The NPR Politics Podcast - In 2020, Some Americans Will Vote On Their Phones. Is That The Future?

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Despite Russia's high-profile interference in the last U.S. presidential election, pockets of the U.S. are experimenting with Internet voting ahead of the 2020 election. This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter Miles Parks, and election security editor Phil Ewing. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Ellie from Elgin, Illinois, calling on a rainy morning as I drop my daughter off at her bus stop. This podcast was recorded at 106 p.m. on November 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Man, that's awesome. Elgin Watch has kept America on time for many, many years. That was before the Apple Watch.

Are you still analog, Phil? 100%. Oh, man. All right, well, at any rate, hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting and don't own a watch. And I'm Phil Ewing, election security editor. And you do own a watch. See, you're learning so much about us already, everybody. All right. Before we get started here, we have so much business to talk through in the world of the NPR Politics Podcast. So let's get to it. We've got a live show tonight here in Washington, D.C., at the Warner Theater. Now, that is going to be our weekly roundup of the week.

So I'm sorry you guys if you have can't let it goes this week. We just don't have time for them. I really apologize. We're going to have to let it go. Exactly. So work on that right now. But that will be in everybody's feeds tomorrow. And we have a big announcement. We have two more live

shows coming up in Chicago on January 10th and another one at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, on January 22nd. To grab a ticket, just head to nprpresents.org. Okay, all of that said, guys, let's get to the news. We have a couple things to get to. First, a shorter thing. There are some new transcripts out in the impeachment inquiry. So tell us, what are the top lines, the things we need to know? Our colleagues are still, as we're recording this, pouring over those transcripts because they just came out. But we already know one or two important things about what they said.

The first is Fiona Hill, who used to work for the National Security Advisor John Bolton, said that they thought it was bad on its merits for the United States to have these strings attached with this relationship with Ukraine. According to Hill, Bolton called it a drug deal. He said that President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who had been deputized to do this work, was a hand grenade in her terms. And Colonel Vindman was on the call himself. He actually heard President Trump have the phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, at which the famous request was made for a favor by the Ukrainians. And he said that, in fact, according to his own account, the White House departed from its normal procedures in handling the account of that call. So that transcript that

we've all read was not placed in the normal communications system they used, but rather a more secure system. And he objected to that and he objected to the policy that was being pursued. He said this was a bad idea because it helped Russia or it could help Russia, even though the will of the administration, the will of the Congress was for the United States to help Ukraine. OK, well, I'm sure we will have more on that in your feeds tomorrow and at NPR.org and on the radio. But in the meantime, let's talk about the future. That's how you say the future, right? Yeah. Specifically, we're going to talk about online voting. And I'm just going to say, Miles, online voting.

I know you've written a whole story about this, so I hope you can break this down for us. Because to me, it sounds like either a terrible idea or a really great futuristic convenient idea. I feel like you're basically giving voice to my entire Twitter mentions this week. Which is a lot of curse words on both sides of the issue. Do you want me to curse? No, no, no. Please, I've had, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, please. I've had enough. I need good energy. Okay. Okay. The big thing here on a whole, the more you know about computers, the less you like the plan to vote online. It's kind of the

top line level of how people seem to come down on this thing. The push recently in voting has been actually back to paper ballots across the country. We're still trying to get there where 100% of the U.S. is voting on either paper ballots or voter verified paper trails in their electronic ballot machines. So the fact that there is this side push to experiment with internet voting at the same time while we're trying to get everyone back to paper, it's just this really interesting contradiction. Well, so let's dig into this. I know we're going to get to the pluses and minuses a little later, but I want to get to where we are right now, because what I found surprising in your piece is that this is already happening in some places. I feel like I was talking to Phil

about this the other day, and he had the light bulb moment of like, wait, we're not, it's not a hypothetical. This is like happening in different places. Right. Basically, it's only a few hundred voters at this point. There's a pilot program that's been going on in West Virginia where 144 voters in the 2018 midterms use this mobile app to cast their ballots. These are military and overseas voters. And then the pilot programs are expanding to a couple of other states, a county in Colorado, a couple counties in Oregon, a county in Utah. We're very, very in the infancy of this program. But it's basically a mobile app where military and overseas voters in Utah, disabled voters can get on their phone, have to go through some security protocols, and then actually cast their ballot that way. I see. So there are steps to make

sure it's super secure. That's what the company says. But the amount of insight we have at this point, cybersecurity experts are not happy with the amount we know about the security measures the company says they have in place. Okay, gotcha. So we've talked a little bit about these concerns. And of course, there were election security concerns very much coming out of 2016. So let's start right now with a big question our listeners probably have, which is, what is the case for this?

There are definitely obvious cases against it, right? But the advocates want this conversation to start at a place of the current system is not working. You know, I think when we talk about election security and improving election security comes from a place of like we have to preserve the integrity of the vote. But they say the U.S. trails most developed countries in terms of turnout rate. One reason is that elections take place during workday, so not everyone can go. Another reason is that we run elections in a very old-fashioned way. You have to take time to go to a gym or a community center or a retirement home and make sure that you're registered and then check in, and then you have to go through a line. And there's a lot of process before you actually get your sticker. The net effect of this is that you may have 55% or so of eligible voters turn out at a

given year, which is what it is. The pitch from advocates for online voting for using apps or email or other services is that if you could reduce what technology types call the friction involved between registering and casting a ballot, then more people might do it. That might result in greater legitimacy for elected officials. Right. Standing in line is harder than just turning on my phone and going through some security measures. Even just the concept of the fact that we have to register as well as vote for a lot of people, for a lot of advocates, they say you actually have to vote twice in this country when you consider registration as well as voting. And they consider that in and of itself quite burdensome to getting that turnout up to a situation where people feel like it's actually representative of the entire population. We're going to leave this here for

now. It's time for a quick break. But up next, we're going to talk about the risks involved in online voting. But before we go, I just want to say that NPR has been holding roundtable conversations with 2020 presidential candidates and voters. We've just put up another one with South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. You can find it at npr.org slash off script. We will be right back. Support comes from Google. From Connecticut to California, from Mississippi to Minnesota, millions of American businesses are using Google tools to grow online. The Grow

with Google initiative supports small businesses by providing free digital skills workshops and one-on-one coaching in all 50 states, helping businesses get online, connect with new customers, and work more productively. Learn more at google.com slash grow. Wake up to a fresh take on the day's news with Up First every weekday morning and now Saturdays at 8 a.m. Eastern, too. Ten minutes is all you'll need to start your day informed. And now you can listen six days a week. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Up First to start your weekend from NPR News. And we're back. So increasing turnout is a positive thing that could result from online voting. What is the case against it when you get down to these technical details that you've told us about here? The fear is if you have an electronic result, but no way to audit that result separate from the electronic system, you can't go back and check after the fact the results that you've recorded. One reason why paper ballots have come back into vogue in a lot of jurisdictions

is because they permit audits after the election so that you can double check, even if there isn't a dispute and you don't need to do a recount, how much fidelity you had in that process beforehand. But if everything is living on site, a server somewhere, and all of your voters are connecting via an app, even if they have Face ID or Touch ID the way you might have with your iPhone, there's less confidence. You can have less confidence about the integrity of those results, even if they're not disputed. So given those fears, I mean, we still have these counties piloting these systems. Is this something we expect to grow even despite these fears? I think that is the open question at this point. I think when you talk to advocates and the people from the company who have actually administered this app, within a decade, they want everyone to

be voting this way. Whether that's going to happen is an open question. What they say basically is, let's get the military voters, the overseas voters, the people who have a lot of trouble, really low turnout rates, let's get them on it. Let's test it that way, make sure it works. Okay, who's next in terms of who else has trouble getting to the polls? Disabled voters. Let's get disabled voters all over the country using this thing. Okay, after that, let's move to rural voters, people who have to drive miles and miles to get to their polling place or have trouble using even the mail system. So once you get all those voters on, at all of these sections, there's going to be a point where society has to decide

which is more important, all of these questions that these cybersecurity experts have, or increasing the accessibility for our disabled population, which is something that is obviously a very sympathetic cause. So to bring in those cybersecurity experts fears that you bring up, I mean, when I was reading your story, I kept thinking about, well, gosh, several times a day, sometimes I open up my phone and I go to a banking app. I go to any sorts of apps where I have very sensitive information and I put in my fingerprint. I mean, it seems like we have pretty secure technology right now, right? Or is this, how is voting different from this? What cybersecurity experts say is that security you feel is actually just a really good PR campaign by the banks themselves and by the

companies. One of my favorite examples about this is how much fraud, waste, fraud, and abuse is baked into the financial and banking system that we use. And so if you say four to five to 7% of your expenses every year are just going to be wasted because there's been theft or malfeasance or the credit card got lost in the mail, and you're a big bank, you can bake that into your cost of operating. And in fact, the American Bank Association puts out an annual report every year about credit card fraud, how scams work, how much money is lost, etc. But imagine having to be the person who was told, sorry, Danielle, your vote didn't get cast because we have five to seven percent of fraud and wastage in our election system. There's just some vote leakage. Better luck next time.

Deleting all my banking apps after this. One final question I want to get at here. Let's zoom out to 2016. Let's include that in this because some people's faith in our elections were really shaken by 2016 by, you know, Russia trying to hurt our confidence in our voting system and, you know, arguably succeeding. So how does online voting fit into this? I find it hard to believe that a system that people don't understand 100% how it works would, if instituted on a wide scale, improve confidence. We've seen people's confidence in elections over the last 20 years slowly decreasing, chip, chip, chip, chip, chip. online voting say is a lot of that is because of things like redistricting and gerrymandering and people not feeling included in the process or feeling their vote matters and that having everyone cast their ballots would actually increase that confidence. There's a lot of

people who are really skeptical and say, if you don't understand the system in which you're casting the ballot, then that confidence is only going to go down. Here's the other challenge. As a country, the United States and as voters were up against one of the most sophisticated cyber miscreants of all time, the Russian intelligence agencies. And they can do a lot of incredible things from what we read in the special counsel report, the reports that have come from Congress. And they don't need to do it everywhere. They only need to do it one or two places. But imagine seeing headlines which had been backed up by officialdom that votes had been changed somewhere or voter information was taken and scrambled on election day and it caused chaos at some polling place, even in a state that was not consequential for the result. If you can inflict that damage into Americans'

confidence in the way that their votes are going to be cast, as we talked about a moment ago, that's a huge strategic victory. And you only have to get it right that one time. No one knows whether 2016 was the real thing or whether it was just a dress rehearsal for a major attack, including one that could be going on right now, for all we know. Now, we have heard about the most recent election from the director of national intelligence, the FBI and others, that they didn't identify any major problems with that. That's good news. But this war is not going to stop. And this is a race, as we've heard from people in covering election security, that does not have a finish line. Well, on that fascinating and unsettling note, we are going to have to leave it there.

Thank you guys so much. I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Phil Ewing, election security editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.