Is Voting Safe?

Summary

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The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: Is Voting Safe?
Date: October 12, 2018
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Logan Lamb (Security Researcher), Susan Greenhalgh (National Election Defense Coalition)

Overview

This episode explores the safety and vulnerabilities of the American voting system, particularly in light of foreign interference and hacking incidents surrounding recent U.S. elections. Host David Remnick, along with investigative reporting by Sue Halpern, interviews cybersecurity experts and advocates to examine how electronic voting systems can be compromised, what this means for the integrity of democracy, and whether anything is being done to safeguard future elections.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Russian Interference and Election Security Realities

• [00:10] David Remnick introduces the topic, reflecting on the shock of Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the difference between influencing public opinion and actually altering voting results.
  • “If somebody really did want to hack the election, it wouldn’t be impossible. Not at all. Sue Halperin has been writing for the New Yorker about election security, and what she’s found should scare us all.” — David Remnick [00:59]

2. Logan Lamb’s Discovery in Georgia

• [01:05-04:00] Security researcher Logan Lamb recounts his accidental discovery of massive vulnerabilities at Georgia's election system center in August 2016.
  • He describes how a basic Google search led to public files containing 15GB of sensitive election data, including:
    • Supervisor passwords for election day
    • Windows programs for electronic poll books
    • The full voter registration database (names, addresses, birthdates, partial SSNs, driver license numbers)
    • Central tabulator ('Jim' server) databases
  • Lamb discusses the grave implications:
    • “An attacker could have compromised that web server and used it as a beachhead to get deeper into the center for Election Systems networks.” — Logan Lamb [03:35]
    • Warns of potential to implant malware, alter databases, or disenfranchise voters

3. Official Response in Georgia

• [04:00-05:23] Despite Lamb’s findings, Secretary of State Brian Kemp rejects federal help, insisting the system was secure.
  • The vulnerabilities aren't patched for seven months.
  • Later, evidence emerges that Russian hackers were probing similar systems in Georgia and elsewhere.

4. Systemic Weakness Nationwide

• [05:23] Susan Greenhalgh (National Election Defense Coalition) underscores that while states oversee elections, they lack substantial cybersecurity expertise.
  • “We understand the states need to run elections. That’s their authority. But they’re not cybersecurity experts.” — Susan Greenhalgh [05:23]

5. Vulnerabilities of Voting Machines (Paperless, Electronic, Internet Connectivity)

• [05:30-06:54] Greenhalgh outlines specifics about voting machines:
  • Some states use touchscreen systems with no paper ballots, making audits difficult.
  • Machines are often believed to be “unhackable” due to lack of direct internet connectivity, but:
    • Machines rely on removable media for ballot programming, creating infection opportunities.
    • Many are equipped with wireless modems sending data via the internet.
  • "If the device that is doing the programming gets infected with malicious software, it can be transferred to the individual voting machines.” — Susan Greenhalgh [06:54]
  • “Those wireless modems go over cellular networks, and those cellular networks are part of the Internet.” — Susan Greenhalgh [07:40]

6. New Forms of Election Manipulation: Voter ID Laws and Roll Purges

• [08:10-09:53] The discussion shifts to another attack vector: restrictive voting laws and database purges, which can systematically disenfranchise voters.
  • Greenhalgh shares her concerns, highlighting unexplained problems with poll books and database errors in North Carolina in 2016:
    • “People were showing up to vote in Durham County, North Carolina, and their names weren’t on the voter rolls… The county report has been made public. It wasn’t very in depth... concluded that it was poll worker error malfunctions. But I think that’s an open question as to what happened in North Carolina on Election Day." — Susan Greenhalgh [08:41-09:53]

7. Federal Funding and the Need for Legislation

• [09:53-10:46] $380 million in Help America Vote Act funds were released for election security, but the federal government attached no requirements for how states must use it.
  • Greenhalgh stresses the importance of nationwide legislative standards, not just ad-hoc funding.
  • “It would be really useful to have some federal legislation to move the states to those remedies that we know are so essential to securing our elections.” — Susan Greenhalgh [10:14]

8. Legitimacy and Public Trust

• [10:46-11:22] Worries about the erosion of faith in the democratic process itself.
  • Greenhalgh insists the best defense is “evidence-based elections”—use of paper ballots with post-election audits.
  • “I worry that people will try to undermine the credibility of it. And the best way to counter that is if we have systems that produce evidence of the election results, which is accomplished with paper ballots and doing a post election audit.” — Susan Greenhalgh [10:55]

9. What’s Next: Patchwork Defenses

• [11:22-11:57] With no federal legislative fix forthcoming and midterms imminent, most states are left on their own, with vastly uneven levels of security preparedness.
  • “It’s hard to imagine election officials actually having a line of defense against cyber attacks by Russian intelligence agents or other malicious actors. But if we don’t do something about this as a country, we’re putting our democracy at risk.” — Interviewer [11:47]

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Notable Quotes

• David Remnick [00:59]: “If somebody really did want to hack the election, it wouldn’t be impossible. Not at all.”
• Logan Lamb [03:35]: “The scariest scenario I can think of would be an attacker implanting malware on the programs that are placed on the electronic poll books, or altering the voter registration databases to disenfranchise voters.”
• Susan Greenhalgh [05:23]: “We understand the states need to run elections. That’s their authority. But they’re not cybersecurity experts.”
• Susan Greenhalgh [07:40]: “Those wireless modems go over cellular networks, and those cellular networks are part of the Internet.”
• Susan Greenhalgh [10:55]: “I worry that people will try to undermine the credibility of it. And the best way to counter that is if we have systems that produce evidence of the election results, which is accomplished with paper ballots and doing a post election audit.”

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Key Timestamps

• 00:10–01:05: Framing the episode—Russian interference and the initial misunderstanding of what “hacking” the election meant.
• 01:05–04:00: Logan Lamb details his discovery of open vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election databases and infrastructure.
• 05:23–06:54: Susan Greenhalgh explains state-level weaknesses and debunks myths of “unhackable” voting machines.
• 08:10–09:53: Discussion of weaponizing voter rolls, poll book errors in North Carolina, and the impacts of restrictive ID laws.
• 09:53–10:46: Federal election funding and the call for mandates and standards, not just money.
• 10:46–11:22: Emphasis on “evidence-based elections” as the foundation for public trust.
• 11:22–11:57: The urgent need for action amid a lack of federal direction.

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Concluding Insights

The episode offers a sobering look at the vulnerabilities within America’s voting infrastructure, both technological and systemic. Experts warn that without legislative standards, paper trails, and proper auditing, the legitimacy of American elections—and by extension, democracy itself—remains at risk. The show closes by emphasizing that while faith in American democracy endures, it cannot be taken for granted, especially when known risks go unaddressed.

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Transcript

[David Remnick]

From One World Trade center in Manhattan.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC studios.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When we first began learning of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which seemed absolutely mind boggling at the time, something that just couldn't happen, it was often said that Russia had hacked the election. We quickly learned a more specific, more accurate way of putting it. Russia had influenced the election by manipulating political messages on Facebook and so on. But they hadn't exactly gone into election computer systems and altered the results. Not exactly. Now, if foreign agents could actually change the outcome of an election, that would be, and you can say this lightly, an existential threat to American democracy. But what we've learned since 2016 is if somebody really did want to hack the election, it wouldn't be impossible. Not at all. Sue Halperin has been writing for the New Yorker about election security, and what she's found should scare us all.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Logan Lamb is a security researcher in Georgia.

[Logan Lamb]

I'm generally a curious guy. I enjoy the poking around part. I like to do that in my free time.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

In August 2016, at the height of the presidential election, we started poking around the Kennesaw State University's center for Election Systems, which ran all the elections in Georgia.

[Logan Lamb]

In the course of doing that, I did a very, very simple Google search. I said, for the site Elections, Kennesaw, Edu, Google, please give me all of the PDF documents on this website. And generally that turns up reports or public presentations. And this particular search didn't turn that up. Instead, I found a very curious link and I was presented with a very long list of what appeared to be voter names and some sort of identifier next to their name. And I immediately thought, wow, that seems a little strange.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And then he crafted a simple program to download what was publicly accessible from the Georgia election website. And what he found was in all of that data astonished him.

[Logan Lamb]

These documents contained supervisor passwords to be used on election day. There were also Windows programs that are placed on electronic poll books.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to know that supervisor passwords should absolutely not be sitting around online unprotected.

[Logan Lamb]

Immediately I thought to myself, wow, this doesn't look like the sort of data they would purposefully put on this web server.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

In total, Lamm downloaded 15 gigabytes worth of data from the center for Election Systems. This by itself would be a huge story. But on top of it, Lamm also found A security hole through which he could download the entire database of the state's 6.7 million registered voters.

[Logan Lamb]

I had access to their full name, their address, birth date, last four digits of their Social Security number, and their driver's license number. And there were also Jim's databases. And Jim's databases are used by the Jim server, which is the central tabulator, which does the final vote count.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

If Logan Lamb had been a bad guy, this would have been a bonanza.

[Logan Lamb]

The scariest scenario I can think of would be an attacker implanting malware on the programs that are placed on the electronic poll books or altering the voter registration databases to disenfranchise voters. An attacker could have compromised that web server and used it as a beachhead to get deeper into the center for Election Systems networks.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

This is right around the same time that the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, rejected an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to help the state harden the election system to protect it from hackers. Because Kemp said that the system was secure the way it was and that the state didn't want any help from the federal government. It wasn't until March of 2017. So, seven months after Lam's initial finding that the system was finally patched, then more information started to trickle out. The Intercept published the NSA report that had been hacked about Russian cyber attacks on election systems in the lead up to 2017. And later, the Mueller indictment found that the Russian hackers had looked for vulnerabilities to election servers in a number of states, including Georgia. Look, we have no idea if the Russians made alterations to Georgia's election systems in 2016. And if they did, we probably wouldn't know. But this is a critical moment. We know that foreign actors are interested in our election system. Just as we head into the midterms a few months ago, the Director of National Intelligence said the warning lights are blinking red. Some states took this seriously, but others seem to have left themselves wide open.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

We're in a new world now. We understand the states need to run elections. That's their authority. But they're not cybersecurity experts.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Susan Greenhalgh is the policy director of the National Election Defense Coalition. So you and I met at defcon, where people were hacking lots of election machines left and right. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about some of the problems in Georgia with their machinery and perhaps even elsewhere, since the same machines are used across the country.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

Sure. The machines used in Georgia are computerized touchscreen voting machines. Georgia is one of five states that entirely has machines that don't have a paper ballot. Then there's also other machines which count paper ballots. Those are also computers. And those machines can be hacked and have digital records changed within them. And that's why having the paper ballot is so crucial, because it's that link to what the voter got to see and say, that's how I voted. And to be sure that that's what's counted correctly.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Election security folks on the ground and people who are the vendors of these machines insist that they're not really hackable because they're not connected to the Internet. And I wonder if you'd just explain why it is that there's this discrepancy in the explanation for the safety of these machines.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

While many of the machines that you and I might interact with on election day at our polling location, whether it's a touch screen voting machine or an optical scanner, may not be connected to the Internet, it has to get programming information from another machine, which is essentially desktop or regular laptop computer. That program, here are the candidates, here are the races, here's how the ballot should lay out. That information has to go from that computer to the voting machine that's in the polling location by some sort of removable media. And it's well known that if the device that is doing the programming gets infected with malicious software, it can be transferred to the individual voting machines. But furthermore, there's another fact that debunks that assertion, which is that many of these machines that are in the polling location are equipped with wireless modems to transmit their election results back to the county headquarters on election night. And those wireless modems go over cellular networks, and those cellular networks are part of the Internet.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

We spend a lot of time talking about hacking voting machines or hacking vote tallies. But there's this new way of hacking an election, and it has to do with the new restrictive voter ID laws in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia that purge from the voting rolls who haven't voted in previous elections or whose names don't precisely match the name on the voter registration database.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

Personally, this has been a concern for me because on election day in 2016, people were showing up to vote in Durham County, North Carolina, and their names weren't on the voter rolls. Or in Durham county, they use electronic poll books and people were showing up and they were being told, you're at the wrong polling location, or you've already voted during early voting, or you already voted absentee, or your name is in here, or your address has been changed. The Vendor for the electronic poll books was a vendor named VR Systems. Now, VR Systems had been targeted by a Russian intelligence spear phishing attack. And the state Board of Elections did their own investigation, as did the county. The county report has been made public. It wasn't very in depth. It didn't consider a cyber attack and concluded that it was poll worker error malfunctions. But I think that's an open question as to what happened in North Carolina on Election Day.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

We heard earlier in the year that $380 million was being released to the states for election security. Can you talk about that? Is that going to make a big difference in the midterms in 2020 at all?

[Susan Greenhalgh]

So there was $380 million was appropriated under the Help America Vote act from 2002. So there were no strings put on it. You have to do this or you have to do that with the money. And there's a lot of states are using that money to good effect to try to bulk up their security profile. But it would be really useful to have some federal legislation to move the states to those remedies that we know are so essential to securing our elections.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Are you worried about the kind of legitimacy of our election system and even broader than that, our democracy?

[Susan Greenhalgh]

I worry that people will try to undermine the credibility of it. And the best way to counter that is if we have systems that produce evidence of the election results, which is accomplished with paper ballots and doing a post election audit. There's a term for evidence based elections, and that's what we want to see, evidence based elections.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So the Trump administration has made it clear that they're actively not interested in a legislative fix. And the midterms are just a few weeks away. So the states are basically on their own. And it's hard to imagine election officials actually having a line of defense against cyber attacks by Russian intelligence agents or other malicious actors. But if we don't do something about this as a country, we're putting our democracy at risk.

[David Remnick]

Sue Halpern is a contributor to the New Yorker, and she spoke with Susan Greenhall of the National Election Defense Coalition and with Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity researcher. Next week, our coverage of the midterm elections continues with staff writer Andrew Morantz, who's going to report on the campaigns of the far right white supremacist candidates. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Henry Worsley]

Good evening. So, underway at last, about 100 miles from the Antarctic landmass, and having sorted out my sledge, taken a bearing south, I was on the way by mid.

[David Remnick]

Afternoon in 2015, a British army veteran named Henry Worsley set out to become the first person to cross Antarctica on foot, alone and unaided.

[Henry Worsley]

3.94 nautical miles over 3 1/2 hours travel was pleasing. I'm in great spirits. It was so wonderful to be back on the snow heading south. Good night.

[David Remnick]

Worsley went on skis, pulling a sled loaded with more than 300 pounds of equipment. He would pass the South Pole and then continue on to the other side of Antarctica.

[Henry Worsley]

Hours in the gym cannot prepare you for that moment and the sign of the airplane that has just dropped you off at your star point fades. Or from then on, this beguiling continent will strip you bare.

[David Remnick]

It was as difficult a journey as a human being could voluntarily undertake. Staff writer David Grann, who's just written a book about Henry Worsley, brings us the story.

[David Grann]

Henry had been to the South Pole twice before, but this would be his first solo expedition. And it was also longer than his other expeditions and more dangerous than any other expedition he had ever attempted. Henry was a meticulous planner, ruthlessly whittling down all his equipment to the bare essentials. Most important was his satellite phone, which would allow him to stay in contact with ALE Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, a company that helped get polar explorers on and off the continent.

[Henry Worsley]

Okay, that's for today. Day 65, 16 January.

[David Grann]

Each night after a long trek, he would call Ale, give them his medical condition and his coordinates. If he was ever in trouble, he could call for what he referred to as the most expensive taxi ride in the world, which would be a rescue plane to pull him out.

[Henry Worsley]

Thanks, Andy. Mike, you and Andrew.

[David Grann]

He also called a friend in London so he could record an audio diary of his day, which could then be posted on his website. And it updated listeners about what he was going through, what he was eating, what he was feeling.

[Henry Worsley]

Good evening, everybody. Sun shone for most of the day, whilst wave after wave of low cloud cast intriguing bands of shadow and light that raced across the surface, creating strips of light.

[Joanna Worsley]

Well, he was incredibly good looking.

[David Grann]

Henry met his wife Joanne at a party in London in 1989.

[Joanna Worsley]

Most of my friends were in the art world and we all thought that someone in the Special Forces was very, very glamorous. And actually I like adventurous people. I think it's great talking to people who are adventurers.

[David Grann]

He had recently completed his selection course for the Special Air Service, or sas, a legendary elite commando unit. In many ways, he and Joanna were opposites. She hates the cold. She couldn't think of any more dreadful place in the world than Antarctica. Yet for all their differences, they shared a similar sensibility.

[Joanna Worsley]

He really was a true romantic. He loved poetry. He loved art. He did tapestry. He stitched the most wonderful tapestry. Two sledges going across the snow. He loved the history of all these old explorers and he glamorized their lives in his head.

[Henry Worsley]

We retraced our steps over crevasses, through soft snow, encountering blizzards Till eventually, on.

[David Grann]

The 1st of March, Henry worshiped Ernest Shackleton, who in many ways was a failure as an explorer. On his first expedition that he commanded himself, he set out to reach the south pole with three other men. They got within 97 miles nautical miles of the Pole. But he feared that if he kept going his men who were already fading would not make it back.

[Henry Worsley]

Those 14 men who were my comrades who, regardless of stealth.

[David Grann]

And so he made a decision that always astonished Henry Worsley. He decided to turn back.

[Henry Worsley]

And it has been through them that we have achieved.

[David Grann]

And on his other most famous expedition Shackleton had wanted to walk across Antarctica. He thought it was the last great prize to be achieved. But before he even reached Antarctica, his ship, the Endurance, got frozen in the ice. And Shackleton found him and all his men marooned on an ice flow more than 800 miles from the closest island with any contact with civilization. What made it so amazing was he was able to guide all the men in his immediate party and get them back all home alive.

[Henry Worsley]

I can only say, speaking here now, that they have been loyal to the very core throughout the trying times we've gone through. Well, yes, I was very interested as a child. Photographs of the Endurance story absolutely captivated me. I started reading more of the diaries and the accounts that they wrote about those expeditions.

[David Grann]

He began to burn with this very peculiar ambition which very few share which was to kind of suffer these miseries and become a polar explorer. And the motto that he lived by was Shackleton's family motto, which was, by Endurance, we conquer.

[Joanna Worsley]

I should have had warning bells when he came back from a trip to South Georgia just after I first met him and was incredibly excited because he had managed to sleep beside Shackleton's grave. It wasn't until when he was about 40 that he started really talking about wanting to do an expedition and follow in Shackleton's footsteps.

[David Grann]

So by the time Henry was talking about doing his first expedition he had two children, Max and Alicia. Initially, when he decided he wanted to do something that you know how many people say, suddenly, wait a second, I want to go walk to the South Pole. His kids were a little bit bewildered, but Joanna was very supportive.

[Joanna Worsley]

Both of us were huge believers in trying to fulfill dreams. A lot of the time marriage stops you from fulfilling your own individual dreams because you feel you have to get permission from the other person. And I felt that through my twenties I had fulfilled a lot of my dreams. I'd had a lot of fun. And he went into the army when he was 18 and I felt that it was his turn really.

[David Grann]

So for his third trip he wanted to walk across Antarctica to fulfill the goal that his hero Shaktin was not able to achieve. But he wanted to do it alone.

[Henry Worsley]

Success or failure of this journey is completely up to me at the moment. I'm up at 7:30 on the trail.

[David Grann]

At 9:00am Each day was similar. I mean, Henry would get up early in the morning, pack up his sled. This usually took about an hour. His harness would be connected to the sled and he would begin to haul it. Not unlike a mule.

[Henry Worsley]

I've been skiing for 90 minutes and then taking a five minute break.

[David Grann]

And he would walk with his skis burning as much as 8,000 calories in a day.

[Henry Worsley]

I've been craving food. Fish pie, brown breast, double cream steak and chips, more chips, smoked salmon, baked potato, eggs, rice pudding.

[David Grann]

He would do this herculean task and challenge day after day. There was something almost primal about it. His singular purpose became to just make his mileage. He had to achieve so many miles a day if he was to ultimately accomplish his goal.

[Henry Worsley]

9.4 nautical miles today. There's a lot of it. Evening everybody. So insom a tough day. The 9.7 nautical miles were hard one. I traveled a bit longer today, just over 11 nautical miles at this early stage. Everybody, day 21, 10.3 nautical miles was a disappointment. But 14 nautical miles is all I can do at the moment. In a 12 hour day he would.

[David Grann]

Track for 14, 15, sometimes 16 hours across an alien landscape that's covered with a sheet of ice, it's pocked with crevasses.

[Henry Worsley]

A white house with just enough visibility to see the horizon greeted me this morning. It was a very tough day with many pauses or intake of breath. Leaning forward on my ski sticks, head dropped. At 7pm I checked my mileage covered during the day and it was 11 decimal 7. At 8pm I checked again. Was 12 decimal 9 not enough?

[Joanna Worsley]

I talked to him a lot while he was out there on a satellite phone. He found it much harder than other expeditions and at least if you're with other people. You can take turns to to be at the front. Whereas if you're the lead skier for 1,000 miles he found it cripplingly hard.

[David Grann]

He felt the constant strain of making his mileage so that he could reach the end point of the expedition before the end of the month of January. Because in February begins the winter season in Antarctica, where the temperature drops even further. It can reach -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Even ale shuts down then and at that point there would be no exit.

[Henry Worsley]

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew, serve your turn long after they are gone. And so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on. Many of you will of course recognize those lines. I rode your Kipling. I'm getting more feeble and more empty. But I still seem to have the will which says to my heart and nerves and sinews, hold on.

[Joanna Worsley]

I listened to his blogs every day and they were pretty good. They were pretty upbeat, but I was just very concerned. It was a thing thousand miles on his own. He was older. He was 55 when he set out instead of 40.

[David Grann]

She could hear him growing more tired and she wondered what she should do.

[Joanna Worsley]

He worried constantly, constantly that he was being delayed. I was in a terrible position as to whether to say, henry, stop. Just listen for a minute. You are not going to make the end. You cannot make the end or say you'll do it, darling. It's a really difficult one. I chose to say, I'm sure you'll be fine.

[Henry Worsley]

Well, I had a very interrupted night's sleep last night. Bad stomach.

[David Grann]

By now his entire body was in agony. His back throbbed, all his muscles ached. He was suffering from the early signs of frostbite, especially in his thumb, which he struggled to move. He had lost more than 40 pounds. He was so tired that one day during a snack break, he fell asleep while sitting on his sled in the middle of a whiteout.

[Henry Worsley]

I decided to stop and rest up. Half risky. Well, I need the miles, but you have to listen to your body sometimes. I've slept all day and feel much better.

[David Grann]

He kept a diary, a personal diary. This one he didn't broadcast. One evening he wrote, legs are stick thin and arms puny.

[Henry Worsley]

Andy, I'm Andrew Henry. Just to let you know, I'm putting in some extra hours at the moment so my briefs will come, but they may be much shorter. It's now 9 o' clock and I'm going off another couple of hours.

[Joanna Worsley]

It was Just really not right. There was something really not right about about it. Then his voice, his despair. He cried quite a lot. He never cried.

[Henry Worsley]

JT Dell Stage 66, 17 Jam Time Trouble 16 hours. In order to keep track, I must not be able to.16 nautical miles per day. This makes for a very long 16 hour day. So that's what I have to do, or do it, I will. As of today, this Evening, I got 142 nautical miles at the finish line.

[David Grann]

The next day, day 67. His journal entry is short and his writing is increasingly difficult to read. He wrote mixed bag, white out, soft snow. Painful. While afraid of stomach, worried about time and distance. On day 68 he didn't record a message for his listeners.

[Henry Worsley]

It's all become quite an ordeal at the moment. No narrative. Could he just explain that time has caught up. Thanks Andy, Thanks.

[David Grann]

The next day on day 69, he scribbled in his diary. Awful. Had to stop after five hours, totally exhausted, feeling terrible, very deplorable. Rested rest of day and into following morning. Just wanted all to end in a good way.

[Joanna Worsley]

He was unable to move really at that stage. We had been on the phone non stop for two days, me very hysterical, begging him to pull out and him just asking me to be patient.

[David Grann]

Henry, throughout his life, especially whenever he was in danger, and he was in more danger now than he'd ever been in his life, he would always ask himself, what would Shaxx do? What would Shackleton do? And he had always thought by endurance we conquer. Was the message of Shackleton that you can always prevail through force of mind. But the thing that sets Shackleton apart from so many other explorers who went to their polar grave is that he acknowledged his human limitations and the limitations of his men. And he turned back. That was the thing about Shackleton. Henry was 900 miles into his thousand mile journey when he rang ale and called for the most expensive taxi ride in the world. Then he composed a final public message.

[Henry Worsley]

Greetings Everybody. It's Friday the 22nd of January, day 70, when my hero, Ernest Shackleton stood 97 miles from the South Pole, he said he'd shot his balls. Well, today I have to inform you from sadness that I too have shot my bowls. My journey is at an end. I have run out of time, physical endurance. But I spent 70 days all alone in a place I love. They will heal over time and I will come to terms with disappointment. Signing off, journey's end. We'll see you later.

[David Grann]

Elie arrived later that day and Henry walked to the plane on his own volition, he was flown to western Antarctica, the Elie base camp. And there he called Joanna.

[Joanna Worsley]

It was such a relief for me, I can't tell you. He was with doctors, and he said to me, I'm fine. I'm going to stay here for a few days and just build up my strength. I'm having a cup of tea and a biscuit and I'm going to be fine.

[David Grann]

But his condition continued to deteriorate and he was flown overnight to a hospital in southern Chile, where they discovered he had peritonitis, which is an infection in the abdomen lining. When Joanna heard he had been taken to a hospital, she hurried to get on a plane. Shortly after she landed in Chile, she received an update that Henry's liver had failed. Shortly after that, she heard that his kidney had failed. And before she could get to the hospital, she learned that Henry had died. The news of Henry's death was greeted in England with an outpouring of emotion. He was healed as an inspiration, a polar hero, much like the heroes that he had revered growing up. Hundreds of people went to Henry's funeral, including the top military brass as well as Prince William. In December 2017, nearly two years after Henry died, Joanna, Max and Alicia set off for the island of South Georgia, which was where Shackleton was buried and which Henry himself had visited many years ago. And they carried with them Henry's ashes.

[Joanna Worsley]

It's an extraordinary little bay and we had a wonderful service there. And we all poured whiskey onto Shackleton's grave.

[David Grann]

They then began to climb up an icy mountain slope, and where the earth was flat, they knelt down and buried Henry's ashes.

[David Remnick]

David Grann's book about Henry Worsley's journey, the White Darkness, comes out later this month. Joanne On Henry Worsley's son, Max, told his mother that he wanted one day to follow in his father's footsteps and go on an expedition to the Antarctic.

[Joanna Worsley]

I knew when Henry died that it would only be a matter of time before Max said he wanted to do one. And when he told me yes, I can't say my heart didn't sink slightly. But Henry's death has not been. Made me lose that really strong feeling of people must fulfill dreams. I know he'll do one, Max, but I'm going to support him. Determined to support him.

[David Remnick]

I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour this week. And until next time, stay in touch with us on Twitter ewyorkerradio.

[Joanna Worsley]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a.

[Susan Greenhalgh]

Co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[Joanna Worsley]

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported.

[David Grann]

In part by the Chorina Endowment Fund.