Submission to the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy Regarding Electronic Voting
Lori Steele Contorer, Everyone Counts, Inc.
About Everyone Counts, Inc. Everyone Counts industry-leading Software as a Service voting platform eLect has been improving voting processes for governments and member organizations throughout the world since 1997. When compared with voting by mail, eLect increases participation, while improving security, access for voters, and auditability of the voting process.
About Lori Steele Contorer, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Everyone Counts, Inc. Lori Steele Contorer, founder and CEO of Everyone Counts, is the world's top expert in election modernization, pioneering the adoption of Software as a Service and bringing state-of-the-art technologies, already proven in other mission-critical industries, to make elections more accessible, affordable, transparent, and secure. The transformation has begun, and her visionary leadership in business, innovation, and elections led to Lori to being named in 2013 to Fortune magazine's 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs list, named a winner of the San Diego Business Journal 's Women Who Mean Business award, and inducted into Bowling Green State University's Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame.
Since founding Everyone Counts, Lori has led successful election administration and voting projects in countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Australia, involving voters located in over 165 countries, as well as for the iconic Oscar and Emmy awards. Lori previously served as a technology investor as vice president at Solomon Smith Barney, specializing in emerging and state-of-the-art technologies globally.
A graduate of Bowling Green State University, Lori's election modernization expertise is frequently called on by legislators from around the world and by the media, including Time , the Wall Street Journal , CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Politico, and the New York Times .
The Reality of Voting and the Reality of the Internet Today The objective of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy is to consider, report and make recommendations on how parliamentary democracy in the United Kingdom can embrace the opportunities afforded by the digital world to become more effective in representing citizens, encouraging citizens to engage with democracy, facilitating dialogue amongst citizens. That is critical, given the continued decline in participation among UK citizens for elections from the general to the EU Parliamentary to local and by-elections.
Methods for increasing participation to date include postal voting. The UK Electoral Commission’s study, The 2010 General Election: aspects of participation and administration showed that it is working: well over half of all postal voters (58 per cent) felt the availability of postal voting encouraged them to vote. Across the United Kingdom in that election, nearly 19% of all the votes counted were postal ballots. More, turnout among postal electors was significantly higher than that among in-person voters, which is a pattern that continues from past elections. 83.2% of those with a postal ballot returned it. By way of contrast, only just over six in 10 of those electors required to vote ‘in person’ did so.
And yet, participation continues to drop in UK elections. That leads to the conclusion, that allowing electors the convenience of voting from wherever they choose, whenever they choose, increases the likelihood that they will vote. But more and more people that believe they should or must vote in person do not vote at all.
Now think about how most people engage remotely in 2014. It is not by post. It is by mobile or internet. And the number of people “connected” today is the highest ever.
Topline findings released on 1 October 2013 by the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, in the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS) 2013 Report: “ Cultures of the Internet: The Internet in Britain 2013 ” show that:
Internet use continues to grow; with big increases in low-income households • Internet use continues to grow across all levels of income. The Internet is now used by 78% of the British population, up from 73% in 2011. • The biggest increases in Internet use are seen in low-income households (58% of households earning less than £12,000 / year use the Internet, up from 43% in 2011).
People are becoming more skillful; mobile and device use is exploding • Devices. Use of Internet-enabled devices has increased sharply: 37% of households now have access to a tablet (26% in 2011). • Mobility. Accessing the Internet on the move has also increased sharply: 57% of Internet users access the Internet while on the move in 2013 (40% in 2011; 20% in 2009). • Mobiles. Mobile phones are increasingly used for a range of Internet-related activities: email (54% of mobile users in 2013), Internet browsing (52%), using social network sites (43%), playing games (43%) and listening to music (43%). • Government services. 65% of users have used online government services in 2013, up from 57% in 2011. • Skills. People’s self-reported ability continues to rise: 74% of Internet users in 2013 rate themselves as having “good or excellent” skills (up from 60% in 2003). This is dependent on lifestage; 92% of students rate themselves this way, compared with 77% of employed, and only 49% of retired people.
The conclusion is obvious. Internet voting is the modern day answer to stemming the tide of decreasing voter participation – and citizen engagement in general – in the UK. The following detail of the current state of the internet and mobile revolutions, including security and accessibility, as well as success in internet and mobile usage globally, including internet voting, serves to validate this conclusion. THE SECOND INTERNET REVOLUTION : BRINGING DEMOCRACY UP TO SPEED
Mobile and Messaging in Democracy
Civil engagement has had a new face and a growing effectiveness in the world of the first Internet revolution - the Mobile Revolution. We all watched in awe as first there were massive protests in Iran over what was perceived to be a fraudulent election in 2009. In spite of the US government saying it would not engage, Twitter, a US company, famously elected not to take its site down for maintenance during this period so the voices of innocent Iranian citizens could be heard in real time, as their cries for justice and democracy were met with violence and death.
This was followed by the Arab Spring, beginning in December 2010. Rulers had been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and civil uprisings had erupted throughout the region. The effective use of social media to organize demonstrations and rallies, and communicate in the face of state-led repression, was instrumental to these efforts. Twitter and Facebook, seemingly overnight, changed how citizens engage in some of the world's most oppressed and most dangerous "democracies."
Now civic engagement startups are all the rage, many being funded with many millions of dollars by big names in Silicon Valley. Even Napster co-founder Sean Parker, with his dream team formed from companies past, has stepped up with the launch of Brigade - a company, according to Politico, "designed to combat a lack of political engagement and interest in all levels of government across America." That's exciting. Political engagement and interest in all levels of government are vital to any democracy.
The Second Internet Revolution, and Real Change in Democracy
The Mobile Revolution, and engagement through communication and conversation, are only first steps. Real systemic change in democratic countries can only come about through what Steve Case, technology visionary and founder of America Online, calls the "second Internet revolution." This second Internet revolution can bring the benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS) to the world's largest enterprise: government.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2013, Steve projected: "The next 25 years won't be focused on creating more Internet or social-media companies; it will be about using Internet and mobile technology to change education, healthcare, government, and energy."
Think about that. The Internet is no longer an unknown and potentially treacherous new horizon over which only the most innovative and daring may cross. Having reached the final stages in the Diffusion of Innovations, in which even the late majority and laggards (Rogers 1962) are engaging and benefitting every day, the Internet is becoming more like a utility infrastructure which facilitates efficiencies and new processes than a playground for risk-seeking adventurers.
Most everyone, every day, engages with friends, media, and work via mobile. Habits are easily learned and hard to break, and people who experience daily the pleasure and ease of state-of-the art mobile communications and administrative processes in their personal lives are then extremely frustrated when they are stuck using cumbersome and antiquated technology platforms in other dimensions of their lives. Government is ready for change.
$3.9 Billion on Outdated Election Technology
Before I share real-life cases of how advances in technology have made real and substantive improvements in democracy and elections - and what's next - let's remember why actual elections, not just social civic engagement, are the linchpin for making democracy work.
Fourteen years ago, the world watched in disbelief when the election for the presidency of the United States of America was turned over to the US Supreme Court to decide. It became clear at that time that one of the most advanced nations in the world was using severely outdated processes and "technologies" for one of the most important business processes in the world. So Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, which provided $3.9 billion to states to invest in technology to improve elections. That was the first time in history that the federal government would fund election systems for states.
In the early- to mid-2000s, innovation was everywhere! Amazon and eBay were changing the way we shop; Citibank and eTrade were transforming the way we bank and invest. Salesforce.com was changing the way businesses win and service customers, with its "No Software" motto. Even Bill Gates, a pioneer and leader of the installed software model, proclaimed that "the next sea change that is upon us is a tectonic shift from single-use hardware and licensed software that organizations install and maintain, to Software as a Service."
There didn't seem to be a mission-critical industry left on earth that would consider installed software or purpose-built hardware as the way to solve modern business challenges, let alone promote innovation. But taking into account the entire global economy, we were probably only at the early-adopter stage in the S curve. And governments remained at the far right in the categories of adopters. "State of the art" technologies in elections in the early 2000s in the UK were a piece of paper, marked with a stubby pencil. In the US “state of the art” meant 30- to 40-year-old, purpose-built optical-scan and touch-screen voting machines and customized installed software for registration systems. So the vast majority of that $3.9 billion was spent within a few years, on antiquated, purpose-built hardware and customized installed software packages.
Where did that decision take the US elections industry?
Bloomberg: Poll Problems 'A Royal Screw-Up' Disaster On Primary Day As Machine Glitches Cause Chaos
Voting As a "Mission-Critical" Industry: A Business Concept Is Born
At the time the US was investing in already outdated technology for voting, I was an investment manager. I specialized in evaluating the technologies that would be game-changers and the companies that would lead the change. I was speaking at a UN conference on technology, where Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, and other industry luminaries were leading the conversations with the heads of states of countries funded by the UN. It happened to be the week that Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in a statewide recall election.
In Europe that was very big news. Everyone was talking about the election. Given my focus on game- changing technologies, all I could think about when people mentioned elections, as I stood among some of the most brilliant minds in technology, was the 2000 US election and how backward the election process had been. Regardless of which side of that election one was on, how was it possible that most of the world questioned the process that elected the president of the United States? Hanging chads? Butterfly ballots? Really? This was the "state-of-the-art" technology relied upon to elect the leader of the free world? People live and die based on who their elected leaders are. How could we be satisfied with such a process?
It was also clear to me that some of the elements of voting were very similar to many other mission-critical business processes: banking, commerce, aerospace It's about authentication. It's about data integrity and protection. It's about secure data transmission. Data integration auditability of process. And it's about customer service. Couldn't state-of-the-art technologies proven in these other industries solve some of the problems in voting, as well?
The late nineties was a time of extensive innovation globally. Companies were thinking big, and it was a land grab for new ideas and new markets. The dotcom collapse changed everything. Capital was drying up; profitability mattered. Companies suddenly had to focus their new innovations on their core customer and core market niches.
Everyone, rightly so, was focused. So no one would listen. I'm a believer in the adage that if you see a problem and you do nothing to solve it, you become part of the problem. This was a big problem. Democracy was being conducted on severely compromised systems. There was zero innovation in voting technology. Up to $31 billion is spent on elections globally. And there was no clear leadership. So I decided to find the right team and the right technologies fix that.
I founded Everyone Counts to bring to the voting process state-of-the-art technologies already proven in other industries. If we did our job properly, election results would become irrefutable. And we would ensure that every voter in every democracy in the world who had the right to vote could do so privately, independently, and securely, and know their ballot was reliably and accurately counted. And we would become a Fortune 1000 company in the process.
The First Internet Revolution and Mobile Drive Adoption
There has been real positive progress and growing adoption of state-of-the-art technologies in voting, with extraordinary results. Everyone Counts and other companies have innovated in niches within elections, starting with serving the most severely disenfranchised voters: military and overseas civilians living and serving abroad, and people with disabilities. In those niches, participation, auditability, security, and accessibility to elections have grown. As advanced Internet and mobile technologies have evolved and been proven, purpose-built hardware and installed software have gotten closer and closer to end of life. I’m proud to say that some of our innovations have been for voting in the UK.
Everyone Counts' Timeline and Technological Advancements:
Internet Global - increasing access 1997 First private sector online election serving membership in six (6) countries
Internet Europe - increasing security 2003 First binding, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-secured government election Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK
Internet UK - increasing access, choice, security and auditability First "Vote Anywhere" multi-channel election (kiosk, phone, mail, Internet) 2007 and first electronic poll book Swindon Borough Council, UK
Internet Australia - increasing access and security 2007 First federal government Internet election for military serving abroad
Internet Global - increasing access and auditability 2008 First online global USA presidential primary, increased participation 7-fold
Internet USA - increasing access and security 2009 First all-digital government election, reduced costs by 50% City of Honolulu Internet USA - increasing access and security 2009 First accessible absentee ballot delivery and marking public election Washington State
SaaS USA - increasing access, reliability and security First secure Internet voting and e-ballot delivery and marking for federal 2010 primary election and meeting new federal guidelines for overseas voters Colorado
SaaS USA - improving administrative process First use of automated ballot transcription from electronically marked to scan- 2010 ready ballots Colorado
Internet Australia - increasing access, security and streamlining administration and Largest politically binding state-government combined Internet and telephone 2011 Mobile (dual channel) voting project undertaken globally to date New South Wales
SaaS USA - increasing access, security, and auditability and 2012 First use of the iPad as a voting machine Mobile Oregon
Internet Global - increasing access, security, auditability - and making it fun to vote! and 2013 First use of Internet voting for the Oscars by the members of the Academy of Mobile Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
SaaS Global - increasing access, security, auditability - and making it fun to vote! and 2014 First use of Internet voting for the Emmys by the members of the Academy of Mobile Television Arts and Sciences
SaaS USA - increasing access, security, auditability and improving the user and experience 2014 Mobile First use of tablets as voting machines in a US polling place Arizona
SaaS USA - increasing security and auditability and streamlining administration and First use of Common Access Cards (CAC) for remote registration and 2014 Mobile authentication South Dakota
SaaS USA - increasing security and auditability and streamlining administration and First electronic ballot return with digital affidavit signatures for military and 2014 Mobile overseas voters Arizona
The First Security Challenge
The core market, though, was still dominated by manual paper process in the UK and Europe, and antiquated, purpose-built hardware in the US. These manual processes and technologies had a combination of problems relating to reliability, accuracy, security and usability. Paper and manual process, of course, is easy to ‘hack.’ And the companies delivering antiquated technologies products weren't comfortable opening their software code to audit. That's understandable in many industries - but not in elections. Customers and end-users - voters - need to feel confident in the process, and therefore in the technologies being used.
When software seems to be switching votes from the selected choice to the opposition party candidate, whether through poor touch-screen calibration, user error, mediocre technology, software bugs, or actual fraud, it is very important for governments and voters to understand exactly what is happening. These companies, though, fought in court for their right to keep their code secret. They became known as Black Box voting systems. The reputation for electronic voting being insecure, unreliable, and potentially easy to hack emerged from these systems. So innovative voting companies, like innovative companies in any industry, had the perception of legacy problems to overcome.
The audit problem is easily solved, through allowing voting software to be audited by customers or outside experts. Auditable code doesn't lose its proprietary nature, nor does it disclose trade secrets. But the other challenges of security, when implementing Internet voting or a SaaS platform for voting in poll stations, connected or not, are significant, as Mark Anderson points out in his recent article "SNS: The Internet of Other Things" (4/24/14).
The security issues around software, the Internet, and devices are not going away; in fact, they grow daily. That's why, as Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, also points out, in the April 15th issue of SNS - The Internet of Things Is Really the Internet of People. It is the responsibility of Everyone Counts, as the leader in the implementation of Perpetually State-of-the-Art, SaaS-based voting systems globally, to have the leading team for security in software systems. And it's our responsibility to stay ahead of the curve on security.
Many of those opposed to e-voting say there's no way to solve the security challenges of the Internet or software-based systems. But really strong technologies, combined with really strong process, have already increased security in elections exponentially. The bar should be set higher than "Is it perfect?" The bar should be: "Can we significantly improve security and reliability and auditability - while increasing access for voters - over the systems currently in use ?" The answer to that is an unequivocal yes. We're talking about competing with repetitive manual paper processes, the postal system, and 30- to 40-year- old, purpose-built hardware.
But in a world where delighting the customer and delivering systems that are Perpetually State-of-the-Art is the only real way to deliver excellence, transform and lead an industry, and even compete, "raising the bar" for current systems is not enough.
That's why Everyone Counts is transforming the standards in elections, by delivering what only SaaS allows: a Perpetually State-of-the-Art platform. Our industry-leading experts in Internet security are raising the bar for security in election security. They are mitigating the risk of manual error-prone paper processes, and deleting the need for purpose-built hardware that reaches its reliability and usable life expectancy faster and faster. We are building something that will systemically improve the democratic process, improve the voter experience and make the world a much better place.
Raising the Bar for Security and Reliability for Mission-Critical Cloud Solutions
Elections are mission-critical. Just meeting - or even exceeding - the historic standard for security and reliability for elections won't do. First, poll station elections may or may not be online. With technological advances, every single polling place can be a VPN, with a secure PC, tablet, or iPad running SaaS software as the local "voting machines." But if a jurisdiction is comfortable with online transmission, security and reliability for hosting is of paramount import.
There are many options in today's Cloud world. Everyone Counts uses the high resiliency of a modular data-center infrastructure to address the critical data-center needs of scalability and disaster recovery. And we require state-of-the-art SAS 70 Type II, TIA-942 Tier 4 data centers that provide a 100% uptime SLA and multiple Internet connection providers, and that are Uptime Institute Tier III design-certified and SSAE16 SOC 1 Type II certified.
But important business processes, and elections specifically, require that security no longer be about just technology. Mission-critical application security requires layer upon layer of technologies combined with layer upon layer of auditable and automated process.
As with any secure process, when it comes to authentication, anything from multiple secret passwords to two-factor authentication to biometrics can be used. To ensure security, it's important that credentials are not stored in text format, but rather are encrypted. Everyone Counts' voter credentials are stored using the highest standards for encryption on the market today.
Ballots, or private data in other applications, must also be protected, as evidenced by the many breaches within retail, banking, and credit card companies. Uniquely in the online and SaaS voting world, Everyone Counts uses military-grade encryption to protect each ballot individually, as well as to protect the ballot box. And the ballot box can only be accessed post-election by a quorum of appointed election judges - several trusted representatives from the government or audit team, each of whom is responsible for entering a confidential password for securing the keys and salts associated with an election. The quorum's combination of passwords is used to encrypt the Election Key Envelope that holds the keys and salts associated with that election.
All information transmitted between the voter's browser and the election server is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) transmission. The SSL protocol enables voters to securely communicate their vote in a way that is designed to prevent and detect eavesdropping, tampering, or communications forgery.
After a voter has completed and submitted his or her ballot, it is securely transmitted to the election server from the voter's browser. When the election server receives the ballot information, encryption software on the server retrieves the unique public key for that ballot and encrypts the ballot.
Once the ballot has been securely encrypted, it is stored in trust within the election database for the duration of the election. No voting preferences are ever stored unencrypted. Once a ballot has been cast, there is no facility to decrypt, read, or modify the ballot, even with physical access, without the quorum members unlocking the election. The encrypted ballots are removed from the Web at the end of an election and only decrypted on a clean PC, ensuring the highest level of security. Monitoring and audit processes also provide administrators, voters, and the media with auditable evidence against any false claims of hacking or intrusion.
Internet Security Is Not Enough
But providing the highest level of security alone is not the Holy Grail for developing the leading voting systems company - or any other software / Internet / mobile company. It's just one important step. To again quote Mark Hurd's recent feature in SNS, "The end goal is to delight customers." If voting system companies deliver excellence for governments, from security to customer service to streamlining process to a delightful end-user experience, they will succeed. For now. But succeeding today is not enough. With rapid, continuous, exponential change in technologies, to be successful, companies must be in a state of continuous improvement - just to keep up with advances in security and customer service and user experience.
Everyone from the front-line staff to managers to executives has to be aligned regarding the definition of excellence. Employees need to be empowered to listen to the customer and think about how their solutions can solve the problems the customers have. It's not about selling them what you know or selling them what you have built. It's about ensuring that what you've built is what will improve your customer's lives - and delight them - every day. With Software as a Service, it's about ensuring that what you deliver for your customers is Perpetually State-of-the-Art. Customers have the same business challenges every day that we do: delivering excellence to their stakeholders and customers. Someday the phrase "That's the way we've always done it" will - thank goodness - be a thing of the past or companies that use it will be.
The Reality of SaaS and Mobile in Elections Today
Anticipation of the next UK general elections is in full swing. And they will surely be conducted with postal voting as the “modern” alternative to waiting in line at a polling place to mark your choices on a ballot paper with a stubby pencil, to be hand counted. But with new standards for security, reliability, customer service, and user experience required in everything we do, and with solid proof points of Internet, mobile, and SaaS advancement in elections, is there any indication that other governments are ready to leave the dark ages and deliver elections in a way that can ensure integrity, auditability, access for voters, and security? Will the second Internet Revolution, the Mobile Revolution, and the Internet of Things converge to transform this outdated $31 billion industry? I'm delighted to say: yes!
When re-elected in the US in 2012, President Obama thanked voters for waiting in line to vote on Election Day, and then said: "We have to fix that." The idea that in that election – like in the UK for every election - citizens had to take time from their busy lives to appear in person at a public facility, wait in line potentially for hours, manually fill out a piece of paper with a pencil, and stuff it into a box to vote is absurd. That is a process that no other industry would require its customers to go through in order to receive a service. And that senior citizens then put that box in the boot of their car and drive it downtown, where it is manually counted, is even more absurd. No high-integrity industry would tolerate such a process.
So much like this Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy, in the US, President Obama appointed a Presidential Commission on Election Administration, to make recommendations on how elections in the US could be improved. Unlike commissions of the past, this select group comprised not only election experts, but also people such as the head of Disney Parks, who excels at dealing with customer service, authentication, line management, and other challenges similar to those faced by voters. In this case, the government is acting like a successful enterprise - bringing in the best resources to solve the greatest challenges.
The commission's report was released in January 2014. The subject on which it felt the greatest need to shine a bright spotlight was the state of voting technology in this country. Benjamin Ginsberg, commission co-chair and a former counsel to the Romney campaign, states: "The reality is that virtually all the machines in the country were purchased in 2003 with Help America Vote Act money as a result of the Florida recount. Those machines are about to wear out.... Part of the voting technology crisis is that we didn't meet a single state or local elections' administration who said God, I love my voting machines, I only wish we could keep them forever. In fact we didn't run into a state or local administrator who liked his or her voting machines and thought they were good."
I'm proud to say that many of the commission's recommendations in the report describe the very services that Everyone Counts has been designing and delivering to early-adopting customers throughout the world: hardware-agnostic SaaS and Mobile voting systems. The year 2014 may bring a "perfect storm" of change. With 10 billion devices across the globe connected to the Internet, leading to the first wave of the Internet of Things, with governments recommending software over hardware for election administration and voting, with the second Internet Revolution commencing as the Mobile Revolution expands - these behemoth "last adopters" are ready for change. They see the efficiencies being afforded to other mission- critical industries, and they need the efficiencies and reliability that innovation brings.
What's Next?
As technological advances provide greater options for voting, it is important to think about those who may not be connected. As of May 2013, the news is positive: according the Oxford Internet Institute, 78% of Britons use the Internet, and 65% of UK residents access government services online already. The Digital Divide is dramatically decreasing and uptake in secure online services is increasing.
And fewer than 65% of registered voters in the UK generally vote, even in a general election. With the second Internet and Mobile revolutions providing greater opportunity, that could change. A solution in the short term could be old-fashioned land-line telephone voting, which Everyone Counts provides throughout the world. And of course, poll stations with hardware-agnostic mobile devices, such as tablets, PCs, or iPads used as voting machines - as provided in England in 2007, Oregon in 2011, Colorado in 2012, and Arizona in 2013 - are a model for providing access to all voters in the US and all developed countries. Mobile solar and satellite vehicles with the same mobile-device polling stations on board can solve the problem in emerging democracies without power sources or security. The Perpetually State-of-the-Art Software as a Service, because of the second Internet and Mobile revolutions, is making a secure, reliable, and auditable democracy accessible to everyone.
In the coming two to six years, governments in most states in the US, and countries from Europe to Asia to Latin America and Africa, will become an integral part of the Internet of Things. Citizens will be civically engaged through social media, and more important, through actual secure and reliable voting. They will vote online from home; they will vote from their mobile devices while on vacation, away at school, or on a business trip. Elections will be auditable, secure, and accessible. It will be so easy to engage that participation will increase significantly. And maybe, just maybe, elected officials will be held accountable for their actions: because the convergence of the second Internet Revolution and the Mobile Revolution will require them to. Will the UK lead or drag their feet and remain in the electoral dark ages with continued declining participation?