And larryt nbc news norden, the director of the Election Reform Program at the Brennan Center for justice. Just a reminder, if you have questions as we chat, feel free to drop them into the chat below. Voting is on everyones mind at the moment, and with coronavirus, more voters than ever are trying mailin ballots or voting early. Alternatives to our usual voting methods, a lot of people are asking will voting become digital, as well . Thent to kick off conversation by asking, why would we even want online voting . My bias is coming from seattle where we have a robust mailin ballot system, and the process is already quite easy. Im curious what the conversation would look like around, why do we need this kind of technology . I think the appeal is in normas. Is enormous. In theory, it has largely been attempted in this country for military deployed service members. It could be used for people with disabilities who dont have a lot of ease getting to the polls. If we somehow had a robust online Voting System, it would drastically increase voter participation. The bigger question is how we would get there, but i think it there arent big numbers of who would show up on a given election day. The vote for American Idol is online. I would second what kevin just said. Voters can hand to mark a paper , but are unable to use the mailin ballot system. We do need to keep that in mind. There is the element of resiliency. We are going to a pandemic right now we need to have backup plans, not just one but several, and digital solutions, protection against those scenarios and access to voters who have traditionally been disenfranchised and cant use the traditional method of voting and it is all about access, as much choices we can for people in a responsible, measured way. Thats a big reason we need to keep exploring this. I will push back a little bit. I should say i work on access issues and always my presumption we want to increase options for voters so if we could find a way to allow internet voting that was secure that would be great to offer that option to voters. Its not clear to me that would increase turnout. It is critical to find ways to increase options for voters, increase access but if you look at states that have more early voting or vote by mail you dont necessarily siege huge increases in turn out. There are other issues where we dont have the kind of turnout many of us would like to see that we see in other countries which dont have internet voting. It is not clear to me that is the key reason. There is no question for some voters, in particular voters with disabilities, there might be a way a way to make it in particular for the challenge they have easier to vote, there is a universal Security Experts that were not ready to roll this out the we need to look at this right now, and help voters with disabilities, to ensure they can vote. We will get back to the issue of security. The cases we havent been following with online voting. He is not leaving the edge of this. Several jurisdictions around the country, a small group of deployed military personnel, us citizens overseas with small jurisdictions and disability. Across the country, 30 states, allow formal electronic towns for a subset of voters and those traditional methods have been facts and email secured by any standards, when you talk about security. Voting on your phone, what does it look like from that perspective. I would be happy to take that one too. The traditional approach, has been the use of native smartphone application. The initial process is the same you would do for any absentee voting process, as an absentee voter there is a federal form and also a state specific form so you can do either. Your county or local election club once you fill out that information and once they are satisfied there is an option which method you want to choose. You can choose a fax system, you can choose electronic in some jurisdictions where electronic options would be email or mobile. Depending on the channel if it is mobile, your downloading apps. The email needs to match the club. The photo id, and let your eyes and teresa is. They are even and you. Look at the barcodes as well and if everything is matching with the voter just ration file you are digitized, stored on the phone in a secure location with the help of biometric credentials, all the documents you provided are deleted for privacy reasons. Then you can mark the ballots in access of that interface, need to blow up the phone to do that and once you are ready, ministates would ask to sign an affidavit, automatically transcribed on the affidavit by the elections club for Voter Registration systems. Then you get a receipt instantly the receipt is house protected which will be access so you can check and also have an identifier in it used to audit your vote and in parallel the jurisdiction gets a copy of the receipt which is used to feed that audit and on election day a paper ballot on the phone is generating paper ballot just as you would have hand marked and in the background every oval goes on a network which is a postelection audit compared with every order on the paper ballot, to give assurance of trust and transparency and that everything went through so end to end that is one of the ways it works. We will get back to the verification process as well. The User Experience especially because i know theres been a lot of mistrust in the last few years. Im curious what the conversation has been like from voters. How do you make sure voters feel secure and particularly curious to hear from kevin who voted on this in his talk. Ive talked to a number of people who cast their ballots through votes in the system and pretty much to a t they are had some difficulty getting it set up and overall enjoyed the experience. Thats a distinct discussion from security concerns but in terms of figuring out and liking it, they had a little trouble, voting is not easy period, but they did enjoy it. I dont know if given a security issue as well, i do think theres enough of a consensus among Security Experts that that is a much much tougher nut to crack. Should we add to that or is this a security issue . I have a couple things. It is interesting if you look at polling on this that in general if you ask voters would they like to vote on their phones they will say yes but if you mention russia or security attacks or nationstates having their elections those numbers plummet so i think most people when thinking about voting and when they go to vote are not thinking about security but that is a great concern and when you raise it with voters it is a great concern to them as well. It is worth noting the fact that weve moved so dramatically away from voting over the internet, dramatically away from paperless Voting Systems and how Much Movement there was because of National Security warnings and because there was a public desire to have a paper record the voter has seen before it was cast, filled out or machine produced a record before the vote was cast and how important that is to people. Weve gone from Something Like even in the past 2 years, 2016 one in 5 voters was voting on a system that didnt have a voter verified paper record and in this election it will be 4 . There is just a dramatic move away from this and that is in part because of security concerns that have been raised. If i could add a couple of things to, a lot of surveys larry was referring to, and a lot of the feedback, jurisdictions that have seen if you have the first question would people want to vote on their phone or online the majority opinion in favor. If you then ask them the question about the risks people get skeptical and if you follow up with a mechanism by which they can audit their vote the number shoots up again and so that is an early indicator that people are looking for a measure of trust and whether it is paper or something digital, that is something that shouldnt be overlooked. Lets back up a little bit. I know larry mentioned the possibility of hacking or state interference with our elections, what are the major security risks compared to traditional voting . The most alarming i have heard talking with experts is the idea to create essentially a Central Place where ballots are cast. A worstcase scenario with a particular voting machine being asked on election day means those those would be spoiled. If we are talking a more centralized tub getting in broad terms we are talking about every vote that was cast on election day with the leader to election day all being spoiled which is essentially orders of magnitude more and furthermore, if there is not a paper record that you can do a separate independent recount the discrepancy might never be found or might not be found for months or years, which states have a couple weeks to certify their election results, it varies by state law but certainly everybody has to be for president ial elections settled between november and january. That is a greater nightmare scenario than anything i can think of with traditional paper vote. That is a good example. I would agree that thats a big concern and with personal devices, how secure those devices are and there is a malware attack that reachedes their iphones, could potentially have their vote impacted. The point kevin brought up at the end about the paper record the voter has filled out i know going into 2020, one of the things everybody has anxieties about this election but one of the things that makes me feel better is battleground states, 96 of the country, if there is problem or doubt we will go back to the paper record the voter has filled out, has confirmed as how she intended to vote and that should go a long way to resolving doubts about vote total so the actual security rest and the perception and as we know that perception is incredibly important in ensuring democracy works. A couple of things, the whole idea of having a Central Store if you look at designs of the mobile Voting System, something that has been addressed through the use of technology and generally every jurisdiction in the us even if you are using the same system across multiple jurisdictions the data would be separated so theres no single place where somebody could come in, the second one, theres a paper ballot being generated here, the key difference is you talk to a lot of voters, i have to trust the existing system. I have to trust the paper ballot i marked and deposited in the machine is not going to be thrown away or something that doesnt happen to it and smaller, inconsequential they will be. And so when people say paper is the ultimate form of trust thats not actually true. With some of the new Technology Methods you literally get 100 assurance that not only did your absentee ballot make it, it was counted and tabulated and that should not be overlooked, that technology now has a way to give us more trust than we had in the existing system. The other perception, i agree. There are a lot of conflicting parts and narratives out there so definitely that is something that builds over a period of time and thats why it is very important to make sure new technologies and rolled out overnight, a very slow, gradual iterative process to make sure everything is good and expands access beyond the small group of people being tested. If i could note here. There have been a couple Security Papers on votes. The m it one found they would be able to control the total results if i understand that correctly. There at least, Security Research disagree on that point. That is essentially a misunderstanding of the architecture of the system and you could correlate that kind of track, in person voting as well. I have to trust as a citizen what is happening in the election office, what is happening behindthescenes and if a malicious actor decides to throw away all the paper ballots or we recently saw the dropbox in california, those underdog votes are never going to be recovered so even now thats not true. The reality is similar to that exists in the in person Voting System as well. Ultimately there is a perception created the that system also has several tracks and so we shouldnt ignore those. If you have adequate controls the action at every step, you can minimize the risk to a level that the system becomes usable and that is what we need to focus on with the digital system like the same approach we followed with the in person Voting System as well. I just want to mention the california example, that instance where it was a dropbox, the empty drop boxes regularly in california they generally have video cameras, there are barcodes on the paper ballots so they are able to Contact People, they Contact People whose ballots may have been lost. Obviously thats an exceptional circumstance. You are talking about limited impact with that kind of attack and ability to recover that i think we still have a lot of questions about the examples kevin or i gave about how you might recover from those attacks and a lot of experience with voting on paper and security measures around paper and have builtin a lot of resiliency in those systems to ensure if there are problems we are able to recover and minimize problems. One of my concerns. I have this concern generally because there are not enough standards and regulation and oversight but really dont have any standard we dont have any National Standards for internet voting. We have private vendors who are selling methods of voting to Election Officials. Our Election Officials havent anything to judge them on. There are no standards they are being set against, no certification system so what you are left with is collection officials having to rely on representations or a vendor for which there is no check. What the vendor is telling you is true. Are there standards they have satisfied . It is a problem and most people agree that we are ready for internet are not, really need to have clear standards before we come anywhere close to a significant number of people voting on it. The understanding of complex Security Systems is pretty low and cant imagine every election official is able to independently verify either. What might those regulations look like . How do we bridge that gap to make sure what is adopted is adopted here. There are some standards put out by the overseer Voter Foundation in connection working with Security Experts but there is a set of independent standards. If we are going to do this in the United States it should be Something Like the National Institute for standards and technology which helped Design Standards that we use for Voting Machines that are in place and put Something Like this to gather but at the end of the day it seems there are at least three things these standards need to satisfy. What is to ensure the privacy of the voter, we went through steps that might be taken to authenticate the voter but how do we ensure their privacy is protected. We have a secret ballot in the United States, another reason this is a security challenge. Its not like banking, we need to make sure people cant buy or see how other people are voting. We need to ensure we authenticate so we cant have a system where anybody can vote for anybody. And probably most importantly we need to ensure the integrity of that vote. We need to make sure every step of the process from the persons trying to vote on their phones when it arrives at the election office, that it actually represents the vote that the voter intended to cast, somehow do that without the voter or anybody else being able to see and confirm with you that tally intended to vote. Those are complicated things to do. If i could add to that. I definitely agree about the problem about the standards, that something we have been advocating for for a while, we published an appeal to all the agencies to work on that. At the same time i think the process of trialing the solution, the standards process, because in the past there has been an attempt to delay creation of such standards so we definitely, that needs to be accelerated and secondly if you look at other approaches, remotely verifying the identity of the voter which is one of the challenges outlined in the report which larry mentioned from a few years ago, that has been addressed based on standards created and so that has been successful in other industries, we brought it to be election space so that is happening bit by bit in a stepbystep manner but with formal standardization process just like the one that exists for in person Voting Machines, that would definitely benefit the space and also controlling some of the kiosks and contradictory narratives. You wanted to jump in. You go ahead. I wonder if you could go over some of what happened recently and how they respond. Kevin reported on them. I dont know that has to do with what you are about to jump in with. Sort of. I wanted to note that trajectory online voting has had in the us recently. We had a fork, if you count that as online voting for military or overseas members, some areas, there are places those voters consent ballots and email attachments so i think it is kind of important to note that trajectory where in recent years there was a surge, West Virginia famously offered all its counties starting with primaries to use votes and a couple counties out west which ended up prompting a couple months ago that really is issuing a warning on voting, talking with some people because they feared more Widespread Adoption quickly. There might be disagreement whether online voting can never happen or whether it is a decade or so before we can do so safely but the consensus was that the feds were afraid of more Widespread Adoption