Election cybersecurity: How ready are we for November 3rd?

Cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter talks with The Verge's Nilay Patel and Russell Brandom about the state of election security in the US — what methods are being proposed to stop potential interference in the voting process, the problems with mail-in voting during a pandemic, and how voting machines are not always the best solution for a presidential election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Nick from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, Russell Brandim and I sit down with Kim Zetter, who's an absolutely amazing cybersecurity journalist. We wanted to talk about election security, voting machine security, e-voting, alternative ways of voting, how to keep votes secure, safe, and anonymous. These are huge issues, especially in the pandemic, when people are not quite as excited to go to polling places than might otherwise be. It turns out e-voting is incredibly hard to do securely. Voting machine security issues have been well-known for a long time. There's just a lot of surface area for attack, even as we all kind of push towards these e-voting solutions. Kim has a lot of thoughts on this, a lot of thoughts on what the safest way to vote is. Obviously, this is all relevant because there's an election coming up.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  One thing I do want to call out, we actually taped this episode back in March before primaries, so you will hear us talk about the upcoming primaries here and there. We just had a really big backlog of episodes, and this one got pushed, but it felt incredibly relevant, so we wanted to get it out this week. So check it out. It's Kim Zetter on The Vergecast with me and Russell Brandom.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  Kim Zetter, you're a cybersecurity journalist. You wrote an incredible book about Stuxnet called Countdown to Zero Day. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  And Verge Policy Editor Russell Brandom is here because anytime there's cybersecurity, I just look inquiringly at Russell for help. Welcome, Russell.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Wouldn't miss it for the world.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  So, Kim, you know, I wanted to talk to you broadly when we asked you to come on about election security in general. We are obviously now talking in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. There's a lot of conversation about how long the sort of shutdowns will last. There's a lot of conversation about voting by mail. I know Nancy Pelosi is pushing that really hard in sort of the stimulus bill negotiations. What is your general sense of how ready we are for this upcoming election, given what's happening right now?

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't think we're ready at all. I mean, I think that, no, I mean, you have, election officials are used to the methods that they've used for years, right? And even those methods that are, you know, long established, we still have problems in elections, you know? And so now you're throwing into the mix something entirely new for many states. I mean, some states are already doing entirely vote by mail, Colorado, Oregon, a couple of them, Washington, Hawaii. And there are states that are, that offer absentee balloting, you know, essentially vote by home or vote at home ballots to anyone who wants them. Some restrict that.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  But when you're talking about going from sort of requested ballots to sort of mandatory ballots to everyone, you're talking about changing the entire infrastructure of an election. And it requires a lot more staff to process vote by mail ballots and just a lot more logistics. And, you know, throwing that into the mix, in some cases, if you're trying to do it now for primaries, because primaries have all been rescheduled for May and June, that's a couple of months. That's not going to happen. And even November is touchy.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Are you used to the nervous laugh response when you give the bad news? I feel like it's usually, usually when we're talking about election cybersecurity, it is the bad news. And I wonder, is the kind of, oh, no.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  A common response.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  I think, well, I mean, I think that elections, you know, in general, don't promote a positive response in the US because they're often so problematic here. And I feel like our elections are sort of jury rigged. You know, we sort of patch them together and at the end of election, we sort of wipe our brow and hear a sigh of relief that, oh, okay, maybe we actually elected the right person, or maybe that went okay, despite everything that goes wrong in elections. So we sort of, you know, fly by in every election a year and feel like, okay, we pulled something off, but it's really iffy every time we do it. And I know

• 5:07Speaker 03

  a lot of people hate it when I talk this way, especially election officials, because they want the public to have confidence in the outcome of elections. But if you are inside and you see how the sausage is made, it's disturbing how elections are pulled off in the country.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  So let's take that for a minute. Outside of the pandemic, outside of maybe we'll postpone our elections, particularly primaries, outside of vote by mail for the general, you've written a lot about the 2016 election, you've written a lot about the 2018 election, when there was concerted attempts to sort of break into the infrastructure, access photo registration databases. What is the sort of state of play of elections before the virus hit?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Well, you know, election officials and DHS have been putting in this very concerted effort since 2016 to try and make election infrastructure more secure. And so they've had three years to do this. And it's great that DHS is playing a role in this now, because prior to 2016, really, we had nothing. And now we have sort of someone leading it who can come in and offer free services and do a security assessment for election officials. But even what DHS has been doing in the last three years is extremely limited. And they've only been able to actually even do their assessments in about 40 jurisdictions. They released a report recently.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Showing their progress since 2016, there are more than 10,000 election jurisdictions in the country. And their reports show that they were able to do security assessments at 40 of them, about 40 of them. And even what they're doing, a security assessment that DHS does, is they come in, they'll sort of do as kind of a pen test of your internet-facing system. So these are, let's say, the voter registration database, or voter lookups, looking up for precincts, anything that's connected to the internet. They will do a scan and see if there are vulnerabilities. But these are only the online-facing systems. They don't look at the voting machines themselves at all. They don't have a mandate for that, and these are proprietary systems, and they couldn't

• 7:13Speaker 03

  look at them even if they wanted to without permission of the voting machine vendors. So there's this large swath of the infrastructure that has not even been examined since 2016.

• 7:24Nilay Patel?

  So just to be clear, I just want to call it off. You said pen test, that's a penetration test. So they come in and they try to attack the systems that are public facing to the internet?

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, they will, they'll do a scan, they look for sort of everything that's on the system, or sorry, everything that's connected to the internet, and then they will look at vulnerabilities and recommend patches, and then they'll do a follow-up and suggest improvements after that. I wouldn't call it, I suppose, that sort of is a misnomer. I'm not sure that I would call it a real pen test that they do.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  That's much more involved, but they're really doing sort of a risk and vulnerability assessment.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  And then the actual voting machines, I remember this being a controversy even so far back as 2000, right, with the machines and the source code is proprietary, nobody could audit the code. That's still going on?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Yes. So since 2016, a couple of the voting machine vendors have agreed to hand over their systems to DHS. So DHS runs out of Idaho National Lab, DHS has a program there, and they've had a longstanding program there for industrial control system security. So it started around a couple of years before.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  around 2006 or so and they started doing assessments of industrial control systems for vendors and they would look at the vulnerabilities, look at the source code and then give the vendor a report. So since 2016, a couple of the voting machine vendors DHS has done outreach to them and a couple of voting machine vendors have agreed to provide their systems to DHS to be examined at Idaho National Lab. But they're looking at, I believe, upcoming systems, not systems that are currently in the market. It's unclear to me exactly what they've looked at. But the problem with that is that we already have longstanding assessments of all of this equipment. Many of the machines out there

• 9:21Speaker 03

  have been examined by academics who were able to get hold of the systems. The vulnerabilities in these systems have been known for two decades. So there isn't really anything, I think, that DHS's assessment could uncover that someone hasn't already uncovered. So you're looking at sort of a feel-good movement of voting machine vendors being able to put out a press release saying, "We are very transparent. We gave our system to DHS to look at and we are actively now looking at addressing these vulnerabilities." But these are vulnerabilities that they sat on for two decades and showed no interest, in many cases, of fixing. And I also want to point out that many of the problems with these systems are architectural. It's not a matter of slapping a patch on them. These are endemic

• 10:06Speaker 03

  problems that have to be fixed through simply re-architecting the system from scratch.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  Give me an example of one of those.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Well, the way that they use encryption in some cases, where they use it badly, they implement it badly, they don't, they use poor algorithms, things like that. Those are things that they have to, you know, fix in a more concerted way, not just with a patch. They have hardcoded passwords in some of these systems. You change a hardcoded password and that potentially breaks other parts of the system. Well, we're not even sure about some of the features of the system. So, for instance, the many systems have an embedded modem that are used to transmit votes on election night. Well, when these Voting machines go through testing and certification in labs that are certified by, on a federal level.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  The actual modem transmission part never even gets examined by these labs. So we have parts that actually, we don't even know how they've secured them. We rely on, for instance, election systems and software to tell us that they have all of these security features around those modems and the transmission, but we don't really know. No one's ever actually been looked at that. And so it's unclear, even in the DHS assessment, if they looked at the modem transmission of votes.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  So this sort of, you know, we're talking about like the voting machines versus the parts of the election infrastructure that are connected to the internet. And this gets to something that you see in a lot of articles of sort of post 2016 where it trickled out that there had been a lot of, at the very least, there were Russian government officials sort of paying a lot of attention to various voter roles and sort of the internet-connected infrastructure. But one of the things that they always say is, okay, there was some sort of message. We don't want to know if it's an attack or not. You know, maybe the system was compromised, but the voter roles themselves weren't changed.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  But there's always this sort of note in the story of, you know, there's no indication that the actual vote tally was altered, right? Because that's not connected to the system. And also, I think, you know, when you're reporting on this stuff, it's sort of seen as good form to like reassure people in the integrity of the result, just to say, you know, don't, it's not like they were sort of doing this to, so that Bernie would lose out or what have you. But it sounds like, from what you're describing, that kind of distinction is not really as clear as it looks.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  So a couple of things about that. I'll, I'll address sort of the messaging that came out after 2016 first. There were, there were talking points passed around by election officials and to DHS that were, that were very concerned that, of course, I mean, there were, there was already concerns before 2016 about the integrity of the outcome and whether or not people could believe it. And of Of course, Trump was tweeting about, you know, when it looked like he might be losing, he sort of injects this tweet out there that would call into question the results if he doesn't win. And then he does win, and then everyone also is suspicious about that.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  So, election officials were very nervous about any kind of loss of faith in election outcomes and elections in general. And so the talking points, repeated over and over again, were that voting machines are never connected to the internet, so no one could hack them. And at first, they said, no votes were ever changed. That was really the adamant statement, no votes were ever changed. And then they had to sort of walk that back, because people like me were criticizing them for that. And then they sort of caveated that, well, there's no evidence that any votes were changed. So, we've gone from, there are no votes that have ever were changed, to there's no evidence of votes were changed. But there has to be a caveat to that, a further caveat to that, in that no one actually looked to see if any votes were changed.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  So, what I mean by that is that, it's part of what I said before, is that the voting machine vendors prevent anyone from looking at their voting machines. They actually go to court to fight this, when people do try to look at them. We don't have any sort of effort after an election to examine voting machines and determine whether or not they perform the way that they were supposed to. And even if we did have an effort to do that, it's really unclear whether we would have the technical ability to see that, because you can make malware on a machine that disappears once the election is over. And so you could test a machine after an election, and it seems to perform perfectly well, but during the election, it might not have, and you might not ever know it.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  So that's an issue there, is that we don't even actually look to see if votes were changed. And so these assertions, you have to take them with a grain of salt, and put caveats around them, that no one actually ever looked. The issue now about whether voting machines were connected to the Internet, or even the issue about those voter registration databases that the Russians were so interested in in 2016, when everyone says they looked at data but they didn't change any data. So this is another statement that we're supposed to be trusting. Given the lack of security, the general lack of security around election infrastructure, we're supposed to believe that all of these states have the ability to detect when voter registration databases have changed.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  And it's not clear that they do have that. In order to do that, you have to have some kind of change management system in place so that you have a backup of the voter roll data over, I don't know, let's say, a year's time or whatever, and to do a comparison to see over those subsequent months when the Russians were looking into voter registration databases, you have to have some change management to see what got changed and what were authenticated changes and what were unauthenticated changes. And it's not clear that states were doing that. So we don't really even know what's behind those statements, those assertions that they're making.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  So I guess, I mean, a lot of what you're describing here are sort of safeguards that we should have, both sort of technically and politically, right? That like, there should be a technical safeguard in the state election system, and then also there should be sort of a political safeguard of like, someone is checking to see a sort of third party is coming in to make sure that that technical safeguard is working appropriately. And, you know, it's absolutely alarming how few of those safeguards are in place. But one thing I always struggle with is, you know, as a cybersecurity writer, a lot of what people think about is sort of threat models, right? What is the attack that you're worried about?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, for this, a lot of what you hear from election vendors is, well, the threat model, because the machine isn't physically on the Internet, right? Like, the voting machine isn't physically on the Internet. The threat model would have to be some sort of Russian spy slash troll coming in and physically plugging a USB stick into, you know, this machine, and then that would compromise this particular voting location.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  So there are multiple threat models. There's the threat model against the voter registration databases, right? So if someone comes in and alters the voter registration databases to remove voters or to indicate that they're an active voter and then they have to vote in some provisional way or something. There are a lot of ways to just sort of disrupt and disenfranchise voters if you mess with the voter registration database. But that's a very visual, sorry, visible way of doing it, right? We'll start to see a lot of voters showing up at the polls and having problems with their voter registration. So that's one thing. That's one threat model. That would create a lot of chaos and it's unclear, you know, if we would do a do-over. That's the other thing is we don't have methods for like, okay, if this goes wrong, what is our plan?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  The second thing about what you said about no voting machines connected to the internet, that's not true. All of those voting machines that transmit votes on election night via modem are connected to the internet. They're connecting to cellular towers in order to do that transmission and that data is going through the internet. And that means that there is a backend system on the internet also that is receiving that cellular transmission. So there are critical systems that are connected to the internet and I wrote a story about that last year, which said not only is there just a system there that's receiving those votes, connected to that system is also the system that does the final tabulation of official voting results. But there's also, that system that does that final tabulation is also in many cases the

• 18:37Speaker 03

  system that programs the, all of the voting machines before an election. So it's not about someone coming in with a USB stick and infecting one system or even just like one county system. You have another threat model here and that is the voting machine vendor themselves. Or in many cases, counties will contract with a third-party company to program the machines for them before an election. Those third-party companies that sort of sit there as middlemen are vulnerable. They don't have CSOs, they don't have security staff. They have never needed or had a requirement to have any kind of security awareness or basic level of security themselves. So

• 19:20Speaker 03

  The threat models are multi here, multiple layers, multiple levels, multiple parties. And that's some of what DHS has been trying to address over the last three years. But like I said, they have a little, a small staff, and they have limited amount of resources and way, way, way too many jurisdictions to try and secure.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  So a thing we talk about on the show all the time is that computers sort of generally are well understood. Like you add a computer to something and you kind of know what problems it comes with. And so here, it seems like computers are very good at counting. So it seems like you should just glue a computer onto this process that is fundamentally counting very fast and reliably. But then there's the set of computer problems of security, network security, you need a chief security officer, you need multiple rounds of audits, and no one has really addressed that set of problems in a holistic or countrywide way. Is that a good frame to think about it?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so any time you introduce computers into the mix here, you have the potential for problems, whether or not it's someone hacking or just a software glitch, or some kind of thing that goes wrong with it. You have, so you have a problem of relying on that system. Now, it's not a bad thing to use a computer to count ballots, to count votes for, you know, rapid counting. And there are some studies that indicate that computers are more accurate than people, you know, hand counting, manually counting. But you need to have a checks and balance. And that's the point of the audits that you mentioned. And doing, first of all, you need that paper trail. You need a paper backup, a ballot that was hand-marked by the voter. So we know the voter's intent. And you have that as a backup.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  That auditing part is critical that you mentioned. Because if no one ever actually looks at that paper backup, then it doesn't mean anything. And the problem that we have right now is that there are only, I believe, two states that actually do the type of audit that is designed to detect if there's been a problem with the software. Many states have audits in place. They have to do some kind of audit legally. But the way that they do the audit won't actually necessarily catch problems. And so we've got sort of these false assurances. We've spent the last two decades, many states moving back to machines that produce a paper backup. But then they don't ever actually even look at the paper backup. So it doesn't mean anything.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  But then we had laws come in that said, okay, now you have to, in some cases, look at that paper backup. But the way that the law is written, it's so badly, the audit is so badly done that it doesn't actually mean anything. So that's really where we are right now that we need to fix.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  So you're describing, you know, just sort of in a very basic sense, a lot of complexity, right? Like, we're going to add computers to this. We got to audit the machines. And then they're going to generate a paper trail. And then we got to audit the paper trail against the result. Shouldn't, I mean, if we're talking about widespread vote by mail, shouldn't everyone just mail a slip of paper in and have that hand counted? And it's probably the same amount of complexity without the same amount of attack surface?

• 23:34Speaker 03

  So there are other issues with vote by mail ballots. And you'll, a lot of the opponents of vote by mail will tell you that this creates a better opportunity for fraud. So not hacking, but this is the way that elections used to be thrown, right? Is that someone who has access to those ballots either replaces a bin of ballots, or loses a bin of ballots, or, you know, changes marks on the ballots, or things like that. So that's a different problem, but it's a smaller scale problem. It's, you're talking about someone who has access to ballots. And that's different than someone who can, you know, get into a voting machine vendor and change the software on, you know, thousands of machines.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  So it's not without its own risks, that issue of someone stealing ballots or replacing ballots. But that's not the primary problem that we're looking at in terms of moving to the vote by mail ballots. The vote by mail ballots involve a lot more processing and a lot more people. It's a really, really complicated process. When you fill out a ballot at home, you put it in an envelope that's specially designed. It has a, usually it has a legal statement on the outside of the envelope and you sign it. When that ballot arrives to the election office, they first have to verify that signature against a signature that you have on file with them in your voter registration or in your DMV registration.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  And sometimes they do that with software, that match, and sometimes they do it simply with a visible match. And there are all kinds of problems there if that, they don't actually match. You know, I don't know, does your signature remain same 20 years down the line? Who knows? But anyways, and so there are states that don't require, when there's a mismatch, for them to actually even tell you that there's been a mismatch. So you may not ever even know that they rejected your ballot based on your signature, and then you have no chance of correcting that. In other cases, the law gives them a minimal amount of time to notify you and for you to then rectify that. And again, if you're unable to rectify that, or you don't respond, then again, your ballot gets thrown out.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  So now what we have here is a situation where we create a lot more opportunities for voters to get disenfranchised, because the processing, the processes in place for processing those mail, vote mail, vote by mail ballots is problematic.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  So one model that I've heard about, I know Votes, V O A T C is very controversial, but when they're talking about the design, they say, all right, you know, to keep people from being disenfranchised, we're going to have, you have this app, the app verifies your identity in various ways, you sort of hit the button and, you know, that casts your vote a certain way, the screen tells you you've cast the vote, and then there's a back end that even though there isn't, either, even though you maintain anonymity in a general sense, or I suppose pseudonymity because it has to be tied to you in some way, you can go in with your password that's granted and see how your vote was registered.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  So that if anyone gets up to any shenanigans, you can go and say, oh, wait, like, this, this was this problem, I've meant to vote for this one person and it cast my vote for this other person. Obviously, like Votes, their specific implementation has come under fire from a lot of the auditing process that you're talking about, but I wonder if as like a, as sort of a mechanism, this idea of voting and then verifying your vote is, is sort of something we should be looking at or sort of thinking about?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Yes, but I want to put a caveat on what you've just described here. The, the method that you're describing doesn't allow you to verify that your vote was counted accurately. All it allows you to verify is that they received your, your ballot and that your ballot presumably is in that mix of ballots that was tallied. But it can't tell you that the, when they tallied that ballot, that they actually tallied your votes correctly. And that's the problem with a lot of these crypto solutions for voting, is that they will give you sort of a tracking number that you can then go online and see that your tracking number is listed among all the tracking numbers that were tallied, but they can't tell you that the

• 27:55Speaker 03

  backend system that then tallied the votes tallied them correctly or didn't drop your votes afterward, something like that. So there, there are two issues here with anonymity. That's the other thing with vote by mail is that you lose kind of that anonymity. You're The ballot that you're sending in and it's supposed to be separate from your ballot. There's a mechanism for they will open, they will check the signature on that envelope and they will separate it from the ballot inside that's in a separate envelope. So they do the verification without actually ever looking at your ballot. They divorce those two, the envelope and your ballot, so that when they tally the ballot, they don't actually have their signature connected to it.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Oh man, you see why I feel like I always see cryptographers talking about how like, this is so much more complex than making someone just like, don't let my credit card get stolen, which we do an okay job on a good day, but like, that's relatively simple. Like, don't let anyone read my email. Like, we got you. It's just this handshake. But then there are so many specific things you have to nail down for voting where it has to sort of, it has to be cast, it has to be tallied, the tally has to sort of, all those processes have to maintain integrity and then at the same time, we have to maintain a level of anonymity so that we can't be like going through and sort of persecuting people based on how they vote.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, I mean, you know, I'm a security reporter. The anonymity issue isn't high on my priority list, but for some people it is. And it used to be an issue for vote buying, right? If you, if you could prove how you voted to someone, your employer or a party or whatever, they could buy your vote. And so that's, that becomes an issue for some. But you know, the votes issue that you were talking about, you know, it requires you to sort of authenticate yourself at the front end of the system. And then the question is, how are they handling that in a way so that that authentication of who you are is separated from your ballot so that someone can't connect those two? So that is, that is an issue there.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  I think the, the larger issue with the, the systems like Votes, which is using mobile phone.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  That's V O A T Z, right?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Yes, V O A T Z, is that we haven't figured out how to secure that backend client system, right? So you're, you're basically saying now, instead of the voting machines that we already know are vulnerable, that we already know were coded poorly. By the voting machine vendors, we're now going to say, okay, the voting machine now is instead of that system that you go to the precinct and vote on, that insecure system. The voting machine now is your laptop, which you haven't updated any patches on in two years. Or, you know, your Android phone that is rife with vulnerabilities and can be hacked. So it's that, you know, your system now, you're required to update and maintain the security of your own voting machine.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  And then it's not just that, is we, the delivery, right? We have to trust that election officials are designing a system, or that a vendor like Votes has designed a system so that that entire chain from transmitting the ballot to you, to then receiving the ballot back from you is also secured, and also authenticated, and also can't be targeted in a denial of service attack that prevents you actually from receiving or sending back your ballots. So a whole host of new problems that haven't been addressed, and yet Votes is out there pushing its solution. And a lot of people are saying, you know, why can't we, we do online banking all the time? We do e-commerce all the time. What's the problem? Why can't we do voting over the internet?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  The problem with, and I get so tired of people using online banking as the example for why we should be doing online voting. When you're doing online banking, you have a record of every one of your transactions. And you're receiving a ledger every month from the bank, either online, or you get it in the mail, and you're able to then verify all of those transactions. It's also not anonymous. You go to the ATM, you get a receipt. You have all of this tracking. And you can go back to the bank and say, look, your system messed up. This is what I did, and this is what your system says I did. So you have a way of, let's say, reconciling for the person what went wrong.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  For a voter, you have, once you've cast that ballot and you're separated from that ballot, you have no way of knowing whether or not something happened to your ballot after you submitted it. And you have no way of then saying, holding up your hand and saying, hey, I have a record here, and it shows that you counted my ballot incorrectly. So the banking example doesn't match the voting example. And so people shouldn't be using that.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  You also have a lot of incentive with the bank to check the bank, right? Like, a personal incentive to make sure the bank gets it right. Whereas, I mean, how much... Political science over 100 years, 200 years is about how voters actually don't have personal incentives and yet they vote anyway.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Right, and they don't even look at, we've seen studies where they hand mark their ballot and they never review the ballot before they submit it. There are systems like the optical scan machines are supposed to spit out your ballot if you vote for too many candidates, like you know, you can only vote for one presidential candidate, but let's say you mark two of them by mistake and you never even look at your ballot or you look at your ballots and you don't notice it, the machine notices that and it spits back out the ballot and says, "Hey, you voted too many times, fix this." So, once you start doing that in a way that is separated from the voter, like the vote by mail ballots, this is going to be a problem. Voters are not going to check their ballots, they send them in. Once they've put that in the post, they have no way then, the system can spit back that

• 33:35Speaker 03

  ballot and say, "Hey, this voter voted for too many candidates in the presidential race", but that ballot has now been separated from the voter. The voter is sitting at home and you can't go back to the voter and say, "Hey, fix this now." So, we're going to have a lot more problems in this election in that regard, a lot more ballots will get thrown out, simply because voters don't check what they do before they send them in and because we don't have a way for them to reconcile the issues afterward.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say a word that'll make you mad? I mean, it'll make me mad too, but I feel like we should say it. Well, I mean, like, you know, votes, V-O-A-T-Z, votes with a Z. I do not think we should turn our democracy over to a company with a Z in the name. That's just me, it's a personal feeling I have.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  My name has a Z, how can you say that?

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but you're not, okay, well, Zetter is like a real, I'm just walking down a dangerous path. It's called a vote. It's not replacing the S. It's called a vote. For god's sake, man.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  It's a cutified, yes.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  It's too cute, like, Kim Zetter is like a meaningful cybersecurity name, he's got a brand. Votes is like, it honestly sounds like a middle school should use it for like a middle school election. But they're trying, right? That's a company that's trying. They've built a tech stack. People have looked at it. What they are not doing, and this is where this will make you mad, is a new look method, like a blockchain method of voting that a lot of people talk about. That seems like it has a number of positive benefits, but it seems like it has huge problems. Have you evaluated that stuff?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Well, so there were people that looked at that system. MIT researchers looked at the claim that they were actually even using blockchain. And it turns out that they're at least not using blockchain for the transmission of the ballots back. And they said that they were. So presumably, they're only using blockchain for the storage of the votes after they arrive. So the whole point of using the blockchain was to preserve the security of the transmission, not just the storage. So even that claim, we couldn't trust. So the problem is, is that until MIT looked at that system, we had to sort of believe the claims of votes itself, that it had done some independent reviews of its system and that they had passed security. Well, now we find out that it doesn't pass security,

• 35:42Speaker 03

  and it doesn't even pass the claims that they asserted about it. And so there's this whole thing about turning over these systems to these third-party vendors, trusting them to get something right, and not having any transparency. That system also doesn't undergo testing and certification in the way that our voting machine does. So this is just remarkable to me, that election officials would, the voting machines that they put in the precincts, by law, their states require, in many cases, them to undergo testing and certification. But then you move to something like this mobile voting app, and that goes out the window. And no one requires the same kind of rigor. And I would question whether or not even the voting machines go under any

• 36:23Speaker 03

  kind of rigorous testing and certification. But even that sort of low level of standard that we've required for the voting machines themselves goes out the window, suddenly, when we're talking about a mobile voting app. And that I don't understand.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I guess. The benefit seems very high. I mean, this is why we keep chasing it, right? Everyone has a phone to, you know, some degree of certainty. It would be better if more people participated in the democracy. It would be simpler. And, you know, I think generally we think computers are good at counting. So it seems very easy to say, we should just all vote on our phones.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Well, I would also say, I mean, this is the only nice thing I've ever said about blockchain voting. But I will, in the most abstract possible terms, the problem you're describing, Kim, of, you know, you've submitted the vote. You know that when you submitted it in the public facing part of it, it was for candidate A. How can you be sure that that's not being tallied as a vote for candidate B? That actually does seem like a problem that could plausibly be solved by having it sort of, having them do the adding on a public ledger, right? Like, like what we want is for that to happen in an open and transparent way so that we can make sure

• 37:40Speaker 04

  that when you're adding up the numbers, there isn't anything funny going on.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Uh, well, okay, so you have to authenticate that everything that's in that ledger is actually a legitimate ballot, right? First of all. So there's still a lot of complications. And then you also have to show in a transparent way that everything that is in that ledger is in the, in the actual tally and that nothing has changed in the tally. So I guess, um, I don't know, I haven't seen a blockchain solution I, that works in voting. I haven't seen or spoken with any kind of, uh, uh, election security expert who believes that blockchain is a solution for voting. They know more than me, uh, better than me about how the blockchain would work for voting. And so I kind of trust them to, you know, in their assessments that blockchain is not,

• 38:30Speaker 03

  you know, where you want to go down with voting.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Well, and I think, I mean, this is 100% the, right? Every time I, I think if I, if I like call up a security expert and mention blockchain voting, they'll like hang up on me. Like they, they are so sick of people talking about it.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  That's why I said it would make everybody mad.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. You succeeded. You succeeded in making this.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  But again, I mean, you know, Russell, you're still talking about the problem of having the backup, right? So let's say one of those, the ledger, the ledger fails, right? And you still don't have that paper backup in any kind of mobile voting. I mean, everyone talks about, okay, this would increase voter turnout. Well, the studies are a little mixed on that. There are some studies that say, yes, that when you do mobile voting, it does increase voter turnout. Others say it's not really, it's sort of negligible. Voting by home should also increase voter turnout, right? The voter does, is the lead, has to do the least thing that they have to do. They receive something in the mail, they fill it out, they send it back. It's a prepaid envelope. That also really lowers the barrier for a lot of voters to cast a ballot.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  And at least in that vote by mail situation, you actually have a paper trail that's filled out by the voter. Look, there isn't a perfect voting solution. What we have to sort of examine are all of the risks, weigh them, and figure out the one that has, the risks that can be most easily addressed or best addressed. And I think that, you know, people who have spent a lot of time talking about this and thinking about this come down to that voter marked paper ballot is the best solution that we have. You can still tabulate the votes with a computer, but you need that paper trail for integrity, for faith and trust in the outcome, and a way to reconcile problems when they do show up.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  So, we only have a few minutes left. I want to ask broadly about our upcoming election, but I feel like we can't have a long conversation about voting security and online voting, all this stuff. Would that, like legally, I'm required to mention Estonia? Like, I feel like the police will come if I don't. So Estonia is a small country. They do a lot of online voting. They're very proud of it. They've had a lot of controversy around it. Are they getting it right? Is that a model that we can look at?

• 40:43Speaker 03

  I don't think it's a model that anyone recommends. That has been audited and two people who are very well regarded in election security did an audit, found numerous problems with the system. Estonia didn't like that they found problems. I don't know that the problems have been solved. I know that Estonia likes to, you know, put itself out there as a leader in, you know, the internet's citizen. So they are pushing this. But I don't know the Estonian system well enough to know what kind of safeguards they have, what kind of checks and balances, what kind of auditing they do in that. So I'm a little reluctant to sort of assert whether or not they're doing it right. All I know is that there are reports out there on the internet that you can look at

• 41:27Speaker 03

  where people examined the Estonian system and found problems with it.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Are there other countries that are good models that are sort of getting the balances right?

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Not for internet voting. I mean, no one recommends internet voting in the security community.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  But elections in general, or election security in general?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, elections are complicated. I mean, the best model, I'll just, coming back to that, I feel like a broken record. The best model is having a voter-handmarked paper ballot in which you do an audit afterwards. I mean, it seems, people don't like that because it seems like, you know, it's not really a sexy solution, right? It sounds like old-school voting, which we had for a long time. But sometimes that is the best solution, is that you have, is to go back to that low-tech, least complicated way of voting. Like I said, again, that has its own issues that you have to address, but every election is going to have integrity issues that need to be addressed.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  And so you just have to come down to where you weigh the risks and decide which has the risks that you can most easily address and that are the most transparent to address.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  So, look, I don't think being a broken record on there is a known best solution is a problem. Like, right? Sometimes there's just a known best solution and we should go with it. I think that brings us to now, which is the known best solution potentially has another very high cost, which is transmission of the virus. How do you see that playing out? I mean, we're recording this, you know, in March. We don't know what's going to happen by November, but... How do you see the conversation playing out right now?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, so weighing those two risks, right, between poll workers and voters getting infected and potentially dying, that, of course, is not the option that we want. And so the second best option that we have may be vote by mail. And so I'm not saying don't do vote by mail. But if we're going to do vote by mail, it's not something that we can slap together at the last minute. It really needs concerted planning, starting right now. And they need to look at it with open eyes and understand all of the potential risks that they're going to have. Quite often what you get are election officials, everyone tells them in advance, okay, this is what's going to happen. People can actually anticipate the problems that are going to happen. And then election officials don't address them. And then on election day,

• 43:45Speaker 03

  everything falls apart and they say, well, no one could have seen this. But everyone can see right now, all of the potential problems of vote by mail. And it requires a lot of planning. And so that's the question now is, will the federal government pass a bill that provides election officials with all the money they need to hire new staff, to implement new processes and procedures, to get it right by November? And so it's really in the hands of the federal government right now to provide the resources necessary to make that go smoothly. It's still not going to go smoothly, but to make it go as smoothly as we can possibly do it in the short amount of time that we have.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  So in terms of like the political wish list that sort of Vergecast listeners should go out and sort of demand from their representatives, it's, we should actually invest in elections that are, that sort of function well. Like, we need to spend a little bit more money on this, it'll be worth it. And then also, it sounds like, for your local, sort of, election body, the county board usually, you should be asking for a paper trail, for a paper ballot, and kind of making sure that they don't do anything too fancy? I mean, is that what we should send folks out to go advocate for?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need to have the paper backup. You need to have an auditing mechanism in place and an auditing law in place. And then you need the resources given to election officials for this process to succeed by November. But really, we don't have a lot of time because primaries are going to have the same issue. And the rescheduled primaries are in, you know, two months or so. So, I mean, I don't, I don't want to depress everyone, but this is, this is a real challenge, how we're going to pull this off this election year. The alternative is that the election gets canceled. And I don't think that we want that either. So everyone has to get this right, has to do the planning, has to get the resources. Federal

• 45:39Speaker 03

  government needs to move on this to get the money out to states. And then election officials have to take the responsibility and actually produce a plan and do this right. Because the alternative is either we have a really messed up election, or we have no election at all. So that's what's in our hands.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  So I want to end on a, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it uplifting. But if, right, we're trying to fix the system.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  No, do the uplifting. I want the uplifting.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  I need it.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  Wander my way to it.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  I've been such a downer.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  No, the reality is that, you know, we live in a society and a democracy that's been going for a while. We have a long history. There's systems that have to be changed, not replaced. Based on everything you know, if you were to clean sheet it, right, and say, this is actually how we should do it, what would be your recommendation?

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Pretty much what I've been saying. I would get rid of the voting machines that we have now in precincts, unless it's an optical scan machine. I would do a, look, DARPA, right? DARPA has been researching, I wrote a story about this. They have been looking at doing a system from scratch that has, uses the latest in secure hardware techniques. So if you could design a system from bottom up, right, I would scrap all of the voting machines that we currently have that we know have problems in them. I would design an open source system that's transparent, that uses secure hardware, so that the, the base of it is already secure, then has open Source software that's been fully vetted and is secure. And then it is, it's a scanner, right?

• 47:11Speaker 03

  It's not a touchscreen machine without a paper trail. And it uses a hand marked paper ballot. For disabled voters, you can have a touchscreen for them. And then you also require those audits. That seems to be sort of the pie in the sky. If we could do this all over again, start from scratch, that would be the way that I'd go.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll get to work on that immediately. My goal when this is all over is to somehow take control of the United States government. I don't know how that works without getting elected, but I'm thinking about it.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  That's the next episode. We have the paramilitary training and yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  First of all, you just take control of the machines. You take control of running machines. And that's how you get elected to then have the control to take over.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm saying, like everybody, I've had a lot of time to sort of sit around at home and think big thoughts. Kim, thank you so much for coming on. We've been huge fans for such a long time. It's kind of an honor to speak with you. So thanks for joining us today.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Oh, you're welcome. And I'm sorry for depressing you.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. My thanks to Kim Zetter for joining us on the Vergecast. Again, sorry that we taped it in March and released it this week, but I still think it's incredibly relevant. I love that conversation. It was actually kind of fun for me to go back and listen to it. Voting, security, voting tech, we're going to keep on top of it as we come up to the election. We've got a lot of plans for election coverage. Also, thanks to Russell for joining me. Always a good time. We'll be back on Friday with a chat show. A lot of news going down lately. We'll see if there's another streaming service coming out. There usually is one. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Let me know who you want me to talk to you, what you want me to cover. I love that feedback. It really helps us drive the show. Other than that, we'll see you on Friday.