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Thanks for completing this transcript Nick!
[0:00] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:02] Daniel Forkner.
[0:04] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:13] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be. The Electoral Integrity Project is an academic project led by Harvard and Sydney University, which studies the integrity of elections around the world. The project looks at the full course of an election, from the various campaigns, the polling, the post-election, and then measures this conduct against international standards of fair elections. As of 2016--so even before the controversial presidential election--the United States is ranked absolute worst among all Western democracies in terms of elections that are free and fair. Out of 153 countries worldwide, the US is ranked 52nd, next to Lithuania, Indonesia, and Bulgaria. Those that made it onto the top of the list are Japan, the UK, Germany, and Norway.
[1:14] These are concerning words as we find a country about to head into the election booths in just a couple days from when this episode first comes out, and that's why we're doing this episode, because this is such an important topic, and maybe we're a little bit late to be able to do anything for this election in terms of enacting any sort of actual change, but we hope that as you head to the polls, as people around you are talking about voting and what it means to act in an election, you can bring these topics and concerns up, talk to them among your friends and family, and let them know that while maybe their vote counts, it might not be quite as much as they think, and the reasons why, we'll lay out across this episode. it ranges everything from politics and the way that politicians legislate and approve voter rolls, the way those rolls are controlled, the gerrymandering that determine where your votes count, the process of voting itself, and ultimately the technical tools that we use to both count those votes, to make them in the first place, and then detect any fraud that might be occurring. And all this will ultimately beg the question, "What is voting, and what does it mean to participate in the political process?" These are all topics we'll be exploring across this episode, and we're very excited to dig in.
[2:26] So, David, why don't we start with the politics--those legislations that you mention and the protocols that get enacted that can discourage people from voting or perhaps encourage them or redraw the lines, and you mentioned gerrymandering.
[2:40] This is my least favorite Gerry.
[2:42] And believe you me, David, if you've met any Jerrys...
[2:46] Yeah, that's saying a lot.
[2:47] That's a bold statement. Yeah. Sorry, my friend Jerry.
[2:52] Sorry, Uncle Jerry.
[2:53] I think most people already have a sense that gerrymandering is a dark part of American politics--maybe even a dark art. For one, the US is the only place in the world, in terms of democracies, where elected leaders themselves are the ones who determine voting districts, and the process of drawing lines on a map to create districts that are based on party lines, it's something that doesn't sit very easy with a lot of people. But what's significant, I think, in the context of this show is how the practice relates to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was a large bill, and it covered a ton of voting-related issues, some of which are going to come up again in this episode, and one of the things that it attempted to do was remedy the way that black Americans and other minorities had been systematically, throughout history, disenfranchised from the political process, particularly in Southern states. But since then, much of the teeth behind this 1965 Voting Rights Act have been very watered down, and as we'll see, this watering down hasn't just impacted racial disenfranchisement through gerrymandering, but a whole host of political tools and tactics to discourage people from participating in what we consider one of the most important ways to participate in our electoral process.
[4:19] I mean, in this show, a lot of the time we come up across a topic where we could say so much, and gerrymandering is absolutely one of those topics. For those that may not be aware, this is the practice of dividing an area that would normally just be divided under very logical geographic and geometric designs into these long, stringy, weird shapes separating different groups of people into their corresponding political parties to make sure that whichever political party has power in drawing these lines can guarantee the fact that they'll garner as many votes as possible, regardless of what the popular vote in an area might actually be. This is a process that has a long history in American politics, and a dirty history for voters who feel like their vote is made to not count, where say I have a city, and I collect all the Republicans together so that their votes will only be for one Republican politician, and the Democrats can take the rest of it, where they can draw districts where the Democrats have a slight edge, or, on the corresponding and more often, Republicans will draw ridiculous-looking maps in order to sort of concentrate the Democratic vote into a single individual and allow the rest of the contested districts to go safely red. [5:28] Both parties participate in this process, and that's because we let these legislators draw the lines that define basically who gets to win and control the political power. It should be no surprise that neither side is particularly good at giving over control of this process to unbiased third-party systems, and we have plenty of systems available to draw these things out without any sort of bias, that draw along population lines, mathematical lines, geometric shapes that are absolutely fair, instead of these ridiculous designs we get that are constructed primarily to maintain power for whichever group is allowed to draw them. [6:02] And until we move past politicians being able to define the very districts that vote to elect them, we're not gonna see this problem get any better, unfortunately. And like I said, we could devote an entire episode on this topic. There's a ton of great reporting on gerrymandering. If you're interested in electoral topics, this is a great way to jump in and really see how this is affecting you, especially in your local area, and we encourage you to do that, but it's well outside the scope of this show, where we're kind of doing just a quick flyby overall of voting in America.
[6:30] Well, something that a lot of people are seeing in the news right now--if you're paying attention to some of the coverage of the ongoing elections, or you're seeing the headlines, you've seen a lot of attention given to voting registration purges.
[6:45] Especially in Georgia, Daniel, right?
[6:48] Absolutely. I'm located in Georgia, and we've seen a lot of reports related to this practice, in particular because of, you know, that conflict of interest that you mentioned is inherent in the process of gerrymandering. [7:00] Well, we're seeing another type of conflict of interest going on in Georgia and also Kansas right now, where the secretary of state, the person that oversees all the rules and regulations related to elections in their state, is also running for state governor. But we'll get to that in the second, David. Coming back to this Voting Rights Act of 1965, it also attempted to address the rampant and historical racial discrimination present in mostly Southern States in which minority groups like African-Americans were directly barred from voting through various regulations, and in these states, because of this history of racial discrimination, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put into place a regulation that required any attempt of these states to change voting regulations to go through a federal court or the Department of Justice to ensure that it was fair and it wasn't an extension of racial discrimination. But then we had a number of landmark Supreme Court decisions which have kind of watered down this act, and most importantly, one happened in 2013, and the Supreme Court struck down this provision, saying that the federal government basically had no right to interfere in states making their own regulations related to elections, and there was an immediate impact. For example, just hours after the Supreme Court decision, both Texas and North Carolina announced controversial voter ID laws. [8:25] But broadly, other states implemented changes to their voter registration requirements, which makes it harder for some people to register to vote while also increasing the number of people who have been purged from voter registration records, so people who were registered to vote, but then, for whatever reason, got removed.
[8:45] So the federal government does have laws that dictate broad criteria, by which a state may remove a person's ability to vote, such as having a criminal conviction, a change of address, or obviously a death, but each state has their own election board under the secretary of state, which creates its own rules, makes clarifications, enforces those rules, and ultimately decides how votes will be counted and with what machines. There really is no federal governing of these practices except for the most basic guidelines, especially after that 2013 Supreme Court decision. Here in New York, I was actually part of this in the 2016 presidential primary election. The state had a number of purges that were certainly done illegally, and removed 200,000 people who were predominantly Bernie voters from voter lists, and many of us have no idea that we weren't eligible to vote until you get there, and you look up your home, and you check your name, and, oh, nope, you're not there on the book, and so you have to leave. And you can file a complaint with the state later, but there was no recourse to this when this happened, and you just had to register for the presidential election when that came around. Convenient.
[9:53] That happened to you? You just showed up, and...
[9:55] Mm-hmm.
[9:55] You weren't on the list?
[9:56] Yep.
[9:57] Did you think it was, like, a mistake? Did you think, "Oh, I must have, like, failed to turn in some paperwork?" Did you argue with the polling official?
[10:05] I mean, I filed a ballot anyway and made them take one down for me as a--it's like a--
[10:11] Provisional or something?
[10:12] Yeah, so it's a provisional ballot. You can vote anyway with it, but your vote is likely not counted, and I'm confident mine was not. I talked to several poll officials. We called, like, the local election center, and I spent a while on the phone, wasted a large part of my day trying to deal with this, and ultimately had no recourse in the end, and I had sort of suspected this might happen, because some friends who had voted earlier in the day had similar things happen to them, so it wasn't quite so surprising when I arrived, but it was disappointing. But, I mean, and again, we're not talking about primary elections or caucuses in this episode. New York has really unbelievably terrible primary elections that are really designed to stifle the democratic process, but that is, once again, outside the scope of this show, but shame on you, New York. You pretend to be democratic, but you are anything but.
[11:01] Well, New York did, in that case, illegally remove at least 200,000 people from its voter lists, but sometimes it's hard to tell if these things are done intentionally or if it's just based on flawed data. For instance, in 2016, Arkansas removed over 7,700 people from its voting registration list due to evidence that they had been convicted of felonies, but in reality, many of these people never did have felony convictions to begin with. It was just inaccurate data. And that's a consistent reality of many of these mass purges: they often include inaccuracies and improper or illegal removals. In Virginia in 2013, the state deleted 39,000 people suspected of having changed residency from voting lists, but up to 17% of those people were removed in error, and in fact had not moved from their residency. And similarly, in Nevada, 90,000 people have been removed in this current election cycle on the grounds that they have changed addresses, but the way the state determined that was based on a method that discriminates primarily against poor and minority citizens, and it turns out not even to be very accurate. The majority of those that have been purged, again, did not in fact change addresses at all, and this is a tactic that's gonna come up again in this episode when we get to my state of Georgia.
[12:22] But to get a sense of whether these voter purges can be used to discriminate along racial lines, let's examine the rates of purges that occurred after the Supreme Court struck down the ability for the federal government to supervise those historically discriminating states. The Brennan Center for Justice looked at purge rates for 49 states and found that immediately following that court decision, the states that had previously had federal oversight aggressively ramped up their purging rates. These states did not just purge more voters from their lists than in the past; they had higher purge rates than the states with the least amount of historical discrimination, resulting in 2 million additional people being removed from voter registration lists between 2012 and 2016.
[13:06] The rules that states create to purge voters from their lists, well, it also works to prevent people from getting on voter lists in the first place. For example, the Supreme Court just decided to allow North Dakota's law requiring a street address for voter eligibility. Now, maybe that sounds perfectly reasonable, but right now is a very important Senate race that's ongoing, and one of the candidates relies on a portion of the Native American population for their constituency. But many of the state's Native Americans do not have residential addresses. Not only is a large share of the homeless population Native American, but many Native American reservations themselves do not have residential addresses. The citizens use PO Boxes for their mail, and they have tribal ID cards to verify their identity. These are government-issued. But the new rules that have come into place less than 30 days before this election is gonna take place, and could be decided by just a few thousand votes, well, a lot of people are confused whether they are even going to be able to vote because of this law.
[14:13] What really strikes me about this, Daniel, is how much it reminds me of the original nature of voting here in the United States.
[14:19] What do you mean, David? You mean we didn't--you mean like how we didn't allow Native Americans to vote?
[14:24] Well, I mean, that definitely. I mean, in that context, what's incredible for us to remember is women in this country haven't even been allowed to vote for 100 years at this point, but we'll get to that a little bit later on. I have some things to say about that. But rather the nature of voting here, and the fact that, in the US originally, to vote, to have your voice count in the electoral or political process, whatever you want to call it, you had to have a couple things that you could check off a box. One, obviously, were you white? Check. Two...
[14:54] Check.
[14:54] Were you a man? Check.
[14:57] Oh. Check. We're two for two so far.
[14:59] We're good right here, but number three comes in: do you own property?
[15:04] How big does the property have to be?
[15:06] I don't know. Maybe that they could have had this scam where people sell, like, 1" pieces of property in order to get voting rights. But it should have been no surprise that a group made up of white land-owning men decided that the only people whose voice should count are, of course, white land-owning men. But we're sort of returning back to that, it almost seems like. We've already talked about how the system is sort of still making sure that race is a factor, disproportionately targeting minorities and the poor who are predominantly, unfortunately, minorities, in order to disenfranchise them through a variety of tactics, some of which we're still getting to and we'll talk about more as this episode continues. But the fact that we are now making sure that people cannot use PO Boxes but must have a permanent address disqualifies a huge number of Americans. Just because you're homeless doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to vote. Just because you don't have a permanent address doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to vote.
[16:00] I mean, it makes sense if you're a citizen of this country.
[16:03] I mean, that should really be the only qualification: are you an American citizen? Are you of voting age? Debatably, which is maybe something we could talk about, but that should be the only qualification: are you an American citizen? Are you of voting age? Period. End of discussion. But this move to have everything based on IDs, which are difficult to get without a permanent address, but to have an actual mailing address instead of a PO Box--all these things are designed to disenfranchise a huge amount of people, and a lot of those people are, of course, not property owners, and this is even more the case while these voter purges very selectively target to make sure that your current address is accurate, versus the one that's on a poll. If you are a renter, odds are much more likely that you move more frequently, and this means that your current address is much less likely to match your registration address, and even if it's the same voting, polling place, where you should be able to vote absolutely, because your vote hasn't moved around, that's still enough to disqualify you, and it means that there is a greater burden on maintaining your ability to vote on the poor, un-propertied class, and on the rich and wealthy who own property, who are mostly singular in their location and can very easily continue voting in this process.
[17:13] I think what's particularly troubling about this example, since it involves Native Americans, is, you know, just one trend, I think, of society--and I think we've touched on this in various episodes--is that it requires a sort of conformity to standards and bureaucratic structures that many people don't necessarily want to be a part of. Like we talked about the last three weeks in our healthcare series, a lot of people don't agree with the framework of medical care, but it is their only alternative a lot of times, because the alternatives are illegal, right? So we force people to conform to a certain way, but you would think that the election process--and Native Americans is a prime example of this. When we came to this land, they preferred to live a certain way, and then we said, "You know what? No. We'll put you on these reservations. We're gonna take away the community structures that you have built over several generations." And in many reservation, it has led to some of the highest rates of depression and suicide in this country. And you would think that the democratic process of this country would give these people an avenue in order to express their grievances and to fight and vote for change. [18:23] But even in this process, we've said, "No, you can't even participate in this process unless you have already conformed to the standards that we're trying to place on you." And so, in a way, I find that troubling. But you did mention, David, how some of these voter registration laws make it difficult for people who move around, or one ID doesn't match another ID, and so this brings us back to my state of Georgia, because, like we mentioned, what's particularly interesting about Georgia is that the highest elections official is also the one running for governor. It's a huge conflict of interest, and this particular candidate does not have a great track record of fair voting registration protocols. In 2017 the secretary of state put new protocols into effect which requires voters to have an exact match between the name on their government-issued ID and the name on their voter registration. [19:17] Well, that has left at least 53,000 people suspended from voter eligibility, 70% of whom are black minorities. But it just recently came out that Brian Kemp, the Georgia secretary of state, improperly purged many more voters from the list over the past year or two. Again, last year, over 530,000 people were purged from voter registration on the grounds that they had moved. However, it turns out that an overwhelming majority of these people--over 340,000 of them--had, in fact, not moved at all. They were still at their current address. But the process by which this was carried out in order to figure out if they had moved was a postcard disguised as junk mail that they had to return, or else they would be removed from the registration list. And this process violates the Supreme Court's current rulings, and it also disproportionately impacts the poor minorities, those renters, David, that you mentioned who move around a lot, and in general, people who are least likely to respond to a postcard mailer. But just as happened to you in New York, most of these people won't even realize that they were taken off the voter registration until they go to the polls, they try to vote, and they are turned away, in which case it is too late.
[20:35] But for many, Daniel, even just getting to those polling locations can be its own odyssey, to be quite honest. The 2013 Supreme Court case which removed that federal oversight also resulted in a wave of polling location closures. Before the court decision, if a state wanted to close polling locations, it had to prove it would not be disenfranchising minority populations. But that standard no longer applies. As a result, over 860 polling locations have been closed in the South since that decision. In Georgia, the star of this show, close to 8% of the state's polling precincts have been closed over the past few years. And, of course, these are mostly in counties with high populations of African-Americans.
[21:20] Two months ago, David, Indiana removed 170 polling locations in Lake County, where the state's largest population of Latinos live, as well as a significant share of the black population. [21:33] And to be clear, when these municipalities close polls, the justification is always either cost or that not enough people use the poll to begin with. And to be fair, it probably is relatively costly to maintain some of these polling locations in their rural areas, where the cost falls primarily on the budgets of local governments. And as we talked about in episode 5, "End of the Road," the budgets of rural municipalities are already stressed from runaway infrastructure costs that have outpaced the growth of tax revenue. But this is not really a good excuse. We have the money outside local government budgets. We're just choosing not to allocate it to these areas. And when it comes to voter participation, there is a great irony here. Minorities are pushed into marginal areas with low to no economic base through systems like gentrification. Poor whites are similarly kept in these dilapidated towns that used to have economic life, but no longer does. Then, all of these areas are gerrymandered out of political participation so that their vote effectively doesn't matter, and then, to seal the deal and put the final nail in the coffin, the elections board says, "Well, look, it's not worth it to keep their polls open." And now this disenfranchisement is complete. And yet we still have these narratives surrounding all these issues that the failings of our democracy are the responsibility of the individual.
[22:58] Look, we're just wrapping up the political stuff here, and you might notice we just really have barely scratched the surface of a lot of this. We just wanted to get a couple quick concepts out of the way as we move forward across this, but a lot of voting and the disenfranchisement that happens in the United States is primarily through legislative actions, and we like to have all these grand conspiracies about computer hackers or state actors coming in, or, you know, people just accidentally not punching their stuff and leaving us with hanging chads and a Supreme Court decision that changes the course of history, but really, when it comes down to the evil that occurs in our everyday electoral process, well, that evil is banal. It is these everyday legislative actions and the actions of these governmental officials in carrying out these orders that makes our electoral system so terrible. The corruption is end to end. It doesn't matter what party it is. It doesn't matter what state. And yes, absolutely, some states are much worse, and a lot of those states tend to, unsurprisingly, be Republican. I'm not apologizing for that. It's in the evidence. You can go look at it. We have so many links on our website for this show. [24:10] But this is something that is done by design. These are politicians who have power. We voted them in at some point, and instead of saying, "Well, you know, I'm gonna change this system to shift some power back to the people"--why would they do that? That doesn't behoove them. And so they're gonna say, "I'm gonna strengthen these walls that others have built before me to make my own position here that much stronger, to make it that much harder for someone to come in and replace me." And a large part of building those walls separating the constituent from their elected official is this voting process, is the disenfranchisement that happens by taking away these polling locations, by purging people from those voter registrations, and we didn't even get into the voter ID laws that are a deep, deep problem in this country and have been shown time and time again to actually do very little when it comes to combating fraud, and there are some great algorithms data scientists have written that show that you can absolutely 100% verify that someone is who they say they are without requiring an ID using just a little bit of publicly identifiable information that any local government should have access to. There's a great paper on our website. Once again, I encourage you to read that if you have concerns about voter ID and voter fraud. [25:21] But what has been shown, without a doubt, is that voter ID laws disproportionately affect the poor and the minority, and people who happen to vote predominantly Democrat, and these laws are put into place predominantly in states that are Republican-controlled. And it doesn't take a genius or conspiracy-minded person to see that these things don't add up, and politicians right now are systematically chipping away at the notion that this is a democratic country, a notion that might have been laughable in the beginning anyway to people who have been paying attention in this process. But even if you are a Republican in these Republican states, you should be outraged, because while maybe this is cementing the control of your party in your state, and that serves your interest, it is 100% devaluing your vote--taking away what autonomy you have by the politician that you elected saying, "You know, frankly, your votes don't matter. The votes of the people who elected me here don't matter, and I'm gonna do what I can to ensure that I stay here, and if that means taking away the votes of one party, then I'm gonna do that." Well, that should be a disrespect to you as an American, as someone who decides that they want to participate in this electoral process. This is not a team game. This is not something about tribes, which is a ridiculous notion. This is about people chipping away the very fragments of the Constitution that you claim to love so much, of the democracy that many people claim that they're out there dying to defend, and whether or not any of those things are true--and I think they're both arguable--but fact of the matter is...
[26:50] This is an electoral system in crisis, and we haven't even gotten to the really scary parts yet.
[26:58] When people hear the word "scary" in context of voting, there are some images that come to mind: hackers, rogue states, people who want to invade our electoral process to serve foreign interests. And I think you're absolutely right, David, when you say that that's not the fundamental thing that's chipping away at our democracy. It's the legislation, it's the power games, it's the rules that seek to disenfranchise the very people that should be the constituents of those in power. But because of this chipping away of democracy, it has perhaps opened the door--very wide, in fact--to some of these more viscerally scary aspects of this election system that we have in the United States, and it's really important to keep in mind, as we transition into the second part of the show, where we're gonna be talking about the technical flaws of the voting systems we have here in the United States, it's important to keep in mind the stated rationale behind so many of these controversial legislations--these voter-registration rules and these voter list purges that we've mentioned. [28:03] The stated reason behind it is to prevent fraud. The purpose, ostensibly, of a rule that makes it harder or impossible for someone to vote if they have mismatching names on their IDs is that it prevents a person from going to the polls and voting as someone else with a similar name--who, I guess, also just happens to live at the same address--and committing some kind of voter fraud. Or, in the example from North Dakota, the rule that requires a street address is to prevent a person from a different state registering in North Dakota because they signed up for a PO Box in the state and then driving across state borders there to vote, and therefore committing fraud. [28:46] Now, these scenarios are completely silly, of course. I mean, how many John Smiths are out there that have the exact same address as Jonathan Smith and have a reason to commit fraud in this person's name, and therefore add one more vote to an election result? It's gonna be extremely low, if not nonexistent. But let's just assume for a moment that this is actually something that might happen and it's something that we should worry about.
[29:14] Well, let's look at a very simple way. Bad voter registration. How much of this is actually gonna swing votes? Each additional person you create, well, that's one more vote. If you can get somebody to vote multiple times, well, you know, maybe somebody could have as many as five votes by traveling around to different polling locations, but that may take all day. It's gonna take money. It's an investment. It's a lot of manpower invested in this process, and it may net out to, maybe in the end of this, in a highly controlled, choreographed process, of a few hundred to a few thousand votes, a problem that it's been shown time and time again to, quite honestly, not really exist in any sort of scale or significant numbers. But what if one person could swing a vote by percentage points with just a couple of minutes of work? That's a real threat, and it's something that it looks like I might be occurring all the time.
[30:05] So as we go into this section, keep in mind that if we are trying to combat fraud, and if there really is a situation out there where individuals want to use fake IDs to commit fraud, we have to admit that the rate at which that type of fraud would occur is extremely low, and if we are willing to spend so much time and effort to try and combat this low-incidence fraud where an individual could at most get one extra vote for themselves, ask yourself, why do we pay so little attention and give so little effort into fixing the glaring technical flaws in our voting systems, which have a very high risk of incidents in which, like you mentioned, David, a single person could impact or change extremely large swaths of votes all at once. So let's look at the actual voting machines and the systems that make up the election environment through which we exercise our right to vote. Voting Machines We Use [31:05] In 2016, there were 52 different models of voting machines that were used in US elections, so there is a lot of variety in terms of systems that are used, but broadly, we can think of these machines as one of three types of systems.
[31:20] Now, this is a little bit technical and kind of boring, but bear with us. It's very important to this conversation. So what you have first is the optical scan ballot. This is one where you just sit down at a desk, you make your votes by marking in a paper with a pen, and when you're done, you deposit that ballot into a machine, and it scans and tallies it, and this is basically the same thing that occurs when you're in high school taking a test with Scantron or the SAT or something like that. Number two are ballot marking devices. These are touchscreen machines that will print out your votes once you make your selections, and then you deposit that paper into a locked box. And the third--and this is important--are DREs. "DRE" stands for "direct recording electronic"--and then I guess they got a little bit lazy--voting machines. And these DREs, what they do is they receive voter input via a touch screen, and then they store those results on a memory card. Some have paper receipts that you can submit into a box, or that will print out directly beneath the machine into a locked box, and some don't. And what we need to understand is that these machines are vulnerable. In our world that is increasingly connected with different electronic devices, it should be no surprise that many of these electronics that surround us are very poorly made, and the software on them is, well, from bad to terrible. And unfortunately, our voting machines are no better.
[32:42] Over 20 states use a machine for rapidly tallying ballots that are possible to hack remotely, and because these machines process so many ballots at a time, infiltrating just one machine in the right state could completely change a presidential election. Other machines which are used in 18 US states can be physically hacked in less time than it takes to vote, which means an individual could show up to vote, alter the machine while they were using it, and impact the way it reports votes, and these types of flaws, they sometimes don't even get addressed after they've been discovered. Over ten years ago, a critical vulnerability in those high-speed tallying machines was reported to the manufacturer, yet nothing was done, and they continued to be used, including in that controversial 2016 election.
[33:32] You might have heard news stories about the holes in the technology here very recently because of the hacker conference DEF CON. Now, DEF CON, under the guidance of Matt Blaze and other voting security experts, created this thing called the Voting Village, and this is the second year that they've had this. And what they did there was buy a whole bunch of voting machines off of eBay, and you can actually just go on eBay, you can type in "voting machine," and you can find all these retired voting devices. You can buy them for as cheap as $100. There are just warehouses filled with them, and because the technology in voting machines doesn't really change, most of these devices are identical to the devices that are actively being used in elections today, right now, and over the next couple days as you head into the election polls. In fact, many of these devices came to them with data still on them. They were able to pull names, Social Security numbers, voting records straight off these devices. They poked into these devices a little bit and found default user passwords and all sorts of crazy stuff, but what they did at DEF CON basically was they set up a bunch of these things in a room, they created a virtual voting system as well as just having random voting machines lying out, and they invited the world's best hackers as well as a lot of just kids into this room in addition to private industry representatives and voting representatives from secretary of state boards across the country to take a look at this and really understand just how insecure our voting system is, and the results, as you might guess, were disastrous.
[34:58] Specifically, the results of the Voting Village show there are four main glaring vulnerabilities in our election system in the United States. Number one: there is no way to ensure that the voting machines we are using are not tampered with at some point during their manufacture. Number two: many of our machines are remotely hackable, even ones that officials claim are not connected in any way to the internet. Number three: the time it takes to hack a machine can be as little as two minutes when physically present, and require nothing more than a pin, meaning they are highly vulnerable on election day.
[35:35] This is important because the average time in a voting booth is just six minutes, so within six or eight minutes, which nobody would suspect you're doing anything, you have enough time to hack this machine and cast your ballot with no one being the wiser.
[35:50] And as we've alluded to, number four: manufacturers and election officials rarely even bother to fix these types of vulnerabilities when they are made aware of them. And on that last point, this is having a direct impact on elections going on right now. In both Texas and Georgia, there have been a number of reports that machines are automatically changing votes. In fact, the Texas secretary of state has acknowledged that this is a problem, and they have blamed it on a glitch. However, this apparent glitch was reported as far back as 2007, so not only is the state using machines that it knows were flawed, but they still have no idea what causes it despite having 11 years to investigate, and in Georgia, the NAACP has filed a complaint that machines are similarly switching people's votes there, switching their votes for a certain candidate for governor, although at this point, the secretary of state denies the possibility.
[36:45] Now, I want to be clear here that these aren't just, like, a couple of minor vulnerabilities that people have figured out and hacked in. It's like, you walk up to these machines, and they are basically as open and as unsecured as possible. A lot of them have default passwords and administrative tools you can quite literally Google, and they're the default thing available out there. Some of the passwords are no more complex than quite literally the word "pasta." That's the kind of security that has been put into these systems that arguably form the foundation of the entire democratic process of this country. They are so incredibly insecure it's mind-boggling. It's incredible. And there's been almost no push-back by these device makers and states, as they are continuously shown over and over, "Look. Look how broken this stuff is." And a lot of these states are just like, "Oh, yeah. Okay." A lot of the manufacturers are like, "Yeah, that's true, I guess, but, you know, we sold them already, so we're not gonna do any updates, because whatever." The disdain that's given to these sorts of problems are just--it almost seems intentional a lot of the time, but then maybe my tinfoil hat's a little bit too tight here.
[37:49] And as we'll illuminate in just a second, David, this is not just something that is a concept or a risk factor, but maybe something that has been going on for years, in terms of influencing our elections, and it's really just something that even the Department of Homeland Security didn't even realize that these vulnerabilities existed until just recently, and it wasn't until January of 2017 that we defined our election systems as critical infrastructure that we need to protect in the name of national security. But real quick, since I'm sure people are wondering, like, "What does it look like to hack one of these machines?" well, all these vulnerabilities mean that a nefarious person has multiple avenues for hacking and cheating these systems. [38:39] For the optical scan machines, probably one of the most effective or safe ways that we employ these machines currently, I mean, you could program a machine to just blanket shift an X percent of all votes a certain way, although that would be very easy to check if you did an audit. A more sneaky way to cheat the system would be to program machines to read unclear responses on those Scantron ballots and give them a benefit of the doubt, but only towards one side of the party or towards one candidate. So that is, you go down to fill in your election ballot, you don't fill in the bubble completely right, and then the machine scans it, says, "Oh, this is unclear, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt towards the left." But then, if you make a mistake on the right side, it will say, "Oh, I can't count this, because it's unclear." [39:34] On ballot-making devices, you could easily hack a machine so that it marks the ballot with selections the voter did not choose. Now, these machines will print out your ballot so you can verify it before you submit it, but if you notice something like this has occurred, often, the voter will just assume that they made a mistake, they'll tell one of the voting volunteers, and they'll just redo their vote, and the machine will be programmed to recognize that, "Oh, this person is going for a second time. They must have noticed the mistake. Let me do it right. That way they don't notice I'm intentionally doing it." There are really an infinite number of ways that you could cheat these systems, and it would be almost impossible to detect, unless, of course, there was an audit done in which human beings manually looked at the ballots that voters themselves had already verified and compared these to the votes that were tallied. But, as you would expect, very few of these audits are ever carried out, and even in localities where they are, many officials often opt for digital audits, in which many of these hacks would not even be discovered.
[40:39] So what this means is that if your voting machine does not have a paper trail--something that either prints out directly from the machine or that you fill in yourself, guaranteeing that what you filled out or what printed out is 100% actually what you intended to vote for--and that this document is put somewhere safe, locked off, and available in the case that somebody needs to count these votes and make sure that the votes are actually who people voted for, well, then if this paper trail doesn't exist, and the system that counts the votes and ultimately prints out the paper for the final audit, as mandated by the federal government, well, if that paper trail isn't confirmed by voters, that means that there is no record that this hack--if it occurred--well, ever happened in the first place. It's invisible and unable to be detected. And in many cases, this seems almost intentional, like this is how the system is supposed to work.
[41:38] But David, let's take a step back for a second, because when people think about our voting infrastructure and the vulnerabilities in our election systems, including myself just a couple weeks ago... Not Just Voting Machines [41:48] I think the primary thing people think about are these voting machines, these devices that actually take in our vote. That seems to be, "Oh, that's where, if I was a hacker, that's what I would target." But as it turns out, our election environment really includes so much more than that, and as we mentioned, even the Department of Homeland Security was pretty ignorant about all these different avenues by which someone could attack our election infrastructure. The Homeland Security officer who first looked at election security in America was blown away at the scope of how many weak links there were in the system. [42:23] Here's from The New York Times: "The entire system, a Rube Goldberg mix of poorly designed machinery from websites and databases that registered and tracked voters to election poll books that verified their eligibility, to the various black box systems that recorded, tallied, and reported results, was vulnerable." And the voter registration list is one that surprised me, because, you know, we've already talked about legislation problems related to that, but just like our voting machines when they lack of paper trail--you know, you can't audit it, and you don't know if it's been tampered--well, our voter registration lists are very similar. If they only exist on an electronic database somewhere, and the only way that poll volunteers can verify your identity is by looking at a registration list that is online, those lists are vulnerable to attack. Even if the state didn't purge your list from that voter registration list, maybe a hacker did, so you show up to the poll, and you present your name and your ID, and the polling officer tries to look you up in the system, and you're not there, or maybe they sent you to the wrong location, or maybe they sent you the wrong times. You know, just like there's so many ways to hack a voting machine, there are so many ways to impact the way people interact with this election system that can leave people frustrated, confused, and if not directly disenfranchised from the system, presented with so many hurdles that they simply check out.
[43:51] Think how easy this is. If you can get access to these voter registration lists--and once again, in that simulated Voting Village at DEF CON, they tried this and demonstrated how easy it is actually to get into a lot of electoral websites for states, state governments, which are notoriously poorly run--if you can get into this master voter registration list, you can very easily correlate names with political affiliations, because our finance-heavy campaign system has endless lists of people and their party affiliations available for very little money, and with just a small investment and careful hiding of my tracks, using just very basic hacks, you could almost single-handedly affect the fate of an election in just a few hours' worth of work. And so obviously voter registration lists are an important component of our election infrastructure, but one that both Daniel I never had really considered is actually just the way that we report on elections. Every election is accompanied by these websites that display progress from various polls, and as you'd expect, these can impact the way that people vote and thereby influence the election results. And, of course, they're vulnerable. At DEF CON this year, California secretary of state watched as children were given mock-ups of the election result websites for the most influential US states and their presidential elections. An eleven-year-old hacked Florida's website in just ten minutes and changed the reported results. Although the security on actual election website tends to be higher, a motivated nation-state has much more at stake and many more resources to put towards this task than just a child at a hacking conference, and this was evident most recently by Russian hackers who altered the reported election results of a major Ukrainian election back in 2014. What they did was hack the election websites to report that in fact the wrong candidate had won.
[45:40] So like we said, keep in mind that a lot of these voter registration laws and these ID laws are aimed at aggressively combating individual voter fraud, which, by the way, no evidence has ever been presented that this actually occurs, but nevertheless, we are devoted to combating this fraud on the individual level. [46:01] However, we know that our own voting machines are vulnerable, but those in power don't seem particularly interested at all In fixing this very broken system. As we increasingly use these vulnerable electronic machines, very few auditing is actually going on to verify their accuracy, and in fact, in some cases, requests for audits are aggressively resisted, as in the case of Kansas. [46:28] A quality engineer with a doctorate in statistics calculated historical voting results in Kansas and found reason to suspect that voting machines in several rural precincts were being manipulated and sabotaged. In order to verify, she requested an audit of several systems that had an anonymous paper trail of ballots that were counted. She wanted to see if the results that these voting machines tallied actually matched the corresponding paper ballot. But election officials said no, they wouldn't give this data to her, and so she sued to force them to conduct an audit. But there was a problem, in which the software used by the machines are copyrighted, and in a way that disallows anyone from viewing it, including election officials, and therefore making an audit impossible. So she filed an open records request for the paper trail so that they could do their own audit, but the judge said no, citing privacy despite the fact that these are anonymous. And this has been an ongoing fight, and just last month, an appeals court again refused to let her see the votes. [47:38] I mean, I just want to point out how crazy it is that we allow private companies to own the formulas that direct our elections, and then they refuse the public access to inspect those formulas. But you know, David, this isn't really anything new. I mean, John Kerry in 2004 was denied access to voting machine audits when his campaign suspected manipulation, and the reason was the same here as in Kansas. It's that, "Oh, well, our machines are proprietary. You can't see our software. It's copyrighted."
[48:07] And remember that paper trail we've been talking about, and the fact that you need it for an actual safe and accountable audit? Well, there are a ton of states that don't have machines that print out these things, making an audit effectively impossible. These states are Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and, of course, Georgia.
[48:35] It's really mind-boggling that we don't have the ability to audit so many of these election systems, and there's really no reason why this late in the game we are still using broken machines that are not even verifiable. In 2006, the National Election Data Archive Project wrote a 21-page report on the importance of auditing electronic voting machines. "The elections industry is the only major industry not routinely subjected to independent manual audits. Electronic vote counts determine who controls budgets of millions to trillions of dollars, yet only perhaps 15 states conduct any audits. Manual checks of vote count accuracy and their procedures are not sufficient to detect wrongfully altered outcomes in close races. This is especially alarming in light of the fact that US jurisdictions publicly report their vote counts aggregated in a way that hides evidence of vote count errors, machine problems, and tampering. In other words, US election outcomes are wide open to undiscovered fraud and innocent error."
[49:45] Of course, there are a million solutions suggested for this process, even though we know very well what we need: paper trails, simple machines that are secured, are open-source, verifiable. All this stuff is laid out, but that's not sexy. Technology like that doesn't sell. But what does are buzzwords, like "the internet" and "blockchain." There has been a lot of momentum gaining in favor of internet voting, in part because we want to increase voter turnout, and then also as sort of a panacea for a lot of the political fraud that we've discussed throughout this episode--things like polling locations or voting times that are inconvenient or impossible for some people to attend. But there are still a lot of problems with this technology, and it's nowhere near ready. According to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, quote, "Internet voting should not be used at the present time, and it should not be used in the future until and unless very robust guarantees of secrecy, security, and verifiability are developed and in place. Currently, no known technology can guarantee the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the internet." End quote. But, of course, the nerds of the world unite and come out with the constant cry of, "What about the blockchain?" After all, I mean, internet voting is not just a concept, but it actually has been carried out for a long time in places like Estonia.
[51:06] Well, never mind, David, the fact that Estonia relies on simple technology that's highly vulnerable to security breaches.
[51:12] Well, no one ever accused Estonia of having tremendously free and fair elections, but it's also been tried here in the United States as well. West Virginia, for example, has experimented with an app that allowed military servicemen and women to vote with their phone on their primary elections while stationed overseas, and this year, in the current election, the state will be the first in the United States to allow the general federal election to be voted on by an app for a select amount of people. And more broadly, 31 states and the District of Columbia offer some form of Internet voting to military personnel and citizens living overseas. But there's something that's important about this fact. [51:49] This is people voting in very controlled circumstances, limiting these access to a small amount of people. In this scenario, secrecy is not quite as important, and secrecy is something I want to emphasize here, because yes, you can make sure your ballot stays secret once you transmit it, but what's different about a poll versus voting on the internet is that, in a poll station, no one can stand over your shoulder with a gun to your back and say, "You have to vote this way." No one can stand there and look at what you actually fill in and say, "If you don't do this, I'm gonna break your legs, I'm gonna take your money," whatever threat they need to come up with in order to ensure that they vote the correct way. But when you can vote from anywhere, when voting is as simple as pressing a button on your phone, that vote can be easily sold. It can be coerced. And that's something that the technology just doesn't exist to take care of, and it may never exist, and we may never have a solution that's better than the polling places that exist now. And this is something that blockchain and internet have no answer to.
[52:45] Yeah, I think that's a really important point that is missing from all these discussions about if internet voting could be secure or not, is failing to see that a physical location has benefits outside of just simple vote security. I mean, you mentioned someone putting a gun to your head and making you vote a certain way, but it doesn't have to be that dramatic. It could just be your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, or anyone who knows you saying, "Hey, you have to vote this certain way or I'm gonna emotionally manipulate in a certain way or punish you in a certain way," and because it's something that you could do on your phone or on your computer, there's no easy out for you to object to that. At least in the polling location, there is no way to show somebody your vote. It's not an option on the table, so it's not something that can be leveraged against you. And, I mean, in the case of paying somebody for their vote, it's very easy to imagine a situation--I mean, we talked about, in our healthcare system, how pharmaceutical companies were using and continuing to use vulnerable people, like the homeless or the mentally unstable or poor minorities, offering them a little bit of cash in order for them to participate in an experiment that could be dangerous for their health. [53:54] You know, it would be very easy to find a group of vulnerable people outside of public view and offer them some cash to say, "Here, pull up your phone. We'll give you 50 bucks, and you vote a certain way." And, you know, another thing about this occurred to me, David, which is that it would probably be hard to show up to a polling place mentally incapacitated, maybe drunk, or for whatever reason under a condition that wouldn't make you fit to vote, but if you could do it from the comfort of your home, you'd probably get a lot more cases of inebriated voting or people who weren't in their right state of mind, and, you know, that also brings up another question in my mind, David, which is that political participation, voting--these are things that we're supposed to do as a society. It's something that, you know, we do because we want something to impact our communities. I mean, maybe there's something to be said for physically going out and participating in a way that is among the public and is among your friends, your family, your community, your colleagues, that puts you in a frame of mind for voting for community benefit. But those are just some thoughts.
[54:56] And we're getting into the weeds here a little bit, so let's go ahead and start wrapping up these ideas with, you know, what are the solutions for this? And I don't even want to say "what can we do?" here, because...
[55:05] This is something that so many times, like, we absolutely know what is the solution. We've talked about this several times, even across this episode. This is not, like, some mysterious discovery that researchers out there are trying to find, like, "Ehh." It is written up in endless government reports of what needs to be done, and like I said earlier, there just is a lack of political will. But let's lay this out here, Daniel, just so everyone can tell their friends, family, and local politicians how they need to get their ass in line and start doing something.
[55:35] Sure. Well, when it comes to these voting machines, like you said, we already know the solution, and it would involve paper ballots that are easy to verify and audit. Again, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, who wrote a consensus report on American elections, they say, quote, "To protect the integrity and security of US elections, all local, state, and federal elections should be conducted using human-readable paper ballots by the 2020 presidential election. In addition, every effort should be made to use paper ballots in the 2018 federal election. Ballots that have been marked by voters should not be returned over the internet or any network connected to it, because no current technology can guarantee their secrecy, security, and verifiability." End quote. In Germany, for instance, one of those countries on the top of the list for fair and free elections, after every single election, humans hand count every ballot. And if you're an American, you might likely rush to ask the question, "Well, how is that affordable? How can we trust those people who are doing the counting?" Well, here's a foreign idea for you: the counting process is carried out by volunteers, and it's entirely open to the public, so that those who are doing the counting can be monitored by anyone and any citizen. The whole process is done out in the open with full participation from the people.
[56:57] But as we sit here at the tail end of this episode, I'm angry, hearing endlessly about how my vote counts less and less with each passing day, and it makes me angry, and this is something that, if you know me, if you're a friend of mine in real life, you know that I have very little faith in the electoral process as it stands. I've voted in every election that I can since I was 18. I haven't always actually cast a ballot. Sometimes I've spoiled my ballot in the process. But I've shown up, because I'm tired of being called out, of being guilted into voting, and, I mean, really, isn't that a lot of our political participation today--somebody guilting you to vote, saying that if you don't vote, this terrible thing will happen? But how did we get into this position in the first place, where our electoral process is something where you have to vote against this person about this idea? [57:45] Where are the days that we are inspired to go out and vote because this is something we believe in, where we want to see this change activated? No wonder our voter participation is so low. Are these things that automated voter registration would fix? Are these things that mandatory voting, like we see in Australia, could correct? I don't know. Maybe. But something tells me that there are bigger problems here. How did we come to an age where our political process and participation is so incredibly lazy? If your idea of what politics is is coming and voting every two years, maybe attending primaries in between, then you are lazy. You are not engaging in the political process. If you occasionally make a call to your senator, to your local representative, maybe write them a letter, well, I'm sorry, but you are barely scraping by along the edge what counts as politics. [58:36] For many people, politics is a matter of life and death, quite literally, and sitting here and barely participating in this voting system, and then guilting people who feel disenfranchised or who have had their right to vote made almost impossible, and guilting them for not participating with this laziest method of participation, you know, shame on you. [58:56] But let's step back for one second. I mean, should we be surprised that we have a government that is elected into power, and then immediately takes that power and consolidates it, makes it harder for them to lose that control, makes it harder for us to participate in the process that puts them there in the first place? Is that surprising at all? And is it surprising that as our voting system gets continuously worse, as we identify these things that need to be fixed, our politicians don't fix them, they don't improve this process? Instead, oftentimes, they make it worse. They make our vote worth that much less in a system that already barely counts in the first place because of the way it's constructed and because of the way that we participate in this process. [59:40] The changes in these voting regulations, it's only gonna come from our explosive outrage. When we are clamoring for there to be fixes, when we're tired of our ballots being flipped on the screens in front of our faces, when we look at these elections, and we see them being stolen time and time again when we show up and are denied our right to vote because of some period that's left out of place on our street name, because our name has been purged from some list that lives in some cloud somewhere, whether by the state itself or some foreign actor taking advantage of the fact that the state doesn't just give a fuck about actually protecting this most hallowed component of the political process, allegedly, should we be surprised? Should we be surprised that this corrupt process that is rotten from the very casting of the ballot all the way to the top of the people that we elect creates this broken system that rots our very world around us and causes the endless systemic problems that we list on this show? [1:00:41] Should we be surprised? How did we get convinced that our political participation should be limited solely to the electoral process, to the fact that we occasionally reach out to those politicians that we elect and say, "Hey, I disagree with you; you're doing a bad job," and then they send us a sternly worded letter back telling us how we're wrong? Is that really what political process is today? In the 1700s, this hallowed time where the mythos of this country was established, and everyone could do no wrong if you were labeled a founding father, well, political participation in that age was ridiculous, because people realized that politics is a matter of life or death. It's not about disagreeing with me. It's about your ideas are putting me, my family, my friends, my community at risk, taking away my livelihood, denying my right to health, happiness, home, and in many cases, life itself. [1:01:34] And people reacted correspondingly. Politics was about getting in fights. It was about quite literally dismantling people's houses when you disagree with them, and that was considered normal. It wasn't uncivil or ridiculous, where shouting at a politician today is something that gets you lambasted in the media with thought pieces written about you in the New York Times op-ed, in The Washington Post. That's ridiculous. We've been castrated. We've been neutered as political participants, and it's all by design. Political participation is barely an electoral process. That's something that has been created to direct our energies, our frustrations, and make sure that we only feel like we have a chance to change anything every few years when they let us. [1:02:17] And that's the important idea: when they allow us to. And that ability is being increasingly taken away by the degradation of our electoral system itself. But we don't have to let them do that. We can cry out. We can be angry. We can let them know that we will not stand for this--Democrat, Republican. It doesn't matter. If they continue disenfranchising us and our communities and those around us, we will not stand for this, whether that means elections, whether that means not allowing them to ever have a meal in peace or show their face in public without being shamed. Whatever it takes, and we need to remember that our political process does not end in the polls. It ends in the community around you. If you go out and you help someone, you are doing politics. The government exists ostensibly to help us, to serve the people that elect it into power, that ultimately compose it. It exists to help people. That's why we have a government. But if we can take that role into ourselves, take that idea and live it in our community around us, then we are living politics. That's where the political process really lives. We've been convinced that it ends in the polling place, when really, it's about reaching out to your neighbor, making sure they have what they need, identifying the problems in your community, and doing the direct action that it takes to actually make a difference. [1:03:33] If we can regain that, regain some of our control, then the politicians will have to pay attention to that ballot box, 'cause as we take their power away by ignoring them, by making this problem disappear by actually taking actions into our own hands, regaining that control that we've ceded away to these out-of-touch idiots far off who are more than happy to disenfranchise us whenever they get the chance, well, the more that we move away from that system, the more they have to pay attention to us once more, and the more things can move to a better, more fair, equitable, and actually political world.
[1:04:07] I think that's really important to point out, that restricting political participation to voting is lazy, because it's ineffective, because when we are voting for someone, what are we really doing? We're putting someone in office who's going to enact legislation that will have a direct impact on our communities. Voting for someone shouldn't be about if they're well-spoken, if they're well-dressed, if they have a nice personality. We need to realize that our world is fundamentally changing because of the policies being enacted in our name from these people that we elect, and political participation really is, and should be, about impacting the communities around us, because that is what electing someone is. It's having a direct impact on our communities. But we've been misled to believe that we shouldn't be involved in politics, we shouldn't care about the actual policies that impact our lives directly. A case in point is an op-ed written recently in The Wall Street Journal by a senator named Ben Sasse in which he says, "Politics can't solve our political problems. The crisis in our country that is the disintegration of communities and an epidemic of loneliness can't be solved by politics." He writes that the only real answers start at home, and then he goes on to write that if we're feeling stressed, if we're angry, it's because we're paying attention to politics, and that's stressing us out, and, you know, we need a break from politics. Stop participating. Stop caring. This is the misdirection that has led us to this disenfranchisement--the assertion that we as individuals have failed. It's not we as individuals that have failed society. Our society is impacted directly by the policies behind it. If our communities have disintegrated, if we as individuals have been atomized and feel lonely, it's because our environment, the society that we are all a part of, has shifted, directly because of the politics. And so you're absolutely right, David, that if we want to solve this problem, we need to be directly involved, not just in voting, not just in demanding a more fair and free election, which we absolutely should do, because if we don't demand it, we're not going to get it. But as best we can, we should extend our political participation into anything that we can do to make our communities a better place.
[1:06:29] As always, that's a lot to think about. We hope you'll think about it and carry it into the polls with you this upcoming week. If you want to learn more about any of the topics that we touched on today or read a full transcript of this episode, you can do all that and much more on our website at ashesashes.org.
[1:06:47] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible, and we will never use ads to support this show, so if you like this show and would like us to keep going, you, our listener, can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, and hitting that five-star button in your podcast app. [1:07:05] Also, we do have an email address. It's [email protected]. And we encourage you to send us your thoughts. We read them, and we appreciate them, even if we do not get back to you in a timely fashion. Next week will be an interesting week. We were invited to speak at a conference in Harvard. I have no idea why anyone would invite us to do such a thing, but David, I read a self-help book that said to say yes to everything, so...
[1:07:36] Yes.
[1:07:37] That's what we're doing.
[1:07:38] Yes, we are. If anyone's in Boston this weekend, give us a shout. We'll be around. Come hang out with us here at the Sound Education Conference at the Harvard Divinity School.
[1:07:48] We're hoping we can get a short show out of that conference participation, but again, it's a little bit up in the air. We'll do our best and hope we have something special for you next week.
[1:07:59] I'm excited, and you should be too.
[1:08:01] But until then...
[1:08:02] This is Ashes Ashes.
[1:08:04] Bye.
[1:08:05] Bye-bye.