Ep 16: Harri Hursti | Ask 'is it true?' even when you like the message

As the United States enters quite possibly its most tumultuous presidential election ever, I welcome hacker-for-good and election interference expert Harri Hursti to the show this week for a quick-hitting download on what to expect in the coming days and weeks.

Among many other topics surrounding this year's election, I point-blank ask Harri: Is there any reason to believe the results of the election will be illegitimate. Listen for Harri's answer, plus so much more wisdom and insight.

Follow Harri at https://twitter.com/harrihursti.

Transcript

Michael Ashford:
How busy is the time for you these days in the final days of the election?

Harri Hursti:
So every single year the election is different. And this year there is a unusual amount of issues in Atlanta. And that's why I have been basically in Atlanta for two and a half months for the primaries. And there has been a various of special elections. So spending time here, and Atlanta and Georgia is in an unusual situation. Because a year ago, Josh made a very good order. Colonel Josh ordered all the, [inaudible 00:01:34] ordered the full system, which was used here to be scrapped and replaced. Unfortunately, the state decided that instead of going in the simplest system, which would have been also the safest, handmade paper ballots, they decided to implement the most complex system probably in the U.S. and most expensive system. And tried to roll it out in the presidential election year.

So there have been a constant string of issues here, mainly the issues are causing long lines and annoyance in that way to the voters. But people are very patient here and standing in line five to eight hours. People are standing in line five to eight hours just to get to vote. So I don't think it's acceptable, but people are, really wanting to vote, which is good.

Michael Ashford:
Yeah. You've been through so many different elections and been involved in so many different ways. How do you judge the turnout that you're seeing so far?

Harri Hursti:
So I have seen a high turnout in local elections. This is really unusual because it is obviously a major election. At the same time, I would like to point out that in Europe and in the international press, it's very often a notation that Americans have low turnouts and Americans are not interested to vote. And, have that negative connotation while the reality here is that people are trying to vote. They just don't necessarily be able to. In June, a special election which was on Tuesday as always, a number of polling locations where I went the post hours after the polls were supposed to be open, they still haven't been able to open the polls and if you are on schedule, you are planning to vote on a lunch break, or if you have planned to vote before you go to work, or after work, before you get your kids out of school, all of a sudden having four-hour line is unacceptable.

And again, in the news, we see long lines and that's of course, a visibly saying this is bad, but especially now in the early voting, my hotel is across the street from one of the polling locations. So I have been going there almost daily to see how things are progressing. Number of days I clocked you cannot wait in that polling location inside. And it's three walls are glass. So from 370 degrees, you can test outside watch what is going on inside. So a number of times I was observing that almost 20 minutes, 17, 18 minutes time from when you get in, before you even get to start to vote, that's how long it took this check you are in. So again, I was observing one hour when they got seven new voters in in the whole hour. So 30 people line is not impressive in the picture, but if the line is not moving, it can be very long line.

Michael Ashford:
Yeah, absolutely. What is the biggest threat or issue that in the final days of an election like this, what are the biggest threats or issues that you and your team have seen or dealt with?

Harri Hursti:
So the story right now is the voter check-in. No problems are acceptable problems, but if you look the grand picture right now, the real big issue is voter check-in and there has been a number of different explanations, and there have been number of times when it has been claimed that the problem has been solved. Again, I just came from Ponce De Leon library location, long line outside. Really the line was moving very slowly and check-in was again, the bottleneck, half of the voting ballot marking devices were unattended. There was no voter because they just simply cannot get people in to vote.

So, even when the state has number of times made a claim that the problem has been solved, it's not solved. The lines are still long and you end up, the problem really is the check-in process part. Then when the actual election day happens, the process on the election day is going to be different. One part of the process used today, it's not going to be any more there, hopefully that helps the lines, but we'll see. So in Atlanta, that's the story. Of course, in the other news, it has been widely publicized that one of the counties north of Atlanta called Hall County has a ransomware, which is preventing them to do a signature checks. Again, since one of the systems are usually used by more than one county. There's no clarity right now, is the ransomware only isolated to one county, or is that a one county which is telling what's going on and the problem is actually more widespread? Nobody knows. But what I'm trying to convey and communicate is there is not a single problem, there's a lot of problems there. Some problems are bigger, some problems might be local, but the unresolved is a long lines in many places.

Michael Ashford:
Harri, what about election interference, are you seeing instances of that? And are they domestic or foreign threats that, if you are seeing them, that you're witnessing?

Harri Hursti:
Now, if you're talking electronic interference as a social media, influence operations, if you may, I guess, that is very visible. There are a completely new kinds of information campaigns, which best of my knowledge either are so small or not reported that in 2016, I didn't hear more than one isolated or two isolated instances. And what I'm talking is influence operations, which are targeting the relatives of a U.S. citizen living abroad. And so there's now a misinformation and information operations, which are not targeting people living in the U.S. for various reasons. Yet the target is U.S. elections in influence operations. So I think that's a new thing. And if you logically think if that is where you are going, that means that all the other activities up to, because that is not a wide market for anyone to add that.

Michael Ashford:
Is election interference, has it always been as prevalent as it's being portrayed right now? Or is this simply a means that we have so much information coming at us?

Harri Hursti:
I think it's a combination of a lot of things. So influence operations are, influence operation elections have been going on widely documented since the second World War. This happened in paper pamphlets in the 50s and 60s with a pirate radio stations in the 60s, 70s, early 80s, all of this has been going on, but those have been a blanket cast operation. You cannot target, if you park your pirate radio station in international borders, outside of the nation's borders, it's then anyone who goes into the channel. What social media is really changing is mostly, it allows the misinformation be targeted, but there's the other thing, which is a, just what the social media is. Social media is an advertising platform. And that means that the operators of the platform, want to keep you spending as much time as possible on their platform.

We as humans, we like when things are agreeing with us and very few people have critical thinking and are happy when things are not agreeing when they are disagreeing with you. So for this reason, social media operator’s algorithms are sending you messages, which are agreeing with you and creating these information bubbles, which are amplifying themselves. Of course, what this creates is the illusion people around me are agreeing, which also creates a lower barrier to retweet and repost everything you have seen. So it actually gives free boost to all information once you create this kind of bubble.

And the key part here is that, what we already know from the Congressional hearings of 2016 and everything when I presented, the messages which are used for political influence, especially if you look the Cambridge Analytica messages, you don't actually by first glance understand this is a political message. It's not clear from the first glance that this is targeting to discourage one candidate or boost another candidate. Because the message itself is hidden through other things. We also always in social media because we are confirmation-bias animals, intellectually we know that when you go to Facebook or when you go to Twitter, you don't see the same messages than your friends. We intellectually know that that's not true, but emotionally we think that we all see the same messages. And that fallacy that our monkey brain not being fine-tuned to this is part of the reason what creates, why the information operations and social media are so powerful and so contagious.

And the big key here is the contagious. And I think one thing, what we have, we have greatly missed is that when the propaganda misinformation operations were done with a more traditional means, we were teaching our youngest in the school and older in different ways to exercise a source critic, ask yourself a question, is this credible source? Is this message authentic? When social media happened we lost that. And we really don't have a program today to train people to have a human firewall, to have a critical thinking. When we see a message which we like, the question is, even when I like this message, is it true?

Michael Ashford:
Yeah. And I just have a couple more questions, because I know you're busy and have to get out of here, but I did want to ask that, what can we as everyday Americans do? You just mentioned asking the question, even if we like what we see, is it true? Are there other recommendations that you can provide us in these final days of the election?

Harri Hursti:
I think the number one is ask yourself, is it true? And especially before you have asked that question, resist the temptation to share it. But I think the most important is to know what we can reasonably expect for the election day. First of all, every state has different laws. And there are states and counties where the law allows opening of the absentee ballots and opening the mail-in ballots only election day. So there can be millions of letters which cannot be opened until election day. If you look how jurisdictions work, it means that small jurisdictions, which are quite often in a rural area, those are the ones which can report early and they can report very quickly the results. While cities and large counties, those will be coming in late. And especially if it's an area where they cannot even start to cross the mailing modes that can be easily three, four days before they can produce a comprehensive results.

So one thing is to expect a long delay before the results are wide enough that you can call the election. The second thing is again, since different size of counties tend to have different demographics. Cities are, by and large, different than rural area in their demographics and political demographics. So that means also that the results will, during the count process progressing, the results will live in a way we haven't seen before. And the way we haven't seen it before is because of the long delays. In the primary, there was a number of cities, including in New York, there were wild swings, all of a sudden double-digit swing in the middle of the county. Which was a rise, a lot of eyebrows. Well, how is possible that there's this double-digit swing, in a day two or day three of the counting?

Well, interestingly enough, when the analysis was made that 15-percent swing in a sense has always been there. It is just when the results came so quickly. So many different results came at the same time that they are canceling the statistical multiplexing, getting so many different things at the same time. Just even it out you didn't see that swing, but the swing was there it just was between the commercial break, during the commercial break, it would already evens out. Now when we are expecting, instead of hours, days, a lot of things which we didn't see but were always there become visible as these people haven't seen those before. I'm absolutely certain, a bad actors with A+ operations, will be pointing to these things and calling them animals and claiming that the smoking gun or a fraud or whatnot. It's not, it's just the way that more things have become visible than ever before.

Michael Ashford:
With the Supreme Court's decision to not allow voters in Wisconsin to have their ballots counted if they've been postmarked by election day but received after election day, is that ultimately the right thing or a good thing in your opinion?

Harri Hursti:
Absentee, balloting and mail-in voting has been around in United States for 150 years. It has been used in the Vietnam war, Korea war, World War II, World War I and Civil War. There is a special class of voters called UOCAVA voters, uniformed and overseas voter, and then they have a special law called UOCAVA Voters Act. There have been never a requirement that your ballot has to be arriving on the election day. And basically, if you are saying that the all voters their ballots have to be in by election day, you're for example, saying, oh, we don't...overseas military active duty military, well, sorry you cannot, your vote doesn't count. I don't know if this [court ruling] has an exempt saying, oh by the way, if you are overseas military voters, then your ballot can arrive late. If that is the case, now you are in the situation where all voters are not treated equally. All Americans should be treated equally. So I think the idea of making a new interpretations is problematic.

And, especially in the questions being raised how U.S. postal service through both pandemic and the delays in data and other ways might be causing delays in delivery of ballots. I think that's a controversial decision right now. I cannot get back to my state to vote this year. It took me a long time to get my absentee ballot. And, I hope my ballot counts when I'm mailing it back, I'm mailing it back week ahead of time. But, I wasn't expecting, it took that long to get the ballot here. I literally received my ballot on Friday.

Michael Ashford:
Wow. Yeah. Get it in as soon as you can right, for everyone. Harri, last question for you and I'll let you go. Is there any reason to believe that the results of this election will be illegitimate in any way?

Harri Hursti:
So my answer to that is that we are more likely to have a false claim that something was wrong than anything else. And unfortunately, our system is not very well suited to prove that nothing happened and defend itself against a false claims. And because of mail-in balloting, which is a paper ballot, we are actually in a much better shape than in previous elections, because now there's more votes are cast in the permanent media, which means that you can audit, you can figure out if there's a question of the results, honest results correct, you can always revisit the ballots and count them. And also, a lot of the voters don't know that most of the United States have mail-in ballots and absentee ballots. They offer a tracking system, like here in Georgia. You can actually track your mail-in ballot. Has it arrived? So, I think we are in a good shape. And, it's not perfect and it has to improve, but under the circumstances we are in a better shape than 2016.

Michael Ashford:
That's wonderful to hear Harri and thank you for all the work that you do. I'll let you get to lunch, sir, but thank you so much for your time. I greatly appreciate your insight on what is going to be a crazy next week for us, right?

Harri Hursti:
It's going to be wild ride.

Michael Ashford:
Thank you so much, sir. Take care.

Harri Hursti:
Thank you, you too. Bye.