Disasters at America’s Polling Places

Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Disasters at America’s Polling Places
Date: February 6, 2020
Host: Dorothy Wickenden (Executive Editor, The New Yorker)
Guest: Sue Halpern (Contributing Writer, The New Yorker)

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Overview

This episode delves into the recurring failures and vulnerabilities in the American electoral system, spotlighting the recent chaos of the 2020 Iowa caucuses. Host Dorothy Wickenden and guest Sue Halpern explore the roots of technological malfunction, systemic voter suppression, election security, and whether there’s any hope for restoring faith in the process.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 2020 Iowa Caucuses and Shadow App Debacle

• Technical Failures:
  • A new vote-reporting app, developed by Shadow, catastrophically failed.
  • The breakdown delayed the final count for days and generated suspicion and confusion among voters, officials, and candidates.
  • Backup phone systems also faltered.
  • Notably, Pete Buttigieg declared himself victorious before results were in.
    • Quote: “We don't know all the results, but we know by the time it's all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” — Pete Buttigieg (02:02, as referenced by Sue Halpern)
• Conflicts of Interest and Appearance of Impropriety:
  • Buttigieg’s campaign had financial and personal connections to groups behind the app, causing further suspicion.
  • Quote: “There's no evidence that the vote tally was compromised… But it sure doesn't look good. And we're in a position now where it's really important to have everything be above board.” — Sue Halpern (03:10)

2. Conspiracy Theories and Political Fallout

• The technical collapse fueled conspiracy theories, especially from the right, suggesting rigging or intentional chaos.
  • Quote: “Conspiracy theorists on the right are calling the results rigged…” — Dorothy Wickenden (04:22)
• Halpern highlighted that the tight-knit nature of political tech makes such apparent conflicts almost inevitable, though not necessarily nefarious.
  • Quote: “…it's a very, very small world. So on some level, it's not unusual that, you know, you would have this apparent conflict of interest.” — Sue Halpern (04:37)

3. Why Did the Shadow App Fail?

• Built too quickly, poorly vetted, unintuitive for users, and contained serious security flaws.
  • Tech-savvy individuals struggled to log in; security researchers later found vulnerabilities that could have allowed for hacking.
  • Quote: “It was built very quickly… the user interface was basically impossible for people to use… some pretty serious security flaws that could have led to hacking.” — Sue Halpern (05:33)

4. Historical Context: 2000 Election and Aftermath

• The infamous Florida “hanging chads” led to the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, leaving many Democrats believing the election was stolen.
  • Quote: “A lot of ballots weren't counted. Something like 2 million ballots were disqualified in that election... At that point, people were like, okay, look, the voting infrastructure that we have is old. We need to replace it.” — Sue Halpern (06:58)
• The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) allocated billions for new machines and created the Election Assistance Commission, meant to be bipartisan but quickly politicized.
• Introduction of poorly auditable electronic voting machines, often lacking paper trails and linked to partisan interests.
  • Quote: “Those machines couldn't be audited. They had black box algorithms... people saying, wait, A minute. This is not kosher.” — Sue Halpern (07:40)
• Computer scientists like David Dill spearheaded early opposition, demanding paper trails.

5. Persistent Voter Suppression

• For decades, especially since the 1980s, Republicans have systematically worked to shrink the electorate using:
  • Restrictive voter ID laws,
  • Polling place closures,
  • Purging voting rolls,
  • Aggressive redistricting.
• The 2013 Supreme Court rollback of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 enabled rapid expansion of suppressive laws—in particular, harming poor people, people of color, and students.
  • Quote: “Our leverage... goes up when the voting populace goes down. So the Republicans took this to heart...” — Sue Halpern (10:57, recounting Paul Weyrich)
  • Quote: “They are primarily targeting poor people and people of color, people who do not have IDs, so also students.” — Sue Halpern (11:50)

6. Case Study: Georgia Elections and Brian Kemp

• Georgia’s election systems were notoriously insecure (2003, 2016), yet officials dismissed warnings.
• Brian Kemp, as Secretary of State, oversaw his own gubernatorial race against Stacey Abrams, using draconian rules to challenge voters based on trivial discrepancies.
  • Quote: “Georgia is...ground zero for the awful things that happen in elections.” — Sue Halpern (13:02)
• Abrams’s 2018 contest was especially contentious, with no auditable ballots used statewide.

7. Contemporary Threats: Technology and Suppression Collide

• New voting machines often provide only unreadable paper receipts (e.g., barcodes), making auditing impossible for ordinary voters.
• Registration databases are vulnerable to hacking—just altering or deleting voter histories can strip voter rights.
  • Quote: “We're in a big mess and we have no leadership in Washington that is able to push through any kind of election security.” — Sue Halpern (16:58)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On public trust:
  “It’s pretty irresponsible of people to suggest [vote compromise], but... it sure doesn’t look good.”
  — Sue Halpern (03:10)

• On systemic problems:
  “You think you know what you said when you voted, but you don’t know what the barcode says.”
  — Sue Halpern (15:46)

• On hope:
  “The cries in the wilderness of the election integrity advocates and the computer scientists have now been heard and people are much, much more aware of some of these problems… we’re in a better position because we know so much more than we knew even four years ago.”
  — Sue Halpern (17:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:16-02:46 — Setting the stage: Iowa caucus meltdown, Buttigieg’s connections
• 03:10-06:32 — Shadow app conflicts, technical failure, the aftermath
• 06:32-09:04 — Historical failures: 2000 election, Bush v. Gore, aftermath, & HAVA
• 10:36-12:45 — Voter suppression: strategies since the 1980s, post-VRA rollback
• 12:45-15:26 — Georgia’s election history, Brian Kemp/Stacey Abrams 2018
• 15:26-17:22 — The dual threat: technology failures & voter suppression today
• 17:22-18:38 — Is there hope? Positive signs and ongoing activism for election integrity

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Tone & Style

The discussion is candid and deeply critical of both parties’ failings, animated by concern for democracy’s future but buoyed by a sense that awareness is growing and that advocacy can fuel real change.

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Conclusion

This episode is a sobering reminder of how technological naïveté, partisanship, and voter suppression intersect to undermine confidence in American elections. Yet, as Sue Halpern emphasizes, increased public vigilance and advocacy may be reason for hope—even if the path to true reform remains daunting.

Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about Politics. It's Thursday, February 6th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. This week's Iowa caucuses revealed once again that the United States electoral process is broken. During the voting, a smartphone app created by the unfortunately named company Shadow malfunctioned. The backup hotline system also failed, causing the final vote count to be delayed for several days and sowing confusion among voters, Democratic Party leaders and and the presidential candidates. But on Monday night, long before the final results were in, Pete Buttigieg essentially declared himself the winner.

[Sue Halpern]

So we don't know all the results, but we know by the time it's all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Sue Halpern, a New Yorker contributing writer, joins me to discuss the history of disasters at the voting booth, why they are so hard to fix, and whether the 2020 presidential election can be saved. Sue, welcome to the program.

[Sue Halpern]

Thank you.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So we've now learned that Buttigieg had both Financial and personal connections to shad, the nonprofit acronym which launched Shadow, as I understand it, as a spinoff organization, a year ago. How true are the accusations that he had a conflict of interest in the Iowa caucuses? And is there any evidence that the vote tally was compromised?

[Sue Halpern]

Well, I think there's no evidence that the vote tally was compromised. I don't think we know that. And I think it's pretty irresponsible of people to suggest that. On the other hand, when we talk about conflict of interest and we see that the person who is backing the app that was being used is married to one of the senior strategists of a candidate, in this case, Pete Buttigieg, when we see that that candidate was spending a fair amount of money on software that was developed by that company, it leads to the understanding that there's something untoward about it. Doesn't mean that people are doing bad things, but it sure doesn't look good. And we're in a position now where it's really important to have everything be above board. We spent the last four years mulling over what happened in 2016, and now the Democrats come roaring back with this problem, which is that they really don't know how to run elections very well either.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And, of course, conspiracy theorists on the right are calling the results rigged and saying that there are operatives in the Democratic Party who contracted with Shadow to fix the election, you know, either by stealing it from Sanders or just by causing chaos.

[Sue Halpern]

Yeah, well, I mean, that's unfortunate that they were given that lift to have that kind of rhetoric, because, you know, they were helped by the Democratic operatives who did this. And the fact is that it was, as I understand it, the Iowa Democratic Party who made this contract. But the real thing that's happening here is that there's a small number of political strategists and developers, and they all talk to each other, and it's a very, very small world. So on some level, it's not unusual that, you know, you would have this apparent conflict of interest. On the other hand, it's also not unusual that you would have bad technology being built by people who don't really know what they're doing.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So what? Tell us just a little bit more about the Shadow app. Why did it fail so spectacularly?

[Sue Halpern]

First of all, it was built very quickly. It was built so quickly that it really wasn't vetted. And one of the problems with it not being vetted was that it turned out that the user interface was basically impossible for people to use. You had to Bypass a lot of the normal ways that you would log on to an app. And people who are somewhat tech savvy were having trouble getting on because of the way it was built. And so you had people not being able to log onto the app, and then they tried to call in results, and that wasn't working either. So that was one of the problems. And then some of the people who now have had a little time to look into how this was built have also found some pretty serious security flaws that could have led to hacking. Probably didn't. But, you know, the fact that this is even a conversation is ridiculous.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Sue, could you take us back for a moment to the first US electoral debacle of the 21st century, which was the 2000 election with those notorious hanging chads in Florida. And that led to the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. Many Democrats still see that as a stolen election. So what happened and what's been done to address the problem?

[Sue Halpern]

So during that 2000 election, voters were voting on machines, and this was in Florida, were voting on the kind of machines that when you pressed the candidate that you wanted, it kind of punched a hole in the ballot. But one of the problems was that if the paper wasn't properly aligned or if the person didn't have sufficient strength, hand strength, the ballot didn't mark what that voter intended. And so we had this situation where a lot of ballots, not just in Florida, but around the country, a lot of ballots weren't counted. Something like 2 million ballots were disqualified in that election. You know, we went through this whole long recount, and there was a lot of evidence that the Republicans in Florida were cheating. And eventually, Gore basically gave up and said, okay, you won. At that point, people were like, okay, look, the voting infrastructure that we have is old. We need to replace it. And Congress passed something called the Help America Vote act, and they allocated about $4 billion for new machines. They also created something called the Election Assistance Commission, which was supposed to be nonpartisan because it had members from both parties on it. But that's not how it worked out. Almost immediately, it became a partisan project, particularly of the Republican Party, to make it more difficult for people to vote. So anyhow, this $4 billion was allocated to the states. And the idea was that all these municipalities were going to use it to buy new machines, new, fancy computerized machines. And it turned out that those machines couldn't be audited. They had black box algorithms, and they were made by companies with ties to the Republican Party. You know, immediately you had people saying, wait, A minute. This is not kosher.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And were these the machines that resulted in vote flipping?

[Sue Halpern]

Yeah, I mean, in 2003. So right after this money was allocated, Santa Clara, California, which is where Silicon Valley is, was about to spend $20 million on touchscreen DRE machines. And thousands of computer scientists, led by a computer scientist at Stanford named David Dill, wrote a petition saying, these computers don't have a paper trail. And if you don't have a paper trail, there's no way to audit them. And if there's no way to audit them, there's no way to know if someone had programmed the machines to flip votes. This was at the very beginning of when these machines were. Were being sent around to the country. And everyone was very excited about the fact that we were voting on computers. But the people who knew the best, which were the computer scientists, said, this is crazy. This is not a good idea.

[David Remnick]

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

For the past, what, 20 years, Republicans have engaged in really persistent renewed efforts to suppress the vote. You know, with restrictive voter ID laws, polling place closures, striking names from the voting rolls, redrawing districts, you name it. Could you talk a little bit about that?

[Sue Halpern]

Yeah. I mean, in 19, I think 1980, a Republican operative named Paul Weyrich, who was the mastermind, I think, behind the Moral Majority and for alec, gave a talk to a conservative group, I think an evangelical group. And basically he said that our leverage. So the leverage of the evangelicals and the Republicans goes up when the voting populace goes down. So the Republicans took this to heart, and so they've instituted so many rules to make it harder. And they got a tremendous assist in 2013 when the Supreme Court, led by John Roberts, basically overturned a very significant part of the Voting Rights act, which was something called Section 5. And Section 5 was part of the law that allowed the Department of Justice to intervene when states that had a history of voter suppression, particularly against African Americans, tried to changed the voting rules. John Roberts did not like that section. It overturned Section five, and almost immediately, states began to institute these draconian voter ID laws. They are primarily targeting poor people and people of color, people who do not have IDs, so also students. And now I can't remember quite the number of states that have these rules, but it's significant. I think it's in the 30s.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So Georgia is a prime case of all of these problems. Tell us about the contested midterm election in 2018 between Brian Kemp, who was Secretary of State at the time, and Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the state House of Representatives.

[Sue Halpern]

Yeah, I think we should start in Georgia a little bit before that happened, because Georgia is. It's like ground zero for the awful things that happen in elections. In 2003, an election integrity activist named Bev Harris was poking around and found that so much of the Georgia election system was sitting unsecured on servers on the Internet. And computer scientists said, huh, that makes it very, very easy to insert malicious code into it. Fast forward to 2016, and another guy, a guy named Logan Lamb, was poking around and found so much unsecured voter data, and he also found passwords for the election system. Brian Kemp, at that point was the Secretary of State of Georgia. And he said, we're fine. Our system is fine. And then Brian Kemp decides he's going to run for governor while he's Secretary of State. So basically, the same person who's overseeing his own election is Brian Kemp. He's running against Stacey Abrams, an African American woman with a pretty big following who's also very invested in getting more and more people to vote. Brian Kemp has at his disposal these draconian laws that are tossing people off the voting rolls for the most insignificant distinctions between, say, their name on their id. So maybe it's Dorothy J. Wickenden on your license, and you go to vote, and it doesn't have the J. And then they say, sorry, you can't vote. And Brian Kemp is the poster person for this effort. But it happens in lots of other states. Wisconsin is a big one, and Stacey.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Abrams did dispute the results. And in this case, were there handmarked ballots as a backdrop?

[Sue Halpern]

No. No, because Georgia voted exclusively in every district on these DRE machines that have no ability to be audited.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

You know, so here we are. The voting system has generally, as you've been outlining, has generally gotten worse, not better, since the 2000 election. What do you regard now as the bigger threat? Outside interference or these domestic snafus and systematic voter suppression?

[Sue Halpern]

I think, you know, they all work together. I don't know if you can say there's one that's worse than the other. We have new machines coming online, huge numbers of new machines coming online that the voting machine vendors have claimed sort of fix the problem of no paper trail because they spit out a piece of paper after you voted on your screen. The problem is that in places like Georgia, what they spit out is a barcode. So most humans can't read barcodes. So again, you think you know what you said when you voted, but you don't know what the barcode says. You know, that's problematic. Any foreign government can decide that they want to poke around in our election systems. Clearly, one of the things that we learned from the last time around is that a lot of voter registration databases sit on Secretary of state's servers, and a lot of those are not well defended. You know, all you have to do is mess with that. People show up to vote. And if it says, you know, that you didn't vote in the last three elections because someone managed to, you know, remove your history and you show up and say, no, I did, there's no way for you to prove it. You know, we're, we're in a big mess and we have no leadership in Washington that is able to push through any kind of election security. It's not anything that's going to solve any of these problems.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I was hoping to end on a somewhat to give listeners some reason for optimism here. Is there any silver lining here?

[Sue Halpern]

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that happened after 2016 was that the cries in the wilderness of the election integrity advocates and the computer scientists have now been heard and people are much, much more aware of some of these problems. There have been a significant number of lawsuits challenging voter ID laws. We've got some really good folks in Washington. Ron Wyden is one of them. Jamie Raskin, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, who are really pushing very hard even against this tide. And even if they don't get as far as we need them to get, we're listening to them and we're hearing them. And I think things don't change unless you've got enough people thinking about these things and advocating for these things. So I think in that sense, you know, we're in a better position because we know so much more than we knew even four years ago.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Thank you so much, Sue.

[Sue Halpern]

You are welcome.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Sue Halpern, a contributing writer who covers politics and technology, has been writing for the New Yorker since 2005 and is the author of seven books, most recently Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app, and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and kylie warner for newyorker.com, Dr. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

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America is changing, and so is the world.

[Sue Halpern]

But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

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I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.

[Sue Halpern]

Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.

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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.

[Sue Halpern]

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

From.

[Sue Halpern]

PRX.