Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Christopher, welcome aboard. Pleased to meet you today. There are a lot of interesting topics we're going to talk about today, so I'm so very happy to have you with us.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I am delighted to be here and to meet you virtually. Ari. We just had a couple of minutes to talk before the show, and like I said, I'm pretty sure you and I could hang.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: I feel like that's one of the highest compliments one can get. I appreciate that. I want to start with a tough question, and I want to ask you what was the hardest moment of your either professional or private life?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: You mean aside from getting ready for this podcast? Right.
One of the things that I had a privilege to do was testify in front of the House of Representatives Administration committee in support of the what is now known as the Help America Vote Act. I got involved in learning about voting technology, actually, when I was in high school. One of the questions on the debate team where I met my wife, by the way, was whether the electoral college should continue or not.
And that was one of our debate topics.
So unfortunately, we did only 50 50 that year. But that got my interest in voting much later on in the nineties, I was working for a consulting company, and we were helping governments around the world prepare for y two k.
One of the things that I noticed was voting systems were going to be an issue, and I started to write about that and cover about that, about some of the problems that were going to appear in voting systems if they weren't addressed in the election in 2000. Now, you're far too young to remember that, but you may have read in your history books about the Bush versus Gore election in 2000, issues with hanging chads and voting systems.
I actually have one of the voting stations from Broward County, Florida in my basement.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: And it still has chads in it, but that's what got me interested in voting systems.
And right after that election, I was invited to speak to the House of Representatives committee about what issues needed to be addressed and how to address them. And it was one of my great privileges to do that in service to our country.
But yeah, that's a little bit of a stress when you're testifying in front of Congress, even if you're there as a witness and not a defendant.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: I definitely wouldn't want to be a defendant in front of Congress. I've seen some of those videos. They, some of those congressmen and women.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Were already not ever going to be there. Not me.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is such a timely topic because for obvious reasons, we've got our elections coming up.
I wanted to dive into this a little bit and ask, when you were talking with conference, there was a list of topics that you talked about. What has stayed the same and what is different today?
[00:03:26] Speaker B: What had been increasing after 2000 was we started to get an increase in confidence again in voting systems.
Some of the things that happened in 2000 were on the extreme side and they were well publicized by the press in a fair and balanced way.
That has changed in the ensuing almost quarter century because people now tend to get into a news cycle where they're getting information that is circular.
People are isolating themselves, typically from a broad based news and focusing in on news that reinforces their belief system.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: And to be fair here, it's the algorithms and social media at fault here as much as the individuals themselves.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Absolutely. And that's what I'm saying.
You watch something, the algorithms pick it up.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Oh, you want more of this?
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So you get into a. And it's not even a circle, it's a spiral, because it gets tighter and tighter each time.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: That's right.
You know, my dad used to say, if you want to know the truth, the actual truth, you've got to read like three or four different biases because nobody will tell you the truth. But you can, if you read four or five different perspectives, you'll get something close to the truth.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: And your father was a wise man, and that's not what happens a lot of times today.
Also, after the election in 2016, there were already starting to hear information from both camps that that election probably wasn't run fairly. It was, you heard that more broadly and louder after the election in 2020, and that election was run fairly. And either way, in 2024, you're going to hear that even more loudly. And I have every confidence that this election is going to be run fairly.
You have to take a look at the processes and the people as well as the results.
So by and large, the manufacturers of the equipment are going to do everything that they can to make sure that each vote that is cast is counted accurately.
But there is a large base of people in the United States that believes that we should go back to hand counting ballast.
And it has been proven time and time again that that system doesn't work.
And there isn't any doubt about it, it just doesn't work. And we can go into as far down in that rabbit hole as you'd like to go. I have examples as recently of June of this year with live data that shows that it doesn't work.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: So let's break this down. This is such an interesting topic, but my general sense is that the public doesn't understand what are the steps here? Or what are the pitfalls in making an election and in a voting process, honest and fair? So let's break it down. What is the first step and what does it go all the way through the process and what are the different pitfalls?
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Okay, now what I don't want to talk about here, because I am not an expert in this area, is voter suppression.
Who is allowed to vote and who isn't allowed to vote? I do want to point out that there is no actual right to vote in the constitution itself.
All it talks about in voting is in the section one where it says federal elections and the participation thereof will be handled by the states.
That's it.
There isn't actual any federal voting regulation until 1870, almost 100 years after the constitution was adopted, and it was spurred on by the end of the civil war.
So, you know, there's 100 years of play there.
So that's not really the area that I can address.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: And what that means I'm going to interpret is that, you know, who comes to vote? Does everybody come to vote? Is there any monkey business in making it easier for some people to come to vote versus others? That's really the criteria of what happens until you get to the building or wherever you're going to cast your vote. That's that step in the process right.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Now, once you get there and your votes in the box are actually when you're starting to mark the vote to go into the box, I can talk about that.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: One topic that I've heard come up multiple times is who can vote? I do. I need an id to vote. Is that different from state to state? Is there any kind of, what's the process? Look, before I cast my vote.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Right. And again, that's not where I come in. You know, you gotta be at the ballot box, and. And that's where we come in.
I mean, I do have some personal feelings about that, but.
And frankly, we even have disagreements between that in our own organization.
So that's not our area of expertise. We help once you get to the ballot box and through the poll book process. So you got to get there and they say, okay, you're allowed to vote, sign the poll book. That's where we come in.
There are some interesting systems that are available. What had been used after 2000 and basically up until 2016 were direct record electronic voting systems, dres, where you push a button on the screen just like you do on your atm or ordering at the kiosk at McDonald's.
And it records your selection.
And then you, you know, it gives you a list at the end, and you say, yeah, that's how I voted. And you press a button and boom, it's recorded. At the end of the day, the machine tallies up all the votes, gives a report to the administrators.
They, in one way or another, pass that on to the central administration for the election, typically at the county level or the parish level. And from there it goes on to the state level and from there reported to the national level. And if that's all done electronically, that can happen very quickly.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Is everything today electronic or is there still various methods that is happening?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Well, there have been some steps back from that. One of the things that has happened is that you press a button on the machine and it prints out a ballot, and you hand carry that ballot to a tabulator, and that tabulator reads the machine. Now, something that happened in my own county, here in Burlington County, New Jersey, is that the ballot printer was designed to print the second page of the ballot. First it prints the ballot. The ballot comes out, it goes back into the machine, and then the other side is printed, and it comes back out and you have your completely printed ballot, but it comes out to the tray and it gets captured again by the machine, and the other side is printed. However, the machines in my county were designed or were set to print the backside first, and people didn't understand that. So when the ballot would come out, they would grab it.
Unfortunately, in the primary elections in June, there was no second page to the ballot, so they were grabbing a blank piece of paper.
And at that point, you're done, and that can't be counted because it hasn't been tabulated.
So you have voted, but your selections don't count.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: So tell me more about this two step process. Right. You're printing it, that something's happening there, but then you're taking it to a different machine to be counted. Is that accurate? Why that separation?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Well, because that way the voter can verify that the ballot that they printed is accurate.
All right. Now, in theory, you holding that ballot, you notice a mistake. You can go back to the, the recording machine and make changes on your ballot, but that means that both the voter and the poll workers understand how that process works.
That's where the breakdown occurs, because that's not something the voter can do by themselves. And if you've got a voter that has physically challenged physical challenges, and particularly if they've been waiting in line for hours, they haven't had any water, which is true in some places. You know, you're not even allowed to give them water before they vote, by.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: The way, is that. That's kind of weird.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Again, so there are issues with that kind of assistance.
And some places you still mark the ballot by hand with a marker, a special marker, and then you take that and you feed it into the machine. And the machine is supposed to be able to, you know, you have to completely fill in the circle.
Okay, well, what if you only fill in the circle one third or two thirds? So how's the machine supposed to interpret that?
Or you draw a line across, how's the machine supposed to interpret that?
So again, that's a lot of voter education that needs to happen, and there has to be some intelligence built into the ballot reading device to do that. So in some regards, that's a step backwards.
Now when you go to the point of hand counting ballots.
So I've got a ballot and I make a check mark. Well, there isn't supposed to be any extraneous marks on that ballot. Right.
So do you ever go down a checklist with a pen in your hand and then, you know, you put a dot next to the ones that you've looked at already?
[00:15:22] Speaker A: I'm not comparing the voters to my five year old son, but he can't hold a pen without having it all over his face, hands and all over the paper, too.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: That's right.
And in some jurisdictions, that would be enough to disqualify that ballot, even putting the marks down where you put the check marks.
So that's the kind of things that happened with paper ballots. We're not talking about the process of counting them yet. That's just getting them into the ballot box.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Right. So it's really giving you a good way to get the vote, verify it, and output it in a very clean and verified way. That's really that purpose of that first step with the tablet or digital device.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Right.
And we have stepped back from that by people that have, you know, I'm willing to bet that very few of those people are only dealing in cash or only writing paper checks.
Right. They're all using ATM's, credit cards, debit cards.
Now, absolutely. There are flaws in the debit card system, but for the majority of the transactions that take place in a year, the amount of issues that happen are a very tiny fraction.
Same is true with voting systems.
Once the voting system is deployed, the amount of issues that happen because of the voting recording system itself is a very small fraction of the problems in the chain. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. I am saying it doesn't happen enough to change the outcome of an election.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: And this the second machine that counts the votes? Right.
What happens there? You just place it in a box. What's that look like?
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Right. Well, depending on the system in use, typically what you do is you feed it into a slot, and that slot takes it into the tabulating machine, which counts the marks, looks at where. Looks at where marks are supposed to be and determines whether or not there is a mark.
That part of the process actually works pretty well in all cases.
There is very little issue with the machine interpreting whether or not a box has been marked.
The issue there is if people aren't coloring it in, they're just putting a dot. You know, this is the person I'm voting for. This is the resolution I'm voting for. And they don't fill in the dot completely, then it can be interpreted.
And machines are notoriously bad at interpretation. They're very good at repetitive tasks.
Machines are getting better at interpretation.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: And that's really the, you know, the first printing machine is really also helping the interpretation machine because it's doing a very consistent manner.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Exactly.
That's exactly the point of the first machine.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Wonderful. Christopher, let me ask you something, and maybe this is outside of your purview, but we've all had this vision of people voting from their homes on their phones.
What's the future hold to us when it comes to voting technologies?
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Okay, I know that I'm not supposed to do plugs here, so I'm not going to. But let me just say that there, you know, maybe a certain company that I know that actually has that technology now, and you could download an app and do it in your phone today.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Today. So in this coming election, you could vote from your phone.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: No. Okay, say that.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Okay, the technology exists.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: The technology exists today.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Would politically, would that technology be better or worse than what we're doing today? How do we compare the two?
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Well, again, that assumes a certain amount of trust and faith in the voting population, and that doesn't exist either.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Break that down to me.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Explain that to me, for example. Oh, gee, you know, I could go out, I could build a bot that votes 17,000 times.
Well, you could also go out and build a bot that does 17,000 transactions out of your bank account.
But the bank's going to have something to say about that.
So there are checks and balances in the system, but the population doesn't believe in the checks and balances. Yet it was a long time to adopt. Going from a card based credit card to the ones that you could wear on your watch or carry in your pocket, in your phone.
That was a 30 year learning process, and that's what was happening now. Now, in smaller elections, where you have a well defined population, unions, school board elections, condo elections, homeowners associations, that kind of stuff, you know, boards of elections, how cooperative, that kind of stuff, where the voting base tends to know each other, that technology is accepted. Now, getting it to the general public in larger elections, that's going to take more time, more education.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: Maybe I'm preaching the choir here, but, I mean, if I'm banking with somebody, they know who I am. They know to take the money out of my bank account.
How is a vote so different? I'm not going to take more money than I have from a bank account. If I have one vote in a bank account, it should be one vote and it should be my bank account. Why is there such a gap here in voting technologies, where we're doing so much on digital banking?
[00:21:46] Speaker B: Well, do you know anybody who's had their account scammed?
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Sure. That's a thing.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Absolutely right. And that's why there's the resistance in voting. Because while the banking technology is good, it's not perfect, and there are bad actors that work to break the banking system. And there would be bad actors, bad actors that would try to break the voting system.
The banking system is getting better and better. The voting systems are getting better and better. Unfortunately, the bad actors are also getting better and better.
But we're generally increasing the security faster generally increasing the security faster than the bad actors are getting better.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Is there a trade off here? And again, maybe this is going beyond scope, but is there a trade off here between access and security? So how much fraud is there? Maybe it's a small percentage versus how many more people would vote. From a democratic perspective, I can double the people that are voting, but I'll have another 3% fraud. To me, that sounds like almost a no brainer.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Well, it depends on whether, and we're talking about politics now. It depends on, remember, the people who won get to get to make the rules. Right? Okay. So if you won, the system that's in place works for you, which means that you may not want to make changes to the system.
Now, if you one, and the people that are going to be added to that through that growth are more likely to support your points of view, then you're going to encourage that.
But if the people who are going to be added through that growth are not going to be supportive of your point of view. You may not be that so inclined to work to bring that group of people in. Right.
And typically those decisions are not made by a nonpartisan or by bipartisan teams.
They should be, but generally they're not.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: Who gets to make the rules? Basically, it's the party that was elected. That's how it works.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Right?
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Do we see kind of back and forth every election that some rules get changed?
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Not every election, because you not only have to have the leadership in place, but you need to have both houses of Congress in place, and that doesn't happen very often.
And when it does, generally voting systems are not the highest priority.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Fair enough.
Fair enough.
I appreciate that.
What do you think that the future holds for us? Do you think this is a problem that's ever, and I guess there's a certain bias in me even calling it a problem. But do you think that we will achieve this next level of voting technologies in 1020 years, or is this just one of those things that are going to stay the way that they are?
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Well, it definitely will improve. We're now moving from a generation that watched this technology evolve to a generation that grew up with it.
So I'm part of the generation that helped evolve the technology.
My sons are part of the generation that was evolved by the technology.
So you're going to see an increasing comfort level.
There are still people that I know that don't know how to compose an email.
And as surprising as that may be to some people, it's an intelligent individual who just never gained that life experience.
But the generation that is coming now and will be rising to, I don't want to use the term in power, but rising to leadership positions over the next few years, as I said, we're evolved by and with that technology, and then we'll see real changes.
I hope that happens within my lifetime. I'm working, so that happens within my lifetime.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: I hope I'm not misquoting, but it was the CEO of Apple who said it in a very blunt way. He said, people die.
And what he meant, it's a very blunt way to say it, but what he meant is that the generations change, and with the new generation, new perceptions and new understandings and new norms come along, is just such an aggressive way to say that, that I never forgot that. But it is fundamentally true. Right? Our things, we feel comfortable change over the generations. I want to flip the script. I've been a little biased towards you. Know, technology can help us out, but I want to flip the script here for a second and talk about the dangers in privacy.
Being of one political or another group seems to be much more dangerous today to have your public opinions known. It could be in related to your employer, who maybe has a different opinion and maybe you won't be promoted or won't even get the job.
So this whole idea of privacy and keeping your vote private, I can imagine if it's just me and in that room and the machine printed it out and I just put a piece of paper in a completely different box, I can imagine that nobody knows how I voted. Like, to me, that's very clear.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: And it should be. But there are people that believe that there are cameras in that room.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Fair, fair. No fair.
But let's say relatively to me, logging onto an app and putting in my Social Security number because they need to know it's me, that I've cast my vote. And then the second after me casting my vote, me believing that those two things are going to be disconnected and lost, that's already a leap of faith, as opposed to, oh, are there cameras in this room?
[00:28:43] Speaker B: It's been like 15 years ago now. The ACLU released a video on ordering pizza in the future. The future referring to about now.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: All right?
[00:28:58] Speaker B: And this guy calls up hands free from his phone and says, hey, I want to pick up a pizza.
And the person on the other end starts going through, well, gee, you know, because of your health history, gee, you're almost diabetic. You have to have this kind of a pizza or there's a surcharge. And, gee, based on your life insurance policy.
And it was quite chilling then, and it's even chilling now. So if you want to watch a scary movie for Halloween, look up the pizza ordering video from the ACLU.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: I mean, that is right. That's the dystopian future, I think, that many are afraid of and that this low tech, in essence, seems to be an antidote to many people.
Are there solutions? Are there ideas that the general public can get behind in understanding that their information is remaining public, is remaining private? Sorry.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Well, again, this has to be parts of policy and law, and it also has to be to the point where people who break those laws are held accountable.
And that part of the process, not everybody has faith in at this point, either.
So you are seeing things happening in that area.
For example, there's an investigation ongoing now that was announced by the attorney general's office about visa, and that is some of the issues there. Or pricing from Ticketmaster which are being investigated and all of those kinds of things need to be factored in and then need to be made policy through legislation and I regulation.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: There's, I mean that's really interesting because good policy and good, let's say investigative practices and the law to put people, to punish people if they do the wrong thing. I mean, obviously that's required. But what strikes me is that that's kind of too late, right? That's after the fact.
Is there anything that you're aware of that is being worked on that kind of helps the process be safe as it's happening?
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Well, yes, quite a bit. And that's where cybersecurity comes into play.
And also there's a process called air gapping.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Let's help bring the audience up to speed. What does that mean?
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Okay. Air gapping is when you disconnect the system that is providing the service from the greater network.
Okay.
For example, ordering your cheeseburger at McDonald's.
The system needs to know what you want. It needs to know who you are, but it only needs to know who you are at the beginning, right? So it does a quick check and disconnects.
And it needs to know how you're paying for it at the end.
So it does a verification and disconnects the rest of the time. There is no reason for that system to be connected to anything other than you and you know, your emotional responses to the pictures that are shown on the menu.
So the rest of that time that's called air gap because it is not connected to the network.
Now that can be extreme. A voting system is a very good example. Again, I'll talk in reference to a certain unnamed company that while you're voting there's no reason for that to be connected to the network. In fact, there's no reason for a voting system to ever be connected to a network because you can take the information from it on a device that's that big and move it by hand.
Alright? So you wrote that's called rowboating when you take it from the system and you plug it into another system. But the two systems are never directly connected.
So I know that the system that I put my results in isn't tampered with because it's never connected to anything else.
That's one of the ways that you instill trust into the system. So you can show a chain of evidence from here, from the beginning of the voting system to the end when results are listed. I can show that this information was at this point and this point and this point and this point and prove where it was at any point in between.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Almost like a legal chain of custody. That's super interesting. That's really interesting. Wonderful. Christopher, I tremendously appreciate you joining us here today.
This is a very timely topic. Obviously, we're all very curious about how these things work. I wanted to ask you one last question.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: If you had to give one piece of advice, whether it's to the public, the voters, the legislators, what would that be?
[00:34:45] Speaker B: I would like to make the final point about this. Every person who is allowed to vote actually votes in every election.
Now, you can do it one of two ways. You can be active about it. You can go to the ballot. You can go to the poll site, make your choices on the ballot, and make your voice. No, if you choose to not do that, you are still voting, but you are voting for whomever you like the least. Whatever proposition you would vote for, you're voting against. Whatever you had voted against, you were voting for. Why? Because somebody else went out and voted the other way and your vote wasn't there to offset theirs. So if you make a choice not to participate actively, you are still participating in the way that affects you the worst way.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: Christopher, thank you so much. I will echo that sentiment. Go out and vote whatever it is you believe in. Make your voice heard. Christopher, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: It was a pleasure to be here, and feel free to invite me back.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: I appreciate you. Christopher, thank you.
[00:36:05] Speaker B: Thank you.
