- Whether you're filling out a paper ballot,
or you're voting directly onto a machine,
there's a computer involved,
and all computers have some kind
of security vulnerability attached to them,
that's the nature of computers and software.
So, the question really should be
what can we do to mitigate that risk?
- Super Tuesday is coming up,
but as caucuses and primaries try out new ways
to streamline the voting process,
questions are being raised about voting security.
And, to learn more about voting technology,
we're talking to Larry Nordon from NYU's Brennan Center.
- There is no such thing as a perfect election,
so there will certainly be hiccups.
- So in 2020, can we all be expecting to vote on our phones?
- I don't think, and frankly I hope
that we're not doing that too soon.
We're not ready to vote by phone,
and it's not just the challenges
of being able to transmit votes in a way that is secure
when we know that there are nation states
that are attempting to interfere in our elections.
It's also ensuring that voters themselves
aren't victims of spoofs.
I think people often also ask the question,
"Well, I bank by phone, why can't I do this by phone?"
And, there's the additional challenge of the secret ballot,
and we want to ensure that people can vote privately,
and the only way to do that
is to make sure that the system is extra secure.
- Right, with my bank,
they know how much money I have in my account.
- And you can go check it.
You can go to them and report to that,
and they should see it also.
And, when you vote on a machine,
there's hopefully a paper record
that they can go to and check to make sure
that the software is recording your votes accurately.
- And, what about people who've heard things
about the Iowa Caucus app in the news?
A lot of things went awry,
- What happened in Iowa is a great example
of the challenges of voting by phone.
That was an app to report results.
- It had a lotta issues.
- It had a lot of issues, it didn't work.
They were lucky that they had paper back-ups
that they could go to to add up the votes,
and that they can still go back to
to double check the results,
and fix whatever the problems are.
If people were voting on that app,
we wouldn't be able to go back and know with confidence
that the results were accurate,
and I think there were a lot of important lessons from Iowa.
One of them is that you don't wanna roll out
new untested technology just before a really big election.
Macy's wouldn't roll out new cash registers on Black Friday.
Iowa wasn't a primary, it was a caucus,
which means that the Democratic Party was running that.
It wasn't run by election professionals.
I'd like to think that most election officials
wouldn't make the kind of mistake that they made in Iowa.
And, it's also a lesson in having contingency plans,
having resiliency plans.
If something goes wrong,
what can you turn to make sure
that the election still runs smoothly?
- What are some, you know, cutting-edge technologies
that have really helped the voting and election days
run more smoothly?
- Electronic pollbooks have been very helpful
in making the process of checking in to voting faster.
It can essentially talk to each other
so that if you've checked in on one line,
all of the other pollbooks will know that you've checked in.
Almost every state at this point
has online voter registration,
and that has a lot of benefits
not just because it's easier to register,
but because it's also easy to check
if there are any problems with your registration
ahead of time.
There has been a move towards paper.
Machines that relied only on software
that didn't have some kind of paper ballot or paper backup
could be susceptible to hacks, and would never know it.
And so, there's been a dramatic move back to paper.
- Paper is a pretty impressive technology [chuckles].
- It's a very useful technology,
and it's a very useful redundancy.
And for something like voting where there's a secret ballot,
and where there's not really any other independent way
to check that the tallies that you're getting
from the software are accurate
that you need that independent record.
- A lot of issues, or problems, or bumps in the road
are expected in elections, right?
And, election officials are prepared for that,
trained for that, and know how to react, right?
- Election officials in general have gotten very good
at contingency planning,
and thinking about what might go wrong.
One of the challenges that we have
in an age of social media and disinformation
is to ensure that every little hiccup
doesn't lead to conspiracy theories,
or the assumptions about why they're happening.
- So, if people have heard
that security researchers and security experts
have found flaws and problems with voting machines,
what would you tell them about what's going on with that?
- For the most part, all Americans are voting on computers.
Whether you're filling out a paper ballot,
or you're voting directly onto a machine,
there's a computer involved,
and all computers have some kind of security vulnerability
attached to them.
That's the nature of computers and software.
So, the fact that people are able to find
security vulnerabilities in them isn't that surprising..
The question really should be:
What can we do to mitigate that risk?
What can we do to make sure
that if there is some hacker or malware on the system
that we can catch it, and that we can recover from it?
And, the big answer for that, frankly,
is having a paper backup.
The good news on that is that's not hard to do,
and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to do it
before the 2020 election.
We have the tools to audit if we want to.
- So, currently in the US
for this really diverse system we have,
what type of oversight is there
for the types of organizations and companies
that are selling equipment, and the equipment itself?
- I make a distinction between the equipment
and the vendors who are selling the equipment.
For the equipment, there's some oversight.
There is a federal certification process
that's voluntary for voting machines,
and those have to be,
if you wanna have a federally certified machine,
not everybody does in the United States,
but most states use the program in some way,
you have to go through a testing process
that tests around security and usability and accessibility.
Separate from that is the companies
who work in our elections,
the private companies who work in our elections.
Those private vendors touch every aspect of our elections,
and there, there is zero regulation at the federal level,
and what that means is you can have things
like happened in Maryland recently
where they discovered that one of their vendors
for their registration system
was actually owned by a Russian oligarch
with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
They would not have known that
if the FBI hadn't informed that,
and in fact, that had been the case for a while
before they found out about it.
So, from my perspective that's a real problem,
and we're eventually gonna need
federal oversight and involvement.
- So, a lot of primaries
are gonna be happening on Super Tuesday.
A lot is gonna be going on.
What can we expect?
- I'm very hopeful that what we can expect
is an election that goes smoothly.
There will be states
where voters are voting on new equipment for the first time,
so that may pose some challenges to voters
who aren't familiar with the equipment.
Another thing that we should be expecting is high turnout,
and that's something that we have to be ready for.
And again, I'm hopeful that election officials
are preparing for that high turnout,
and that are ready that if systems fail,
that they have back-up plans in place
so that people can still vote,
and that they can vote with confidence
that their ballots are are going to be counted.
- Looking ahead, what trajectory do you think we're on
in terms of the safety, security, and stability
of elections in the United States?
- I think the trend is a good one.
We haven't done as much as I would've liked since 2016,
but there's no question
that there is a much greater awareness
of election security issues
than there was both in the elections community
among election officials,
and at the state and federal level
than there was just a few years ago.
There's been more resources devoted to election security,
and we've had a move to paper and to redundancies.
Every battleground state in the United States
now has a paper record of every vote.
We are using that paper more and more
to double check the accuracy of electronic totals.
And so, while we're far from where we need to be,
and cybersecurity is a race without a finish line,
so we're gonna have to keep investing in it.
We're on the right course
in that we understand that it's a race,
and that we're gonna need to continue to be vigilant,
and that's really the most important step
that we could be making.
- Yeah, there's a lot to talk through here,
so thank you so much for coming.
- Thanks, Lily.
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