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Can everyone hear me?

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Oh, wow, it works.

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Hi, everybody.

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I'm Susan Greenhall.

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I'm the Senior Advisor for Election Security at Free Speech for People.

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We are a national, nonpartisan, not-for-profit legal advocacy organization that works to...

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Susan, stay sitting down.

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Don't go in front of the speaker.

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...that works to protect elections and democracy.

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No, no, please don't touch anything back there.

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Thank you.

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For all the people, we have a part of that program which focuses on election security.

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And I've done a lot of work on internet voting for over 15 years, studying the policies and practices, written several reports on it.

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And I'm here to talk about this issue with our esteemed panel.

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First, starting with David Jefferson, Dr.

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David Jefferson, who is a researcher from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, retired.

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In 1999 to 2000, he was the co-chair of the California Secretary of State's Task Force on Internet Voting.

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He'll talk a little bit more about that.

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He was also the... He was one of the co-authors of the peer review that was done on the Department of Defense's CERV internet voting system in 2004, which ultimately resulted in the Department of Defense canceling the project.

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And he can talk a little bit about that.

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It was a $22 million project that was ultimately shut down.

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And he's been writing , speaking, and testifying in opposition to internet voting ever since.

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So that's David.

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Next, we have Matt Blaze, professor at Georgetown University School of Computer Science and Law.

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He is also co-founder of The Village.

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And he's been working in election security for two decades, especially interested in the impact of complex software systems on security and reliability.

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And Hari Hirstie, also co-founder of the DEF CON Voting Village.

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He is the OG in election security reviews, famously conducting the Hirstie hack back in the 2000s.

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He also was part of a team that reviewed the Estonian online voting system for security and traveled to Estonia to present the findings to people there.

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So we have an incredible panel.

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And I will turn it over to David.

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David, are we using slides?

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No, I'm just... my notes.

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Yeah, I'm coming over here to avoid the feedback and because I have my notes on my laptop, so... and I hope you can hear me.

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And then I need my glasses.

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Okay.

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All right .

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So first let me give you a summary up front of where I'm coming from, which is that it isn't possible now or in the foreseeable future with any combination of technologies that we can envision today to secure an online voting system.

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And thus, we shouldn't be instituting internet voting anywhere in the U.S.

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and we should really stop using it where it's in use today.

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Voting, of course, is a national security issue and the legitimacy of democratic government depends on voting being secure and open.

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So we really... we cannot open our voting systems to the various kinds of threats I'm about to describe to you, some of which... many of which are... would open our elections to manipulation by foreign actors.

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So let me talk about what internet voting is, first of all.

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What we mean by that is any voting system in which voted ballots are transmitted over the internet.

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Maybe one hop of the communication is just over the internet, but if it's... if voted ballots are ever transmitted over the internet in the course of running an election, it's an internet voting system.

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It doesn't matter whether it's by email or fax or web or mobile app, any scheme, doesn't matter what the protocol is, if it's transmitted over the internet, it's going to be vulnerable to the kinds of threats I'm about to describe.

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So let's talk about those threats.

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What are the threats that we're talking about?

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There are many of them.

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The first one is authentication-related threats.

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When you...

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when you vote online, of course, you have to identify yourself so that you can be checked that you're registered and that you are... you haven't already voted, and so you have to actually identify yourself.

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There are... that will have to be done online also, and an attacker can mess with that system so that it makes it too difficult for people to authenticate themselves and they get disenfranchised, or too easy for people to authenticate themselves, and phony voters can can vote.

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So authentication threats, number one.

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Number two, and perhaps the most insidious, is client-side malware.

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You're going to be voting from some device, a phone or a PC or other mobile device, and that device might be infected with malware, and that malware might have the purpose of interfering with your voting, either preventing you from voting or modifying your votes before your votes are even... even get out of the device,

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before they're encrypted for transmission, your votes can be modified.

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You wouldn't know if the election officials wouldn't know it.

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That's a profound problem, the client malware problem.

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The third problem, the third kind of attack, would be network attacks, attacking routers or DNS or other parts of the internet infrastructure, where even if your ballots are transmitted in progress, they can still be stopped or redirected or otherwise interfered with.

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There are spoofing attacks, where you are tricked into voting on...

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to an incorrect site, a site which may look like the real site, but which you are...

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which is not, and you think you voted, but you didn't, and you don't know whether your vote was transmitted or modified or just thrown away.

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There are denial-of-service attacks, where the server that receives votes is overwhelmed with a lot of fake ballots sent to it by an attacker.

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It's so overwhelmed that the service slows down.

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It may slow down to the point where voters get timeouts and they can't vote at all, or the system, the server just crashes.

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There are server penetration attacks, where an attacker actually gains control remotely of the servers that's accepting the ballots, and when he gains control, he can do anything he wants.

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Many of these attacks can be insider-aided, but insiders would include election officials and programmers and so on, and there are many variations of all of these attacks.

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Now, there are no strong defenses to most of these attacks.

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There just are no strong defenses.

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There are ameliorations, there are ways of handling certain special cases of these attacks, but they're not general solutions with technologies that we have today.

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And they rest on some profound problems in computer science, which Matt is going to tell you about in the next talk.

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These are the same threats that we encountered 25 years ago when I was the chair of the California Secretary of State's Internet Voting Task Force, and they're why we recommended that California not institute internet voting in 1999.

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These threats haven't really changed material in the last 25 years, and they may not change materially in the next 25 years.

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They are that intractable.

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Now, the problem is that all of these attacks that I mentioned can be automated and scaled up to massive scale, depending upon technical details of the architecture of the voting system.

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The attacks can come from anywhere on earth, including rival nation-states or our own domestic partisans.

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Successful attacks may go completely undetected, but if they are detected, they may be completely uncorrectable without running the election over again.

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The perpetrators of the attack may never be identified, but even if they are identified, they are likely to be out of reach of U.S.

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law, as the 12 Russians who are under indictment for interfering with the 2020 election are out of reach of U.S.

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law.

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So the problems with internet voting are profound.

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And I'm going to now turn it over to Matt, so he can talk more about that subject.

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Thank you.

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So thanks, David.

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So I just want to expand on some of the stuff that David was talking about.

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He mentioned fundamental problems.

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And as a scientist or as an engineer, when somebody says, oh, that's a theoretical problem, we understand it to be different from when the general public uses the term theoretical problem.

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A theoretical problem in normal life is one you don't really have to worry about.

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A theoretical problem in science and engineering is the worst possible kind, right?

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It's the kind that is fundamental to the system, that it's something that you cannot do anything about without either changing the assumptions or compromising on what the requirements are.

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And there are two sets of fundamental problems.

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The first set of fundamental problems are computing problems, computer science problems.

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And all of the problems in voting, in building a secure voting system that we encounter from an engineering point of view, are problems that actually were around before voting was an application people were even considering.

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There is a fundamental theorem in computer science that essentially says it is impossible to compare a program with its specification and understand whether it meets it.

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And this is not a problem that we simply haven't worked hard enough to try to solve.

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It's a problem that we know that we cannot solve.

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We will never be able to solve it.

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And the implication of that is that general purpose complex software can never be assured to be completely correct.

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Now, that mostly doesn't bother us for all sorts of applications of computing that we rely on for many things.

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In fact, the title of this panel, I can bank online, why can't I vote online, is an example of that.

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We rely on the same flawed computing systems for things like banking.

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So why is it we're able to get away with it?

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And the short answer is we don't.

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Bank fraud is enormously common.

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Banks are robbed online all the time.

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There is identity theft and so on constantly.

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The difference is a second set of fundamental problems, which is the voting application itself has a set of incredibly stringent and in fact somewhat contradictory requirements for building a voting system.

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One of them is that your vote must be anonymous.

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And it must be anonymous to the point where you can't even voluntarily prove who you voted for.

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And that requirement exists to prevent people from being able to be coerced into voting a particular way or being able to sell their vote.

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And there's a long history, even in the United States prior to that requirement existing, of people having their franchise coerced away from them because it's possible to tell how someone voted.

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Banking transactions don't have that requirement.

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A banking transaction is reversible.

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If money disappears from your bank account, it's possible to be made whole again.

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But if your vote is changed after it's been cast, we don't know whose it was.

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And you have no way as a voter of proving how your particular vote was cast in order to be able to correct that.

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And if that changed, you'd be able to prove how you voted.

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So we have these two sets of fundamental problems clashing with each other.

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The first is we don't know how to build systems that are reliable enough to avoid problems like this.

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And the second is voting requires us to build systems that avoid problems like this rather than correct them after the fact.

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And this, combined with the fact that an online voting system requires using complex computer technology, means that this is a problem that we won't be able to solve, no matter how hard we work at it.

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It's not that we're just not very smart.

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It's that these problems are beyond human capacity.

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So where does that leave us?

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Where that leaves us is we have to recognize that online voting is intrinsically very risky.

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That it will lead to elections that we will never be able to satisfactorily show were conducted without fraud, without hacking, and that the outcome is genuinely true.

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And that will always be with us when we do it that way, unless we relax some very important requirements of voting systems.

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So, by the way, I'm not the only one saying this.

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There was a report from the National Academy of Sciences called Securing the Vote, where the top experts in the field got together and produced what's called a consensus report.

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It essentially makes a very strong statement, you know, this is something we do not know how to do.

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And, you know, recommends against it wholesale.

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So, you know, those who propose online voting systems are essentially proposing something that the consensus of scientists is impossible.

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So we should understand it in that context.

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So, thanks.

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So, internet voting is a vacuum.

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It keeps on coming back.

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And the argument is very often say, well, we have this excuse.

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Can we do just a little bit of internet voting?

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There's two reasons why that's not a good idea.

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First of all, all the votes are one pool.

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The idea that I can vote insecurely myself wouldn't disfranchise the other voters is logical fallacy.

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Because if there's only one result, and if I'm choosing to make my own vote insecure, I'm also making everybody else's vote vulnerable.

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But there's even more profound reason.

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A lot of nations, including United States, and a lot of states in the United States, but other nations, have the same principle that all voters should be voting with the same method.

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So once you are enabling the door that let's have a little bit of internet voting, the next step is to say, now everybody has to vote with internet voting because we cannot have separate methods.

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The common ways we are hearing always to give an excuse, what are the special groups who need to vote the internet?

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And one of these are in America, it's called the UOCAVA voters, Unified Overseas Voters Empowerment Act.

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So they are mainly the boys and girls in the military, who have a problem of getting the ballots done on time.

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However, this same problem is everywhere else in the world.

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And the other part is why UOCAVA is, or military voters in general, are a very good target for saying, let's do internet voting, because in a lot of nations, military voters are not guaranteed to have secret ballots.

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It's a best effort basis only.

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So military voters don't enjoy the same legal protections as general public, and that also enables you to have a little bit more relaxed voting system, because you don't have to guarantee a secret ballot.

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Another group is, and very powerful lobbying groups, is disabled voters, and especially print disabled voters, so people who cannot read, cannot write, cannot hold a pen in their hand.

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There are a lot of devices, for example ballot marking devices, which are designed to access, but the idea is, okay, well let's do that at home.

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Again, this is leading, this whole path leads to a dual language, where a constantly the attempt is to call the voting to be not internet voting, but instead of calling it to be electronic return of your ballot.

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It's the same thing, but the idea is, this is the way we sell the idea, without a getting into the trap or informing people that this is the bad idea.

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Again, internet voting.

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Internet voting has been claimed to be successful in Estonia.

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I went to Estonia with Professor Arthur Haldeman and a couple of other folks.

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We took a look into the system, and it was a fairly decent high school project.

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That was the quality of the code.

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However, there was a lot of interesting things in operational side.

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For example, they rented the servers every year separately.

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So from a supply chain point of view, this one agency is renting three computers.

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That's your target.

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The lowest bidder, and you can poison all you want.

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There were a lot of designs in that area.

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For example, they published a video where a code is signed cryptographically, so that the voters will know this is an honest code.

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And they claim that this computer, where the video is taken, has never been connected to internet.

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But it had a microtorrent, and pirated movies, and pirated films, and online poker on the screen.

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So slightly suspicious that it might have been in internet.

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In Finland, we tried internet voting, or online voting.

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It was kiosk voting, but a system which can be used for internet voting too, in three counties.

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And it was demonstrated that three and a half percent of the votes were lost, and hence the vote, the election had to be reconducted.

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Because three and a half percent in a, what you call Jefferson counting method, means that it's absolutely certain that the last candidates in the city council will be awarded to the wrong people.

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The common excuse also is to claim that we need internet voting to activate young voters.

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Young people like mobile phones.

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Estonia is a brilliant country from the point of view that they publish at age brackets.

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And when you look in Estonia, you see that the fastest growing group of voters online is over 65.

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And the young voters are rejecting the idea of internet voting.

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The same was in Norway.

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So the actual government public data doesn't support the common wisdom that young voters would be activated by using internet voting.

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Last but not least, I want to touch a very big topic in, for example, Europe and Germany.

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A lot of old democracies have a rule that common person has to understand how votes are counted and have to be able to verify the vote counting process with no special tools and education.

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Common man's common knowledge has to be enough.

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Now we are proposing very complex ideas like homomorphic encryption, blockchain.

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The joke in the U.S.

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is that average age of poll worker is one year older every year because we don't have enough young people coming to be a poll worker.

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But until we live in a Star Trek universe where teenagers are casually talking about quantum mechanics, who is going to be explaining to a 70-year-old normal person how homomorphic encryption works?

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And in today's world, why anyone, why you believe that you could be ever getting normal people to accept the idea that this is so complex idea that even most of the experts don't know how it works.

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So let's keep it simple.

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Thank you.

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Okay.

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So after hearing all of that, I'm guessing everyone probably think who would ever want to do internet voting for public governmental elections.

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But unfortunately, right now, 32 states permit some subset of voters to vote online either by email, fax, or some sort of online portal.

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And there's a lot of ballots coming back online.

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In the 2020 election, there were over 300,000 ballots cast online.

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And in some states with small margins, there were a significant number of ballots cast online.

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And this is a problem because those ballots we know are not secure and they can't be audited.

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So I want to talk a little bit about the policy and the history of how we got here and how it's playing out today to understand our situation.

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So as I mentioned in the intro, back in 2004, David was part of a security study that examined the system that was being put together by the Department of Defense to military and overseas voters to vote online.

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This was something that was tasked by Congress, Congress tasked them to do this.

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And they built a system, had a peer review of the security.

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The peer review said this is not secure.

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You cannot ensure the legitimacy of ballots cast online.

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So the project was scrapped.

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Congress turned around and said, okay, we'll have NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, develop standards for a secure online voting system.

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And then we'll have the Department of Defense build to those standards.

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So NIST spent the later part of the 2000s and early 2010s studying the problem, writing several reports.

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And they came to the conclusion that the all come to, that there's this broad scientific consensus, that these problems are really not solvable with the security tools that we have today.

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And they wrote a statement saying, we don't know how to write security standards because we don't know how to do internet voting securely.

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It's not yet feasible.

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So we're not doing it.

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So Congress said, okay, a couple years later, because Congress moved slowly between 2014 and 2015, Congress repealed the directive to the Department of Defense to build an online voting system, essentially taking the federal government out of it.

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We often hear, why isn't the federal government studying it?

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The answer is they already did, asked and answered.

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So in the subsequent years, we've seen more reports come out in 2018.

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The National Academy study came out that Matt mentioned.

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There's been numerous academic studies.

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There's been some states have done their own studies.

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Time and again, when the computer scientists and the security experts look at the problems, they realize that voting is not something that you can apply today's security tools to in a sufficient way to secure it.

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So we've never come up with anyone that says, here, this is a secure way to do it from a scientific perspective.

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Yet, in that early 2000s period of time, and even the late 90s, there was a reasonable expectation that we were going to have a secure online voting system from the Department of Defense.

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So states passed laws to allow electronic ballot return.

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By 2010, I think there were 29 or 30 states already had electronic ballot return laws in place.

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So that was before NIST came up with their statement saying we can't write security standards for this.

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And before the bulk of the scientific research that's so conclusive had come out.

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So in the mid-2010s, we'd seen kind of a slowdown in the movement for online voting.

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But now we're in the middle of an aggressive push once again to have people vote online.

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And that's coming mainly from two places.

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First, there's a guy named Bradley Tusk, who is an Uber multimillionaire, made a bunch of money for Uber, and he helped change their policies.

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He's not a tech guy, he's a policy guy.

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And he helped change state laws to allow Uber rideshare policies around the country.

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He also was responsible for changing state laws to allow sports betting on the FanDuel app.

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So he knows what he's doing as far as changing state laws.

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And he's decided that he's going to save American democracy by getting everybody to vote on their phones by 2028.

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He said that on his podcast.

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He has also said that he will do anything unethical short of committing a crime to get everyone voting on their phone.

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So he's hired lobbyists, he's got public relations people, and he's introducing bills in different states around the country to allow people to vote online, starting with subsets of military and overseas voters for states that don't already have it, and then to expand it to voters with disabilities,

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to expand it to voters with... to first responders who may be displaced, and then ultimately with the goal of getting everybody to vote online.

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Now, the problem is...

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oh, and one of the most definitive studies, or scientific studies that we saw, or I shouldn't call it a study, it was a risk assessment that came from the Department of Homeland Security, CISA, FBI, NIST, and EAC in 2020, which warned states, you don't probably want to do this,

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because those ballots will be high risk of compromise, manipulation, deletion, or privacy violations.

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Any ballots cast online via any method, even with security tools in place.

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So even with this security, all this guidance coming from the federal agencies, those federal agencies can't go into the states and lobby.

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They put out their risk assessment, hope the states look at it.

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Instead, it's left to organizations like our organization.

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We work with Verified Voting, with Brennan Center, with Public Citizen.

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These are all groups.

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We are very deeply committed to ensuring access for all voters.

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My organization actually takes legal actions to ensure people's access to the ballot.

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But we want to also protect that ballot and make sure that the election is secure.

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So that's why we are going in and raising these security concerns in the state legislatures and trying to keep states from introducing more bills to spread online voting.

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In the last year and a half, we saw bills introduced in California, Washington, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.

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So we have that.

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That's one aspect of the push for online voting.

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There's another aspect that comes from the vendors, because this is an industry that is not regulated at all.

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The systems that are being sold commercially don't undergo any sort of public testing that anyone else can review.

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The vendors make claims of security or claims about the way the system operates that are unfounded, baseless.

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Actually, our organization has written letters to attorneys general arguing that these could constitute false claims and deceptive marketing and could be actionable in asking for investigations.

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But there's nothing to counter it other than us bringing up the other side of it.

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The vendors are also lobbying in state legislatures and promising state lawmakers that these systems can be secured.

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And that's another aspect of it.

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So this is an ongoing problem that we're going to continue to see because of these two forces pushing online voting at a time when we really need to have auditable systems, transparent systems, secure systems that we can ensure that all people can have confidence in the results of an election and not expand an unsecure system that we know is insecure.

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Internet voting has been glibly referred to as the Theranos of voting.

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And I think that's actually a very apt analogy.

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Because I don't know if you're familiar with the Theranos story.

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Theranos is the blood company that was founded that went to a billion dollars and they were going to take a tiny pinprick of blood and be able to run a complete screen of every test that you could ever possibly need and know your entire health history.

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And it would be cheap and everyone would be able to do it at CVS or Walgreens.

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And it was a great idea.

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Who doesn't want that?

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But the problem is the science didn't let you do it.

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You needed more blood to be able to run certain tests.

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The blood needed to be centrifuged and separate out the cells and reagents put in there.

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You can't do it all.

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But the idea is so great.

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Everybody wants to do it.

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Yes, it would be really great if we could all vote on our phones.

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But the science isn't there.

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So I'm going to wrap with that.

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And we're going to go to questions after.

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And I guess we lost Hari.

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But I'm going to, as the moderator, I'm going to take prerogative and ask the first question of David.

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So when I was talking, I was speaking about the importance of auditing elections, especially everyone should have confidence.

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We don't want to just, you know, trust elections.

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We want to verify elections.

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So how can you audit an online voting, an online system, or can you audit an online voting system?

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So when you voted a precinct, or if you, if you mail in a ballot, I'm going to step over here to get out of the feedback.

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You, you have, well, that's not working.

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You, you hand mark the ballot, and there is no question that the ballot actually reflects the voter's intent.

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When you vote online from your phone, and sorry, and that ballot, that hand marked ballot becomes a contemporaneous record of the voter intent.

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So that if those ballots are later counted by machine and the, and the software in those machines is full of bugs and is full of, of malware.

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And so the counts are wrong as produced by machine.

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You can always go back.

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In fact, you should always go back to the original hand marked paper ballots and audit the machine results using an RLA or risk limiting audit, for example, as was discussed at a panel yesterday.

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And, and therefore you, you, you can determine that the machine counts were wrong and you can, you can correct the outcome of the election.

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Now with a, with any kind of online voting system, if you are voting from your phone or your personal computer, there is no indelible contemporaneous record of how the voter voted.

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I mean, what, what, what the voter's actual intent was, there is no record from which to audit the election.

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So it's really not possible to audit an online election.

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And that's just another reason why we shouldn't be doing it.

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And I'll just, oh, am I off?

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And I'll just add that one of the things we see the vendors say is that we produce a voter verified paper ballot.

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Our system isn't online voting.

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It is an internet voting.

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One of the, the CEOs of one of the vendors told a radio show that we don't use the term internet voting because it's a loaded term.

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We say electronic ballot return.

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So it's a little bit of this smoke and mirrors.

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And that they produce a voter verified paper ballot.

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Well, a lot of times the digital record is sent to the elections office and then it's printed there.

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But obviously that paper ballot has never been verified by the voter because the, the digital record was what was sent.

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But to say it's a voter verified paper ballot is, is highly misleading at best.

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So you don't have a voter verified paper ballot to audit the election.

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So are there any questions?

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Do you want to use the microphone?

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Oh, okay.

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I'll do that.

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You can talk in that.

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Um, so, uh, purely from a technical perspective, uh, you folks were talking about the kind of combating requirements of a secret ballot and a technically secure ballot.

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I vote for Mickey Mouse every year.

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I don't care who knows that.

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From a purely technical perspective, if you omit the requirement of secrecy, does online voting become much more viable?

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There are all sorts of things that, all sorts of problems get easier if you, um, reduce the requirements.

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And, you know, the requirement for a secret ballot isn't, doesn't exist just because a bunch of technologists said it should.

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The requirement for a secret ballot evolved over, you know, centuries of US law and centuries of experience with fraud in democracies based on coercing votes from people.

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We could, as a society, decide to eliminate the secret ballot, uh, and maybe we decide that we want to.

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But I think a poor reason to eliminate the secret ballot is simply to accommodate some future voting technology that finds it an inconvenient requirement.

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Um, so, you know, I think it's very important to, to understand here, these requirements didn't come from us.

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These requirements are not requirements that the technologists invented.

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These are requirements that society has decided are important properties for voting systems.

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And, uh, you know, we can discuss whether those requirements are good or not, but that discussion had nothing to do with technology.

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It's a, it's a democracy requirement.

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Um, you know, and again, there are many, you know, when I hear about internet voting, I find it helpful to substitute in my head perpetual motion machine, right?

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If we had perpetual motion machines, it would be great.

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It would solve our energy problems.

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Everybody agrees perpetual motion machines would be terrific.

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Unfortunately, a bunch of, you know, a bunch of killjoy physicists tell us that we'll never be able to have them.

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Now, if you believe the killjoy physicists, it would be a bad idea to create policy on the assumption that we're about to build a perpetual motion machine because we're really not.

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And internet voting has many, many of the same, uh, properties there.

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And I would like to add one thing before, before we go, uh, which is I want to praise the secret ballot requirement.

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The secrecy of the ballot is the, is the strongest defense by far we have against voter coercion, vote retaliation, and vote buying and selling.

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Without the secret ballot, our elections could be irredeemably corrupted by those effects.

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Thank you.

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Do we have a question?

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Yeah, I have more of a comment that I'd love to get our moderator's, uh, response on here.

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Um, what really worries me more than anything about online voting is much more lower tech actually, is that if it goes broad, large scale, it's subject to, uh, phishing attacks, right?

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You could, uh, have very large scale voter suppression with fake emails coming from secretaries of state, apparently, and you go and you lose your boat and maybe you get your identity theft too.

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Now, phishing campaigns can be just, you know, 19, 20% effective, effective.

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Targeted, they can be 70% effective.

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And who's going to get targeted in a voter suppression campaign?

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The same people who always get targeted, communities of color.

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So I think this whole issue very quickly becomes a racial justice issue, honestly.

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And that's, that's not even getting into the stuff you all have been talking about that I firmly agree with.

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I, I, my comment is I agree.

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I don't know.

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I don't have much more to add that was very well put.

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Um, any other?

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Hi there.

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So just a quick question regarding authentication and biometric data.

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So can your team speak to, um, the benefits of that?

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I know that the TSA, for example, is using biometric data for authentication purposes for international travel, comparing your photo to your passport photo to your face while you check in.

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Um, obviously having biometric data stored by the government, maybe isn't the best idea, but you could do something like hashing or something different like that.

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But can you speak to the advancements of biometric data and how it may pertain to online voting in the future?

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So one property of biometrics is that, um, there, there are two unfortunate properties about biometrics.

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Uh, the first is they're biometrics, uh, they're tied to you as an individual.

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You can't change them if they're compromised.

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Uh, so if something happens to your biometric data and other people learn about what it is, they, uh, they know it and you're stuck.

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Um, the, uh, and that means that effectively supervised biometric authentication, you know, you go into the kiosk, there's a guard, you put your fingerprint on a reader, might be okay.

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Um, under, you know, because they know that you're not bringing some equipment in to fake what the fingerprint is.

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But unsupervised biometric authentication, I'm using my phone, it reads my biometric and sends that data somewhere is something that's always going to be subject to compromise, uh, in that way.

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So biometrics, you know, solve some problems for in-person authentication that work very poorly, uh, in the online context.

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I think another issue that, that isn't really considered is the fact that, you know, for instance, if Bia was going to vote and with her cell phone and she's asleep, I can just pick up her cell phone, unlock it with her face and vote on it.

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Or, um, you know, Bob over there wants me to vote for Pinkie Pie.

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So he gives me a thousand dollars to go vote for Pinkie Pie, which, you know, we still have that problem in our regular elections.

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And those are small, small little votes, but there's no privacy.

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You know, if, if you have a partner that's very controlling and they're trying to force you to vote for somebody, when you walk into that voting booth by yourself and you close that curtain, you can vote for whoever you want.

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You lose that a hundred percent when you do online voting and vote by phone or any of this.

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Great for American Idol, not great for elections.

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That was not a question.

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Any other questions?

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Hi , so I have a general question about remote voting, which is not electronical, such as postal voting, which is used in many countries to support, for example, disabled voters or voters who are otherwise unable to go to the polling station.

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And postal voting has many risks of the kind that you mentioned, such as the risk of coercion or the risk of not knowing that the ballot that arrived was actually marked by a legitimate voter.

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So given all this, what kind of secure enough options would you recommend for remote voting?

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So, I mean, one of the, you know, one property of this is it's important not to confuse online voting with the general problem of remote voting.

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Remote voting exists everywhere in the United States, at least as a special case for absentee ballots, you know, people who can't travel and so on.

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It's generally done on paper and by mail.

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That has some of the same problems as online voting, but not all of them.

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So it leaves us with the one-on-one coercion problem, right, that if you're sent a paper ballot, it is possible you could be coerced by a partner or an employer to vote in a particular way, but that has to be done on a retail level, ballot by ballot.

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In an online voting system, that same type of compromise can be done centrally.

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A piece of malware that's spread via phishing or any of the other ways that malware spreads can be used to wholesale compromise many, many different ballots.

391
00:43:11,800 --> 00:43:28,780
So my suggestion is that to accommodate voters who can't travel, we stick to the paper-by-mail method and not introduce methods that also add the wholesale fraud and wholesale abuse vector.

392
00:43:28,780 --> 00:43:41,000
But even, you know, even by-mail voting does compromise some of the properties of the secret ballot, and we have to be very careful when we scale that up.

393
00:43:41,280 --> 00:43:47,420
I'll just add that there are solutions that have been implemented.

394
00:43:47,420 --> 00:43:58,340
So when the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act was passed, it required that all counties or states send ballots to military and overseas voters 45 days before the election.

395
00:43:58,500 --> 00:44:04,260
It also stipulated that they had to make the option available to send the blank ballot electronically.

396
00:44:04,280 --> 00:44:11,380
Blank ballots can be sent with reasonable, acceptable security electronically because they don't have the vote.

397
00:44:11,380 --> 00:44:14,780
They don't have the secret value piece of data on them.

398
00:44:14,780 --> 00:44:17,120
Everybody knows what's going to be on the blank ballot.

399
00:44:17,440 --> 00:44:21,140
So you get your blank ballot in 45 days and then still have 45 days.

400
00:44:21,140 --> 00:44:29,380
The military have access to expedited free postal mail return that is provided to everyone, you know, in the military.

401
00:44:29,420 --> 00:44:38,840
And the, what we see, as I mentioned, you know, there's 32 states that currently allow electronic ballot return, 28 that do not.

402
00:44:38,860 --> 00:44:40,380
There, I'm sorry, 18 that do not.

403
00:44:40,380 --> 00:44:52,240
There are several states that don't allow electronic ballot return that have higher rates of participation for military and overseas voters because they have other, they have robust communications in place.

404
00:44:52,240 --> 00:44:55,620
They're making sure that they get the information to those voters.

405
00:44:55,620 --> 00:45:02,420
So I don't think that we can make a correlation that electronic ballot return is going to increase participation for those voters based on that information.

406
00:45:03,640 --> 00:45:04,420
Any other?

407
00:45:04,420 --> 00:45:04,940
Hi.

408
00:45:08,520 --> 00:45:09,560
I have a couple.

409
00:45:09,560 --> 00:45:11,320
David, what is your last name?

410
00:45:11,920 --> 00:45:12,600
Jefferson.

411
00:45:12,600 --> 00:45:13,000
Jefferson.

412
00:45:13,000 --> 00:45:14,620
Oh, I don't need any spelling on that one.

413
00:45:14,620 --> 00:45:14,900
Okay.

414
00:45:14,900 --> 00:45:16,040
Just like the county.

415
00:45:16,420 --> 00:45:16,820
Got it.

416
00:45:16,820 --> 00:45:18,080
Just like the county, right.

417
00:45:18,080 --> 00:45:18,580
Yeah.

418
00:45:18,960 --> 00:45:21,340
And the name of your organization again is?

419
00:45:21,340 --> 00:45:22,480
Free Speech for People.

420
00:45:22,480 --> 00:45:24,480
Free Speech for, I'm surprised I haven't heard from you.

421
00:45:26,620 --> 00:45:28,540
Free Speech for People.

422
00:45:28,540 --> 00:45:34,140
So military ballots and voting is always kind of interesting on all the campaigns I've worked on.

423
00:45:34,760 --> 00:45:39,800
And generally each county is autonomous in how they vote and yet you're talking about military and state.

424
00:45:39,800 --> 00:45:40,920
So I'm really a novice.

425
00:45:40,920 --> 00:45:42,760
I really don't know what I'm doing on this one.

426
00:45:42,760 --> 00:45:44,960
So you're saying the states have better things in place.

427
00:45:44,960 --> 00:45:48,860
So how does that work with the counties being autonomous in how they do their voting?

428
00:45:52,560 --> 00:46:02,380
So it actually depends state by state because some states have, some states run their UOCAVA outreach to those voters or military and overseas.

429
00:46:02,380 --> 00:46:14,160
The outreach to those people at the state level and some places do it at the county level, meaning that the county officials have to email the ballot or send the ballot to the people or some places they do it from the state level.

430
00:46:14,160 --> 00:46:16,040
So it really depends on the state.

431
00:46:16,600 --> 00:46:18,560
Yeah, you have to go state by state.

432
00:46:20,380 --> 00:46:22,200
Any other questions?

433
00:46:27,520 --> 00:46:29,860
Trying to minimize the feedback.

434
00:46:29,880 --> 00:46:31,420
So I don't really have a question .

435
00:46:31,420 --> 00:46:32,680
I have a comment.

436
00:46:32,860 --> 00:46:44,640
I think it's important for people to be careful not to generalize your personal experience of voting and think that's how it is throughout the United States.

437
00:46:44,640 --> 00:46:48,300
It's easy to make blanket statements that don't apply.

438
00:46:48,380 --> 00:47:00,160
So for instance with respect to voting by mail, if you live in the state of Georgia, the only way to be able to do a hand marked paper ballot is if you vote by mail.

439
00:47:00,380 --> 00:47:05,280
The only way to have ballot secrecy is if you vote by mail.

440
00:47:05,460 --> 00:47:15,300
Because if we go into a precinct, we have ballot marking devices that are huge, they're upright, they're lit up and anyone can see how you're voting.

441
00:47:15,620 --> 00:47:24,160
So if you want ballot secrecy and hand marked paper ballots in the state of Georgia, you have to be able to vote by mail.

442
00:47:24,300 --> 00:47:31,700
And the other thing to be aware of in the state of Georgia is that the Secretary of State controls all counties.

443
00:47:32,160 --> 00:47:37,100
So we're required to do everything the same way throughout the entire state.

444
00:47:37,140 --> 00:47:39,660
It's not county by county decisions.

445
00:47:39,900 --> 00:47:48,680
So I just want to caution people, don't generalize based on your own experience because across the United States, there are very different circumstances.

446
00:47:49,840 --> 00:47:51,600
Any other questions?

447
00:47:53,320 --> 00:47:56,460
Going once, going twice.

448
00:47:57,740 --> 00:48:00,080
All right, well thank you everybody and please help me.

449
00:48:00,080 --> 00:48:01,140
Thank you all.