The Scary World of EVMs, Part One

Hey Jonathan, thanks for having me on this 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 that in true is getting a little weird? Um, 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 used 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. 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 um. 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 there are quite a few things that would be called conspiracy theories. There are also quite a few very valid criticisms are 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 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 and the enlightened leaders. The quote Titian can't even appreciate a coup movement, Julie,

that's true. Yes, uh, here about recognize the 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 accidentally by a machine or

the people in charge of the software running the machine. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, these are are 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 mastered on 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 there was no secret ballot, You declared your vote in front of people, which yeah, and that, um, I mean it clearly has some manages 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 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 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 U s 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 ninete century. I guess then the best way to organize the candidates would be by their crime in alphabetical order. 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. Yep, 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 gift shop and buying a whole bunch of T shirts and that money goes to making making ballots. Uh. 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. It got popular,

um I was adopted throughout the world. And so by the late nineteenth century, it's 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 population. 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. It sounds like a like a limi he is or he was. Can I say limey on the air? That? Okay? I mean we can beep it out. It's just gonna sound like I said something works 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. So so you like in other words, like when we go in for an election, frequently we have multiple uh positions or or issues that we're voting on, not just the president or maybe a state rep or as state senator, but also uh controller uh well, and then and people in the actual House of Representatives in the U. S. Senate. So you've had 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 uh 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. Know, 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, which I think voting will count as my political careers, say, before you burnt all the bridges and before I burned the bridges and became an

inspiration for several characters in the House of Cards. 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 machine that used to be that used to be in Georgia. But foo, 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. Was again pretty simple. Even when you get to electro mechanical voting booths 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 problem. They sound positively steam 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 a store. Yeah,

and then you that's you got a lever action voting machine. Uh. 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 levers to indicate 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 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 in 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. Let's also point out that here in the well eight

nineteen century, yep, post civil war, at least in the US. Yes, the late nineteenth century 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 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 uh, some

tampering 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 swort, 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 and practice. We still have a ways to go. Bea 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 papers 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, no 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 L sets, 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 you. Okay, but but right now we've got the scanners, and then we move 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 use 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 and 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 am currently a resident of Fulton County, though for a long time I was over there with you in Decab. Yeah, And and to be fair, I think only a couple of miles separate Ben and Ben's house in my a my house, so we're right there on the border of

the two counties. Anyway, those 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 voto Matic 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 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, their buzzword. Yeah. Yeah.

So if you look at any of the cafeterias from back then, there were a lot of the like the serve o matic 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 aig seven hours ago. If you really be still my heart or just a

jar of eggs. Yep, man, those are the days, right, 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 poppuli 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. I'll talk about that. Um. But but does it does open up the opportunity for tabulation errors only because if the piece of paper that you are punching out isn't come 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 V 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 the 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 to 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 it maybe a touch screen in some cases where you you know your your choices pop up, you press, the screen activates, and your vote is uh is reflected on what you see on the screen. H. 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 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. 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 H. 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

every 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 a lead 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 could 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 could be as 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 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, Okay, and know if it's people named Chad, I don't believe in nominative determinism, which is the smart word for the smart phrase for that kind of belief. Yeah, we were

very intelligent about our our short sighted uh bad jokes. Yeah, so yeah, this is this is a huge eel 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 you 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 uh, and they eventually made the decision, going back to I love that you put this in earlier, going back to your comments about tabulating things in a timely manner. Ultimately right, Um, 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. Now, you don't wanna you don't

wanna 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 elections. 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 cards stems

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 regions did opt to go with electronic voting machines, and in two thousand two, the first state to use the 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. This is one of the good ones, arguably. So it was interesting to see that Georgia was just was taking a leadership position and 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 depend on the season. If there's inclement weather in a place like Alaska, you know, how 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 legitimate reason, I guarantee you they want to vote, usually against having their foreign

income tax at 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 in to 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 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, then 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 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, Electric solutions used to be die Bald elections and we'll get into Diebold 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. In 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. 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 haye, 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 can 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 are no moving parts, you don't have to worry about the physical wear and tear the way you would with those mechanical devices. Mays

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, I wish I could see this in the studio. I just did President Handry. Yeah, you get the thumbs slightly extended and the fist clinched, and then you do all your gestures. You know why you do it that way, right, So you're not pointing 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 A 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

falling place. I'd like to point out that the cab County has much more respectable volunteers at the pollings into a free sassafras. Yeah, you get a little bit of that. Sasaparilla is actually what I was thinking of. It's fair, but yeah, there are differences. So you've got lots of different companies that make these, 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 are 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. Alright, 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. Write 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 Hollywood 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 Mecause that time for bonds or whatever it was, you choose, you choose the Gipper, you choose Ronald Reagan, and uh and in the distance you hear 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. 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 and I know that we are going to go back and forth on some of this, and that's fine. 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 gip 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. No, that would 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 after you cast your vote, the piece of paper prints out and it says Ronald Reagan, Like, yep, that's who 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 were drawing the same conclusion, so quick leap, 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 that 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 at 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. 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 hampering involved, there's no bias that's been introduced, either unconsciously or purposefully, then it's a beautiful world. Beat 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 the votes come in and there they announced the results for Georgia, and it's like ninety 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 accept perhaps uh, circumstantial evidence 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? Did we all just not go all? Forget about kings Row bedtime for Bonzo? I told you be bonso I knew that was the

chump one. And I don't have a computer in front of me. I was purely for memory. That's just from that's yeah, that's just because you care, 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 right, no legal leg 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 uh so noticeable that there would be an investigation to follow, right, Like, your whole goal is to do this clandestine lee 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. Unfortunately 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, thoughts and jokes and fats, got a lot of ends, get a lot of outs, you know, a lot of big Lebowski's happening, and um, 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 you will get to hear the conclusion of this and Ben, tell people where they can find your stuff. Sure, thanks Jonathan. Folks, if you haven't heard yet, you can find uh find me and several other like minded compatriots at a show called Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, which examines fringe theories and applies critical thinkings and stuff the mainstream media would

often rather not tell you about. And that is true. Uh. We also have a show called car Stuff that I do with my with my co host and erstwhile guests here on tech Stuff Scott Benjamin. Also your road trip buddy, also my road trip buddy we take Ah, we took a road trip together. You can find out about everything that floats, fly, swims or drives on that show. So

thanks for having me on. And uh then, and I hope that you guys come in for the next week's podcast because I feel like we had some pretty solid jokes and yeah, and we undermined the political system pretty sufficiently. We launched a bit of a revel We may have we may have ventured slightly into rant territory a little bit. Oh oh, I forgot that we have a brain stuff video, Jonathan. You and I do a show called brain Stuff together. We have a brain stuff video about how much it

costs to run for president. It's not as much as you think. Just to run uh, and it's not as hard to register. It's just really really it only gets really really expensive if you want to win. Yeah, because you you got to get in front of those voters faces. Uh. We also have a great brain stuff video, the two of Us for twins. Oh, one of my favorites of all times. Corny, I love it. I love it so much. But we we did a lot of overacting in that one.

So guys, if you have any suggestions or questions, you got any any people that I should have on either to interview or to be a guest host, please give me a shout let me know the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or dropped me a lot and on Facebook or Twitter. The handling both of those is text stuff hs W and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com