The Future of Voting

Voting technology is tricky. It's outdated in many jurisdictions but the next step might have big security problems. What is the future of voting?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says we're clearly
soldiers and petticoats and dauntless crusaders for women's votes. I'm

(00:21):
Jovin Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be probing the future of democracy. Yeah, we're specifically
looking at this, I would say, from the perspective of
being in the United States, just which because that's where
we we are from. So a lot of this conversation

(00:42):
is really kind of gravitating towards that because that's that's
that's our lives, right, especially in an election year, you've
got that kind of a spotlight on that. So as
we record this, just remember that's where we're coming from.
But a lot of the stuff we're gonna talk about
applies to pretty much any place where there's a democratic processes.

(01:03):
The question of what is the technology around voting, how
does that shape voting, What are some potential changes in
the future, what are some of the risks or benefits
of that technology? How do people cheat? Yeah, that's gonna
be a big one. Specifically, Yeah, we are talking about voting,
So maybe what I said was not strictly correct, and

(01:23):
that we wouldn't have to be talking about democracy. We
could be talking about an oligarchy ruled over by a
small elite of people who vote on what happens to
everybody else. Again, as long as long as the voting
procedure is somewhere in there, right, Yeah, But but I
don't think you can use the movie announcer voice to say,
like today, we're talking about the future of oligarchy. Yeah,

(01:44):
the same ring as democracy. We're also not going to
dive into some of the related topics that we could
have explored, but it would have made this episode even longer,
things like what about the future of the electoral college?
Will that always be a thing? We're not going to
go into that. We're specifically focusing in on the voting
ASP act, Yeah, because there's there's way too much to
go into. Otherwise, we could do a whole podcast, like,

(02:06):
not an episode, but a series about this if we
wanted to. Yeah, well, I wanna take you listeners out
there to a place you might not usually go with
your brains. Okay, so you might participate in some kind
of no, no, no, some kind of electoral process. And
you take the voting process for granted, maybe you vote,
maybe you don't vote, but you know, you know, voting

(02:28):
goes on you. Basically, voting is something that happens. You
basically assumed that the elections are fair. I mean hopefully
they are. But think about trying to organize a massive
democratic election yourself. I mean especially, I mean, like, have
you ever tried to order a pizza for like ten people? Yeah? Yeah,
like picture that, but with presidents and how many millions

(02:52):
of people of the pizza I would like taff So
if you have never yeah, so, so imagine you no
infrastructure in place, you've never done this before. You've just
got say, well, we'll shrink the number to a very
manageable size. You've got ten thousand people and you're trying
to get them to vote on something to find out

(03:12):
what they've voted for. How would you do it? If
I'm going to sit there and have ten people vote
on things, I want to make sure I have a
way of distributing uh, ballots of some sort that's fair
so that everyone has access to it, that does not
appear to have a bias to it, so it doesn't
seem to wait one option over another or over several

(03:35):
others to share the type of vote that is easy
to complete, so that the barrier to actually participating in
the voting process is low, and that is easy to tally,
so that I can make certain that I can get
the results back at a reasonable amount of time, and
is difficult to game the system. It is not a

(03:57):
that's not a that's a lot of stuffs and a
jug several balls, and just for ten tho people. It
would be really really hard, Like I mean, I wouldn't
want to start starting from scratch. Yeah, it's a daunting prospect.
But imagine a country of three something million, of whom
you know a good percentage are of eligible voting age. Yeah, yeah,

(04:21):
that's it's really tough, really tough. And beyond that, in
the United States, at least, we don't have a single
like approach to this. It's not like there's one methodology
that is used throughout the entire country and everyone follows
it and therefore it's all exactly the same and you

(04:42):
can be certain that if it's if it's not fair,
it's at least consistent. That's not the case. You know,
fun fact, they vote in Iowa by taking a bite
out of a piece of cheese that represents who gets
their vote. Good times. What kind of cheese is? One
is a moonster cheese and the other is plot twist

(05:04):
head cheese. Oh oh man twist. You've got to really
be dedicated to voting, especially if you're lactose intolerant. I
don't know, it depends on how hungry you are, but
at any rate, yeah, no, there are there are a
lot of things that you have to kind of sess
out in creating this sort of system. But history has

(05:25):
provided us with really quite a lot of examples to
work from. Yes, yes, So going back democracy itself, if
you're looking at the representational democracy that we have here
in the United States, Uh, there have been some examples
that you could argue from from history. So how how
would we look at voting from a historical perspective. Let's
say that we're going back I don't know, Renaissance time period.

(05:49):
What would be the methodology for voting back then? The
method the methodology for voting in the Renaissance was actually
taken from the methodology for voting in ancient Greece. So
so so this system is is you know a few
thousand years old to give a take here and joined
you joined the thunderbirds, right, and you do musical numbers. Lauren,
please proceed as if he said nothing. Uh. The ancient

(06:15):
Greek system was was was tokens. You you take a
token representing your your choice of electorate. No, that's the
wrong word of of elected official or stuff, and and
you put it in the appropriate box. Um. And and
that is where eventually we got the word ballots from,
because it derives from the Italian bete, which is a

(06:37):
diminutive form of the word ball, so ballot, ball, ballot. Yes,
the word ballot was first used in Venice circa the
fifteen forties, where indeed small balls were used to cast votes.
So you would just place this like you've got your
boxes there, you got maybe Candida Day or candidate B.

(06:57):
And you think, well, Canada Day is a real stand
that person. I'm going to vote for Canada Day and
Canada B. I can go take a long walk off
a short pier. I'm gonna put this ball into Canada
as box. And then presumably you would just count up
all the balls in both boxes, and whoever had the
most winds. Alternately, you might have like a like a
like a light colored token and a dark colored token

(07:18):
given to you, and you can you can put you know,
whichever one you want exactly into a box. So I've
got a question who invented that type of voting that
looks like it's a bunch of bull to me? Where
somebody stands at the front of a room and says,
all who agree, say I, and some people say I
and then other people say nay, and it's like you

(07:39):
didn't actually count you just sound you know, that sounds
like more That was their screaming matic yes of the
of the longstanding scream a matic claim. Yes, uh no, no.
But but voice voting is another form of voting that
goes back quite a long time, especially in American history. Um,
it was part of our history up until the eighteen

(08:00):
sixties at the very least, which kind of is surprising
to me that ballots didn't catch on everywhere earlier than that.
But uh yeah. The voice voting is the practice of
going to your polling location and calling out your name
and your vote to the recording clerk and that's your vote.
That sounds cheaper than buying a bunch of balls and boxes.
It also seems to me that it means that everyone

(08:23):
knows who you voted for. Yeah, that is extremely true,
and it also led to a lot of dishonesty in
terms of of pressure from outside sources. Like if you
if you knew that your boss was going to be
in the polling location and your boss really wanted you
to vote for Canada Day, then there's not a good
way to get around being like, I'm voting for candidate

(08:44):
be like that, it's you know, you're it's shouting. This
is the democracy of shouting. It's the Internet, right, which
which could then mean I mean the reason why we
one of the reasons why we value privacy when it
comes to casting a vote is that it helps you
get around being intimid aided into voting for something you
don't truly believe in. Right, you aren't you aren't feeling

(09:05):
an intense sense of communal pressure to vote a specific
way if your vote is anonymous. But at the same time,
if your vote is anonymous in private, that's where you
start to introduce the question of is it a legitimate
vote or has someone been putting in fake votes? On
behalf sure and it was pretty pretty safe in that

(09:26):
sense because it was you know, in general, if you
have a if you have a person come up and
get sworn in by a judge say hey, this is
my name, I am allowed to vote and I have
not voted yet. Then the judge goes cool, everyone else
in the room goes cool, and then you shout your vote.
Uh that that that's a you know, communal effort at
keeping everybody honest and making sure that no one is

(09:47):
in their voting seventeen times right, But it does still
mean that if you feel like I really want Canada
Day to win, but if I say Canada Day, those
big people in the back of the room are going
to totally roll me as soon as I'll here. Okay,
we've got to address something before we proceed in this episode.
We can't keep saying candidate d A and candidate B.
So from now on we will say kang in kodos. Okay,

(10:09):
kang in kodos, don't blame. Moving on to paper ballots,
the amazing technology that is paper. Uh So, originally ballots
like this, we're just a slip of paper that you
would bring in yourself that you had written out your
your candidate choice onto all right, and so it's just

(10:31):
a little piece of paper, says Kodos yeah or Kang yeah.
I mean if you if you want to support a king. Eventually,
the interested parties, you know, the the National Convention for
for Kang, would would begin handing out little pre completed
tickets um, saying like like, hey, like like you probably

(10:53):
since you're voting for me, you probably want to vote
for all these other people. You definitely don't want to
vote for any of the Owes other people. So uh
and and so so here's Kang and here's all the
Kang approved down ballot names. Yes. And that's where we
came up with the word a ticket, like if you're
voting Democratic ticket or Republican ticket. That that was the

(11:14):
word for the single piece of paper that someone would
hand you and go like just drop it in the box.
It'll be great, we'll have some laughs. Um. And the
system was pretty private, but it did provide a whole
lot of opportunities for for ballot box stuffing so fraud cheating, um,
which led to changes like like the boxes being transparent um,

(11:39):
which made your vote less private again so hull, especially
because now the questioning look in your eye. Maybe what's
that dude with a camera outside of our recording studio
or it? Maybe why why would why would a transparent
box make a paper ballot less private? And the answer
to that is is that a lot of these ticket

(12:00):
that parties were handing out were on these very distinctive
bits of paper, so that a party official standing in
the back of a voting precinct could kind of like
head tally who was voting for their representatives. So so
so when you made the boxes transparent, it made everything
less anonymous and you get back into that that that
that that group of group of goons out there is

(12:21):
going to roll me as soon as I get out
of the polling box. So this this led to the
idea of secret ballots. Secret ballots, Why haven't been We've
been using these all the time. The concept of a
government printing a ballot with all of the running parties
and providing that piece of paper to every voter who
comes in. Uh. It was instituted for the very first

(12:45):
time in Victoria, Australia in eight That's crazy. It's hard
to imagine, right, yeah, yeah, but but you know it
had to do with with like funding and just no
one had thought of it before, I guess, or or
the very least thought of it hard enough to make
it so. Yeah, Hey, guys, I'm really tired of being
beaten up. What if we just made this stuff secret

(13:06):
so that you know, they stopped beating me up and
and and even even from eighty eight, Um, in the
United States, certainly the system was very slow to take hold. Um.
Some localities still allowed voters to bring in whatever a
little bit of paper they wanted through nineteen forty at
the very least, and I'm looking at you, delaware, you're
messing stuff up for all of us. Uh so so

(13:29):
so this this system, of course is very private. That's great. Um.
And it kind of it kind of shifted the way
that people cheat at voting. It shifted it from influencing
the voter or or having uh having voter fraud, to
having counting fraud. Now, if you want to influence an election,
you have to figure out how to influence the counting,

(13:52):
which people proceeded to do. Although well we will get
into that a little bit later. But um, but but
one more, one more technology that I want to talk
about in order to set up how voting works today
is the very first concept of a voting machine. UM,
which were which were lever devices? Um? And and some
of you guys out there may have actually used these

(14:12):
pretty recently. UM. Lever Lever voting machines are these geared
devices that first gained popularity in the eighteen nineties. And
the way that they work is is there will be
a bank of switches with all of the candidates names
in there, and you pull switches over your chosen candidate's name,
and uh then pull a main lever to cast those votes,
which turns all of the chosen gears and then resets

(14:36):
all of the switches. UM. The maker of one famous
brand of this one Jacob H. Myers of the Myers
Automatic Booth. So that said that the machines were designed
to end I quote protect mechanically the voter from rascaldom
and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain,
simple and secret and loud. This is my favorite. I

(15:03):
remember these sorts of machines. Not they haven't been in
use in Georgia for quite some time, but I remember
you were used until ten Since then, since I'm looking
at you now, you know, i'd almost I think I
maybe rather use a machine like this than an electronic
voting machine. We'll get into those in a in a
little bit. But I I see where you're going with

(15:25):
that too. Uh yeah, I remember going into this when um,
I was with a relative who was voting and they
were showing me how the voting process works. And uh,
sadly Cleveland didn't take it. Harrison went back into Uh
he took over the president twenty third presidency. Uh, it was.
It was a good day though. Other than that, it

(15:45):
was really interesting to see how how the voting process works.
Moving on into this this idea, what about what about
more current forms of voting, because, like we just said,
the lever machines, those finally were phased out of the
United States in two we should look at some of
the things that we're using now. Sure, because okay, so

(16:08):
so as as we have been saying here, uh, there's
no one system there. There are many systems that are
in use throughout the United States. It it it depends deeply
on what jurisdiction you're in. Fun fact, did you know
that under the United States Constitution you do not have
an explicit right to vote? Kind of weird you'd think

(16:30):
that that would be up there. Yeah, So it's not
in the Constitution. There's nowhere it says explicitly that you
have a right to vote. Now, it's pretty clear throughout
the Constitution that voting is just sort of an assumed behavior.
It's the subtext right. It assumes elected officials. It prohibits
certain restrictions on the right to vote in the amendments.
The amendments say the right to vote based on race

(16:54):
or or sex will not be infringed, or something like that,
But there's nowhere in there it just says by the a,
you know, adult people in this country can vote. So
that's kind of strange. Some legislators have actually proposed constitutional
amendments to fix this, but it hasn't happened yet. So
still the US Constitution does not say anywhere that you

(17:14):
can vote. I have another fun fact that's a little
bit more actually fun. Ye okay, Yeah, Texas passed a
law that says that astronauts can and should vote electronically
from space if they are in space during an election.
That's it really hard to drop a ball from lower
thorbit into a box that's in Texas. They originally tried

(17:37):
to do voice voting. That wasn't very good either. There
were like mistakes were made, so as as astronauts from
Texas can definitely participate in Texas elections from space, good
job text. I wonder what that's got to be like, right,
Like can you just imagine, like, hey Bill, stop looking

(17:57):
over here, my my right to making a private vote here?
Like it's crazy. I mean, it obviously makes sense, but
it's one of those things where I just didn't occur
to me until until we started doing this episode. So
talking about some of the other ways that here in
the United States people vote, uh, A lot of states

(18:18):
still use paper ballots in some way, shape or form,
particularly the upper Midwestern states and New England. Um. They
paper ballots can take different forms themselves. It's not like
they're all uh, you know, produced by one company and
then shipped off to each state. You've got the optical
scan approach, which is kind of similar to standardized tests

(18:40):
like the S A T. Where you know, you fill
in the circle completely so that a scantron type machine
can tell you the votes later, so that a human
person doesn't have to sit there and go through all
of them, right, although sometimes a human person does, but
that's not the intent. It is to make that automation possibility,
and then their punch cards, which if you were paying

(19:01):
attention to the elections back in two thousand, you heard
a lot about hanging Chad's, especially in Florida. Yep, yep,
you this is where you would you use Usually you
typically use a little punch hole kind of device thing
to push. It depends on it depends on whether you're
in a precinct with a machine where sometimes there will

(19:21):
be like a like a button thing that you use,
or um, if you're doing a mail in thing, which
is what I did in Florida for that election, where
they like send you a paper clip with your mail
in ballot, and they and the instructions are like unfold
this paper clip and punch with it. Yeah, the idea
being that you So wait a minute, Lauren, you voted
in two thousand in Florida. Do you know if your

(19:43):
vote for Kang was counted? You know, to this day,
I'm not sure. It was very confusing the little punch card, Like,
I mean, I consider myself like a relatively uh observant
human person, and I and I definitely was not positive
whether I was voting for Kang or Cronus to be

(20:03):
to be fair. I I consider myself a fairly capable
at at at simulating a human being, and I have
also I have also found numerous voting devices to be
unnecessarily obtuse, like to the point where I'm thinking, like
I understand what first of all, when you read a
sentence and you think, I understand what each individual word

(20:26):
in the sentence means, but when you put them together
and together quite like that? Yeah, oh yeah, Like sometimes
in Georgia will have we'll have state referendums on an
issue and standing there trying to read this and it
has like fourteen negatives in it, the right to not
do X when unprivileged with X, you know, will not

(20:49):
be infringe And you're like, I'm not I just did
a visual gag out of there was a lot of
there were a lot of faces being pulled at that moment.
But so the punch cards, you know, obviously, the way
you vote is that you punch a hole next to
whatever your choice is, right either it's usually a pre
perforated type of of ballots, so that you're actually just

(21:12):
punching out something that's meant to be punched, as opposed
to having to make a hole in that piece of paper. Um.
And of course the idea of that is that again
you could have an automatic tally machine. You could feed
it through and uh the machine would very quickly be
able to determine who you voted for based upon where
the holes are. Yeah. And an interesting story about these.

(21:34):
They came about in the nineteen sixties when a couple
of Berkeley professors adapted IBM s like pre cut punch
cards for computers, and they're they're portable punching machine for
those cards, um, in order to to make and and
cast ballots. And IBM briefly owned the company um uh

(21:54):
the votomatic or the or. Yeah, that's that's the great
terminology of the day, right, that's the sixties ist term
that I've heard all day and I love it. Um
and And actually one of the first tests of this
technology was conducted right here in Fulton and Decab counties
in Georgia. Those are interesting to the three of us
and maybe not to anybody else counties in the metro

(22:16):
Atlanta area if you were not aware, if you're not
from Georgia, there's no reason you would be. But but yeah,
these these uh, the photo of the photomatic and other
similar punch card devices have generally fallen out of fashion,
um in a widespread kind of way because of these
these issues with with jamming and with less than clean punches,

(22:37):
and with the dangling chads chads, Yeah, the chad by
the way, that refers to the little piece of paper
that you've punched out, Yeah, perforated. Yeah, they they And
you could imagine that these problems with UH processing these
punched out pieces of paper, they increase as the age

(22:58):
of the machines that tally increase, things just start to
break down. Also, you can imagine that if there are
more people voting, if you have a greater volume of
votes that you have to process, then you have the
the potential for more problems happening over time. And that's
not that's not great. That's not a great way of

(23:18):
of making sure you have a fair fairly and consistently
and and speedily run election process. Then you've got ballot
marking devices, and these are usually reserved for people who
would have difficulty making marks on paper ballots. UM. It
usually involves something like a touchscreen interface and an audio
output to help voters navigate the ballot. So if you

(23:41):
have like UH problems with your vision. This might be
something that you use so that you can still participate
in the voting process and still have a private, you know,
a secret ballot, as opposed to having to rely on
someone else to put the that in for you, which
would necessarily mean that you have to share your it
with someone else. Kind of goes against the spirit of

(24:03):
the thing. UM and there's votes by mail. A couple
of states UH conduct their their votes by mail UM
Washington State, Oregon, and Colorado. Do you you could imagine
that any state where you have a pretty UH sparse
population or people just tend to live very far apart,
it's very difficult to create polling places that are centrally

(24:26):
located for enough of the population so that they can
actually participate in the process. So that's a that's a
possible solution is doing the votes by mail UH and
paper ballots, like we said, could be tallied manually or
by machines. So in some cases you actually had people
whose job it was was to go through each of
those paper ballots and mark down what the various UH

(24:47):
votes were for. But various types of scanners have have
come out are recently and and lots of different ones
like different states use different companies. It's not again, it's
not like there's an impartial producer of voting machines and
tallying devices and that's where all of it comes from. No,

(25:07):
they're they're companies from across the United States that make
either the voting machine or the telling machine or both,
and different states by different ones, So you don't have
a consistent kind of experience from one state, sometimes not
even between one county and another. You can come across
some very different systems and that can be a little. Uh.

(25:30):
I don't know if daunting is the right word, because
you're not typically going, as an individual, going to encounter
more than one system, because you're going to be in
whatever county you you reside in. But it seems perhaps
counterintuitive if you're trying to have what if you need
to go to the next county to vote again, so
you live in So you live in Illinois, So you've

(25:50):
been dead for fifty years, and you want to vote
as many times in the Chicago elections, you've only got
until dawn because they turned to dust. And then we
have fun with Chicago, but we love you. Uh. This
moves us over into pretty controversial but also extremely common

(26:10):
method of voting. They the last few times I've voted,
I've voted on one of these, the direct recording Electronic
Voting system. Yeah, the d r E s, these are
the the Essentially they're like touch screen computer typically it's
like a touch screen computer interface. Uh. In Georgia, that's
been the case for a while, and in fact, Georgia

(26:31):
is one of the states that happens to have some
of the oldest d r E s currently in use.
I think the ones that were purchased in Georgia were
purchased before two thousand six. D r E s typically
have a ten to fifteen year long lifespan and they
have not been replaced purchased. More more on that in
a minute. A quick historical note though, Uh, patents for

(26:54):
electric ballot machines not electronic quite yet, but but but
electric like like tell Graham or telegram telegraph based machines
started appearing in eighteen fifty, but nobody ever used them
until nineteen. Uh, just just everyone was like electricity, it's

(27:15):
a passing phase. Yeah, it's not as reliable as good
old mechanical work. I can just imagine someone over and
an office just kind of you know, a clerk with
like the little the little visor on his head and
he's he's guys chin in his hand. He's just sitting
there looking at a little light bulb and then suddenly
blinks twice. Another one for for Kang Mark, another one

(27:38):
down for Kan. But but but when we when we
did eventually get electric devices, they were like push button
kind of things, sort of like sort of like a
keyboard or an old phone pad, if anyone ever pushed
a phone button in their life. Yeah, and these these
are meant to record votes electronically, right, Like, that's the

(27:59):
idea is that if you can record your vote electronically,
it's speed of light. I mean, it's really easy to
tell you because you put it through a computer program
that just sorts the votes on its own, and the
user interface is easy, right, And in theory it protects
the person's privacy and like that. There are a lot
of things that on the surface are very easy to

(28:22):
point out as pros uh to be fair, though they're
not all equal. Right. There's some d r E s
that generate a hard copy of every single vote that
is cast, and this is meant so that you can
compare the hard copy against the electronic copy, makes certain
that the machines are accurately recording the votes as they
were cast. Uh. In some cases, we would allow even

(28:45):
the voter him or herself to see immediately after casting
the vote if the paper ballot that is generated reflects
what they actually chose, so they can be certain that
their vote was recorded the way they wanted it to
be recorded. There are other places that have absolutely no
hard copy produced, so the only copy is electronic. I

(29:08):
just get a little card, stick it in the machine.
Vote how I want, take the card out, give the
card to somebody. Yep, And I don't see any It's
not a paper card, it's a little it's plastic. Yeah,
that's how it works. In Georgia, we do not have
a paper copy that gets generated. There's no way to
compare a hard copy against the electronic copy and make

(29:29):
certain that in fact the votes match up. Uh. And
we'll talk more about that in greater detail. But you
could see that that creates some that could create some
some controversy at the very least. Yeah. Uh. And but
like I said, most of the time, the interfaces for
these machines, they typically are touch screens, but you can
also find some that are mechanical buttons like you know,

(29:51):
the screen tells you which button corresponds with which choice
and exactly twigs and k ing Man, I remember that campaign. Uh.
And again since twenty ten, we haven't had any mechanical
lever voting machines, but those were still in use up
to that point. Um. So in the United States, Congress

(30:14):
passed the Help America Vote Act in two thousand two
to make reforms to the voting process. So it wasn't
that long ago. And that act required states to invest
money in updating and upgrading voting equipment for because as
as this equipment ages, than it has more potential for
inserting errors. And when you're talking about voting, obviously the

(30:35):
the stakes are very high, right, you don't want there
to be errors in that sort of thing. Uh. The
Act was actually drafted in a response to problems people
encountered in the two thousand election, and that brings us
to a section about problems with voting and voting technology. Uh.
One of the big ones is accessibility. Making sure that

(30:56):
the system you have designed is accessible by the population
at large, and that you're not excluding anyone through the
design of your voting system. Yeah, because imagine everyone has
a legal right to vote. But say there's only one
building in the entire United States of America where you

(31:17):
can vote, and it closes at six pm on voting day,
and it's up five flights of stairs. Yeah, the voting
places up five ft no elevator. Yeah, So anyone with
mobility issues, anyone who can't get to that building. You know,
there are a lot of different dolleks. You can you
can have somebody granted explicitly the right to vote. Yeah,

(31:39):
the conditions make it such that they really can't. Yeah. Yeah.
And and this is sadly a thing that is that
is contested in several places in the country. Absolutely. One
of one of the one of the other elements of
that act I was talking about, had a section in
it about how states had to come up with a

(31:59):
voter i A D system so that they could prevent
fraud from happening. In other words, you can't just have
someone show up and claim that they are eligible to
vote in that jurisdiction and then cast a vote and
then leave. There has to be some way of of saying, yes,
this person does have the right to vote in this jurisdiction.
According to that act. But what if they are eligible

(32:21):
to vote and they don't have the appropriate I D. Yeah,
that's a and that that is a continuing issue here
in the United States and multiple jurisdictions, A very a
very challenging problem because there are two very important aspects
at play here. The idea of let's make certain that
we don't create a system that allows folks to gain

(32:45):
that system, and also, let's make sure we create a
system that allows the people who are eligible to participate
in it to actually participate in it, that the people
who are eligible to actually vote. Yeah, and not than that, right,
it's and no one who is intelligible, right, this is right,
no one who's dead or yeah, exactly. Uh. And we

(33:08):
could get into voter eligibility stuff too, but that would
just be an enormous can of worms, because there are
different states that have different definitions of that. Like if
you have committed a felony or been convicted of a felony,
don't even have to have committed a felony, you just
have to be convicted of one. That that could be uh,
that could strike you from ever being able to vote
again in certain states, not in all of them, but

(33:30):
in some of them, So that's another issue entirely. Then
there's problems with tallying votes. This gets back to that
hanging chat issue. So that was when in Florida these
ballots that had the punchhole variety. That wasn't the only kind.
They're also the butterfly ballots that also that had issues.
They were related to the punch hoole ones where it
wasn't clear which indicator areas were related to which names. Yeah,

(33:54):
that was a real issue with the punch hole ones.
Sometimes the paper wouldn't completely tear from the ballot when
you get that hanging chat, it's still something, it's still
partially attached to the ballot itself, and that could end
up creating errors when the when the votes were being
tallied by machine. So there was a very close race

(34:15):
in the United States in two thousand, I mean it
was it was really coming down to Florida, and so
everyone was really paying close attention. And while many were
calling for a careful recount of the votes to make
certain that the votes that were cast accurately reflected the
results that were being posted, the Supreme Court ruled that

(34:35):
George W. Bush had won the election over al gore,
and that caused its own controversy that lasted for quite
some time. Uh So in the wake of that, that's
when that act was drafted, saying we want to make
sure that you know, we're not saying that something wrong
definitely happened in two thousand, but we want to make
sure that that possibility doesn't arise again. Yeah. Well, I mean,

(34:57):
even if you're the person who won, it's not fun
to be uh entering public office with suspicion hanging over
you that you're not actually the people's choice, right, and
to say nothing of the person who didn't win and
are wondering if maybe they should have. Right. Yeah, it's
it is not healthy for the country as a whole.

(35:17):
So then we get to d r s without a
paper trail like here in Georgia, the type that we
have here in Georgia. The concern here is that there's
since there's no physical piece of evidence of a vote
and it's all just a file, this could easily be
misrepresenting the actual votes of the populace, which we can't
check because we don't have anything to check it against.

(35:38):
Right if we even if we had a paper trail,
the let's say that's Uh, that's sending out a hard
copy printed version. Unless the voter him or herself is
able to look at that paper trail and say, yes,
this does accurately reflect what I chose. Uh, then the
paper trail is kind of meaningless, right, because the paper

(35:58):
trail could say the exact same thing that the electronic
results say. Unless you relate it back to the individual voters,
there's no way of saying that it is verified or
fraudulent because if if I sit there and like, no, no, no,
the twenty tho pages of votes I have here exactly
match up against the electronic file, but it turns out

(36:21):
that if you pull those people and they all voted
something else, then you're like, well shucks. You know, there's
nothing that links it to the actual intent of the voter.
And it's really challenging to change that without bringing that
privacy concern back up and saying, well, unless we're specifically

(36:42):
linking very specific votes to a very specific people, how
do we verify this? And if we do that, then
we remove the privacy from the vote. It's no longer
a secret ballot, and that's very important in this process. So, uh,
that's been pretty ugly um. And also it's very easy
to lose electronic votes. It's a file. It's not hard

(37:04):
to completely disenfranchise an entire population from from any sort
of voting process by quote unquote losing on purpose an
electronic file. Not that that necessarily even even by accident.
I didn't mean to you don't want votes to be lost, right, Yeah,
it's just that it's one of those things that it

(37:25):
lends itself to conversations where you start to make cynical
assumptions that the parties that are perhaps administering a vote
have invested interest in the outcome of that vote, and
therefore they are working toward that purpose. That's not necessarily
the case, but this sort of stuff lens ammunition to

(37:47):
that kind of argument, right, Like you're like, well, if
they can do it, then they must be doing it,
and that's the problem. Uh. There's also the question of security.
How do you make sure that the votes are actually
coming uh from legitimate SSEs and meanwhile protecting that privacy. Um,
all of the systems that are in place according to

(38:08):
that act I was mentioning earlier, are supposed to be auditable.
But how do you make a system auditable that is
also protecting the identity of the voters. How can you
audit an electronic system and say yes, in fact, I
know that this is working because Miss Johnson over there
voted for Kang, and it's sure comes up as Kang

(38:28):
over here, and and Mr Johnson voted for Kodos, and
Nick came up as Codas, and that dinner is going
to be interesting. But I know for a fact the
system is working. That that's It's really hard to do.
But at the same time, you gotta say, well, an
auditable system is important because you don't want there to
be some sort of bias inherent in the machinery itself.

(38:50):
So you start to see where these challenges are coming in.
One potential solution to this, or one that people have proposed,
is called the voter Verified Paper Trail, which sounds like
Oregon Trail to me. It's like we're going on an
adventure and we're probably gonna get dysenterry, Like, yeah, Kang
broke your leg and bought three barrels of salt pork. Yeah,

(39:13):
I kind of want to play Oregon Trail now. But
the very the voter Verified Paper Trail talks about producing
a paper ballot that reflects the electronic choices of the voter,
and then ideally the voter would be able to compare
the paper ballot to the output of the electronic screen
and make certain that, in fact it does say exactly

(39:33):
what they intended it to say. But of course, if
you were particularly sneaky, you could have the printed ballot
reflect what the displayed results are on the screen, but
have the recorded but vote be something totally different. So
like vote number fifty on the screen, it says this.
On the paper ballot it says the same thing. That's

(39:54):
exactly what I wanted, Press submit, But when it goes
to be saved, all the lets get switched. That's entirely possible.
So it's not a perfect system either, right, And because
the electronic approach has the capacity of affecting a very
large number of votes with a relatively small amount of effort,

(40:17):
that has got a lot of people worried about it. Right, Like,
if you wanted to affect paper votes, that takes a
lot of effort, especially if assuming that the people running
the election are on the up and up. It's hard
to do. You need help, Yeah, if you are capable
of of executing an attack upon a vulnerability and an

(40:37):
electronic voting system, then you could affect thousands or maybe
millions of votes from one single source. And that, I
think is where a lot of people are saying, Okay,
we really have to read evaluate the approach we're taking.
And then there's that that question of of including a
bias in a system, which is not just uh academic

(41:01):
discussion in many ways, because this question was very seriously
raised in the not too distant past because of the
political um involvement of a CEO who was the head
of a company that made voting machines. UH specifically talking
about the the then CEO of Diebald Incorporated. Back in

(41:24):
two thousand three. Die Bald was one of the big
companies producing voting machines they had. Their business was mainly
a t M S, but they also did voting machines.
And the same ceo wrote fundraising letters on behalf of
the Republican Party and included the sentence quote, I am
committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the

(41:46):
president next year. End quote. Now I suppose that could
be interpreted in an innocuous way, sure, just saying like
I want to help with the system yeah, I am
going to advocate for this person and we're gonna get
them into off that. That's one way of looking at
Another way of looking at it, saying I'm the head
of a company that creates voting machines and I could

(42:08):
totally make this happen, So at least for people reading
that on the outside, introduced suspicion, right. It raised ethical questions.
It was obviously a conflict of interest for someone who
is the head of a company that is producing machines
that are supposed to be unbiased and not give any
weight toward one choice or another, so that you have

(42:31):
a a an approach that any voter can come into
absolutely with a clean slate and just be confident that
their vote will be reflected. And then they're also advocating
for a specific party. That is problematic, and it has
raised some pretty tough questions. Now. Of course, one solution
that people have discussed to this is that if you know,
if you have machines that have software governing the process

(42:55):
behind counting votes, that software should be open source. People
should be able to see what the code is doing.
But of course companies who make those machines probably don't
want that no, they take a very proprietary approach. And
again it's different systems across the United States, so you have, uh,
you don't have a consistent approach. And according to professors

(43:17):
with john hop Johns Hopkins University and Rice University, who
did a study on various d r E machines, they
said that out of all the d r E machines
they looked at, none of them used cryptography correctly and
many of them didn't use it at all. So that
you have these unencrypted results there that could be altered,

(43:39):
they could be it could be stolen, so that someone
is getting specific information about specific voters. It's it was
a big mess. Um. So we obviously see that there
are some real areas for improvement. Uh, there's some opportunities here.
If we were giving if we were giving voting, the

(43:59):
voting process a review a performance review. Right now, it's
saying we've we've identified some areas, some opportunity areas for us,
feel like you're not living up to your full potential
and we want to try and fix you. Man, how
many of my performance reviews have gone with that specific route.
We want to fix you, get you fixed. Yeah, So

(44:22):
one of the big issues facing the United States. Uh,
is this aging voting equipment story? Like I said, Georgia's
got some of the most ancient of the the d
r E systems that are out there. And by the way,
as when The Atlantic ran a piece about aging electronic
voting systems, had no contention of replacing them, or at

(44:43):
least no plan to do so. Uh. And according to
the piece in The Atlantic from it said, the problem
of aging voting technology reaches nearly every corner of the
United States. Unlike voting machines used in past eras, today's
systems were not designed to asked for decades. And this
is an issue we see just by going in that
high tech route. I mean, if you've bought a computer,

(45:06):
you know that after a few years that computer just
doesn't seem to work so well anymore. Well and for
them where you're you're gonna especially like I read that,
I read that a lot of the systems that are
in place there are from the nineteen nineties even And uh.
And when you're using equipment that old, you start getting
into the issues that you would get into with with
any kind of proprietary legacy systems. You know, the vendors

(45:28):
eventually stop using that operating system and aren't going to
be able to help you, uh fix or update anything
that goes wiggy. So when you do have a situation
where let's say a machine goes down in a busy
polling place, you may not have any way of addressing
that in a in a way that the matters to

(45:51):
any of the voters who are in line, and so
that process slows down more and more. This in turn,
can create a hardship on the people who want to vote.
It can it can It can disincentivize I guess that's
a terrible that's not even a real word, but it
can use. It disincentivize when I'm when I'm living in

(46:12):
suburbian areas as my other terrible flood I've done in
the past, that i will never live down, and so
I've just adopted it. It will make it will make
people less likely to go out and vote, because if
they go out there and they see that there's a
line that stretches around the block and hasn't moved significantly
for the last twenty minutes, then that creates this this

(46:33):
barrier to voting, And it is the opposite of that
accessibility we had been talking about. Sure, so okay, so
we want to replace these systems, but what kind of
technology would it be best to implement. Should we take
some off the shelf stuff that would be cheaper and
easier to set up and also easier to hack. Yeah,
let's just like put some MacBooks on the you know, oh,

(46:58):
here's my voting app. Right, And it's easy for us
also to to say, hey, you guys should replace those systems.
But that costs money. And then you get into the
argument of who pays for this? And this is I
bet you know I have a guest who pays for it?
Somebody else? Well, ultimately it's the taxpayers who pay for it, right,

(47:19):
ultimatelysdiction Right. The question is is it is it coming
from county budgets or state budgets those tend to in
the United States, that tends to be a pretty hotly
contested uh kind of argument about whether should it be
the local region that has to pay for those upgrades
or should it be a state budgetary concern and uh some.

(47:42):
In fact, the Atlantic report says that like some of
the problems here is that it seems like the various
parties are essentially waiting until something catastrophic happens in the
federal government steps in and says, all right, now we're
gonna have to pay for these upgrades. But that's not
a great stress to g right. Let's well, I'd like
to build up the levy a little more, but I

(48:05):
don't have the money for it. So we're just gonna
wait for a massive storm to come in wipe out
the levy. Lots of people are going to be harmed,
perhaps killed in the process, but afterward we'll have the
money to build up that levy again. Or we're going
to change public opinion with a John Bonham drum solo
also a possibility. So one of the other options we

(48:27):
have heard about in the past is the idea of
allowing people to vote over the internet. Genius there it is.
That's the I mean, I would love to be able
to vote online. I don't know if I'd feel very
good about it, but that would be great because the
last time I went to the polls, I went there
and I you know, I got there and they were like, oh,

(48:48):
you're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be
at this other place back where your old address was.
And I was like, why aren't stirred here. I just
want I just want an approach like American Idol, were
two different phone numbers pop up and I just have
to call one of them. M M, That's what I want.
So the Internet, like you're you know, the idea of
having something really convenient and instantaneous and having this ability

(49:12):
to to see in real time what election results are going,
like who's in the lead and who's behind. That has
a certain uh, you know, charm to it, as certain
attractiveness to it. You could argue that this would open
up access to even more voters. It lowers that barrier
of participation even further for people who have access to
a computer. Anyway, that's still not that's non trivial, by

(49:35):
the way, like you know, that's that's still that's still
a huge assumption. But I mean, there are a lot
of people who probably are you know, they worry about
how can I get away from work? Right? You know,
they've got stuff to do there for I mean, technically
your boss is supposed to let you go vote, but
a lot but in practice that's not necessarily going to
be how it turns out like And it's not like

(49:56):
most of us are equipped to say, oh, well, I
was going to vote and then my boss said that
I had to come in and so now I'm going
to have a civil lawsuit that most of us can't do.
That it's not something that we it's not it's not
a realistic approach. So yeah, so that could make it
easier in those cases. You can just go to work

(50:17):
still and then if you get you get a ten
minute break, go vote on your break. Yeah. In fact,
that this might end up increasing voter participation, which is
something of a weird topic here in the United States too.
You may have heard that in the US that voter
participation is particularly low. The Pew Research Center found that
voting participation in the US was that um only seventy

(50:42):
one percent of the United States citizens who are eligible
to vote were even registered. It's been decreasing for fifty
years running. I actually saw some figures earlier today that
if true. They say that more than half of eligible
eighteen to twenty four year olds are unregistered. Yeah, so
that's so young people especially don't even get registered. That's

(51:03):
even that's just registering, not that's so that you can vote. Right. Uh. Yeah,
so we're we're seeing that the participation on that side
is pretty low. But to be fair, to be perfectly fair,
some countries that have incredibly high percentages, it's compulsory, like
you have no choice in it um and and some
some of them you have no choice but to vote

(51:25):
as well, like you are you are compelled to vote.
So it all depends upon the systems you look at.
It's not we can't just assume that all of them
are equivalent to the approach the United States takes. Um.
It would be a very different story if in the
US you not only had to register to vote, but
you had to vote in every election, and then you
see the numbers go up if you had like real

(51:47):
consequences that could happen to you if you did not participate.
So yeah, that's important to keep in mind too. Uh
So there's some people say, yes, we should have internet voting.
It would it would mean that more people would partic
sipate in the system, that the whomever is voted or
whatever measures are past would accurately reflect the majority the

(52:09):
desire of the largest number of people within the population
who are eligible to vote, and that that would be
more fair. So it would be super fast, to be
super easy to tell you those votes why not go
that way? Well, one would be you remember those old
rock the Vote things the future that could be replaced

(52:29):
with hack the Vote. You're killing me that you're calling
it the old rock the Vote things that was a
voting age when those were up. Come on hack the
Vote that that is what you you'd have people like
organizing conferences for fun just to try to do things. Absolutely. Yeah,
communication over the internet is is pretty much insecure. That's

(52:50):
like excluding the people who would have organized nefarious campaigns
trying to sway the election. Right there's there's already been
a published paper that contains a no own hack for
attacking home WiFi routers in order to tamper with PDF
ballots on the way from a voter back to the precinct. Yeah,
so that is a thing that exists on the Internet
right now, and that's that's that's before you actually see

(53:12):
a rollout to a larger population. Like even if you're
just doing a little pilot program where you're testing it out, uh,
you you would have hackers target that. A general rule
of thumb is the the shinier the target, the more
hackers are going to want to attack it. And nothing
really gets shinier than the elections of a nation um,

(53:34):
and you could see all sorts of ways to disrupt
an election, from something as simple as a di DOS attack,
that the distributed denial of service attacks, so that that
the actual servers that are accepting votes and allowing you
to vote are down, thus you cannot even participate. There's
that approach to perhaps infecting computers and having them vote

(53:57):
via a bot net to sway results or to deny
people their actual chance to vote. There are a lot
of ways that they could block a vote so that
it looks like you've cast your vote but nothing has
actually happened, or they could make changes to results. I mean,
there's so many different avenues to attack that making sure

(54:19):
all of them are secure would be a massive undertaking,
one that some security experts say is, for for all
reality's sake, impossible, Like it's just not it's not within
our capability of producing that. Uh. Obviously, if you were
to create that system, it would have a huge target

(54:40):
where hackers would have this enormous incentive to try and
find vulnerabilities, and it's highly unlikely we will ever produce
a system with no vulnerabilities, So it would be a
very high stakes game. Ah, so you also have problems
with transparency. How could you be sure that such a
system and internet voting syce him is accurately reflecting what

(55:01):
is really happening on the voter side of this right
right back to the back to the it's digital. How
do we tell exactly? Yeah, unless you're unless you're able
as a voter to say, I have cast a vote,
I see that the vote recorded is in fact reflective
of my choice, and I can see that it has

(55:22):
been included in the overall votes, and I can see
that in the final results, my vote is among them.
Unless you have that assurance somehow, this is a very
difficult approach. Now. Granted, you could argue you don't have
that assurance with other methods of voting either, But you
could build that into an electronic system if it weren't

(55:45):
for the fact that you still have the security issues
that don't magically go away. Right. Um, So, yeah, this
is something that a lot of people have pushed for,
a lot of countries have pushed for at least experimenting
with internet voting. But almost every computer security authority I
could find said this is not a practical idea. It

(56:10):
is at best misguided and at worst it would be catastrophic.
So uh, yikes, Um, what about other ways? What if?
Well if what let's go back to my smartphone. So
let's say all right, so let's say the calling the
American idle number doesn't work. What about something else? Well? Yeah,
other other methods have been proposed for for coming a

(56:32):
little bit halfway towards towards getting getting more accessibility for
people to vote, making it a little bit easier, like
a like a system where people could could download an
app on their phone precomplete a ballot, um maybe even
scan in QR codes from campaign posters if they so chose, um,
and then when you go to the polls, you just
upload it or even video conference yourself in to a

(56:53):
polling official and you know, for for like military personnel
overseas or sure and uh and and so that up
and could make it easier for for not just people
who are are incapable for whatever reason that day of
getting out to the polls, but but also for for
voters with disabilities with with audio or visual disabilities, who
who need a better way to to access that information. Yeah.

(57:16):
But of course, if you're main concern is increasing voter
turnout or at least accessibility. I think there are arguments
that there are other ways to increase voter turnout and
accessibility that wouldn't compromise security in the same ways, and
maybe it would be better to try those first. So,
for example, we might have mentioned this earlier, I think,

(57:37):
But one is making voting day of federal holiday. This
is a pretty standard proposal. Um, you know it's not
so we hold federal elections on Tuesdays in November. Why
do we do that? As we have for a minute, Yeah,
so we do that, and I love most people as
we always did it that way. That's not a reason

(57:58):
most people have to go to work. Work your boss.
Your boss is supposed to say it's okay for you
to leave work to vote. But you know, bosses are
supposed to do a lot of things. It doesn't always
work that way in the real world, right. Um, So
if you simply made the day on which the elections
occur a federal holiday in which nobody is supposed to

(58:20):
be going to work, then then that that should increase
voter turnout. It should make it easier. And this has
been advocated by a lot of people, among them Bernie
Sanders you know, Vermont senator and recent US presidential candidate,
but also universal automatic voter registration. This is a big
one because one obstacle to voting is the registration block.

(58:43):
So you can't just show up at the polls and say, hey,
I'm over eighteen and I'm not a felon time to vote. Yeah,
here's my ide, but yeah, you have to be registered,
and you have to be registered a certain period of
time before the elections. Yeah. And so an easy way
around this would be to say, well, why don't we
just have some some system that automatically registers everybody who's
eligible to vote. I don't understand why why don't we

(59:06):
do that? And that actually is not only proposed, it's
approved in five U s States as of last month.
So according to the Brennan Center at the n y
U School of Law, quote, eligible citizens who interact with
government agencies are registered to vote unless they decline, and
agencies transfer voter registration information electronically to election officials. So

(59:29):
this means you interact with any agency of state government
or federal government. I guess you, uh, you go to
the d m V or you do whatever. You know,
you interact with the government Uh, they know who you are,
and they say, Okay, by the way, I see that
you're over eighteen, and you're not a felon. You're registered
to vote unless you unless you say I don't want
to be right. That seems like an to me. That

(59:53):
seems like a fair way of going about it, especially
to remove that that barrier of entry where people who
are either unaware of the process of registering to vote,
or it's not built into a way that's easy for
them to get to or do or whatever, that the
barrier is just too high for them to go past

(01:00:15):
it for whatever personal reason there may be. To remove
that or as much of that as possible, I think
is that's that's a decent thing to do, doesn't It
doesn't even mean that that person has to vote. It
just means that they're registered. Right. Well, you know, sometimes
I think I hear people making an argument like, oh,
you know, how how easy does it have to be?
It's not that hard to get registered to vote, but
shouldn't be too easy. I mean, think think about your life.

(01:00:38):
You you people have a lot of things going on. Yeah,
they have a lot of things to do. They might
care a lot about politics, but they're also working very hard.
They're taking their kids, you know. Well, and let's let's
let's take I'll take myself as an example, because I
I come from an extremely privileged kind of background in
that regard, and yet even I would have a certain barrier.

(01:01:00):
Uh you know, I don't I don't drive, for instance, right,
so I don't get a driver's license. I do have
an I D because I need one for lots of
different reasons. So going to get an I D though,
that's a that's a pretty that's that's a lot of
work for me to get there. I mean that's before
I even get into the point where you enter the

(01:01:20):
d m V and you have, you know, the the
whole U Labrinthian line system that you have to go through,
and the waiting times and everything before you even get
to that. It's hard for me to get to the
place where I'm going to get my I D H
if it if it weren't for the fact that voter
registration is just immediately lumped into that too, like I
can just register to vote as I get my I D.

(01:01:41):
If I had to do something similar to that, I
could see it being one of those things where I've
got to really, I've got to really be like dude,
I it's my responsibility as a citizen to participate in this.
I've got to push myself. But it would be pushing myself,
it would not It would not be just so simple. Uh,
same thing for participating in the voting process. In my case,

(01:02:01):
very very fortunate in this sense, the polling place that
I have to report to happens to be the walking
route on the walking route to work. If it weren't,
imagine a work day where I have to walk the
opposite direction, I'm already walking three miles to get to work. Um,

(01:02:22):
it would be uh more of a hardship. And I
realize I am lucky in that sense. There are thousands
of people out there who the situation I am in
would seem like a dream to them. Yeah, at the
very least you could call an uber or whatever if
he really needed to. Not Not everyone is is in
that is an that position, right. So again, like you know,

(01:02:46):
making the argument of well, how difficult can it be
often comes from such a position of well, yeah, in
your situation, it may not be that big of a barrier.
But not everyone is in your situation. But everyone who
is eligible to vote should still be capable of going
through that process. And I guess we should say, you know,

(01:03:08):
for all the things we've just been talking about, they
do simply assume that increasing voter turnout is a goal
we want to achieve. Now, personally, I'm fairly convinced that's
a good thing, But I guess somebody can make the
argument that as long as everyone has the opportunity to vote,
we shouldn't bother enacting measures to try to pump up
the turnout. You know, maybe some people just don't care.

(01:03:29):
You know, maybe I think it's kind of a weak
argument against making it easier to vote, because many people
may feel they want to vote, but they're unable to
because of other pressures on their time or something like that.
But as for people who genuinely don't care, I guess
that you genuinely don't care, I don't see a good
reason to try to pressure you to vote, right, I
think the registering thing makes sense. I think compulsory voting

(01:03:52):
doesn't make sense personally, personally compulsory not so much compulsory,
but automatic registration. I'm in favor of compulsory voting, not
so much. If you don't care, you should at least
not if you haven't formed an educated opinion and don't
bothered to read anything. You know, are we really that

(01:04:13):
eager to get you involved? I'm not. I'm not so
worried about so much worried about that. But I'm you know,
someone who someone who for whatever reason doesn't feel like
they want to participate in that particular uh voting process.
I totally get it, and they should not be forced
to do so. Well, that's another thing for somebody, whether
or not you agree with the wisdom of this. For

(01:04:34):
some people also, they regard not voting as a legitimate
form of protests. So absolutely, yeah, as you were saying,
like the people who argue against making voting easier, and
I was reminded of the The Bit and Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy of where the city plans for Arthur
Dense's house was being demolished, like it was in a

(01:04:56):
basement in a disused lavatory that had a sign on
it saying beware of the leopard. Right, like to some
people the process they have to go through to either
register or to vote is while not that exact thing,
at least you could empathize with that passage right, and
we don't. I think that's the bad way to go personally.

(01:05:18):
That's my personal opinion. Um, this was a really interesting
topic and like we said, you know, this just covered
the voting aspect, uh and what is the future of voting.
I imagine we're going to see some other uh probably
other groups dip their toe into the idea of internet voting.
I hope to a level that is done responsibly and

(01:05:42):
with the guidance from real computer security personnel. I don't
expect that to become widely adopted because of the vulnerabilities
we've already mentioned. You know, if we do, I suspect
there will be extreme prank voting hacks that will, like
for example, Kang and photos will actually win elections. It
would it would be really odd. It would mean it

(01:06:05):
would mean that it would mean an unprecedented approach, right
like the point where a government would have to say
the results of this election are not valid because that's
a cartoon character. We got to totally do a do over. Guys.
It's like, think about any time you've ever seen a
corporate identity or brand try to do a voting campaign

(01:06:25):
on social media or something. Every single time, what happens,
it gets hijacked by people trying to make fun of it. Yeah,
as soon as you I mean, we've talked about this
before to right, Like, as soon as you create a system,
people want to see how far you can push the
system before it breaks. And when you're talking about something
this big and this this important, that has lots of

(01:06:46):
different implications, not just on the voting side, but the
privacy side, the security side. If you let me generate
my own Coca Cola ads, I'm going to try to
find a way to make one about demons. It's I mean,
that's just who Joe is. Alright, guys. Well, that wraps
up this discussion about voting. Uh. I am curious to
see how this continues for I mean, obviously because it
has such a huge impact on millions of people and

(01:07:08):
and uh, not just obviously in the United States but
around the world. Uh. If you guys have suggestions for
future episodes of Forward Thinking, you get an idea for
a topic that you would like us to cover, please
send us an email or message on Facebook or Twitter.
Our email addresses FW Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com.
Our Twitter Twitter handle is f W Thinking, or you

(01:07:30):
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(01:08:00):
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