Linda Souza

In this fast-changing world, many elderly individuals have had a hard time embracing technology. The keys of a laptop often feel forbidding to a generation used to ink flowing from a pen; the abstract network of mobile connections far more inappreciable than landlines tethering their phone conversations. In short, they are an analog generation lost in a digital world. My dad, on the other hand, was just the opposite, jumping into the tech rabbit hole at age 76, when I gave him his first laptop. Dad was amazed by the look and feel of his brand new 2006 Apple MacBook—the smooth white polycarbonate casing immediately lured him into a dizzying new world of emails, digital media, and social media that not only quenched his thirst for current events but also connected him to the ones he loved until his very last breath.  I wondered later if we should have immersed Dad’s precious Apple devices along with his ashes to keep him company. Dad died this spring in my brother’s home in New Jersey from complications due to old age, just shy of 90. It was only then that he finally let go of his trio of constant companions in his final decade of life—his iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro. In some ways, Dad’s love of tech was an unlikely romance. As a career banker and later, a senior executive in an Indian commodities company, Dad never had to touch tech. In fact, in India at the time, any form of tech (including typewriters, and later, computers) was viewed as lower status—something to be delegated to paid staff. So, the higher Dad rose in his career, the less connectivity he had with technology.However, in other ways, it was entirely natural that Dad would embrace technology to share his love of knowledge with the world.  From Village Square to Global Village T. Vijayaraghavan, known simply as TVR to his friends, had an intellect as deep as his name was long and an unparalleled discipline that followed him everywhere his life took him. Born in 1930 in a small village in South India, Dad was the son of a homemaker and a brilliant barrister, whom he revered. The youngest of eight children, Dad grew up in the shadow of the British Empire, fueled by world events including the Great Depression and World Wars I and II. Dad’s fascination with technology came as a young boy when sound movies or “talkies” were invented. Transfixed by Hollywood classics, he spent his allowance pennies to get ice cream (he had a big sweet tooth) and movie tickets. He sat on the dusty ground in the village square on every chance he got, watching the talkies. Golden age hits starring the likes of Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, and Spencer Tracy sucked him into not only a lifelong passion for films but also a newfound reverence for the technology that allowed it to happen.Dad’s first brief job was as a journalist where he first learned touch typing but through most of his adulthood, like many in his generation in India, he went without personal tech. However, later on in life his frequent trips to the U.S. to spend time with his kids and grandkids rekindled the tech love from his childhood that would inspire and sustain him in his final days. The Two Loves of his Life  Under the tutelage of his father and a school teacher who capitulated and allowed him to sit in his older brother’s class instead of his own, Dad skipped two elementary school grades and eventually became the only sibling to go to college. Mom, on the other hand, never made it to college. She and Dad had an arranged marriage as is customary in India, when she was just 17. Nine years his junior, Mom was whip-smart and tough as nails but with a marshmallow heart. She was a feminist in her own right, paying our maid’s daughters’ school fees, urging them to get a college degree and resist marrying too early in life. I know Mom often chafed at being a homemaker and in another time and place, she might have become an architect. While Mom was at home forging our family, Dad was traveling all over the world for work and gaining a global perspective. He loved reading, had an encyclopedic command of history, politics, and economics, and could absorb and retain vast amounts of information. Though dad was better read and better traveled, Mom held up her own in their feisty relationship and he respected and loved her, though she drove him batty with her strong opinions and stubbornness. Dad taught Mom to become a serious newspaper reader, too. I’ll always remember them, first thing in the mornings, sitting and reading the papers together and drinking scalding hot strong Madras coffee. I’ll always remember them, first thing in the mornings, sitting and reading the papers together and drinking scalding hot strong Madras coffee. When my brother Ramesh and I and our families began sharing our love of Apple products with Dad and Mom, it was a match made in heaven for Dad. Tech skyrocketed Dad’s reading to the next level—and he would spend hours each day on his iPad, devouring more than a dozen newspapers and magazines online, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and more. Both his marriage to Mom and his relationship with his electronic devices (arranged by his kids) grew into true love. Mom was his first love, always. But his iPad was a close second. And that led to some tensions between them. Unlike Dad, Mom was not in love with tech, in fact, she was barely even in like. Her iPhone was more a means to an end. Initially tolerant of Dad’s intense focus on the treasure trove of reading—the digital candy assuaging his intellectual sweet tooth—Mom became irritated of their hold over him as the years passed.  “Always on your iPad,” she would exclaim. “I’m going to throw it away one day.”Dad knew Mom’s bark was

When Amelia Powers Gardner won political office as county clerk and auditor in Utah County, Utah, in January 2019, she was determined to fix what she viewed as the county’s archaic and dysfunctional voting mechanisms.Around that same time, nearly 800 miles northwest, Christine Walker, the long-time county clerk in Jackson County, Oregon, had been deploying various hardware and software products to revamp her county’s voting technology and processes with little success. She was ready for something new. Walker and Gardner don’t know each other. But when they each learned about a small Boston-based tech startup, called Voatz, that had built the first mobile voting app and platform secured by blockchain technology, they were immediately intrigued. And upon discovering that West Virginia and Colorado were already testing the app for absentee military voters overseas, the two election leaders were even more eager to put their counties on the map as trailblazers in online voting. “I like to be the person that’s kind of setting the pace, not just following along,” says Walker, who prides herself on her tech-savvy leadership. Gardner, a former Caterpillar executive, automotive technologist, and business efficiency expert, is similarly technologically inclined.  “It piqued my interest because not only is it blockchain and I’m a bit of a blockchain nerd,” Gardner says, “But also because it seems like a more secure, more simple way, more reliable way for these underserved and disenfranchised citizens to cast their votes.” The Reality, However, May Be Anything But Secure  Noble intentions aside, Walker and Gardner’s vote of confidence in Voatz may be misplaced, say members of the cybersecurity community who have repeatedly warned the U.S. government that the app is vulnerable to hacking. These experts, along with several members of Congress, have criticized Voatz for its failures in transparency, lack of accountability, and refusal to release its source code so that it can be better tested for security flaws.“I struggle to find anybody in the information security community that has anything good to say about them,” says Tarah Wheeler, a Belfer fellow in cybersecurity at Harvard University, an international security fellow at New America, and a Fulbright scholar.Voatz’s CEO and co-founder Nimit Sawhney asserts that his startup is deeply committed to security and that his mobile voting app is secured with the best “military-grade technology available, including biometric identification, cryptography, and blockchain.” He says the voting platform “has successfully defended itself against 100% of the cyber attacks directed at it.” Sawhney believes that, “a lot of claims have been theoretical: X, Y, Z could happen. And, in theory, a lot of bad things can happen with in-person voting and with postal voting as well. But we still, you know, use them.”But information security experts describe the conundrum with Internet voting as so “fundamental” and “inherent” that even the best cryptographers and systems security researchers have failed to solve it, literally for decades, despite intense and focused efforts. “Any product claiming to have solved this problem is therefore making an extraordinary claim,” says Michael Specter of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has extensively analyzed Voatz and other Internet voting technologies. “Attacks on Internet voting systems are scalable (allowing one attack to change many ballots rapidly and undetectably), remote (can be conducted from pretty much anywhere with an internet connection), and relatively cheap,” Specter says, whereas, “Attacks on in-person voting, if done properly with the right set of tools, is auditable and really expensive to attack, often requiring physical access and many human failures to change an election outcome.” Indeed, despite the scores of last-ditch, politically motivated, in-person voter fraud allegations leveled by former President Donald Trump and his attorneys in last year’s Presidential race, won by Joseph R. Biden, the Washington Post reported that “in a remarkable show of near-unanimity across the nation’s judiciary,” 86 judges ranging from state courts to the Supreme court strongly rejected every single fraud allegation. And the Department of Homeland Security declared the November 3rd elections as “the most secure in U.S. history.”   Between A Rock and A Hard Place The security concerns and controversies swirling around Voatz highlight the extraordinary challenges confronting the U.S. government as it attempts to modernize the nation’s archaic voting mechanisms at a time when voting rights are proving to be an increasingly explosive issue. That’s evidenced by the violent and bloody January 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol, instigated by Trump, culminating in his second, historic impeachment by the House of Representatives, with conviction proceedings to commence next week in the Senate. The Voatz saga exposes the deep rifts between tech startups, governments, and information security communities regarding the safety and efficacy of online voting—specifically mobile voting technologies. And it demonstrates the challenges confronting local elected officials such as Walker and Gardner, who find themselves between a rock and a hard place in evaluating and picking from the very limited choices of Internet voting technologies and parsing the often-opaque marketing claims of ambitious startups such as Voatz. These officials must balance the conflicting tensions between complying with federal law—which requires that electronic ballots must be sent to all military and disabled voters overseas—and laws in 32 states, including Utah, that also require the electronic return of ballots, all the while expanding access to underserved voters while at the same time ensuring ballot security and integrity. The alarming cyber vulnerabilities of American elections were first exposed by the 2016 Russian hacking in the U.S. presidential elections and led the National Academy of Sciences to issue a strongly worded report in 2018 that warned against sending electronic ballots by Internet. “No current technology,” the report read, “can guarantee their secrecy, security, and verifiability.” The continued boldfaced Russian, Chinese, and Iranian interference in last year’s presidential elections, in addition to the recent months-long SolarWinds hacking—reportedly Russian-led and penetrating multiple U.S. government agencies—only served to further exacerbate those concerns. Sawhney blames the decades-long institutional resistance against Internet voting for the blowback against Voatz.“Many researchers have taken an absolutist position declaring that Internet voting is not secure,” says Sawhney. “This blanket statement does not consider the recent developments in technology or advancements in security. The cost of holding back innovation in voting is continuing to