What Is Electronic Voting, and Is it Secure?

The Disruption, a lively discussion between UVA Darden School of Business professors Yael Grushka Cocaine and Mike Lennox on cutting edge technologies and practices that are challenging the status quo.

All right, hello, Yael.

Hey Mike, how are you?

I'm doing well.

I'm doing well.

You enjoying your fall?

I am enjoying my fall.

It's like feels like time is rushing by.

It is, it is.

We are already in October, actually.

We're already mid-October to date ourselves for when we're recording this episode.

Mid October.

Something big is coming up.

Yes, well, I'm curious.

The elections are coming up in November this year in the United States.

Have you voted already?

I actually have.

So last weekend, um, my son, who's 22, and my daughter who's 20, she was back from college.

And we had a family gathering outgoing where we all went and voted uh for uh for for the upcoming presidential election.

That's exciting, I guess it's your daughter's first time voting for the presidency, for the presidency.

Yes, OK, fantastic.

Well, congratulations to the Lennox family.

Tell us a little bit about your experience.

Where did you, did you have to go to a special facility?

You didn't do it by post.

Yeah, so we did not do voting by mail.

We actually voted at an early voting station that they had.

Um, it was at the, um, uh, administration building for the county that we have here, uh, walk-in.

Do the ID check, they give you a ballot.

You go to a little private booth, which wasn't really that private.

I was a little surprised by that.

There was like 4 people around a round table with a little bit of a divider between us.

Fill in a little dot with a pencil with a pencil, a #2 pencil, I believe it's a #2 pencil, uh, that's what we always used to use at least, uh, and then this was the maybe the tech interesting piece.

You take this sheet of paper which did have a little bit of, you know, uh, digital, um, measurement on the side and you put it into a scanner.

They give you your little I voted sticker and off you go.

The whole thing probably took 5 minutes and you never saw what got scanned or how it looked after it went through the scanner.

No, not exactly.

You do get a little screen that tells you it was registered.

Whether it registered correctly or not, you don't, you don't know.

You assume it does.

One hopes.

Well, um, it sounds already, uh, a lot more sophisticated than some of the other types of voting that I've, you know, participated in in my time, uh, uh, since I was 18 and I was, uh, first voting.

And today we're going to focus a lot about voting tax, so I'm excited.

It seems timely topic, timely topic, timely topic, yeah, and I feel like it touches on so many people around the world.

This has been, I mean, all countries have to figure this out, not only when it comes to Issues like presidential elections um of sorts, um, but at various levels there's always elections of many types and voting of many kinds.

So it's exciting to think about all the technology innovation.

Has there been a lot of technology innovation?

Well, again, as we often do in this podcast, now I get to date myself here, but as a young aspiring engineer and technologist, actually one of my first cool technologies that I vividly Remember experiencing were these old style voting machines literally called Acme voting machines.

It sounds like something out of the Roadrunner like Doctor Who Doctor Evil.

I don't know.

It comes up with the Acme voting machine, but let me explain these because these are fascinating to me.

These were these large metal booths, probably 6 7 ft tall, 3 or 4 ft wide, that had a curtain there.

You'd walk in the booth and you'd pull this giant red-handed lever lever, and I mean giant, it was like, kind of, kind of, I mean, not that hard to do, but you pull it to the left and it would close the curtains.

And then in front of you would be the names of the different candidates and these levers, mechanical levers that you would put, push down for your candidate.

And once you had it all set up on the board in front of you, you take the lever, you move it back to the right, it records your vote and the curtains open.

And what's fascinating to me about these machines.

Zero digital.

Like these were not digital machines.

These were purely mechanical systems.

A little.

It sounds like a little bit of a, a kid's toy, right? almost like a kid's toy, a little like the old Rube Gold device idea.

Like I imagine there was like cool things happening in the box while you did this.

Now what we know is these types of boxes actually go back to like 1892.

So for a long part of the 20th century.

At least in certain parts of the United States, and again, I grew up in the Philadelphia area, this was the common voting technology.

And it's interesting that this was an improvement over the way we voted for nearly 100 years before that, which was by voice on the steps of the county courthouse.

Yeah, and you know, it's interesting oral voting where everybody comes together in a room and actually, you know, uses their voice to express their opinion seems like such a safe mechanism for voting, doesn't you think, you think, I feel like this leads to a lot of fistfighting potential acrimony.

In the, in the voting process, I said, or privacy, I said, uh, uh, trustworthy in other ways, but it's fascinating to think about it because it's not the kind of technology or innovation that we talk about often, the two of us, um, and yeah, you made me laugh thinking about that description of the, of the mechanical voting, um, when I was younger, we used to take little, you know, little notes where there was a whole wall of different notes representing the different parties and the different.

Entities that you could vote for and you would choose your notes and put them in an envelope and you had to make sure that you didn't get 2 or 3 or 4 and just what you know, each envelope was counted on its own, but it was very, very manual, very manual, and very, very manual, and it seems like not only manual to do but also so much labor would have to go into counting the vote and aggregating the votes.

And so my question is, do you think the scanning makes it better?

Does it make it quicker or does it scale quicker?

I mean, Let's talk about kind of the history from these voting machines that I experienced in the 1970s.

Um, we did move on to these newer systems that had kind of again optical scanners and the like, but that were based on again kind of punching holes on cards, uh, and for those of you old enough on our podcast listening to our podcast might remember this was infamous in the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W.

Bush.

And the term hanging chad became a very popular might have been one term.

Remind us what that is.

So we had a very close election, uh, like we've had in many of our presidential elections in the last couple of decades.

It came down to the state of Florida.

And if the state of Florida went for Gore, Gore wins.

If it went for Bush, Bush wins.

And I forget the exact number, but I believe it was within like 1000, a multi-million dollar multi-person state there.

So quite amazingly close election.

And so they got to the point of recounting the ballots.

And so there was this very heavily legalistic process where both sides had their lawyers and they were going through individual ballots saying, did they fully punch through?

Was there a hanging shad, meaning like the little thing that was supposed to punch out didn't punch out?

Would we count it or not?

And, uh, dare I say it was kind of chaotic.

It was chaotic and there was a lot of debates, uh.

And uh eventually we have the Supreme Court basically come in and say we're done, we're happy enough with the vote as it is, and, and off we we went with the George W.

Bush presidency.

So again, what you're describing is a fairly mechanical approach to it when you're taking a piece of paper and punching holes in it.

Yes, we all know what happens sometimes if you don't punch all the way through and you have those hanging pieces of paper, that can create a lot of confusion, um, but anything to do with manual entering manually.

Anything can be confusing.

Even did I mark with my pencil everything properly or not?

Um, what, what are some barriers?

I mean, we live in a digital world.

We do everything else in our lives online.

Let's talk about the post 2000 election.

So, as we always do, we come up with legislation to solve the previous problem, and that led to the push to modernize a lot of our election equipment and processes that had in place, and including government funding to help.

Municipalities and localities improve their voting machine process.

So this is the Help America Vote Again Act or Help America Vote Act of 22002, right? 2002, exactly.

OK, I got it.

And that led to the rise of, um, more digital voting, uh, and especially these voting machines which would be touch screens, touch tone screens where you can go in and, you know, digitally record your vote, uh, and the like.

Those though have proven.

At least concerning to some.

In what way?

Why, why is that now open to again some concern either regarding the validity of them or how well they were, and I think this is where there's debates.

But again, in our, uh, 2020 election, uh, some of these from the Dominion Company, Dominion Voting Machines, there was this at least assertion by some quarters, uh, that these machines had been hacked.

In some way, um, I think more dare I say legitimately, but more, uh, poignantly, there had been also concerns about user error that people thinking they hit, you know, one area but the screen read, you know, somewhere else and it kind of misread their intentions there.

So I think there's that kind of user error with a touch screen that was a concern.

But again, but as we digitize this bigger concern that it's susceptible to hacking in some way.

OK, so as we become more sophisticated in terms of our technology, which we need to do for many reasons, we need to do because we need to scale, we want speedier turnaround in terms of learning the outcomes of elections, we would are constantly trying to make elections, um, safety proof and keep maintain the integrity of the process.

And so as we become more sophisticated and technology and leverage all of the other ways in which our lives have evolved.

It opens the door to questions around user error, user comfort.

Do all parts of the population feel comfortable leveraging that technology?

And then like anything else, just around the corner is the way to hack the new technology and to find ways to actually create some doubt and some question around the validity of it, which again opens up some areas of vulnerability.

Is that a cycle?

We, we've talked about this so much on this podcast where you almost get these battles between the technologists and dare I say the Luddites, right, who are disagree is the technology the solution to some of these problems, or is it the risk that it creates?

Um, what we know, what we've seen in other countries now is that it is possible to do a fully digital online election.

Uh, and you, when you say fully digital, you mean.

Like, not even online on my computer, but even on my phone.

Like I don't even have to go anywhere.

I can be at home.

Yeah, yeah.

So, uh, the UAE, um, had a fully digital election where people would download the voting app on their iPhone or their Samsung, whatever they prefer, and it would use facial recognition to verify that it is you register your vote, and it would go, I assume, into the cloud, and they would, uh, tabulate the results and Uh, I believe it was something like 8 minutes after polls closed they had the final results.

Oh, you can't imagine what that would be like.

It would be very different than our experiences here in the United States.

Estonia is another country that has really pushed to digitize all of their government functions and again has digital voting, uh, which again creates some efficiencies and, and arguably maybe some even greater.

Safety protocols, but again, people debate this, debate whether the technology allows for this or not.

Well, you and I know that we're not an expert in every specific disruption or area of technology.

Sure, I'm not an expert on any of them.

We gotta be clear, I just keep the theme of the podcast here.

That's why we leverage, uh, so many experts around us.

So I think this is a great time to bring in our experts.

Do you agree with me?

OK.

So, um, we're gonna invite into our conversation, um, uh, and we're so, so fortunate to have our incredible expert, uh, David Nemmer, who's an associate professor at the Department of Media Studies and an affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology and in the Latin America studies Program at UVA.

We were talking a little bit about our countries that have moved more digital or have advanced their.

Uh, technology around voting, um, what are some kind of considerations that countries have to think about, or are there limitations like a small country like Estonia can maybe go there and go fully digital, but a state like a country like the United States cannot?

Are there certain dimensions in which we've reached some barriers in terms of how tech we can go, how digital we can go with voting?

Yes, and, and this is where the complexity lays in terms of like how the voting system is actually a reflection of a country's culture, right?

So if you pick a place like Estonia, which is a very centralized country in the sense that the way that they manage their um their businesses, their governments, their elections is so very much centralized, very different if we compare to how elections are controlled in the United States.

Not even the common American would know how to explain exactly how like the votes are counted in this country, right?

Uh, I'm from Brazil and I have a hard time explaining to my friends how the elections work in the United States.

Uh, countries in Brazil as well are very centralized, uh, we have a specific branch of the Supreme Court called the Electoral Supreme Court that takes care of, uh, the elections, so they can pull these, uh, these executive orders or judicial orders, uh, to make sure that, you know, the, the voting system and the voting processes are conducted according to plan without certain interferences that could harm the process.

But again, it's all about how much trust the people have in their, in their countries or in their governments, uh, how much, uh, faith they have in the electoral process.

This is something that they are aware of each step.

So anyways, it's, it's a conversation that I believe we're gonna unpack here, but I think it has to do more about culture than technology.

David, uh, you, you're an expert on Brazil.

You've written a book about Brazil.

Can you just tell us a little bit about that experience?

What, what happened there with their election and the, um, the technology they were using and the like?

Yeah, so in Brazil, uh, we've had, uh, voting machines since 1996.

Um, and before it was all, you know, uh, paper ballots, people would come in, um, cast their vote.

It would take weeks and months for all votes to be manually counted, as you can imagine, that opens space for all kinds of.

Uh, fraudulent actions, but we've had, uh, experiences where we had turnarounds in terms of different governments occupying and being elected and occupying the offices. 1996 we developed these voting machines that basically revolutionized the way that we did elections where people would come in, casting their vote, uh, submit, and then we would have the outcomes within hours.

And we could even like celebrate or cry on the same night and this was a system that stayed in place since 1996.

Obviously the voting machines have been upgraded and updated um to be faster, to be uh safer to offer more security, but the unders the overall understanding of the system stayed since 1996.

Yeah, and so as this is progressing, um, what other mechanisms have to, or what are kind of the derivative implications that come with such a system where you have these voting tools and techniques?

What else has to be in place to ensure like the integrity of the process?

I mean, you, you mentioned earlier the idea of that culture and trust.

Plays such a such a central role in it.

Can you give us some examples of the kinds of things that either come naturally from the culture or have to be imposed by the government in order to ensure, uh, an, uh, a proper process?

And that's an important point because for example, in the Brazilian case you have to be registered to vote at a specific section.

And at a specific place, uh, you have to come in with your, with a valid ID.

Um, and if you don't vote for the first round, very unlikely you can vote for the second round.

Um, so, you know, these security measures that are put into place before you actually get to the voting machines just to make sure that, um, there are no, no other person voting for you or there's no, uh, bad actors trying to interfere with someone else's, um.

Uh, voting, uh, each person gets a receipt, but the receipt, and this is where the, the controversy lies in Brazil, the receipt doesn't tell you anything about your vote, and it shouldn't because your vote should be secret.

Uh, it's a pre-printed, uh, receipt, so after you vote, you know, the person that taking care of the section will give you that ticket, uh, but it's not something that the machine prints.

As in like, OK, you deposited your vote, here's the receipt as a sign that the machine recognizes your vote, and here's a receipt.

Um, so it's not a perfect system, and there are conversations about to improve it, you know, some people wanna have this printed receipt, uh, to check that the vote that you casted in the electronic ballot is actually the one that is actually being, uh, understood by the machine.

But the question is, can you walk away or walk out with that receipt?

You shouldn't because that vote should be secret.

Nobody should know.

So then there's this, this other, uh, idea of, uh, depositing that receipt into, um, uh, a cast just to make sure that yes, you're verified that's the vote that you put in the machine and OK, you can go into the.

Um, to the box and also have a secondary way of verifying the votes that the machines count.

It seems so obvious to me, but it is important like you're mentioning, I think, kind of three things here, right?

There's, there's validating that what I tell the machine is what the machine read, right?

There seems to be, um, the need for some type of paper trail so that if you wanted to have an alternative audit of the vote, you could do so.

And then you've got this third thing lurking which is the anonymity piece that we don't want to create a system in which your vote could be, could be tracked.

I, I'm curious, um, how much you know about like some of these pure online systems like we've seen in, as I was mentioned before, like the UAE.

Do they, do they have a technology fix for this?

Is there a way to do that, um, if it's a purely online voting system, or do you need to be on a physical place to have like that machine printing something out for this, for this set of challenges?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Well, that's a good question.

I'm not a, a specialist on the, on online voting systems, uh, and to, you know, I, I don't really understand much about the security art, but there's one thing that's important to mention that.

Uh, we are so used to the Silicon Valley ways of thinking of moving fast and breaking things.

And here's the thing, we're dealing with democracies, we're dealing with governments, we're dealing with societies that can't afford to be broken, right?

We cannot move in, in a certain pace that would break society, and it's not because Silicon Valley works in a diff in a very fast pace that doesn't mean that governments should work on the same specific pace.

They shouldn't be walking like turtles, but.

You know, not as fast as, uh, that could lead to irresponsible outcomes, and I think this is the concern that most governments have, uh, because there's no such a thing as an unhackable system.

Every system is hackable every system there's a a way to break into it nowadays we have ways of making sure that it's really close to being possible.

But that 1% or even that 0.0001%, it's still there, which makes that system hackable.

So I think this is the biggest concern is the 0001%, and I think that's where most governments will step on the brakes when it comes to coming out with super innovative systems that has, that haven't been fully tested.

Uh, even, uh, in, in, in different democracies, so I think this is where, uh, we'll see governments being very conservative when it comes to, um.

Deploying which system will lead, you know, will take care of the electoral process.

Yeah, and I, I wanted to, um, uh, to ask you a related but somewhat adjacent question.

You're a professor in the department of media, media studies.

So much of the elections also takes place before in the campaigns and how they, the, the.

You know those who are running show up and how they're trying to influence uh various uh voters' opinions, um, uh, there's a lot of opportunity for hacking there too in terms of spreading uh wrong information or or problematic information. um, uh, tell us a little bit if you, if you can from your research like how that's evolving.

I know you shared with me.

Previously some, some exciting or interesting ideas around what Brazil's trying to do.

Um, how does that shake out when it comes to election time?

Yeah, so as you well said, Yael, bad actors are trying to break into this system from beginning to end, right, not just the actual voting process, right, because that process has shown to be stable all around the world.

But then we see these bad actors acting.

You know, before and after, after we've seen things like January 6th in this country and January 8th in Brazil, which came two years later, uh, but before, and this is where my research focuses on and how these bad actors.

Together to delegitimize the uh democratic process, which is the electoral process in order to force an outcome that is very unlikely to be the one that will be the outcome of the elections and in my research I look into how they organized in Brazil we have this thing called WhatsApp and Telegram.

Uh, which is basically the one of the, you know, the most, uh, used and, and most popular app in the world, but not so popular in the United States.

Uh, in Brazil, just to give you a, a, a sense, 99% of smartphones.

Uh, use WhatsApp as their main means of communication.

So this is basically where people go to talk.

That's where they do, you know, business, that's where they do online classes.

Anyways, it's a whole world on its own, uh, but it's in a messaging app.

So for you to receive a message, you need deliberate human action to send you something.

Um, so there's no such a thing as an algorithm on WhatsApp, and it was right at this void where there wasn't an algorithm to curate and distribute misinformation that these bad actors created what I call in my research the human infrastructure of misinformation where then not only they create the misinformation, but they curate and distribute according to.

Uh, WhatsApp groups that, uh, fulfill certain demographics, fulfill certain interests, they know exactly what to deliver to specific people according to their biases, um, their political views, their age group, their even religious views.

So they truly work like an algorithm that we see, for example, on Facebook.

And because of the encryption aspect of WhatsApp, then it becomes really, really hard to identify these bad actors just because the only person that can find out who sent you something is you who received that message, and most people who receive certain messages, they believe it's true.

They don't, they don't think it's problematic, and then unfortunately they end up Spreading the misinformation once they identify with that um sort of misinformation and agree with it, uh, and in Brazil that became a, a huge problem and as you can imagine, the voting machines became a big victim, right?

Like, uh, in 2018, in 2022, uh, during the first round of votes, people were sharing, um.

Uh, videos of malfunctioning, um, machines, uh, people say that they voted for Bolsonaro, but in fact on the screen, uh, the picture of Lula was coming up.

Anyways, people are getting very creative, and then the, the Supreme Court, the, the elect the Supreme Electoral Court came up with some measures to circumvent and, and minimize, you know, this spread of misinformation.

One.

Uh, it became illegal to take selfies on the voting machine, uh, boats.

Um, I actually think we, we might have something similar in the US, Sure, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

I don't think you're allowed to be taking pictures, pictures.

It makes sense to me, snapping that like, here I am.

Yes, yes, there's no need to take a selfie in the vote while you're voting, right?

Right.

If, if it's secret, then it should be secret, right?

And of course taping is also recording is not legal, uh.

The electoral Supreme Court have has become very uh proactive in terms of explaining the population how the voting machines work.

For example, uh, the machines are, uh, coded in open source code and every rep every political party can send a representative to go check on the open source code.

Uh, universities can send their tech departments to go check it out.

Uh, the, uh bar association, for example, uh, the Brazilian Bar Association have, has access to it, uh, the Brazilian Federal Police, so it's a very open and transparent process that pretty much anyone belonging to the government of the civil society can go.

And audit the, the source code that, uh, you know, runs these machines, um, as you can imagine, these machines are not connected to the Internet during the voting process whenever voting's closed, then they're connected, uh, to a specific server and that server aggregates all of the votes and then within hours we have the, um.

The results, but it requires a lot of work, a lot of, uh, uh, prebunking, and debunking is a term that we use that it's foreseeing a potential misinformation and coming up with the actual truth of this potential misinformation just so.

If the misinformation comes up, people know already the truth.

It, it works like a, a vaccine that you insert a weakened virus, so the body produces your antibodies.

So whenever the virus come, the body's ready to fight that virus.

Yeah, I think, I think what's fascinating about all this is like what we're really talking about here is the integrity.

Our elections, right, it's about trust.

Do I trust the process?

And I think, you know, again, we, we tend to favor technology.

This idea of like technology can help build trust.

It can help solve what could be these various issues of, of fraud or voter, uh, um, um, takes taking votes and the like, but.

Your Brazil story struck me about how it might not even matter, right?

Like if technology can be used, whether it's social media and otherwise, to simply undermine faith in elections, regardless of the technology for the elections is solid, well, it doesn't matter how.

Buttoned up it is if that's there, but I'm glad I heard the, the second part of your story about the kind of reaction of how you make it more trustworthy, and it's not just technology, it's all of these social and behavioral pieces to getting people to understand that the technology is.

It is worthwhile.

Yeah, David, uh, it's, uh, it's so insightful and you're really, uh, uh, teaching us here this notion of delegitimizing the democratic process here, right?

So it's not just about the elections and the voting itself, the act of voting, it's the entire process that comes into question, um, and, and the notion that culture and trust plays such a role.

We've talked about many disruptions that at the end of the day are a matter of trust and, uh, and culture, how people adopt certain technology, how they embrace it.

When we talk about disruption, we often talk about what is being replaced, right?

Like what is, what is moving aside for a new technology.

So, are there any big changes in the, the logistics, the layout, the people like involved in the process is, are there different skill sets?

We suddenly need technologists and data scientists versus people of all kinds of ways of life that can man the, the voting stations.

I'm not sure.

How, how have you seen it play out?

Is there a change in the, the organization that runs uh these, these elections?

Uh, not that I see it.

Like I said, these, uh, the technologies or the, the, the ways that these systems change are very slowly.

And uh although again we see we have ideas we have understandings, they don't seem sexy enough for governments to feel uh inclined to adopt them uh and again one thing uh as Mike well as well said, uh, you know, technologies although seen as a solution, what they do is to they what they amplified.

The current, uh, cultural values.

So if we have a, a, uh, the culture of distrust, then these technologies will only amplify distrust, right?

Cause we have to think about the system.

The system is a social technical system with, you know, the technology and the social, um, as well.

Uh, but yeah, going back to your question more specifically, you know, there's a lot of conversations about using blockchain.

As voting solutions, uh, I've been reading about this.

It's very confusing even for me as someone that has a, a, a, a, a background in computer science.

It seems, it seems legit, and I think the future, I think is right there.

But imagine if for me, who is very informed, you know, I have, I have a computer science background, it's confusing.

Imagine for the common.

Uh, voter, the common citizen, and I think, uh, the news technologies, you know, we're, we're very, um, against change.

Like humans don't really like change, and every time there's change, uh, we open new avenues for questions, for doubts, which is fine, but then these bad actors will try to double down and create all kinds of real serious doubts about the process.

So then again I think it has to be a very slow and steady.

Movement, but before thinking about the technology itself, I think we have to think about the system that will sustain this technology.

So the social system that will have to have very deep foundations in order to secure a system that will eventually specify the future of that specific country.

Let me ask a question on those lines that I've been grappling with thinking about the US system.

I, I think we could all agree probably that the US system is incredibly inefficient, right, and complex, um, probably very unnecessarily so.

However, with this one particular argument, which is by having such a distributed system where it really is coming down to each of these local municipalities and counties running their processes here.

It makes it very hard to hack at scale, right?

Like to, to create widespread fraud would require such a Herculean effort requiring thousands of people because it's so distributed and disjointed and not consistent.

We're not all using the same systems and software and the like.

That it actually provides that trust because it's, again, using the hacking term like so hard to hack this very distributed system as opposed to again if you have a centralized system with one, you know, conduit there that opportunity for for fraud or for hacking could be more pronounced.

Uh, David, have any thoughts on this idea of like maybe there's benefits in being inefficient and distributive.

Exactly.

There are, there are pros and cons for both approaches, uh, and if we look at what happened during the last elections, the only attempt to delegitimize the process was right when things became more centralized, right, you know, when we had that, uh, with, uh, Vice President Mike Pence when he had to have that centralized meeting that he would.

Um, authenticate, I don't know if that's the term, the election or, you know, it was just a formality, but that was a centralized manner or when, um, the delegates would meet and actually vote, people were, you know, try to push or pressure each delegate to vote against.

Uh, the, the final, uh, state vote.

So anyways, uh, that's exactly that.

So as, as more centralized, decentralized you have, more proxies you have to think about in, in order to break into each system.

And then by breaking into each system you have to bring everything together, uh, centralize again to make that count, and that's exactly what is really hard.

Uh, whereas in Brazil, for example, if you were to think of a way of hacking, just hack the main server and then you have full control of everything.

Uh, the problem is with the fully centralized system you have much more control and more security in that sense.

That's where security lies, whereas the decentralized, the decentralization is a feature in itself for protection, as you well explained.

So again, pros and cons, no perfect system, but we do have systems that work in the end.

Amazing.

Well, David, this was a hugely, uh, interesting and timely and, uh, just, uh, I learned a lot.

So educational, uh, thank you so much, uh, for joining us today.

Um, uh, we really appreciate your insight and your knowledge because, uh, we, we needed it.

Yeah, thank you so much, really helpful.

Thank you.

Uh, it, it strikes me, Mike, that this is a different type of, uh, innovation in the sense that.

Usually our disruptions are a few early adopters kind of experiment, and then it kind of catches up and, you know, you're driving your Rivian around, around, right?

Um, but, but this is different.

When we think about elections, we need to think about the almost like the the last adopter, the person least likely to adopt, and how do we custom, how do we design systems for them.

I think that's right.

I mean, I think David said it well that like there are certain times where, you know, move fast and break things could actually be a feature.

This is not one of them, right?

This is one of these critical systems.

And again I go back to that trust word like, and you need 100% trust, hopefully, or at least close to that.

It can't be that 60% of the population is saying, ah, this works pretty well, and there's 40%.

Whose hair is on fire and are saying this is not working, um, and so that that higher standard definitely, uh, is, is, is a challenge, a challenge here.

So it's, it's our time where we need to discuss good, bad, or no disruption here.

Yeah, where, where are you falling on that?

Oh, it's fascinating.

I do feel like our, um, democratic processes are being challenged, so I feel like there's disruption.

I don't know if it's exactly in the voting technology, but I feel like there's disruption.

Because it feels, it seems to me, uh, in my lifetime that these processes have been called to question more often than before.

Uh, maybe it's just as I get older and less cynical or less naive, I see it more, but it just feels like there is disruption.

You're getting on cynical as you get old.

Yeah, I know, right?

Why don't you go the other way.

So, maybe, maybe it's my view.

So I feel like it is being disrupted.

Um, I, I'm gonna go on a, on a limb here.

I, I think it's a good disruption to start to think about how can we make these processes, thinking again about everything that David mentioned, thinking about how we can customize processes that protect our democracy.

I think that's a good disruption, meaning once we figure it out.

We will be thankful for a long, long time.

I'm not quite sure that we're there yet, but I think all of these attempts and having experimentation go on around the world, not Silicon style, Silicon Valley style, I understand, not break it, but thoughtful attempts, slow, thoughtful attempts at innovation is really important because we need a solution that works better for everybody.

Yeah, I.

I'm, I'm tortured by this one.

I have to say, as, as, as you know, I'm generally pro-technology.

I mean, we call the podcast Good Disruption, of course, we didn't call it Bad Disruption, we call it Good Disruption.

And, and I think that side of me says, man, we could do this better, more efficiently, safer, with more trust than what we currently have.

But in the back of my brain is that distributed piece, this idea that like it is so messy and distributed right now that it is a feature because it gets really hard to truly manipulate the election.

With that said, the thing that keeps coming back in my mind is something that we had here at Darden where we had our own server room very close to where we're currently sitting recording this podcast, and the logic that we kept hearing is we can't go to the cloud because that's unsafe and this is important student data.

We need to have it here.

And the fact is that's absolutely not true.

It was far more exposed, far more, uh, susceptible to hacks, far more susceptible to even someone breaking in and going directly to our servers than using, you know, a cloud services provider, which is what we do now, that has the, the state of the art security, state of the art security and the resources to put that in.

I think as we see these nefarious players and, and state actors or non-state actors beyond the borders of the United States, that has to be top of mind as well.

And I think for that reason I am gonna go that we should push towards more technology and say that this would be a good disruption at the end of the day so I think we're gonna agree on this one, And fingers crossed that our election day goes off without a hitch and that there is trust and belief in the results that come forward to that because that that is the bedrock of our democratic societies and uh the integrity of the elections is just so important.

And so, uh, with that we'll wish everybody a happy voting voting, happy election day.

And um uh do you want to do our thanks?

Of course, you know, as always, uh thank you to our special guest David, also to our producer Gary and to our researcher extraordinaire Becky, who was incredibly helpful uh for in preparation for this particular podcast as she always is.

OK, I'm gonna go off and vote right now.

All right, go do that.

Thank you everybody.

Good Disruption is a podcast from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.