Podcast

The Future of Voting

The primary means of voting in the USA for many years was through paper ballots. In the late 1800s, this changed as automation was encouraged to count votes. In 2000, the US used voting machines during the electoral process through computer-assisted technology but encountered a voting dilemma the same year. Afterward, purely electronic devices were used, but the damage was done, and a general lack of faith in the technology caused a mistrust of these machines and their accuracy.

Today, due to the issues of ballot design, voting errors, and counting and recounting errors, more sophisticated technology is now being considered over the current ones. 

In this episode of The Future Of, Jeff is joined by Gregory Miller, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at OSET Institute, Marcelino Alvarez, Chief Product Officer at Fresh Consulting & Jocelyn Bucaro, Director, Mobile Voting Project, Tusk Philanthropies.

Gregory Miller: The paper ballot is the currency of our democracy. Like paper currency is in the world of finance and economics, I think we’re going to have this problem where it is still a revered element or asset because it can be recounted. You can look at voter intent. You can do a verifiable election with a risk-limiting audit when you have paper ballots. If you don’t have those paper ballots, that evidence becomes incredibly difficult to prove to people.

Jeff Dance: Welcome to The Future Of, a podcast by Fresh Consulting, where we discuss and learn about the future of different industries, markets, and technology verticals. Together, we’ll chat with leaders and experts in the field, and discuss how we can shape the future human experience. I’m your host Jeff Dance.

In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by Gregory Miller, COO, and Elections Technology Strategist at the OSET Institute, and Marcelino Alvarez, Chief Product Officer at Fresh Consulting to explore the Future of Voting. Welcome. It’s my pleasure to have you with me on this episode for the Future of Voting. Excited to have not only two leaders, but two serious technology evangelists that think about the future and, in particular, voting. For those of you who don’t know you, if we could just get some quick insights into your experience, and your journey into this space, the voting space, and the technology space. Greg, if we can start with you, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Gregory Miller: Sure. Thanks for having me, Jeff, and it’s great to be here. The OSET Institute’s been around for 15 years. We just got past our 15th birthday. I’ve been in tech for four decades as of this year. I’ve got a multidisciplinary background in law, technology, and business. The OSET Institute, the Open Source Election Technology Institute was founded in 2006 as quite by accident in a venture capital firm I was with at the time doing some work for a VC firm.

Our mission is to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes through publicly available technology, really, in defense of democracy is a matter of national security. The mission is global in nature. We do as much work abroad as we do domestically. About 75 people based in Silicon Valley with small epicenters around the country, and in Toronto, Canada, and University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Jeff: That’s amazing. I noticed that you were on the San Francisco Voting Systems Taskforce as well, where you were giving recommendations for the future of voting. How long ago was that?

Gregory: Oh gosh, that was some time ago now. I’d have to really think back for a second. I’m going to say at least nine years ago.

Jeff: Nine years ago.

Gregory: Eight or nine years ago when that voting system taskforce was underway.

Jeff: You’ve been working on the future of voting for some time.

Gregory: 15 of my 40 years, yes. [chuckles]

Jeff: Amazing. Good stuff. I also noticed that you’re the recipient of an Open Source for America Excellence Award with the OSFA. Which organization is that?

Gregory: That was also some time ago and was an open source organization that may still be around. I’m forgetting what that acronym stands for, but as part of an Open Source Conference, we were pleasantly surprised that our work had reached that level of visibility only three, four years into our existence. That was some time ago, but it is where I met some folks at Red Hat and one of the Red Hat executives ultimately joined our board of directors.

Jeff: Awesome. Well, thanks for your leadership and your devotion to this space. Having that background of an MBA, and a computer science degree and a law degree seems like the perfect triangle to be able to really make a difference in this space. I’m grateful for all the work that you’re doing. 

Marce, turning it over to you. Can you introduce yourself to the listeners?

Marcelino Alvarez: Sure. I’m Marcelino Alvarez. I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Fresh Consulting. I look after the strategy practice here at Fresh. Over my career, I’ve had the fortune of sitting at the intersection of a new technology design and integration, public policy, corporate innovation, and startup ecosystems. For me, the topic of voting and voting systems is really of interest because it brings a number of those things together.

I studied public policy and political science in college. I had the good fortune of doing some work with the Census Bureau back in 2018. As I got my career started on product design, one of the first digital products that I ever worked on was actually a newsreader app for the 2008 election called Campaign. It was a political newsreader app that allowed you to filter news-by-news sources. I’ve always just been a bit of a policy wonk and I enjoy conversations like this, so super grateful to be here.

Jeff: Awesome. Now, we’ve got the introductions out of the way, I just want to give a little bit of format for our discussion today. I want to start with a little bit of the 101 for those that are newer to the space, then really dive into the future. What can we anticipate in the future, knowing that there’s a lot of frustration in the current system, a lot of news articles flying around about some of the issues that Greg, you, and others haven’t really been working on?

Then I want to jump back to the present and see if we can get a little advice for our listeners today. That’s the format. To kick-off, Greg, can you talk to us just briefly high level through the voting process? There’s registration, there’s Election Day, there’s validation, there’s voting, can you give us a little bit of a high level around the process today?

Gregory: Sure and thanks for asking, because demystifying this whole thing is really what needs to be done today in a post dominion world as I call it. There’s two ways to look at this. You can look at it from the eyes of the voter, and you can look at it through the eyes of the election administrator. From the eyes of the voter, the touchpoints are voter registration, getting access to the ballot, whether it’s by mail as we do in Oregon and five other states or in-person at a polling place, going through the polling place experience and then waiting on pins and needles to see what the results are as they’re posted through the media.

Behind the scenes, however, it’s a considerably more complicated and nuanced process. I have to say upfront, it’s really important to remember the recovering lawyer in me will beat me up if I don’t remind everyone else that elections are State’s matter. Two articles and seven amendments to the United States Constitution say so. As a result, we have at least 50 ways of doing things by design. Unfortunately, a lot of the mishegoss over elections administration comes from people realizing a problem in Texas that has absolutely no application whatsoever in Illinois. While we would love to have some standards across the country, the most important thing is to remember that this system is balkanized by design.

By that, I mean that everybody has their own way of doing something. 3300 counties, over 10,000 elections jurisdictions, and now that we just had to redistrict in, we’re going to see that all chewed up again. If we look at it from the perspective of the election administrator, those big events of registration, and then Election Day, the casting and counting, and then the reporting out and analytics are also there, but there’s a lot more that happens in between. We can go through that to any extent that’s necessary, but the most important thing is to remember that there’s something called election management system. It’s the mothership, the back end of all of this stuff that operates out of the local elections offices.

That is the thing that controls all of the different moving parts from configuring touch screens, where those are used, to configuring poll books and populating poll books of information in the right jurisdictions, to handling the counting equipment, to rolling up the tallies into tabulation and then reporting that all out. There is a lot of misunderstanding, thanks to folks like Phil Jordan and Mr. Pulitzer out there as to what really happens in the world versus the reality. A lot of misunderstandings, but it’s really challenging to go through each one of those in two hours, but we can certainly focus on the things that are of most interest.

Jeff: To summarize, it’s very decentralized, it’s vast and separated in a lot of different ways, but there is a centralized aspect to how it’s collected, and curated, and understood.

Gregory: Jeff, you should be on my side of the mic here because you actually said it better than I, and I should have cut to the chase in that. It is a highly decentralized system by design. There are centralized aspects, but yes, it’s highly distributed and diffuse.

Jeff: Got it. What about key players for some of the current voting systems that are used today? Are there any commonalities for key players that are serving all these different states and jurisdictions?

Gregory: Sure. It’s really important to remember, and this is one of the compelling realities of the space that drew us into our project in the first place over 15 years ago. That is that three vendors, three, control 90% of America’s voting infrastructure, and those same three vendors control approximately 75% of the global infrastructure. Now, there are smaller vendors of specialized pieces and parts and services that roll into that, but the vendors of federally certified systems for casting and counting ballots is three. It is Dominion, Elections Systems and Services, and Hart InterCivic.

The common ground between all of them is that the predominant way of casting and counting is a paper-based ballot of record, which we highly endorse either machine-marked or hand-marked and then tabulate by a high-speed optical scanner that avoids stray pencil marks, and focuses on properly black circle dots and gives us tallies. In a central count system, all of those ballots are actually tabulated in the central office, example, Los Angeles County.

In other parts of the country and still quite popular is what we call precinct counting where the casting and counting happen at local levels in your district and your precincts, and then they’re all rolled up to the state secretary’s office, ideally at the end of the night, or oftentimes, early the next morning. That’s just for the ballots that are cast and counted there in-person or locally. Remember, we have an enormous world of absentee ballots on those ballots that are coming in from overseas and the military.

Jeff: As I understand, the overseas ballots are they paper as well, or was there another system for those?

Gregory: Overseas ballots can be paper, and that’s been one of the challenges, is getting those ballots returned in time. As a result, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, or FVAP of the Department of Defense has for years offered a variety of alternative ways of getting a ballot sent back. Unfortunately, in our perspective, highly insecure, unreliable. Everything from using a good old, dare I say the word, fax machine to email attachments, God forbid, to some experimental applications that are attempting to use more secure means of digital ballot return, all of which show considerable vulnerability.

I’ll mention that we’re working on a project right now for the disability community, which also can serve the overseas community in certain circumstances that a part of it will facilitate digital ballot return. It’s not our part. We’re working on a paper ballot return, but there is work to try to improve upon that because we have a lot of overseas voters, both military and expat.

Jeff: In addition to the conversation we had with our guests on today’s episode, we asked another expert to provide their insights on the future.

Jocelyn Bucaro: Hi, I’m Jocelyn Bucaro. I’m the Director of Mobile Voting with Tusk Philanthropies. I’m also a former election administrator. I ran elections in the City and County of Denver, as well as in a suburban Cincinnati County in Ohio. Democracy right now is imperiled, partisan gerrymandering, low voter turnout in primaries and non-presidential elections. An increasing distrust in the election outcome has created a crisis that we have to solve quickly. The good news is that technology can help us solve some of this.

Emerging technology, like mobile voting, can help make access easier without sacrificing security and can help us increase turnout in all elections in the future. With end-to-end verification, mobile voting and even other forms of voting will be more transparent so that voters can verify for themselves that everything is working the way it’s supposed to, and help restore trust in the process.

If we succeed in increasing turnout and making our elections more transparent in the next 10 to 20 years, we should see the voting process completely transform. Very few voters will still be visiting polling places on Election Day. Most voters will be able to vote on their smart devices, whatever form those take, in 10 to 20 years. Voters will be able to closely track how their ballot is received and counted. Results will be ready faster, and turnout and participation will be fully trackable in real-time through public bulletin boards.

Jeff: What about some of the challenges we face in voting? Now, Marce, let’s start with you, and then, Greg, come back to you.

Marcelino: Sure. I think for me, it starts with registration. Last year 2020 was one of the record voter turnout years in the United states, 67% of the voting-eligible population voted. We had a huge turnout, but that still meant that close to 80 million people didn’t vote. It also meant, of the folks that are registered, there’s still an opportunity to increase that registration. As I think about democracy and I think about people’s voice being heard, even in a best-case scenario, it’s 33% of the population that are deciding who might be the next president in a federal election.

Certainly, voter turnout in smaller elections, off-year elections, it’s just harder. I think for me, democracy works when people vote. We make it easy for people to register to vote, and for people to cast their vote, and for that vote to be made in confidence, and for the effects of that vote to be captured in a way for everyone to have trust in the process. For me, areas of just challenge is, how do we reach those voters. Those that perhaps aren’t motivated to even register?

Of those who are registered, why is it that sometimes some people stay home? How can we ensure that we have an engaged populace that they understand every vote literally counts? As a former Floridian, I will say every single vote absolutely counts. Don’t take that for granted. I think for me, that’s where I see a big challenge, is making sure that we are capturing the intent of people, that they are informed and able to vote. It certainly goes through to voting and processing, which I know is, Greg, your area of expertise.

Jeff: Thank you, Marce. We’ve heard about the importance of having representation registration. Greg, tell us more about some of the challenges with voting and processing?

Gregory: Well, I think that the biggest challenge is trust, and trust in the vote. We have seen the surveys last year, again, this year right now at a frightening rate, 67%, 68%, closing on 70% of those surveyed, political stripe notwithstanding, have doubts that they can trust that ballots are counted as cast, that qualified voters are casting ballots, a host of things. Trust in the system is muddled by disinformation and misinformation. I was just on a big call this morning with my colleagues at Twitter, including one of our executives who now is at Twitter. This is a really thorny problem.

On the technology side, the greatest challenge we face is inherently vulnerable technology based on PCs, desktop, personal computers, and personal computing products. They’re inherently vulnerable because they’re modifiable. If you have a radio card, a Mac card, a USB slot, if there’s any way for me to introduce content or software to that machine, then I’ve lost the ability to trust that machine inherently. That’s the biggest problem and challenge that we’re working on. We call that trusted boot with hardware attestation; a nice, fat, complicated five-word phrase to say that we have to be able to prove that machine has not been tampered with at a hardware, firmware, and software level.

Unfortunately, the realities of the inherent vulnerable designs of this equipment were really taken advantage of by groups of folks who were blinded by their ideology and drunkenly convinced that something happened that didn’t happen this time. That’s what we call the big lie. The problem with the big lie is that it is predicated on a scintilla of truth that the machines are inherently vulnerable. That’s the work of the OSET Institute and the TrustTheVote Project to build more verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent systems so that we can move from black box to glass box voting. We think to take a big chunk out of this distrust quotient.

Jeff: As far as security risks that are present in the voting systems today, you said there is a scintilla of truth too, and you mentioned the surveys. Tell us more about those risks. You’re speaking broadly to them, but how could things happen from a threat perspective? Before we talk about the future and what the future might look like, give us some examples.

Gregory: Sure. That’s because I think we believe the future is predicated on solving the trust issue and the security issues to the extent that we can. The reason I broadly danced around it is because that’s a rabbit hole that we could venture down and come back out in a few days and still not have all the answers. I have to say that thanks to the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and CISA, there has been a great deal of effort mounted to help the states mitigate the opportunities for compromise so that we can muddle along in an inherently insecure world of hardware and software.

Let me put it this way. The industry is a backwater of government IT. It’s inherently partisan in nature. It’s not exactly a hotbed of innovation. Quite candidly, innovation in this space amounts to a guarantee of spare parts. Those are purchased on reverse auctions in Southeast Asia. Not kidding. There is a very low bar here to clear when you talk about innovation in this space and what the opportunities are. We’ve managed to muddle along with the system as it is in a status quo state through improvement of processes. If you think of the five Ps of the ecosystem democracy, there’s people, process, platform, policy, and politics.

I’m going to leave politics out of it for now. It’s way above my pay grade. People as a social engineering problem. Focusing on the platform and the processes and policies around it, we’ve managed to securify to the extent we can, the existing vulnerable stuff through administrative processes and policies about how that stuff works. For example, thou shalt not ever allow an Internet connection near an EMS computer under no circumstances. I don’t want to hear it was plugged in for only a moment to download a form because I need less than that to cause hell.

A lot of steps have been taken, but the security, the threats, if you will, are really to what we call Type III attacks, the insidious attacks of attempting to compromise a piece of hardware or software without you knowing it. The likelihood that it could cause a widespread problem is rare, but in a world where nobody has defined the risk model of what is an acceptable loss rate for ballots, we have a zero-tolerance for error. Not even a 1% doctrine. In the financial world, you could talk about cryptocurrencies and online banking and everything else where you have a risk model.

The banks have accepted a model of a risk of loss, and they have built a business around allowing that so you can bank online. That’s a very different story when we talk about casting ballots online because the risk of loss is zero there. Counter to what some people believe, we don’t need a widespread attack or hack on an election to cause pandemonium. I only need a contentious swing state with a highly contentious precinct and a targeted attack to throw a few votes, and there you have it.

Witness how it’s always down to five states, including Florida, Florida, Florida. You’ve always have this problem of where the action is going to be. We’ve basically made it this far by adjusting processes and policies to try to prevent those machines from being compromised. “I have a better idea. Let’s build better machines and we can eliminate the incredible risk that we all take, where elections are becoming a gamble.”

Jocelyn: Security is designed to protect the integrity of our elections, so only eligible voters are able to vote. Votes are cast and counted the way the voter had intended and voter privacy is protected. Security must also be balanced with access to ensure that all eligible voters are able to vote. It’s true that without secure elections, there’s no faith in the outcome, but without sufficient turnout, we lose faith as well.

As a former election director, myself, I understand first-hand that all voting methods carry some security risk, but the biggest risk that I’ve seen is that eligible voters are unable to cast a ballot, which is why we need to carefully balance laws, rules, and procedures to help ensure our elections are both secure, but also ensure voters are able to participate.

Jeff: Let’s segue there now, and just talk about the future. Marce, let’s start with you. What do you think the future of voting looks like? You’ve been a specialist and an expert really on user experience and designing of systems in lots of different industries. If you think about voting, what do you think the future looks like, especially for the generation that expects maybe something–? Maybe paper still is innovation, but this isn’t the generation of paper that’s used to dealing with paper. Tell us more about what you think the future looks like.

Marcelino, I think it certainly starts with paper and it starts with automation as well. I think that the big innovation for me is automation. I’m in Oregon now. Oregon is the first state to roll out automatic voter registration, getting everyone to vote. Oregon is also a vote-by-mail state, and our election have been secure. Vote-by-mail in the state has bipartisan support. It would be amazing for others to look at what Oregon has implemented and what has tested. It’s not a new technology. It’s here. It’s been here, and to increase voter participation through making it easier for folks to register and to vote.

I think working your way to Election Day, again, vote-by-mail is great, but also early voting. Systems that make it easier for people to vote, not just requiring folks to take time from their day. It is easy for salaried workers to take a day off, but an hourly worker might not be able to. Someone who’s dependent on childcare, might not be able to take off. Policy innovations like making Election Day a national holiday or even better yet, letting people vote on weekends leading up to an election. Making it easier for people to find out information.

I think the last few years have certainly shown that all politics is local, and really understanding where your local politicians stand and making that easier to access. I think there are a number of software platforms that make it easy to understand where folks stand on an issue, and also making it easier to reach voters. A lot of people who aren’t drinking the political news feed from the fire hose, they might not know that something’s happening. Phone banking, calling software, being able to reach that voter who might not be paying attention as difficult as that seems in these days, to be able to reach that voter, I think there’s opportunities to innovate.

Having phone banked that a bit over the last couple of years, it’s like that technology certainly has ways to go. Then I think through the design of a ballot, again, former Floridian here, the design of ballots is critically important. You can track the effects of a poorly designed ballot in situations where there is an undervote for a particular candidate running for perhaps a different office in the stack. It used to be that people would maybe split their vote a certain way that seems to happen less and less. When there’s significant undervoting for particular candidate, meaning that they didn’t even vote, there wasn’t a vote cast for particular candidate, you can track and see where the UX of a ballot design might affect.

I believe, and Greg probably got the info here. Florida was guilty of that again. 2016, I think was Miami-Dade County, a ballot was poorly designed leading to another vote, again, in a state where every vote seems to matter. Then I think on the post-processing side of things, a number of states that tried vote-by-mail this year needed a number of things. You needed a signature on the outside of the envelope, a signatured thing. You needed an affidavit, so someone else co-signing. That’s just really difficult to do particularly since we’ve been in this pandemic for so long. The idea of finding someone outside of your household to validate that that’s what you voted, we’re introducing barriers.

I think in a lot of cases, both the design of these systems and the actual technology used is actually solving for an edge case. This fear of someone casting a fraudulent vote, and the Associated Press came out with a study the other day, that despite all the hype that we’ve seen in the news, there were only 475 fraudulent votes cast that we know about in the last election. We’re designing for this edge case versus designing for a much greater societal benefit, which is like, “How do we make it more inclusive by having inclusive design, inclusive systems, adapting the voting methodology to reach more people?”

Yes, a lot of this involves paper and automation. What does it look like a little bit down the future? It would be amazing if someone could vote via an app, or vote via website securely, and then have a paper backup of that vote. I truthfully think that the initial innovation is through automation and design. I think the vote from screen-type voting, perhaps that’s a little bit further along. Greg, give us what your thoughts are because you’ve certainly looked at this over the years?

Gregory: I got to say that from Tim Cook on, everyone has said, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if I could vote from the convenience of my smartphone.” That is one of the gnarliest problems and challenges that we have in computer science with several different aspects of that being very hard to figure out how to do. Again, we just have a zero-trust model and we live in a space where there’s no allowance for error, even one ballot. The compromise of a ballot of anyone is a compromise of everyone. That’s the challenge there. We have to dial it back. Jeff, if I may, I’ve got to say that one of the things I love about just chatting with Marce is looking at our various viewpoints and how we look at this stuff.

I always have to come back and do a reset for myself. We run into this all the time about who we are, and what do we do? What are we actually focused on? What’s our knitting? There’s a bright line for us between what we call civic tech and gov tech. The differences between those two I think are pretty straightforward. Civic tech is technology that people use to interact with their governments, and gov tech is technology that governments use to interact with their constituents. It’s really important, and there’s a membrane in between the two of those. There’s a layer in-between where you can cross over, back and forth.

It’s really important to remember that the OSET Institute in the TrustTheVote Project is principally in gov tech. It’s not something that you and I think about just building an app and putting it out there and getting people in front of as quickly as we can. Gov tech is this bizarre little controlled industry of big companies who have tall buildings on the west shore of the Potomac River. Things are procured and there’s a procurement process and there’s big government contracts and deals too big to succeed in all of that.

Civic tech is quite different. Civic tech, thanks to the Internet, thanks to APIs, thanks to the modernization of software development engineering, and the wide accessibility of data, has made it possible for us to very rapidly build tools and services to facilitate the citizens better interacting with their government. It’s almost imbalanced right now. Thankfully, I think it’s a good thing that the people are rapidly gaining power over their governments because of the wide availability of civic tech.

By and large, the things that Marce is talking about are incredibly important, and they’re civic tech. There are things that we need to do for the citizens’ engagement with government. The challenge of fixing the gov tech though remains, and that’s what we’re working on now. That said, there are things that in our side of the world that are really voter-facing. Voter registration services is a really good example of that.

I’m 100% with Marce that we need to build more tools to make it easier for people to participate. That’s why despite our work in gov tech and the heavy lifting of ballot casting in county election results reporting in EMS and all that, we build technology for Rock the Vote, one of the largest third-party voter registration platforms in the country and all of its partners, Voto Latino, NAACP, VoteAmerica, America Votes, the RNC and DNC parties.

Online voter registration, what we call third-party voter registration, is an enormous, really important facility. Where we come in then, is not only do we build that, but we’re also integrating that with state voter registration databases. We’re crossing that chasm into gov tech so that they can directly take ballot registration requests from say, Rock the Vote, for example. There’s different realm of where things can be fixed. For the future, I think the opportunity really lies in civic tech. I think the opportunity to build voter services technology.

A lot of projects we’re working on, VoteReady, basically LifeLock for your voter registration record. The moment something goes wrong with your voter registration record, your phone gets dinged that there’s been a change to your status. We live in a digital arms race here, and we need to arm voters with the ability to fix those problems before they show up at the polling place, and someone asking them, “Didn’t you get your 3×5 postcard? I’m sorry, you’re not registered to vote. Go home, go away or take a provisional ballot if I care to give you one.”

We need to continue expanding those kinds of tools, absentee ballot request. This was not the last as pandemic we’re going to see. It was the first. Superstorm Sandy wasn’t the last weather event that we’re going to see. We’re going to see more of them. We’re going to have to give people the ability to cast their ballots because no one size fits all. Many states allow for vote-by-mail, but many states do not. We’re going to have to be flexible in that regard. Our hope is to just build the technology that ensures that those elections are verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent in their process.

Jocelyn: Technology can also make it easier for voters to learn about elections and access their ballots. Voting on a smartphone and mobile devices will make it easier to access the ballot for all voters, but especially for those who face barriers to voting today, like voters with disabilities or voters in remote locations. We know that friction in the voting process results in fewer votes cast. Elections happen, at least, once per year in most states, but the vast majority of the country does not participate except every four years. Most voters only vote when they feel informed about what’s on the ballot, yet we do a very poor job of arming voters with information except during presidential elections.

Technology can help transform that. Consider the notifications we receive when a new TV or podcast episode is available. Imagine the same notifications when your ballot is ready to view. You open your voting app on your smartphone using your digital ID. Once your ballot is open, you may decide you want to learn more about each of the candidates or questions on your ballot, to simply click through each name and learn more about their top issues, their resume, who’s supporting them, and even answers to questions on issues that are important to you.

After you’ve done your research, you can mark your ballot on your device and submit it. No need to sign an affidavit or provide more ID with your ballot since you’ve already used a digital identification process to access your ballot in the first place. Once it’s submitted, you can track it through the process making sure it’s received correctly and receive notifications when it’s been counted. When the voting period’s over, complete results will be available in a matter of minutes with the tabulation process completely viewable to the public through an online bulletin board.

Jeff: Tell us more about how technology can play a role. You mentioned technology. I know innovation doesn’t always mean technology. There can be innovation in our process, for example, or in the way we audit things. There could be innovation in the way we present the paper ballot. Tell us more about technology.

Gregory: I want to say there is a lot of opportunity for technical innovation. Process innovation, sure, just go look at Congress trying to get AXA legislation through to help process and help policy a lot of opportunity there. National holiday for elections, as Marce pointed out. There’s a lot of opportunity for technology too, across the spectrum. The TrustTheVote is working on something called ElectOS. In a very rough metaphor that my tech team always cringes when I say this because it’s not technically correct but it’s enough to get the idea across, is that ElectOS is for voting machines, what Android is for smart devices.

If you get that comparison right away, at least, you’re in the ballpark of understanding what we’re doing. Now, I quickly want to say, and a whole different level of security than what we see with Android apps and all that experience. Loosely speaking, ElectOS is a software technology framework designed to replace the software layer and leverage off-the-shelf hardware to build finished systems that are about one-third of the cost of what they are today under a very different system architecture. The problem that we have is not individual machines; it’s really a system-level problem.

Let me give you a quick example. In the world of critical democracy infrastructure, like all sectors of critical infrastructure, applications specific purpose-built devices are the rule of the day. There’s a whole way that you design, develop those by folks who’ve worked in technology to keep planes in the air and satellites in the sky and ICU units functioning correctly. It’s critical infrastructure. It’s high assurance computing. In the world of high assurance computing, you build application-specific purpose-built devices. You don’t do a Swiss Army knife sort of thing.

In the elections rule, we have something called an EMS. It’s the back office machine I mentioned earlier, some other ship. An Election Management System is what that means; the typical EMS software does a whole bunch of things. It’s like a Swiss Army knife of election administration. It configures poll books. It configures the layout of screens for touchscreens when you’re doing machine-generated ballots. It does tabulation of all the tallies that come in. Now, that’s a honeypot of an attack vector. No one would ever build a machine that does all those things in one place if it’s truly going to be a fault-tolerant environment.

Our architecture of ElectOS says that’s ridiculous. That’s nonsense. You shouldn’t have all those things together. We’ve broken them out into individual-specific devices. Here’s a quick example of some innovation that can go forward. There’s lots of innovation opportunity in the user experience at both a software level and a hardware level. When I look for us, over the horizon because unfortunately, innovation here does have some different bars than what Marce is used to, I do imagine a day and I would love the day to come here in the not too distant future, when Fresh and the Institute could get together to look seriously at what does a voting machine look like in the mid-21st century?

I imagine this device that sits in the polling place that as you approach it, it can tell right away your size, your height, your stature, whether you’re in a wheelchair or not. Automatically, as you’re approaching the machine, raise or lower the keyboard and change the size of the display to allow you to have an interaction that greets you and accommodates and anticipates what your needs are going to be as you go into that ballot casting experience. That’s a cool industrial engineering thing that I just salivate at the opportunity someday to do.

Can you imagine how that experience could change for people? The fact of the matter is, for the foreseeable future, at least in the remaining election cycles, I’m going to be around to witness the durable paper ballot of record, and in personam, as we say in Latin experience is going to be the rule of the day for many states. states manage their process of elections, and their loathe, unfortunately, some of them to make it any easier than necessary. We’re going to keep working with them but that physical experience is going to continue.

One other thing I want to say, and that is, ballots are the currency of democracy. The challenge that we have as we’re all existing in the transition stage between the second and third age is that we have a lot of people that were dragging, kicking, and screaming across the abyss into the digital age. A lot of constituents today only know cryptocurrency, and they only know being online, and they only know their iWatch and the iPhone and everything else. The idea of a paper ballot is just so completely foreign to them.

Jeff: Exactly.

Gregory: You still have to fill up paper records oftentimes in a healthcare setting too. I cringe; I get irritated every time I’m asked with a clipboard to sit down to fill out a form so I can get a vaccination.

Jeff: It’s filling out the same information 20 times.

Gregory: Yes. All that should be automated. Well, that’s electronic medical records and we’re getting there. Right?

Jeff: Right.

Gregory: Similarly, we’re seeing opportunities to automate and digitize various parts of the ecosystem of voting, but for the time being, the paper ballot is the currency of our democracy. Like paper currency is in the world of finance and economics, I think we’re going to have this problem where it is still a revered element or asset because it can be recounted. You can look at voter intent. You can do a verifiable election with a risk limit audit when you have paper ballots. If you don’t have those paper ballots, that evidence becomes incredibly difficult to prove to people.

I’ll just leave it like this when I hear people talk about blockchain and voting. While blockchains and digital ledgers have some really interesting applications for various aspects of election administration, the notion that they can help the process of casting and counting ballots is ludicrous and subject for another session. I will say this, here’s the irony, in a world where everyone is demanding that we move away from black box voting to glass box voting, you have people crying for blockchain voting.

Guess what folks, blockchain voting works because it relies on, wait for it, highly distributed black boxes that you could never see, touch, or try. It’s dripping with irony. The point here is that technology has some limitations as to its practical application for us. While we want to look over the horizon, we have to think about how we get there. For now, that means coming up with innovative ways to verifiably, accurately, securely, and transparently count ballots that ultimately have to be a paper ballot of record at some point.

Jocelyn: Blockchains can be helpful for maintaining voter registration rolls across state lines, so when voters move their voter registration follows them. A decentralized Web 3.0 coupled with digital wallets can enable voters to easily use their digital identity to access government services, including voting. Mobile devices or other portable computers will become the standard tool for voting, replacing paper and in-person voting for the majority of voters. Biometrics and digital identity will become our tool for voter authentication, replacing physical identity cards or ink signatures.

Jeff: I’m not aware of it being done. Are you aware of any other countries that are using a distributed ledger or blockchain to help with their voting process?

Gregory: Yes, there are and this is a point that has to be made right away. It is an apples and oranges comparison to talk about how election administration occurs in the representative democracy of a republic like the United States of America from a parliamentary democracy in a federalized system of a foreign country. Estonia, Switzerland pick your favorite country where you have nothing but federalized elections and lots of them with a very different structure than we have in the United states balkanized by design, those kinds of technologies have a greater application. Remember, if you have the ability to federalize identification, one of the big problems of all this, then you’re halfway down the road to being able to do things like have trust and a system that maybe Blockchain-based in nature. In the United States where there’s no chance, you’re going to get a federal ID and I’m going to have a single ID card for you to do that. Everybody’s going to do things the same way that’s likely to happen. Yes, there is stuff happening abroad, but we have to bear in mind those are very different systems of democracy.

Jeff: Interesting perspectives on Blockchain, for sure. As we think, you had mentioned identification, as we think about identification, if I go out of the country, if I come into the country, the government is taking a photo and I just got back from Dubai, Abu Dhabi. I came in and out of the US and went to these other countries and went to Japan recently. Everyone’s taking my photo and there’s a biometric aspect to that photo. Do we anticipate a role for advanced biometrics in the future, whether that’s face identification or rather I can identify someone via their face, via their ear, via their voice, via their fingerprint? As we think about identification and advanced biometrics, do we anticipate anything at the voter level and that could be opt-in playing a role in the future?

Gregory: In a word absolutely, with conditions and cautions. First, I just have to congratulate you on that amount of international travel in the face of COVID. You are far better than I at wanting to take that that trip. I’d love to be able to do that one. Anyway, seriously, the opportunity for biometrics, and this gets back to a strongly authenticated voter and the whole voter ID thing. Again, it’s going to be met with, by some people, being dragged along, kicking and screaming at the notion of this.

The other side of it is that generations coming forward are increasingly comfortable. I have no problem staring at my phone and staring at long enough that says, oh, sure, I’ll let you log in. In the area of registration, the area of remote ballot access of absentee balloting, things like that, we’re definitely going to see the opportunity for biometrics. No pun partially intended there because having said that, I’ll tell you that today. I’m pretty sure my CTO and I agree on this. I’m not at all interested in seeing facial recognition as a form of any authentication.

We all know the problems for example, with people of color and the challenges of facial recognition and that form of biometric work. It’s just too easy to perpetuate some unfortunate problems that we have with disenfranchisement.

There are plenty of other forms of biometric authentication though, that I think have some wonderful application. We have had in the past opportunities to take a look at those. We see them coming again soon. Great point, and it an excellent area to advance in. Marce I know that your firm has done a lot of work in this whole space of biometric. I know that you’re seeing it. Again, the two things that matter most to us these days, our health and our wealth. Both are figuring out how to survive and flourish in a digital age.

Democracy administration is running behind them and going to be a little bit slower, but where there are opportunities to innovate, we can, and we should, and we will. Biometric Marce, is one of them in a limited capacity. Would you agree?

Marcelino: Yes, I would agree. If you look at the systemic skepticism that exists again on a state by state level, in terms of who controls the election, precincts, the administrations, ballot boxes, not being made accessible, machines being delivered without cords in certain states. The unfair distribution of lines for certain voting precincts versus others. If you think through somewhat malicious intent that sometimes those obstacles of voting have in a world where people didn’t know who’s behind the technology, or how easy it might be to sweep it and be like, oh, the internet access wasn’t available at this entire voting precinct therefore we weren’t able to authenticate anyone’s faces. Therefore no one here was able to vote, oh, you can’t vote in another precinct.

Those skepticisms and distrust of systems, particularly in areas that were gutted by the removal of the voting rights act. I agree wholeheartedly. You’re going to have to overcome not just the barrier to get to that technology, but also people’s deep-seated skepticism of it. State by state, I think there might be opportunities for some states where perhaps there are stronger trusts and have historically a proven track record.

I still think that putting a stamp on an envelope and if you could trust the postal service, although sometimes that seems to be an issue as well. Mailing it, or dropping it off at a box is probably the simplest way. Maybe there’s some level of authentication that happens at that level. I totally agree with what you were saying, Greg

Gregory: One good example of where innovation in that space can happen. This is the ability to authenticate a voter at a polling place or to authenticate a voter who needs to cure a signature defect and an absentee ballot. If I can authenticate to my phone using the secure enclave to accept my biometric, that I know is not being stored any place else. If I can authenticate to my phone in that chain of trust, my phone can authenticate to the system.

One of the things that we want to work on, Marce, is this notion of the Digital Pass. You all know the airport experience? I walk in with my phone, I scan my phone on the thing, I show my passports to the TSA official and off I go. I may not even need to show the passport anymore, I can just put the phone on the reader. Well, what does that allow me to do? Well, if I’m TSA approved, I go to a different line. Why can’t we do that in the polling place? For those who are comfortable with their phone authenticating their biometric, I just go right up there, and I check in with my phone.

Similarly, if I get a phone call that someone doesn’t think my signature at a station envelope here in Oregon was really my signature, an app called Serif[sp] that we’re working on. I bio-authenticate to my phone, I upload a photo of my signature, or I actually scribble my signature on my phone and send it in, and away we go. Jeff, we got a lot of opportunities here. We just have to understand we’re not going to end up all smartphone voting in 2024.

Jeff: The mobile device is certainly the gateway to a number of things. Greg, I really like that this idea of a pre-check for voting, cut to the front of the line. Just seems like a solid improvement because people do trust their phones or if they don’t, then it’s at least the thing that they know how much to distrust. This idea of using your own device as a gateway to that, certainly could overcome a number of the risks. Greg, I know that you all were working on this, but for me, I moved recently. I changed districts as a result of that. Again, Oregon makes it really easy, “Hey, we noticed you moved, here’s your new information.”

You don’t need to do anything, just make sure this is correct. If it’s not, give us a call. That’s not the case in a lot of places and that disproportionately affects people who aren’t homeowners, people who might be renting an apartment. Thinking through, what is the role again? Registration wise, or your mobile device would be like, “Hey, we just noticed that you moved, would you like to update your registration records?” Or if you’re in a state that frequently urges voter rolls, if you inadvertently get flagged to be able to rectify and correct it. Again, I know that this is an area where Greg’s technology works. Even if the mobile device isn’t the key mechanism for actually casting the vote, it is so important to track that.

Again, post-vote, you voted, your signature was off because you registered when you were 18 and your signature looked like this, and now you’re a distinguished professional and you’ve got a much nicer signature, how do you reconcile that in a way that’s easy? Hey, we notice that your registration was flagged. You live in North Carolina, you’ve got 10 days to rectify this. Hope you didn’t plan a trip. The interim, you’re making sure that you’re notified and you have the ability to, again, ensure that your voting intent was realized.

Mobile, again, Blockchain for some of the backend systems to track some of these behaviors. Plenty of places for that technology to make its way. I think the simple cast of voting for the foreseeable future will be paper-based, but all those areas around it can certainly employ quite a bit of other technology to improve the experience.

Gregory: We’re working on a big project right now to develop a ballot marketing tool for the disability community. 15 million voters folks need assistive technology to cast a ballot in an equal participation capacity. We’re working on apps right now with the Federation of the Blind and others to actually do that. That’s going to start out with a marking system. It’s going to print out a balloting paper, then that ballot’s going to be returned. Some people will do digital return.

Even in the digital return, those digital ballots will end up being printed on official ballot paper. I’ll just leave with the fact that with the official ballot paper, although expensive, there’s potentially technologies there to make sure that that piece of paper, that ballot, can be authenticated much in the way that you look at a $100 up in the light to make sure that yes, sure enough, it’s official.

Now, there is lots of digital innovation that can happen there too. We’re working on what we call end-to-end verification, verifiable voting systems. It’s a cryptographic method that could give you a piece of paper on the way out the door that you could subsequently go look up on a public bulletin board to determine that your ballot was counted as cast.

There are steps that are going to slowly get us to the point of where we can increasingly rely on digital means and rely less on the archaic piece of paper that may be archived for record purposes. I would say this to that audience that says, man, I just can’t imagine paper, help us. Here’s how you can help us. You are going to be running the state houses one day. You are going to be the future leaders who are going to make decisions about how this democracy is administered. If you want to see paper become something of a piece of democracy history, then help change the laws and policies that address how we go about casting and counting our ballots. That’s how we’re going to get there.

It won’t be on technology alone. This is one of the big problems of Blockchain voters, Jeff. Is that they all talk about this elegant technocratic world where yes, in a perfect world that would work but what you’ve told me is you have no appreciation, no respect and no understanding for how regulated by law and policy the process of administering elections are today in order to do something very important to our democracy. That is to preserve and protect the secrecy of the ballot and the anonymity of the voter.

Until you decide as a policy manner that that’s no longer necessary, we’re going to have to have means to protect and preserve those two fundamental pieces of our democracy, secret ballots cast in a way that it can never prove how you cast it. Marce laid down the goals, make it easy, convenient, dare I say, delightful to participate and suddenly the fact that we end up with a piece of paper is going to be incidental

Jeff: Just to make sure we’re capturing all your thoughts in the future. If the constitution was formed in the last decade. If democracy started in the last decade and here we were, Hey, or Hey, maybe Wall-E helped rescue us up in space and we came back to inhabit earth and we’re going to start voting over today. Do you have any thoughts about how things would be redone knowing that there’s so many pieces, you probably talked about 20 different pieces of the puzzle. If you think about the technology and the structure that we have today, if you were to redo things, any thoughts on that as we think about the future?

Marcelino: This is probably off topic a little bit for this one, but I think about representation in the Senate and the distribution of land versus people. Certainly a couple more states and just a different form for the Senate. I think about districting and how maps are drawn and would want equitable drawing of districts. Again, making sure that the intention of people is such that the majority of a the population has a vote. What you don’t want in a democracy is minority rule. I think often in some places you get into that space. Different podcast not for today. I think there’s part of like, if you could start over making sure again the broader intent is people have a voice and that that majority has an effect.

Then I think through the simplicity, the pathway to get there I would love to see 90% of eligible voters vote in an election. To me that gets really, really close to the possibility of a majority of the population actually deciding outcomes. I think that to me is truly a representative democracy would be incredible to get to that place and to see trust. I think there’s something to be said about peaceful transfers of power and trust in the system.

If your person doesn’t get it to still realize that the person who gets elected into the other side of it is part of continuing an institution not necessarily a partisan view. I think trust is so fundamental and we’ve lost that. Again, we’ve lost it for very, very different reasons, but in order for it to work members of both parties, cause we’re a very bipartisan system, need to see, get through and then also trust the outcome of it.

Then maybe it’s a multi-party system. Maybe truthfully like what the last few years have shown is that there is an in between and I think just trying to lock things into parties. How could you make it easy for third parties to be part of it? Could you have things like rank choice voting that allows people to make a vote for their number one, two, three and four and so they can make a vote for particular policy issue, but then not use it necessarily at the expense of much more negligible outcome.

I think there’s so much that you could do and technology could absolutely play a huge role in explaining how something like rank choice voting might make its way into an election system and make it easier for people to understand that it’s not just one side or the other that there’s really where we’re very multicultural country. There’s so many opinions making sure that there’s pathways to see those opinions translate into votes.

Gregory: I would echo a lot of what Marce said in a slightly different way that there’s the technologist being encumbered by legal training. The question you pose is predicated on a recognition of what we have as a grand experiment of democracy that’s hurdling towards it’s 250th birthday in July of 2026. When as my constitutional law professor likes to continually bug me about the fact that this is the grand experiment and we’re about to see if we can make it because you cannot name for me a democracy in the Western world in a civilization that has survived more than 250 years.

I would love to have been back there watching this all unfold with Franklin and Hamilton and everyone else, because you see this grand experiment was predicated on understanding why this nation was formed in the way it is. Those folks coming back from space would have to be asking a very fundamental question. Are we facing a nation that is a group of states? A United States of America in which there’s representation of the states and representation of the people or is this one big country from sea to shining sea? Depending upon what you’re asking of a democracy is going to dictate a lot about how you’re going to manage and administer the technology.

When people come to understand that the people don’t vote for the president, the states were intended to be selecting the president and the people were intended to pick their representatives. The House of Representatives and the Senate. This is a huge challenge. Heaven forbid what we’re racing towards is a challenge in the Supreme Court of the Electoral Count Act of 1789 and I dare say that if that is ever put before SCOTUS,  I believe it’ll be overturned. We’re going to have an entirely different magnitude problem on our hands.

If the electoral count is overturned, the Electoral Vote Count Act. What that means is that the states truly control what the constitution has always said they do control. Their choice of electors for the president of the United States. That they can summarily set aside the people’s vote, heaven forbid that happens. As we look forward and think about how this democracy is structured, we’re going to have to remember that it is the way our founding fathers put it together. They brought together a bunch of colonies, they made them states, they added more states into it. They created a union. It’s a one way trap door you can join, you can check anytime you like, but you can never leave as one great artist once said, “These states can’t succeed. Their succession would bring about a problem.”

We’ve been there. We played that movie. We saw how it ended. We don’t want to go through it again. Yet we’re closer than we ever have been only by reestablishing trust in how this process and system works today can we hope to go forward and have that chance. If we were to redo it over, I think we’d have to ask a very strong, important question, threshold question, are we going to be a group of states united by a federal constitution with a tremendous amount of independence of those states state sovereignty, or are we going to be one federalized nation of people? Depending upon how we choose that outcome is going to determine how we build a system of democracy administration.

That’s my humble opinion. Your mileage may vary, see your professors for further advice.

Jeff: I loved your earlier emphasis on unification and the United in United States, but then the balance with this sovereignty and the independence of states and how we’ve built this nation, lot of factors to weigh here as we think about the future Greg, you’ve been with OSET for some time, you’ve do it a had almost 15 years to this space. What other organizations are you aware o,f bipartisan organizations that are really trying to move the needle forward? Sounds like your organization is one of those. What other organizations are you aware of that are really trying to push the experience and the future forward?

Gregory: We’re unique in nature, because as far as according to a UN working group, we’re the only non-profit nonpartisan C3 that’s literally trying to build the soul of a new machine to borrow a title of a famous book long ago. We really are trying to cut the code of the people’s voting system. That’s our charge. Build the people’s voting system, public technology. That’s unique. It’s difficult for me to cite anyone else doing that thing.

In terms of people we’re trying to move forward, advance the innovation of democracy, Oh my gosh, there is a long, long list. I know most of them by acronyms these days, like CLC comes to mind, the Brennan center and their research work and what they’re doing. There literally are countless organizations who were trying to advance the cause of free and fair elections and improve upon the processes for doing that.

If I name any one I’m going to miss five others, but we all know them from the Get out the vote folks to the folks who are fighting to end- Represent US another great one. The folks trying to do things to improve the four corners of our democracy. If we real quickly think about those four corners there is the notion of campaign finance. There’s the notion that a service in government should be just that a deployment, a service not a career. Seats in Congress should not be like franchises that are handed down generationally and bought and sold. Why is it that politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians? That’s leg number three, I’m talking about districting.

You’ve got campaign finance, how much money goes into politics? You have term limits, you have redistricting or gerrymandering and then you have the fourth leg, which is the way we cast and count our ballots. There’s lots of effort across those other three. Most of them require some self-policing and self discipline in order to happen, yet there are things that can happen at the state level to reform some of those things like term limits. There’s a lot of effort I think trying to save our democracy. Everyone needs to find a way to get involved. You don’t have to be able to cut source code or design objects to have a meaningful role.

Jeff: Marce as we’re wrapping up here, you have two beautiful kids Caleb and Lucia, as we think about their future, what would be a cool experience for them in the future when they’re grown up, as they’re participating in a hopefully United States still then and we have advanced the systems. What would be a cool experience for them?

Marcelino: Yes, that’s a good question. As a half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, should Puerto Rico choose statehood then one of my kids decide to live there to be able to cast a vote for a president from Puerto Rico would be amazing. I think that would truly be just an opportunity, again, that’s a choice of the Puerto Rican folks and not so much from our side, I think it needs to be from folks who are still on the island.

I think that would be really awesome to just have trust. Trust in wherever they are, whatever they believe in, like, whatever issues are sort of the issues of the day to just know that their vote matter, that every vote matters. Democracy works when people participate and when they get engaged. I have no idea where my kids are going to be in 13-15 years from a voting perspective, but to be in a place where they would feel empowered to run for something whether that’s a local school board, to state legislature to who knows something even higher office, I think would be tremendous.

Again, I think to Greg’s previous point, that’s not something that’s necessarily accessible to everybody, I think. Few and far between are the folks who are young and are able to run for office successfully if they are coming from perhaps not a storied legacy of politicians. As a person, who’s not a politician, it’d be great for my kids to run for office or to support any of those initiatives in any of the ways that you can get involved. I would just love to see them be involved, I think is maybe the simplest answer.

Jeff: Thanks for that. Greg, for you, you have a lot of experience in the space. You have three different degrees. Thank you for your devotion to the space. If you could look back and give yourself some advice, your 21-year-old self some advice what would that be?

Gregory: Really take that ski lift operating job in Aspen. [laughs]

No, I’ve been very blessed to have had the journey I’ve had with the various brands thatI have the privilege and pleasure of working with in the valley, and now this project, which is a moral imperative. There’s no really other anyway to state it, knowing what we know. Fortunately, this conversation allowed us to stay within guardrails, several of our organization work in the national security apparatus. All I can tell you is that knowing what we know, this is a moral imperative that we protect and preserve our ways of ministering democracy for not only domestic, but foreign attack.

Boy looking back, and looking forward, if I could do it all over again, I would really have to ponder that one more, to be honest with you. I think that where I’ve come has been what a long, strange trip it’s been, but I wouldn’t do it any different.

I think that to Marce’s point of engagement, getting involved. I think the only thing I regret is that I came to this so late. I’m in the final quarter of my career easily. I’m probably going into overtime, but I can’t stop. I wish that we had seized upon these issues earlier, but they happened when they happened. Let’s face it. It wasn’t all that long ago, 21 years ago that we had the hanging Chads. We’re at a place today where people are concerned that some poor kid named Chad actually was hung. It’s that much distance has separated the election of 2000 and Bush be gore and where we are today and the introduction of technology to try to take us away from that problem.

I would’ve engaged earlier. I think if I’d had the opportunity. I didn’t. I spent a good portion of my life being an athlete. I tried to avoid the at stuff. I still really hate politics, to be honest with you. I’m reminded every day by our comms director that we have no choice, but our ship set sail on that ship of- on that sea of crap and we can’t get away from it. We just have to figure how to navigate it.

Engagement’s everything. I wish I get so bummed out when I hear younger folks today who are just a voting age who have no intention of participating, who look at what’s going on and seeing the crap that’s going on. The fact that there’s no accountability. In the world of politics, it’s not a lie. It’s a messaging strategy. Please don’t confuse me with the facts. I would’ve tried to engage earlier to figure out if there are ways to bring honesty and integrity into a system that has become so besieged by it being natural to just lie. I’m very disappointed in that part of it.

Jeff: Thank you. I really appreciate both your insights and wisdom and all the devotion to this space. Loved having you on the show, again, as leaders and as evangelists, and really appreciate your time.

Marcelino: Thanks.

Gregory: Thank you. My pleasure.

Jeff: The Future Of podcast is brought to you by Fresh Consulting. To find out more about how we pair design and technology together to shape the future, visit us at freshconsulting.com. Make sure to search for the future of an apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe, so that you don’t miss any of our future episodes, and on behalf of our team here at Fresh, thank you for listening.