Twitter explains how it will handle misleading tweets about the US election results

Twitter recently updated its policies in advance of the U.S. elections to include specific rules that detailed how it would handle tweets making claims about election results before they were official. Today, the company offered more information about how it plans to prioritize the enforcement of its rules and how it will label any tweets that fall under the new guidelines.

In September, Twitter said it would either remove or attach a warning label to any premature claims of victory, with a focus on tweets that incite “unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession,” the company had explained.

This morning, Twitter added that it will prioritize labeling tweets about the presidential election and any other “highly contested races” where there may be significant issues with misleading information.

The company says tweets are eligible to be labeled if the account has a U.S. 2020 candidate label, including presidential candidates and campaigns — meaning the Trump and Biden campaigns will not be immune to the new policies.

Tweets can also be labeled if the account is U.S.-based with more than 100,000 followers or if they have significant engagement with the tweet — the threshold is either 25,000 Likes or 25,000 Quote Tweets plus Retweets, the company says. This latter guideline aims to clamp down on allowing misinformation to go viral, even if the tweet in question was initiated by a smaller account.

Twitter also explained how it will determine if an election result is considered “official,” saying that the result will need to be announced by a state election official. Alternately, Twitter may consider an election result official if at least two of a select list of national news outlets make the call. These outlets include ABC News, The Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, and NBC News.

If a tweet is labeled as being “misleading information” under this new policy, users will be shown a prompt pointing them to credible information before they’re able to retweet or further amplify the post on Twitter. However, Twitter won’t stop retweets from being posted.

Twitter, however, recently made it more difficult to blindly retweet, by forcing retweets to go through “Quote Tweet” user interface instead. This change aims to slow people down from quickly retweeting posts without adding their own commentary.

In addition to labeling tweets with misleading information, Twitter says if it sees content “inciting interference with the election, encouraging violent action or other physical harms,” it may take additional measures, including adding a warning or even removing the tweet.

Issues around a contested election have been of increased concern, following reports that said President Trump has a plan to declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s ahead. Trump denied these claims on Sunday, but added he thinks it’s a “terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over,” Axios reported.

Google confirms post-Election Day political ad ban, partners with AP on election results

Google today announced several updates related to how it’s helping direct people to the polls, provide election results, and help people access real-time election news across its platforms and services, like Search, Assistant and YouTube. The company said it will again partner with the Associated Press (AP) to deliver authoritative information on election results on both Google Search and Assistant. It also confirmed earlier reports that it won’t run political ads on its platform after the polls close on November 3.

Axios had first reported on Google’s plans to ban political ads after election day, citing an email sent to advertisers. The email had told advertisers they would not be able to run ads “referencing candidates, the election, or its outcome, given that an unprecedented amount of votes will be counted after election day this year.”

Google confirmed the move at the time of the original report by offering a statement.

Today, Google published the details of its decision in a company blog post, saying it has chosen to enforce its Sensitive Events policy as soon as the polls close on Nov. 3, given the possibility of “delayed election results this year” and to “limit the potential for ads to increase confusion post-election.”

The policy, specifically, says Google does not allow:

Ads that potentially profit from or exploit a sensitive event with significant social, cultural, or political impact, such as civil emergencies, natural disasters, public health emergencies, terrorism and related activities, conflict, or mass acts of violence

Google isn’t the only tech giant to take aim at political advertising in this heated election season. Facebook this month widened its ban on political ads, saying those ads would be blocked indefinitely after Nov. 3. Twitter made the decision to ban political ads last year.

In Google’s case, it’s calling its political ad ban a “temporary pause,” and says it’s directed towards an ads referencing “the 2020 election, the candidates or its outcome.”

The company also took the time today to note other voting and election-related initiatives it has underway, including its ongoing activities taking place in election seasons that help people find voter registration information and other election deadlines. It’s also directing users to voting locations and ballot drop boxes on Google Maps.

On YouTube, it’s pointed users to relevant election-related search results, voter registration information, and details on how to vote.

This year, Google noted it will partner with the AP to provide election results in Google Search and Assistant. The companies have worked together in the past elections, too.

Users will encounter a new election module with data provided by the AP when they either search for “election results” on Google Search or ask, “Hey Google, what are the current election results?” The data will include both federal and state level races across more than 70 languages, Google says.

YouTube, meanwhile, will feature real-time election streams from major news providers, and link to coverage on Google Search. Google News will also feature a 2020 U.S. Election section where users can follow both local and national news.

TikTok launches a U.S. elections guide in its app

Though TikTok is in the middle of fighting off the Trump administration’s attempt to ban its app in the U.S. over data privacy concerns, the company today is launching a new feature focused on the 2020 U.S. elections. TikTok announced this morning it’s introducing an in-app guide to the elections, which offers its 100 million U.S. users with information about the candidates, details about how to vote, and educational videos about misinformation, media literacy, the elections process and more.

The company, however, is not producing this content itself. It’s leaving that up to partner organizations, including the National Association of Secretaries of State, BallotReady, SignVote, and several others.

BallotReady, for example, will power the elections guide with detailed information about the candidates at the federal, state and local level, in both English and Spanish. Details about how to vote in every state are offered by National Association of Secretaries of State. MediaWise will provide the educational videos about spotting misinformation and the elections process, as well as how to vote.

The effort will also include resources for voters in different circumstances, TikTok says. This includes information about voting as a person with disabilities, from SignVote; as someone overseas, through the Federal Voting Assistance Program; as a student with help from Campus Vote Project; and as a person with past convictions, with help from Restore Your Vote.

TikTok will feature this elections guide starting today in the U.S., where it will be accessible both on the TikTok Discover page and on election-related search results. It will also feature the guide at the bottom of videos relating the elections and on videos posted by verified political candidates, it says.

The company preemptively explains it only verifies accounts to indicate the authenticity of the account ownership, but the verified badge does not indicate TikTok’s endorsement. (The issue around what it means to be verified on a social network is a problem Twitter has faced for years, as it doled out its coveted verified badges to controversial figures, like white nationalists.)

Image Credits: TikTok

 

Though TikTok is working with established partners to put its elections guide together, the mere act of involving itself in any way in American politics right now is a fairly bold choice on the company’s part. As users interact with the new elections guide, they could be sharing additional signals about their political leanings.

In theory, these signals could be used to tweak their personalized recommendations, like those shown on TikTok’s For You page, for example. But TikTok could also store this signal data with the user’s TikTok account for future use. That’s not all that different from how Facebook is able to identify your leanings by parsing your profile information or the Pages you’ve “liked.”

TikTok, though, says it won’t be collecting any users’ personal information with the launch of the guide, nor will it use the signals to customize your experience.

“…A user must visit the website for a state or a non-profit for anything that involves sharing their information, including registering to vote,” the company stated, in an announcement. “Interactions with this guide in our app have no bearing on future TikTok experiences, such as recommendations or ads.”

Image Credits: TikTok

Despite the controversies surrounding TikTok’s ownership, TikTok is joining many social networks that are offering voter guides or running “get out the vote” campaigns in their apps.

Facebook rolled out voting resources to U.S. users this August, and Twitter debuted its Elections hub earlier this month. Snapchat said it helped 400,000 people get registered to vote. YouTube, meanwhile, recently began adding vetted information about mail-in voting to counter misinformation along with a few features that encourage users to register to vote.

Even Tinder is running a promotion in the U.S. to drive voter registration through the use of in-app cards that direct users to online resources.

Image Credits: TikTok

However, TikTok’s voter registration efforts could be impactful because of its younger, Gen Z user base. For decades, youth voters fail show up at the polls. And every election year, reports wonder if this year will be any different.

But TikTok users, in particular, have been politically motivated in recent months. Some helped to prank the Trump campaign by registering for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, which they didn’t intend to use. They also trolled the official Trump campaign app to the point that it finally had to reset its App Store ratings. And many went on the app to troll their parents’ political choices.

To what extent TikTok’s young users will transition from being armchair activists to real-world voters –if they’re even of age — remains to be seen. And though news coverage has focused on left-leaning TikToker’s, the app can easily direct you to the pro-Trump bubble where you’ll find plenty of MAGA hat-sporting teens.

Like the rest of the U.S., teens on TikTok have their own political divides. That means even if TikTok is successful in boosting youth voter turnout, there’s no reason to believe it will necessarily help sway the vote one way or the other.

Mobile voting can ease polling place unease in the COVID-19 era

A bitterly divided nation heads into the 2020 presidential election with accusations of potential voter fraud, calls for delays and charges of voter suppression as state and local election officials cope with the ongoing threat of COVID-19.

Their challenge: Keep the polling places safe and efficient while providing more effective and trustworthy options for citizens.

Efforts to expand mail-in voting options because of COVID-19 were criticized for overwhelming election clerks and disenfranchising voters, whose ballots were either lost or not counted during the primaries.

Recently, government and media criticism of allowing more mail-in voting beyond traditional absentee ballots has cast a harsh light on flaws in the system.

I believe we can implement a better technology choice that guarantees a voter’s identity, keeps the vote anonymous and keeps voters safe from COVID-19. A mobile voting system that provides a supplemental option to in-person voting makes the most sense in this highly charged political atmosphere.

We have an archaic voting system

Efforts to provide voting options beyond in-person balloting have increased over the years to encourage greater turnout, which is still abysmally low. Ideas such as mail-in balloting, extended hours, weekend voting and other options have found mixed success, but still rely on old, outdated processes. The decentralized nature of the U.S. election process, in which individual towns choose their preferred voting method, has resulted in voting devices that range from paper ballots to mechanical voting machines to electronic voting via a touch-screen tablet.

One only needs to look at the 2000 presidential election recount to see this archaic process in action, as the term “hanging chad” entered the lexicon. Many efforts around improving the election process began as a result of the 2000 election, but now, two decades later, we still see the same process, and the same mistakes, in many locations.

Efforts aimed at expanding mail-in voting earlier this year during the primaries were troubling. In one Pennsylvania county, 6,000 voters were not mailed their ballots until the day before the election, preventing them from getting ballots postmarked before the deadline.

Across the nation, voters requested ballots but did not receive them in time to vote. Even when ballots were mailed in on time, election officials were overwhelmed with the spike in volume.

In-person voting: Long lines, masks, dangerous for at-risk populations

With the COVID-19 virus maintaining its hold on a large part of the country, election officials need to develop in-person voting plans that keep residents safe, but the potential for disaster looms. In many locales, a presidential election often results in long lines and wait times at polling centers, often with understaffed officials or volunteers working tables to verify voter registration.

Many of these volunteers are older Americans, members of the highest-risk population for developing serious complications from the virus. Not only will election officials need to ensure the safety of voters, but they will also need to make sure their own workers and volunteers are protected. This means developing more protocols, testing and potential disinfection procedures, which could extend the time it takes for people to vote.

Given the potential of a multihour wait with hundreds or more people in line, many citizens would likely simply choose to not vote, which would be a greater disaster to American democracy.

Mobile voting is secure

A mobile voting system allows registered voters to use their mobile phones and a verified app to record their vote. Using blockchain technology, an app can provide an audit trail that verifies the identity of the voter, and keeps their vote anonymous. Mobile voting systems can also include a paper record for additional security.

Early mobile voting programs have allowed an easier way for citizens and military personnel overseas to cast their ballots. The same is true for individuals with physical disabilities that could also be vulnerable to the COVID-19 virus.

A 2018 mobile voting pilot program for citizens and military personnel overseas held in West Virginia provided a high rate of engagement.

Mobile voting has also proved more secure than other electronic voting methods, including web-based voting systems. Critics of electronic voting have lobbed accusations of potential hacking, but the facts tell a different story.

As of May 2020, Tusk Philanthropies has successfully completed 14 mobile voting pilots in five states with several mobile voting technology platforms and a mix of overseas voters and those with disabilities. It’s good to be concerned about election security, but mobile voting offers more security than existing electoral systems, which can include late or lost ballots, incorrect markings, machine breakdowns and other errors.

Democracy is strengthened when everyone participates

In these challenging and worrisome times, trust and faith in our government leaders is of utmost importance. The right for Americans to vote in a safe, secure and trustworthy environment is fundamental to continue the ideals that so many of our predecessors fought and died to protect.

When more citizens participate in the process, democracy is strengthened. Failing to explore new options to prevent a voting disaster this fall amidst a global pandemic could have grave repercussions on the future of this nation.

Decrypted: Hackers show off their exploits as Black Hat goes virtual

Every year hackers descend on Las Vegas in the sweltering August heat to break ground on security research and the most innovative hacks. This year was no different, even if it was virtual.

To name a few: Hackers tricked an ATM to spit out cash. A duo of security researchers figured out a way to detect the latest cell site simulators. Car researchers successfully hacked into a Mercedes-Benz. A Windows bug some two decades old can be used to plant malware. Cryptocurrency exchanges were extremely vulnerable to hackers for a time. Internet satellites are more insecure than we thought and their data streams can contain sensitive, unencrypted data. Two security researchers lived to tell the tale after they were arrested for an entirely legal physical penetration test. And, a former NSA hacker revealed how to plant malware on a Mac using a booby-trapped Word document.

But with less than three months until millions of Americans go to the polls, Black Hat sharpened its focus on election security and integrity more so than any previous year.

Here’s more from the week.


THE BIG PICTURE

A major voting machine maker is finally opening up to hackers

The relationship between hackers and election machine manufacturers has been nothing short of fraught. No company wants to see their products torn apart for weaknesses that could be exploited by foreign spies. But one company, once resistant to the security community, has started to show signs of compromise.

Election equipment maker ES&S is opening up its voting machines to hackers — willingly — under a new vulnerability disclosure program. That will see the company embrace hackers for the first time, recognizing that hackers have knowledge, insight and experience — rather than pushing them away and ignoring the problems altogether. Or, as the company’s security chief told Wired: “Hackers gonna hack, researchers gonna research.”

Twitter pledges to dial up efforts to combat election misinformation

In the latest sign of US platforms bracing for the 2020 US presidential election in November, Twitter has said it will step up efforts to prevent its service from being used to target voters with false information around election participation.

Earlier today Facebook announced the launch of a voting hub aimed at combating election misinformation on its platform by gathering together genuine election resources.

Twitter is spinning a bolder message — saying its aim is to “empower every eligible person to register and vote” by working to surface accurate information. The aim is then that genuine information being made more prominent will squeeze the risk of voters being tricked out of their vote by election misinformation being spread on its platform.

In a statement reported earlier by Reuters the company’s VP of public policy and philanthropy for the Americas, Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, said: “Twitter is working hard to increase informed participation in democratic processes around the world. Ahead of the 2020 US Election, we’re focused on empowering every eligible person to register and vote through partnerships, tools and new policies that emphasize accurate information about all available options to vote, including by mail and early voting.”

New tools, policies, and voting resources will be rolling out over the next month that reflect that mission, according to Twitter, though it’s not offering much detail on exactly what’s cooking.

In recent years the platform has inched up efforts to combat vote misinformation, adding a button that lets users report misleading election tweets last year — and grasping the homegrown nettle by labelling and calling out president Trump’s misinformation about vote by mail earlier this.

More such tools and interventions are slated as on the way — with Twitter saying it’s exploring ways to expand its civic integrity policies, including in order to address new challenges related to election and other civic events as a result of COVID-19.

The coronavirus has thrown a peculiar spanner in the works of democratic processes by attaching potential public health risk to in person voting, making alternatives such as vote by mail or staggered voting vital options to avoid voter disenfranchisement.

Per Twitter, part of the work it’s going to do to expand its civic integrity policies is likely to focus on tackling emerging trends that arise around mischaracterizations of mail in voting and other voting procedures, including voter registration.

Its current policy — which covers political elections, censuses and major referenda and ballot initiatives — states that:

You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes. This includes posting or sharing content that may suppress participation or mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process.

But the policy is narrowly focused — on misleading information about vote participation. Whereas posting inaccurate information about a candidate or political party, hyperpartisan content or making broad claims that elections are “rigged” — such as this one — do not currently constitute a civic integrity policy violation, per Twitter’s guidance.

Despite its bold messaging today about empowering voters, there’s no sign Twitter is planning to broaden its policy to, for example, stamp on Trump’s ability to use its ‘free speech’ megaphone to trash established democratic processes with unfounded general claims of manipulation.

Instead, where election participation is concerned, Twitter looks focused on a ‘more speech to combat bad speech’ model. So it’s saying it will continue to promote voter registration resources prominently — while also expanding partnerships aimed at building out a suite of bona fide resources to support eligible voters to vote safely, including by mail and alternative early voting options.

Among its current partners in this area are Vote Early Day, National Voter Registration Day, and Civic Alliance.

It has also worked with organizations such as NASS and NASED, which support local election officials, and to support their #TrustedInfo initiative, along with a number of other nonpartisan civic tech and civil rights organizations which work on ensuring eligible voters have the information they need to engage in the democratic process.

The great huge elephant in the room here is of course voter suppression — and the risk of Twitter’s platform being used to spread negative messaging that’s intended to dissuade certain demographics from voting.

Trump’s baseless claims of “rigged” elections — which Twitter continues to allow to be broadcast at the push of a button to millions of its users — are intended to have such an effect, by firing up his own base to vote while encouraging others to stay at home by undermining trust in the democratic process.

Anything less than nationwide vote by mail is electoral sabotage

The global pandemic has cast a light on decades of cumulative efforts to manipulate and suppress voters, showing that the country is completely unprepared for any serious challenge to its elections system. There can be no more excuses: Every state must implement voting by mail in 2020 or be prepared to admit it is deliberately sabotaging its own elections. (And for once, tech might be able to help.)

To visualize how serious this problem is, one has only to imagine what would happen if quarantine measures like this spring’s were to happen in the fall — and considering experts predict a second wave in that period, this is very much a possibility.

If lockdown measures were being intensified and extended not on May 3rd, but November 3rd, how would the election proceed?

The answer is: it wouldn’t.

There would be no real election because so few people in the country would be able to legally and safely vote. This is hardly speculative: We have seen it happen in states where, for lack of any other option, people had to risk their lives, breaking quarantine to vote in person. Naturally it was the most vulnerable groups — people of color, immigrants, the poor and so on — who were most affected. The absurdity of a state requiring voters to gather in large groups while forbidding people to gather in large groups is palpable.

With this problem scaled to national levels, the entire electoral process would be derailed, and the ensuing chaos would be taken advantage of by all and sundry for their own purposes — something we see happening in practically every election.

For the 2020 election, if any elections official in this country claims to value the voters for which they are responsible, voting by mail is the only way to enable every citizen to register and vote securely and remotely. Anything less can only be considered deliberate obstruction, or at best willful negligence, of the electoral process.

Image Credits: Bill Oxford / iStock Unreleased / Getty Images

There’s a fair amount of talk about apps, online portals and other avenues, and these may figure later, but mail is the only method guaranteed right now to securely serve every address and person, providing the fundamental fabric of connectivity that is absolutely necessary to universally accessible voting.

Hand-wringing about fraud, lost ballots and other issues with voting by mail is deliberate, politically motivated FUD (and you can expect a lot of it over the next few months). States where voting by mail is the standard report no such issues; on the contrary, they have high turnout and few problems because it is simple, effective and secure. As far as risk is concerned, there is absolutely no comparison to the widespread and well-documented process and security issues with touchscreen voting systems, even before you bring in the enormous public health concerns of using those methods during a pandemic.

Federal law requires that troops around the world, among others unable to vote in person, are able to request and submit their ballots by mail. That this is the preferred method for voting in combat zones is practically all the endorsement such a system needs. That the president votes by mail is just the cherry on top.

Fear of voters

So why hasn’t voting by mail been adopted more widely? The same reason we have gerrymandered districts: Politicians have manipulated the electoral process for decades in order to stack the deck in their favor. While gerrymandering has been employed with great (and deplorable) effect by both Democratic and Republican officials, voter suppression is employed overwhelmingly by the political right.

While this is certainly a politically charged statement, it’s not really a matter of opinion. The demographics of the voting public are such that as the proportion of the population that votes grows, the aggregate position begins to lean leftward. This happens for a variety of reasons, but the result is that limiting who votes benefits conservatives more than liberals. (I am not so naive to think that if it were the other way around, Democrats would altogether abstain from the practice, but that isn’t the case.)

This is not a new complaint. Deliberate voter suppression goes back a century and more. Nor is the practice equally distributed. For one thing, white, well-off, urban areas are more likely to have effective and modern voting systems and laws.

This is not only because those areas are generally the first to receive all good things, but because voter suppression has been aimed specifically at people of color, immigrants, the poor and so on. Again, this is no longer a controversial or even particularly partisan statement; it has been admitted to by politicians and strategists at every level — including, quite recently, by the president: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

When voting by mail was merely a convenient, effective alternative to voting in person, it was fairly easy to speak against it. Now, however, voting by mail is increasingly looking like the only possible method to accomplish an election.

Again, think of how we would vote during a stay-at-home order. Using only today’s methods would be dangerous, chaotic and generally an ineffective way to ask the population at large who they want to lead their city, state and country.

That is no way to conduct an election. Therefore, we currently have no way to conduct a national election. Voting by mail is the only method that can realistically be rolled out to accomplish an effective election in 2020.

Disunited states

Because elections are run by state authorities, voting methods and laws vary widely between them. The quickest way to a nationwide vote-by-mail system would use federal funding and authority, but even if states were in favor of this (they won’t be, as it is an encroachment on their authority), Washington is not. The possibility of a bill implementing universal voting by mail passing the House, Senate and the president’s desk by November is, sadly, remote.

Which is not to say that no one in D.C. is not trying it:

This means it’s down to the states — not great news, considering it is at the state level that voting rights have been eroded and voter suppression enshrined in policy.

The only hope we have is for state authorities to recognize that the 2020 presidential election will be a closely watched litmus test for competence and corruption that will haunt them for years. It’s one thing to put your finger on the scale under normal circumstances. It’s quite another to author a high-profile electoral failure in an election few doubt will be one of the most consequential in American history — especially if that failure was manifestly preventable.

And we know it is preventable because due to federal voting rights laws, every state already has some form of accessible, mail-in or absentee voting. This is not a matter of inventing a new system from scratch, but scaling existing, proven systems in ways already demonstrated and verified over decades. Several states, for instance, have simply announced that all voters will get absentee ballots or applications sent unrequested to their homes. No one said it would be easy, but the first step — committing — is at least simple.

It will be obvious in a few months which state authorities actually care about the vote and which see it as just another instrument to manipulate in order to retain and accrue power. The actions taken in the run-up to this election will be remembered for a long time. As for the federal government interfering with states’ prerogative to run their own elections — that’s a violation of states’ rights that I expect will encounter strong bipartisan opposition.

How tech can help without hindering

Image Credits: NickS (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The tech world will want to aid in this cause out of several motives, but the simple truth is there’s no way a technological solution can be developed and deployed by November. And not only is it infeasible, but there is serious political opposition to online voting systems to be widely deployed. The idea is a non-starter for this election and probably the next.

Rather than trying, Monolith-style, to evolve voting to the next phase by taking on the whole thing tip to tail, tech should be providing support structures via uniquely digital tools that complement rather than replace effective voting systems.

For example, there is the possibility, however remote, that a mailed ballot will be intercepted by some adversary and modified, shredded, selectively deposited, or what have you. No large-scale fraud has ever been perpetrated, despite what opponents of voting by mail might say. States developed preventative solutions long ago, like secure ballot boxes placed around the city and tamper-evident envelopes.

But end to end security is something at which the tech sector excels, and moreover recent advances make a digitally augmented voting process achievable. And there’s plenty of room for competition and commercial involvement, which sweetens the pot.

Here’s a way that commonplace tech could be deployed to make voting by mail even more secure and convenient.

Imagine a mail-in ballot of the ordinary fill-in-the-bubble type. Once a person makes their selections, they take a picture of the ballot in a dedicated, completely offline app. Via fairly elementary image analysis nearly any phone can now perform, the votes can be detected and tabulated, verified by the voter, then hashed with a unique voter sheet ID into a code short enough to be written down.

The ballot is mailed and (let us say for now) received. When it is processed, the same hash is calculated by the machine reader and placed on an easily accessible list. A voter can check that their vote was tabulated and correctly recorded by entering their hash into a website — which itself reveals nothing about their vote or identity.

What if something goes wrong? Say the ballot is lost. In that case the voter has a record of their vote in both image and physical form (mail-in ballots have little tear-off tabs you keep) and can pursue this issue. The same database that lets them verify their vote was correct will allow them to see if their vote was never cast. If it was interfered with or damaged and the selections differ from what the voter already verified, the hash will differ, and the voter can prove this with the evidence they have — again, entirely offline and with no private information exposed.

This example system only works because smartphones are now so common, and because it is now trivial to process an image quickly and accurately offline. But importantly, the digital aspect only addresses shortcomings of the mail-in system rather than being central to it. You vote with only a ballpoint pen, as simply as possible — but if you want to be sure, you may choose to employ the latest technology to track your vote.

A system like this may not make it in time for the 2020 election, but voting by mail can and must if there is to be an election at all.

U.S. House approves remote voting, though the tech is unclear

Congress will allow remote voting for the first time in its history, after the U.S. House approved Resolution 965 late Friday in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The measure — sponsored by Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern — authorizes proxy voting by members for renewable periods of 45 days and allows for remote participation in committee hearings.

H.R. 965 could also permanently alter the way Congress operates through a provision that establishes a bi-partisan process to explore digital voting away from Capitol Hill.

Per the directive, “The chair of the Committee on House Administration, in consultation with the ranking minority member, shall study the feasibility of using technology to conduct remote voting in the House, and shall provide certification…that operable and secure technology exists.”

Previous House rules required in person voting only. The Senate still makes decisions by recording verbal “Yeas” and “Nays” on a tally sheet.

Friday’s congressional action is another example of how COVID-19 is forcing every organization in the U.S. to overhaul longstanding ways of doing things, usually through a mix of digital tools.

We still don’t have clear details on what tech the U.S. House will use to implement both the short and longer term provisions of H.R. 965.

The proxy voting arrangement will allow members to vote remotely through designated representatives on Capitol Hill — effectively a form of pinch-hitting for Congress. For remote participation in hearings, there are a range of options that could be selected — from Google Meet to Microsoft Teams. Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the U.S. Senate using Zoom.

On determining long-term means for remote voting, that’s now up to the Chairperson of the Committee on House Administration —  representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) —  and the ranking minority member Rodney Davis (R-IL), who voted against H.R. 965.

Lofgren offered a preview of how it could shape up in a statement supporting H.R. 965 late Friday: “For voting on the floor, we will rely on a secure email system, coupled with member-driven, remotely-directed authorizations.  This system would use secure email for proxy votes: a solid, well known, resilient technology with very low bandwidth requirements that we understand very well from a cybersecurity standpoint.”

Of course, she and Republican Congressman Davis will have to find agreement on this during a time when both parties rarely agree on anything. The vote on H.R. 965 was split along party lines, with 217 Dems voting in favor and not a single Republican member supporting the measure.

In the past, Congress has resisted calls to allow for remote voting. There was discussion of the need for such provisions after the September 11 attacks and 2001 Anthrax attacks. These was overridden by a long time expectation that those elected to represent constituencies be physically present to vote.

Over the last two months, it appeared the House might become a last holdout in the U.S. for in person only workplaces, as much of the country has shifted to tech-enabled measures for remote operations.

Shortly after the coronavirus outbreak hit the U.S. in March, Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) pressed a resolution with Arkansas Representative Rick Crawford (R-AR) that would allow members to participate virtually in hearings and vote remotely, under special circumstances.

US capitol building at night

Image Credits: Bill Dickinson/Getty Images

That was nixed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi  who, at the time, wanted Congress to remain in session and present to pass the first coronavirus stimulus bill.

Two months and nearly one hundred thousand American deaths later, it appears COVID-19 could force one of the more significant procedural changes in the House’s 231 year history.

In person voting could soon be replaced with some form of two-factor authentication, digital voting. This could alter longstanding patterns for how lawmakers travel, interact with constituencies, and divide their time between the Beltway and districts back home.

Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

It’s a mark of 2020 that the image of throngs of Americans flocking to polling places to exercise their right to vote, once a heartening symbol of democracy in action, is now a nightmare scenario that could visit widespread death on unsuspecting communities nationwide.

In the midst of a viral outbreak that’s infected more than half a million people and swiftly claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone, the country is grappling with the question of how Americans will safely cast their votes in November’s election—and time is running out.

A number of state officials have pushed back their primaries to protect residents, but last week’s Wisconsin primary, with its long lines, uneven protective measures and shuttered polling places demonstrated a worst case scenario for what November’s general presidential election could look like if states don’t quickly implement a Plan B.

But a handful of lawmakers pushing for a more equitable voting system don’t believe we need a full-on Plan B to rescue the election, just a scaled-up version of systems in place that millions already use to cast their ballots each election cycle. Early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting have all ticked upward in the last 20 years. Five states now use vote-by-mail as their primary way of voting: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. The military also relies on mail-in absentee voting for those deployed overseas. By 2018, one in four Americans who voted did so through the mail.

Residents wait in long lines to vote in a presidential primary election outside the Riverside High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 7, 2020. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

With the economy still frozen in place, Congress is working on another big coronavirus relief package, though efforts are at a political standstill for the moment. Proposing their own bill, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden are striving to get vote-by-mail provisions into the next relief package. “… It is wrong to shortchange our election officials as we provide relief to address the effects of this global pandemic,” Klobuchar said in a statement.

The bill, called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act (NDEBA), seeks to provide 20 days of early voting for all states, a guarantee that all voters can request to vote with a no-excuse absentee ballot, accommodations for voters who don’t receive an absentee ballot in time and additional funding for the Election Assistance Commission to make the changes.

“We are gonna fight like hell to get our bill in the next COVID-19 package,” Wyden told TechCrunch in an interview.

States take the lead

Republicans in Congress have yet to show any support for expanded mail-in voting, but a swath of Republican state officials close to the election process have turned to mail voting systems to keep residents safe, including the secretaries of state in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Georgia.

On a bipartisan call led by Sen. Klobuchar with secretaries of state last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner was skittish about the idea of a permanent, expanded vote-by-mail system but agreed voters should be allowed to cast their votes safely through the mail during the COVID-19 crisis. He previously announced that all West Virginia voters would be sent application postcards for voting through the mail.

“The Governor, Attorney General, county clerks and I have zealously worked together within state law to balance health concerns with the ease of voting,” Warner said. “We have determined that the absentee voting process is the safest method… Your ballot box is as close as your mailbox.”

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, touted her state’s own system in the bipartisan call.

“Washington state’s vote-by-mail system is accessible, secure, fair, and instills confidence in our voters,” Wyman said, encouraging officials “across the political spectrum” to unify around keeping voters safe and stressing that expanded absentee voting and vote-by-mail “must be options on the table” for 2020.

On the call, secretaries of state around the U.S. emphasized the need to act quickly to scale up absentee voting systems, stressing that funding, organizing and putting new systems into practice will be a scramble over the next seven months.

President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail systems in recent White House coronavirus briefings and tweets, but there is no evidence that voting through the mail is “fraudulent in many cases” as he has claimed. Trump himself uses mail-in voting to cast his absentee ballot in Florida.

The president’s attacks on expanded vote-by-mail also contradict the CDC’s own guidance for safe elections during the pandemic, which encourage expanded mail-in voting to “minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.”

Out of the billions of absentee votes cast through the mail in the U.S. over a 12 year period, an examination of all known instances of voter fraud found only 491 cases involving absentee voting. With those numbers, Americans are less likely to commit voter fraud than they are to be struck by lightning. In states with vote-by-mail, safeguards built into the system can catch or deter anyone who might tamper with a ballot. In Oregon, which uses forensic signature matching to secure its vote, a poll was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine for tampering with two ballots.

Politics aside

Republicans today mostly believe that Democrats would benefit from any effort that might broadly boost voter turnout, a perspective that the president echoed in a recent Fox News interview discussing the early coronavirus relief bill. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That package included $400 million to safeguard November’s election—an amount Democrats argue is insufficient—and no requirements that states implement vote-by-mail. But the conversation around vote-by-mail hasn’t always broken down along today’s political lines and the political reality of a broad mail-in voting system is likely nuanced, though untested on a national scale.

An early and vocal proponent of vote-by-mail, Wyden explains that those lines have been redrawn over the years as attitudes toward implementing vote-by-mail have shifted.

“You have to put this in context of where we are,” Wyden said, noting that the debate around vote-by-mail was an “academic thing” two decades ago, with political scientists hashing out which party stood to benefit. In Oregon, other Democrats initially opposed vote-by-mail efforts, believing that because their voters skewed older, Republicans would benefit.

“After all this bickering back and forth on who would benefit, Oregonians put it on the ballot.” In 1998, 69% of voters supported the ballot measure, which passed easily.

In the U.S., implementing any voting changes across the country is politically challenging due to the fact that states oversee and administer their own elections. Even the oversight process varies widely from state to state. Differences aside, many states have expanded absentee voting in recent years.

“Back then when I was introducing those first bills, you didn’t have the number of people voting absentee that you have today,” Wyden said. While voting absentee once required a justification, a “big chunk” of those excuse requirements have given way since then, allowing more people to vote by mail.

“Absentee voting is enormously popular,” Wyden said. “Basically what I tell people… is what we’re really doing with our legislature is kind of upscaling what is already going on—not reinventing the wheel.”

Wyden warns that we’ve already seen the worst case scenario play out in Wisconsin. “You have older voters waiting in line to talk to older poll workers… some had masks, some didn’t.

“[In] Wisconsin, literally in the middle of a pandemic, the legislature said ‘we’re going to put the lives of our people at risk.’ I thought that was very troubling,” Wyden said.

“All I can think of was at this point in the middle of a pandemic, I don’t think this is a partisan issue.”

We must consider secure online voting

The list of states delaying primaries and elections is quickly increasing, with New Jersey adding local elections to the list. Even Congress — in a break from tradition — is rethinking what it means to vote safely in this new paradigm, stirring calls for remote voting for its upcoming legislation around the pandemic.

This debate, however, lacks important context: Many U.S. citizens are already voting online at home and abroad. In fact, 23 U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow some voters to return absentee ballots via email, while five others permit some voters to do so using a web portal.

We are election officials in two states that require us to offer an online method to some of our voters. For these voters, the argument is not an academic one, but an issue of necessity — traditional voting methods simply don’t work for those living abroad, deployed in the military or those with disabilities. As election officials, it’s our duty to stand up for the constitutional rights of our citizens, whatever their circumstances, and the reality is that online voting dramatically improves the opportunities for these two groups to engage with our democracy.

We should not be debating whether online voting should exist, but rather asking: What is the most secure way to facilitate electronic voting? Because it’s already being done. And because it’s needed by some voting groups — whose volume might expand in the near future.

As a country, we currently have three million eligible voters living abroad, and only 7% cast ballots in the 2016 elections, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s biennial Overseas Citizen Population Analysis. This same analysis found that removing logistical barriers to voting would raise participation by 30%. A different analysis separately found that while nearly one million active-duty military are eligible to vote, only around 23% of them actually did in 2018.

The traditional system of mailed-in absentee ballots and centralized polling places is failing these voters, and they aren’t alone among the disenfranchised. The turnout story is also grim for the 35 million U.S. voters with disabilities. An October 2017 Government Accountability Office report also found widespread barriers to disabled voting, such as machines that could have made it impossible to cast votes privately. It’s no wonder that, as a 2017 Rutgers University study found, disabled voting participation has declined in each of the last two presidential elections, dropping from 57.3% in 2008 to 55.9% in 2016.

New technologies offer promise to expanding and securing access for overseas citizens and voters with disabilities. Consider MacCene Grimmett, who is, at 106, Utah’s oldest voter. When she was born in 1913, women did not have the right to vote. Homebound since she broke her ankle two years ago and unable to hold a pen steadily, she was able to cast her ballot last year thanks to an app on a mobile device. The technology empowered her, helping her execute — independently, anonymously, securely and with dignity — her most basic duty as a citizen.

Pilots and tests are happening at different scales in localities around the country, and early results are demonstrating positive outcomes. In 2019,Utah County’s offering mobile-phone voting to overseas citizens resulted in a marked increase in participation rates. In fact, turnout rates for voters using the app overseas were higher than for those who went to the polls in-person on Election Day. Oregon also successfully permitted its citizens to use app-voting in 2019.

Importantly, all pilots include the ability to rigorously audit the results so we can ensure 100% accuracy along the way.

The challenge, ultimately, is how to continue leveraging technology in a secure and innovative way to maximize access. Safety is paramount: We are deeply aware that we live in an interconnected world where foreign adversaries and other malicious entities are using information technology to try to undermine our political system. It’s our responsibility to understand the environment in which we operate as we forge ahead.

But while these concerns can be valid, they should not outweigh both the necessity and potential benefits of internet-based voting. Just as we cannot place blind faith in the infallibility of our technologies, we also cannot fall into a senseless, all-encompassing mistrust that would both disenfranchise millions of voters and shake trust in our elections.

Rather than making sweeping judgments, we need to weigh each case individually. Why, for example, should Iowa’s failure, which involved poor training, lack of testing and trouble reporting caucus results on one specific technology platform by a political party adversely affect whether a disabled Utahn or an Oregonian soldier can cast their vote — and verify it — by app?

Expanding voter participation by ensuring ballot access for all citizens is paramount to protecting our democracy. In the 21st century, that will necessarily include electronic methods, particularly as we face challenges with voters abroad and contemplate emerging challenges at home like COVID-19, where large public gatherings — and long lines — spark new threats to consider.

We must continue trials and experiments to broaden access for voters, while hardening the system and making it more resilient, and that means beginning with small-scale pilots, seeing what works, stringently auditing the results and then employing that knowledge in new rounds of testing. App-based voting, for example, is already more secure than returning a ballot by email, and it also preserves voter anonymity in a way that email makes impossible (because whoever opens the email to hand-copy the vote onto a paper ballot for tabulation knows who sent it).

These are the everyday successes that internet-based voting is producing right now. And they ought to be driving the discussion as we move forward slowly, responsibly and confidently.