June 15, 2020 • 50 mins
In the conclusion of this two-part series about electronic voting machines, Ben Bowlin joins the show to talk about all the challenges that come along with trying to modernize the democratic process.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. And if you
listened to last Wednesday's episode, you heard a classic episode
of tech Stuff about electronic voting machines. The episode published
(00:27):
back in October twenty six and Mr Ben Bolan of
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History
Fame joined me for that discussion. We are going to
continue that discussion today. This is part two of that episode,
and we are going to continue to dive down the
(00:47):
tricky and potentially disastrous pathway to creating voting systems. The
idea that if you create a voting system that is
perceived to be unfair, then you're really undermining the entire
foundation of democracy. And I know that sounds like I'm exaggerating,
(01:10):
but I'm not because if we lose faith in the system,
if we do not believe the system works, then it
becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course, we have to
make sure that the system does work. If the system
is not working, then we absolutely have to fix it.
So it is a very tricky subject, Ben and I
will go into much more detail that I hope you
(01:30):
guys are doing well. I know this is still a
very trying and challenging time for so many reasons. I
want you guys to know I believe in you. I
think that you guys are awesome. Uh you all have
proven that over and over. So let's sit back and
listen to this classic episode about the scary world of
e v M S Part two. At the close of
(01:53):
our conversation, we has our votes and we decided democratically
that this would be better as a two part series
than a single epic length episode that would have stretched
the patience of the most uh most forgiving of listeners.
Now we have broken it up into two parts, so
(02:14):
what you are about to hear is the conclusion of
that two parts. Also, I should add that when we
get to the end and we sign off, we did
not know at that point that it was going to
be a two parter, so we actually have already recorded
the end of the episode that I'm recording the beginning
of now. And yes, time travel does confuse me. So
let's just segue in to part two of how electronic
(02:37):
voting machines are going to ruin everything. Remember we mentioned
that in two thousand two, that's when they started to
appear on the scene. That's when Georgia. Actually they started
to appear before two thousand two, but two thousand two
is when Georgia became the first state to have just
the electronic voting machines out there in the polling places. Um,
many of those machines have not been updated since, and
(03:00):
almost all of them are running on a version of
Windows XP which hasn't been updated since April two thou fourteen.
So that means any security vulnerability that has been discovered
since two thousand and fourteen is still there. Chances are
some of the ones before two thousand fourteen are still
there because I bet a lot of those machines have
never received a patch, right, They're just these big there,
(03:23):
these machines that are being overseen by the government, and uh,
you know it, Chances are a lot of them are unpatched.
So there's a lot of potential for people to tamper.
And not only that, you know, I mentioned the idea
of either unconsciously or purposefully inserting a bias. That's a
real concern too, right, because private companies are the ones
(03:45):
designing these machines. They do so with using proprietary software
that is not visible to the general public, nor is
it uh what's what's word, nor is it in any
way compelled to answer to the general public, Like the
public doesn't have a the quote unquote Capital p public
(04:08):
doesn't have a vote regarding which companies run these machines.
You look at this and you see that everyone says, well,
we can't reveal our code because if we did, uh,
then our competitors would see how we do things, and
then we can't compete in the marketplace anymore. And so
meanwhile you've got security experts saying this should all be
(04:31):
open source. And the reason it should be open source
is so that the community at large would have the
opportunity to look at the code and see if there
are any vulnerabilities and if so, make sure that those
get patched before you get to a point where the
code is being put into play in an actual election,
so that those vulnerabilities can't be exploited. Because if something
(04:53):
is proprietary and someone figures out an exploit to that software,
then it's all behind closed doors. There's no way to
address it, and you end up with a huge problem.
But but beyond that, you have companies that could insert
a bias into the programming itself. And this kind of
stems from an interesting story that happened in the early
two thousand's. So two thousand three, Walden Wally O'Dell and
(05:19):
I'm not making up the nickname Wally, that is what
he would go by. Wally O'Dell was at that time
the CEO and chairman of die Bald. Now Diebald's best
known for making a t M S but dial, Yeah, well,
they also for a while made electronic voting machines. There
(05:39):
was a subsidiary called Diebold Election Systems, which the company
has since divested itself of that particular property. But Diebold
Election Systems made a lot of electronic voting machines. And
die Bald, by the way, is headquartered in Ohio, a
very important state in national elections here in the United States.
(06:00):
Swing states, that's what we call it, yep swing some
meeting swing states for you know, there's probably I've got
some listeners who are outside the US. You may have
heard the term swing state, and you don't know what
that means. So the way elections work in the US.
You know, you've got your major two party system, and
ninety five percent of the time that's the those are
the only parties that really make an impact. So you've
(06:22):
got your Republicans and your Democrats, and you've got a
lot of states that that lean toward one or the other,
and it is almost unheard of for them to support
a candidate of the opposite party, sure like uh for
one example of this would be UH state like Utah
would be legendarily not voting Democratic, and a state like
(06:45):
Vermont would be legendarily not voting Republicans. Right, So it
would be an incredibly strange set of circumstances to see
one of these states support a candidate of the opposite
party that it tends to support. So for the most part,
we just assume those electors in the electoral college will
support the traditional candidates that those states would support. But
(07:08):
there's some states that could go either way. They could
swing towards the Republican side one election and swing towards
the Democratic side and another Florida, Pennsylvaniaia. So the the
electors in these states, UH, it may be that they
are the ones that are chosen are the ones for
Republican uh in one one election our Democrat and another election.
(07:33):
So Ohio is one of those states, which means it's
incredibly valuable. Right. It means it's a battleground state. You
want to win that state because you know you've got
your your foundation, that's almost guaranteed. Nothing's ever a guarantee,
but it's almost a guarantee. And uh so you need
to really concentrate on the states where you have the
(07:53):
potential to flip it. So that's on your side and
not your opponents side. Well, Ohio is one of those states.
Eyebold has its headquarters in Ohio, and Wally, the CEO
of Diebold at that time, wrote a letter where he
was uh committing himself to quote helping Ohio deliver its
(08:15):
electoral votes to the president end quote, president being George W.
Bush at that time. So the CEO of a company
that makes voting machine saying he's committed to delivering Ohio's
electoral votes to the president. Now, the company was quick
to say, hey, he's not talking about using our products
(08:37):
to push the elections a personal fundraiser dotor, right, he's
talking about campaigning and but a lot of people said, hey,
isn't there a conflict of interests if you've got the
head of a company making the voting technology that people
depend upon also openly supporting a specific candidate in the race.
It's very It's very close to a member of the
(09:02):
Supreme Court saying like, I will do anything I can
to get you elected, George, and then and then saying, oh,
fiddle D D. We don't have time to recount the
votes from Florida, and we look, there's some things that
are more important than making absolutely certain that the people's
vote was reflected in the actual election. Like reasons. I
(09:26):
just like saying fiddle D D. But I don't think
the Supremes say that. But you're you're raised the supremest
they sing, I referred to them as the Supremes. I
like that. John robertson the Supremes. So many wonderful visions
going through my head right now. Oh man, you should
have seen the comedy show we did with that with
that sketch. Well, but anyway that at that point inside
(09:50):
like what you're saying is really important here because let's
assume if we were to take Wally at his word,
then even is that a PR firm would say, the
optics look bad. So when you when you make those
sorts of statements, you have to be very conscious, conscious
(10:11):
of what is going to happen. This is uh, this
is an environment wherein uh, let's see what year was this,
two thousand three, right, two thousand three was when you
wrote the letter. Thousand four was the election. So people
are already very sore off of the two thousand election,
and we have seen an accelerating distrust in the American
(10:31):
political system or sometime you know, and this this thing
is just making it, exacerbating it. And I think in
one of the Wired pieces I read it might have
even been the one you just referenced. Uh. The the
author of the piece made a really great point, which
was that you don't need any case of tampering or bias.
(10:54):
It doesn't have to exist, but the possibility of it
of it existing is an off to cause turmoil. Right,
you can cause real world turmoil just from the possibility
of this being a thing without any evidence of it
actually happening. So you don't need to have evidence of
someone purposefully trying to rig the system in order for
(11:16):
people to not trust the system. As long as it's
clear that it's a possibility. That's enough to have people
say like, well, how can I trust anything? How can
I trust the results? Because you know you're telling me
there's no evidence, But how do I know there's no evidence?
I know it's possible. Twice you can't get fooled aget. Yeah, thanks,
(11:36):
it's a it's a great quote that I'm not gonna
make any fun of. All Right, So then we've got
the fear of hackers. We've got the fear of bias
from the standpoint of the manufacturers of the voting machines themselves,
and then we get the fear of hackers third parties
that want to rig the results or prevent people from voting.
Completely possible, absolutely, completely possible, because again, these systems are
(12:01):
not terribly secure. Um. Now you've got a couple of
different arguments about this, Right, You've got people who support
d r S and they say, listen, hacking trying to
trying to affect politics on a national level here in
the United States is a fool's errand for multiple reasons,
and a big one is that we have so many
(12:23):
different types of electronic voting machines out there, and they
are proprietary. They don't all work on the same software,
so you can't develop a universal approach to affect all
the machines. Now, if the entire United States, if all
of us use the exact same kind of machine across
all the states and the territories, then that could be
(12:45):
a potential vulnerability. If in fact they were also connected
to like the Internet, right, you would have an amazing
target because you think, well, if I developed the right
kind of software, I can affect every single vote cast
in the United States. But that's not the reality of
our situation. We have all these different types of machines,
some of which are connected to the Internet, some of
(13:06):
which aren't. You have running on different types of software,
so you cannot create that one size fits all approach
to affecting all of them. That being said, you could
still affect specific ones, like you could target specific regions
that you think are particularly important and and try to
affect voting that way. In fact, critics say that because
(13:31):
the return on investment is so high, it's an incredibly
tempting target for hackers. Like you might say, yeah, it's
a lot of work, but look at the outcome. The
outcome is the effect of a national election. It's it's
harder to have a bigger set of stakes than that,
So you can say like, yeah, it's hard, but the
(13:52):
the goal is so huge that justifies the hard work
on the part of the hackers. Ben and I have
a little bit more to say about the scary world
of e v ms, but first let's take a quick break.
(14:14):
Here's the thing. Yeah, you don't have to be like
the Liam Neeson taken level of hacker. You don't have
to be anonymous or you know, some faction set operations.
You don't have to have a particular set of skills. Yeah, exactly,
And that was that was not very bad. I've had
a little thing stuck in my teeth, that's all. But
(14:37):
but yeah, you you don't have to be some amazing
savvant hacker with these crazy credentials and qualifications. You don't
even have to be states a state sponsored hacker like
a you know from the Chinese military, right, No, you
can if you're talking about systems running on when nose
(15:00):
XP that haven't been patched in two years at the
very at at best, they haven't been patched in two years.
At worst, it's been much longer than that. Uh, and
if there is a way to access the machines, either
over the Internet or through physical contact with the machines,
it's entirely possible for someone to use code developed by
(15:21):
somebody else and infect that machine. So yeah, so the
diminutive term for these people, uh, and my friend Shannon
hates this term would be script kitties. Script kitties meaning
a type of person who uh profits off of malicious code.
But they didn't develop the code themselves. They went to
(15:43):
some place that where that code is available. They either
purchase the code or they download the code for free,
depending upon the place that they're going to, and then
they deploy that code. And in some cases the code
is pretty much automated. It does everything for you. You
just have to be the one. You just have to
be able to deploy it somehow right, and you don't
(16:05):
have to have any knowledge of how it works. All
you need to do is just make sure the code
gets on the machine that you wanted to get on
in the right direction. Yeah. So, imagine that you've got
a thumb drive with this code and it's in a file,
so it will auto execute once it connects to a
USB drive on a machine. You come out to a
voting machine that happens at USB drive, which would be
(16:25):
a terrible idea. I'm not even suggesting that there are
electronic voting machines that have USB ports. I don't know
if there are. If there are, that's a terrible idea.
You plug in the thumb drive, automatically executes runs the
malicious code that has become part of the voting machines
programming from that point forward, and you can no longer
trust the results generates. Uh, that is entirely possible, assuming that, again,
(16:49):
you have some way of of injecting the code into
the machine. So if you do have that possibility, that
would be bad um. And also you don't even necessarily
have to set out to change votes. Right like that,
that's the way we mostly think of it. Like again,
going back to the Reagan Carter example, we would think, oh, well,
(17:09):
they've programmed it so that it took that Reagan vote
and flipped it to Carter. You could also just try
and overload the voting machine so that no votes could
be cast on it at all. You can take it down. Yeah,
you're just taking down the machine you just wanted to
to crash and be unrecoverable, and then you you really
impact that the ability for people to cast votes. If
(17:33):
you do that in enough places that have very particular
political leanings, you can affect the outcome of an election
simply because the people who wanted to vote were physically
unable to do so. And unless you make special allowances
for that, then those those votes will never happen. Uh.
(17:54):
So that's kind of ugly to um. And also finally,
uh turns out at the results are unencrypted, which is
crazy to me, which yeah, is bizarre. Yeah, it doesn't
make any sense. Votes recorded in plain text in a
file where you're not you haven't even encrypted the results,
(18:15):
so there's no protection there. Like if someone does get
access to that data somehow, no matter you know, whatever
methodology you might need, they can make changes. And you
know this is not just theoretical. And the state of
Virginia de certified hundreds of wind vote e v m
s because they were insecure, and according to the officials,
(18:39):
you could change the votes in these wind vote machines
undetected if you were anywhere within a half mile radius
of the machine, even if you weren't like a knowledgeable
hack like you don't want to have to get out
of the car. It's like Pokemon go, but for election. Yeah. Um,
(19:01):
that's crazy. Now. I should also add that according to
the Wired article where I've pulled that from, UH, they
never found any evidence that someone had tampered with the votes,
but they did discover that the vulnerability was there, which
meant that there was always the possibility someone could tamper
with the votes, which is why they were de certified. Um. Luckily,
at least according to the officials, it doesn't look like
(19:24):
anyone actually managed to do that or took the time
to do that, But that's that's a possibility that has
to be addressed, right um. And that kind of brings
us up to the hacking threat. So I don't know
if you guys have been paying attention here in the
United States. Earlier in hackers gained access to the Democratic
(19:45):
National Convention databases and they stole a whole bunch of
emails and files, more than twenty thousand of them, and UH,
a lot of them were released by wiki leaks. Around
twenty thousand were released by wiki leaks, but that doesn't
mean that that's all of them. And there were a
lot of questions like who the heck hacked into the
d n C. Yeah, and we were pointing out a
(20:06):
specific country and that country is Russia, thank you, but
but it's want okay, yeah, all right, Well, so here's
here's one of the things that makes this an interesting story,
and into some degree the reports of it remind me
a little bit of the famous Sony hack, right where
(20:30):
they talking about North Korea being the culprit and you
and I explored that together as well. So one of
the big questions is to what end, to what what
value would Russia's state sponsored hacking branch, which does exist,
(20:50):
what what value would it see in interfering on such
a minimal level at this point? Is this a buy
in for blackmail? Further down the line, is this to
discredit something? Because the d n C is a domestic
(21:11):
facing organization, so it's a lot, it's much more. Um,
it's an entirely different animal in comparison to something like
a State Department server which would have stuff about Russia. Yeah, yeah,
any of those things like c I A are you
know that would be another or n s A. Right,
like the targets that you would think of if you
(21:33):
wanted to gather a lot of intelligence yeah, and so
the issue here. Initially, I I don't know about you,
but initially I was skeptical because I thought, this, all
this bear poking that's going on now is not gonna
it's not. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's not gonna. It's
not gonna pay off. Because there is a reason that
(21:54):
the Putin government has been in power for as long
as it has, and it's it's because, as you know,
this this government is seen. American presidents come and go,
and they have a maybe a longer horizon politically sure
when they contemplate these things. So I it's strange to
(22:14):
see what appears to be harmless rhetoric trotted out against them. However,
I had to rethink my skepticism on this when more
than one security firm came out saying evidence indicates it's
probably these guys. Yeah. As it turns out, a security
firm immediately, pretty much shortly after the leak was was
(22:37):
made public, said that the signs were pointing towards a
Russian actor, um that the methodologies and software used were
the same that had been employed by Russian state sponsored
hacking groups in the past. And uh, there are some
folks who said I'm you know, I don't think so.
In fact, one um jusipher to point, oh hacker came
(23:02):
out and said, no, no, no, it was me. I'm
a lone wolf. I did it. It wasn't. I was
the one who who stole all that and gave it
over to Wiki leaks and uh. Although they also claimed
that he was Romanian or he or she the hacker
claimed that he or she was Romanian, but then when
people were trying to communicate with him or her in Romanian, Uh,
(23:23):
the responses did not seem particularly coherent, which seems to
give the lie that they are in fact Romanian. But
other security firms ended up corroborating the findings of the
first one. They said, yeah, the exploits that were used,
the malware that was used is identical to the type
of malware that has been used by this Russian hacking group.
(23:45):
It is exactly the m O that we've seen in
other cases, including a case that involved the German parliament.
In so uh, either it's again another Russian hacking group,
or it's someone who learned everything they know from a
Russian hacking group because it was identical in nature. Yes,
(24:08):
So why would Russia want to infere interfere with the DNC.
And I think the most distinct way of putting that
is that Pewton doesn't like Clinton, huh. Kind of kind
of what it boils down to is that Pewton uh
and would not want Clinton and the White House well
as president. Yeah, also as an active Secretary of State
(24:30):
at times when NATO and NATO and Russia as well
as its allies were engaged in geopolitical tensions that sparked
into Right now, there's an ongoing proxy war in Syria
and it's between Russia and between the U S. No,
of course it's not being reported that way or marketed
(24:51):
that way, but unless you're reading any media outside of
the US or Russia, in which case everyone says RUSSI
and who backs the Syrian government and the US that
backs the rebels like, and that goes across political spectrum.
I'm glad you pointed that out. So you know, a
very very um historically conservative papers of note in England,
(25:16):
like like the magazine The Economist or the much more
liberal paper The Independent, will both pretty much say what
it is. It's just we don't talk about it here
on CNN. Uh. There is, there is an antagonistic thing.
So I would say there's probably resentment or concern about
having a commander of chief who knows all the State
(25:38):
Department's skeletons and including the Russian ones. And then additionally,
and there always has to be a question when there's
this level of nepotism in American politics, where the because
we had the son of a former president become president
somehow in a meritocracy, and then actually right right multiple times,
(25:58):
and then having the um the spouse of a former
president be in the running for president. What's really crazy
is if you ever see a family tree of all
the presidents and see how much except for that one,
there's like one guy. Yeah, but everyone is pretty much
everyone else's cousin at at most. And there's an interesting
mathematical aspect to that, because if you go for far
(26:22):
enough out or the further you go, the more people
you're related to us, like I've probably you're probably sixteen
cousins with someone that would completely it would completely baffle you. Yeah,
and so that I mean, that's true, but I could
see that it. I could see the Russian government having
(26:43):
that kind of concern, but also funding wise, uh, funding wise,
and infrastructural wise, they're pretty strapped for cash right now
and strapped for manpower as well, So it's a question
of how well quick they are as well as how
motivated they are. Right and and let's also point out
(27:04):
that hacking the d n C is different than hacking
an election, because, like I said earlier, with the electronic
voting machines, you have all these different targets, with all
these different softwares, Whereas hacking the d n C means
focusing on a single target, not looking at a bunch
of different targets across the United States. So that requires
(27:26):
less of an investment. I mean, it's still, you know,
obviously requires a great deal deal of work in order
to find to create a vulnerability or to exploit a vulnerability,
But it's different than having to target whole bunch of
different machines. But it has raised the question a lot
of people have asked, well, if they hacked the DNC,
could Russia also interfere with the actual election of sixteen
(27:50):
uh And Wired's Brian Barrett, who wrote one of the
articles I read for this episode, specifically says he does
not think so. Uh most because if in fact Russia
wanted to interfere with the election, it would not have
also targeted the DNC database and hacked into it, because
(28:11):
once everyone finds out about that, then you are on
high alert for the election. Uh And so if you
wanted to hack the election, you would not want people
to know that you were capable of doing something on
that scale before you did it. You don't want to
You don't don't monologue in front of James Bond before
(28:32):
you push the button exactly exactly. And it's not the
first time at the geopolitical rodeo. So they've done this
if Yeah, they're they're old hands at uh and as
as is the United States. I'm not giving the US
a pass. Yeah, we've got any major player in geopolitics.
There's some dark stuff going on, which in regimes the
(28:52):
way that people named Chad changed cargo pants right, So
probably Russia has not gone to be uh involved. And
plus again it would it would require a much broader
attack that would require multiple strategies and where for you
to play it out. So but the fact that the
possibility has been raised again creates uncertainty among the US public,
(29:18):
and that alone is enough to cause a lack of
confidence and results. Right, we've already seen I mean Trump
has even said, like I expect there's gonna be a
lot of tampering involved in this, uh in this election,
already bringing into question the results which haven't happened yet.
It's like he's it's like he's already said we can't
(29:41):
trust what the results will say. And we haven't even
gone into the voting booths. We're just about to wrap
up this discussion about electronic voting machines. But before we
get to that, let's take another quick break. What do
we think how do we wrap this wall up? Well,
(30:05):
first we should remember that while in Georgia it's hard,
it's easy for us to forget we're in the minority,
not everyone is using an electronic voting machine to cast
their vote. In fact, according to uh UM Pamela Smith
of Verified Voting, about the nation will vote on some
form of paper ballot in the two thousand sixteen election,
(30:26):
only us using other methods. So there's not some maniacal
corporate super villain who's out to rig the election across
the nation for the Clinton campaign, the Trump campaign, or
Gary Busey, right right, Gary Busey can try and infect
as many computers as he wants, but as it turns out,
(30:47):
unless he's figured out away to replace all the choices
on a paper ballot with Gary Busey, which would be amazing,
I kind of want to see an official ballot that
just as Gary Busey as all the different options, like
including including the resolutions that are exactly Unless he's able
to do that, then it's not going to have that
(31:09):
big of a scale of impact. So so this is
also some of that fear uncertainty in doubt, right, Like,
on the one hand, yes, these systems are not as
secure as they should be. They aren't encrypting data, which
they should be, or at least not all of them are. Um,
they not all of them have paper trails. Even the
(31:30):
ones that do have paper trails may not the state
may not require a post election audit, which they absolutely
lee should. Also, the paper trails may not be voter
or verifiable, which they absolutely should be, so that we
can be well, so that we can have confidence that
the results announced are in fact reflective of the actual
(31:51):
choices that people made. Whether it's in favor of your
candidate or against your candidate, you want to know that
the results it happened. We're real and not reflective of
someone else's machiavellian plan to put put a specific person
in power, or specific group in power, or specific set
(32:11):
of laws into play. You want to feel like the
process works, and in order to do that, you need
this verifiable voter trail. You need to have these post
election audits. And not everywhere has that ability or option.
So now that's one thing. Um. Another thing to remember
is that, uh, it's hard to get these systems up
(32:36):
to date and at that level where we could be
confident in their results, because again, it costs money, and
it's politically difficult to convince groups to spend that money,
specifically to upgrade election equipment. Keeping in mind that this
is stuff that's used only a couple of times a
year at most, right, Like you might have to if
(33:00):
you are very active in your local community, you may
be voting maybe a couple of times per year, depending
upon how things are run in your area. Uh, some
people only come out to vote for the presidential elections.
They don't vote for any of the other ones. And
so it's hard to justify like you're gonna spend X
million dollars this year for equipment that you're gonna be
(33:22):
able to use maybe in two elections before you need
to like to general elections before you need to upgrade
the equipment again. And there's a great argument about open
sourcing yware exactly. So I mean, I think I would
love to see more transparency both on that open source approach,
(33:43):
so people can make sure there's no inherent bias in
the code again, conscious or not, because there there are
times where people can insert of by us without even
thinking they are right like that that just happens because
we're human. You don't have to be making a conscious
decision to be a jerk to create. Yeah, And there's
also there's also a perception problem that comes out post event,
(34:06):
which is, you know, humans are intensely tribalistic. It's we're
not particularly fact based creatures, unfortunately, and because we were,
we evolved to live off of perceptions. So what what
inevitably happens is no matter what side of the political
aisle you find yourself kicking it on the people who
(34:30):
feel that their candidate has one or when a candidate wins,
the supporters will say the system works. These people who
object to my candidate are just total Yeah, just sour grapes,
these n income poops. They don't understand. And of course
I would be I would be a dignified, a dignified,
(34:53):
dissenting voice if I, you know, if I didn't pick
the obviously the best candidate, which if the other and
it had one, which they didn't, but if they had,
then I would have been a gracious loser. However, in
the alternative, in the alternative, university schrod Injur's cat this
for a second, what what would happen if the same
(35:13):
people lost? They would say, well, the systems rigged. It
was rigged from the beginning. It was rigged because the media.
The media reported things in such a way as to
minimize the the opponents flaws and maximize my candidates flaws
which didn't even really exist. They manufactured flaws and then
they maximize them and etcetera, etcetera. And this this is
(35:37):
like a natural sort of thing that happens. We're not
trying to vilify anyone in particular or any political party,
to be honest, we've already seen it here in the
US this year, just through the primaries. Primaries happened. You
saw people who were like progressives, who were supporting Bernie Sanders. Uh,
refusing to believe that Clinton had won the primary. Now
(36:00):
there's another Uh, there's another Wally Adell situation there. However, Yes,
where you had the the chairwoman of the Democratic Convention
who in some of those leaked messages that Wiki Leaks released, Uh,
it was clear that she was favoring She she personally
(36:22):
favored Clinton over Sanders. Whether that actually ever had any
effect beyond her personal beliefs is less clear. In fact,
the evidence doesn't really support that there was like a
a concentrated effort to diminish Sanders to a point where
he would be he would not be allowed to be
(36:43):
a candidate. Um. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
It just means that there wasn't like a smoking gun
from that Wiki Leaks release. Yeah. But again, just like
a PR company would see Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was
the head of that who was the head of the
convention at the time, did write and vociferously supported, uh,
the Clinton campaign. So whether or not there was any shenaniganry, yeah,
(37:09):
I just barely stumbled through that word. Whether or not
there was the fact of the matter is that it
increases Uh, distrust and fear and uncertainty you said earlier, Right,
so you get this lack of confidence in the system. Uh.
And obviously that's not the direction we want to move in.
We want to move in a direction where everyone is
(37:30):
at least confident that their voices being heard. It may
turn out that their voice does isn't powerful enough to
make the change they want, which is frustrating obviously, but
less so than feeling like you are being ignored or
purposefully silenced. Right, you don't want that at all. But
so is the direct democracy really an answer, because if
(37:53):
we define direct democracy as well, let's see, for example,
one of the best arguments against direct democracy. Alright, ch okay,
anyone with anyone with an Internet connection can go on
there and say whatever they want. And now we're starting
to see the priorities of a massive people without some
(38:13):
kind of structure to their interaction. Well, uh I, I'm
really in favor of um approaching this from a plurality standpoint,
where at least in most areas of government, where you
make sure that the representatives of government reflect the levels
of support in the general population. So instead instead of
(38:37):
it being like every single position is determined by a majority.
If you have a plurality, then you say, all right,
well X percentage of Congress must be made up of
this party because that reflects the American the American voters.
And then this why percentage must be of this other
(38:59):
party because that represents and then these independents also won
this amount, so they should take up these seats. But
that would be a totally different approach to government than
the way the United States is structured, and it could
get complicated. Who from where, from what? But this is
already complicated. Could I could I plug some stuff real quickly? Alright, So,
(39:19):
first off, thank you so much for having me on,
and ladies and gentlemen, uh off the Jury, I almost
said of the podcast Jury, thank you so thank you
so much for checking out this episode. If you're interested
in this. In this process, um, Jonathan and I have
looked at some other some other tech related conspiracy theories,
(39:41):
including that Sony hack, and you've been on several episodes together.
So you can find all of those in either one
of our various internet uh presences. There are videos or
podcasts or you know sometimes the mad scribblings on a
blog somewhere. Yes, yes, uh, the whispers of the whispers
(40:05):
of a a person passing you buy on a moonless
night at the crossroads. Occasionally you'll just be in the
woods and you'll hear the sound of a baby laughing.
And if you listen very carefully, just before the blair
witch gets you, you'll hear at any rate. Right, yes, uh,
that's uh, that's how we met. So there's another There
(40:27):
are another couple of things that I think would be
worth your time to check out if you're interested in
this subject that's specifically applied to uh, the U S.
Voting system and stuff they want you to know. Has
a couple of videos about this. We have one about
the Federal Election Commission, one that's a grab bag of
political conspiracies for seen, and then one thing called five
things you should know about primary elections. So do check
(40:51):
this out. They are free on the internet. Well, I
mean they're free, you know, assuming that you have an
Internet connection, right, Yeah, the content is free. The manner
of trans mission may be uh, somewhat less so depending
on whether or not you're at the local library. And
no wonder this is maybe a forward thinking question that
you know. Jonathan has another show called forward Thinking the
(41:13):
Future of voting. So go ahead and hit me. Yeah,
it's a future it's a future facing show about the
evolution of tech. Did you Did you touch on anything
about machine consciousness or artificial intelligence and voting a couple
of times. Actually, we did an episode specifically about what
it would be like to have a robot as president?
Would you ever want a future where a robot could
(41:35):
be president? Uh? The idea being that if you had
a truly impartial, artificially intelligent creature that would be able
to make choices that are the greatest benefit and the
least detriment to the population. Would you want to do that?
Or do you think humanity is absolutely essential in order
(41:55):
for you to have a leader? We did an episode
about that. We also did an episode about the future
of voting and some of the pitfalls, including things like
machine intelligence, Uh in the future. That one was not
too long ago. That that published, probably was about a
month or two ago maybe, So, Yeah, we've got some
stuff that we've talked about. I personally think that there
(42:19):
are a lot of problems we need to solve in
the immediate future that uh, some of which would would
avoid the machine learning artificial intelligence question for quite some time,
because um, like there there have been people who have asked, well,
what about the possibility of voting via the internet, the
idea being that if you could vote via in an internet,
(42:42):
you could drive up voter participation dramatically. You've you, the
more you reduce the investment required to participate, the more
people will participate. That's the idea, right, So if you
make it less of a chore to vote, more people
will vote. Because that that's one of those ongoing narratives
in the United States, right, that's such a small, relatively
(43:04):
small percentage of our population actually participates in the process,
particularly if it's not a presidential election. Yeah, I think though,
I think that people should I know this is controversial,
but I think people should be required to vote. I
think it should be part of the stuff you have
to do, and there's not there's not very much stuff
(43:25):
you have to do. Uh, if you were born here
to be a citizen's services, there's actually way more stuff
that you aren't supposed to do. Yeah, there's a much
bigger list of do not. But I think it's While
it's controversial, it's a good system to consider because then
(43:45):
we will see all of the people who for one
reason or another. We're not able to get time off
to vote. We're not able to get which is which is,
by the way, illegal. You are supposed to be your
employer is supposed to allow you the time to vote.
That's it's illegal in theory. It's a legal in theory
and practice it is much different, right, Yeah, I mean again,
(44:06):
just like we were talking about with the electronic voting machines.
Ideally it works one way. In reality it may work
a totally different way. There are countries that have compulsory voting.
Because often when you see the United States the voting numbers,
the percentage of people participating, it will be compared against
other nations and say, look, how terrible the US turnout
is compared to these countries. And then you start looking like, yeah,
(44:27):
but four of those countries you listed require everyone to vote.
So therefore, first of all, that none of them are
at a ent, so someone slacken. And secondly, that's not
fair to to hold up a country that doesn't have
compulsory voting against ones that do. Um, I don't know
that I whoever go with compulsory I kind of I
(44:48):
kind of feel you, I mean, I kind of I
want I want to see more people involved in it,
whether it's but I also don't know the reasons behind
people not voting, right, If they're not voting because there
is an uh a hardship on them in order to
(45:08):
participate in the system, It's not like I can blame them, right,
if there's some form of hardship, whether it's economic or
it's just you know, practical, like how do I get
to the voting station, whatever it may be. I have
a lot of sympathy for those people. And I even
have sympathy for people who have lost confidence in the
system and the reason they don't vote is because they
(45:28):
feel like their vote doesn't really have um an impact.
And I can certainly see, especially based upon the rhetoric
that you tend to be subjected to in the election seasons,
how you can get disillusioned and sad and therefore you're like,
I kind of just want to disappear until this is over. UM.
(45:52):
Although this every time there's an election, it's really important,
very very important, including at the local level, maybe especially
at the local level. UM. Here in the US, we
give a lot of attention to the presidential elections. Truth
to be known, your local elections are going to have
a much larger impact on your day to day life
than your national ones. Um, but obviously that's not the
(46:17):
big story. You're looking at who Who's who's sitting on
the on the throne I'm sorry in the oval office.
I'm the Royalist, so I have a little bit of
a different view on things. Um, I'm not really a royalist.
So well that that was a great discussion about it.
Obviously we got a little philosophical and um, you know,
(46:38):
I don't want anyone to base their political opinion on
anything I say. I think it's very important for you
to form your own even if I fully disagree with it,
I respect the fact that you guys have a political opinion.
So I'm not trying to sway anyone to my side. Um,
which is good because your side is crazy. My side
votes Reagan uh in this election. Yeah, he's he's he's
(47:03):
passed on and yet I write it in. Also, by
the way, you may not be able to write in
a president presidential candidate. Not all states allow it. Yeah, yeah,
that's a bummer. I think it's like forty seven states
allow it, so there's like three that do not. Something
like that. You know what probably happens somebody was screwing
around too much with what they thought was a great bit,
(47:23):
and they were like, guys, we cannot make we cannot
make the pink panther the state senator or build a cat,
or build a cat. Bloom County has run the presidential
candidacy quite a few times, right, Yeah, so, uh, maybe
it's just the joke gone wrong. But if you're in
one of the vast majority of states and you want
(47:44):
to write a vote in, then civic Seneca right as
a citizen of the United States. Some would argue your
moral responsibility depends on your on your perspective on the candidates,
I suppose, but I didn't the rate there we go
see at any rate. That's how you know it's me
when you hear that voice in the woods. Uh. Thank
(48:06):
you again Ben for being on the show. And that
wraps up this pair of classic episodes. Thank you so
much for listening. I think these are very important things
for us to be aware of, things that we need
to pay very close attention to. We can't just take
for granted that the systems that we have in place
to allow us to to participate in the democratic process
(48:29):
just work or that they just don't work. We need
to really examine them, ask questions, make ourselves accountable, and
make certain that we still have a system that people
can believe in. It's hard enough out there right now
to find representatives sometimes that actually reflect our own values.
That can be a real challenge. We don't need to
(48:51):
make it even harder by making the process one that
we feel we cannot rely upon. We need that process
to be rock solid. I hope you guys enjoyed these
classic episodes. Will be back with a new episode in
Wednesday's show, so stick around for that. And uh yeah,
I apologize for running reruns in a way, but at
(49:13):
the same time, I just felt like this is something
that we need to think about, especially in the advance
of another election year here in the United States. We
really need to pay attention to this stuff and be
active participants if we want to make any real substantive change.
All right, guys, if you want to reach out to me,
(49:33):
you can do so on Facebook or Twitter. The handle
for both of those is text stuff hs W and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My
Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
(49:54):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. And if you
listened to last Wednesday's episode, you heard a classic episode
of tech Stuff about electronic voting machines. The episode published
(00:27):
back in October twenty six and Mr Ben Bolan of
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History
Fame joined me for that discussion. We are going to
continue that discussion today. This is part two of that episode,
and we are going to continue to dive down the
(00:47):
tricky and potentially disastrous pathway to creating voting systems. The
idea that if you create a voting system that is
perceived to be unfair, then you're really undermining the entire
foundation of democracy. And I know that sounds like I'm exaggerating,
(01:10):
but I'm not because if we lose faith in the system,
if we do not believe the system works, then it
becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course, we have to
make sure that the system does work. If the system
is not working, then we absolutely have to fix it.
So it is a very tricky subject, Ben and I
will go into much more detail that I hope you
(01:30):
guys are doing well. I know this is still a
very trying and challenging time for so many reasons. I
want you guys to know I believe in you. I
think that you guys are awesome. Uh you all have
proven that over and over. So let's sit back and
listen to this classic episode about the scary world of
e v M S Part two. At the close of
(01:53):
our conversation, we has our votes and we decided democratically
that this would be better as a two part series
than a single epic length episode that would have stretched
the patience of the most uh most forgiving of listeners.
Now we have broken it up into two parts, so
(02:14):
what you are about to hear is the conclusion of
that two parts. Also, I should add that when we
get to the end and we sign off, we did
not know at that point that it was going to
be a two parter, so we actually have already recorded
the end of the episode that I'm recording the beginning
of now. And yes, time travel does confuse me. So
let's just segue in to part two of how electronic
(02:37):
voting machines are going to ruin everything. Remember we mentioned
that in two thousand two, that's when they started to
appear on the scene. That's when Georgia. Actually they started
to appear before two thousand two, but two thousand two
is when Georgia became the first state to have just
the electronic voting machines out there in the polling places. Um,
many of those machines have not been updated since, and
(03:00):
almost all of them are running on a version of
Windows XP which hasn't been updated since April two thou fourteen.
So that means any security vulnerability that has been discovered
since two thousand and fourteen is still there. Chances are
some of the ones before two thousand fourteen are still
there because I bet a lot of those machines have
never received a patch, right, They're just these big there,
(03:23):
these machines that are being overseen by the government, and uh,
you know it, Chances are a lot of them are unpatched.
So there's a lot of potential for people to tamper.
And not only that, you know, I mentioned the idea
of either unconsciously or purposefully inserting a bias. That's a
real concern too, right, because private companies are the ones
(03:45):
designing these machines. They do so with using proprietary software
that is not visible to the general public, nor is
it uh what's what's word, nor is it in any
way compelled to answer to the general public, Like the
public doesn't have a the quote unquote Capital p public
(04:08):
doesn't have a vote regarding which companies run these machines.
You look at this and you see that everyone says, well,
we can't reveal our code because if we did, uh,
then our competitors would see how we do things, and
then we can't compete in the marketplace anymore. And so
meanwhile you've got security experts saying this should all be
(04:31):
open source. And the reason it should be open source
is so that the community at large would have the
opportunity to look at the code and see if there
are any vulnerabilities and if so, make sure that those
get patched before you get to a point where the
code is being put into play in an actual election,
so that those vulnerabilities can't be exploited. Because if something
(04:53):
is proprietary and someone figures out an exploit to that software,
then it's all behind closed doors. There's no way to
address it, and you end up with a huge problem.
But but beyond that, you have companies that could insert
a bias into the programming itself. And this kind of
stems from an interesting story that happened in the early
two thousand's. So two thousand three, Walden Wally O'Dell and
(05:19):
I'm not making up the nickname Wally, that is what
he would go by. Wally O'Dell was at that time
the CEO and chairman of die Bald. Now Diebald's best
known for making a t M S but dial, Yeah, well,
they also for a while made electronic voting machines. There
(05:39):
was a subsidiary called Diebold Election Systems, which the company
has since divested itself of that particular property. But Diebold
Election Systems made a lot of electronic voting machines. And
die Bald, by the way, is headquartered in Ohio, a
very important state in national elections here in the United States.
(06:00):
Swing states, that's what we call it, yep swing some
meeting swing states for you know, there's probably I've got
some listeners who are outside the US. You may have
heard the term swing state, and you don't know what
that means. So the way elections work in the US.
You know, you've got your major two party system, and
ninety five percent of the time that's the those are
the only parties that really make an impact. So you've
(06:22):
got your Republicans and your Democrats, and you've got a
lot of states that that lean toward one or the other,
and it is almost unheard of for them to support
a candidate of the opposite party, sure like uh for
one example of this would be UH state like Utah
would be legendarily not voting Democratic, and a state like
(06:45):
Vermont would be legendarily not voting Republicans. Right, So it
would be an incredibly strange set of circumstances to see
one of these states support a candidate of the opposite
party that it tends to support. So for the most part,
we just assume those electors in the electoral college will
support the traditional candidates that those states would support. But
(07:08):
there's some states that could go either way. They could
swing towards the Republican side one election and swing towards
the Democratic side and another Florida, Pennsylvaniaia. So the the
electors in these states, UH, it may be that they
are the ones that are chosen are the ones for
Republican uh in one one election our Democrat and another election.
(07:33):
So Ohio is one of those states, which means it's
incredibly valuable. Right. It means it's a battleground state. You
want to win that state because you know you've got
your your foundation, that's almost guaranteed. Nothing's ever a guarantee,
but it's almost a guarantee. And uh so you need
to really concentrate on the states where you have the
(07:53):
potential to flip it. So that's on your side and
not your opponents side. Well, Ohio is one of those states.
Eyebold has its headquarters in Ohio, and Wally, the CEO
of Diebold at that time, wrote a letter where he
was uh committing himself to quote helping Ohio deliver its
(08:15):
electoral votes to the president end quote, president being George W.
Bush at that time. So the CEO of a company
that makes voting machine saying he's committed to delivering Ohio's
electoral votes to the president. Now, the company was quick
to say, hey, he's not talking about using our products
(08:37):
to push the elections a personal fundraiser dotor, right, he's
talking about campaigning and but a lot of people said, hey,
isn't there a conflict of interests if you've got the
head of a company making the voting technology that people
depend upon also openly supporting a specific candidate in the race.
It's very It's very close to a member of the
(09:02):
Supreme Court saying like, I will do anything I can
to get you elected, George, and then and then saying, oh,
fiddle D D. We don't have time to recount the
votes from Florida, and we look, there's some things that
are more important than making absolutely certain that the people's
vote was reflected in the actual election. Like reasons. I
(09:26):
just like saying fiddle D D. But I don't think
the Supremes say that. But you're you're raised the supremest
they sing, I referred to them as the Supremes. I
like that. John robertson the Supremes. So many wonderful visions
going through my head right now. Oh man, you should
have seen the comedy show we did with that with
that sketch. Well, but anyway that at that point inside
(09:50):
like what you're saying is really important here because let's
assume if we were to take Wally at his word,
then even is that a PR firm would say, the
optics look bad. So when you when you make those
sorts of statements, you have to be very conscious, conscious
(10:11):
of what is going to happen. This is uh, this
is an environment wherein uh, let's see what year was this,
two thousand three, right, two thousand three was when you
wrote the letter. Thousand four was the election. So people
are already very sore off of the two thousand election,
and we have seen an accelerating distrust in the American
(10:31):
political system or sometime you know, and this this thing
is just making it, exacerbating it. And I think in
one of the Wired pieces I read it might have
even been the one you just referenced. Uh. The the
author of the piece made a really great point, which
was that you don't need any case of tampering or bias.
(10:54):
It doesn't have to exist, but the possibility of it
of it existing is an off to cause turmoil. Right,
you can cause real world turmoil just from the possibility
of this being a thing without any evidence of it
actually happening. So you don't need to have evidence of
someone purposefully trying to rig the system in order for
(11:16):
people to not trust the system. As long as it's
clear that it's a possibility. That's enough to have people
say like, well, how can I trust anything? How can
I trust the results? Because you know you're telling me
there's no evidence, But how do I know there's no evidence?
I know it's possible. Twice you can't get fooled aget. Yeah, thanks,
(11:36):
it's a it's a great quote that I'm not gonna
make any fun of. All Right, So then we've got
the fear of hackers. We've got the fear of bias
from the standpoint of the manufacturers of the voting machines themselves,
and then we get the fear of hackers third parties
that want to rig the results or prevent people from voting.
Completely possible, absolutely, completely possible, because again, these systems are
(12:01):
not terribly secure. Um. Now you've got a couple of
different arguments about this, Right, You've got people who support
d r S and they say, listen, hacking trying to
trying to affect politics on a national level here in
the United States is a fool's errand for multiple reasons,
and a big one is that we have so many
(12:23):
different types of electronic voting machines out there, and they
are proprietary. They don't all work on the same software,
so you can't develop a universal approach to affect all
the machines. Now, if the entire United States, if all
of us use the exact same kind of machine across
all the states and the territories, then that could be
(12:45):
a potential vulnerability. If in fact they were also connected
to like the Internet, right, you would have an amazing
target because you think, well, if I developed the right
kind of software, I can affect every single vote cast
in the United States. But that's not the reality of
our situation. We have all these different types of machines,
some of which are connected to the Internet, some of
(13:06):
which aren't. You have running on different types of software,
so you cannot create that one size fits all approach
to affecting all of them. That being said, you could
still affect specific ones, like you could target specific regions
that you think are particularly important and and try to
affect voting that way. In fact, critics say that because
(13:31):
the return on investment is so high, it's an incredibly
tempting target for hackers. Like you might say, yeah, it's
a lot of work, but look at the outcome. The
outcome is the effect of a national election. It's it's
harder to have a bigger set of stakes than that,
So you can say like, yeah, it's hard, but the
(13:52):
the goal is so huge that justifies the hard work
on the part of the hackers. Ben and I have
a little bit more to say about the scary world
of e v ms, but first let's take a quick break.
(14:14):
Here's the thing. Yeah, you don't have to be like
the Liam Neeson taken level of hacker. You don't have
to be anonymous or you know, some faction set operations.
You don't have to have a particular set of skills. Yeah, exactly,
And that was that was not very bad. I've had
a little thing stuck in my teeth, that's all. But
(14:37):
but yeah, you you don't have to be some amazing
savvant hacker with these crazy credentials and qualifications. You don't
even have to be states a state sponsored hacker like
a you know from the Chinese military, right, No, you
can if you're talking about systems running on when nose
(15:00):
XP that haven't been patched in two years at the
very at at best, they haven't been patched in two years.
At worst, it's been much longer than that. Uh, and
if there is a way to access the machines, either
over the Internet or through physical contact with the machines,
it's entirely possible for someone to use code developed by
(15:21):
somebody else and infect that machine. So yeah, so the
diminutive term for these people, uh, and my friend Shannon
hates this term would be script kitties. Script kitties meaning
a type of person who uh profits off of malicious code.
But they didn't develop the code themselves. They went to
(15:43):
some place that where that code is available. They either
purchase the code or they download the code for free,
depending upon the place that they're going to, and then
they deploy that code. And in some cases the code
is pretty much automated. It does everything for you. You
just have to be the one. You just have to
be able to deploy it somehow right, and you don't
(16:05):
have to have any knowledge of how it works. All
you need to do is just make sure the code
gets on the machine that you wanted to get on
in the right direction. Yeah. So, imagine that you've got
a thumb drive with this code and it's in a file,
so it will auto execute once it connects to a
USB drive on a machine. You come out to a
voting machine that happens at USB drive, which would be
(16:25):
a terrible idea. I'm not even suggesting that there are
electronic voting machines that have USB ports. I don't know
if there are. If there are, that's a terrible idea.
You plug in the thumb drive, automatically executes runs the
malicious code that has become part of the voting machines
programming from that point forward, and you can no longer
trust the results generates. Uh, that is entirely possible, assuming that, again,
(16:49):
you have some way of of injecting the code into
the machine. So if you do have that possibility, that
would be bad um. And also you don't even necessarily
have to set out to change votes. Right like that,
that's the way we mostly think of it. Like again,
going back to the Reagan Carter example, we would think, oh, well,
(17:09):
they've programmed it so that it took that Reagan vote
and flipped it to Carter. You could also just try
and overload the voting machine so that no votes could
be cast on it at all. You can take it down. Yeah,
you're just taking down the machine you just wanted to
to crash and be unrecoverable, and then you you really
impact that the ability for people to cast votes. If
(17:33):
you do that in enough places that have very particular
political leanings, you can affect the outcome of an election
simply because the people who wanted to vote were physically
unable to do so. And unless you make special allowances
for that, then those those votes will never happen. Uh.
(17:54):
So that's kind of ugly to um. And also finally,
uh turns out at the results are unencrypted, which is
crazy to me, which yeah, is bizarre. Yeah, it doesn't
make any sense. Votes recorded in plain text in a
file where you're not you haven't even encrypted the results,
(18:15):
so there's no protection there. Like if someone does get
access to that data somehow, no matter you know, whatever
methodology you might need, they can make changes. And you
know this is not just theoretical. And the state of
Virginia de certified hundreds of wind vote e v m
s because they were insecure, and according to the officials,
(18:39):
you could change the votes in these wind vote machines
undetected if you were anywhere within a half mile radius
of the machine, even if you weren't like a knowledgeable
hack like you don't want to have to get out
of the car. It's like Pokemon go, but for election. Yeah. Um,
(19:01):
that's crazy. Now. I should also add that according to
the Wired article where I've pulled that from, UH, they
never found any evidence that someone had tampered with the votes,
but they did discover that the vulnerability was there, which
meant that there was always the possibility someone could tamper
with the votes, which is why they were de certified. Um. Luckily,
at least according to the officials, it doesn't look like
(19:24):
anyone actually managed to do that or took the time
to do that, But that's that's a possibility that has
to be addressed, right um. And that kind of brings
us up to the hacking threat. So I don't know
if you guys have been paying attention here in the
United States. Earlier in hackers gained access to the Democratic
(19:45):
National Convention databases and they stole a whole bunch of
emails and files, more than twenty thousand of them, and UH,
a lot of them were released by wiki leaks. Around
twenty thousand were released by wiki leaks, but that doesn't
mean that that's all of them. And there were a
lot of questions like who the heck hacked into the
d n C. Yeah, and we were pointing out a
(20:06):
specific country and that country is Russia, thank you, but
but it's want okay, yeah, all right, Well, so here's
here's one of the things that makes this an interesting story,
and into some degree the reports of it remind me
a little bit of the famous Sony hack, right where
(20:30):
they talking about North Korea being the culprit and you
and I explored that together as well. So one of
the big questions is to what end, to what what
value would Russia's state sponsored hacking branch, which does exist,
(20:50):
what what value would it see in interfering on such
a minimal level at this point? Is this a buy
in for blackmail? Further down the line, is this to
discredit something? Because the d n C is a domestic
(21:11):
facing organization, so it's a lot, it's much more. Um,
it's an entirely different animal in comparison to something like
a State Department server which would have stuff about Russia. Yeah, yeah,
any of those things like c I A are you
know that would be another or n s A. Right,
like the targets that you would think of if you
(21:33):
wanted to gather a lot of intelligence yeah, and so
the issue here. Initially, I I don't know about you,
but initially I was skeptical because I thought, this, all
this bear poking that's going on now is not gonna
it's not. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's not gonna. It's
not gonna pay off. Because there is a reason that
(21:54):
the Putin government has been in power for as long
as it has, and it's it's because, as you know,
this this government is seen. American presidents come and go,
and they have a maybe a longer horizon politically sure
when they contemplate these things. So I it's strange to
(22:14):
see what appears to be harmless rhetoric trotted out against them. However,
I had to rethink my skepticism on this when more
than one security firm came out saying evidence indicates it's
probably these guys. Yeah. As it turns out, a security
firm immediately, pretty much shortly after the leak was was
(22:37):
made public, said that the signs were pointing towards a
Russian actor, um that the methodologies and software used were
the same that had been employed by Russian state sponsored
hacking groups in the past. And uh, there are some
folks who said I'm you know, I don't think so.
In fact, one um jusipher to point, oh hacker came
(23:02):
out and said, no, no, no, it was me. I'm
a lone wolf. I did it. It wasn't. I was
the one who who stole all that and gave it
over to Wiki leaks and uh. Although they also claimed
that he was Romanian or he or she the hacker
claimed that he or she was Romanian, but then when
people were trying to communicate with him or her in Romanian, Uh,
(23:23):
the responses did not seem particularly coherent, which seems to
give the lie that they are in fact Romanian. But
other security firms ended up corroborating the findings of the
first one. They said, yeah, the exploits that were used,
the malware that was used is identical to the type
of malware that has been used by this Russian hacking group.
(23:45):
It is exactly the m O that we've seen in
other cases, including a case that involved the German parliament.
In so uh, either it's again another Russian hacking group,
or it's someone who learned everything they know from a
Russian hacking group because it was identical in nature. Yes,
(24:08):
So why would Russia want to infere interfere with the DNC.
And I think the most distinct way of putting that
is that Pewton doesn't like Clinton, huh. Kind of kind
of what it boils down to is that Pewton uh
and would not want Clinton and the White House well
as president. Yeah, also as an active Secretary of State
(24:30):
at times when NATO and NATO and Russia as well
as its allies were engaged in geopolitical tensions that sparked
into Right now, there's an ongoing proxy war in Syria
and it's between Russia and between the U S. No,
of course it's not being reported that way or marketed
(24:51):
that way, but unless you're reading any media outside of
the US or Russia, in which case everyone says RUSSI
and who backs the Syrian government and the US that
backs the rebels like, and that goes across political spectrum.
I'm glad you pointed that out. So you know, a
very very um historically conservative papers of note in England,
(25:16):
like like the magazine The Economist or the much more
liberal paper The Independent, will both pretty much say what
it is. It's just we don't talk about it here
on CNN. Uh. There is, there is an antagonistic thing.
So I would say there's probably resentment or concern about
having a commander of chief who knows all the State
(25:38):
Department's skeletons and including the Russian ones. And then additionally,
and there always has to be a question when there's
this level of nepotism in American politics, where the because
we had the son of a former president become president
somehow in a meritocracy, and then actually right right multiple times,
(25:58):
and then having the um the spouse of a former
president be in the running for president. What's really crazy
is if you ever see a family tree of all
the presidents and see how much except for that one,
there's like one guy. Yeah, but everyone is pretty much
everyone else's cousin at at most. And there's an interesting
mathematical aspect to that, because if you go for far
(26:22):
enough out or the further you go, the more people
you're related to us, like I've probably you're probably sixteen
cousins with someone that would completely it would completely baffle you. Yeah,
and so that I mean, that's true, but I could
see that it. I could see the Russian government having
(26:43):
that kind of concern, but also funding wise, uh, funding wise,
and infrastructural wise, they're pretty strapped for cash right now
and strapped for manpower as well, So it's a question
of how well quick they are as well as how
motivated they are. Right and and let's also point out
(27:04):
that hacking the d n C is different than hacking
an election, because, like I said earlier, with the electronic
voting machines, you have all these different targets, with all
these different softwares, Whereas hacking the d n C means
focusing on a single target, not looking at a bunch
of different targets across the United States. So that requires
(27:26):
less of an investment. I mean, it's still, you know,
obviously requires a great deal deal of work in order
to find to create a vulnerability or to exploit a vulnerability,
But it's different than having to target whole bunch of
different machines. But it has raised the question a lot
of people have asked, well, if they hacked the DNC,
could Russia also interfere with the actual election of sixteen
(27:50):
uh And Wired's Brian Barrett, who wrote one of the
articles I read for this episode, specifically says he does
not think so. Uh most because if in fact Russia
wanted to interfere with the election, it would not have
also targeted the DNC database and hacked into it, because
(28:11):
once everyone finds out about that, then you are on
high alert for the election. Uh And so if you
wanted to hack the election, you would not want people
to know that you were capable of doing something on
that scale before you did it. You don't want to
You don't don't monologue in front of James Bond before
(28:32):
you push the button exactly exactly. And it's not the
first time at the geopolitical rodeo. So they've done this
if Yeah, they're they're old hands at uh and as
as is the United States. I'm not giving the US
a pass. Yeah, we've got any major player in geopolitics.
There's some dark stuff going on, which in regimes the
(28:52):
way that people named Chad changed cargo pants right, So
probably Russia has not gone to be uh involved. And
plus again it would it would require a much broader
attack that would require multiple strategies and where for you
to play it out. So but the fact that the
possibility has been raised again creates uncertainty among the US public,
(29:18):
and that alone is enough to cause a lack of
confidence and results. Right, we've already seen I mean Trump
has even said, like I expect there's gonna be a
lot of tampering involved in this, uh in this election,
already bringing into question the results which haven't happened yet.
It's like he's it's like he's already said we can't
(29:41):
trust what the results will say. And we haven't even
gone into the voting booths. We're just about to wrap
up this discussion about electronic voting machines. But before we
get to that, let's take another quick break. What do
we think how do we wrap this wall up? Well,
(30:05):
first we should remember that while in Georgia it's hard,
it's easy for us to forget we're in the minority,
not everyone is using an electronic voting machine to cast
their vote. In fact, according to uh UM Pamela Smith
of Verified Voting, about the nation will vote on some
form of paper ballot in the two thousand sixteen election,
(30:26):
only us using other methods. So there's not some maniacal
corporate super villain who's out to rig the election across
the nation for the Clinton campaign, the Trump campaign, or
Gary Busey, right right, Gary Busey can try and infect
as many computers as he wants, but as it turns out,
(30:47):
unless he's figured out away to replace all the choices
on a paper ballot with Gary Busey, which would be amazing,
I kind of want to see an official ballot that
just as Gary Busey as all the different options, like
including including the resolutions that are exactly Unless he's able
to do that, then it's not going to have that
(31:09):
big of a scale of impact. So so this is
also some of that fear uncertainty in doubt, right, Like,
on the one hand, yes, these systems are not as
secure as they should be. They aren't encrypting data, which
they should be, or at least not all of them are. Um,
they not all of them have paper trails. Even the
(31:30):
ones that do have paper trails may not the state
may not require a post election audit, which they absolutely
lee should. Also, the paper trails may not be voter
or verifiable, which they absolutely should be, so that we
can be well, so that we can have confidence that
the results announced are in fact reflective of the actual
(31:51):
choices that people made. Whether it's in favor of your
candidate or against your candidate, you want to know that
the results it happened. We're real and not reflective of
someone else's machiavellian plan to put put a specific person
in power, or specific group in power, or specific set
(32:11):
of laws into play. You want to feel like the
process works, and in order to do that, you need
this verifiable voter trail. You need to have these post
election audits. And not everywhere has that ability or option.
So now that's one thing. Um. Another thing to remember
is that, uh, it's hard to get these systems up
(32:36):
to date and at that level where we could be
confident in their results, because again, it costs money, and
it's politically difficult to convince groups to spend that money,
specifically to upgrade election equipment. Keeping in mind that this
is stuff that's used only a couple of times a
year at most, right, Like you might have to if
(33:00):
you are very active in your local community, you may
be voting maybe a couple of times per year, depending
upon how things are run in your area. Uh, some
people only come out to vote for the presidential elections.
They don't vote for any of the other ones. And
so it's hard to justify like you're gonna spend X
million dollars this year for equipment that you're gonna be
(33:22):
able to use maybe in two elections before you need
to like to general elections before you need to upgrade
the equipment again. And there's a great argument about open
sourcing yware exactly. So I mean, I think I would
love to see more transparency both on that open source approach,
(33:43):
so people can make sure there's no inherent bias in
the code again, conscious or not, because there there are
times where people can insert of by us without even
thinking they are right like that that just happens because
we're human. You don't have to be making a conscious
decision to be a jerk to create. Yeah, And there's
also there's also a perception problem that comes out post event,
(34:06):
which is, you know, humans are intensely tribalistic. It's we're
not particularly fact based creatures, unfortunately, and because we were,
we evolved to live off of perceptions. So what what
inevitably happens is no matter what side of the political
aisle you find yourself kicking it on the people who
(34:30):
feel that their candidate has one or when a candidate wins,
the supporters will say the system works. These people who
object to my candidate are just total Yeah, just sour grapes,
these n income poops. They don't understand. And of course
I would be I would be a dignified, a dignified,
(34:53):
dissenting voice if I, you know, if I didn't pick
the obviously the best candidate, which if the other and
it had one, which they didn't, but if they had,
then I would have been a gracious loser. However, in
the alternative, in the alternative, university schrod Injur's cat this
for a second, what what would happen if the same
(35:13):
people lost? They would say, well, the systems rigged. It
was rigged from the beginning. It was rigged because the media.
The media reported things in such a way as to
minimize the the opponents flaws and maximize my candidates flaws
which didn't even really exist. They manufactured flaws and then
they maximize them and etcetera, etcetera. And this this is
(35:37):
like a natural sort of thing that happens. We're not
trying to vilify anyone in particular or any political party,
to be honest, we've already seen it here in the
US this year, just through the primaries. Primaries happened. You
saw people who were like progressives, who were supporting Bernie Sanders. Uh,
refusing to believe that Clinton had won the primary. Now
(36:00):
there's another Uh, there's another Wally Adell situation there. However, Yes,
where you had the the chairwoman of the Democratic Convention
who in some of those leaked messages that Wiki Leaks released, Uh,
it was clear that she was favoring She she personally
(36:22):
favored Clinton over Sanders. Whether that actually ever had any
effect beyond her personal beliefs is less clear. In fact,
the evidence doesn't really support that there was like a
a concentrated effort to diminish Sanders to a point where
he would be he would not be allowed to be
(36:43):
a candidate. Um. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
It just means that there wasn't like a smoking gun
from that Wiki Leaks release. Yeah. But again, just like
a PR company would see Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was
the head of that who was the head of the
convention at the time, did write and vociferously supported, uh,
the Clinton campaign. So whether or not there was any shenaniganry, yeah,
(37:09):
I just barely stumbled through that word. Whether or not
there was the fact of the matter is that it
increases Uh, distrust and fear and uncertainty you said earlier, Right,
so you get this lack of confidence in the system. Uh.
And obviously that's not the direction we want to move in.
We want to move in a direction where everyone is
(37:30):
at least confident that their voices being heard. It may
turn out that their voice does isn't powerful enough to
make the change they want, which is frustrating obviously, but
less so than feeling like you are being ignored or
purposefully silenced. Right, you don't want that at all. But
so is the direct democracy really an answer, because if
(37:53):
we define direct democracy as well, let's see, for example,
one of the best arguments against direct democracy. Alright, ch okay,
anyone with anyone with an Internet connection can go on
there and say whatever they want. And now we're starting
to see the priorities of a massive people without some
(38:13):
kind of structure to their interaction. Well, uh I, I'm
really in favor of um approaching this from a plurality standpoint,
where at least in most areas of government, where you
make sure that the representatives of government reflect the levels
of support in the general population. So instead instead of
(38:37):
it being like every single position is determined by a majority.
If you have a plurality, then you say, all right,
well X percentage of Congress must be made up of
this party because that reflects the American the American voters.
And then this why percentage must be of this other
(38:59):
party because that represents and then these independents also won
this amount, so they should take up these seats. But
that would be a totally different approach to government than
the way the United States is structured, and it could
get complicated. Who from where, from what? But this is
already complicated. Could I could I plug some stuff real quickly? Alright, So,
(39:19):
first off, thank you so much for having me on,
and ladies and gentlemen, uh off the Jury, I almost
said of the podcast Jury, thank you so thank you
so much for checking out this episode. If you're interested
in this. In this process, um, Jonathan and I have
looked at some other some other tech related conspiracy theories,
(39:41):
including that Sony hack, and you've been on several episodes together.
So you can find all of those in either one
of our various internet uh presences. There are videos or
podcasts or you know sometimes the mad scribblings on a
blog somewhere. Yes, yes, uh, the whispers of the whispers
(40:05):
of a a person passing you buy on a moonless
night at the crossroads. Occasionally you'll just be in the
woods and you'll hear the sound of a baby laughing.
And if you listen very carefully, just before the blair
witch gets you, you'll hear at any rate. Right, yes, uh,
that's uh, that's how we met. So there's another There
(40:27):
are another couple of things that I think would be
worth your time to check out if you're interested in
this subject that's specifically applied to uh, the U S.
Voting system and stuff they want you to know. Has
a couple of videos about this. We have one about
the Federal Election Commission, one that's a grab bag of
political conspiracies for seen, and then one thing called five
things you should know about primary elections. So do check
(40:51):
this out. They are free on the internet. Well, I
mean they're free, you know, assuming that you have an
Internet connection, right, Yeah, the content is free. The manner
of trans mission may be uh, somewhat less so depending
on whether or not you're at the local library. And
no wonder this is maybe a forward thinking question that
you know. Jonathan has another show called forward Thinking the
(41:13):
Future of voting. So go ahead and hit me. Yeah,
it's a future it's a future facing show about the
evolution of tech. Did you Did you touch on anything
about machine consciousness or artificial intelligence and voting a couple
of times. Actually, we did an episode specifically about what
it would be like to have a robot as president?
Would you ever want a future where a robot could
(41:35):
be president? Uh? The idea being that if you had
a truly impartial, artificially intelligent creature that would be able
to make choices that are the greatest benefit and the
least detriment to the population. Would you want to do that?
Or do you think humanity is absolutely essential in order
(41:55):
for you to have a leader? We did an episode
about that. We also did an episode about the future
of voting and some of the pitfalls, including things like
machine intelligence, Uh in the future. That one was not
too long ago. That that published, probably was about a
month or two ago maybe, So, Yeah, we've got some
stuff that we've talked about. I personally think that there
(42:19):
are a lot of problems we need to solve in
the immediate future that uh, some of which would would
avoid the machine learning artificial intelligence question for quite some time,
because um, like there there have been people who have asked, well,
what about the possibility of voting via the internet, the
idea being that if you could vote via in an internet,
(42:42):
you could drive up voter participation dramatically. You've you, the
more you reduce the investment required to participate, the more
people will participate. That's the idea, right, So if you
make it less of a chore to vote, more people
will vote. Because that that's one of those ongoing narratives
in the United States, right, that's such a small, relatively
(43:04):
small percentage of our population actually participates in the process,
particularly if it's not a presidential election. Yeah, I think though,
I think that people should I know this is controversial,
but I think people should be required to vote. I
think it should be part of the stuff you have
to do, and there's not there's not very much stuff
(43:25):
you have to do. Uh, if you were born here
to be a citizen's services, there's actually way more stuff
that you aren't supposed to do. Yeah, there's a much
bigger list of do not. But I think it's While
it's controversial, it's a good system to consider because then
(43:45):
we will see all of the people who for one
reason or another. We're not able to get time off
to vote. We're not able to get which is which is,
by the way, illegal. You are supposed to be your
employer is supposed to allow you the time to vote.
That's it's illegal in theory. It's a legal in theory
and practice it is much different, right, Yeah, I mean again,
(44:06):
just like we were talking about with the electronic voting machines.
Ideally it works one way. In reality it may work
a totally different way. There are countries that have compulsory voting.
Because often when you see the United States the voting numbers,
the percentage of people participating, it will be compared against
other nations and say, look, how terrible the US turnout
is compared to these countries. And then you start looking like, yeah,
(44:27):
but four of those countries you listed require everyone to vote.
So therefore, first of all, that none of them are
at a ent, so someone slacken. And secondly, that's not
fair to to hold up a country that doesn't have
compulsory voting against ones that do. Um, I don't know
that I whoever go with compulsory I kind of I
(44:48):
kind of feel you, I mean, I kind of I
want I want to see more people involved in it,
whether it's but I also don't know the reasons behind
people not voting, right, If they're not voting because there
is an uh a hardship on them in order to
(45:08):
participate in the system, It's not like I can blame them, right,
if there's some form of hardship, whether it's economic or
it's just you know, practical, like how do I get
to the voting station, whatever it may be. I have
a lot of sympathy for those people. And I even
have sympathy for people who have lost confidence in the
system and the reason they don't vote is because they
(45:28):
feel like their vote doesn't really have um an impact.
And I can certainly see, especially based upon the rhetoric
that you tend to be subjected to in the election seasons,
how you can get disillusioned and sad and therefore you're like,
I kind of just want to disappear until this is over. UM.
(45:52):
Although this every time there's an election, it's really important,
very very important, including at the local level, maybe especially
at the local level. UM. Here in the US, we
give a lot of attention to the presidential elections. Truth
to be known, your local elections are going to have
a much larger impact on your day to day life
than your national ones. Um, but obviously that's not the
(46:17):
big story. You're looking at who Who's who's sitting on
the on the throne I'm sorry in the oval office.
I'm the Royalist, so I have a little bit of
a different view on things. Um, I'm not really a royalist.
So well that that was a great discussion about it.
Obviously we got a little philosophical and um, you know,
(46:38):
I don't want anyone to base their political opinion on
anything I say. I think it's very important for you
to form your own even if I fully disagree with it,
I respect the fact that you guys have a political opinion.
So I'm not trying to sway anyone to my side. Um,
which is good because your side is crazy. My side
votes Reagan uh in this election. Yeah, he's he's he's
(47:03):
passed on and yet I write it in. Also, by
the way, you may not be able to write in
a president presidential candidate. Not all states allow it. Yeah, yeah,
that's a bummer. I think it's like forty seven states
allow it, so there's like three that do not. Something
like that. You know what probably happens somebody was screwing
around too much with what they thought was a great bit,
(47:23):
and they were like, guys, we cannot make we cannot
make the pink panther the state senator or build a cat,
or build a cat. Bloom County has run the presidential
candidacy quite a few times, right, Yeah, so, uh, maybe
it's just the joke gone wrong. But if you're in
one of the vast majority of states and you want
(47:44):
to write a vote in, then civic Seneca right as
a citizen of the United States. Some would argue your
moral responsibility depends on your on your perspective on the candidates,
I suppose, but I didn't the rate there we go
see at any rate. That's how you know it's me
when you hear that voice in the woods. Uh. Thank
(48:06):
you again Ben for being on the show. And that
wraps up this pair of classic episodes. Thank you so
much for listening. I think these are very important things
for us to be aware of, things that we need
to pay very close attention to. We can't just take
for granted that the systems that we have in place
to allow us to to participate in the democratic process
(48:29):
just work or that they just don't work. We need
to really examine them, ask questions, make ourselves accountable, and
make certain that we still have a system that people
can believe in. It's hard enough out there right now
to find representatives sometimes that actually reflect our own values.
That can be a real challenge. We don't need to
(48:51):
make it even harder by making the process one that
we feel we cannot rely upon. We need that process
to be rock solid. I hope you guys enjoyed these
classic episodes. Will be back with a new episode in
Wednesday's show, so stick around for that. And uh yeah,
I apologize for running reruns in a way, but at
(49:13):
the same time, I just felt like this is something
that we need to think about, especially in the advance
of another election year here in the United States. We
really need to pay attention to this stuff and be
active participants if we want to make any real substantive change.
All right, guys, if you want to reach out to me,
(49:33):
you can do so on Facebook or Twitter. The handle
for both of those is text stuff hs W and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My
Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
(49:54):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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