Bad voting tech is ruining US elections
On February 3rd, Iowa went to the polls, officially kicking off theDemocratic presidential primary. It was the first big chance for candidates to seize the momentum and it was kind of a disaster. - It all comes down to technology. It appears that this app just failed. - A technical disaster. - And what seemed to becoding problem with the app. - You probably heard about this app that was supposed to reportresults back from the caucuses. On the night of the vote, it broke, which meant the precincts weresuddenly sending back totals through clogged phonelines or, in some cases, texting pictures of the caucus worksheet. Because of the incomplete results, it took days to nail downwho had actually won. Now there's no indicationthat this was a cyber attack or a conspiracy or anything, but it's still a really alarming sign, particularly as we head intothe 2020 general election. Voting infrastructure isreally vulnerable, underfunded, and increasingly, it's breaking down when we need it the most. This is one of the biggestthreats to democracy right now and it comes down to a technology problem. But to see why it's happening, you gotta look at the big picture.
So the problem here was a single app made by a firm called Shadow to help the more than 1,600precincts send back results. Unfortunately, the appwas made quick and dirty, apparently built over twomonths for just $60,000. That might sound like a lot, but when you're makingiOS and Android apps plus a whole databaseto maintain the results, you go through it pretty fast. When Microsoft bankrolled a similar effort for the 2016 Iowa caucuses,members of the team said the bill was closerto a million dollars. The Shadow team also madeweird rookie mistakes like distributing the appthrough a testing platform that made it hard to even download. Even when precinctscould download the app, a coding error meant they couldonly report partial results, which then meant the party had to restart the entire process from the beginning just to make sure the numbers were right. Days later, they're stillsorting through it all. Now apps fail all the time, andgiven the shoestring budget, it's not that surprisingthat this one did. But because it's election tech, the fallout's been really intense. - But what we've also seen is an enormous amount of social media with a whole bunch ofcrazy conspiracy theories, a whole lot of arguments that this is maybe whypeople shouldn't vote. - When the tech fails, ithurts the whole process. Everyone assumes that things went bad because someone wantedto hurt their candidate, and it's not a crazy thing to think because in America specifically, voting has gone from a fundamental right to one more piece of the partisan game. A lot of the people running US elections just want to turn out as few of the other side'ssupporters as possible, whether that means kickingpeople off voter rolls without telling them orshutting down polling places so people have to wait hoursjust to cast their vote. Funding's a big part of ittoo, and this is a big reason why elections are sounderfunded in the US.
Your local polling place isusually run by the county with only a tiny bit offunding from the state and federal governments. So even when a county election board wants to make voting easy and secure, they often can't afford to. That weakens the whole system,just like we saw in Iowa. Now it doesn't have to be this way. Policies like automatic voterregistration can stop people from playing politicalgames with voter rolls. More polling places mean shorter lines. And if you make ElectionDay a federal holiday, you won't get a huge rushas soon as work lets out. You can even spread ElectionDay out over a whole weekend just so everyone can make it to the polls. But we don't do any of that in the US and it's because a lotof the people in power just don't want everybody to vote. People worry a lot about cyber attacks on voting infrastructure, but really, we don't need hackers tobreak our election systems. We're doing it ourselves.
The whole idea of elections, the whole idea of democracy itself, is to let these opposingfactions agree on a process and agree to be bound by the result, even if it doesn't go their way. But the more we degrade that system, the less reason there is to trust it and the less it's actually ableto resolve those conflicts. That starts with the tech breaking, tech like the Iowa app,the registration roll, the voting machine itself. But it ends with a much deeper rupture in the way political powerworks in this country. And fixing that ruptureis gonna be a lot harder than fixing an app. Thanks for watching. Throw us a like if you liked it, and if you want to hear me complain about thegovernment a little bit more, check out our video on robo-calls. They're actually doing like an okay job on that one finally, butstill, I have some concerns.
So the problem here was a single app made by a firm called Shadow to help the more than 1,600precincts send back results. Unfortunately, the appwas made quick and dirty, apparently built over twomonths for just $60,000. That might sound like a lot, but when you're makingiOS and Android apps plus a whole databaseto maintain the results, you go through it pretty fast. When Microsoft bankrolled a similar effort for the 2016 Iowa caucuses,members of the team said the bill was closerto a million dollars. The Shadow team also madeweird rookie mistakes like distributing the appthrough a testing platform that made it hard to even download. Even when precinctscould download the app, a coding error meant they couldonly report partial results, which then meant the party had to restart the entire process from the beginning just to make sure the numbers were right. Days later, they're stillsorting through it all. Now apps fail all the time, andgiven the shoestring budget, it's not that surprisingthat this one did. But because it's election tech, the fallout's been really intense. - But what we've also seen is an enormous amount of social media with a whole bunch ofcrazy conspiracy theories, a whole lot of arguments that this is maybe whypeople shouldn't vote. - When the tech fails, ithurts the whole process. Everyone assumes that things went bad because someone wantedto hurt their candidate, and it's not a crazy thing to think because in America specifically, voting has gone from a fundamental right to one more piece of the partisan game. A lot of the people running US elections just want to turn out as few of the other side'ssupporters as possible, whether that means kickingpeople off voter rolls without telling them orshutting down polling places so people have to wait hoursjust to cast their vote. Funding's a big part of ittoo, and this is a big reason why elections are sounderfunded in the US.
Your local polling place isusually run by the county with only a tiny bit offunding from the state and federal governments. So even when a county election board wants to make voting easy and secure, they often can't afford to. That weakens the whole system,just like we saw in Iowa. Now it doesn't have to be this way. Policies like automatic voterregistration can stop people from playing politicalgames with voter rolls. More polling places mean shorter lines. And if you make ElectionDay a federal holiday, you won't get a huge rushas soon as work lets out. You can even spread ElectionDay out over a whole weekend just so everyone can make it to the polls. But we don't do any of that in the US and it's because a lotof the people in power just don't want everybody to vote. People worry a lot about cyber attacks on voting infrastructure, but really, we don't need hackers tobreak our election systems. We're doing it ourselves.
The whole idea of elections, the whole idea of democracy itself, is to let these opposingfactions agree on a process and agree to be bound by the result, even if it doesn't go their way. But the more we degrade that system, the less reason there is to trust it and the less it's actually ableto resolve those conflicts. That starts with the tech breaking, tech like the Iowa app,the registration roll, the voting machine itself. But it ends with a much deeper rupture in the way political powerworks in this country. And fixing that ruptureis gonna be a lot harder than fixing an app. Thanks for watching. Throw us a like if you liked it, and if you want to hear me complain about thegovernment a little bit more, check out our video on robo-calls. They're actually doing like an okay job on that one finally, butstill, I have some concerns.
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