On The Inc. Tank, Ed Smith of Smartmatic and Larry Moore of the National Council of Independent Living discuss how technology can be used to make voting accessible and secure for everyone.
With growing worries about both mail-in and digital ballot technologies, voting seems fraught with uncertainty. Listen to the episode
Christina: Welcome to “The Inc. Tank,” where we explore the impacts of leading-edge technology on business and society.
Hi, this is Christina Elson. Welcome to “The Inc. Tank”. I’m joined today, as always, by my co-host, David Yang. David, how’re you?
David: Doing fine. Good to see you again, Christina.
Christina: Good. I’m so glad that we’re here today. We have a really important and interesting show, and it’s about something that you and I are both very, very deeply passionate and concerned about. And that is the state of voting in our country and making sure that we are leveraging technology to ensure free and fair elections now and forevermore.
So to help us understand the current situation and envision what we can do with the future of voting in America, we have two really fantastic guests. We have Ed Smith, who’s with Smartmatic. And Ed is actually on his way to Los Angeles, where he will be overseeing elections for LA County. And we also have Larry Moore, who is with the National Council for Independent Living. And Larry has many, many years of experience in this area of voting. So gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Larry: Thanks for having us.
Ed: Yes, thank you, Christina.
Christina: So let’s just start with the big question. What is going on with our elections? And by that, I really mean there’s a lot of concern right now about elections. But one thing that we want to help people understand is that the election process has been undergoing increasing complexity and difficulties that already needed to be sorted out. So help us understand why this is such a difficult election for us.
Larry: I’m reminded of the movie, “Groundhog Day,” where every single day was a new day with no memory of the previous day. And back in 2000, was the first episode of “Groundhog Day,” and we’ve had several sequels since. But this one in 2020 is vastly different from all the other issues that have been raised in a presidential election.
In years past, there was fights over voting systems, their security, their vulnerabilities to attack. In 2016, late in the day, we had the specter of foreign hacking. But today, we’ve really entered into a period of almost a perfect storm of issues that were really not present at the beginning of the year…Read more
