Speaker 0
0:10 – 0:12
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
Speaker 1
0:13 – 1:22
CT. Tea. Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Jamal Magby, and it's time to talk tech. As The United States gears up for another election season, many experts are exploring new digital solutions to aid in keeping Americans safe while voting during COVID nineteen. But what are the dangers of online voting? How do we ensure our elections are safe and secure while in the midst of a global pandemic? How can technology assist in ensuring everyone can participate in the twenty twenty election safely and securely? Here to answer some of these questions is Ben Adida, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit VotingWorks, and Hannah Coydelavele, senior technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Ben and Hannah, thank you so much for being here today. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Of course. So to kick us off, how has the COVID nineteen pandemic impacted the current state of elections?
Speaker 2
1:22 – 4:14
I would say that you just have to take a look at Wisconsin, in the primary that they had in early April to see that, unfortunately, in addition to all the other damage that it's doing, COVID is also having a pretty deep impact on elections this year. And, the first and most obvious one is that if you're for whatever in person voting you're going to do, to apply the social consent, masking, all the normal policies that, all the policies that we are now, applying everywhere else in our lives. We have to apply them to in person voting. And you have to consider in particular, the risk two things. One, the risk to poll workers, folks who are there in sometimes confined spaces, for a long period of time, who are handing materials to voters and sometimes materials going back to them. So it's having a pretty big impact on how on the job of poll workers. And when you consider that poll workers, tend to be more in older than I would say the average population, that means they're even more at risk. It's it's something that's really a concern, and I know election officials across the country are working hard to think about moving polls to, precincts that, have more space, that allow for, social distancing, that allow for, safety for poll workers. But even then, if you look at the pictures and videos from Wisconsin, you see that it's hard. It's very difficult to to make it safe. So I think that's the first, and most important point to keep in mind, and, my hat goes off to election officials around the country that are working incredibly hard to make in person voting safe. But, of course, the the problem is that if you've ever voted in person, you know that, traffic can just get high at certain times of the day on election day. And, there's very little way around that except if we give voters ways to cast a ballot, not on election day and potentially safely from home. And so that's why the recommendations you're hearing from experts across, across the country and across the political spectrum is to make it possible for as many voters as possible to cast their ballot by mail this year. And, I think you're seeing a lot of that. But, of course, that's easier said than done. It it depends on the state. It depends on the policies around vote by mail. Certainly, it's a pretty strong consensus that to make things safe this year, we're probably gonna see a very significant uptick in vote by mail.
Speaker 0
4:15 – 4:58
I think that's a a really wonderful overview of a lot of the things that are going to change, and I just want to add on to something that, Ben said about how we're gonna see a an uptick in vote by mail. And that's not gonna be trivial. You know? A lot of the there's this much of the structure of vote by mail is sort of expects a fairly low percentage of voters to utilize that pretty significant in terms of, how to handle the increase in vote by mail vote by mail ballots and doing that at the same time that you're trying to protect the people who ultimately have to take in and count those ballots.
Speaker 1
4:59 – 5:08
So with that being said, how are we thinking about and approaching this election cycle in comparison to past years? I think, you know, this is this was already going to be,
Speaker 2
5:09 – 7:55
a pretty important election, obviously. Right? We, as a country, there's, we're we're quite divided on the issues, and it's a presidential election year. So already, this was gonna be a pretty critical election in terms of, making sure that we build processes for trust, making sure that we implement audits, that states, continue on the paths they've been on to, bring back paper bring paper ballots, to, all voters and to audit the tabulation. So there was already a lot of work going on. And, I think this is you know, the COVID situation has added a significant amount of work and complexity. So I think I think what's happening again is you're seeing a lot of great work from organizations from, like, vote at home, and verified voting, and I hope a little bit voting works to, to help election officials think through how do they adapt to a significant uptake in vote by mail. Because the one thing I forgot to mention in previous answer is that even though the primary in Wisconsin was in early April, so, pretty soon after all the shelter in place orders were were put in place. There there's not a lot of time to adapt. And even though Wisconsin has, I wouldn't say, the most stringent constraints on vote by mail, but, certainly, they're not a state that typically does a lot of vote by mail. From 2016 from the equivalent primary in 2016 to this primary in 2020, vote by mail went from 10% to 71%. And that's with very, very little time to prep. And, and with the process for, for going to vote by mail, that is not, the simplest for voters. There are some hurdles, including, witness requirements in particular for vote by mail. So it's, it it what we're having this what we're seeing this year is we're seeing election officials adapt incredibly rapidly to an incredibly rapidly set changing set of situation of conditions. And, I don't know that I have anything more detailed than that to say, but that's we're seeing a lot of very rapid change in a lot of states. And, of course, in some states that already have a lot of vote by mail or that are already all vote by mail, then it's just mostly doubling down on what they're already doing and doing a lot to help teach other states, how they do that. So the amount of stress and rapid change, I would say, has not evenly distributed across the country.
Speaker 1
7:57 – 8:02
So are there any proposals for technology assisted election infrastructure that show promise?
Speaker 2
8:05 – 11:44
I think the most important thing to know about, elections in The US is that technology has played a role, in US elections for more than a hundred years. You you see in, in the even in the late eighteen hundreds, you see the introduction of lever machines. And then as technology has progressed, you see technology, you see things like, punch cards and, optical scan machines and, eventually, touchscreen voting machines. So technology has always played a role in US elections, and some of that is due to the to the fact that as a country, I think we like, using modern technology for what we do. But there's a more fundamental reason, which is that tabulating elections in The US is complex compared to other countries, other democracies. We tend to have ballots that are very long, that have often twenty, thirty questions on them, sometimes even more. Whereas a lot of other democracies have maybe one or two questions on them. And so the task the task of it's it's that simple fact that makes tabulating elections in The US that much harder. Not to mention that because you have all these questions including at the local level, at at the county level, at the at the state level, then sometimes your across the street neighbor has a slightly different ballot than you do. Right? You might be in different school districts, and so you might have 28 out of 30 questions in common on your ballot, but two of them are different. So because the administration of elections is this much more complicated in The US, there's always been, technology involved. Of course, the problem is when you have technology involved, then you have questions of trust. How do you trust those, those, that that technology? And is that technology is that technology something you have to trust to believe in the integrity of the election? And that's, of course, where all the issues have come about regarding the requirement the the need for a paper ballot to make sure that you can have these tangible, voter verification act where they see the paper ballot. They verify that it's marked correctly and why that's been critical. If we get to more recent, you know, improvements in technology that have been helpful, I think the one I'd wanna point out that's, been the work of a number of election activists and experts and security experts across the board is the introduction, over the last few years of risk limiting audits, which is the introduction of technology for the sake of auditing other technology. Specifically, if you've got tabulators, scanners that scan paper ballots, that's critical technology because counting pay the paper ballots we have in The US by hand is incredibly tedious, and it can't be done in time to report results. And it's usually very error prone, all because we have fairly complex and long balance. Right? So the risk limiting audit is a piece of technology that helps you check that the tabulation was done well. And I think the, Colorado was the first state to do risk limiting audits. They've been doing them for a few years. And this year, we're gonna see a few more states do them. And I think that's a, an incredibly important, introduction of technology that increases trust in the outcome of the election.
Speaker 1
11:45 – 11:53
So with this new technology being introduced to voting, why wouldn't we want to move the vote to being held online? What are some of the inherent risks?
Speaker 0
11:55 – 14:37
So there's a a number of concerns that plague online voting, and I think that there is a tendency to sort of conflate technology with, you know, technology as far as voting goes in the context of voting in person. Right? Ballot marking devices, things like risk limiting audits are very different than using technology that's intended for state just average consumer use for voting. And so the main concern there is a lot of our consumer grade technology, your your computer, your smartphone, aren't designed for the same risk context that elections present. And so, consequently, you have to think about things like attacks on the operating system. Right? So one of the major concerns, for instance, with mobile voting is how do you secure a mobile device? Like, that's a really hard question, and we, tend to shunt off a lot of the risk for that question through, like, other cultural approaches. So one of the examples people like to say is, you know, if you can bank on your phone, why can't you vote on your phone? And the reality is that banking on our phones isn't actually as safe as it feels to the consumer. Banks take on a lot of losses. There is a lot of fraud that happens, and banks are willing to take on the cost of that fraud because the increased convenience for consumers means that, you know, they bank more often, they buy more things, so it's ultimately good, for the banks. Right? But you can't use a lot of those same approaches with voting, because there's no way to sort of move the fraud somewhere else. There's no way to say, like, well, somebody else will take the burden of voter fraud or of, interference into elections. Like, those are things you just have to guard against, and our current consumer grade technology isn't really built for a no errors possible situation. So you really have to think about those concerns. So, yeah, I think that's sort of the major concern is voting presents this world where you have an incredibly high security bar, but you also have a high secrecy bar. Right? People have a right to a secret ballot. So you can't just say, like, oh, let me just check that your vote was right. Tell me who you voted for. So a lot of the mechanisms that we use for security, in our consumer devices. But other things don't really carry over to voting. So that's one of the major concerns with doing it online is the online approach generally assumes that you're gonna use your consumer device. I would double down on what you said. I think that
Speaker 2
14:38 – 16:58
Hannah's description of the the threat model here is incredibly important, and we it's it's easy to think that the banking threat model is the obviously hardest one out there because it's a lot of money. But it turns out it's not because exactly as Hannah said, a small amount of of loss in the financial system is already built in, and it's okay. You know, a few dollars here lost is can be made up through, insurance and and and whatnot. You can't do that with votes. If you have if you're off by 1%, you might throw the election. Right? And so that's the threat model is actually much, much more complex for voting. And Hannah mentioned this concept that I think is incredibly critical to understand, in voting, which is different than everything else, and and that is the secret ballot. The secret ballot means that no one involved in administering an election should know how you voted. Only you should know how you voted. And that requirement does not exist in any other activity that we do, in person or online. If you think about the two typical activities that people think about when they think about high security, they think about banking, and they think about health. Well, your bank obviously knows every single thing about your your finances, and your doctor obviously knows everything about your medical record. These are not the same threat models. These are not the same, trust models as you have in voting because your election clerk obviously should not know how you voted. And that difference is what makes what makes it critical to have a system that lets every voter check how their vote was recorded independently. They can't rely on somebody else. And that's why, ultimately, you need a paper ballot that voters are handling and seeing themselves because that is the only mechanism we know that universally allows any voter to check that's how my phone was recorded. If you intermediate that with a phone, a server, a network, or anything else, then voters would have to trust a third party to record their vote properly. And that's the one thing that we cannot have in elections.
Speaker 1
16:58 – 17:04
So what framework do you believe is important to remember when thinking about secure and safe elections?
Speaker 0
17:04 – 18:33
So I think I think it's sort of a a crystallization of, what Ben and I have mentioned in our previous answer, which is that, you know, there's sort of security and safety and secrecy. And I think that those are the, kind of have to be your guiding lights. Right? Any structure you develop, any approach you take has to, protect from alteration of votes. It has to enable people to vote secret secretly, which ends up just I I think that that's something that we sort of take for granted, but it's it's it's surprisingly important. Right? Like, for a very long time, we didn't actually have secret ballots, and it turns out it makes it incredibly easy to buy or coerce an election. So that principle, which might feel like it's a little bit less important than preventing a vote change or, making sure you don't have outside interference, it actually is part of protecting against outside interference. So I think those safety and secrecy are very tightly tied together. So any approach you take has to protect those two things. You have to make sure that nobody else changed the votes after the user voted, and you have to make sure that the user, has their secret ballot that enables them to vote in whichever way they feel is fit. Yeah. I agree with all of that. I think those those are incredibly important points.
Speaker 2
18:35 – 20:37
The way I the way I encourage folks to think about voting to make it very concrete, and it's a it's a little bit more, simplistic, what I'm about to say, than than a framework. I think what Hannah described is more of a framework. The two things I insist on in voting is a paper ballot and tabulation audits, also known as risk limiting audits, specifically. Those are the two pillars in my mind of a secure voting system, where you've, you've got a paper ballot that voters can verify, and you've got an auditing process to make sure those paper ballots are tabulated correctly. There's one more thing I'll mention, which is not on the security front, but it is on the integrity front. One issue that often doesn't get enough attention, actually, almost never gets enough attention, is the issue of voters with disabilities. And I wanna be clear that when we say that, we immediately think, oh, that's probably a small number of voters. We definitely should, you know, make sure they get to vote. But, it's not a small number of voters. As we know from, product development in other areas, when you, start building products for voter for peep for users with disabilities, you start to realize that, actually, disability and ability is a continuum. Right? It's a spectrum. And, as we get older, we all have some level of vision impairment or at least most of us do. And and so when you think about what it's like to vote if you're blind or visually impaired, you're not just thinking about blind voters, although there's a lot of them, millions. Right? You're thinking about, aging voters too. Right? And so, I start and I say paper ballots and risk limiting audits, but then we also have to think about how do we let voters with disabilities mark those paper ballots. And when you think about building an election with integrity, you have to think about that too.
Speaker 0
20:37 – 20:51
Just to drive Ben's point home, it's something like twelve percent of voters, who have some sort of visual or mobility or other disability that means that they need assistance voting. So it's a very high number.
Speaker 1
20:51 – 20:59
So let's go back a little bit and lay the groundwork for folks who who are new to this topic. What principles already govern US elections?
Speaker 0
21:00 – 22:48
So I'm gonna sort of dig away at the foundation of that question, which is that, there's not really a US election. Elections are done as a on a state by state basis. So there aren't a lot it's a it's a very fragmented system. So one of the things that serves as a little bit more of a foundation is, there's something called the voluntary voting system guidelines. It's these are a set of guidelines. They are developed by the federal government, but, again, that's part of the reason they're voluntary is because, voting is very much a state, very much in the aegis of states. So the voluntary voting system guidelines help lay out, guidelines for what makes for a secure and usable voting machine and allows states to, incorporate these guidelines into their own certification processes. So the guidelines lay out standards for things like, how secure the machines are, whether they have all of the needed functionality, and whether they're accessible. So that goes to, the point Ben was just making about ensuring that every voter who needs these things, can actually make sure that they cast their vote well. These guidelines are actually in the process of being updated. So they're working on version two point o of the guidelines to help incorporate guidelines for more of the techno technological advancements, that we've been talking about. So those are one of the the things that underlie the foundations of the elections to try to help move that expertise from the federal to the state level. You know, the the it's it's critical
Speaker 2
22:49 – 24:55
to have a certification process for voting equipment so that it's functional, secure, etcetera. It's also incredibly difficult to build that certification process, and so I I'm, it's it's important that that process gets updated, over time as we adjust different technologies and different threads, etcetera. And I'm I'm very optimistic about the VVSG two point o, which is in active review right now. I kinda wish it could get here faster. One of the most important improvements that it makes is that prior versions of the guidelines only allow for so called complete voting systems to be certified. So let's say you've got, an incredibly innovative and useful and secure way to help voters with disabilities cast a ballot, you can't get that certified on its own. You would have to integrate that into a complete system that addresses every possible need in every voter, including absentee voting, and then the whole thing, basically, before you could get that certified. And then the folks that have worked on the VVSG and, in the federal government, they know this. And this is why VVSG two is is built to be more modular. So you can certify modules, and then you can assemble, certified modules together into one system. I think that's one of the most important improvements that's coming in the in the framework for evaluating voting systems. The second most important one is that, the VVSG two is structured with a set of high level design principles, and then the details the detailed requirements of how these principles are met can be tweaked over time, by NIST, a little more rapidly than it would take to get these requirements these specific requirements tweaked, with changing technology if it were done at the VVSG level. So we're gonna get a more agile standard, and a more modular standard, and that's very good for everybody.
Speaker 1
24:57 – 25:11
So let's dig a little deeper on, these voluntary voting system guidelines. When individuals vote, does anyone verify, and does anyone audit? And if so, who does that? And and can that be done online?
Speaker 2
25:13 – 28:08
So the the key thing to understand about the VVSG is that it is a standard, that is defined for the equipment itself, the equipment that's used in elections. It it does not specify the, audit processes that happen after the fact in an election. And, however, there are things that can be done to audit elections. And I mentioned one of them, which is the risk limiting audit. And the key idea to understand about the risk limiting audit is you take a bunch of paper ballots that have been verified by voters, and you put them through a scanner. And then the scanner tells you the result of the election. And that's great because the scanner will do that very quickly. And it's there's a question mark around, well, did it do it correctly? And the risk limiting audit is the process that is run after an election to check that the, scanner actually did do that did report the results correctly. Performing a risk limiting audit requires you to look with to have people, election officials, review a small subset of the ballots that is randomly selected. So go back to the paper, check that it was interpreted correctly for a small subset of the balance. And the power of the risk limiting audit is that it can give you high confidence by just selecting a small number of ballots compared to the large to the total number of ballots. And, and the other thing that's interesting about risk limiting audits is that the best way to perform them is at the state level. It's the most efficient way to perform them to to to have a state do one risk limiting audit for, for its important contests. However, the ballots themselves are stored at the county or at at the township level depending on the state. So where technology can help here, where online technology can help is the workflow coordination of running an audit that basically connects the state to the counties and allows a, an orchestration of this audit by way of an online application. And that's actually, something that we worked on at VotingWorks that we continue to work on with, our system called Arlo, which, yes, is a phonetic joke on RLA. And it is an open source web based system to help conduct a risk limiting audit. It doesn't do it for you. You still have to have election officials do the work, but it is, in some sense, the orchestrator, the metronome of the audit. And that's an incredibly important tool that's necessary to conduct an audit and that I think is gonna be even more incredibly important in times of COVID where you don't really wanna have a large number of election officials get together in a single space to do an audit. You can have small groups, connect over the Internet to perform that audit.
Speaker 0
28:09 – 28:48
Again, wanted to to highlight the way the state by state nature of this makes this, you know, complicated. Right? It's messy. The National Council of State Legislatures has this great chart that goes into, for every state who does the audit, what kind of audit they do, when they do the audit, and it's just an incredibly complex process. So building tools like risk limiting audits and the technology to make those more possible, more doable, go an incredibly long way to increasing the confidence, in our elections.
Speaker 1
28:49 – 28:57
One thing we mentioned earlier that I wanna go back to is vote by mail. Can you explain how vote by mail works, and what are some of the risks associated with it that aren't usually discussed?
Speaker 2
28:59 – 32:10
I think there's there's a few important things to understand about vote by mail. It is not a perfect mechanism for voting. It sounds of course, and it is very convenient, and there's some recent research that shows some recent research and some less recent research that tends to show that it does increase participation, which is a really good thing. It does increase turnout. And the most important thing that I would call out in in favor of vote by mail is that unlike, assumptions that people make on, on both sides of the aisle, actually, that there's this assumption that vote by mail, let's be very clear, there's this assumption that vote by mail favors Democrats. Right? The research does not show that. The research shows that, vote by mail increases turnout, across the board and does not, favor one party over another. So it really should be a bipartisan, policy, especially this year, to increase vote by mail. The one thing that, vote by mail that that makes security folks, a little bit nervous about vote by mail is, what I would call subtle coercion. And that is you know, if you're voting by mail, if you're voting from your kitchen table or wherever you're voting from, you don't quite have the secret ballot that you have if you walk into, right, a a a precinct. You might have a relative that has a strong opinion, and that strong opinion might be more forcefully expressed if you're filling out your ballot together at the kitchen table. And that might influence you. You might not vote exactly the way you want. Now I'm not saying everybody will do that. I'm not saying, you know, some people will still be able to vote their mind even if they have a disagreement with a spouse or whatnot. But there's still some concern that's very hard to measure and very hard to prove, but some concern that the loss of the truly secret ballot might change how some people vote. So I think that's one concern I have when I think about vote by mail. But I wanna be very clear that it's a concern that I think is dwarfed by the need this year in in 2020. We we simply need more vote by mail even if it is imperfect. There's another way in which it is imperfect, which is that in some places, you can track your ballot and make sure that it does get back to election officials, but that is imperfect, and it's not done well everywhere. So there are issues about ballots sometimes not getting to, to their destination in time. And and, again, these are small issues this year compared to what's needed. My approach in general is to try to be very honest about the pros and cons of every system, so I'm not going to sit here and say vote by mail is perfect and there's no issues with it. I think there are some issues with it. But in 2020, it's necessary, and we need it because, otherwise, we don't know how to vote safely.
Speaker 0
32:11 – 33:50
I just want to add on, and note that there are often cases where some of the things we're talking about are a bit at odds. Right? So, the obvious example being the way that a secret ballot makes, in some ways, a secure election harder, right, in that you can't go back and double check people's votes with them. So you can't verify that there was no interference by just going back and asking people how they voted. And I think that that same tension is gonna carry through into things like by mail. Right? The coercion factor that Ben was talking about is absolutely something that needs to be addressed and thought about and factored in, but there's also concerns that happen with in person voting that maybe don't happen so much with vote by mail. Right? So, it makes it a lot easier to vote if your, say, abusive partner normally would just keep you from going to the polling place for a full day. Right? It's much easier to keep an eye on somebody for a full day than it is for whatever the window for vote by mail is. So these things are very rarely confined to one form of voting and not at all present in another form of voting. And I think that the main approach there is to, as Ben said, be really honest about what a particular form of voting, what issues does it raise, and that lets you think through the best ways to approach those issues and try to mitigate them as much as possible in whatever method of voting you're dealing with at that time.
Speaker 1
33:51 – 34:02
So to close this out and one our very last question, is vote by mail our best option to ensure everyone who can vote is able to do so safely?
Speaker 2
34:03 – 37:03
In 2020? Absolutely. I think one thing we should be wary of is making long lasting policy changes in the middle of a pandemic. So I am not in favor of, states wholesale moving to vote by mail indefinitely, while under pressure for, from the pandemic. I think that, you know, emergency times call for emergency measures. So I hope that states that have high requirements for vote by mail lower those requirements. I hope that they make it a lot easier for voters to vote by mail this year. And then if hopefully things are better next year, then the states can consider the states that have made these changes can consider if they want those changes to continue. I think it's it's unwise to make long lasting changes, under pressure. But it's also unwise to, be stubborn and say, well, we've we've never voted by mail. Why do we need to start voting by mail now? Well, these are pretty unique times, and we do need to adapt if we wanna have, a safe and representative election. So I I think that we should be moving to a significant amount of vote by mail this year. And one of the things I'll I'll mention is, at VotingWorks, one of the concerns we have is that even, if there's a will, there might not be a way for, existing vendors to scale up their offering in vote by mail. It's it's not obvious how you just get every state to 80% vote by mail with in such a short period of time. And so one of the things we've done at VotingWorks that I'll I'll plug and then make sure, Hannah can can provide the more objective point of view is, we, we're developing a system called VXMail, which is, a solution using off the shelf hardware and the software we've been developing for the last eighteen months, to allow states, especially small jurisdictions within the states that are not that accustomed to vote by mail right now, to have a fully integrated turnkey solution to implement and deploy vote by mail very quickly. Because we think the states that need to adapt, very quickly from, say, 5% to 70% vote by mail. The small jurisdictions within those states currently have a very manual process for doing absentee voting. They just have a a small number of ballots they probably stuff by hand and then process by hand when they they come back. If you multiply that volume by 10 or more, the existing processes simply won't work, and that's who we are trying to help with VXML. So one, yes, vote by mail should play a very important role this year. But two, just deciding that doesn't solve the problem. I know election officials are working around the clock to scale up their processes, and we at VotingWorks are gonna try to do our part to help them with tools to do that.
Speaker 0
37:04 – 37:55
Yeah. I will absolutely, provide the, as you say, more objective, although don't know how objective I am. But, yeah, I think it's clear in this pandemic world we're living in that remote voting is going to be important in this election. And, vote by mail is the best way we have to do that right now. We have an infrastructure that, as Ben points out, absolutely needs to be scaled up, and that's going to be difficult. That's a very nontrivial issue. But it is an infrastructure that we have in place. We have a context for how that works and how we make that accessible to voters. And I we're nowhere near that with other solutions such as online voting. So I think given the context that we're in, it's absolutely the way forward for this year's election.
Speaker 1
38:01 – 38:26
Well, Hannah and Ben, it's been a pleasure having you and thank you so much for joining us. You can find out more about VotingWorks efforts online at voting.works and on Twitter at voting underscore works. Keep up with more of the work CDT's policy teams are doing related to the coronavirus response at cdt.org backslash coronavirus and on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at sendemtap. Thank you so much for listening.