Transcript

Using Modern Technology to Legitimize Elections | Lori Steele Contorer | TEDxSanDiego

we live in extraordinarily innovative times think about DNA sequencing you can today determine if years from now you're going to get an illness think about self-driving cars today individuals have drones not just governments and military ten years ago we sent a robot 150 million miles away and it landed within a football field of where we wanted it to so you'd imagine that in days like today every mission critical industry in the world is using modern technology to make sure what they're doing is as good as it could be in fact that's not the case you remember hanging chads butterfly ballots sadly the most important business processes in the world are not using technology and that matters it matters for a lot of reasons you'll remember 2000 our president was elected not by the people but by the Supreme Court of the United States regardless of which side of that argument you were on in fact it's not okay to not have ballots elect the President in other countries it's worse in other countries Afghanistan for example in some jurisdictions there are more people who said that they voted then there are ballots that were counted in other parts of Afghanistan there are more ballots in the ballot box than there were registered voters that's the problem with paper ballots in Haiti you wait in line for hours to make sure that your say that you have a say and who's going to be elected you want a legitimate regime and on your way home from work you see ballots floating through the streets poll stations were ransacked ballots were dumped on the streets and never counted paper ballots are not a good idea in Mexico ballots are set on fire full ballot boxes people have no way to know with paper ballots whether or not their election was legitimate in Kenya it's worse people wait in line in spite of the violent politics all around them because they want to be counted and people are massacred at polling places voting in person by paper manually is not a good idea you've heard this before in life it's called a big lie remember when cigarettes were good for your health you'll be sexy you'll be skinny you'll have a clear throat remember how absolutely certain we were that subprime mortgages were riskless that your house was an endless cash machine trust me we know how this works you'll be fine and paper ballots are secure accurate and reliable remember we sent a robot a hundred and fifty million miles to Mars and yet this is how you're told to securely vote vote by mail was invented by Abraham Lincoln yes that Abraham Lincoln and he did it because he wanted the Civil War soldiers to be able to vote that was innovation a hundred and fifty years ago do any of you know have soldiers today vote from Afghanistan by mail it's required by law how many of those ballots do you think got back in time to be counted on Election Day I know a lot of election officials throughout the world and there is no one who cares more about the integrity of elections and the validity of your vote but they're given processes and tools from a hundred and fifty years ago to process arguably the most important business process in our world it matters not just in the United States it matters globally there are people who are risking their lives every day to ensure that their vote counts women who never had the right to vote youth who didn't care because they knew nothing could change are risking their lives daily to say not only I want to vote that counts but to say I want to be sure it was accurately counted I want to know that my leadership was actually elected remember the first Iraq election and all of the women and and people in general with the purple fingers that was a really game-changing period those people risk their lives to ensure that they could elect their leaders at the time I wasn't thinking much about voting but I looked into these women's eyes and I saw that in that moment they believed they mattered they did something that affected their future their community's future and their country's future and I don't know about you but I've seen a lot of cases where when someone knows they matter they think bigger they imagine what they could do and then they do something big so I'm fortunate when I was a little girl my mom told me that I could do anything I wanted in life I'm pretty sure she meant I could manage the grocery store down the street but that's not what I heard I'm from a small town in Ohio that's not what I heard what I heard is you can do anything so I became an investment manager and during that period of the purple fingers I was speaking at a united nations conference on technology and it happens to be a huge UN conference where all of the great minds and technology or they're talking about how they're changing the world it has a really cool thing strangely this year or coincidentally it happened to be the week that Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in California in a statewide recall election as the governor at the time that was shocking to most people at the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was thought of as a bodybuilder and an actor he was the Terminator so everyone in this conference imagine it's in Switzerland next to Austria where he grew up as a bodybuilder so every one of the conference was talking about elections they were talking about voting and I kept thinking because it was the same period of the women with the purple fingers and hanging chads and butterfly ballots and recall elections and saying people care if people care important things can happen but we have to do something to make sure that they know that in fact their vote counts so I started talking to the people at the conference mr. online banking mr. defense miss online commerce what you do is a lot like voting it's authentication its data its security you should think about doing something with elections it's important yeah aren't you cute now so I thought wow the other thing I was told as a little girl is if there's a problem and you aren't part of the solution you're in fact part of the problem so I started thinking about how I could try to make this democracy thing work better so I brought together a team of internationally recognized election administration experts and technology experts because you can't just throw technology at a problem and expect that it's going to solve it you have to deeply understand the problem so we came together and we began to change the way the world votes so the people that tell you that paper ballots are secure and accurate and reliable the people who tell you that technology that technology can't happen in elections it's too important unlike DNA sequencing and sending robots to the moon so we started to do something about it and there is proven success using technology and elections in 2007 we did a vote anywhere election where people could vote from home on their phones in polling places on PCs anywhere in the world on a PC and every polling place was open to everyone and it was a first election in history where public key infrastructure was used to encrypt ballots so you can in fact it's proven that you can increase accuracy and security and elections while increasing participation we did the same thing in Australia for the military in 2007 so military were able to vote privately and independently and know that their ballots got back electronically in time to be counted we continued that throughout the United States and then in 2009 we had the first ever all digital election so people could devote my phone they could vote by PC a woman called and told us that her entire life she has had to have her sister fill out her ballot for her because she's blind paper by the way is not accessible that day she voted for the first time knowing that her ballot was submitted the way she had intended her fear forever had been that her sister was a different political party so we continued this throughout the country and then in 2011 magically appeared the iPad so suddenly it's not voting online it's not loading by software it's ipad voting but that's okay I Apple can take the court of the credit because what that does is make people realize something big is happening the mobile revolution has said has allowed people to say I want to vote conveniently when I can in that iPad election in 2011 people with disabilities participation increased by fifteen hundred percent we moved on to doing private sector elections for very high profile and very high integrity organizations like the Oscars and the Emmys after 85 years of vote by mail they decided it's important to have secure an accurate transmission of ballots because the technology is here South Dakota is now using military IDs to authenticate voters when they're serving from abroad so you can increase security while increasing access and while increasing participation and it continues so when you hear that technology is not ready for elections think about the facts think about the data know that the reality is technology enables you're going to hear the big lie again and again and again between now and the 2016 election you have a choice you can remember what happens in paper ballots with paper ballots in elections and you can say no I'm not going to believe the big lie anymore because when technology enables it allows people to know that they matter to trust in the results and to do something very important with their lives thank you you