With elections around the corner and ongoing fears of Russian interference and vulnerabilities in electronic election systems, The Cipher Brief sat down with Rachel DeLevie-Orey of the Atlantic Council to discuss the current state of the U.S. election system and why election technology—when correctly implemented—is so important for actually creating more secure elections than before.
The Cipher Brief: What is the current level of technical sophistication of U.S. election technology? Are there aspects of it that are entirely digital?
Rachel DeLevie-Orey: Election technology can mean anything from an actual ballot box to things like voter registration. Online voter registration, for example, is election technology, and is expanding. Electronic voting can mean anything from voting on a touch screen in a poll booth where a paper receipt is printed, to voting online—which doesn’t exist in the U.S. right now. But it is still electronic voting even if you have a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), where the machine prints a piece of paper at the end to keep in case something goes wrong. These machines are not connected to the internet, making them a lot harder to hack.
Change in the U.S. system is difficult, particularly compared to established democracies in the rest of the world, because it’s such a decentralized system. If you look at the U.K., Brazil, and India, they have a much more centralized voting system. Alternatively, in the U.S. everything is done by states or counties, or even by jurisdiction. There are over 11,000 voting jurisdictions in the U.S. Having this degree of variability means just as many methods by which people vote.
A lot of states are also moving towards having electronic voting machines, although some are still blended. For example, in Washington, DC you go to your polling booth and you can decide whether you vote on a piece of paper where you bubble in—with pencil—who you are voting for, or you can choose to vote at one of the direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines. And then you have places like the state of Maryland, which is going backwards—after 12 years of completely electronic voting, the state is returning to paper for this election. So we don’t see the linear path that we expect of technology.
TCB: What are some of the potential pros and cons of creating digital elections systems?
RDO: Obviously ideas of security and voter fraud—and cost—are always the most prevalent concerns. And they should be, elections are the very foundation of democracy. People should be deliberate, strategic and smart when thinking about how they operate elections. That’s why we are quite a while away from being able to do any sort of mobile voting from phones or laptops, because it requires an internet connection, and so far it seems that’s not secure enough.
There is basically an understanding in Silicon Valley that the way we will vote online will be using blockchain technology—a ledger used in crypto currency exchanges like Bitcoin. But that is still quite a ways off in terms of the technological implementation and public trust in it. We are in a post-Snowden era, where people are rightfully anxious about the security of something that would be done online.
That said, these in-person, electronic booths are not connected to one another online, and therefore in order to hack them, you would have to hack each individual machine. This is the same as hacking a ballot box that is stuffed with paper, which you could stuff with more ballots, or even set on fire.
Cost is also a problem. It is expensive to purchase this type of machinery and to run the necessary voter education campaign to implement it. Technology constantly changes and these machines would only be used once a year or so. But paper is expensive too, and so is its transportation. So this is something that probably has a very high cost of transition, but ultimately becomes more sustainable and affordable in the long term.
There is clearly a movement towards electronic voting systems, and if done correctly, both security and costs could become pros. Greater speed of election is important, particularly for newer democracies—speed is crucial to the trust of the electorate. The longer it takes to report results, the more people think the results are being tampered with. In Brazil’s most recent presidential election, results were reported within 90 minutes of polls closing—in a country of 135 million voters. Speed is important for the perceived legitimacy of the election, and the perceived legitimacy is in many ways paramount.
Accuracy is also a benefit. We are aware of human error – people counting these paper ballots work late into the night, someone can get tired and miscount. We are looking at greater accuracy with technology.
TCB: What are some things the U.S. can learn from international elections that they could apply to their own election technology?
RDO: In the U.S. there is this eternal struggle between federal and state control. It is not likely that we are going to see any sort of federal election commission have the type of jurisdiction that we see in India, Mexico or Brazil. After the 2000 elections and the infamous hanging chads, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) was put together and offered financial and technical assistance for counties to update their systems. That was really useful, except is now over ten years old. We need a funded, staffed and technically capable election assistance commission to help counties modernize their systems.
There also remains a divide between Washington and Silicon Valley, where there is a certain sense among both of those communities that they don’t need one another. Governments inherently run election technology, but if you want to include technology, you also have to include the techies. If you look at India or Brazil, these countries actually manufacture their own machines; they are not working with external contractors. There is a really close, intrinsic relationship between technological development and government policies there. So I think those kind of close ties could help.
TCB: Where do you see the discussion of U.S. election technology going in the future?
RDO: In order to remain relevant, the U.S. elections are going to have to advance technologically. If not, civic participation is going to seem like something that is not meant for future generations. That is not a sustainable system – that’s not a way for democracy to thrive. That is the U.S. government shirking its responsibility to remain accessible and relevant to all of its citizens.
Ethnic demographics will also inform this because greater ease of voting—which is facilitated by election technology—can increase voter turnout, particularly for the Latino and African American communities in this country. But don’t forget that elections are political, which means you may see efforts to stem the expansion of election technology as certain political parties benefit from lower voter turnout. As election technology is intrinsically tied to voter turnout, this will not just become a policy issue, but a political issue as well.
