TechStuff Flashback: The Scary World of EVMs Part Two

Fame joined me for that discussion. We are going to continue that discussion today. This is part two of that episode, and we are going to continue to dive down the tricky and potentially disastrous pathway to creating voting systems. The idea that if you create a voting system that is perceived to be unfair, then you're really undermining the entire

foundation of democracy. And I know that sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not because if we lose faith in the system, if we do not believe the system works, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course, we have to make sure that the system does work. If the system is not working, then we absolutely have to fix it. So it is a very tricky subject, Ben and I will go into much more detail that I hope you guys are doing well. I know this is still a

very trying and challenging time for so many reasons. I want you guys to know I believe in you. I think that you guys are awesome. Uh you all have proven that over and over. So let's sit back and listen to this classic episode about the scary world of

e v M S Part two. At the close of our conversation, we has our votes and we decided democratically that this would be better as a two part series than a single epic length episode that would have stretched the patience of the most uh most forgiving of listeners. Now we have broken it up into two parts, so what you are about to hear is the conclusion of

that two parts. Also, I should add that when we get to the end and we sign off, we did not know at that point that it was going to be a two parter, so we actually have already recorded the end of the episode that I'm recording the beginning of now. And yes, time travel does confuse me. So let's just segue in to part two of how electronic voting machines are going to ruin everything. Remember we mentioned that in two thousand two, that's when they started to

appear on the scene. That's when Georgia. Actually they started to appear before two thousand two, but two thousand two is when Georgia became the first state to have just the electronic voting machines out there in the polling places. Um, many of those machines have not been updated since, and almost all of them are running on a version of Windows XP which hasn't been updated since April two thou fourteen. So that means any security vulnerability that has been discovered

since two thousand and fourteen is still there. Chances are some of the ones before two thousand fourteen are still there because I bet a lot of those machines have never received a patch, right, They're just these big there, these machines that are being overseen by the government, and uh, you know it, Chances are a lot of them are unpatched. So there's a lot of potential for people to tamper. And not only that, you know, I mentioned the idea

of either unconsciously or purposefully inserting a bias. That's a real concern too, right, because private companies are the ones designing these machines. They do so with using proprietary software that is not visible to the general public, nor is it uh what's what's word, nor is it in any way compelled to answer to the general public, Like the public doesn't have a the quote unquote Capital p public doesn't have a vote regarding which companies run these machines.

You look at this and you see that everyone says, well, we can't reveal our code because if we did, uh, then our competitors would see how we do things, and then we can't compete in the marketplace anymore. And so meanwhile you've got security experts saying this should all be

open source. And the reason it should be open source is so that the community at large would have the opportunity to look at the code and see if there are any vulnerabilities and if so, make sure that those get patched before you get to a point where the code is being put into play in an actual election, so that those vulnerabilities can't be exploited. Because if something is proprietary and someone figures out an exploit to that software,

then it's all behind closed doors. There's no way to address it, and you end up with a huge problem. But but beyond that, you have companies that could insert a bias into the programming itself. And this kind of stems from an interesting story that happened in the early two thousand's. So two thousand three, Walden Wally O'Dell and I'm not making up the nickname Wally, that is what he would go by. Wally O'Dell was at that time

the CEO and chairman of die Bald. Now Diebald's best known for making a t M S but dial, Yeah, well, they also for a while made electronic voting machines. There was a subsidiary called Diebold Election Systems, which the company has since divested itself of that particular property. But Diebold Election Systems made a lot of electronic voting machines. And die Bald, by the way, is headquartered in Ohio, a very important state in national elections here in the United States.

Swing states, that's what we call it, yep swing some meeting swing states for you know, there's probably I've got some listeners who are outside the US. You may have heard the term swing state, and you don't know what that means. So the way elections work in the US. You know, you've got your major two party system, and ninety five percent of the time that's the those are

the only parties that really make an impact. So you've got your Republicans and your Democrats, and you've got a lot of states that that lean toward one or the other, and it is almost unheard of for them to support a candidate of the opposite party, sure like uh for one example of this would be UH state like Utah would be legendarily not voting Democratic, and a state like

Vermont would be legendarily not voting Republicans. Right, So it would be an incredibly strange set of circumstances to see one of these states support a candidate of the opposite party that it tends to support. So for the most part, we just assume those electors in the electoral college will support the traditional candidates that those states would support. But there's some states that could go either way. They could swing towards the Republican side one election and swing towards

the Democratic side and another Florida, Pennsylvaniaia. So the the electors in these states, UH, it may be that they are the ones that are chosen are the ones for Republican uh in one one election our Democrat and another election. So Ohio is one of those states, which means it's incredibly valuable. Right. It means it's a battleground state. You want to win that state because you know you've got your your foundation, that's almost guaranteed. Nothing's ever a guarantee,

but it's almost a guarantee. And uh so you need to really concentrate on the states where you have the potential to flip it. So that's on your side and not your opponents side. Well, Ohio is one of those states. Eyebold has its headquarters in Ohio, and Wally, the CEO of Diebold at that time, wrote a letter where he was uh committing himself to quote helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president end quote, president being George W.

Bush at that time. So the CEO of a company that makes voting machine saying he's committed to delivering Ohio's

electoral votes to the president. Now, the company was quick to say, hey, he's not talking about using our products to push the elections a personal fundraiser dotor, right, he's talking about campaigning and but a lot of people said, hey, isn't there a conflict of interests if you've got the head of a company making the voting technology that people depend upon also openly supporting a specific candidate in the race.

It's very It's very close to a member of the Supreme Court saying like, I will do anything I can to get you elected, George, and then and then saying, oh, fiddle D D. We don't have time to recount the votes from Florida, and we look, there's some things that are more important than making absolutely certain that the people's vote was reflected in the actual election. Like reasons. I just like saying fiddle D D. But I don't think the Supremes say that. But you're you're raised the supremest

they sing, I referred to them as the Supremes. I like that. John robertson the Supremes. So many wonderful visions going through my head right now. Oh man, you should have seen the comedy show we did with that with that sketch. Well, but anyway that at that point inside like what you're saying is really important here because let's assume if we were to take Wally at his word, then even is that a PR firm would say, the

optics look bad. So when you when you make those sorts of statements, you have to be very conscious, conscious of what is going to happen. This is uh, this is an environment wherein uh, let's see what year was this, two thousand three, right, two thousand three was when you

wrote the letter. Thousand four was the election. So people are already very sore off of the two thousand election, and we have seen an accelerating distrust in the American political system or sometime you know, and this this thing is just making it, exacerbating it. And I think in one of the Wired pieces I read it might have even been the one you just referenced. Uh. The the author of the piece made a really great point, which was that you don't need any case of tampering or bias.

It doesn't have to exist, but the possibility of it of it existing is an off to cause turmoil. Right, you can cause real world turmoil just from the possibility of this being a thing without any evidence of it actually happening. So you don't need to have evidence of someone purposefully trying to rig the system in order for people to not trust the system. As long as it's clear that it's a possibility. That's enough to have people say like, well, how can I trust anything? How can

I trust the results? Because you know you're telling me there's no evidence, But how do I know there's no evidence? I know it's possible. Twice you can't get fooled aget. Yeah, thanks, it's a it's a great quote that I'm not gonna make any fun of. All Right, So then we've got

the fear of hackers. We've got the fear of bias from the standpoint of the manufacturers of the voting machines themselves, and then we get the fear of hackers third parties that want to rig the results or prevent people from voting. Completely possible, absolutely, completely possible, because again, these systems are

not terribly secure. Um. Now you've got a couple of different arguments about this, Right, You've got people who support d r S and they say, listen, hacking trying to trying to affect politics on a national level here in the United States is a fool's errand for multiple reasons, and a big one is that we have so many different types of electronic voting machines out there, and they are proprietary. They don't all work on the same software, so you can't develop a universal approach to affect all

the machines. Now, if the entire United States, if all of us use the exact same kind of machine across all the states and the territories, then that could be a potential vulnerability. If in fact they were also connected to like the Internet, right, you would have an amazing target because you think, well, if I developed the right kind of software, I can affect every single vote cast in the United States. But that's not the reality of

our situation. We have all these different types of machines, some of which are connected to the Internet, some of which aren't. You have running on different types of software, so you cannot create that one size fits all approach to affecting all of them. That being said, you could still affect specific ones, like you could target specific regions that you think are particularly important and and try to

affect voting that way. In fact, critics say that because the return on investment is so high, it's an incredibly tempting target for hackers. Like you might say, yeah, it's a lot of work, but look at the outcome. The outcome is the effect of a national election. It's it's harder to have a bigger set of stakes than that, So you can say like, yeah, it's hard, but the the goal is so huge that justifies the hard work

on the part of the hackers. Ben and I have a little bit more to say about the scary world of e v ms, but first let's take a quick break. Here's the thing. Yeah, you don't have to be like the Liam Neeson taken level of hacker. You don't have to be anonymous or you know, some faction set operations. You don't have to have a particular set of skills. Yeah, exactly, And that was that was not very bad. I've had

a little thing stuck in my teeth, that's all. But but yeah, you you don't have to be some amazing savvant hacker with these crazy credentials and qualifications. You don't even have to be states a state sponsored hacker like a you know from the Chinese military, right, No, you can if you're talking about systems running on when nose XP that haven't been patched in two years at the very at at best, they haven't been patched in two years.

At worst, it's been much longer than that. Uh, and if there is a way to access the machines, either over the Internet or through physical contact with the machines, it's entirely possible for someone to use code developed by somebody else and infect that machine. So yeah, so the diminutive term for these people, uh, and my friend Shannon hates this term would be script kitties. Script kitties meaning a type of person who uh profits off of malicious code.

But they didn't develop the code themselves. They went to some place that where that code is available. They either purchase the code or they download the code for free, depending upon the place that they're going to, and then they deploy that code. And in some cases the code is pretty much automated. It does everything for you. You just have to be the one. You just have to be able to deploy it somehow right, and you don't

have to have any knowledge of how it works. All you need to do is just make sure the code gets on the machine that you wanted to get on in the right direction. Yeah. So, imagine that you've got a thumb drive with this code and it's in a file, so it will auto execute once it connects to a USB drive on a machine. You come out to a voting machine that happens at USB drive, which would be a terrible idea. I'm not even suggesting that there are

electronic voting machines that have USB ports. I don't know if there are. If there are, that's a terrible idea. You plug in the thumb drive, automatically executes runs the malicious code that has become part of the voting machines programming from that point forward, and you can no longer trust the results generates. Uh, that is entirely possible, assuming that, again, you have some way of of injecting the code into the machine. So if you do have that possibility, that

would be bad um. And also you don't even necessarily have to set out to change votes. Right like that, that's the way we mostly think of it. Like again, going back to the Reagan Carter example, we would think, oh, well, they've programmed it so that it took that Reagan vote and flipped it to Carter. You could also just try and overload the voting machine so that no votes could

be cast on it at all. You can take it down. Yeah, you're just taking down the machine you just wanted to to crash and be unrecoverable, and then you you really impact that the ability for people to cast votes. If you do that in enough places that have very particular political leanings, you can affect the outcome of an election simply because the people who wanted to vote were physically unable to do so. And unless you make special allowances

for that, then those those votes will never happen. Uh. So that's kind of ugly to um. And also finally, uh turns out at the results are unencrypted, which is crazy to me, which yeah, is bizarre. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Votes recorded in plain text in a file where you're not you haven't even encrypted the results, so there's no protection there. Like if someone does get access to that data somehow, no matter you know, whatever methodology you might need, they can make changes. And you

know this is not just theoretical. And the state of Virginia de certified hundreds of wind vote e v m s because they were insecure, and according to the officials, you could change the votes in these wind vote machines undetected if you were anywhere within a half mile radius of the machine, even if you weren't like a knowledgeable hack like you don't want to have to get out of the car. It's like Pokemon go, but for election. Yeah. Um,

that's crazy. Now. I should also add that according to the Wired article where I've pulled that from, UH, they never found any evidence that someone had tampered with the votes, but they did discover that the vulnerability was there, which meant that there was always the possibility someone could tamper

with the votes, which is why they were de certified. Um. Luckily, at least according to the officials, it doesn't look like anyone actually managed to do that or took the time to do that, But that's that's a possibility that has to be addressed, right um. And that kind of brings us up to the hacking threat. So I don't know if you guys have been paying attention here in the

United States. Earlier in hackers gained access to the Democratic National Convention databases and they stole a whole bunch of emails and files, more than twenty thousand of them, and UH, a lot of them were released by wiki leaks. Around twenty thousand were released by wiki leaks, but that doesn't

mean that that's all of them. And there were a lot of questions like who the heck hacked into the d n C. Yeah, and we were pointing out a specific country and that country is Russia, thank you, but but it's want okay, yeah, all right, Well, so here's here's one of the things that makes this an interesting story, and into some degree the reports of it remind me a little bit of the famous Sony hack, right where they talking about North Korea being the culprit and you

and I explored that together as well. So one of the big questions is to what end, to what what value would Russia's state sponsored hacking branch, which does exist, what what value would it see in interfering on such a minimal level at this point? Is this a buy in for blackmail? Further down the line, is this to discredit something? Because the d n C is a domestic facing organization, so it's a lot, it's much more. Um, it's an entirely different animal in comparison to something like

a State Department server which would have stuff about Russia. Yeah, yeah, any of those things like c I A are you know that would be another or n s A. Right, like the targets that you would think of if you wanted to gather a lot of intelligence yeah, and so the issue here. Initially, I I don't know about you, but initially I was skeptical because I thought, this, all this bear poking that's going on now is not gonna it's not. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's not gonna. It's

not gonna pay off. Because there is a reason that the Putin government has been in power for as long as it has, and it's it's because, as you know, this this government is seen. American presidents come and go, and they have a maybe a longer horizon politically sure when they contemplate these things. So I it's strange to

see what appears to be harmless rhetoric trotted out against them. However, I had to rethink my skepticism on this when more than one security firm came out saying evidence indicates it's probably these guys. Yeah. As it turns out, a security firm immediately, pretty much shortly after the leak was was made public, said that the signs were pointing towards a Russian actor, um that the methodologies and software used were the same that had been employed by Russian state sponsored

hacking groups in the past. And uh, there are some folks who said I'm you know, I don't think so. In fact, one um jusipher to point, oh hacker came out and said, no, no, no, it was me. I'm a lone wolf. I did it. It wasn't. I was the one who who stole all that and gave it

over to Wiki leaks and uh. Although they also claimed that he was Romanian or he or she the hacker claimed that he or she was Romanian, but then when people were trying to communicate with him or her in Romanian, Uh, the responses did not seem particularly coherent, which seems to give the lie that they are in fact Romanian. But other security firms ended up corroborating the findings of the

first one. They said, yeah, the exploits that were used, the malware that was used is identical to the type of malware that has been used by this Russian hacking group. It is exactly the m O that we've seen in other cases, including a case that involved the German parliament. In so uh, either it's again another Russian hacking group, or it's someone who learned everything they know from a

Russian hacking group because it was identical in nature. Yes, So why would Russia want to infere interfere with the DNC. And I think the most distinct way of putting that is that Pewton doesn't like Clinton, huh. Kind of kind of what it boils down to is that Pewton uh and would not want Clinton and the White House well

as president. Yeah, also as an active Secretary of State at times when NATO and NATO and Russia as well as its allies were engaged in geopolitical tensions that sparked into Right now, there's an ongoing proxy war in Syria and it's between Russia and between the U S. No, of course it's not being reported that way or marketed that way, but unless you're reading any media outside of the US or Russia, in which case everyone says RUSSI and who backs the Syrian government and the US that

backs the rebels like, and that goes across political spectrum. I'm glad you pointed that out. So you know, a very very um historically conservative papers of note in England, like like the magazine The Economist or the much more liberal paper The Independent, will both pretty much say what it is. It's just we don't talk about it here on CNN. Uh. There is, there is an antagonistic thing.

So I would say there's probably resentment or concern about having a commander of chief who knows all the State Department's skeletons and including the Russian ones. And then additionally, and there always has to be a question when there's this level of nepotism in American politics, where the because we had the son of a former president become president somehow in a meritocracy, and then actually right right multiple times, and then having the um the spouse of a former

president be in the running for president. What's really crazy is if you ever see a family tree of all the presidents and see how much except for that one, there's like one guy. Yeah, but everyone is pretty much everyone else's cousin at at most. And there's an interesting mathematical aspect to that, because if you go for far enough out or the further you go, the more people you're related to us, like I've probably you're probably sixteen

cousins with someone that would completely it would completely baffle you. Yeah, and so that I mean, that's true, but I could see that it. I could see the Russian government having that kind of concern, but also funding wise, uh, funding wise, and infrastructural wise, they're pretty strapped for cash right now and strapped for manpower as well, So it's a question of how well quick they are as well as how

motivated they are. Right and and let's also point out that hacking the d n C is different than hacking an election, because, like I said earlier, with the electronic voting machines, you have all these different targets, with all these different softwares, Whereas hacking the d n C means focusing on a single target, not looking at a bunch of different targets across the United States. So that requires

less of an investment. I mean, it's still, you know, obviously requires a great deal deal of work in order to find to create a vulnerability or to exploit a vulnerability, But it's different than having to target whole bunch of

different machines. But it has raised the question a lot of people have asked, well, if they hacked the DNC, could Russia also interfere with the actual election of sixteen uh And Wired's Brian Barrett, who wrote one of the articles I read for this episode, specifically says he does not think so. Uh most because if in fact Russia wanted to interfere with the election, it would not have also targeted the DNC database and hacked into it, because once everyone finds out about that, then you are on

high alert for the election. Uh And so if you wanted to hack the election, you would not want people to know that you were capable of doing something on that scale before you did it. You don't want to You don't don't monologue in front of James Bond before you push the button exactly exactly. And it's not the first time at the geopolitical rodeo. So they've done this if Yeah, they're they're old hands at uh and as as is the United States. I'm not giving the US

a pass. Yeah, we've got any major player in geopolitics. There's some dark stuff going on, which in regimes the way that people named Chad changed cargo pants right, So probably Russia has not gone to be uh involved. And plus again it would it would require a much broader attack that would require multiple strategies and where for you to play it out. So but the fact that the possibility has been raised again creates uncertainty among the US public, and that alone is enough to cause a lack of

confidence and results. Right, we've already seen I mean Trump has even said, like I expect there's gonna be a lot of tampering involved in this, uh in this election, already bringing into question the results which haven't happened yet. It's like he's it's like he's already said we can't trust what the results will say. And we haven't even gone into the voting booths. We're just about to wrap up this discussion about electronic voting machines. But before we

get to that, let's take another quick break. What do we think how do we wrap this wall up? Well, first we should remember that while in Georgia it's hard, it's easy for us to forget we're in the minority, not everyone is using an electronic voting machine to cast their vote. In fact, according to uh UM Pamela Smith of Verified Voting, about the nation will vote on some form of paper ballot in the two thousand sixteen election,

only us using other methods. So there's not some maniacal corporate super villain who's out to rig the election across the nation for the Clinton campaign, the Trump campaign, or Gary Busey, right right, Gary Busey can try and infect as many computers as he wants, but as it turns out, unless he's figured out away to replace all the choices on a paper ballot with Gary Busey, which would be amazing, I kind of want to see an official ballot that just as Gary Busey as all the different options, like

including including the resolutions that are exactly Unless he's able to do that, then it's not going to have that big of a scale of impact. So so this is also some of that fear uncertainty in doubt, right, Like, on the one hand, yes, these systems are not as secure as they should be. They aren't encrypting data, which they should be, or at least not all of them are. Um,

they not all of them have paper trails. Even the ones that do have paper trails may not the state may not require a post election audit, which they absolutely lee should. Also, the paper trails may not be voter or verifiable, which they absolutely should be, so that we can be well, so that we can have confidence that the results announced are in fact reflective of the actual choices that people made. Whether it's in favor of your candidate or against your candidate, you want to know that

the results it happened. We're real and not reflective of someone else's machiavellian plan to put put a specific person in power, or specific group in power, or specific set of laws into play. You want to feel like the process works, and in order to do that, you need this verifiable voter trail. You need to have these post election audits. And not everywhere has that ability or option.

So now that's one thing. Um. Another thing to remember is that, uh, it's hard to get these systems up to date and at that level where we could be confident in their results, because again, it costs money, and it's politically difficult to convince groups to spend that money,

specifically to upgrade election equipment. Keeping in mind that this is stuff that's used only a couple of times a year at most, right, Like you might have to if you are very active in your local community, you may be voting maybe a couple of times per year, depending upon how things are run in your area. Uh, some people only come out to vote for the presidential elections.

They don't vote for any of the other ones. And so it's hard to justify like you're gonna spend X million dollars this year for equipment that you're gonna be able to use maybe in two elections before you need to like to general elections before you need to upgrade the equipment again. And there's a great argument about open

sourcing yware exactly. So I mean, I think I would love to see more transparency both on that open source approach, so people can make sure there's no inherent bias in the code again, conscious or not, because there there are times where people can insert of by us without even thinking they are right like that that just happens because we're human. You don't have to be making a conscious

decision to be a jerk to create. Yeah, And there's also there's also a perception problem that comes out post event, which is, you know, humans are intensely tribalistic. It's we're not particularly fact based creatures, unfortunately, and because we were, we evolved to live off of perceptions. So what what inevitably happens is no matter what side of the political aisle you find yourself kicking it on the people who feel that their candidate has one or when a candidate wins,

the supporters will say the system works. These people who object to my candidate are just total Yeah, just sour grapes, these n income poops. They don't understand. And of course I would be I would be a dignified, a dignified, dissenting voice if I, you know, if I didn't pick the obviously the best candidate, which if the other and it had one, which they didn't, but if they had,

then I would have been a gracious loser. However, in the alternative, in the alternative, university schrod Injur's cat this for a second, what what would happen if the same people lost? They would say, well, the systems rigged. It was rigged from the beginning. It was rigged because the media. The media reported things in such a way as to minimize the the opponents flaws and maximize my candidates flaws which didn't even really exist. They manufactured flaws and then

they maximize them and etcetera, etcetera. And this this is like a natural sort of thing that happens. We're not trying to vilify anyone in particular or any political party, to be honest, we've already seen it here in the US this year, just through the primaries. Primaries happened. You saw people who were like progressives, who were supporting Bernie Sanders. Uh, refusing to believe that Clinton had won the primary. Now

there's another Uh, there's another Wally Adell situation there. However, Yes, where you had the the chairwoman of the Democratic Convention who in some of those leaked messages that Wiki Leaks released, Uh, it was clear that she was favoring She she personally favored Clinton over Sanders. Whether that actually ever had any

effect beyond her personal beliefs is less clear. In fact, the evidence doesn't really support that there was like a a concentrated effort to diminish Sanders to a point where he would be he would not be allowed to be a candidate. Um. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen. It just means that there wasn't like a smoking gun

from that Wiki Leaks release. Yeah. But again, just like a PR company would see Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the head of that who was the head of the convention at the time, did write and vociferously supported, uh, the Clinton campaign. So whether or not there was any shenaniganry, yeah, I just barely stumbled through that word. Whether or not there was the fact of the matter is that it increases Uh, distrust and fear and uncertainty you said earlier, Right,

so you get this lack of confidence in the system. Uh. And obviously that's not the direction we want to move in. We want to move in a direction where everyone is at least confident that their voices being heard. It may turn out that their voice does isn't powerful enough to make the change they want, which is frustrating obviously, but less so than feeling like you are being ignored or

purposefully silenced. Right, you don't want that at all. But so is the direct democracy really an answer, because if we define direct democracy as well, let's see, for example, one of the best arguments against direct democracy. Alright, ch okay, anyone with anyone with an Internet connection can go on there and say whatever they want. And now we're starting to see the priorities of a massive people without some

kind of structure to their interaction. Well, uh I, I'm really in favor of um approaching this from a plurality standpoint, where at least in most areas of government, where you make sure that the representatives of government reflect the levels of support in the general population. So instead instead of it being like every single position is determined by a majority.

If you have a plurality, then you say, all right, well X percentage of Congress must be made up of this party because that reflects the American the American voters. And then this why percentage must be of this other party because that represents and then these independents also won this amount, so they should take up these seats. But that would be a totally different approach to government than the way the United States is structured, and it could

get complicated. Who from where, from what? But this is already complicated. Could I could I plug some stuff real quickly? Alright, So, first off, thank you so much for having me on, and ladies and gentlemen, uh off the Jury, I almost said of the podcast Jury, thank you so thank you so much for checking out this episode. If you're interested

in this. In this process, um, Jonathan and I have looked at some other some other tech related conspiracy theories, including that Sony hack, and you've been on several episodes together. So you can find all of those in either one of our various internet uh presences. There are videos or podcasts or you know sometimes the mad scribblings on a blog somewhere. Yes, yes, uh, the whispers of the whispers of a a person passing you buy on a moonless

night at the crossroads. Occasionally you'll just be in the woods and you'll hear the sound of a baby laughing. And if you listen very carefully, just before the blair witch gets you, you'll hear at any rate. Right, yes, uh, that's uh, that's how we met. So there's another There are another couple of things that I think would be worth your time to check out if you're interested in this subject that's specifically applied to uh, the U S. Voting system and stuff they want you to know. Has

a couple of videos about this. We have one about the Federal Election Commission, one that's a grab bag of political conspiracies for seen, and then one thing called five things you should know about primary elections. So do check this out. They are free on the internet. Well, I mean they're free, you know, assuming that you have an Internet connection, right, Yeah, the content is free. The manner of trans mission may be uh, somewhat less so depending

on whether or not you're at the local library. And no wonder this is maybe a forward thinking question that you know. Jonathan has another show called forward Thinking the Future of voting. So go ahead and hit me. Yeah, it's a future it's a future facing show about the evolution of tech. Did you Did you touch on anything about machine consciousness or artificial intelligence and voting a couple

of times. Actually, we did an episode specifically about what it would be like to have a robot as president? Would you ever want a future where a robot could be president? Uh? The idea being that if you had a truly impartial, artificially intelligent creature that would be able to make choices that are the greatest benefit and the least detriment to the population. Would you want to do that? Or do you think humanity is absolutely essential in order for you to have a leader? We did an episode

about that. We also did an episode about the future of voting and some of the pitfalls, including things like machine intelligence, Uh in the future. That one was not too long ago. That that published, probably was about a month or two ago maybe, So, Yeah, we've got some

stuff that we've talked about. I personally think that there are a lot of problems we need to solve in the immediate future that uh, some of which would would avoid the machine learning artificial intelligence question for quite some time, because um, like there there have been people who have asked, well, what about the possibility of voting via the internet, the idea being that if you could vote via in an internet,

you could drive up voter participation dramatically. You've you, the more you reduce the investment required to participate, the more people will participate. That's the idea, right, So if you make it less of a chore to vote, more people will vote. Because that that's one of those ongoing narratives in the United States, right, that's such a small, relatively small percentage of our population actually participates in the process,

particularly if it's not a presidential election. Yeah, I think though, I think that people should I know this is controversial, but I think people should be required to vote. I think it should be part of the stuff you have to do, and there's not there's not very much stuff you have to do. Uh, if you were born here to be a citizen's services, there's actually way more stuff that you aren't supposed to do. Yeah, there's a much

bigger list of do not. But I think it's While it's controversial, it's a good system to consider because then we will see all of the people who for one reason or another. We're not able to get time off to vote. We're not able to get which is which is, by the way, illegal. You are supposed to be your employer is supposed to allow you the time to vote.

That's it's illegal in theory. It's a legal in theory and practice it is much different, right, Yeah, I mean again, just like we were talking about with the electronic voting machines. Ideally it works one way. In reality it may work a totally different way. There are countries that have compulsory voting. Because often when you see the United States the voting numbers, the percentage of people participating, it will be compared against other nations and say, look, how terrible the US turnout

is compared to these countries. And then you start looking like, yeah, but four of those countries you listed require everyone to vote. So therefore, first of all, that none of them are at a ent, so someone slacken. And secondly, that's not fair to to hold up a country that doesn't have

compulsory voting against ones that do. Um, I don't know that I whoever go with compulsory I kind of I kind of feel you, I mean, I kind of I want I want to see more people involved in it, whether it's but I also don't know the reasons behind people not voting, right, If they're not voting because there is an uh a hardship on them in order to participate in the system, It's not like I can blame them, right, if there's some form of hardship, whether it's economic or

it's just you know, practical, like how do I get to the voting station, whatever it may be. I have a lot of sympathy for those people. And I even have sympathy for people who have lost confidence in the system and the reason they don't vote is because they feel like their vote doesn't really have um an impact. And I can certainly see, especially based upon the rhetoric that you tend to be subjected to in the election seasons, how you can get disillusioned and sad and therefore you're like,

I kind of just want to disappear until this is over. UM. Although this every time there's an election, it's really important, very very important, including at the local level, maybe especially at the local level. UM. Here in the US, we give a lot of attention to the presidential elections. Truth to be known, your local elections are going to have a much larger impact on your day to day life than your national ones. Um, but obviously that's not the

big story. You're looking at who Who's who's sitting on the on the throne I'm sorry in the oval office. I'm the Royalist, so I have a little bit of a different view on things. Um, I'm not really a royalist. So well that that was a great discussion about it. Obviously we got a little philosophical and um, you know, I don't want anyone to base their political opinion on

anything I say. I think it's very important for you to form your own even if I fully disagree with it, I respect the fact that you guys have a political opinion. So I'm not trying to sway anyone to my side. Um, which is good because your side is crazy. My side votes Reagan uh in this election. Yeah, he's he's he's passed on and yet I write it in. Also, by the way, you may not be able to write in a president presidential candidate. Not all states allow it. Yeah, yeah,

that's a bummer. I think it's like forty seven states allow it, so there's like three that do not. Something like that. You know what probably happens somebody was screwing around too much with what they thought was a great bit, and they were like, guys, we cannot make we cannot make the pink panther the state senator or build a cat, or build a cat. Bloom County has run the presidential candidacy quite a few times, right, Yeah, so, uh, maybe

it's just the joke gone wrong. But if you're in one of the vast majority of states and you want to write a vote in, then civic Seneca right as a citizen of the United States. Some would argue your moral responsibility depends on your on your perspective on the candidates, I suppose, but I didn't the rate there we go see at any rate. That's how you know it's me when you hear that voice in the woods. Uh. Thank you again Ben for being on the show. And that

wraps up this pair of classic episodes. Thank you so much for listening. I think these are very important things for us to be aware of, things that we need to pay very close attention to. We can't just take for granted that the systems that we have in place to allow us to to participate in the democratic process just work or that they just don't work. We need to really examine them, ask questions, make ourselves accountable, and make certain that we still have a system that people

can believe in. It's hard enough out there right now to find representatives sometimes that actually reflect our own values. That can be a real challenge. We don't need to make it even harder by making the process one that we feel we cannot rely upon. We need that process to be rock solid. I hope you guys enjoyed these classic episodes. Will be back with a new episode in

Wednesday's show, so stick around for that. And uh yeah, I apologize for running reruns in a way, but at the same time, I just felt like this is something that we need to think about, especially in the advance of another election year here in the United States. We really need to pay attention to this stuff and be active participants if we want to make any real substantive change. All right, guys, if you want to reach out to me,

you can do so on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.