voting process honest. Um. And then the first time Myers machine was actually used, I remember it was made Ino, so it didn't take long. And again there still was a weak point here. If you had someone whose job it was to write down the results, they

could fudge the results from the machine. And let's also point out that here in the late nineteen century, yep, post civil war, at least in the US, Yes, late nineteenth the three is post civil war even today, even today, I'm just saying with with that having occurred so recently, corruption was rife and rampant, oh yeah, especially like there's certain areas of the United States that have almost a comical association with election fraud, Chicago, Chicago being the big one,

Like like you'll hear stories about Chicago elections that are amazing, like like like how how how many people turn out to vote in an election, including ones who haven't been alive for like ten years, um, boss tweed kind of stuff. Right, yeah, yeah, So, at any rate, the the this didn't erase the ability for some tampa to happen, right, But again it would be the humans. Ideally, the machines count all the votes

as they were cast. But the humans whose job it was to transcribe that could fudge if they wanted, if they if they were so inclined. Not that they were allowed to, but they could have because there's a hierarchy of reporting here. One person tabulates each machine. After each vote goes to a precinct, precinct tabulates, it goes to a higher authority of a regional sort, and then on and on and on up to the national level. Yeah.

And just like you said earlier, the more moving parts we have in a mechanism, whether an organization or a machine, the more potential points of failure we have, right, And and this again kind of leads into the thinking that would eventually develop into the electronic voting machine, the idea of being that, hey, if we can remove some of these steps, then perhaps we can end up having a

more accurate reflection of the public's intent. Right, Which that's a very honorable thing, but it gets a little a little muddy in practice. Yeah, we do so. Nineteen thirty lever voting machines have become a common site throughout elections in US cities. Most major cities had these by nineteen thirty. UM. In nineteen sixty two karn City, California, would use optical scan ballots for the first time. So these are like the center dized tests, like the s A T. I

assume they're still like that. I haven't been in high school in a really long time. But you know the kind of test where you have to fill in the bubble all the way to indicate your choice. That's what we're talking about optical scans. So you've got your ballot and you fill in the ballot as directed in order to make your choices, and then those are later put

through a scanning machine. It's essentially like a camera. It just detects where the dots are and then it can tell who you voted for based upon the position of the dots. And obviously this means that you have to have uh very standardized paper so that they can load in properly, be read by the machine correctly, so that

you don't get misidentified votes that sort of stuff. You have to also have the seemingly unnecessary but in practice crucial instructions for every voter on what we actually mean when we say filling in a bubble. Yes, you know, check marks no X. You have to fill it in completely all the stuff you may remember from your S A T S A C T S or EL sets right right, yeah, because if you don't fill it in correctly, if you don't fill in that bubble fully, then it

may not be counted. And obviously every person who goes to the trouble to vote once his or her vote to matter, right, I mean we don't. We don't just stand there just for the fun of it. Um, maybe the first time, but after that you're like, well, I'm doing my civic duty. It's not my civic Oh boy, let's go and do this. Remind me at some point

when we get to the contemporary area. I have a great voting story for okay, but but right now we've got the scanners, and then we move into something that's a little bit of local history for you and I. Yeah. In nineteen sixty four, Fulton and Decab Counties in Georgia used punch cards and computer tallely machines for the first time in an election. Uh. Fulton and Decab Counties are

really the two main counties of Atlanta. If you look at Atlanta on a map, especially if you look up the term metro Atlanta, there are a whole bunch of counties that are in that something. There's like thirteen or something. It's crazy at this point. But but the two big ones that make up what we what we who live in Atlanta think of as Atlanta are Fulton in Decab. And so in fact I think Ben, I think you you might live in one and I live in the other.

That is true. I'm currently a resident of Fulton County, though for a long time I was over there with you in Decab. Yeah, and then to be fair, I think only a couple of miles separate Ben and Ben's how in my house, so we're right there on the border of the two counties. Anyway, those two counties became the first to use punch cards and computer tally machines for the first time, and that would quickly get adopted

by a lot of other places. In Joseph P. Harris would patent the votomatic punch card system and that would require voters to use like a stylus like pen to punch holes into a ballot. This became very common to and it was on a sort of a template thing, right, like it would slide into this thing with the choices, the one that you chose almost like a frame that would hold the paper taut. Yeah, I remember those. And also I want to point out this is one of

my favorite eras of American history for gadgets. It's the time when everything was legitimized by adding oh matic at the end. It was their digital or their organic the buzzword. Yeah. Yeah.

So if you look at any of the cafeterias from back then, there were a lot of the like the serve ohmatic or whatever, and they tend to be uh, you know, like a series of windows and you would put coins into a slot and you would be able to open up one of the windows and get your you know, the ham sandwich that was made seven hours ago, if you really be still my heart or just a jar of eggs. Yea man, those are the days, right, Ben and I have more to say about electronic voting machines,

but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. So, so, yeah, this this is something that has an important difference though, right because the while the act here was just relatively simple human technology, a person popping the style is into a piece of paper. How did they count this? Again? You would put it through a tabulation machine typically, uh you you would do this again using light to detect

where the the punched hole was. This also leads us to another issue in American elections later on, the the dreaded hanging chads. But we'll get there, we'll talk about that, um.

But but it does it does open up the opportunity for tabulation errors only because if the piece of paper that you are punching out isn't completely free of the ballot, like if it doesn't break off from the ballot, then it can it can obscure that whole, and a tabulation device could think that you made no choice whatsoever for that particular vote, whatever it might be. YEA n seventy four. That was the first patent for a direct recording electronic

voting machine or d r e UH. These are also known as electronic voting machines e v m s. They're essentially computers computer terminals UH. And it was first used in and the first one that was used was called the video voter. Yeah. Now, typically these days you have an electronic display that shows you the ballot and electronic version of the ballot, and then you use some form

of interface make your choice. It might be buttons, so it might be a physical button that you have to press that corresponds to a choice you see on the screen, or maybe a touch screen in some cases where you you know your your choices pop up, you press the screen, it activates, and your vote is uh is reflected on what you see on the screen. UH. At that point,

a couple of different things could happen. The vote could just be recorded electronically in memory, and then at the end of the day, what the precinct folks will do is remove the memory from each device, and then you send that over to a centralized tabulation area and then the results would be collected there. Or it may also print a paper record so that you have a hard copy to compare against the electronic ones. Not all e v M s have paper trails. In fact, a lot

do not, which is problematic. Will get more into that. Uh. Location Yeah, not even not even state to state, but within within a state, you could have one area, one precinct where there's a paper trail, and one whether it's not. This is largely because in the United States, UH, the decision on what sort of machine you're using is made at the local level. It's not federally mandated. Right. The federal mandate is that you must have a system in

place for people to vote. You got you gotta have somehow right, But beyond that, it ends up being a decision made on the local level. And there's been a lot of arguments about who should foot the bill for these systems. Should it be a state level thing, should be regional, should it be federal? And uh, this is why we get a lot of disparity across the United States when it comes to different ways to cast a vote on an election year. Um, in two thousand, Uh,

this was a big, big year. This was a year that really started to change things here in the US. Yeah, this is the year when Al Gore was running against uh George W. Bush and um, it was a very close race throughout the United States, but particularly in Florida, which was seen as a state that was going to decide everything right and also, to add to the allegations and the controversy here, the vote in Florida at the time could be influenced by the governor who was brother

to w Yeah. So you had, um, you had polls, like the actual surveys indicating that Gore actually had a bit of a lead in in a lot of areas, but elae elite enough of a lead to bring into

question the results that came in later. But then you also had this issue of the hanging chad's in Florida, millions according to according to some some sources, millions of votes were tossed out because you had these ballots that had chad's hanging from them and they would not be tabulated by the machines, and so rather than tear off the piece of paper, which would almost be seen as like you could argue as a way of tampering, like

how to be sure? Like what have you looked at a ballot and legitimately they had not made a choice for a specific issue or a specific position, or you weren't sure if it just got messed up, right, Yeah, you don't know if maybe they started to tear and then they change their mind, Like how how far does the chad have to hang before you can make the determination? Oh, this is what they meant to do. And of course

I wish I jumped in with this earlier. But when you talked about these millions of hanging chad's, of course we're saying that the chad is the is the leftover piece of perforated piece of paper. It's not you know, a bunch of guys in backwards chats a cargo shorts hanging out. Although I wish I was, Yeah, I wish that the I mean, yeah, I would expect to see see a bunch of chads hanging out in Florida, but only on spring break, right, and know if it's people

named Chad. I don't believe in comitti determinism, which is the smart word for the smart phrase for that kind of belief. Yeah, we were very intelligent about our our shortsighted uh bad jokes. So yeah, this is this is a huge deal though, because UM people who naturally people who support UM the Republican candidate at the time, George who would later become president, George Bush. Uh, they say, well, this is how democracy works, and we have to make

sure it's a clean election. And then the Democrats who are supporting Al Gore say, this is not how democracy works, and yes, we need to make sure there's a clean election. These votes count. You can't you can't just throw people's votes out the door because you don't you don't like what they say, and use the excuse that they don't fit your standard, and so this was this was an ugly, ugly mess, very much so, all the way, all the way to the Supreme Court. That's how far this ugly

mess went. And and they eventually made the decision going back to I love that you put this in earlier, going back to your comment about tabulating things in a timely manner. Ultimately, right, the people who, of course the winning party is going to fight and say there shouldn't be a recount because they got it done the once. You don't when you think about it, a recount to the winner, it sounds like you're doing the election all over it. It's like double jeopardy. You don't wanna you

don't want to run the risk of losing again. You you want to you one, you want to keep moving, and you know you can't really blame someone for wanting that, right, So ultimately the Supreme Court said, okay, like we can't hold up the the American political process, and they and

the Supreme Court ultimately decided the president in that election. Yeah, this was a big point of contention for lots of people on both sides really, because there were people who were very concerned about what this set meant for future alle actions. And so in two thousand to the US government actually passed the Help America Vote Act or HAVA h a v A in response to the two thousand Hanging Chad debacle, and their goal was to phase out

punch card systems entirely and use other systems. Didn't They weren't specific in saying, you have to move to electronic voting machines, but just let's not have this happen again, because that was not pleasant. And so a lot of regents did opt to go with electronic voting machines, and in two thousand two, the first state to use d r E machines statewide it is mandated at a state level is Georgia. Yeah, look at us. Take that. Yeah, we're first in something. We're first in several things, but

this is one of the good ones, arguably. So it was interesting to see that Georgia was was taking a leadership position in innovation in this way. But we should point out that in most states, electronic voting machines are not the only way you vote. In fact, in most states there's some sort of combination of different voting methodologies. Uh, some states you are are you still mail in your vote?

You don't even go to a polling place because, uh, those states are known for having low populations dispersed across the wide area, and it's hard to make a journey all the way to a place where you can go and cast a vote, especially depending on the season. If there's inclement weather in a place like Alaska, you know, how can you realistically expect someone to travel all the

way in? And then you know, also the reason we have to depend on some hybrid systems is because we may have UM veterans or state level officials, people working for the government that are stationed abroad. Might have people who are living abroad for some reason or another. But if it's a legit intimate reason, I guarantee you they want to vote, usually against having their foreign income taxes

US rates. But but then there are you know, there are multiple people who, for one extenuating circumstance or another, need to send a vote, can't be physically at the machine. So overall, it's good for us to have this mix right, right, and and uh, you know again, for a lot of places, it's it was not so much that we have to move to electronic voting machines. We just had to move

off of punch cards. Um. So. One of the other sad things about Georgia though, is that in a lot of areas the machines being used are essentially the same ones that were launched in two thousand two, which means we have early adopter syndrome. Yeah. Well, we also have the the problem that a lot of people have when they get into PCs for the first time, which is that they realize they have to upgrade every few years. Uh. We have not done that in a lot of states,

including Georgia. And this also comes into play with the idea of the expense right. You have to pay to get those new systems in and that means you have to allocate taxpayer money to do that. And I don't know if you've noticed this, Ben, but um a lot of taxpayers aren't keen on the whole idea of paying more tax, which means that if you aren't paying more tax than you have to take money away from something else in order to pay for the electronic voting machines.

And it's it's hard to make that a politically positive move. It is difficult to justify that because there's so many different interested parties and if you were to say, hey, uh, this group over here, I know that we typically budget a certain amount every year for you guys, but we're gonna decrease that budget a little bit this next year so that we can put that towards electronic voting machines.

And then that group says, why are you punishing us? Um, And I'm not I'm not trying to pass judgment here. I understand like there's it's just it's a difficult political game to play. And then we have to also ask, you know, what private industry is involved with this. Yeah,

so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna. I don't want to go I know we'll get into it later, but I do want to point out, you know, when we're asking that question, or we're bringing up the point of how difficult it is to ask taxpayers to pay more in tax so that these machines can be serviced. The government's not paying itself to do it. In the case of Georgia, they're paying someone called Premier Election Solutions. Yeah, yeah, just electric solutions. Used to be die Bald elections. Then

we'll get into die Bald in a minute. So over the next several years from two thousand two on to today. Various security experts in civil rights groups have been challenging the use of d r E systems and elections for various reasons, and two thousand twelve, issues with the election in New York City were so bad that in the city would actually pull five thousand one liver voting machines out of storage to use instead of electronic voting machines. She yeah, well, it's a good thing they kept him.

Huh Yeah, So whoever was in charge of keeping all that old stuff? I'm sure you listen to tech stuff and hate You're no longer a hoarder. Yeah, now you're a patriot. So what are some of the advantages? Okay, before we get into all the criticisms, and then we're gonna also address the fear of the election being hacked, because that has been in the news for a while, let's talk about what are some of the good things

about election voting. Well, first off, speed is huge, right, Like you can you can collect and tabulate votes faster through this method than through any other method, and assuming that everything is working the way it's supposed to, then you know you've got a really accurate result and you can very quickly proclaim a winner in whatever district you're

talking about. So, uh, there's very little delay between the end of voting and declaring who the winner is using those methodologies because you don't have to go through any laborious process to tabulate the votes. And yeah, I mean that's it's it's like any other computer program. You know. You typically, unless you're talking about a computer whose processor is just laboring under way too much work, you get

results very quickly. Another is that there are no moving parts in the actual voting mechanism, and electronic voting mechanism purely electronic. We're not talking about electro mechanical. You don't have moving parts, so that means they don't wear down over time physically. That being said, you can still have errors pop up in electronic voting machines. You could have

operational errors. Things can crash. It's a computer program, and I'm sure all of us out there have had experiences where inexplicably a computer has crashed or in my case, failed to connect to the WiFi. Uh, And so that is still an issue. But because there's no moving parts, you don't have to worry about the physical wear and tear. The way you would with those mechanical devices. May was

wont to say there's more. Yeah. So, one of the big advantages of electronic voting machines, and I think this is a really important one, is they are customizable so that citizens are able to more citizens can participate in the voting process. For example, if you have people who have visual impairments, like they can see, but they might have trouble reading something that's in small print because it's on an electronic screen, most of the time, you have

an option for a large print version. But beyond that, if you have someone who has a complete visual impairment, perhaps they're blind or they're effectively blind, then you can have audio versions as well. So it's and you can't really do that with mechanical ones, right like you can't magically make the print on a series of levers larger, but with a screen you can do that. So it creates more accessibility for a larger number of people who

want to participate in the system. However, not all electronic voting machines are created equally. No, Um, okay, I wish you guys could see this in the studio. I just did President Handry. Yeah, you get the thumbs slightly extended and the fist clenched, and then you do all your gestures. You know why you do it that way, right, So you're not exactly because if you point, then it almost feels like an accusation. They train you President one oh one,

you can train don't point. Um. So your basic d r E is just a computer, right, so it records votes cast on the device typically you would use here in Georgia. You tend to get like a card, an activation card that you plug into almost like a little disk drive, and then you can make your votes and then you are told to remove the card at the end of it, and then you turn it back into somebody and a volunteer at your little polling place, Jimmy

the volunteer, Ben's polling place. I'd like to point out that Decab County has much more respectable volunteers at the polling centers, all with free sassafras. Yeah, you get a little bit of that. So Sasaparilla. Sasparilla is actually what I was thinking of Fault County. It's fair, but yeah, there are differences. Ben and I will conclude Part one of the Scary World of E v M s in

just a moment. But first another quick break. So you've got lots of different companies and make peace right, there's no standard across them, and in fact that ends up causing an issue. But once you make those selections on your computer screen, you get kind of too broad um types of d r s. In one type, it's all records, just electronically, so all you have is the electric electronic record of the votes, and the other one you have

some sort of paper trail. Uh. Now, the paper trail ones you can even divide again because there's somewhere you have a paper trail, but there's no way for the voter to verify that the vote recorded on paper reflects their specific choices. So, Ben, I'm gonna give you an example. All right, let's say, let's let's let's go back in time and uh, you are picking between um, oh, let's say, uh, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. You've got you've got your

choices of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But but back in this time period, this alternate history, they do have electronic voting machines. Wrap your mind around that. So so there you are, you're looking at Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and you, being a huge fan of Reagan's Holly would career, you've decided you're gonna support Mr Reagan and not Mr Carter, the Georgian native. Right, so I'm going against the home team. Yeah,

you're going against the home team. And this is one of those cases where you are very pleased that your your vote is secret. Yeah, because my love of Western's compels me that time for Bonzo or whatever it was. Vote you choose, you choose the Kipper, you choose Ronald Reagan, and uh and in the distance you hear g G, which indicates that indeed the printer has printed out the lines that are supposed to reflect your vote, but you

are not able to see the piece of paper. So, for all you know, the piece of paper actually says Jimmy Carter was the one you voted on. And so while the the review screen that you get says you picked Ronald Reagan, electronically it records that vote as a vote for Jimmy Carter, and on the paper it says it's a vote for Jimmy Carter. And since you can't see the paper, you can't say, hey, wait a minute, that's not who I voted for. I let down the giver.

Well you didn't, because you voted. You did everything you could. Now, there's also the voter verifiable paper trail, and the very viable paper trail means that you would be able to see the paper representation of your vote before you leave the precinct. So in that case, you vote for Ronald Reagan, piece of paper prints out, it says you voted for Ronald Reagan. Now I should add there's still the possibility

that electronically it flips your vote. But for that to happen, and for it to essentially flip back at some point, for it to purport that you have voted what you thought you were voting for, that makes let me put it this way, Jonathan. Yeah, and I know that we are going to go back and forth on some of this, and that's fine. Yeah, that's a very that's a difficult mistake to make. In other words, that's not a mistake

that's something someone did on purpose. It seems more plausible that it would be like something that's something that involves those points occurring. Uh. Register electronically, Let's say I do vote for Big gif uh and then have the verifiable paper trail come out and says, hey, congratulations, you voted Ronnie, but then have the machine somehow register that as a

vote for an opposing candidate. That I would argue that I can't think of a scenario where you could innocently do that, right, because you have to remember that the way these systems tend to work is that you get a verification screen at the end that says, hey, is this what you wanted before you actually cast your vote? Right, so that electronic screen is going to, in theory, reflect what you actually chose, and if you look down, you're like, yep,

there's Ronald Reagan. That's who I picked. And then the piece of paper says, do you cast your vote? The piece of paper prints out and it says Ronald reagular Yep, that's so I picked. But electronically it says Jimmy Carter. I say, something hinky has gone on, and sure that it was somebody doing that on purpose. You know, I've got to confess. I'm I'm surprised that you're I'm surprised that you're drawing the same conclusion so quickly, because you're

very um the way that you evaluate situations. And you guys, you guys know Jonathan, you listen to this show is to go through all of these facts. So to hear you say something with this certitude is is pretty significant. Well, and and it's because I understand the technology right, Like if you've if you've designed a system, first of all, in order to get any electronic voting system in place, it has to go through lots of different third party

testing to make sure that it actually works right. Um, So for it to pass all those tests and then magically not work properly on election day tells me something someone has interfered, whether it was someone on the actual uh manufacturing side, like someone on the software side for the company that made the voting machine, or some other third party actor who has infected a machine with malicious

code to change votes on the electronic level. The whole point of this, though, is that if you have a paper trail, especially a voter verifiable paper trail that's the most important kind, then you have something against which you can perform an audit after an election. So the elections over, the results are in, and then a lot of states, not all, but a lot of states require a post election audit where they will compare the electronic results against

a hard copy of the results. If it's a voter verifiable hard copy, then theoretically every single voter had the opportunity to see that his or her vote was actually recorded as intended, and means that if there is a disparity, then you could bring that up and say, hey, we're going through this, and there seems to be some significant differences between the electronic copy and what's on the hard copy, right, like like, hey, some of us voted for Hillary Clinton,

some vote for Donald Trump, and a couple for some third party candidates, but every vote here is for Gary Busey. Yeah what gives Yeah that that's a terrifying future that I had never ever considered. But in the in the Reagan Jimmy Carter example, we gave before you could say, well, according to this paper copy, this one person who happens

to be Ben. But they don't know that. Because voter identity is very important, we want to keep that when I go in disguise, based on our earlier series about how to use the Internet and without being caught, right, So, so Ben, they don't know it's Ben, but they look and they see this voter record that says this person voted for Ronald Reagan, but electronically it says Jimmy Carter something is wrong, and then then there could be a

better investigation. It's great to have that, but we'll go more into why that's not working everywhere in just a second. So this kind of brings us into those concerns more formally. We've already kind of addressed a big one. But if your goal is to make voting and tabulation easy and efficient, then if everything's working properly, there's no tampering involved, there's no bias that's been introduced, either unconsciously or purposefully, then

it's a beautiful world. You get that, you get those votes in, you're done with it and it you get the winner and the loser can be gracious and defeat and all that wonderful stuff. Um, but it's really hard to make sure that your vote is being counted the way you want it. So first of all, there are a lot of electronic voting machines that have no corresponding

paper trail at all. So let's say let's say that again, uh Ben, you voted for Reagan and votes come in, and there they announced the results for Georgia and it's like nineties, seven point three percent of voters voted for Jimmy Carter. Well, you don't know. If you were in that small percentage that didn't vote for Carter, you would have no way of knowing. You're one person. I would have nothing to refer to except perhaps uh, circumstantial evidence based on exit polls or pre voting polls, so I

could say, what the heck happened? There were you know, fifty percent of us last week, we're gonna did we all just not go? They forget about kings Row, bedtime for Bonzo. I told you be for bonso I knew that was the jump one. And I don't have a computer in front of me. I was purely for member. That's just from that's yeah, that's just because you care. It's because I care. But yeah, that's that's a great point. So aside from that, there would be no, um, certainly

nothing with a legal basis, no legal le to stand on. Yeah, so, uh, that would be problematic. The only thing that would make you really suspicious if they said, of all Georgia voters supported Jimmy Carter, and you think I'm pretty sure I didn't. But you know, any system where someone's gonna do tampering, Um, you would figure they'd be smart enough not to make it so noticeable that there would be an investigation to follow. Right, Like, your whole goal is to do this clandestinely and not

get caught. So if you're doing that and you're being careful, you would want to design a system where it's not a blowout for a state where it might have been close leading up to the election. So if there is no corresponding paper trail, then you don't You have nothing to audit against. All you have is the electronic copies, and as we know, you can alter electronic copies. Now, it's in the best interest of all the companies that create these electronic voting machines to be as secure as

possible on Fortunately, that never happens. Right. Security on electronic voting machines is a joke, It's terrible. As a matter of fact, Wired released a pretty uh, pretty scary article which you you've probably already you're already aware of it back in August. Yes, title being American's electronic voting machines are scarily easy targets. Yeah, hey, Ben, hey Jonathan, so um you and I kept talking after this bit that

we just stopped just now for a while. So, uh, what happened, ladies and gentlemen, is that when we finished talking, we stepped outside to look and see how long we had been talking, because we don't currently have a producer sitting at our desk to to maintain the recording, just because of we got lots of stuff we got. We got lots of things going on and thoughts and jokes and facts, got a lot of ends, got a lot of else you know, a lot of big Lebowski's happening.

And so it turned out we had been recording for almost two hours, and we realized that's probably too long for a single episode. So we're going to conclude part one here, but next week we're gonna pick up with part two right where we left off. We got a lot more to say, so Ben, we'll be back in part two because he never left. And that wraps up this part one of the two part series about electronic

voting machines. On Monday, we will listen to part two and we will get the conclusion where Ben and I are talking all about the issues around electronic voting and what we can do to make sure that the process remains intact, that we don't lose confidence in it, because if we lose confidence in the process, then democracy itself sort of falls apart. Right. If you don't trust that the votes you are casting are being counted, then you don't have any trust that the people who are representing

you are actually representing you. That the game is fixed, and that is a problem. But we'll listen to that part two next week. I hope you guys are well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.