Transcripts For CSPAN3 Georgetown Law Discussion On Digital

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Georgetown Law Discussion On Digital Technologies Voting 20240713

Hi, welcome. So im mac, a professor here at georgetown, in the law school and Computer Science department. I welcome you to our after lunch panel. Thank you for sticking around. On Digital Technologies and coding. We have on our panel who i will introduce very briefly, four very distinguished experts at various parts of the digital elections landscape, and the technology and the risks of some of the Underlying Technology that is inherent there. And well be talking about this subject for, from a very wide range of different perspectives, but all with a very technological bias. So im going to very briefly introduce these people and i want to apologize now for being extremely incomplete in my introductions because they would take up the entire panel. Andrew appel is a profess her of Computer Science at princeton, where he served since 1986, and in fact, he was one of the members of my Doctoral Committee at princeton. His research focuses on software verification, security programming languages, and technology policy, and in the case of the latter, particularly with a focus on Election Technology, and Voting Systems. The next, on our panel, is kim zetter who is an Award Winning journalist who was covered Cyber Security and National Security since 1999. She has been on the staff of wired magazine for over a decade. And had written about tech and security for publication for instance in the new york times, politico, the Washington Post, and many others, she is also the author of would it serve absolutely the best book on the stuck net virus and everyone should run out and buy it and read it. Philip stark is a professor in the department of statistics at uc berkeley. His work has influenced many aspects of Public Policy from the u. S. Census to credit risk modeling, and so forth. Its a huge range of incredibly influential and important work that he has done. Most relevantly to us, his message for auditing for Election Outcomes, his method for auditing Election Outcomes are largely recognized as the standard for liable election tasks to make use of technology, something you will be hearing about quite a bit during our panel. And then finally, Barbara Simmons is chair of the board of verified voting. Shes a Computer Scientist whose work has been at the intersection of technology and policy for as long as i can remember. She is a former president of the association, and she was one of the first voices to look at the risks of the use of technology in votesing systems. And again, ive not done justice to any of these people, but im sure they will introduce themselves as well. So im going to just briefly introduce our panel an kind of frame some of what were talking about here. Technology is all over our elections. We have Voting Systems which are probably the most prominent and the most highly visible part of elections. In particular, the technology in Voting Systems can sometimes be essential for the integrity of the ballot itself, for the integrity of the vote count and so forth. Voting systems are probably the main subject of the help america vote act. And there are obviously quite important, theyre obviously quite prominent, theyre targeted by corrupt candidates and their supporter, who have the aim of altering the official outcome of elections. So the risks are quite serious in Voting Systems, the integrity issues are quite important. But thats not the only place that technology exists in election systems. We also have the election management infrastructure. This is less visible. Its less standardized. It tends to be built and maintained by individual counties and its dependent upon the logistics of elections includingth registration of voters and the voting books to check voters in to determine whether they are allowed to obtain ballots in the first place. These systems as well are exposed to risks and to the attention of hostile actor, particularly hostile state actors who may not be seeking to choose the outcome of an election so much as disrupt the election or cast doubt on the length macy of its outcome. And these systems are much larger and more exposed than the Voting Systems that we tend to focus on. So the issues in technology and Election Integrity are vast, and we will be touching on them quite a bit. I think this all starts with a photo. If you recognize this photo, that dates to you some extent, as having been around at the turn of century. Who recognizes this photo . This is of course the recount of the 2000 president ial election in florida, and this photo and variants of it show, you know, somebody applying scrutiny to a piece of cardboard that was used to express the voters choice during the election. And this photo is interesting, because we all know it because it was on the news and in the newspaper pretty much every day for over a month, as the example of how terrible things were in the florida election. This is a national embarrassment. And we have to do something to make sure that this never happens again. And i think its interesting that this photo has almost inverted in its meaning, in the two decades since, as also a look at the 2000 election, that a human being could look at a physical artifact and make a judgment about what the voter may have intended, and we may agree or disagree about but we can at least get closer to the truth by examining this. So where does this come from . And it came in fact from a Technology Failure in the voting equipment that was used that did not itself actually involve computers or even electricity in the voting booth. This was the voting machine that produced those ballots, it is a voteomattic, and the technology involves taking a perforated punch card, inserting it in the top of the, and making your choice among a column of hole positions, using a stylus, by punching through the ballot. And that would have been produced, a punch card, that could be put into an electronic calculator, and the vote tallied according to what hole positions had been punched out. The interesting thing about this is that the only electricity even involved in the voting booth itself is for the lights in the room. This is a completely mechanical device. And yet it had a failure rate, which a Computer Science would recognize probably as a garbage collection failure, in that the, as more voters than usual showed up for the voting, for voting, eventually, the little pieces of cardboard that were punched out from the more popular candidates would back up behind the position where the ballot was to be punched out. And as the day would wear on, in a hotlycontested and very popular election, eventually would become physically harder to vote for your candidate of choice, and the difficulty would ule actually be proportional to how popular the candidate was, because of the pieces of cardboard behind the ballot. And the consequence of that was that, you know, a properlypunched ballot, if you look at hole number 68 there right in the center, will be cleanly punched out and easily read by the optical electronic tally device that these cards were fed through. But what might happen, is that if we look in the center, instead of the cleanly punched ballot hole that we see in the upper right corner, we might see only a dimpling of the little cardboard square, a term that became known to every american, the dimpled chad, or we might create a flap, where the hole might have been, it might close up, and neither of these two, a hanging chad, in this terminology of these machines, and what would happen is that these cards, a human being would be able to look at them and say ahha, there is a dimple in that position, but the reader, which worked by casting a beam of light through each position, would interpret either of these conditions as no vote. And what we saw in a very close race is that the number of people in certain counties who didnt vote was within the margin of victory, for the winner. Greater. Sorry, the greater, the margin of victory was within the margin of nonvotes so we had to resort to this lengthy tedious recount that you can read about now in the history books. So the country, unlike today, was heavily divided on who should be president. It was a very sharplydivided, not at all bipartisan world, where there was bipartisan agreement on one thing, which we should replace these florida punch cards Voting Machines. And congress very willingly and bipartisanly passed the help america vote after the 2000 elections and mandated that states shift to acceptable voting technology, that would generally mean electronic touch screens with Adaptive Technology that people could use if they couldnt interact with paper, or with an ordinary type of interface. So there would be various assistive technologies available. And it also provided substantial funding to the states to purchase new equipment. Unfortunately, for the most part, the equipment mandated by the help america vote act didnt really exist at the time that the, the task in full production form, and the understanding of how to do, build equipment, that would comply with help america vote in a reliable way, was not well understood by the technical community, and to the extent it was sbunderstood, it really wast a design consideration in the certification of the equipment. So they allowed for a number of different types of voting equipment. The most prominent is the direct recording, electronic voting machine, which is essentially a computer that stores the tally of the votes cast on it internally. In the computer memory. It also permitted optical scanned ballots and absentee ballots that are mailed in on paper, as well as assistive technologies like ballot marking devices which im sure will be discussed by the panel as we two on. But i want to talk a little bit about our Voting Machines, because these probably received the majority of attention from people concerned about technological risks. These are essentially computerized Voting Machines, these are computers in a particular form that make them look like a voting machine, but these are really computers just like your laptop or your desk top or your phone, in that theyre controlled by software. And the tally of votes is maintained inside the memory of the machine, under the control of the Software Running on the equipment. And so many questions have been raised over the years, about whether vre Voting Machines can be made reliable enough to use in election, and the overwhelming consensus of experts is that in fact they cannot, yet many states are still to this day using them. So with that, id like to turn this over to our first panelist, andrew appel. I think if we just keep going right here. Yes. No, its not. Okay, so ive been studying Voting Machines and computerized Voting Systems since about the hanging chad bee cackle. In 2017, i was asked to serve on a National Academy of Sciences Medicine an consensus study panel which met for five, twoday meetings over 18 months, we heard from panels of witness, both scientific and election administrators. On the panel, there were two University President s cochairing, five Computer Scientists, mathematician, two social scientist, one law professor and three actual Election Officials. And we were asked to write down what is the Scientific Consensus. Dont invent any new science. And we wrote a report, here it is. Which has many recommendations backed up by even more pages of scientific explanation. So here are the key recommendations which i dont nearly have time to describe all of. Now, let me get to the main two or three points. Elections should be conducted with human paper ballots, marked by hand or by machine. That was the Scientific Consensus in 2018. That no longer the Scientific Consensus and ill come back to that. Counted by hand or machine by optical scanner and audits should be made by human inspection of the ballots. Voting machines that do not provide capacity for independent auditing, machines that do not produce a voter verifiable paper audit should be removed from service as soon as possible. So these are the dre machines that you just heard about. They dont have a paper trail. You interact with them on the touch screen. And at the end of the day, the Computer Program in there says how many votes each candidate got. And so it is very easy to commit largescale election fraud, by a Computer Program that states, make sure it doesnt cheat except on election day, like those volkswagen diesels, they wont test in theyre in the test environment outside of election day, and get them installed on all of the Voting Machines and there are various ways to do that. So heres me installing some software on a new jersey voting machine, well, its in new jersey, i own this one, and it would be a felony to do it on a real in use in the state of emergency voting machine but modern computer, it is much easier to install Software Just through network promle gation, and in fact, any Computer System nowadays has so many lay efrs software, the top layer is the application that counts your votes and below that, the operating system, and the hyper binder and the bios, there are millions of lines of code, thousands of software bug, and amid the software bugs, some portion are exploitable vulnerabilities to allow hackers to install a different application on top. Vote stealing software instead of vote counting software. It can propagate through a note work and it can also propagate on removable media which stucks net did. And ill tell you more about that. All right. So anybody with a bachelors degree in Computer Science could write that Computer Program that shifts some of the votes around but doesnt do it when it is not election day. So the solution recommended in the National Academy report, the Scientific Consensus is to vote on optical scan forms. This is a much Better Technology by the way for punch card, for a couple of reasons. One is that you have it next to the candidate on the change sheet of paper and the pen is intended to be read by humans as well as read by humans and the Technology Works and highly accurate and there are measurements of how accurate it is. And then we count those in some sort of machine, even a precinct count optical scanner that the voter feeds the form in in the precinct or deposited in a ballot box or mailed in for a central count. And this year, here is how were going to vote. This information is from the database of the verified voting foundation. In white or cream colored, optical scan form, counted by op scan computers recounted by hand. And in light, light brown, are places where for accessibility, theyre going to use paperless dres or maybe dres with paper. It is not a great idea. And then in dark, dark brown, and in red, are places where theyre going to use dres without a paper trail, or ballot marking devices with an inadequate paper trail. So part of the good news is that most states use about the right technology for voting. They use the most auditible, least insecure technology. And there are a few laggard states such as my own state of new jersey, that are still using paperless dres. Now, there is a bigger problem, that most states dont actually audit their paper ballots, or even recount them with any reasonable probability, and well come back to that. So, heres how we vote. The voter marks an optical scan ballot, feeds the scanner, and the scanner is just a computer and all my remarks goo to a hacker that could be part of that machine as well and if the hack her fraudulent software, that software could shift the election by miscounting the ballots. What saves you is that the paper ballot drops into a sealed ballot box and you can maintain a reliable chain of custody of that ballot box to the polls place where it can be stored for auditing and recounting later, then you can trust the results of the election independently of any possibly hacked computer. So if you have to recount the ballots by hand though, whats the point of having a computer . And the answer is, you can do a random sample audit of the paper about the ballots to, it be assured of a statistical guaranteed probability that the outcome of the election is consistent as reported by the computers, its consistent with what is actually on the paper ballot. Now, many states do some sort of random audit. But only recently have there been a real science of what kind of random audit will give you that guarantee. And professor stark will be talking about that later. So ill just cite the National Academys consensus study report that says that states should mandate, risk audits prior to the certification of election results. All right. So some states do some sort of audit. The states in pink here do no audits or completely unsatisfactory audits. The states in yellow do mostly unsatisfactory audits. The states in blue do moderately unsatisfactory audits and all

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