Podcast Episode Rerelease: Securing the Vote

This episode was first published on May 24, 2022.

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U.S. democracy is at an inflection point, and how we administer and verify our elections is more important than ever. From hanging chads to glitchy touchscreens to partisan disinformation, too many Americans worry that their votes won’t count and that election results aren’t trustworthy. It’s crucial that citizens have well-justified confidence in this pillar of our republic.

Technology can provide answers - but that doesn’t mean moving elections online. As president and CEO of the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting, Pamela Smith helps lead the national fight to balance ballot accessibility with ballot security by advocating for paper trails, audits, and transparency wherever and however Americans cast votes.

On this episode of How to Fix the Internet, Pamela Smith joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to discuss hope for the future of democracy and the technology and best practices that will get us there.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Why voting online can never be like banking or shopping online
• What a “risk-limiting audit” is, and why no election should lack it 
• Whether open-source software could be part of securing our votes
• Where to find reliable information about how your elections are conducted

Pamela Smith, President & CEO of Verified Voting, plays a national leadership role in safeguarding elections and building working alliances between advocates, election officials, and other stakeholders. Pam joined Verified Voting in 2004, and previously served as President from 2007-2017. She is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, a diverse cross-partisan group of more than 50 experts whose mission is to prevent and mitigate election crises by urging critical reforms. She provides information and public testimony on election security issues across the nation, including to Congress. Before her work in elections, she was a nonprofit executive for a Hispanic educational organization working on first language literacy and adult learning, and a small business and marketing consultant.

Transcript

CINDY COHN Hi, this is Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With the latest indictments out of Georgia and the 2024 elections coming up on us soon, the security and trustworthiness of our elections are once again top of mind for many people. And that reminded us of a great conversation my former co-host Danny O’Brien and I had in season 3 with Pam Smith, the CEO of Verified Voting. Pam gave us a pathway to respond when we hear about election problems, and also gave us a lot of hope about how we can all be sure that the person who gets the most votes is indeed declared the winner of our elections. So we thought we’d share that episode with you again. I hope you enjoy it.

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PAM SMITH It's not like banking and shopping, and it's not like banking and shopping online and other things that don't require secrecy and disassociating the identity of the person doing the transaction from the content of the transaction. And that's why internet voting is so challenging. If you were to send in your ballot from remotely and then call the election official and say, "Hey, it's Pam. I sent my ballot, I voted for candidate A, is that what you've got?" That's not how elections work first of all. But if it were, why not just do that and not do the send. Just say, "Hey, I want to vote for candidate A, could you mark that down for me?" That would actually be safer. It wouldn't be private, but neither is internet voting.

CINDY COHN That's our guest, Pam Smith. She's the CEO of Verified Voting. And today she's going to be joining us to explain how digital technologies can help secure elections but we are also going to talk about how we need to keep a clear separation between our actual votes and the internet. 

DANNY O'B