June 7, 2023 • 31 mins
The term “election fraud” is on the verge of making a comeback with the approach of the 2024 presidential election. Liberty Vittert and Munther Dahleh speak to MIT political scientist and MIT Election Lab director Charles Stewart to get to the bottom of modern-day election fraud. When are voting errors significant? How has voting evolved throughout American history? What effect did the COVID pandemic have on our elections? What do you need to know to be an informed voter in America?
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Episode Transcript
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Hello, and welcometo Data Nation,
a podcast from MIT's Institutefor Data Systems and Society.
I'm Liberty Vittert.
And I'm here with myco-host, Munther Dahleh,
the head of MIT's Institutefor Data Systems and Society.
In this episode, we chatwith Dr. Charles Stewart.
Charles is a distinguishedprofessor of political science
at MIT, where he hastaught since 1985,
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and a fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences.
With election chatter for2024 starting to begin,
we take a deep dive intowhat happened in 2020,
if there is any evidence ofthe election being stolen,
and how we could prevent anyupset for future elections,
including the idea of votingelectronically from home
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as technology advances.
Charles, I got to startwith the biggest question
first, which maybe isn't fair.
But I'm going to dive inwith this biggest question.
You are an expert in elections.
And we hear, everyelection cycle, about
the minor or majorinconsistencies, oversights,
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election fraud.
These are buzzwordswe hear all the time.
And is it true that this eitherfraud, intentional or accidental
errors, have a widespreadeffect on American elections?
Has there been an electionstolen in the United States?
Or could you really stealan election in our democracy
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as it is?
Well, yeah.
So that's not a big question.
That's big questions.
So let me pick itapart, and we can go
where we want to go with that.
And actually, unfortunately,I'll start as a professor.
But I think it's theimportant place to start.
Elections form twofunctions in society
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where these issues of accuracyand fraud and stealing,
mistakes, et cetera,kind of come to a head.
And the two functionsare expressive.
We, as citizens, want to expressour opinions about things
that were mad or happy.
We like this.
We don't like that.
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And we want to chooseelected officials.
And by the rules of majorityrule in this country,
we want to make sure we pick theperson who got the most votes.
And those are twodifferent things.
Voters and the peoplewho run elections
focus on different things.
So as voters, weknow, from experience
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and from the politicalscience literature,
that voters are mostlymotivated by the expressive
side of voting.
Think about Massachusetts.
We had record turnout inthe 2020 election, one
of the highest turnouts ofany state in the country,
to go vote for JoeBiden, in which there
was no question in the worldthat Joe Biden would win.
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No question about that.
So why go to votein Massachusetts?
Your vote-- one vote nevercounts anyway, on the margin.
And in Massachusetts,millions of votes
might not count on the margin.
But people go and vote.
And that's the expressivepart of voting.
And people care aboutdeeply about politics.
And we see sometimes, inAmerica, for better or worse--
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usually worse, we see inthe rest of the world--
sometimes, peoplewill give their lives
to express their politics.
Here, we get to expressour politics mostly
through the ballot box.
And that's a really importantthing in a democracy.
On the election officialside and on the legal side,
elections are waysof choosing leaders
by a particular rule, which ismost commonly the majority rule.
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And there, if youwin by one vote,
if you win by 2 millionvotes, you still win.
And so keep thosetwo things there.
You have enormouslyimpassioned people on one side.
And then you have people andall sorts of complications
in the United States tryingjust to determine who got
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more votes than somebody else.
And you can solve that problemunder most circumstances
by making some mistakesby not quite getting
it right, by lettingsome things slide,
by emphasizing one set of rulesand not another set of rules.
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And 999 times out of 1,000,you'll get the right answer even
with those mistakes.
And what I thinkwe're seeing right now
is a particularpolitical movement
at the moment that isobsessed with small errors.
And they are guaranteedto happen in any election.
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And so you take smallerrors, a particular mindset
obsessed withsmall errors that's
aligned with thepolitical party,
and you get something thatlooks not just the normal give
and take grumblingabout election returns,
but gets to be something that'sweaponized and can actually
be quite dangerous.
Short answer toyour two questions,
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yeah, there's mistakes.
Can you steal electionsin the United States?
Yes.
Elections have beenstolen, but not recently.
You want to seestolen elections,
let's think about the storiesthat are periodically told about
North Carolina in the 1890sand 1900s where there was
a coalition in North Carolinaof progressive white Democrats
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and African-Americans thatwere able to take control
of particular cities.
Legislative districtsin which there were,
at times, mobs thatwould go in and murder
and terrorize African-Americanleaders, drive them out of town,
and whites would take over thetown regardless of the election.
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So yes, there have been stolenelections in the United States.
But that's what a stolenelection in the United States
normally looks like.
There are some minorcases that come up.
There is a little townin LA County that was
discovered several years ago--
had like 23 voters.
And basically, it was a familykind of paid a bunch of people,
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and they got to run the town.
So yeah, you seethings like that.
You don't see this in largeelections, state elections,
city-wide elections.
That's really rare.
Sometimes found, butreally, really, really rare.
This is great,actually, Charles.
And I think thisdivision is illuminating.
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But let me challengethis a little bit
and say that there'sI error, which
is a natural error,whether it's actually
fraudulent or systemicerror in the process.
And then there is the actualvote that could be naturally
very close in the sense thatif you have a divided group
of people, and it's almost 50/50that we're going right and left,
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well, then this I error becomeslarger than the other one.
And so if the errormargin of winning
is within the error marginof the systemic problem,
then we have an issueof making a decision.
And this is where theconfidence of the voter
comes into the picture becausethen a small fraudulent error
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becomes a hugedeal in expressing
my opinion about the vote.
So I don't know if this isactually a reasonable concern
or not.
Well, again, I mean,there's two ways
of parsing out this questionabout a small fraudulent error.
So consider two things.
One, I think we wouldagree with-- certainly
falls within the classificationof small fraudulent error
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or actually, a small fraudulentvote, not even an error
in some ways where you getpaid to vote for somebody when
you wouldn't have votedfor them, otherwise.
Maybe you've stuffeda ballot box.
You've done thingsthat everyone would
recognize as being fraudulent.
So that's one thing.
In normal times, Idon't think anyone would
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doubt that was fraudulent.
And I would also say thatthe types of controls
we have on elections right noware geared toward discovering
those sorts of frauds.
And for better or worse--
and I think, for worse--
have in mind models of fraudthat were common in the 1880s
and 1890s.
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And in Massachusetts,in fact, we still
have some vestigesof that to this day.
The other thing thatwe're discovering
in our public opinion,research around fraud
and how peoplethink about this is
think about another caseduring a global pandemic
where citizens are eitherlocked in or discouraged
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from leaving theirhomes or discouraged
from gathering in large groups.
There's emergency legislationthat makes it easier
to vote by mail.
And a presidential candidate,for whatever reason,
begins to talk about thisis how the opposition is
going to stuff ballots.
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And now, let us say thatthe other party wins
by a small margin.
And a reasonableargument could be
made that had thisaccommodation not
been made on an emergency basis,that the other party would
have won.
Is that fraud or not?
That actually is where a lotof the argument in the United
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States right now is.
If you listen--and I don't think
we're listeningcarefully to the forces
on the right, mostly, who aresaying that elections in the US
are fraudulentbecause they're saying
many, many different things.
And about half of them,and probably the smartest,
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are saying--
actually, I heard NewtGingrich say this the other day
when he was pressedon an NPR interview
on whether Joe Biden was thelegitimate president, whether he
actually won the election.
And Gingrich said, I agree thatBiden won by the rules in place
in 2020.
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But I think the rules werechanged in an illegitimate way.
Now, I could go back andsay, OK, changed or not,
that didn't matter.
But nonetheless,that's the framing.
And that's where I think thatthe difference between what
you and I, computer scientists,somebody who hangs out
with computer scientists, howwe would think this through
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doesn't necessarily map onto how the public thinks
about these things.
Interesting.
I read something thatyou said, actually,
where you were talking aboutthe states that do only mail-in.
And there's three statesthat do all mail-in.
And as you said, ittook them decades
to get to that point ofbeing mail-in ballot places.
And so to have, all of asudden, all of these states
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go boom, we're doingmail-in ballots is
a huge amount ofour vote, that there
would be way moreerror in something
like that, given howquickly they implemented it.
Is that possible to thatframing that you just put?
Yeah.
And that's a moresophisticated way
of thinking thesethings through and, I
think, the right way ofthinking these things through.
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I think the wrong way,which we saw in 2020,
was just to say they'reletting everything happen.
But that was thenarrative that you heard
and the framing that youheard among, I would say,
serious people.
In fact, I thinkI'm a serious guy.
And in 2020, I wascautioning two things.
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And one was to point out thatit was harder than you think
to run an all mail election.
And secondly, youwant to distinguish
between what youdo in an emergency
and what you do in normal timesbecause you might be willing--
and I think we were during 2020.
There was a lot of forbearance,especially in the early part
of the pandemic,people trying to go
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about their lives and peopletrying to figure this out.
There might be mistakesand actually there
were a lot of mistakesin the primary period.
But once theemergency goes away,
then the forbearancealso goes away.
And this attention to detail washonored more in some places than
in others.
But the final thing Iwill say related to 2020
is that we were ableto work out a lot
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of the bugs in theprimary off-season
and that the general electionlearned a lot by what
happened in the primary season.
Mail-in elections arecomplex in different ways
than in-person elections.
When you increasethe complexity,
if the administrativereaction isn't sufficiently
sophisticated,then you can really
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get mistakes thatare really bad.
But if the administrativecapacity increases in parallel,
then maybe it won't be so bad.
And to the degree thatwe've measured this in 2020,
it looks like, maybecounterintuitively,
the administrative challengesmore than met the increase
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in mail in ballots.
So the places that alreadyhad a lot of mail-in ballots,
they had fewer errors.
They had fewer rejected ballots.
You just got togo down the line.
And in states that expandedout their voting by mail,
they did not go off thecharts in terms of rejections,
returned, spoiled, all sortsof things that we measured.
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They didn't have proportionalincreases in those things.
And so we know by themeasures, by talking to people,
that there was anadministrative response.
But that's an unusualadministrative response.
I mean, this was all hands ondeck for the 2020 election.
So I think in theory, yes.
You've got to worry about that.
I think in theparticular case of 2020,
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if you were to do casesthat you would say, yeah,
almost everywhere, theadministrative response
was at the appropriatelevel, and then well.
So let me piggy back on thisand also reference, I think,
an interview I heard thatyou gave at CSL a while back.
Basically, and I'mparaphrasing, you
argued for a distributedelection system.
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Basically, the idea isthat different states,
different people, differentcosts, different comfort levels,
they should have theirown system in place.
And we've got 50states and potentially,
a lot of districtswithin these states.
This adds to the complexityin terms of a viewer that
looks at the holistic system.
So how do we managethis tradeoff
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between having suchvariability, trying
to keep everythingconsistent, managing
this complexityand, at the same,
time actually working ina distributed way, which
we also know fromcomputer science,
to be an effective wayof getting the job done?
Yeah.
And let's leave COVIDout of it because that
was a big discontinuouschange that we're still
working through.
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But the historyof voting systems
and the use of thesystems has been
to basically to slowly workout technological or management
complexity.
Just take the caseof voting by mail.
It's not a coincidence that theplaces where all vote by mail
got adopted was in the Westernstates with great distances
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like Colorado.
Think about how many houses werebuilt in Colorado in the 1920s
by mailing a check toSears Roebuck in Chicago.
And they would ship a house outto you, and you would build it.
So you have a long, long historyof doing important things
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by mail.
And so if you look at theadoption of voting by mail, what
you see is a gradual--
gradually movingin that direction.
Society becomes adaptedto it, its expectations.
There's a strong autocorrelationin terms of what you did
last time, you do this time.
You become morecomfortable with it.
To the point where now, inAmerica, without disruptions,
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people feel very comfortablewith how they vote
and very uncomfortable with howother people vote because you
just kind of learn that way.
A second big movementstarting in the 1960s,
there started being greater andgreater premium on convenience,
time saving, doingthings on my own time.
And elections inthe United States
are very muchtraditionally constrained
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to one time a few hours,one day every few years.
Well, citizens started agitatingfor more flexibility, more
access to maybe mail.
I want to do thisbefore election day.
Well, out in the West, theypioneered not sending ballots
to everybody, butallowing anybody
to vote by mailif they wanted to.
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In the Southern part of thecountry where there's greater,
I would say, skepticism,ideology is less attuned
to letting 1,000 flowers bloomand letting things happen over
there and actually, maybe evena little bit of less trust
because we conservativeideologies is also associated
with less trust.
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So on the one hand, less trustby the prevailing ideologies,
but a desire to accommodatedesires for more complex voting.
Well, what theydid in the South,
they said, OK, you canvote before election day,
but you have to do it in person.
But what we see over a 20-yearperiod is a sliding of states
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from in-person election dayvoting in one of two paths.
One path is to expandout mail voting.
The other path is to expandout early in-person voting.
And one of thethings that does is
allows you to innovate graduallyand get people comfortable.
One of the ways ofcharacterizing this
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is have a regular wayof voting, and you
have a backup way of voting.
And so you justdevelop the backup way,
and you hold on to theway you've always done it.
And that becomesadministratively manageable.
Up before 2020, only one statehad roughly equal amounts
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of early in-person voting,election day voting,
and mail voting.
And that was Florida.
They were running threeelections on election day.
Everybody else wasbasically running two.
And by and large, therewere controversies
about elections in states.
But they were usually not aboutelection day voting versus mail,
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et cetera.
They were more likevoter ID and access
to being able to vote at all.
They weren't thesesorts of where
do you vote, and do we trustthat the right people are
voting, and that sort of thing.
And so I think thatthe disruption,
the technological, innovativedisruption that was COVID,
forced many states thatused to run two elections,
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to run three elections.
And the thing is aboutrunning an election is
that when you, in thepast, have been running
a mail and an electionday operation,
well, if you're going to addan in-person early voting
component, thesefirst two components,
you can't give them up.
You've got to keep them goingpretty much at the same level
as you did before.
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And now, you'readding something else
in an environment in whichelections are considered to be
underfunded to begin with.
In a normal time, youwould have liked the states
to innovate more slowlybecause the trust of voters
comes from seeing the regularthing happen all the time
and for innovation to be slow.
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The accuracy of the processcomes from election officials
to be able to adaptincrementally on the side.
And when you get massivedisruptions, then
administratively,you have problems.
And you naturally shouldbe asking questions
about the ability ofthe system to adapt.
And then if you haveother political reasons
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to mix the pot a bit, thenyou can get into the situation
that we're in right now.
Charles, I can't help butnote two of the things
you discussedabout how different
ideologies tend to leanone way or the other
on what they may think isfraud or what issue they choose
to harp on, or how if there'spolitical motivations,
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they can kind of stir the pot.
And just as I've heard somepeople talking about the 2020
election being stolen, I'vealso heard the other side talk
about the 2000election being stolen.
And is theresomething more to it
than just, oh, myguy didn't win,
so I'm going to say theelection was stolen?
Is there sort of an analysison why one ideology says
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mail-in voting is badand another ideology says
something else is bad?
You mentioned trust.
Is there an analysis of that, ofwhy really, besides just my guy
didn't win?
Yeah, I mean, there is.
And actually, I'm doingsome of that research.
So in terms of the historicmarkers that you're laying out,
2000 versus 2020, thefirst thing I would say
is there was the 2000 election.
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And then there was the 2004election where, in Ohio, there
was a controversy in Ohio.
And a bunch of Democratsclaim that Diebold had stolen
the election for Bush in 2004.
So there wereprecursors back then.
I classify that in termsof traditional, what we
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political scientists callwinners and losers effects.
And there are winners andlosers effects among the voters.
And there's winners and loserseffects among candidates.
And this has been noted goingback into the 1960s where,
for instance, candidateswhen they win,
they take all the credit.
And when they lose, theyblame somebody else.
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And their followers who don'tknow anything about, really,
the details of electionadministrations,
they cue off of whattheir admired and trusted
political leaders say.
So you get these kind of thingsthat we just by following
politics in the United States.
You get these stories.
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Oh, in Chicago, theyhave dead people voting.
And just kind of the thingsthat get to be said and people
understand this.
And some people in some placeslike in Illinois, people
downstate continueto hold grudges
whenever the Democrats would winbecause, well, maybe that was
because of fraud up in Chicago,even after Chicago had cleaned
up pretty much everything.
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So that's kind of normalpolitics in the United States.
And that goes backto the founding.
And I suspect that's a commonpart of politics everywhere
in democratic nations.
You kind of grumbleabout losing.
You have storiesabout why you lose.
And you particularlyhave stories
why you lose there because ofsomebody else doing something.
2020, there's a coupleof differences here.
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One is I would just note thatin 2004, when Democrats in Ohio
said that Diebold stolethe election for Bush,
you didn't have Democratsstorming the Capitol
building in Columbus.
So there's a degreeof anger that
has been added tothe current debate.
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Where does that anger come from?
And that's where some ofthe research that I'm doing
is beginning to dip into.
The best we can tell rightnow-- the running hypothesis
is that there arepsychological movements
that we see that havearisen alongside of populism
in the United States.
Christian nationalismis one of them.
The great replacementtheory or conspiracy,
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which we're seeinga lot of in Europe,
is coming to the US,the QAnon conspiracy.
These sorts of conspiracies,which, altogether, energize
people who believethat there once
was a white Christiannation that's
being overthrown bynon-Christians and non-whites.
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And so it's not just that,ah, these white Democrats
are beating up on thesewhite Republicans.
In the view of some people--
and I very quickly say this isnot the majority of Republicans.
But there are people alignedwith the Republican Party
who are terrifiedthat they are living
through a moment inwhich, if not them,
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then their childrenwill be imperiled
because of this movement.
And it's that dynamic,I think, that's
changing how all of us whowork in this area do our work
and change the sorts of thingswe're doing research in.
And it matters, bythe way, finally,
to understand thesemovements, because we
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do want to assurepeople who can be
assured that the electionsare honest and not fraudulent.
And until we understand thesenew currents of public opinion,
we're not going to understandwho can be convinced,
who can't beconvinced, and what are
going to be the convincingarguments and methods.
This is trulyfascinating, Charles.
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But I do want to maybe takeit a slightly different angle
and just concludein a different note.
And that is, in allthe conversation
about evolving theelections, we're
changing things incrementally.
And the verificationprocess is complex.
And as we introducea new system,
a new thing popsup and so forth.
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But at the same time, technologyhas evolved so rapidly,
we run millions offinancial transactions a day
without even peopleunderstanding that plumbing
system and how it works.
And we trust thefact that we're going
to have our money inthe bank tomorrow,
that no one hasactually taken them.
There's probably an evolvingprivate encryption system
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that can help us run an electionin a completely different way,
transformative way.
So why aren't we there?
Why are we thinking ofthe incremental ways
that we have adopted frommore than a century ago?
Well, I mean, thefirst thing, I think,
is we should be askingyour colleagues in computer
science why that is because theloudest voices and the greatest
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skeptics, up untilvery, very recently,
like the last couple of months,were the computer science
community and someof them at MIT
who have been leaders in this.
What they tellme-- again, I'm not
going to pretend to bea political scientist.
But the secret ballotends up being the problem.
And it's the adherence to asacrosanct secret ballot that,
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in their view,means that you need
something independent ofthe technology in order
to verify at some point, thatthe technology had operated
properly.
And practicallyspeaking, that kind
of folk technology that endsup being the ground truth
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is a piece of paper.
Here's a problem I'vebeen having conversations
with election officials for thelast couple of days about this.
There are cryptographicschemes that one
can adopt to make greateruse of either technology
or the informationavailable in the vote.
There are new methods ofauditing statistical techniques
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that were actually adoptedduring the first and Second
World War for qualitycontrol that you could adopt
into elections so that you couldverify that the vote was right,
not by recountingthousands of ballots
but maybe under certaincircumstances, counting 15,
doing widespreadverification very cheaply.
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There's new ways of doing this.
But all of these new waysinvolve greater complexity
that is hard to explain to mygrandmother if she were still
alive or to the regularelection official.
So there's the matter of inelections, two things then.
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One is that we're told thatwe can't trust the technology.
We need a backup in paper.
Let's now think aboutthe better technology.
In order to get it accepted,you need a very high level
of literacy in thislevel to gain trust.
And my observation isthat level of literacy
is higher than youwould ever expect
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a regular citizen to have ifthey weren't running a computer
system.
And I think that'sthe challenge.
I'm hoping we can work on that.
The auditingtechniques are the area
where I think that there'sthe greater opportunities.
There's also greateropportunities in, I would say,
overseas voting fortechnological developments
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because right now,think about this.
So yes, there are concernsabout computers and networks,
et cetera, and voting remotely.
We can't verify that thevoter is who the voter is.
The voter can'tverify definitively
that the vote is actually goingto the election department.
And neither side canverify definitively
that there's not aman in the middle.
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So that's the basicproblem over there.
But right now, inthe United States,
there's a federallaw which states,
if you are an overseasvoter, your state
has to accept from you anemailed or faxed ballot.
Well, you want to talk about--
OK.
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And this is where I've triedto engage the computer science
skeptics.
OK, yes.
Let's take as given yourskepticism about this normally.
But right now, there are peopletransmitting, in the open,
ballots from overseas.
And there are efforts touse cryptographic techniques
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and others that probably getyou 99.9% of the way there.
And why isn't thata better solution
than a fax machine or an email?
And so I think if there'sgoing to be developments--
and there alreadyare developments.
West Virginia is usinga computerized system
for their overseas voters.
So I think that'swhere it's going to be.
But as my friend,Ron Rivest, keeps
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arguing that the electionsindustry is a small industry.
And in his view--
I don't want to put wordsin his mouth, but I will.
This cryptographicproblem in elections
is the hardestproblem he knows of.
And it's not going tobe the small elections
industry that solves it.
It's probably going to besomebody else who solves it.
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And if it's solvedin another industry,
then there's hopefor it in elections.
Thank you for listening to thismonth's episode of Data Nation.
You can get more informationand listen to previous episodes
at our website,idss.mit.edu, or follow us
on Twitter andInstagram @mitidss.
(30:44):
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Thanks for listeningto Data Nation
from the MIT Institute ofData Systems and Society.
(00:08):
Hello, and welcometo Data Nation,
a podcast from MIT's Institutefor Data Systems and Society.
I'm Liberty Vittert.
And I'm here with myco-host, Munther Dahleh,
the head of MIT's Institutefor Data Systems and Society.
In this episode, we chatwith Dr. Charles Stewart.
Charles is a distinguishedprofessor of political science
at MIT, where he hastaught since 1985,
(00:30):
and a fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences.
With election chatter for2024 starting to begin,
we take a deep dive intowhat happened in 2020,
if there is any evidence ofthe election being stolen,
and how we could prevent anyupset for future elections,
including the idea of votingelectronically from home
(00:53):
as technology advances.
Charles, I got to startwith the biggest question
first, which maybe isn't fair.
But I'm going to dive inwith this biggest question.
You are an expert in elections.
And we hear, everyelection cycle, about
the minor or majorinconsistencies, oversights,
(01:14):
election fraud.
These are buzzwordswe hear all the time.
And is it true that this eitherfraud, intentional or accidental
errors, have a widespreadeffect on American elections?
Has there been an electionstolen in the United States?
Or could you really stealan election in our democracy
(01:35):
as it is?
Well, yeah.
So that's not a big question.
That's big questions.
So let me pick itapart, and we can go
where we want to go with that.
And actually, unfortunately,I'll start as a professor.
But I think it's theimportant place to start.
Elections form twofunctions in society
(01:57):
where these issues of accuracyand fraud and stealing,
mistakes, et cetera,kind of come to a head.
And the two functionsare expressive.
We, as citizens, want to expressour opinions about things
that were mad or happy.
We like this.
We don't like that.
(02:18):
And we want to chooseelected officials.
And by the rules of majorityrule in this country,
we want to make sure we pick theperson who got the most votes.
And those are twodifferent things.
Voters and the peoplewho run elections
focus on different things.
So as voters, weknow, from experience
(02:38):
and from the politicalscience literature,
that voters are mostlymotivated by the expressive
side of voting.
Think about Massachusetts.
We had record turnout inthe 2020 election, one
of the highest turnouts ofany state in the country,
to go vote for JoeBiden, in which there
was no question in the worldthat Joe Biden would win.
(02:59):
No question about that.
So why go to votein Massachusetts?
Your vote-- one vote nevercounts anyway, on the margin.
And in Massachusetts,millions of votes
might not count on the margin.
But people go and vote.
And that's the expressivepart of voting.
And people care aboutdeeply about politics.
And we see sometimes, inAmerica, for better or worse--
(03:19):
usually worse, we see inthe rest of the world--
sometimes, peoplewill give their lives
to express their politics.
Here, we get to expressour politics mostly
through the ballot box.
And that's a really importantthing in a democracy.
On the election officialside and on the legal side,
elections are waysof choosing leaders
by a particular rule, which ismost commonly the majority rule.
(03:41):
And there, if youwin by one vote,
if you win by 2 millionvotes, you still win.
And so keep thosetwo things there.
You have enormouslyimpassioned people on one side.
And then you have people andall sorts of complications
in the United States tryingjust to determine who got
(04:04):
more votes than somebody else.
And you can solve that problemunder most circumstances
by making some mistakesby not quite getting
it right, by lettingsome things slide,
by emphasizing one set of rulesand not another set of rules.
(04:27):
And 999 times out of 1,000,you'll get the right answer even
with those mistakes.
And what I thinkwe're seeing right now
is a particularpolitical movement
at the moment that isobsessed with small errors.
And they are guaranteedto happen in any election.
(04:48):
And so you take smallerrors, a particular mindset
obsessed withsmall errors that's
aligned with thepolitical party,
and you get something thatlooks not just the normal give
and take grumblingabout election returns,
but gets to be something that'sweaponized and can actually
be quite dangerous.
Short answer toyour two questions,
(05:09):
yeah, there's mistakes.
Can you steal electionsin the United States?
Yes.
Elections have beenstolen, but not recently.
You want to seestolen elections,
let's think about the storiesthat are periodically told about
North Carolina in the 1890sand 1900s where there was
a coalition in North Carolinaof progressive white Democrats
(05:31):
and African-Americans thatwere able to take control
of particular cities.
Legislative districtsin which there were,
at times, mobs thatwould go in and murder
and terrorize African-Americanleaders, drive them out of town,
and whites would take over thetown regardless of the election.
(05:52):
So yes, there have been stolenelections in the United States.
But that's what a stolenelection in the United States
normally looks like.
There are some minorcases that come up.
There is a little townin LA County that was
discovered several years ago--
had like 23 voters.
And basically, it was a familykind of paid a bunch of people,
(06:14):
and they got to run the town.
So yeah, you seethings like that.
You don't see this in largeelections, state elections,
city-wide elections.
That's really rare.
Sometimes found, butreally, really, really rare.
This is great,actually, Charles.
And I think thisdivision is illuminating.
(06:34):
But let me challengethis a little bit
and say that there'sI error, which
is a natural error,whether it's actually
fraudulent or systemicerror in the process.
And then there is the actualvote that could be naturally
very close in the sense thatif you have a divided group
of people, and it's almost 50/50that we're going right and left,
(06:57):
well, then this I error becomeslarger than the other one.
And so if the errormargin of winning
is within the error marginof the systemic problem,
then we have an issueof making a decision.
And this is where theconfidence of the voter
comes into the picture becausethen a small fraudulent error
(07:19):
becomes a hugedeal in expressing
my opinion about the vote.
So I don't know if this isactually a reasonable concern
or not.
Well, again, I mean,there's two ways
of parsing out this questionabout a small fraudulent error.
So consider two things.
One, I think we wouldagree with-- certainly
falls within the classificationof small fraudulent error
(07:40):
or actually, a small fraudulentvote, not even an error
in some ways where you getpaid to vote for somebody when
you wouldn't have votedfor them, otherwise.
Maybe you've stuffeda ballot box.
You've done thingsthat everyone would
recognize as being fraudulent.
So that's one thing.
In normal times, Idon't think anyone would
(08:01):
doubt that was fraudulent.
And I would also say thatthe types of controls
we have on elections right noware geared toward discovering
those sorts of frauds.
And for better or worse--
and I think, for worse--
have in mind models of fraudthat were common in the 1880s
and 1890s.
(08:23):
And in Massachusetts,in fact, we still
have some vestigesof that to this day.
The other thing thatwe're discovering
in our public opinion,research around fraud
and how peoplethink about this is
think about another caseduring a global pandemic
where citizens are eitherlocked in or discouraged
(08:46):
from leaving theirhomes or discouraged
from gathering in large groups.
There's emergency legislationthat makes it easier
to vote by mail.
And a presidential candidate,for whatever reason,
begins to talk about thisis how the opposition is
going to stuff ballots.
(09:07):
And now, let us say thatthe other party wins
by a small margin.
And a reasonableargument could be
made that had thisaccommodation not
been made on an emergency basis,that the other party would
have won.
Is that fraud or not?
That actually is where a lotof the argument in the United
(09:28):
States right now is.
If you listen--and I don't think
we're listeningcarefully to the forces
on the right, mostly, who aresaying that elections in the US
are fraudulentbecause they're saying
many, many different things.
And about half of them,and probably the smartest,
(09:49):
are saying--
actually, I heard NewtGingrich say this the other day
when he was pressedon an NPR interview
on whether Joe Biden was thelegitimate president, whether he
actually won the election.
And Gingrich said, I agree thatBiden won by the rules in place
in 2020.
(10:10):
But I think the rules werechanged in an illegitimate way.
Now, I could go back andsay, OK, changed or not,
that didn't matter.
But nonetheless,that's the framing.
And that's where I think thatthe difference between what
you and I, computer scientists,somebody who hangs out
with computer scientists, howwe would think this through
(10:30):
doesn't necessarily map onto how the public thinks
about these things.
Interesting.
I read something thatyou said, actually,
where you were talking aboutthe states that do only mail-in.
And there's three statesthat do all mail-in.
And as you said, ittook them decades
to get to that point ofbeing mail-in ballot places.
And so to have, all of asudden, all of these states
(10:52):
go boom, we're doingmail-in ballots is
a huge amount ofour vote, that there
would be way moreerror in something
like that, given howquickly they implemented it.
Is that possible to thatframing that you just put?
Yeah.
And that's a moresophisticated way
of thinking thesethings through and, I
think, the right way ofthinking these things through.
(11:13):
I think the wrong way,which we saw in 2020,
was just to say they'reletting everything happen.
But that was thenarrative that you heard
and the framing that youheard among, I would say,
serious people.
In fact, I thinkI'm a serious guy.
And in 2020, I wascautioning two things.
(11:36):
And one was to point out thatit was harder than you think
to run an all mail election.
And secondly, youwant to distinguish
between what youdo in an emergency
and what you do in normal timesbecause you might be willing--
and I think we were during 2020.
There was a lot of forbearance,especially in the early part
of the pandemic,people trying to go
(11:58):
about their lives and peopletrying to figure this out.
There might be mistakesand actually there
were a lot of mistakesin the primary period.
But once theemergency goes away,
then the forbearancealso goes away.
And this attention to detail washonored more in some places than
in others.
But the final thing Iwill say related to 2020
is that we were ableto work out a lot
(12:22):
of the bugs in theprimary off-season
and that the general electionlearned a lot by what
happened in the primary season.
Mail-in elections arecomplex in different ways
than in-person elections.
When you increasethe complexity,
if the administrativereaction isn't sufficiently
sophisticated,then you can really
(12:44):
get mistakes thatare really bad.
But if the administrativecapacity increases in parallel,
then maybe it won't be so bad.
And to the degree thatwe've measured this in 2020,
it looks like, maybecounterintuitively,
the administrative challengesmore than met the increase
(13:04):
in mail in ballots.
So the places that alreadyhad a lot of mail-in ballots,
they had fewer errors.
They had fewer rejected ballots.
You just got togo down the line.
And in states that expandedout their voting by mail,
they did not go off thecharts in terms of rejections,
returned, spoiled, all sortsof things that we measured.
(13:27):
They didn't have proportionalincreases in those things.
And so we know by themeasures, by talking to people,
that there was anadministrative response.
But that's an unusualadministrative response.
I mean, this was all hands ondeck for the 2020 election.
So I think in theory, yes.
You've got to worry about that.
I think in theparticular case of 2020,
(13:47):
if you were to do casesthat you would say, yeah,
almost everywhere, theadministrative response
was at the appropriatelevel, and then well.
So let me piggy back on thisand also reference, I think,
an interview I heard thatyou gave at CSL a while back.
Basically, and I'mparaphrasing, you
argued for a distributedelection system.
(14:10):
Basically, the idea isthat different states,
different people, differentcosts, different comfort levels,
they should have theirown system in place.
And we've got 50states and potentially,
a lot of districtswithin these states.
This adds to the complexityin terms of a viewer that
looks at the holistic system.
So how do we managethis tradeoff
(14:31):
between having suchvariability, trying
to keep everythingconsistent, managing
this complexityand, at the same,
time actually working ina distributed way, which
we also know fromcomputer science,
to be an effective wayof getting the job done?
Yeah.
And let's leave COVIDout of it because that
was a big discontinuouschange that we're still
working through.
(14:52):
But the historyof voting systems
and the use of thesystems has been
to basically to slowly workout technological or management
complexity.
Just take the caseof voting by mail.
It's not a coincidence that theplaces where all vote by mail
got adopted was in the Westernstates with great distances
(15:14):
like Colorado.
Think about how many houses werebuilt in Colorado in the 1920s
by mailing a check toSears Roebuck in Chicago.
And they would ship a house outto you, and you would build it.
So you have a long, long historyof doing important things
(15:36):
by mail.
And so if you look at theadoption of voting by mail, what
you see is a gradual--
gradually movingin that direction.
Society becomes adaptedto it, its expectations.
There's a strong autocorrelationin terms of what you did
last time, you do this time.
You become morecomfortable with it.
To the point where now, inAmerica, without disruptions,
(15:59):
people feel very comfortablewith how they vote
and very uncomfortable with howother people vote because you
just kind of learn that way.
A second big movementstarting in the 1960s,
there started being greater andgreater premium on convenience,
time saving, doingthings on my own time.
And elections inthe United States
are very muchtraditionally constrained
(16:20):
to one time a few hours,one day every few years.
Well, citizens started agitatingfor more flexibility, more
access to maybe mail.
I want to do thisbefore election day.
Well, out in the West, theypioneered not sending ballots
to everybody, butallowing anybody
to vote by mailif they wanted to.
(16:40):
In the Southern part of thecountry where there's greater,
I would say, skepticism,ideology is less attuned
to letting 1,000 flowers bloomand letting things happen over
there and actually, maybe evena little bit of less trust
because we conservativeideologies is also associated
with less trust.
(17:01):
So on the one hand, less trustby the prevailing ideologies,
but a desire to accommodatedesires for more complex voting.
Well, what theydid in the South,
they said, OK, you canvote before election day,
but you have to do it in person.
But what we see over a 20-yearperiod is a sliding of states
(17:22):
from in-person election dayvoting in one of two paths.
One path is to expandout mail voting.
The other path is to expandout early in-person voting.
And one of thethings that does is
allows you to innovate graduallyand get people comfortable.
One of the ways ofcharacterizing this
(17:43):
is have a regular wayof voting, and you
have a backup way of voting.
And so you justdevelop the backup way,
and you hold on to theway you've always done it.
And that becomesadministratively manageable.
Up before 2020, only one statehad roughly equal amounts
(18:05):
of early in-person voting,election day voting,
and mail voting.
And that was Florida.
They were running threeelections on election day.
Everybody else wasbasically running two.
And by and large, therewere controversies
about elections in states.
But they were usually not aboutelection day voting versus mail,
(18:26):
et cetera.
They were more likevoter ID and access
to being able to vote at all.
They weren't thesesorts of where
do you vote, and do we trustthat the right people are
voting, and that sort of thing.
And so I think thatthe disruption,
the technological, innovativedisruption that was COVID,
forced many states thatused to run two elections,
(18:50):
to run three elections.
And the thing is aboutrunning an election is
that when you, in thepast, have been running
a mail and an electionday operation,
well, if you're going to addan in-person early voting
component, thesefirst two components,
you can't give them up.
You've got to keep them goingpretty much at the same level
as you did before.
(19:11):
And now, you'readding something else
in an environment in whichelections are considered to be
underfunded to begin with.
In a normal time, youwould have liked the states
to innovate more slowlybecause the trust of voters
comes from seeing the regularthing happen all the time
and for innovation to be slow.
(19:32):
The accuracy of the processcomes from election officials
to be able to adaptincrementally on the side.
And when you get massivedisruptions, then
administratively,you have problems.
And you naturally shouldbe asking questions
about the ability ofthe system to adapt.
And then if you haveother political reasons
(19:53):
to mix the pot a bit, thenyou can get into the situation
that we're in right now.
Charles, I can't help butnote two of the things
you discussedabout how different
ideologies tend to leanone way or the other
on what they may think isfraud or what issue they choose
to harp on, or how if there'spolitical motivations,
(20:14):
they can kind of stir the pot.
And just as I've heard somepeople talking about the 2020
election being stolen, I'vealso heard the other side talk
about the 2000election being stolen.
And is theresomething more to it
than just, oh, myguy didn't win,
so I'm going to say theelection was stolen?
Is there sort of an analysison why one ideology says
(20:36):
mail-in voting is badand another ideology says
something else is bad?
You mentioned trust.
Is there an analysis of that, ofwhy really, besides just my guy
didn't win?
Yeah, I mean, there is.
And actually, I'm doingsome of that research.
So in terms of the historicmarkers that you're laying out,
2000 versus 2020, thefirst thing I would say
is there was the 2000 election.
(20:57):
And then there was the 2004election where, in Ohio, there
was a controversy in Ohio.
And a bunch of Democratsclaim that Diebold had stolen
the election for Bush in 2004.
So there wereprecursors back then.
I classify that in termsof traditional, what we
(21:17):
political scientists callwinners and losers effects.
And there are winners andlosers effects among the voters.
And there's winners and loserseffects among candidates.
And this has been noted goingback into the 1960s where,
for instance, candidateswhen they win,
they take all the credit.
And when they lose, theyblame somebody else.
(21:39):
And their followers who don'tknow anything about, really,
the details of electionadministrations,
they cue off of whattheir admired and trusted
political leaders say.
So you get these kind of thingsthat we just by following
politics in the United States.
You get these stories.
(21:59):
Oh, in Chicago, theyhave dead people voting.
And just kind of the thingsthat get to be said and people
understand this.
And some people in some placeslike in Illinois, people
downstate continueto hold grudges
whenever the Democrats would winbecause, well, maybe that was
because of fraud up in Chicago,even after Chicago had cleaned
up pretty much everything.
(22:20):
So that's kind of normalpolitics in the United States.
And that goes backto the founding.
And I suspect that's a commonpart of politics everywhere
in democratic nations.
You kind of grumbleabout losing.
You have storiesabout why you lose.
And you particularlyhave stories
why you lose there because ofsomebody else doing something.
2020, there's a coupleof differences here.
(22:42):
One is I would just note thatin 2004, when Democrats in Ohio
said that Diebold stolethe election for Bush,
you didn't have Democratsstorming the Capitol
building in Columbus.
So there's a degreeof anger that
has been added tothe current debate.
(23:04):
Where does that anger come from?
And that's where some ofthe research that I'm doing
is beginning to dip into.
The best we can tell rightnow-- the running hypothesis
is that there arepsychological movements
that we see that havearisen alongside of populism
in the United States.
Christian nationalismis one of them.
The great replacementtheory or conspiracy,
(23:26):
which we're seeinga lot of in Europe,
is coming to the US,the QAnon conspiracy.
These sorts of conspiracies,which, altogether, energize
people who believethat there once
was a white Christiannation that's
being overthrown bynon-Christians and non-whites.
(23:48):
And so it's not just that,ah, these white Democrats
are beating up on thesewhite Republicans.
In the view of some people--
and I very quickly say this isnot the majority of Republicans.
But there are people alignedwith the Republican Party
who are terrifiedthat they are living
through a moment inwhich, if not them,
(24:11):
then their childrenwill be imperiled
because of this movement.
And it's that dynamic,I think, that's
changing how all of us whowork in this area do our work
and change the sorts of thingswe're doing research in.
And it matters, bythe way, finally,
to understand thesemovements, because we
(24:33):
do want to assurepeople who can be
assured that the electionsare honest and not fraudulent.
And until we understand thesenew currents of public opinion,
we're not going to understandwho can be convinced,
who can't beconvinced, and what are
going to be the convincingarguments and methods.
This is trulyfascinating, Charles.
(24:54):
But I do want to maybe takeit a slightly different angle
and just concludein a different note.
And that is, in allthe conversation
about evolving theelections, we're
changing things incrementally.
And the verificationprocess is complex.
And as we introducea new system,
a new thing popsup and so forth.
(25:14):
But at the same time, technologyhas evolved so rapidly,
we run millions offinancial transactions a day
without even peopleunderstanding that plumbing
system and how it works.
And we trust thefact that we're going
to have our money inthe bank tomorrow,
that no one hasactually taken them.
There's probably an evolvingprivate encryption system
(25:36):
that can help us run an electionin a completely different way,
transformative way.
So why aren't we there?
Why are we thinking ofthe incremental ways
that we have adopted frommore than a century ago?
Well, I mean, thefirst thing, I think,
is we should be askingyour colleagues in computer
science why that is because theloudest voices and the greatest
(26:00):
skeptics, up untilvery, very recently,
like the last couple of months,were the computer science
community and someof them at MIT
who have been leaders in this.
What they tellme-- again, I'm not
going to pretend to bea political scientist.
But the secret ballotends up being the problem.
And it's the adherence to asacrosanct secret ballot that,
(26:25):
in their view,means that you need
something independent ofthe technology in order
to verify at some point, thatthe technology had operated
properly.
And practicallyspeaking, that kind
of folk technology that endsup being the ground truth
(26:46):
is a piece of paper.
Here's a problem I'vebeen having conversations
with election officials for thelast couple of days about this.
There are cryptographicschemes that one
can adopt to make greateruse of either technology
or the informationavailable in the vote.
There are new methods ofauditing statistical techniques
(27:08):
that were actually adoptedduring the first and Second
World War for qualitycontrol that you could adopt
into elections so that you couldverify that the vote was right,
not by recountingthousands of ballots
but maybe under certaincircumstances, counting 15,
doing widespreadverification very cheaply.
(27:29):
There's new ways of doing this.
But all of these new waysinvolve greater complexity
that is hard to explain to mygrandmother if she were still
alive or to the regularelection official.
So there's the matter of inelections, two things then.
(27:50):
One is that we're told thatwe can't trust the technology.
We need a backup in paper.
Let's now think aboutthe better technology.
In order to get it accepted,you need a very high level
of literacy in thislevel to gain trust.
And my observation isthat level of literacy
is higher than youwould ever expect
(28:13):
a regular citizen to have ifthey weren't running a computer
system.
And I think that'sthe challenge.
I'm hoping we can work on that.
The auditingtechniques are the area
where I think that there'sthe greater opportunities.
There's also greateropportunities in, I would say,
overseas voting fortechnological developments
(28:35):
because right now,think about this.
So yes, there are concernsabout computers and networks,
et cetera, and voting remotely.
We can't verify that thevoter is who the voter is.
The voter can'tverify definitively
that the vote is actually goingto the election department.
And neither side canverify definitively
that there's not aman in the middle.
(28:56):
So that's the basicproblem over there.
But right now, inthe United States,
there's a federallaw which states,
if you are an overseasvoter, your state
has to accept from you anemailed or faxed ballot.
Well, you want to talk about--
OK.
(29:17):
And this is where I've triedto engage the computer science
skeptics.
OK, yes.
Let's take as given yourskepticism about this normally.
But right now, there are peopletransmitting, in the open,
ballots from overseas.
And there are efforts touse cryptographic techniques
(29:38):
and others that probably getyou 99.9% of the way there.
And why isn't thata better solution
than a fax machine or an email?
And so I think if there'sgoing to be developments--
and there alreadyare developments.
West Virginia is usinga computerized system
for their overseas voters.
So I think that'swhere it's going to be.
But as my friend,Ron Rivest, keeps
(30:00):
arguing that the electionsindustry is a small industry.
And in his view--
I don't want to put wordsin his mouth, but I will.
This cryptographicproblem in elections
is the hardestproblem he knows of.
And it's not going tobe the small elections
industry that solves it.
It's probably going to besomebody else who solves it.
(30:20):
And if it's solvedin another industry,
then there's hopefor it in elections.
Thank you for listening to thismonth's episode of Data Nation.
You can get more informationand listen to previous episodes
at our website,idss.mit.edu, or follow us
on Twitter andInstagram @mitidss.
(30:44):
If you liked thispodcast, don't forget
to leave us a reviewon Spotify, Apple,
or wherever youget your podcasts.
Thanks for listeningto Data Nation
from the MIT Institute ofData Systems and Society.
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