Voting Machine of the Year
A politically-incorrect reality TV showman takes the White House. America is in shock -- and following the election, it turns out faulty voting machines were involved.
It’s the plot from Man of the Year, a 2006 film starring Robin Williams - but change a detail or two and it might sound familiar in 2020, weeks after a US election.
Today’s elections are managed, or mismanaged, with voter counts on flash drives (that go missing) and true-life conspiracy theories about stolen or rigged voting software.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs said, “We remain confident that no foreign cyber actor can change your vote and we still believe that it would be incredibly difficult for them to change the outcome of an election at the national level” (before the President fired him).
Fair enough. But… has he heard of Edward Snowden? The NSA? If the most secure, sophisticated organization in the USA’s spy network is vulnerable, what makes you think that you can build a really, really secure electronic voting system?
Recently, many people have been asking why we can’t just vote over our smartphones. Can you imagine how much worse it would be today if we’d done that?
One of the pillars of electoral democracy is secrecy: “The security of the ballot is paramount, and the system makes it impossible to discover for which candidate a specific voter has voted. Furthermore, a ballot cast with a mark that could potentially allow the voter to be identified has to be rejected. This is to ensure that no electors are intimidated or bribed into voting in a particular way.”
Just this requirement disqualifies the usage of any electronic device such as a smartphone.
In this case, it would have been far better to stick with paper ballots, pens and cardboard voting boxes -- with people physically counting and other people watching the counters.
I bring this up because I see a similar problem a lot in business. Technology is often seen as the solution to every problem within an organization. It is not.
First, you need to understand the problem and devise a strategy. Only then, can you apply technology in a way that makes sense.
The message to politicians - don’t try to fix low voter turnout by hiding behind technology. Improve your ability to lead.
And that’s the recurrent pattern.