Voting Expert Explains How Voting Technology Will Impact the 2020 Election

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.

[soft music]