Entries Tagged "voting"

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Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections

No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer.

Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of internet voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity doesn’t matter. Bradley Tusk and his Mobile Voting Foundation keep touting internet voting to journalists and election administrators; this whole effort is misleading and dangerous.

I am one of the many signatories.

Posted on January 21, 2026 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

The group will redo the election, but this time setting a 2-of-3 threshold scheme for decrypting the results, instead of requiring all three

News articles.

Posted on November 24, 2025 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

AI and Voter Engagement

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.

In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign’s use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term Senator to win the White House.

Over the past few years, a new technology has become mainstream: AI. But still, no candidate has unlocked AI’s potential to revolutionize political campaigns. Americans have three more years to wait before casting their ballots in another Presidential election, but we can look at the 2026 midterms and examples from around the globe for signs of how that breakthrough might occur.

How Obama Did It

Rereading the contemporaneous reflections of the New York Times’ late media critic, David Carr, on Obama’s campaign reminds us of just how new social media felt in 2008. Carr positions it within a now-familiar lineage of revolutionary communications technologies from newspapers to radio to television to the internet.

The Obama campaign and administration demonstrated that social media was different from those earlier communications technologies, including the pre-social internet. Yes, increasing numbers of voters were getting their news from the internet, and content about the then-Senator sometimes made a splash by going viral. But those were still broadcast communications: one voice reaching many. Obama found ways to connect voters to each other.

In describing what social media revolutionized in campaigning, Carr quotes campaign vendor Blue State Digital’s Thomas Gensemer: “People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take.”

The Obama team made some earnest efforts to realize this vision. His transition team launched change.gov, the website where the campaign collected a “Citizen’s Briefing Book” of public comment. Later, his administration built We the People, an online petitioning platform.

But the lasting legacy of Obama’s 2008 campaign, as political scientists Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna chronicled, was pioneering online “relational organizing.” This technique enlisted individuals as organizers to activate their friends in a self-perpetuating web of relationships.

Perhaps because of the Obama campaign’s close association with the method, relational organizing has been touted repeatedly as the linchpin of Democratic campaigns: in 2020, 2024, and today. But research by non-partisan groups like Turnout Nation and right-aligned groups like the Center for Campaign Innovation has also empirically validated the effectiveness of the technique for inspiring voter turnout within connected groups.

The Facebook of 2008 worked well for relational organizing. It gave users tools to connect and promote ideas to the people they know: college classmates, neighbors, friends from work or church. But the nature of social networking has changed since then.

For the past decade, according to Pew Research, Facebook use has stalled and lagged behind YouTube, while Reddit and TikTok have surged. These platforms are less useful for relational organizing, at least in the traditional sense. YouTube is organized more like broadcast television, where content creators produce content disseminated on their own channels in a largely one-way communication to their fans. Reddit gathers users worldwide in forums (subreddits) organized primarily on topical interest. The endless feed of TikTok’s “For You” page disseminates engaging content with little ideological or social commonality. None of these platforms shares the essential feature of Facebook c. 2008: an organizational structure that emphasizes direct connection to people that users have direct social influence over.

AI and Relational Organizing

Ideas and messages might spread virally through modern social channels, but they are not where you convince your friends to show up at a campaign rally. Today’s platforms are spaces for political hobbyism, where you express your political feelings and see others express theirs.

Relational organizing works when one person’s action inspires others to do this same. That’s inherently a chain of human-to-human connection. If my AI assistant inspires your AI assistant, no human notices and one’s vote changes. But key steps in the human chain can be assisted by AI. Tell your phone’s AI assistant to craft a personal message to one friend—or a hundred—and it can do it.

So if a campaign hits you at the right time with the right message, they might persuade you to task your AI assistant to ask your friends to donate or volunteer. The result can be something more than a form letter; it could be automatically drafted based on the entirety of your email or text correspondence with that friend. It could include references to your discussions of recent events, or past campaigns, or shared personal experiences. It could sound as authentic as if you’d written it from the heart, but scaled to everyone in your address book.

Research suggests that AI can generate and perform written political messaging about as well as humans. AI will surely play a tactical role in the 2026 midterm campaigns, and some candidates may even use it for relational organizing in this way.

(Artificial) Identity Politics

For AI to be truly transformative of politics, it must change the way campaigns work. And we are starting to see that in the US.

The earliest uses of AI in American political campaigns are, to be polite, uninspiring. Candidates viewed them as just another tool to optimize an endless stream of email and text message appeals, to ramp up political vitriol, to harvest data on voters and donors, or merely as a stunt.

Of course, we have seen the rampant production and spread of AI-powered deepfakes and misinformation. This is already impacting the key 2026 Senate races, which are likely to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. Roy Cooper, Democratic candidate for US Senate from North Carolina, and Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, were both targeted by viral deepfake attacks in recent months. This may reflect a growing trend in Donald Trump’s Republican party in the use of AI-generated imagery to build up GOP candidates and assail the opposition.

And yet, in the global elections of 2024, AI was used more memetically than deceptively. So far, conservative and far right parties seem to have adopted this most aggressively. The ongoing rise of Germany’s far-right populist AfD party has been credited to its use of AI to generate nostalgic and evocative (and, to many, offensive) campaign images, videos, and music and, seemingly as a result, they have dominated TikTok. Because most social platforms’ algorithms are tuned to reward media that generates an emotional response, this counts as a double use of AI: to generate content and to manipulate its distribution.

AI can also be used to generate politically useful, though artificial, identities. These identities can fulfill different roles than humans in campaigning and governance because they have differentiated traits. They can’t be imprisoned for speaking out against the state, can be positioned (legitimately or not) as unsusceptible to bribery, and can be forced to show up when humans will not.

In Venezuela, journalists have turned to AI avatars—artificial newsreaders—to report anonymously on issues that would otherwise elicit government retaliation. Albania recently “appointed” an AI to a ministerial post responsible for procurement, claiming that it would be less vulnerable to bribery than a human. In Virginia, both in 2024 and again this year, candidates have used AI avatars as artificial stand-ins for opponents that refused to debate them.

And yet, none of these examples, whether positive or negative, pursue the promise of the Obama campaign: to make voter engagement a “two-way conversation” on a massive scale.

The closest so far to fulfilling that vision anywhere in the world may be Japan’s new political party, Team Mirai. It started in 2024, when an independent Tokyo gubernatorial candidate, Anno Takahiro, used an AI avatar on YouTube to respond to 8,600 constituent questions over a seventeen-day continuous livestream. He collated hundreds of comments on his campaign manifesto into a revised policy platform. While he didn’t win his race, he shot up to a fifth place finish among a record 56 candidates.

Anno was RECENTLY elected to the upper house of the federal legislature as the founder of a new party with a 100 day plan to bring his vision of a “public listening AI” to the whole country. In the early stages of that plan, they’ve invested their share of Japan’s 32 billion yen in party grants—public subsidies for political parties—to hire engineers building digital civic infrastructure for Japan. They’ve already created platforms to provide transparency for party expenditures, and to use AI to make legislation in the Diet easy, and are meeting with engineers from US-based Jigsaw Labs (a Google company) to learn from international examples of how AI can be used to power participatory democracy.

Team Mirai has yet to prove that it can get a second member elected to the Japanese Diet, let alone to win substantial power, but they’re innovating and demonstrating new ways of using AI to give people a way to participate in politics that we believe is likely to spread.

Organizing with AI

AI could be used in the US in similar ways. Following American federalism’s longstanding model of “laboratories of democracy,” we expect the most aggressive campaign innovation to happen at the state and local level.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is partnering with MIT and Stanford labs to use the AI-based tool deliberation.io to capture wide scale public feedback in city policymaking about AI. Her administration said that using AI in this process allows “the District to better solicit public input to ensure a broad range of perspectives, identify common ground, and cultivate solutions that align with the public interest.”

It remains to be seen how central this will become to Bowser’s expected re-election campaign in 2026, but the technology has legitimate potential to be a prominent part of a broader program to rebuild trust in government. This is a trail blazed by Taiwan a decade ago. The vTaiwan initiative showed how digital tools like Pol.is, which uses machine learning to make sense of real time constituent feedback, can scale participation in democratic processes and radically improve trust in government. Similar AI listening processes have been used in Kentucky, France, and Germany.

Even if campaigns like Bowser’s don’t adopt this kind of AI-facilitated listening and dialog, expect it to be an increasingly prominent part of American public debate. Through a partnership with Jigsaw, Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan Institute will use AI to elicit and synthesize the views of at least five Americans from every Congressional district in a project called “We the People.” Timed to coincide with the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026, expect the results to be promoted during the heat of the midterm campaign and to stoke interest in this kind of AI-assisted political sensemaking.

In the year where we celebrate the American republic’s semiquincentennial and continue a decade-long debate about whether or not Donald Trump and the Republican party remade in his image is fighting for the interests of the working class, representation will be on the ballot in 2026. Midterm election candidates will look for any way they can get an edge. For all the risks it poses to democracy, AI presents a real opportunity, too, for politicians to engage voters en masse while factoring their input into their platform and message. Technology isn’t going to turn an uninspiring candidate into Barack Obama, but it gives any aspirant to office the capability to try to realize the promise that swept him into office.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Fulcrum.

Posted on November 18, 2025 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

How Cybersecurity Fears Affect Confidence in Voting Systems

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.

Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in the machinery of democracy itself.

Commentators blame ideological tribalism, misinformation campaigns and partisan echo chambers for this crisis of trust. But these explanations miss a critical piece of the puzzle: a growing unease with the digital infrastructure that now underpins nearly every aspect of how Americans vote.

The digital transformation of American elections has been swift and sweeping. Just two decades ago, most people voted using mechanical levers or punch cards. Today, over 95% of ballots are counted electronically. Digital systems have replaced poll books, taken over voter identity verification processes and are integrated into registration, counting, auditing and voting systems.

This technological leap has made voting more accessible and efficient, and sometimes more secure. But these new systems are also more complex. And that complexity plays into the hands of those looking to undermine democracy.

In recent years, authoritarian regimes have refined a chillingly effective strategy to chip away at Americans’ faith in democracy by relentlessly sowing doubt about the tools U.S. states use to conduct elections. It’s a sustained campaign to fracture civic faith and make Americans believe that democracy is rigged, especially when their side loses.

This is not cyberwar in the traditional sense. There’s no evidence that anyone has managed to break into voting machines and alter votes. But cyberattacks on election systems don’t need to succeed to have an effect. Even a single failed intrusion, magnified by sensational headlines and political echo chambers, is enough to shake public trust. By feeding into existing anxiety about the complexity and opacity of digital systems, adversaries create fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Testing cyber fears

To test this dynamic, we launched a study to uncover precisely how cyberattacks corroded trust in the vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential race. We surveyed more than 3,000 voters before and after election day, testing them using a series of fictional but highly realistic breaking news reports depicting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. We randomly assigned participants to watch different types of news reports: some depicting cyberattacks on election systems, others on unrelated infrastructure such as the power grid, and a third, neutral control group.

The results, which are under peer review, were both striking and sobering. Mere exposure to reports of cyberattacks undermined trust in the electoral process—regardless of partisanship. Voters who supported the losing candidate experienced the greatest drop in trust, with two-thirds of Democratic voters showing heightened skepticism toward the election results.

But winners too showed diminished confidence. Even though most Republican voters, buoyed by their victory, accepted the overall security of the election, the majority of those who viewed news reports about cyberattacks remained suspicious.

The attacks didn’t even have to be related to the election. Even cyberattacks against critical infrastructure such as utilities had spillover effects. Voters seemed to extrapolate: “If the power grid can be hacked, why should I believe that voting machines are secure?”

Strikingly, voters who used digital machines to cast their ballots were the most rattled. For this group of people, belief in the accuracy of the vote count fell by nearly twice as much as that of voters who cast their ballots by mail and who didn’t use any technology. Their firsthand experience with the sorts of systems being portrayed as vulnerable personalized the threat.

It’s not hard to see why. When you’ve just used a touchscreen to vote, and then you see a news report about a digital system being breached, the leap in logic isn’t far.

Our data suggests that in a digital society, perceptions of trust—and distrust—are fluid, contagious and easily activated. The cyber domain isn’t just about networks and code. It’s also about emotions: fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

Firewall of trust

Does this mean we should scrap electronic voting machines? Not necessarily.

Every election system, digital or analog, has flaws. And in many respects, today’s high-tech systems have solved the problems of the past with voter-verifiable paper ballots. Modern voting machines reduce human error, increase accessibility and speed up the vote count. No one misses the hanging chads of 2000.

But technology, no matter how advanced, cannot instill legitimacy on its own. It must be paired with something harder to code: public trust. In an environment where foreign adversaries amplify every flaw, cyberattacks can trigger spirals of suspicion. It is no longer enough for elections to be secure – voters must also perceive them to be secure.

That’s why public education surrounding elections is now as vital to election security as firewalls and encrypted networks. It’s vital that voters understand how elections are run, how they’re protected and how failures are caught and corrected. Election officials, civil society groups and researchers can teach how audits work, host open-source verification demonstrations and ensure that high-tech electoral processes are comprehensible to voters.

We believe this is an essential investment in democratic resilience. But it needs to be proactive, not reactive. By the time the doubt takes hold, it’s already too late.

Just as crucially, we are convinced that it’s time to rethink the very nature of cyber threats. People often imagine them in military terms. But that framework misses the true power of these threats. The danger of cyberattacks is not only that they can destroy infrastructure or steal classified secrets, but that they chip away at societal cohesion, sow anxiety and fray citizens’ confidence in democratic institutions. These attacks erode the very idea of truth itself by making people doubt that anything can be trusted.

If trust is the target, then we believe that elected officials should start to treat trust as a national asset: something to be built, renewed and defended. Because in the end, elections aren’t just about votes being counted—they’re about people believing that those votes count.

And in that belief lies the true firewall of democracy.

This essay was written with Ryan Shandler and Anthony J. DeMattee, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on June 30, 2025 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

The Voter Experience

Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.

Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?

In software development, the concept of user experience (UX) is fundamental to the design of any product or service. It’s a way to think holistically about how a user interacts with technology. It ensures that products and services are built with the users’ actual needs, behaviors, and expectations in mind, as opposed to what developers think users want. UX enables informed decisions based on how the user will interact with the system, leading to improved design, more effective solutions, and increased user satisfaction. Good UX design results in easy, relevant, useful, positive experiences. Bad UX design leads to unhappy users.

This is not how we normally think of elections. Campaigns measure success through short-term outputs—voter contacts, fundraising totals, issue polls, ad impressions—and, ultimately, election results. Rarely do they evaluate how individuals experience this as a singular, messy, democratic process. Each campaign, PAC, nonprofit, and volunteer group may be focused on their own goal, but the voter experiences it all at once. By the time they’re in line to vote, they’ve been hit with a flood of outreach—spammy texts from unfamiliar candidates, organizers with no local ties, clunky voter registration sites, conflicting information, and confusing messages, even from campaigns they support. Political teams can point to data that justifies this barrage, but the effectiveness of voter contact has been steadily declining since 2008. Intuitively, we know this approach has long-term costs. To address this, let’s evaluate the UX of an election cycle from the point of view of the end user, the everyday citizen.

Specifically, how might we define the UX of an election cycle: the voter experience (VX)? A VX lens could help us see the full impact of the electoral cycle from the perspective that matters most: the voters’.

For example, what if we thought about elections in terms of questions like these?

  • How do voters experience an election cycle, from start to finish?
  • How do voters perceive their interactions with political campaigns?
  • What aspects of the election cycle do voters enjoy? What do they dislike? Do citizens currently feel fulfilled by voting?
  • If voters “tune out” of politics, what part of the process has made them want to not pay attention?
  • What experiences decrease the number of eligible citizens who register and vote?
  • Are we able to measure the cumulative impacts of political content interactions over the course of multiple election cycles?
  • Can polls or focus groups help researchers learn about longitudinal sentiment from citizens as they experience multiple election cycles?
  • If so, what would we want to learn in order to bolster democratic participation and trust in institutions?

Thinking in terms of VX can help answer these questions. Moreover, researching and designing around VX could help identify additional metrics, beyond traditional turnout and engagement numbers, that better reflect the collective impact of campaigning: of all those voter contact and persuasion efforts combined.

This isn’t a radically new idea, and earlier efforts to embed UX design into electoral work yielded promising early benefits. In 2020, a coalition of political tech builders created a Volunteer Experience program. The group held design sprints for political tech tools, such as canvassing apps and phone banking sites. Their goal was to apply UX principles to improve the volunteer user flow, enhance data hygiene, and improve volunteer retention. If a few sprints can improve the phone banking experience, imagine the transformative possibilities of taking this lens to the VX as a whole.

If we want democracy to thrive long-term, we need to think beyond short-term wins and table stakes. This isn’t about replacing grassroots organizing or civic action with digital tools. Rather, it’s about learning from UX research methodology to build lasting, meaningful engagement that involves both technology and community organizing. Often, it is indeed local, on-the-ground organizers who have been sounding the alarm about the long-term effects of prioritizing short-term tactics. A VX approach may provide additional data to bolster their arguments.

Learnings from a VX analysis of election cycles could also guide the design of new programs that not only mobilize voters (to contribute, to campaign for their candidates, and to vote), but also ensure that the entire process of voting, post-election follow-up, and broader civic participation is as accessible, intuitive, and fulfilling as possible. Better voter UX will lead to more politically engaged citizens and higher voter turnout.

VX methodology may help combine real-time citizen feedback with centralized decision-making. Moving beyond election cycles, focusing on the citizen UX could accelerate possibilities for citizens to provide real-time feedback, review the performance of elected officials and government, and receive help-desk-style support with the same level of ease as other everyday “products.” By understanding how people engage with civic life over time, we can better design systems for citizens that strengthen participation, trust, and accountability at every level.

Our hope is that this approach, and the new data and metrics uncovered by it, will support shifts that help restore civic participation and strengthen trust in institutions. With citizens oriented as the central users of our democratic systems, we can build new best practices for fulfilling civic infrastructure that foster a more effective and inclusive democracy.

The time for this is now. Despite hard-fought victories and lessons learned from failures, many people working in politics privately acknowledge a hard truth: our current approach isn’t working. Every two years, people build campaigns, mobilize voters, and drive engagement, but they are held back by what they don’t understand about the long-term impact of their efforts. VX thinking can help solve that.

This essay was written with Hillary Lehr, and originally appeared on the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s website.

Posted on May 22, 2025 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Security Analysis of the MERGE Voting Protocol

Interesting analysis: An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways.

Abstract: The recently published “MERGE” protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit votes over the internet and then transmit voter-verifiable paper ballots through the mail. In the MERGE protocol, the votes transmitted over the internet are used to tabulate the results and determine the winners, but audits and recounts use the paper ballots that arrive in time. The enunciated motivation for the protocol is to allow (electronic) votes from overseas military voters to be included in preliminary results before a (paper) ballot is received from the voter. MERGE contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound; but to make the system trustworthy—to apply the MERGE protocol—would require major changes to the laws, practices, and technical and logistical abilities of U.S. election jurisdictions. The gap between theory and practice is large and unbridgeable for the foreseeable future. Promoters of this research project at DARPA, the agency that sponsored the research, should acknowledge that MERGE is internet voting (election results rely on votes transmitted over the internet except in the event of a full hand count) and refrain from claiming that it could be a component of trustworthy elections without sweeping changes to election law and election administration throughout the U.S.

Posted on November 25, 2024 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Problems with Georgia’s Voter Registration Portal

It’s possible to cancel other people’s voter registrations:

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts…

…the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers—the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations.

I get that this is a hard problem to solve. We want the portal to be easy for people to use—even non-tech-savvy people—and hard for fraudsters to abuse, and it turns out to be impossible to do both without an overarching digital identity infrastructure. But Georgia is making it easy to abuse.

EDITED TO ADD (8/14): There was another issue with the portal, making it easy to request cancellation of any Georgian’s registration. The elections director said that cancellations submitted this way wouldn’t have been processed because they didn’t have all the necessary information, which I guess is probably true, but it shows just how sloppy the coding is.

Posted on August 7, 2024 at 7:10 AM • View Comments

On Secure Voting Systems

Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but it’s general in nature.

From the executive summary:

We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the uncertainty introduced by use of electronic machinery and the ability of bad actors to exploit electronic vulnerabilities to remotely alter the results. However, some portion of voters mistakenly mark paper ballots in a manner that will not be counted in the way the voter intended, or which even voids the ballot. Hand-counts delay timely reporting of results, and introduce the possibility for human error, bias, or misinterpretation.

Technology introduces the means of efficient tabulation, but also introduces a manifold increase in complexity and sophistication of the process. This places the understanding of the process beyond the average person’s understanding, which can foster distrust. It also opens the door to human or machine error, as well as exploitation by sophisticated and malicious actors.

Rather than assert that each component of the process can be made perfectly secure on its own, we believe the goal of each component of the elections process is to validate every other component.

Consequently, we believe that the hallmarks of a reliable and optimal election process are hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned, separately and securely stored, and rigorously audited after the election but before certification. We recommend state legislators adopt policies consistent with these guiding principles, which are further developed below.

Posted on March 26, 2024 at 7:08 AM • View Comments

Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy

Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century.

My thinking is very broad here. Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. Were democracy to be invented from scratch today, with today’s technologies, it would look very different. Representation would look different. Adjudication would look different. Resource allocation and reallocation would look different. Everything would look different, because we would have much more powerful technology to build on and no legacy systems to worry about.

Such speculation is not realistic, of course, but it’s still valuable. Everyone seems to be talking about ways to reform our existing systems. That’s critically important, but it’s also myopic. It represents a hill-climbing strategy of continuous improvements. We also need to think about discontinuous changes that you can’t easily get to from here; otherwise, we’ll be forever stuck at local maxima.

I wrote about the philosophy more in this essay about IWORD 2022. IWORD 2023 was equally fantastic, easily the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year. The event is like that; the format results in a firehose of interesting.

Summaries of all the talks are in the first set of comments below. (You can read a similar summary of IWORD 2022 here.) Thank you to the Ash Center and the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Knight Foundation, for the funding to make this possible.

Next year, I hope to take the workshop out of Harvard and somewhere else. I would like it to live on for as long as it is valuable.

Now, I really want to explain the format in detail, because it works so well.

I used a workshop format I and others invented for another interdisciplinary workshop: Security and Human Behavior, or SHB. It’s a two-day event. Each day has four ninety-minute panels. Each panel has six speakers, each of whom presents for ten minutes. Then there are thirty minutes of questions and comments from the audience. Breaks and meals round out the day.

The workshop is limited to forty-eight attendees, which means that everyone is on a panel. This is important: every attendee is a speaker. And attendees commit to being there for the whole workshop; no giving your talk and then leaving. This makes for a very collaborative environment. The short presentations means that no one can get too deep into details or jargon. This is important for an interdisciplinary event. Everyone is interesting for ten minutes.

The final piece of the workshop is the social events. We have a night-before opening reception, a conference dinner after the first day, and a final closing reception after the second day. Good food is essential.

Honestly, it’s great but it’s also it’s exhausting. Everybody is interesting for ten minutes. There’s no down time to zone out or check email. And even though a shorter event would be easier to deal with, the numbers all fit together in a way that’s hard to change. A one-day event means only twenty-four attendees/speakers, and that’s not a critical mass. More people per panel doesn’t work. Not everyone speaking creates a speaker/audience hierarchy, which I want to avoid. And a three-day, slower-paced event is too long. I’ve thought about it long and hard; the format I’m using is optimal.

Posted on January 8, 2024 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

AI and Lossy Bottlenecks

Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.

AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar, call this AI overcoming “lossy bottlenecks.” Lossy is a term from information theory that refers to imperfect communications channels—that is, channels that lose information.

Multiple-choice practicality

Imagine your next sit-down dinner and being able to have a long conversation with a chef about your meal. You could end up with a bespoke dinner based on your desires, the chef’s abilities and the available ingredients. This is possible if you are cooking at home or hosted by accommodating friends.

But it is infeasible at your average restaurant: The limitations of the kitchen, the way supplies have to be ordered and the realities of restaurant cooking make this kind of rich interaction between diner and chef impossible. You get a menu of a few dozen standardized options, with the possibility of some modifications around the edges.

That’s a lossy bottleneck. Your wants and desires are rich and multifaceted. The array of culinary outcomes are equally rich and multifaceted. But there’s no scalable way to connect the two. People are forced to use multiple-choice systems like menus to simplify decision-making, and they lose so much information in the process.

People are so used to these bottlenecks that we don’t even notice them. And when we do, we tend to assume they are the inevitable cost of scale and efficiency. And they are. Or, at least, they were.

The possibilities

Artificial intelligence has the potential to overcome this limitation. By storing rich representations of people’s preferences and histories on the demand side, along with equally rich representations of capabilities, costs and creative possibilities on the supply side, AI systems enable complex customization at scale and low cost. Imagine walking into a restaurant and knowing that the kitchen has already started work on a meal optimized for your tastes, or being presented with a personalized list of choices.

There have been some early attempts at this. People have used ChatGPT to design meals based on dietary restrictions and what they have in the fridge. It’s still early days for these technologies, but once they get working, the possibilities are nearly endless. Lossy bottlenecks are everywhere.

Take labor markets. Employers look to grades, diplomas and certifications to gauge candidates’ suitability for roles. These are a very coarse representation of a job candidate’s abilities. An AI system with access to, for example, a student’s coursework, exams and teacher feedback as well as detailed information about possible jobs could provide much richer assessments of which employment matches do and don’t make sense.

Or apparel. People with money for tailors and time for fittings can get clothes made from scratch, but most of us are limited to mass-produced options. AI could hugely reduce the costs of customization by learning your style, taking measurements based on photos, generating designs that match your taste and using available materials. It would then convert your selections into a series of production instructions and place an order to an AI-enabled robotic production line.

Or software. Today’s computer programs typically use one-size-fits-all interfaces, with only minor room for modification, but individuals have widely varying needs and working styles. AI systems that observe each user’s interaction styles and know what that person wants out of a given piece of software could take this personalization far deeper, completely redesigning interfaces to suit individual needs.

Removing democracy’s bottleneck

These examples are all transformative, but the lossy bottleneck that has the largest effect on society is in politics. It’s the same problem as the restaurant. As a complicated citizen, your policy positions are probably nuanced, trading off between different options and their effects. You care about some issues more than others and some implementations more than others.

If you had the knowledge and time, you could engage in the deliberative process and help create better laws than exist today. But you don’t. And, anyway, society can’t hold policy debates involving hundreds of millions of people. So you go to the ballot box and choose between two—or if you are lucky, four or five—individual representatives or political parties.

Imagine a system where AI removes this lossy bottleneck. Instead of trying to cram your preferences to fit into the available options, imagine conveying your political preferences in detail to an AI system that would directly advocate for specific policies on your behalf. This could revolutionize democracy.

a diagram of six vertical columns composed of squares of various white, grey and black shades

Ballots are bottlenecks that funnel a voter’s diverse views into a few options. AI representations of individual voters’ desires overcome this bottleneck, promising enacted policies that better align with voters’ wishes.
Tantum Collins, CC BY-ND

One way is by enhancing voter representation. By capturing the nuances of each individual’s political preferences in a way that traditional voting systems can’t, this system could lead to policies that better reflect the desires of the electorate. For example, you could have an AI device in your pocket—your future phone, for instance—that knows your views and wishes and continually votes in your name on an otherwise overwhelming number of issues large and small.

Combined with AI systems that personalize political education, it could encourage more people to participate in the democratic process and increase political engagement. And it could eliminate the problems stemming from elected representatives who reflect only the views of the majority that elected them—and sometimes not even them.

On the other hand, the privacy concerns resulting from allowing an AI such intimate access to personal data are considerable. And it’s important to avoid the pitfall of just allowing the AIs to figure out what to do: Human deliberation is crucial to a functioning democracy.

Also, there is no clear transition path from the representative democracies of today to these AI-enhanced direct democracies of tomorrow. And, of course, this is still science fiction.

First steps

These technologies are likely to be used first in other, less politically charged, domains. Recommendation systems for digital media have steadily reduced their reliance on traditional intermediaries. Radio stations are like menu items: Regardless of how nuanced your taste in music is, you have to pick from a handful of options. Early digital platforms were only a little better: “This person likes jazz, so we’ll suggest more jazz.”

Today’s streaming platforms use listener histories and a broad set of features describing each track to provide each user with personalized music recommendations. Similar systems suggest academic papers with far greater granularity than a subscription to a given journal, and movies based on more nuanced analysis than simply deferring to genres.

A world without artificial bottlenecks comes with risks—loss of jobs in the bottlenecks, for example—but it also has the potential to free people from the straitjackets that have long constrained large-scale human decision-making. In some cases—restaurants, for example—the impact on most people might be minor. But in others, like politics and hiring, the effects could be profound.

This essay originally appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on December 28, 2023 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.