Can You Trust Technology?
What should we focus on?
Before I worked in computers, I was in love with engines. It started as a kid with retooling lawn mower-type engines for my first mini-bike and that quickly grew into modifying dirt bikes. Then ultimately it was car engines.
Between the ages of 13 and 21, I lost count of the number of engine swaps I was involved in. First, it was with friends and family, but then I started to go out on my own when I got hooked on doing “unusual swaps.”
One of my most memorable experiments was taking a small 1970 Datsun and swapping the Japanese 6-cylinder with a muscle car Chevy 8-cylinder. I worked on this car for months making this big engine fit in this little car. It was not my car, but I was so in love with what I was doing, I was just dreaming about taking this car out for a drive once it was done. The funny thing was I didn’t even have my driver’s license at that time.
I’ll never forget how it roared to life and shook the little car when we finally got the engine running. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, I exclaimed “It’s ALIVE!”
Much like the story of Dr. Frankenstein, I was also horrified by my creation once the owner showed up to take it for a quick test drive. We begged him to be careful since this small car was now extremely overpowered.
But in typical New Jersey bravado, the car’s owner jumped in the car and proceeded to floor the accelerator. The tiny stock tires filled the suburban street full of white smoke making only the tail lights of the small car barely visible. Then the loud roar of the engine was silenced by a loud crash.
We ran through the smoke to find the owner stumbling from the car that was now wrapped around a large tree near the end of the street. He was all right, but the car was a total loss.
I was infuriated and it was actually one of the last times I worked with this group of people. But instead of quitting what I was doing, it was a powerful experience I was afforded at the age of 15.
In the days after that incident, I thought of all the reasons the experiment went wrong. Was it the size of the tires? Was it the brakes? Was it the weight of the bigger engine that made the car difficult to steer? What could I have done differently???
Then as if a hand smacked me across the face, it dawned on me. My inner voice asked, “Did you ever consider the people you were working with? You trusted the owner when you took on this job. He completely ignored you when you told him to take it easy. Did he have to show off?”
That was the moment when people became disconnected from objects in my reality. I realized that objects don’t intentionally cause harm. Even if you were in a situation where for example, the brakes didn’t work on the car and it caused an accident. Was it the car’s fault or the person who put it together? Maybe the person driving could have avoided the accident.
From that point forward, I was more concerned about the people I chose to associate with. And I also immediately saw the similarities in the gun debate. I often found myself as a teenager arguing with teachers and other adults, about the merits of banning guns. After this lesson it was clear to me, it was not the gun’s fault it was involved in a crime. We should focus on the criminals and try to stop them from obtaining guns.
I wondered why people associated human traits with anything that was not living. Can you trust a car? Can you trust a computer? I think they inherit those traits from the people who assembled them.
Fast forward to the 2020 election and the current debate on electronic voting machines. Again I thought it was very odd, that a lot of the focus went immediately on the voting machines and voter rolls.
I watched the people involved. How did the officials react? How did the legislatures react?
One of the most motivating moments for me to get involved with election integrity in Florida was reading an article in the Orlando Sentinel by my Lake County Supervisor of Elections, Alan Hays. A year after 2020, as the concerned locals presented canvassing data to Hays, he fumed and blasted back that no one would be auditing “his election”. He wrote an article titled “Put Up or Shut Up.”
The moment I read that article, I was disgusted by the utter contempt a Constitutional Officer had for his constituents. “His Election?” The picture of him laughing pushed me off the sidelines. It was exactly at that moment, I said…”Oh… you SOB, if there is any fraud in this county, I’m going to find it.”
I immediately went out to find the local groups and get access to the Florida voter rolls.
But I want to be clear. My decision was based on the people in the process. Not the process. Good moral people would have acted totally differently even with the most broken or antiquated systems.
A moral person would have opened the records up for scrutiny and allowed locals to investigate. They would have recognized problems and set up ways to correct them. Most importantly, they would act as “Public Servants” and work to build trust with their constituents. That is the oath you take to be a Constitutional Officer in Florida.
On my journey within Election Integrity, I got into a few debates on the priorities to try and fix the issues. I immediately prioritized getting moral people to fill the positions of Supervisors of Elections. We have all heard the stories of George Soros filling Attorney Generals and Secretary of State positions. Do you have any faith that he or the people he got appointed stopped there? Soros focused on people.
When I started my first business, I wanted to help build businesses with new ideas. However, God has a way of having you repeat an experience over and over till you learn your lesson. One of the first projects I worked on was some of the first body monitoring devices ever developed back in the early 2000s. I worked for months developing the project and even had patent applications for the first uses of “gamification” as we developed a whole new way to encourage exercise with these devices.
After a year of hard work, I was exhilarated to see my software screens come to life and see LARGE people you would never dream of finding in a gym, waking up at 5 am to get there. But just like that powerful little Datsun, the whole project slammed right into a tree.
I was called into a special meeting by the owners of the tech to discuss my business partner. He was asking them to do something illegal so they were shutting down our project. They offered me a job, but they would be repurposing my invention to do weight loss.
I was devastated. I left my business partner after he repeatedly lied about what happened and I found him trying to do something illegal with another tech partner a few months after that.
A few weeks later, I opened up the local newspaper and saw his mug shot. He was being arrested for insurance fraud. Turns out, he was funding our business ventures with fake insurance policies that he collected money on, and then fabricated policies for locals.
The moral of the story and the lesson that finally got driven into my head is "People are the most important factor.” You can have the best technology and the best designs. You could even have smart people working and developing those projects. But if there is ANY corruption in the leadership of an organization if left untreated it will metastasize like a cancer and typically kill an organization.
I will tell you that my business partner was the most charming man. He drove around in expensive supercars and was always “dressed to the nines.” He donated to charities and on the surface looked like a pillar of his community.
But hindsight being 20-20, there were some red flags that I ignored. The problem at the time, like my engine swapping group, was I had more focus on the technology than the people I was working with.
So can you trust technology?
The machines will do what they are told, by the people who programmed them. If there were transparency through having an open source counting program you may have a slightly higher ability to trust them, but what if those well-designed machines are left in the hands of a corrupt or inept Supervisor of Elections? What if election workers pulled suitcases of ballots out and ran those extra ballots through the machine?
Again, I’m trying to drive home the point that no matter how complicated you make a process and how many checks you think you have, a cunning person will ALWAYS be able to circumvent the protections if they want to.
So what can we do?
I like to use the analogy of a stream when explaining how to fix problems to business owners. You want to go as far UP river as possible to reach the source of issues. And in my opinion, that source is the modern Republican and Democratic Parties. It’s my opinion we need to fix the parties and the candidates recruited and elected will be of higher moral character.
Even if a bad candidate was cunning enough to fool the parties, they would not last long. Think of all the money that was raised after the stolen election by the Republican Party. Was that money ever used to hire investigators or lawyers to help find the stolen election?
Again, it wasn’t a lack of resources or technology available. It was only the horrible people we left in those positions. So it is my opinion we need more focus on the political solution in reforming and refilling our political parties with good moral people who will steadfastly guard our Republic.
I have definitely learned my lesson. Focus on people you can trust…not technology.