From the Air Force Times:
“Troops aim to be made ‘first-class voters’ with new DARPA tech”
U.S. service members deserve to
cast a paper ballot on election night. That’s the premise behind a $6.8 million
research effort headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that
aims to develop technology that could change the voting game for troops
stationed far from home and even deployed to remote locations. Steve Trout,
head of government partnerships for DARPA contractor VotingWorks, puts his
vision more bluntly: “My goal is there’s a ballot cast from the International
Space Station.” VotingWorks and DARPA held a preview demonstration Feb. 7, with
military representatives and state government officials in attendance, to show
what a “first-class” military voting experience could look like.
The problem, as presenters
outlined it, was clear: For troops and family members, voting looks and feels
very different than it does for most Americans. They mail an absentee ballot
that may look unlike the one used in their state or local voting region, and
won’t get counted until an audit period some time after the projected winners
have all been announced. And that difference in experience and perception
directly translates to voting participation: According to information presented
by VotingWorks, military voters have an average turnout of 47%, compared to 74%
for civilians. Polling data presented underscores the part that voting
challenges play in nonparticipation.
Some 54% of surveyed military
members who wanted to vote but didn’t said they had trouble requesting an
absentee ballot, and another 43% said the ballot never arrived at all. Other
reasons for not voting included a too-complicated voting process, difficulty
with the mailing system, and trouble accessing their state’s election website. The
technology proposal from VotingWorks would change the game with portable
one-stop voting stations, compact enough to fit in a big suitcase, that print a
paper ballot just like the one corresponding to a service member’s local
election and also generate a label for mailing that mallet to the correct
polling center, all the way up until the night of the election. An end-to-end
encrypted electronic version of the ballot is then immediately transmitted to
the local election center for counting, while the paper version follows in the
mail, allowing the hard copy to be verified within the three-to-four week audit
window following an election. In this scenario, the process is all enabled
through the service member’s military common access card, or CAC, which
verifies their identity, thereby sidestepping the most challenging problem
standing in the way of large-scale electronic voting.
VotingWorks leaders are quick to
stress that they’re not trying to develop an internet-based voting system. Nor,
they say, are they working to solve civilian absentee voting problems. “We are
explicitly not trying to use military voting as a jumping-off point for broad
internet voting,” said Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks. “We have
aspects of our design that are only going to work for the military, and we’re
100% okay with that.” While the effort is still in a research phase, company
leaders at the end of the year want to present DARPA with a working prototype
and open-source design code “so anybody can take it and go from there,” Adida
said. While plans are not yet final, limited-scope pilot programs may be rolled
out in 2025 to test the usefulness of the technology.
Dan Wallach, program manager for
the DARPA Innovation Office, said in 2025, after the close of the 2024
presidential election cycle, will present more opportunities for trial and
experimentation. “You don’t roll out new things in a high turnout, high-stakes
election,” he said. “When we’re voting for the dog-catcher, that’s when you try
the new stuff.” The innovation behind the current proposal is a dual-track
system in which the voting stations, consisting of a terminal and printers for
ballots and mailing labels, are distributed across military bases and deployed
environments. After securely identifying a military voter via their CAC card,
the stations dispense a paper ballot, which can be filled out and mailed using
the label. Ballots also are scanned electronically, allowing the encrypted
votes to be instantly and securely transmitted to polling places and counted
with those of local voters.
The military voter’s paper ballot
will arrive after the election, but in time to be included in the vote audit,
which verifies election results and can take up to four weeks after an election
to complete. To work well, the voting stations will need to be secure enough
that theft or breach of a station won’t result in a compromise of ballots or
voter data, and able to function with minimal internet connectivity ― while
electronic transmission will be necessary to send votes, the stations need to
be able to print the right local ballots and mailing labels for any military
voter while offline. That’s all in the design specifications, Adida said. “We’re
going to try to do it with the minimum amount of internet and the minimum
amount of cell service, sporadically,” Adida said. “Maybe at one base, you
don’t have an internet connection, but maybe you can write some USB sticks and
get them transported to a base that does have internet.”
Christy McCormick, the chairwoman
of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, expressed skepticism that the
system would work as advertised. “I was tasked with getting election results
back to the Pentagon as part of my job when I was in Iraq, and we couldn’t even
use CAC cards,” she said. “So there’s some huge hurdles here in these
countries, especially war zones, where you’re not going to have a place to put
that machine.” McCormick, who was stationed in Iraq from 2009–2010 as an
elections expert with the Department of Justice, told Military Times after the
presentation that she was hopeful about the new project, but aware of the
extensive collaboration from federal agencies and the Defense Department that
would be needed to make such a proposal successful. “It’s always worth the
attempt,” she said, “And I hope that they can get those issues worked out, that
we can enfranchise more of our overseas population.”
Wallach, of DARPA, said a
combination of new and maturing technology and the narrow scope of the effort “There’s
been a lot of research on electronic voting and security over the past few
decades that this program has drawn on,” Wallach said, adding that the
relatively new post-election risk-limiting audit process and advances in
encryption all helped to make a better military voting solution practical. “There
are a bunch of things that are very recent,” he said, “And putting them
together is what’s novel.”
^ It’s important to make it
easier and timely for Soldiers and Military Families to vote in every election since
they are risking their lives for us and deserve the right to vote the people in
who will put them in harms way. ^
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