 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Jane Hu and I'm a journalist and a contributor to Future Tense. Future Tense is a collaboration between Arizona State University, New America, and SLEEP that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. I'll be moderating our conversation today and I'm thrilled to be joined by Kevin Collier, who's a reporter at NBC News, Nimit Sani, who's the co-founder of Votes, and Larry Nordin, who's the director of the election reform program at the Brennan Center for Justice. So just a reminder, if you do have questions as we chat, please feel free to drop them in the tab below. And so, yeah, voting is on everyone's mind at the moment. And this year with coronavirus, especially more voters and ever are trying mail-in ballots or voting early. And as we're talking about alternatives to our usual voting methods and so many things have moved online, a lot of people are asking, will voting become digital as well? So I want to kick off the conversation by asking, why would we even want online voting? And I'll say that my bias is coming from Seattle, Washington, where we have a robust mail-in ballot system, and the process is already quite easy. I'm just curious what the conversation has looked like around why would we need this kind of technology? I can feel that. I think the appeal is enormous. I mean, in theory, it's largely been attempted in this country for military, deployed service members, or it could be used for people with disabilities who don't have a lot of ease getting to the polls. I think it's been theorized with fairly convincingly that if we somehow had a robust online voting system, it would drastically increase voter participation. The bigger question, of course, is how we actually would possibly get there. But I think it would likely really, this country doesn't have really great numbers of people who actually show up on a given election day, and far more people are engaged. I think a vote for American Idol is the line than actually vote in the given election. Yeah, I would second what Kevin just said. I think we also need to keep in mind that there is a non-trivial number of voters who can't handmark a paper ballot and who are not able to effectively use the postal ballot, mail and ballot system as well due to various constraints. And so we do need to keep them in mind. Also, there's an element of resiliency. If there is a natural disaster and we're going through a pandemic right now, we need to have backup plans, not just one, but several. And a digital solution provides that element of resiliency and protection against the worst case scenarios. In addition, provides access to voters who have traditionally been disenfranchised and can't use the traditional method of voting. And elections are all about access. So let's give as much choice as we can to people in a responsible, measured way. And so that's the big reason why we do need to keep exploring this. So maybe to keep things interesting, I'll push back a little bit. First of all, I work on voter access issues. And it's always my presumption that we want to increase options for voters. So if we could find a way to allow for internet voting that was secure, I think that would be great to be able to offer that option to voters. It's not totally clear to me that that would really increase turnout. As I said, I think it's critical to find ways to increase options for voters to increase access. But if you look at states that have more early voting, states that have more vote by mail, you don't necessarily see huge increases in turnout. I think there are other issues around why we don't have the kind of turnout in the U.S. that many of us would like to see and that we see in other countries, which also, by the way, don't have internet voting. So it's not clear to me that that is the key reason. At the same time, there's no question that for some voters, in particular voters with disabilities, this might be a way to make it, in particular, for the challenges that they have easier to vote. I think for the time being, and I'm sure, but we'll get into this discussion where there's a pretty much universal opinion by security experts that we're not ready to roll this kind of thing out that we need to be looking for alternatives right now that can help voters with disabilities, voters living abroad, to ensure that they can vote and that their votes will get counted. Great. And we'll definitely come back to the issue of security. But before we get into that, I wanted to kind of catch folks up in case they haven't been following the story very closely. So how close are we to having online voting? Like, where has this happened already? And who's on the leading edge of this? So I can address that. So as Kevin previously mentioned, currently, several jurisdictions around the country have this option available to a very small group of voters, primarily deployed military personnel, US citizens who are living overseas and in a small number of jurisdictions, voters who have some form of a disability. So pilots are happening across the country. I believe more than 30 states do allow some form of electronic ballot return for this group of voters or a subset of voters. And some of those traditional methods have been facts and email, none of which are secure by any standard. And so that's also something that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about security. So what does the actual process of voting on your phone or online look like? Like, do you have to log into something? What does it look like from the user perspective? Sure, be happy to take that. So there are a couple of different approaches. The traditional approach has been to use some form of a website and then the approach votes has been piloting, pioneering is the use of a native smartphone application. From a voter's perspective, the initial process is the same as you would do for any absentee voting process. So you register with your jurisdiction as an absentee voter. There's a federal form and then there's also a state specific form. So you can do either your county or local city election clerk will do a little bit of vetting once you fill that information. And once they're satisfied, there's an option on the form which method you want to choose. So you can choose postal mail, you can choose facts in some jurisdictions, and then you can choose electronic in some jurisdictions where electronic options would be email or web or mobile wherever it's being piloted. And so you typically get an invitation and depending on the on the channel, if it's mobile, we'd be asked to download an app, do an initial authentication using your mobile number and email that needs to match what you've provided to the county clerk. And then you're prompted to do a ID verification. So you have to take a picture of a government you should photo ID, you can use a driver's license, state ID or passport. And then you're asked to take a live video selfie, where you blink your eyes, move your face so it knows it's it's real. You're not taking a picture of another picture or picture of another video. It then tries to match you with the picture in your ID, make sure your ID is valid, legitimate looks at the the holograms and the barcodes as well. And if everything's matching with the voter registration file, then your identity is digitized stored on the phone in a secure location and locked with the help of a biometric credential, which would be a fingerprint, a face ID or a wearable. And then all the documents you've provided are deleted for privacy reasons. And at that point, you're ready to receive your ballot. So you then receive your mobile ballot on the phone, you can mark the ballot. It's an accessible interface. So if you're disabled or need to blow up the funds, you could do that. And then once you're ready, you confirm your choices. Many states would ask you to sign an affidavit. So you sign on the phone screen that gets automatically transcribed on the affidavit, which is then compared by the elections clerk with the data on the state voter registration system. You then get ready to submit with your biometric credential, you get a receipt instantly. So you as a voter can the receipts encrypted and password protected, which only you have access to. So you can quickly check and it also has a identifier in it, which you can use to audit your vote. And then parallel, the jurisdiction gets a copy of your receipt, which then is used to do a pre tabulation audit. And then on election day, a paper ballot is actually produced. So even though you're actually voting on the phone, it's actually generating a paper ballot, just as if you would have hand marked it. That's what's tabulated with the primary voting system. And then in the background, we use a distributed ledger system as well. So every oval goes on a on a blockchain based network, which then facilitates a post election audit, where every oval marked on the phone is compared with every oval on the paper ballot and the data on the blockchain. And to give assurance of trust and transparency and also ensuring everything went through without any tampering. So end to end, that's one of the ways it works right now. Great. Yeah, we'll get back to some of the verification process as well. But I want to go back to the user experience, especially because I know that there's been a lot of mistrust over the last few years, especially about phone security. I'm curious what the conversation has been like from voters, like how do we make sure that voters feel secure in using this system? I'm particularly curious to hear from Kevin, who I know is reported on this, and also Larry, who I know has been researching this. So I've talked to a number of people who have cast their ballots through votes in this system. And pretty much to a T, they all had some difficulty getting it set up and overall enjoyed the experience. Now, I think that's a distinct discussion from security concerns. But just purely in terms of figuring it out and liking it, they had a little trouble. You know, there's a couple of steps to it. You know, voting is not easy, period. But then they did enjoy it. I don't know if you want to get into the security issue as well. But I do think that there is enough of a consensus among security experts that that's a much, much tougher nut the crack. Larry, do you have anything to add to that, or should we get into the security issues? Yeah, I would add a couple of things. One is, I think it's interesting if you look at polling on this, that in general, if you first just ask voters like would they like to be able to vote on their phones, they will say yes. But then if you mentioned Russia or security attacks or nation states potentially attacking our elections, those numbers plummet. So, you know, I think most people when they're thinking about voting and when they go to vote aren't necessarily thinking about security. But of course, that's a great concern. And when you raise it with voters, it's a great concern to them as well. And I think it's worth noting how the fact that we have moved so dramatically away from leaving aside the whole voting over the internet, moved dramatically away in this country away from paperless voting systems and how much movement there was, both because of national security warnings, but also because there was a public desire to have a paper record that that voter has seen before it was cast, either filled out or the machine produced a record before the vote was cast and how important that is to people we've gone from something like even just in the past few years in 2016, I think one in five voters was voting on a system that didn't have a voter verified paper record. And in this election, it will be 4%. You know, there's just been a dramatic move away from this. And I think that's in part because of these security concerns that have been raised. And if I could add a couple of things, things over there quickly. So we've also seen a lot of surveys, some of which Larry was referring to. And a lot of the feedback, the jurisdictions which have piloted with us have seen is, yes, if you asked the first question, would people want to vote on their phone or online? There is a majority opinion in favor. If you then ask them the question about the risks, people do get skeptical. And then if you follow up with a mechanism by which they could audit their vote, the number shoots up again. And so that to us is an early indicator that people are looking for a measure of trust. And whether it's a handmark paper or something digital, I think that's something that shouldn't be overlooked as well. So let's just back up a little bit. I know Larry mentioned that just the possibility of hacking or state interference with our elections. What are the major security risks, especially compared to traditional voting or mail-in voting? I think the most alarming that I've heard talking with security experts is the idea that an online voting system can create essentially a central place where ballots are cast. A worst-case scenario with a particular voting machine being hacked on election day means that those votes would be spoiled. If we're talking about a more centralized hub, and I'm speaking in broad terms here, we're talking about every vote that was cast on that on election day or on the lead-up to election day, all being spoiled, which is essentially orders of magnitude more. And then furthermore, if there's not a paper record that you can do a truly separate independent recount, the discrepancy might never be found or might not be found for months or years, which states have a couple weeks maybe to certify their election results. It varies by state law, but certainly everybody has to be, for a presidential election, for instance, settled long before between November and January, when we swear in the next president. That's a greater nightmare scenario, I think, than anything I can think of with traditional paper voting. That's a good example, Kevin. I would agree with that. That's a big concern. There are also concerns, of course, about if you're voting from personal devices, what, how secure those devices are, and if there's a malware attack that reaches all iPhones, everybody that's voting on their iPhone could potentially have their vote impacted. And I do think the point that Kevin just brought up at the end about the record, the paper record that the voter has filled out, that I know going into 2006 into 2020, one of the things that I've got, I think everybody has anxieties about this election, but one of the things that makes me feel a lot better is that in all of the battleground states, and as I said earlier, 96% of the country, if there's some kind of problem, if there's some kind of doubt, we'll be able to go back to that paper record that the voter herself has filled out, has viewed, and has confirmed is how she intended to vote, and that that should go a long way to resolving doubts about the vote total. So there's both the actual security risk, but also the perception. And as we know all too well, that perception is incredibly important in ensuring that our democracy works. So a couple of things to add there, which Kevin mentioned, the whole idea of having a central store for all the votes. And so if you look at the designs of some of the the mobile voting systems out there, that's something which has been addressed through the use of distributed ledger technology. And generally, every jurisdiction in the US conducts its own election. So even if you are using the same system across multiple jurisdictions, the data would be logically separated. So there is no single place where somebody can come in and alter the votes. So that's that's one. The second one is that there is a paper ballot being generated here. The key difference here is that if you talk to a lot of voters, when I go vote in person, I have to have to trust the existing system. I have to trust that the paper ballot I marked and deposited in the machine is not going to be actually thrown away or something bad is going to happen to it. And there are instances where that happens, however small or inconsequential they may be. And so when people say that paper is the ultimate form of trust, that's not actually true. Here with the 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 I think that should not be overlooked that technology now has a way to give us more trust than what we have in the existing system. Regarding perception, I agree. There is there are a lot of conflicting thoughts and, you know, narratives out there. So definitely that's something which trust, you know, builds over a period of time. And that's why it's really important to make sure that any new technology isn't rolled out overnight. It's a very slow, gradual, iterative process where you can test it out repeatedly, make sure everything's good. And then, you know, expand, expand access beyond the small group of people where it's currently being tested. I do think it's, sorry, if I can note here, the, you know, there have been a couple studies of security papers on, on votes. The MIT one found that votes of server did, would be able to control the total results if I understand that correctly. So there at least is, you know, security researchers have a disagree on that point. Yeah. And that's, that's essentially a misunderstanding of the architecture of the system. And you could correlate that kind of a threat with the existing in-person voting system as well. I have to trust as a citizen what's happening in the elections office, what's happening behind the scenes. And if a malicious actor decides to throw away all my, you know, all the paper ballots, or we recently saw, you know, arson with a, with a draw box in California in those, you know, 100 odd votes are never going to be able to recover. People who voted don't even know if it was not. So I mean, it's, the reality is similar threats exist in the in-person voting system as well. It's ultimately, you know, there's, there's a perception that's created, that that's foolproof. No, that system also has several threats. And so we, we shouldn't ignore those and, you know, no systems are percent perfect. I think if you have adequate controls, detection at every step, then you can minimize the risk to a level that the system becomes usable. And so that's what we need to focus on with a digital system, just like the same approach we follow with the in-person voting system as well. Sorry, Jen. I just want to, I don't want to comment here the conversation, but I just wanted to mention it. You know, the California example is, that instance where it, with the draw box, they empty, they empty draw boxes regularly in California. They generally have video cameras. There are barcodes on the, on the paper ballots. So they're able to contact people, you know, the barcode keeps track of the ballots as it goes. They're able to contact people whose ballots may have been, been lost. And obviously that's an exceptional circumstance. So you're talking about limited impact with that kind of attack and an ability to recover, that I think we have, we still have a lot of questions about, for the examples that, that Kevin or I, I gave about how you might recover from those attacks. And we have a lot of experience with voting on paper and with security measures around paper and, and have built in a lot of resiliency in those systems to ensure that if there are problems, we're able to recover and that we minimize problems. And one of my concerns, I have this concern generally, because there are not enough standards in regulation, I think in an oversight in our election systems, but we really don't have any standard national, we don't, I mean, I shouldn't say we don't have any national standards for, for internet voting. So we have private vendors who are selling methods of voting to election officials without election officials really having anything to judge them on, right? There's no, there's, there are no standards that these are being set against. There's no certification system. So at the end of the day, what you're left with is, you know, election officials basically having to rely on the representations of a vendor for which there's really no check. There's nothing, what the vendor is telling you is true. Are there, are there standards that they have satisfied? I think it's a real problem in this space. And I, you know, I think most people agree, whether they, they think we're ready for internet voting or not, that we really need to have clear standards before we come anywhere close to like having any significant number of people voting on these systems. That was something I was curious about as well. I would guess that the average person's understanding of these complex security systems is pretty low. And I can't imagine that every election's official really would be able to independently verify security either. So what might those regulations look like? Like how do we bridge that gap to make sure that what is adopted if we do adopt these systems is actually secure? Well, you know, there, there, there are some standards that were put out by the overseas voter foundation in connection working with security experts. So there is some set of like independent standards out there. Frankly, I think, you know, if we're going to do this in the United States, it should be, it should be something like NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which helps design the standards that we use for voting machines that are in place that put something like this together. But, but, you know, at the end of the day, it seems to me that there are at least three things that these standards need to satisfy. One is to ensure the privacy of the voter, right? Then it went through the steps that might be taken to authenticate the voter. But how do we ensure that their privacy is, is protected? We have, we have a secret ballot in the United States. That's one of the reasons that this is such a big security challenge, right? It's not like banking. We need to make sure that people can't buy or see how other people are voting. We need to ensure we need to, but we still need to authenticate. So we can't have a system where anybody can go in and vote for anybody. So that there's a bit of attention there. And then, of course, probably most importantly, we need to ensure the integrity of that vote. We need to make sure that in every step of the process from, from the persons, when the person's trying to vote on their phone to when it arrives at the election offices, that it actually represents the vote that the voter intended to cast. And somehow do that without, without the voter or anybody else, certainly anybody else being able to see and confirm with the voter, but that was actually how the intended to vote. So those are complicated things to do. And if I could, if I could add to that, I think I definitely agree about the problem about the standards. That's something we've been advocating for for a while. Earlier this year, we actually published a paper almost like an appeal to all the, all the agencies to work on that. But at the same time, I think the, the process of piloting and trialing the solution aids in that standards process, because in the past, there has been an active attempt, unfortunately, to prevent or delay the creation of the, of such standards. So we definitely, I would agree with, with Larry that, that needs to be accelerated. And, and secondly, if you look at some of the piloting approaches, for example, the idea of remotely verifying the identity of a voter, which is one of the challenges outlined in the report, which Larry mentioned from a few years ago, that's actually been addressed based on standards which NIST has created. And so that's been successful in other industries. We've brought it to the election space. So, so there is work happening bit by bit, you know, step by step manner, but with a formal standardization process, just like the one which exists for, you know, hardware in person voting machines, that would definitely benefit the space and also, you know, help in controlling some of the, the chaos and the contradictory narratives which are out there. Speaking of those pilots, oh, sorry, Kevin, you wanted to jump in. No, you go ahead. I was going to ask, speaking of those pilots, I'm wondering if we can go over some of those pilots that have happened recently and how they've gone. I feel like Kevin has definitely reported on them. I don't know if that has anything to do with what you were about to jump in with. Well, sort of, I wanted to kind of note the trajectory that online voting has had in the U.S. recently. You know, we've had a form, if you count facts as online voting for military and overseas voters, or, you know, in some areas you can, I think they mentioned this earlier. There are places, it's not common, but where those voters can send a ballot as an email attachment. So technically, that is voting online and it's existed for a while. But I think it's, it's kind of important to note the trajectory recently where since in recent years there was sort of a surge. You know, West Virginia famously offered all its counties, starting with the primaries in the midterms to use votes. And there were a couple counties out West which ended up prompting a couple months ago, several federal agencies issuing a warning about online voting. And I think they only did that, well, I can say they only did that because I've talked with some of the people, the feds involved, because they feared a more widespread adoption quickly. Now, there might be some disagreement whether online voting can never happen or whether it's just a decade or so before we can do so safely. But the consensus there was that the feds were afraid of it being, of it spreading any more than it had and warning against more widespread adoption. Sorry, Jane, what was the, what was your kind of original question? If you don't mind repeating back briefly? I think Kevin helped answer that a bit. Just what the, what those pilots have looked like and how they've gone. But I guess to move on, I feel like we've been circling this question of security and trust. And I imagine to really test whether any online voting platform truly works in a secure, researchers need to be able to independently test for vulnerabilities. And I know that after the West Virginia trial in particular, votes face some criticism about that transparency. So I'm curious, what will it take to build more transparency? I guess, Kevin and Larry, from what you all have seen, what might you recommend and Nimit, are you all doing anything to try and improve that transparency? Sure. So we've kind of been at the forefront. We were the first elections company to officially roll out a public bug bounty program. And the intention there was to kind of have some form of a formalized process where individuals and other entities who are curious to do research and provide constructive feedback would have a formal method of doing that. One of the challenges which applies uniquely to this space is there's the notion of a live infrastructure, which is being used as elections are happening. And then there is test or replica infrastructure, which mirrors the live infrastructure. And, you know, the only difference is that it doesn't have live voters on it. And so that's essentially being our appeal to the community that use the test system, don't try and do disruptive activities on a live system. Because on a live system, if any disruptive activity happens, we have to treat it as hostile. And that's essentially what happened in the incident you were alluding to, where it's not possible for the system to know the good intention or bad intention of somebody who's trying to do something malicious. And that would, you know, get reported to the customer and then it's up to the customer to do whatever they want. And so that's something which has been a source of contention. But we feel there's a lot of information out there about the system. There's test platforms available. And so there's ample opportunity for individuals and organizations to do constructive research and aid the process in a constructive manner rather than, you know, attempting to stop or derail the process. Larry, do you want to jump in? Or I can. You can go ahead. I do think it's it's worth pointing out in terms of this bug bounty that a the FBI opened an investigation into a, as I've reported, a University of Michigan student who was looking into was researching vote security. And votes did have a bug bounty program at the time, but only after the investigation started, updated the terms on Hacker 1 to include that it's prohibited to use or to target or to look at a quote, live election system. That's, that's not correct. And we've pointed that out numerous times. It's archived. It's internet archived. It's there's history of terms, published terms. There was clarification posted, but the test system information has been there from the very beginning. And this was a live election and an attempt was made to disrupt a live election. The system caught that attempt, reported it to the customer, as you would expect a normal system to do. And beyond that is not not in our control. And so if if someone does not want to follow the guidelines, then it's not something we can control our duties towards our customer, our duties to make sure that the system remains, safe from all attempts and threats. And so if you try to tamper with a live election system, then the system has all rights to fight back. I don't think it's controversial to say, for your terms to say that no tampering with a live election system, I think that's understandable. But I do think it's worth noting that those were not the published terms at the time that the student was referred to the FBI. I just want to add that that's not accurate. It literally is one year after the tamper. I do want to hear what Larry has to say about this. And I see he's gone off mute, so I assume. Well, you know, I mean, my only thought is that it's I have a problem with using a system on during a live election and then using that as an excuse for for not allowing more openness and testing of the system. So my thought would be like maybe we shouldn't be using the system in a live election yet. We should, we should, you know, I know, for instance, in Washington DC, they tested the system without using it first in a live election, but they decided to withdraw after finding that there were there were problems with it. So I think, unfortunately, that we've got things a little bit backward when we're talking about using these systems. Just just to, you know, add to that, this is this is not the first time the system was used. There were close to 50 elections, the system had already been used in. And so exactly following the the prescription you you described Larry, it was never an intention of anybody to, you know, use an untested system on a live election. It's gone through a series of, you know, smaller elections and, you know, in an iterative manner. And that that's the whole notion of pilots, that if we don't do these small calibrated, well designed pilots in the in the real environment in the real field, then the process of learning is significantly innovative. And each of these pilots, they've been significant learnings on multiple fronts. And so our appeal is that that process needs to continue that process needs to be supported, because not everything can be tested in a lab. And until we keep doing this process until we support this process, we'll never, you know, reach a better state. Aside from learning, I think that there have been quite a few criticisms of the current online voting systems security. And just generally whether we're ready to implement the technology. I guess I'm curious to hear what you all make of this process. I'm imagining that as an average consumer reads the news and sees these systems being rolled out and the security issues with them, I wonder if that decreases overall public trust in these systems. And if there's anything that we can be doing to try and repair that over time. Well, so my view is that we shouldn't be using them this time. So, and, you know, as Kevin mentioned, I mean, there's there really is near universal agreement among security experts that we are not ready to be using these systems and live elections, whether it's the, the, the FBI, CISA, NIST, EAC, a warning that was put out with really unusually blunt language this year or the National Academy of Sciences report, many others basically saying that we're not ready to do this. So, you know, I'm always concerned about voter confidence and about scaring voters unnecessarily. But you know, my own view is like at this time we're not ready to be using these systems and live elections. So I don't think we're ready to repair confidence because we shouldn't be I think what we should be doing is setting up some kind of national standards first, vetting these systems. Bug Bounty Program is a great idea, but I, you know, not, not for, for use in actual elections where we're putting the actual votes of citizens at risk. So there's something firstly, a few different things there. Wherever this technology is being piloted, it's an improvement over the existing system. What's the existing option for the deployed military voters, citizens overseas, and voters with disabilities, email or fax. So those are not exactly the top of the line security systems out there. And so this system is whether you agree with, you know, you should do online voting or not incrementally and significantly safer than that. And so that's one reason. The other reason is, as we discussed earlier, not everybody has an opportunity to vote using the traditional system. So what we are saying here is let's just ignore those group of voters, however small or big they may be. And that's, that's, I think that's unfair. Technology is here. It's been slowly piloted and, you know, tested in various different scenarios. And wherever it's the risk profile is adequate. I think we need to use it. We need to help the voters vote. And then the question of that there is near universal agreement that these systems should never be used or are not safe enough. I think that's, that's not true. There are lots of people who are security practitioners or large amounts of time who have been working in, you know, different aspects of our, you know, industries. And the technology to make this safe is here. It's being used in different aspects. We're just bringing it here. And it's being tested in a thoughtful, graduated manner. So I don't think we should just assume that it's not, not possible. It's never going to be possible. And regarding the media narrative and, you know, the element of public trust, I think, and I would kind of put this on Kevin, since he represents the media here, that a lot of times the media doesn't have the nuance of, you know, reporting these things in a manner which, you know, give people a balanced opinion. If a theoretical vulnerability is detected in a system, it does not mean that your vote is going to get compromised. And CISA actually put out a document this week on how, you know, such theoretical vulnerabilities exist in the traditional system and those should not be misinterpreted. So I think the folks in the media should also, I would say, look at that aspect of, you know, how some of these new technology nuances are reported because that can also play a constructive role in, you know, educating the people that, you know, how, what really is, you know, important here. It's not, we shouldn't be fear-mongering, but at the same time, we should, you know, present the facts to the people. So from what I've seen with Kevin's reporting, I know that he has talked with many experts about this, and that is a reporter's job. I guess I'm curious to hear Kevin's response to that. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of cybersecurity reporting can overemphasize sometimes danger at the expense of realistic use of a system. That said, there's really not any both sides here. There's a National Academy of Scientists report. There is the peer reviewed MIT report. There is the joint assessment of four government agencies. Just the consensus that there are too many potential vulnerabilities, there's not enough guaranteed ways to ensure security to conduct an election online. I mean, the consensus is absolutely near unanimous. There's, I cannot in good faith as a reporter try to present them as equally valid ideas. It's that simple. Jen, I just want to add, I mean, I don't want to speak for Kevin, but I certainly wouldn't say that internet voting is never possible, and I didn't mean to imply that, but I also don't think that, you know, saying that there are challenges for voters with disabilities or voters who are overseas or that there are some systems that maybe are not as secure as we would like means that we should have systems that security experts are warning are not secure being used in live elections. It's a little bit like, you know, there are people, unfortunately, in the United States who have trouble getting medicine or drugs that they need. I don't think there are too many people who would argue that we should have a market for drugs that are not approved by the FDA that should be sold to people for use with no regulation and no testing. And essentially that's what we're saying here. We're using systems where there are no standards and there is no independent authority that is testing to ensure that they're secure. What we have is vendors who are saying that it's secure. And I don't think that's enough for a live election. I think since you brought the aspect of medicines, I would show you, we all know the whole idea of clinical trials, how critical that is before a medicine is approved or not. And what's essentially happening in the politics we are doing are essentially the same. They're inaugural us. It's a small group of people. These voters have been carefully selected. The risks have been analyzed. And a determination has been made that, you know, and these people have volunteered to participate and have been given an array of options to vote and they pick this option. And so I think we need to keep that in perspective. And, you know, the idea of standards is something I totally agree. We've been pushing that, but we should also not forget that there's been an actual attempt to delay or prevent the creation of standards by the very people who criticize the whole idea of, you know, mobile or online voting. So let's keep that in perspective as well. And at the end of the day, I think we need to keep the voters' needs up front. There are voters out there who are benefiting from this technology. They may be a very small group of people, but we need to keep their interests top of heart. And, you know, elections in this country are, you know, technologies produced primarily by the private sector. And the private sector is leading that path of innovation and pushing this technology so that, you know, more people have access, standards get created. And, you know, there needs to be more collaboration on that front. And lastly, I would say, you know, you pointed out, Kevin pointed out some of the reports. Many of those reports use data which is 10 years old. I mean, the whole idea of remote identity proofing, the secure elements which are available on the smartphones, those were not even considered when those reports were written. So let's be realistic. Let's look at the, you know, the cutting edge security technology which is out there, which is actually being used by the military in other areas, which has been used by the other industries. And so, let's keep an sort of an open focus there on that as well. But that's not the extent of what these reports are. They are robust and comprehensive. But they are using technology paradigms which are, many of them are outdated. They're looking at your app which has only been around for a few years. Yes, but it takes into account missed standards for remote identity proofing, something which has been successfully used for a decade in other industries and has been proven to be safe and secure. So I don't think you're comparing, you know, apples with apples over here. But that's not the only issue they found. I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but the whole idea of using, you know, theoretical conjecture without actually, you know, using the system. I mean, the system is being used in 70 plus elections. Every attempt to break into the system has been blocked, detected and thwarted. It has been thoroughly audited. More than 35% of voters. But I do want to leave some time here for some of the attendee questions. So Nimit, I know you had talked about how this votes makes voting accessible to some folks who might otherwise have worse options. We actually have a question from Mia Armstrong that's kind of the converse question which is what can we, what could be done to make online voting accessible to folks who don't have access to tech devices and or are unfamiliar with technology? That's a great question, Mia. So one of the jurisdictions we work with has been pioneering the idea of curbside voting. And so they've, they've adapted this technology to essentially an iPad. And so the iPad is actually brought to the voter. And so if you are a voter with a disability, you can request accommodation. An election official will bring the iPad to your home. And then you can, in the privacy of your home, they train you. And then you can privately mark your ballot. Similarly, if you're a disabled voter, you could drive up to the county office and they'll bring the iPad to your parking area. And so the whole idea of using technology for curbside voting. So that's something which is being actively piloted by a jurisdiction with focus of, you know, helping voters who may not be tech savvy, who may not have a personal smartphone, but still could use the, the great accessibility functions which, you know, Apple has added to, to iPads and, you know, Google has added and Samsung have added to their devices. So that's great for folks who maybe live in a city and have access to, you know, officials. But I'm imagining, you know, there are folks who live in rural areas or folks who don't have internet access. Is that, how, how will that be resolved? That's definitely a very important aspect as well. So one of the, one of the pilot projects, which is happening in that front is the, you know, process of maybe getting satellite connectivity, satellite internet connectivity, some of these remote locations and then having a shared device. And this is being proposed for some of the Native American jurisdictions where they have traditionally very difficult access to the postal system. And so that's one option that's being proposed. Similarly, you know, internet, other forms of internet access using microwave technology is also being piloted in some areas. So definitely that's, that's a challenge need that needs addressing. But there are, you know, attempts being made to bring more access, especially getting broadband access to rural and inaccessible areas. Another question. Curious to hear from all three of you on this. Does including blockchain technology in the idea of online voting solve any of the security concerns? Or is it just adding a layer of potential failure in the system? I am positive that Nimit is going to disagree with the sentiment. So we'll just go ahead and lay that out there. I have, again, my role here as a journalist, I talked to the security experts, I'm not a technologist myself. I have never found an election technologist who found that that addresses any of the significant, like the fundamental issues with online voting. It's cool as a ledger, but doesn't address the fundamental issues of software based online voting. So to address that, I think a lot of that comes from a basic misunderstanding of the system. So I try and lay it out very, very simply. The blockchain is not solving all the problems here. It's not a cure for everything. It's a solution we've used as part of a multi-pillared solution to solve some specific problems. And the problems are one is resiliency. It is unlike a traditional centralized architecture, which suffers from single points of failure. Right now, we have 64 nodes running in our network. And so it's incredibly hard for somebody to disrupt that network. So it adds resiliency, given that it's no longer a centralized system, but a distributed system. Number two, it, for the first time, lets citizens audit their vote. So just as you may remember from the earlier description, any citizen now, once they voted can go into the system, audit their vote confidentially without revealing to anybody else how they voted. And then similarly, an auditor, a group of citizens, all of us here could then independently audit an election using the blockchain without actually knowing how somebody voted. And so those are some small advantages of using the system. As we said, it's not a cure for everything. It helps resilience. It helps secure the aggregate vote. And it helps provide this end-to-end audit capability, which a traditional system doesn't have. Could you do this without the blockchain? Yes. That's possible if somebody figures out a way to do it. It's definitely feasible, but we haven't found a way to do these things in a manner that's reliable without using this technology. And that's why we are piloting and testing it as part of our wider solution. So in these last couple of minutes, I just want to give Kevin and Larry a chance to, is there anything that we haven't touched on or any final thoughts you have to share? Look, my only final thoughts are that the security risks are very seriously. We've got all of the intelligence agencies, bipartisan intelligence committees in both the Senate and the House warning that the threat of nation-states attacking our elections is real. And so I do not discount the possibility that we will one day be able to have internet voting that is secure. But I think what Kevin says is correct, that any independent security expert says that there's still a lot of challenges that we have to overcome before we can do so securely. And given how important our elections are and how important trust in those elections is, it's essential that before we start using these systems in actual elections, that we have national standards and that there's both national standards for what those systems have to satisfy, a testing system for those systems. And all of that should be happening before we're using them in actual elections. I think we've touched on all the major points. I think it's important to highlight how difficult it is to audit an election in general or to do a cybersecurity audit on an election system. So for instance, we did not know publicly until the Mueller report that the GRU part of its 2016 interference campaign was that it had hacked one, though as we've since learned, two Florida counties. We didn't know until last year, we didn't get a full audit of the equal book failure. Some speculated it was maybe hackers report did not find evidence of that before there was a federal report into that. The incident was in 2016. The audit was not until last year. So those things take a lot of time. And again, we are talking about states have so little time to certify an election that we would not likely be able to tell exactly what went wrong if something were to go wrong until it's way too late. And that's the main reason when somebody says, you know, I can bank online, I can vote online. That's the main fundamental difference is banks can hold a little bit of can have an acceptable level of loss, which they do. Banks are actually hacking attempts every minute. And then also the, you know, you can reverse charges and you can't really reverse a vote. Well, thank you, all three of you for joining us today. I also just wanted to remind folks that next week's event is with the free speech project. And it's on if we need a First Amendment 2.0. And that is at 11.30 a.m. Eastern time rather than the usual noon time. But thank you all again for joining us all of you and have a great rest of your day.