Beyond the Ballot: Election Security Insights with Mark Listes

Secure Talk - Mark Listes

Justin Beals: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Secure Talk. It's your host, Justin Beals. This time, live, well, at least in person. By the time you hear this, it won't be live with my dear friend, Mark Listes. Mark, thank you so much for joining me in person.

Mark Listes: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Justin Beals: We don't get to do this as often, but I find it really helps in the discussion, and so I'm excited about our topic today, too.

Mark Listes: Me too.

Justin Beals: We're going to chat about election security.

Mark Listes: Yeah, there's nothing going on about these days.

Justin Beals: There's no big election. My television media algorithm isn't filled with YouTube videos from candidates or anything. No, it's not happening. Yeah. So, uh, maybe let's just catch up a little bit.

Two things: maybe start us. You're a deep expert in this space.  You, work with I believe for the Federal Election Commission at one point in time. Just remind us your background. 

Mark Listes: Almost, almost. So, uh, I'm a trained election attorney, campaign finance focus and political operations focus. And then, I worked at a place called the U. S. Election Assistance Commission, which is a counterpart to the F. E. C. The F.E.C. does campaign finance regulation, and the Election Assistance Commission, known as the E. A. C. Is what does the federal half of election administration, so there's like 6000 about 5600 different election jurisdictions in the country. And then there's one counterpart on the federal side, which is a very crazy ratio.

That kind of part is the Election Assistance Commission. I was the head of policy there. I was also the head of all of our national security work and our head strategic planner in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

I got tricked into thinking so.

Justin Beals: Mark, I was going to say,

Mark Listes: like, what

Justin Beals: What are you doing here?

Mark Listes: I'm getting to build Pendulum.

Justin Beals: That's exactly right. Catch us up on Pendulum. You're the CEO and founder. How's Pendulum?

Mark Listes: Yeah, thanks. And thanks for having me back. I mean, it's such a good podcast, and I love everything that you do.  I'm very grateful to get to do anything with you. But to have the opportunity to talk about Pendulum, it's been a big year for us.

We actually. Pendulum has won a few awards in the risk space. We also were a highlight at the Cannes Lion Festival this year, which was a really special moment for us, and I think speaks to some of the broader playability of our technology that's mostly focused on the influencer and brand reputation space, which we have a number of new offerings on and, particularly relevant to this conversation. We also have a new offering this year that we call election IQ. Which helps brands and companies understand the risk to their strategic planning and the reputation during the election cycle. It's a really cool proactive risk-sensing opportunity-sensing tool that we've been able to custom fit for this election cycle And helps people get up to speed and then set up basically war rooms for election-related risk and about 30 days.

Justin Beals: How intriguing

Mark Listes: it's been fun.

Justin Beals: Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. You got to strike while the iron's hot, too.

Mark Listes: Yeah, you know, and it's such a chaotic conversation right now. I mean, this is one of the most volatile election cycles that we've ever seen. It is, certainly one of the fastest moving, and we have a number of unique technological forces that are in this cycle, and because of that, we see a pretty big demand for people needing to understand where they sit, and all this kind of chaos of hurricane that sits around them, and understand it not just from, you know, their individual perspectives of who to vote for, but how to operate their business during this time,

Justin Beals: You certainly want to playbook, right? So you're not trying to think on your feet as much as know where to go, depending on what the outcomes look like.

Mark Listes: Well, we traditionally find in our ElectionIQ offering is that we help people buy time. Yeah, they understand the risk or the change in the landscape early. If their reputation is getting pulled into it, or their industry's reputation or a type of offering getting pulled into in a different way.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: You know, electric vehicles have been a very political conversation this time around. That's a great example of the type of conversation where like, literally, product offerings can get pulled into this in a very politicized way.

Understanding the dynamics of that and where your brand and your corporate planning sits within that. We found it to be pretty helpful to be able to get out early.

Justin Beals: Oh, that's excellent. Well, you know, we're not on the risk side as much as the mitigating the risk side with the compliance work. I think the big change for us at Strike Graph is that we recently launched a new A.I. tool called Verif A.I. and it is essentially like an internal auditor, and it's very dynamic. So, however, you design the security posture, It will change the model and then retest evidence-based upon that. That was really exciting. So that is really pretty fun. Wow. That sounds incredible to have good.

Okay. So, let's baseline elections a little bit. So we're going to, I feel like I should get the bill that's sitting on the capital steps in the cartoon from when we were kids. I'd be like, Hey, you want to talk to us a little bit about elections? So, Look, uh, I think they're, you know, we live in a form of democracy here in the United States, and election is a big part of that, right?

Mark Listes: Yeah, it is. I mean, I think it's one of the foundational kind of cornerstones of what it means to live in a representative democracy. Like, well, yeah, you have to have a potential for transition of power. The people need representation in that process, and then you have to have a peaceful transition of power.

So usually kind of the three legs of the stool, and the election is what makes all of that happen.

Justin Beals: It's interesting, you know, I read a book recently about early human civilization, pre-written civilization. And one of the things they point out is that it is likely that when people didn't like their leader, they could just leave. Because there was enough room to roam.

Mark Listes: Yeah. That's something we don't really have the option to do anymore.

Justin Beals: No, we don't have that lever I think a peaceful transfer of power is healthy.

Mark Listes: Sure, sure. And in some ways, that's kind of the way our party system is supposed to work. You're supposed to be able to leave the party, at least from your voting standpoint, but we don't see as much of that anymore.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it's gotten, uh, it's interesting, you know, very affective. Like this party is my affect, I must believe in it no matter what.

Mark Listes: And identity politics is alive and well.

Justin Beals: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I talked to people that are working in the government or have, and I think as a civil servant, they have a much more nuanced approach, right?

Mark Listes:Yeah.

Justin Beals:  Cause you might get a new boss.

Mark Listes: I think so. And I think that most civil servants that I've ever met are very good about checking the personality and the personhood at the door and doing the job that they have while they're in the office. But the reality is that at the end of the day, you might get a new boss.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: And it's really important for soul servants to separate those things out and be able to kind of like have your home life at home and have your, your kind of talk to your parents until you never to have talk politics over dinner.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: But then also do the job. While you're at work.

Justin Beals: It's funny, like the 20 25 years ago, Justin would have been like, the bureaucracy is the downfall of our society. But now today, when I speak to civil servants, i'm like, you guys are keeping the train on the track.

Mark Listes: Yeah, it's I think bureaucracy always gets a really bad name, yeah and I often for really good reasons. But there is a system that has to take place, and that has to run, and it has to be unbiased, and it has to be non-partisan. And that means that we need full time employees doing jobs. And they are often not the most fun, sexiest jobs that are out there, but they are really cool. Really important. Yeah, a continuation of democracy

Justin Beals: And they're the professionals that usually have the skill set to deliver on that work.The elected politician not quite so much.They're a representative. Yeah.

Mark Listes: No, that's not the elected politician's job. The elected politician's job is to represent the people who chose to put him or her in office  And that is not supposed to be the ability to affect the way the election runs. You want people to be able to pick the politician, not politicians to be able to pick people.

Justin Beals: A lot of this comes down to trust right?

Mark Listes: All of it

Justin Beals: All of it. Yeah, so we've had discourse in our, United States about whether or not we trust elections lately. In your mind, how critical is it that we trust our election process?

Mark Listes: Oh, that's probably the easiest question. We'll have to answer it. Right? I mean, it's paramount. Right?

If we don't trust the election, we lose faith in the people who are chosen to run the country. And when we lose faith, we lose the ability for those people to do the job in a way that connects to us as people. So, really, our day-to-day lives are affected by how much we trust the elections. So it's one of the most important things that we have, but it's a complicated equation.

I mean, we've seen that in recent history of some of the politics, but also just the way our election system works is exceedingly complex. And the way we count votes and the way that we manage this task, that is the American democracy, is hard, and hard work to understand.

Justin Beals: Yeah, if we don't trust it, we can get lack of participation, and then, people feel like they are not being represented. And I mean, let's look, let's face it a little bit. The idea of voting is a soft form of revolution in a way, right? I like it. Because the harder forms are a little more destructive.

Mark Listes: I'd put, I would put voting as a soft form of revolution on t shirt wear.

Justin Beals:  Okay. Next starter.

Mark Listes: Well, I don't know about the election space. That's tough business.

Justin Beals: It's on a t-shirt. So one of the things I thought we might talk about next is, and this is a classic for security, what are the vulnerabilities that we deal with? Yeah. Sure. And I thought we might. Capture this in three major aspects of election as a process.

And the first, uh, aspect I thought we might talk about some vulnerabilities is the pre vote before we ever vote. Yeah. Any vulnerabilities crop up in your mind in that arena?

Mark Listes: Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, when we think about what before voting means, that's something that has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: We used to think about election day, And it's still a concept that will play out this year. We'll have a big night with election night and all of the major news publications and TV stations will run election night, but a lot of votes will have already been cast and there's early voting. There's mail in voting.

What we've ended up with is a time window where Americans will cast their votes over. Many days rather than just one, So really, pre-voting is a pretty long timeline. And it's gotten really messy with what's pre-voting and what's during voting But there's vulnerabilities throughout, and I mean, I think as you focus on Strike Graph, right?

A lot of this is process-oriented to ensure compliance, but a lot of this is trust-based as we were just talking about, and I think when we look at the category of pre voting vulnerabilities, A lot of it is information-based.

A lot of it is malign actors or nefarious actors or even actors that are spreading information without nefarious intents starting to move and infect the way that people think about the voting process.

I think it's important to really carve out pre voting vulnerabilities into two categories. Okay. One of which is what we might talk about as mis and disinformation, that is intended to push one candidate or the other, and another category is Missing disinformation, that is intended to negatively affect the process of the voting process. And I think it's really important to call those out because one of them is intended to bring our entire system down. One of them is intended to advocate for a candidate or against the candidate.

Yeah, and we might think differently about these two. And I think that the biggest vulnerability the election system has is information spread that can be as nefarious as Mr. Disinformation but can also be much more nuanced information that convinces people that the election system is insecure and that they should not participate.

I'm not here, nor should anybody be at any point in time from a private business pushing anyone to vote one way or the other.

But we can all agree that higher participation is good for society.

Justin Beals: Absolutely.

Mark Listes: And that's the biggest pre-voting vulnerability. That's out there is getting populations to not vote, encouraging populations to not vote.

It's a really commonly used tactic by foreign adversaries. It's a commonly used tactic for nefarious actors domestically. There are all kinds of ways to do it, but that information spread is one of the biggest harms to this country's election system.

Justin Beals: Yeah, It's really intriguing to me because I read an article recently about companies in Germany that were a little bit worried about the rise of fascism again in the country, and had brought in training classes into their orgs on civic responsibility.

Because at Strike Graph,  in our culture, We basically tell people we want you to vote,  we want to provide space for you to vote, and if you need that space, tell us we will provide space for you to participate, you know, civically we think it's very valuable. But also We believe that you make a choice and that certainly, you should talk to your colleagues and friends about those choices that you make, but there's no corporate direction.

Mark Listes:It's great

Justin Beals: Not that I’m very good about creating

Mark Listes: Not every company feels that way.  There are a lot of companies out there and there's actually a substantial portion of us election regulation law that is intended to affect and reduce the amount of which companies can direct their employees to do things because it's a really tough relationship where employees have this ability or this, this tendency to think that if they don't vote the way that their employer wants them to vote that they could lose a job. And I mean, you can imagine like a shift worker in a factory thinking that way. This is the way it used to play out. And that is really detrimental to our election system running in the way that it should, which is representing the people, not the companies within it.

So,  it's great that you provide the access. It's even better that you don't, don't push them in one way or the other. Yeah.  for anybody watching at home, it's great. generally illegal to push your employees,  to put it vote one way or the other.

Justin Beals: Generally illegal from a lawyer means you could go to jail.

Mark Listes: It's non-legal advice. But that's it.  I mean, pre pre voting, it's, it's really interesting in that. There are a number of kind of ways to look at vulnerabilities in our system, right? There's the information flow of vulnerability, which is like, think of it as missing disinformation. There's the cyber vulnerabilities that are there, right?

There are electronic voting machines that exist in many jurisdictions. We rely on them for counting votes and collecting votes. And there's all kinds of processes to make sure that they're secure. But there are machines. In the process, right? So there's anything that has a digital footprint has some sort of vulnerability footprint, and then there are a number of other administrative vulnerabilities that are there, but unless you're talking about kind of like a latently hidden kind of cyber threat that just happens to be there at a time where people start voting vulnerabilities really with people,

Justin Beals: I think that's the one we've seen levered the most in the last decade.For sure. It is the pre vote voter education, things like that.

Mark Listes: And what's interesting is that that's not new, right? Yeah, it feels new to us because the decade prior, we didn't see it as much, and the decade prior to that we didn't see it as much So we have this recency bias where what we grew up in feels like what's normal  However, if you look at American history The information and the missing disinformation risk within elections is the number one risk through and through.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: And the thirties and forties and fifties, a lot of the regulations we have in place, we're talking about like, the employers, you know, to push people or the sensational news cycle that was there. Constantly leveraged. You can actually go all the way back to the very early campaigns that like mudslinging and missing this info there.

They've been around as almost as long as the country has been around. We got used to a world. In the 80s and the 90s where people were not using that as much for portions of the population, right? So it feels dill but actually it's kind of tried and true American politics.

Justin Beals:  I've had this sense of this but I'm glad that someone's confirming it for me because I was looking back into disinformation in, let's say, the 1800s, so early 19th century, and people could, you know, if you had a printing press, you could print whatever you wanted, and people would believe a lot of it.

It was a real issue with fraudulent bank notes, right? like we didn't have U.S. treasury notes at the time, so you could print up your own fake, fake notes and, and perpetrate fraud. And the same would goes with the stuff, the pamphlets, like pamphlet writing, was a big deal. And, uh, but then we all got editorial boards,  and Information got kind of, you know, metered in a way, but then we invented the internet, and now everybody can distribute anything they want to say once again.

Mark Listes: Yeah, exactly. There are, there are substantially fewer editorial and moderating components of our system right now, whether that's good or bad is I think something to be debated.

But the fact of the matter is that there are less points that can control the flow of information. I'll push you though. Actually, I think that in between your two steps there, there was a time where we had editorial boards, but they were full of machines that were pumping out missing this information

Justin Beals: Oh, yeah, I could see that

Mark Listes: And we  have times where really notable election effects have happened because of that the Dewey beats Truman moment is a huge one where Dewey was likely going to lose the election, but one of the major news publications published a headline that says Dewey beats Truman and the effect of that was that people don't vote.

When you think the elections over you don't go vote You And it starts to skew the results. And that was a time where we had editorial boards, where we had a pretty professionalized press when we had a lot of the things that we looked at and say like the nineties as kind of the way that we've learned how to trust news. But we were still seeing populations really pushed one way or the other because of the mis and disinfo.

Justin Beals: Yeah, absolutely fair. Thinking about the vulnerabilities in the actual voting, certainly, you mentioned,  you know, there's technology involved these days in a lot of voting, almost all voting on some level.

I know here in the state of Washington, we vote by mail  in the state of Georgia. We've got these really bad computer systems that they've put together after the hanging chat issue. Yes. But, you know, there's a chain of custody to the votes. I can think of all kinds of like data processing vulnerabilities that might exist.

Mark Listes: I mean, I think categorically you're, you're spot on. I think that for the most part. What I always try to encourage people to know about this step is that for the most part, the election system in the U. S. is incredibly secure.

it is a system that is incredibly complex. It is one that is very easy to get lost in and to start to really understand or misunderstand how things are working.

But for the most part, our election system is incredibly secure. That is not because there are no vulnerabilities. It's because the system has been designed for the vulnerabilities that exist. I think the other thing to call out in the very beginning is that there is not one system. Yeah, that's very true.

There are 5, 000 ish election jurisdictions in the country. So that means there are 5, 000 systems. And each state has the ability to affect how much control and centralization happens in that state for the processes that are followed. Georgia, for example, actually has a pretty unified system, but not the furthest end of the spectrum, but they follow some statewide practices. Instead you have like,  Wisconsin, which is a wonderful state run by like really great election administrators. Not the Georgia is not, but, um, in Wisconsin, Wisconsin is a home rule state.

And in home rule states, the elections are really run in a much more localized level, which means that you can have varying processes kind of from city to city to city and how things are being tabulated and how those counts are being secured and controlled.

So really, I mean, there are thousands of systems in this, what we call the U. S. Election System, and each one's gonna have their own kind of types of vulnerabilities. So I think if we talk about it, we have to talk about it kind of categorically, ] we can talk about it from a machine standpoint. A voting standpoint and we can look at it from kind of a secure of the count standpoint , which is a part of the system that's commonly not talked about

Justin Beals: the tally.

Mark Listes:Yeah. Yeah, and then also the referencing so generally there's kind of like a ledger that makes sure that you have duplication and they're not just like running around with a singular thumb drive that has the fate of democracy in it uh, and that is that's one of these areas where the way that we secure that is It's an incredibly complex cryptographic scheme that is enabled, right?

Something similar to what you would find in the cyberspace. So it's hard to understand. It's hard to build faith in things that are difficult to understand, but it's an important piece of the equation.

Justin Beals: Yeah. This is a constant tension. Uh, I think about voting machines specifically a lot of times then, you know,

Mark Listes:I don't know what you're talking about. Voting. Why? Why do I care? Right? But you've been talking about him for ages

Justin Beals:. It's been an interesting tension between for me, from my perspective, like open source versus closed source system. And I'm a big fan of, like, open source being able to look at code, like, I think I think trust is driven through transparency. It's just the most confidence boosting of all the tactics. Yeah, but yet so often we You know those that are trying to keep something secret lean towards obfuscation Instead of trusting and educating. It's the harder job. Maybe

Mark Listes: it is it is. I think it is the harder job.  It's interesting, right? So the technology in our election system is mostly vote tabulation It's a kind of egregious over categorization, but that's mostly what it is. It's vote tabulation and communication of those results. I mean, we think about, like what voting really is. I mean, we could all vote with a piece of paper, we could all vote with a thumbprint. We could all vote with anything that allows us to indicate that it was us and only us. That actually cast that vote that was there.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: So really what the machines are doing is they're presenting options and then recording that results accurately and Every bit of technology in the world has vulnerabilities in them.

if you have unlimited access to them, and the voting machines have certainly been the subject of a lot of scrutiny. And there are some famous cases where people brought voting machines into courts and tried to hack them live, and tried to prove this under the oversight of a judge, which is not something we see through a lot of other technology. I don't see. I mean, I don't see Dell and Apple's laptops being drug into a court for a live hacking presentation, maybe at DEF CON, but not this.

Justin Beals: Not, not for the judge.

Mark Listes: No, no. It's an incredible, it's an incredible amount of scrutiny that goes into these machines, and I'm not saying it's the wrong amount of scrutiny, But it is a lot.

Justin Beals: It is a simple, you know, in a way, it's an adding machine, right? Yes. One vote was one to this person. It's, it's not very complicated from a software perspective, but, you know, you take a small function and put 300 million people through it or attempt to. It has weird outcomes at times.

Mark Listes: I think, right, like, what's the cost of being wrong?

Yeah is the question which is to say it is a relatively simple concept of what the machine does needs to do. However, if my laptop doesn't turn on and I can restart it my cost of my laptop being wrong that moment was very low

Justin Beals: Yeah,

Mark Listes: If we mistabulate results in a jurisdiction and we end up with a different president That's pretty high cost of being wrong.

Justin Beals: Yea, I'd love how you and I always bring it back to risk

Mark Listes: I'd say most a lot of a lot of election administration is risk management. Yeah, it really is and I think that it's a really interesting category to talk about risk management. Something a lot of people don't know about election voting is that there is a  federal compliance standard for these machines that states can choose whether or not there's their machines in their state need to apply to It's not a federal regulation. It's actually a voluntary standard the federal government builds and then is puts out and then states Individually can choose whether or not each machine in their jurisdiction needs to comply with that standard.  But as we often look at, you know, NIST and MITRE and all of these kind of key players for cyber frameworks, if you look at the federal entities that help build and maintain that framework for the same ones

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: So the Election Assistance Commission has something called the VVSG, the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, that are maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

It is a incredibly high bar that the government holds itself to, that then these machines can be forced to comply with.

Every state doesn't require them, and there are other ways to build compliance standards. I'm not the person to say the federal government's the only way to get things done. However, there is a lot of work that goes into making sure that these relatively  simple concept machines function the way they should.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: The biggest thing we always hear people talk about is what happens if you can hack a machine. It's an interesting question, right? What happens if you can hack this machine? And I think that what scares people, which is, I think the big kind of load bearing question. Is that people don't understand the way that a lot of these kind of like adding machines work.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: And it's really difficult to verify and your average citizen shouldn't have to have a computer science degree to have faith in their elections. And the question is always posed in two, one of two different ways. The question for in voting vulnerabilities is either one, are there vulnerabilities in the elections?

Or in the, in the, um, in the voting machines, if you have unfettered access. Or the other way that the question is poses. Are there vulnerabilities in the election system in a live environment? And they're very different results.

As you might imagine, if I take my MacBook and give it to a dev and say, you can do whatever you want with this in isolation, and no one's going to interfere with you, they're probably gonna have a higher success rate of hacking into the computer than if they're trying to do that in a live environment.

The other component of this in the elections is that air gaffing is a big, big component of safety here. As it is with a lot of corporate cyber security, right? We're seeing, we're seeing the increase in rise of air gaps for cyber posture, large corporations, air gapping and the network of humans that need to transfer information.

In that environment is one of the biggest ways that we have security in these systems to protect against those vulnerabilities that do exist.

Justin Beals: Yeah, certainly in Georgia. I noticed, right? Like, I have to get a card. Then I take the card to the machine.

Mark Listes: Yeah,

Justin Beals: then the machine records what I tallied to the card, and then I take the card back. So, every in a way, those cards are that air gapping modality, right? Like, you got my vote against your vote. Like, they're on 2 different cards at least. Right? So when they do the tally, they can retally the cards. Yeah. it doesn't ameliorate any digital vulnerability in that system, but I think to your point, segmenting the information is really critical to minimizing any issue.

I read an article in preparation for this conversation about Web 3 and voting because I was kind of interested if the blockchain technology has gotten really farther, but the fundamental breakdown for me is this, it's one singular system, despite the fact that you've distributed a ledger, if you get enough of them to agree, you've changed the ledger.

Mark Listes: Yes, it's a really interesting question. So did you read, was Estonia a part of,is Estonia utilizing this?. So, Estonia is a really interesting, really interesting example. Estonia and a couple of other countries started to claim that they used blockchain technology for voting. How much they really lived into that promise, I think is open for debate.

And Estonia has taken different positions on this at times. However, there are some countries in the world that stand out as technical innovators in the field of voting, and the question is always can we increase transparency? Can we increase trust, and help modernize the way that we vote?

Justin Beals: Yeah,

Mark Listes: And If you can help modernize the way you vote. Maybe more people can vote right if we make it less arduous if we make it more accessible, then the single mom who's trying to take time off from her shift work to be able to go vote will be able to do that rather than trying to weigh whether or not she's going to get as many groceries this week to be able to cast that vote, which we can all agree is a situation we're trying to avoid.

Absolutely trying to avoid. Absolutely. So these countries have tried distributed ledger systems. They've tried distributed token systems. There's a really interesting, I think it was Estonia that did this, but I may have the exact reference wrong. There's a country that does the ceremony at the beginning of their election season where they take 12 keys.

And each key can decrypt enough  of the ledger to be able to verify that it is functioning correctly, but not show individuals votes. And they give them to 12 random citizens in the country.And they do this huge ceremony every year, and they hand out these keys, and at the end of the, at the end of it, you're able to then, you give the key back, and they destroy it, but throughout that entire cycle, you've had these 12 random points of verification that's built in. So there's some really interesting innovation.

Justin Beals: I love that. Yeah. I mean, this is like Isaac Asimov's foundation like in real time. So cool! I know.

Mark Listes: It is it is it feels very kind of sci-fi  futuristic in this it also I think puts in a really interesting type of verification philosophy that we're truly going to randomize and we're going to make more accessible the idea that we can check that the system is working well.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: Now, I think important details in this every one of these countries that are identified as innovative leaders in the field of elections, are so substantially smaller than the U. S. And if I have my memory  serving me correctly, they're all smaller than the state of New York. So, which includes, right, of course, one of our biggest metropolitan areas, but scale in our system is a really interesting question. And it's not as easy to say it worked there, so it will work here.

And their systems work a little bit different for how they elect how they elect their leaders Yeah, but I do think it's important for us to be able to adopt technology and innovation to be able to open up accessibility to voting the question though And this is always the question we seem to get to in the U.S.Is that as you were talking about before? Transparency is a big part of this.

Understanding is often what leads to belief. And if you're using an advanced cryptography or you're using an advanced standard, the average citizen doesn't really understand why their votes are secure. And when you have lack of understanding, or you have a really complex topic that needs to be distilled into something really simple, the opportunity for injection of mis and disinformation is incredibly high.

And that is a really difficult question in the U. S., which is to say, not only does the election system need to be secure, We all need to be able to believe that it's secure, and we need reason to believe that it's secure, and all three of those things need to be true. And that last one's pretty tough.

Justin Beals: Yeah, especially, I mean, I get the United States is big, but it's also very heterogeneous. You know, 5000 plus election commissions is a perfect example of, you know, South Georgia is different than Metro Atlanta. And, you know, where I live closer to Bellingham is a slightly different culture than here in downtown Seattle.

Yeah. And, and you need to be able to have those thousands of election commissions. To help a local constituency have some belief in what's going on.

Mark Listes: You do, you do and they're people of all education levels and education levels should not be determined on whether or not you can believe in the election We should all be able to believe in it.

We all need to have access. We need to be able to have each culture understand and believe in the process I think we we learned during the covid times about how localized people are beliefs and community beliefs can develop these pockets that are really prone for missing disinformation. Yeah. There are lessons that we learn the hard way, but the standard we have to hold ourselves to is this incredibly high one.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: Which is that we believe in the election and that we want to vote in it, because we don't have compulsory voting.

A lot of countries have compulsory voting. I'm not here to argue that we should. But once you remove compulsory voting from the equation, you then have to ask yourself the question, Why are people going to vote or not vote?

And there's a lot of reasons, legitimate reasons for people to vote or not vote. Some people will argue that not voting is a First Amendment freedom of speech. But people should want to feel, should want to vote because they feel like their voice is heard. And that's something we can agree on.

Justin Beals: Yeah. I don't want it to be, I have a friend who feels this way. Very punk rock. Yeah. Uh, young man. Uh, um, my friend Jeff and, um, it's been hard for him to trust the system. And so, whatever. It's his emotional space. Sure. I'm comfortable with it. Uh, I feel a sense of civic responsibility to be engaged. On some level and participate.

Mark Listes: Good. I think everyone should vote. Please. That's you should all vote this year. You should vote in local elections and national elections. It's incredibly important for your voice to be heard.

Justin Beals: Don't do it illegally. Not more than once.

Mark Listes: That's very illegal.

Justin Beals: Yeah, you know, one thing that you mentioned about the 12  key holders.Is just how ritualized elections could be in our civic fabric and I think how that's really valuable like we need a ritual to our, the fabric of our culture in a way and we could celebrate it more.

Mark Listes: We could. Yeah, we could. There are states that have tried voting day. There are states that have tried to celebrate individuals and try to create this kind of moment.This cultural moment. It's something that we in the US struggle with.

Justin Beals: Yeah,

Mark Listes: It is. And I think that there's a lot of reasons behind why we struggle with it. But for us, voting feels like a chore often. And that I think is something that's like a real shame.

Justin Beals: Yeah,

Mark Listes: I worked in a period of my life, helping people get their voting rights back.

And I can tell you, once you've lost your voting right, you don't look at as a chore. It's something that you can be incredibly happy to have access to again because it means that the system then has to pay attention to.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it's different than a dollar, right? Yeah, like, it is more equitable it  I realized with citizensunited that some of this has changed for us in the United States, but, and I'm speaking now about the citizens united ruling from the supreme court, but this idea that it can't just be the most powerful among us that are making decisions, but we as a shared population get to kind of reset, at least for a moment, um, the direction of the government on some level,

Mark Listes: which has not always been the case in this country, right?

Justin Beals: That's true.

Mark Listes: And I think history is really important here. When this country was founded, the average citizen actually had indirect representation for most of the voting process that was there, if they even had access to voting. Mostly it was white male landowners in the beginning, and even as that pie started to expand to other populations, The way we voted and who we voted for, and then this indirect chain of basically the average citizen would vote for a representative that would vote for someone else. And that's how we would end up with most of our government.

That's the way we originally positioned and we over the history of this country have expanded both the pie of who can vote rightfully so, and the amount of direct representation that we have. And I think that that's a trajectory that's easy to lose track of an easy to devalue when we lose track of. But it's been a hard fought for hundreds of years for individuals to have their voice heard all the way up to the president. And I think when we think about the fight that has gone into that, we can start to place more value and celebrate the fact that we are allowed to.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it is feeling a little bit like the past, but the Civil Rights Act wasn't that long ago.. You know, Dred Scott wasn't that long ago. Certainly where I grew up, there's been significant change in who gets to vote in Atlanta, Georgia, and how their voice is heard, and significant change in the representation.That we see at, you know, at the government level.

Mark Listes: It's interesting. It's, you know, I grew up in the South as well, right? And it's easy for us to think. I think about the kind of like bastion Southern states is the highest concentration of where a lot of these problems existed. But if you look at the jurisdiction breakdown of the Voting Rights Act and the jurisdictions that became covered jurisdictions on the Voting Rights Act, actually a substantial, almost 50 percent of them are outside of the South.

And actually a lot of them are in what we think of as the opposite. It's the end of the political spectrum. It was everywhere. And I think what we're pulling at in this is that what we're really talking about is the reins to power in this country, and anything that can interrupt the responsibility of those elected to the people anywhere and everywhere in our system is something that means that those people are no longer taking care of those people are no longer have a government that works for them. It doesn't matter if you're left or you're right. You're conservative. You're liberal. We all deserve to have a government that knows that we're there and is thinking about us on a day to day basis.

Justin Beals: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to celebrate the South here for a little bit. I tell people all the time that like, the Southeast has Southeast United States for international listeners. Thank you.  the Southeast United States has, has this, reputation of being a little backwards. Sure redneck is not an uncommon term, but I tell people all the time that if you want to see the front lines of this progress around rights and our civics that the south has been working hard at it for hundreds of years and if you want to know, people like Stacey Abrrams and her organization capabilities, Ossoff I'm very proud of and we have a history with people like Jimmy Carter um that obviously I'm revealing my politics a little bit, but I just am really proud at the progress the south has made.

Mark Listes: Yeah, I think so, I mean, I think that the south has made a lot of changes in the way that it has looked at a lot of its social policy and it has allowed access to resources and represented representation to a substantially higher portion of the population than it ever has in the past.

There's still a lot of progress to be made, of course, that being said it's also it's interesting and that like I think the the south becomes this like heat sink for problems or it's like well, those are southern problems,

Justin Beals: right?

Mark Listes: But really what that is is a lot of the country's saying well, they're not here, and that actually I think inhibits the progress that has to be made other places.

Yeah as well and the south produces a lot of great things, so does the west and so does the northeast and all the problems, but the south is the best, gosh, it just really attracts the animosity of many things.

Justin Beals: Well, it's you know,I'd like to think also about places that have been through a substantial war, and even though the civil war was a long time ago It ravaged everyone that lived through it and, it leaves a scar in those places.

Mark Listes: Yeah, it does,

Justin Beals: Okay, so we have some emerging issues for election. I thought we might touch on a couple these are recent topics and you can say, I don't know anything about that Justin or yeah I have a little bit of an opinion All right.

Mark Listes: I don't know anything about it feels like that's the safest thing here.

Justin Beals: I gave you an easy.

Mark Listes:  Yeah, Thank you

Justin Beals: You're welcome. So, recently it was revealed,  many of the investors that help  Musk take over Twitter. Turned into X now and what was, I guess I should have been shocked.  But it's a little shocking was it seems like a number of russian oligarchs were on the list and I feel like we have this pre-vote issue again. How do you how do you feel about this type of thing?

Mark Listes: I think much like the south is an easy heat sink I think the large platforms are too. I think that anytime society adopts something as its town hall, we have to look at it with a responsibility.

However, at the same time, I think that it's really easy to say, well, if we removed foreign money from Twitter, then democracy would be better. There's not a lot of data that shows that, right? And you call back to kind of the earlier conversation we're having about early days, holy U.S-owned U.S citizen-led newspapers that were still pumping out mis and disinformation.

And. I offer this to say it's not that foreign influence and U. S. companies and U. S. companies that are really places where people gather isn't something that we have to watch. However, break break also removing it isn't a complete fix the problem. I think that we've got to understand that these major platforms have a role in each of our individual lives at the same time, they're not the only way people consume information. Definitely not anymore. Now, I mean, at Pendulum, we cover information out of 25 different platforms.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: And X actually has some of the lowest viewership [ out of any of them.

Justin Beals: Don't tell them that.

Mark Listes: I think they're well aware these days. They haven't told their boss, maybe.

Yeah. But it's interesting, right? So, there's a lot of federal regulation that regulates the amount of effect that foreign adversaries can have on U. S. companies. Yeah. In theory, if those regulations are working, this foreign ownership in X isn't a problem. The question is, does it work? And does it work in a world that takes account for what X and Meta and BitChute, and Rumble, and Gab, and all of these platforms are, which is this hyper fast way to communicate.

Justin Beals: Yeah.

Mark Listes: I think the moment that we see that any sort of foreign adversary has had effect on the algorithm is the moment that this is completely, completely out of bounds. I think we need to understand a little bit more to be able to really make a judgment call though.

Justin Beals: Let me put this forward. I think you and I have a sense of ethics and the work we do.

And one of the things that I'm always worried about is undermining the trust in our product. And I, I don't think that the CEO of X considers the relative trust or the undermining of that trust with their platform.

Mark Listes: Musk is an outspoken proponent of the idea that any form of moderation Is censorship.

Justin Beals: Yeah,

Mark Listes: It's a line that he's actually started using pretty regular these days If he holds true that line, then that means that he's not pushing the needle for the U.S., it doesn't mean that he's pushing the needle for the Russians, it doesn't mean that he's pushing the needle for the Chinese or the Iranians or anybody else that's out there. I think if that is the case, then he's owns a platform that is truly unmoderated and unbiased and we should all take as much stock in it as we should the random voice that we hear is somebody yells down the street.

If that's not the case, and the needle is being moved one way or the other we have to have real conversations about the way that that platform is allowed to have access to the U.S. population, we cannot allow at any point in time a foreign adversary to affect nefariously affect the population of the United States in the way that we think you In the way that we process and the way that we think about issues, because the information we consume is effectively the source code the decisions we're going to make.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it's our reality It is yeah, and we're programmed by the media that we consume.

Mark Listes: Yeah, do I think that the only way to help have a healthy reality is for only us money to be in a company? No,, but do I think that the risk increases every time that somebody connected to a foreign adversary that has a history of influencing U.S.elections? Yeah, absolutely.

Justin Beals: Okay, one other one that has cropped up recently. The Georgia State Election Board has a number of board members that have been very pro-Trump and also I think talked about um that the issues with the prior election and felt like it was a fraudulent election, so the Democrats in the state of Georgia are suing to have them removed, and even Brian Kemp, the GOP governor in the state has expressed concern about them as well.

So, this seems to be some level of bipartisan issue that would appear so yeah, having worked with election boards in the past, you know is this good? Are we working through some issues here? Is this, you know painful stomach, but we're gonna be okay ?

Mark Listes:  Yeah, I think so. I think we're gonna be okay. Genuinely.I think we're gonna be okay. One of the interesting things about elections is that it is effectively like a giant law and economics framework that we administer through technology, but the only way it works is it works for people and by the functioning of human beings. And here in the U. S., we have this added layer over the top that is the electoral college, and we have this, these slates of electors that come out of individual states.

And that means that there's just more of a human influence within the system. For that reason, we have regulation that allows people to examine who the humans are at any point, whether or not we're talking about the election director, the secretary of state or the slate of electors, and sometimes the people are going to be the people we want them to be,and sometimes they're not.

I think what we're seeing right now is that Georgia is focusing us on the potential that people in these seats could not be who we want them to be, and by that I don't mean picking left or picking right but rather picking what the population is voted for. And I think that that makes us uncomfortable.

We're forced to look at the reality of what it means to have human beings in the system, but that doesn't mean the system is necessarily broken We're just now have to watch the second half of it play out and make sure that the system is examining those people for the right reasons, examining those people for reasons of legitimacy andmaking sure there's no impropriety And if they pass, they pass. If they don't pass they don't pass. But there's a reason we have courts.

Justin Beals: I mean, it seems to me like we want people whose values are a fair and effective election. Above and beyond anything else, right?  that that's their goal. No, no winners or losers to them other than if they didn't, uh, weren't able to effectively pull off a great election.

Mark Listes:  I love the phrase that society begins when men plant trees they won't sit beneath, and I think elections is the perfect quintessential example of that playing out. Yeah, we have to be planting things that are better for society regardless of who sits underneath them in the future, and here maybe we have some people that share that philosophy. Maybe we don't .

Justin Beals: Mark, I'm like uplifted now You and I are out planting trees

Mark Listes: I feel like I'm everybody's doom and gloom person. I don't get the uplifted comment a whole lot.

Justin Beals: You know the role of the CEO is a bad news role. It's so great to have you back on the podcast with us as such a great colleague, friend, and  and maybe we'll do a post election one of these and, and see how things went.

Mark Listes: I'd love to. Thank you so much for having me and thanks for everything you do at StrikeGraph. It's an incredible company. Everybody should use Strike Graph.  And if you have any questions about the election or the reputation in the election and how politics are affecting your company, like, please let us know.

Justin Beals: Thank you. Absolutely. Pendulum. Amazing technology.  It is a little mind-blowing. I love it. And, um, Mark, we'll talk again soon. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. Thank you.