Obsolete systems

On the intersection of democracy and technology

Today’s post is less personal, more political than usual. If you’re new here, you can go back and read my previous posts, Adrift online and Where is my mind(‘s eye)?

Alexander Richard Wilson, 2021

Last week, I attended a small retreat about the intersection of democracy and technology in Southwest Harbor, Maine. I found myself in conversation with some seriously impressive humans leading on this issue, and I left feeling both urgency and hope.

The last time I was in Bar Harbor, I was visiting a friend in college. We drove a hot-boxed car nine hours overnight, only to get pulled over by a cop as soon as we crossed the state line. In the car, we were three people of color and one white person, just to set the scene. Though to be fair, we were also driving a Lincoln with tinted windows. The cop let us go only to pull us over a second time, several miles later, after he called for backup from the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency.

Needless to say, this year’s visit to Maine was much more pleasant. Not only do I have a fully developed prefrontal cortex now, but a new appreciation for the natural world as well as a healthy disdain for the police.

The retreat was centered around building relationships with each other and with our surrounding environment with the expectation that magic happens when organizers meet each other. We spent our days eating locally grown food, talking about the issues with our elections systems, and dreaming up the possibilities for a new kind of democracy.

My first memory of an election must be when I was 5 or 6 years old. My grandmother and I walked to the polling place in my hometown, and I watched her make some markings on a slip of paper. She folded the paper in half and dropped it through a narrow slit in a big box. I remember how important it felt. I didn’t step foot in a polling place again until I was 18 and voting myself for the first time.

As a young organizer, I used to scoff at people who did election work. What a waste of time. I was doing real organizing; elections were just a distraction. Many people on the left still feel this way.

Since then, I’ve knocked many doors in many states (rest assured!). I’ve texted and called thousands of voters, and I’ve volunteered to do deep canvassing (highly recommend!). I softened my black-and-white thinking about electoral organizing, and started to understand it as one way we can strategically shift power and build long-term power if we do our work effectively. This past week made it even more clear what’s at stake.

“If our communities understood socialism as access to affordable and quality housing, jobs that pay a decent wage, food on people’s tables, or even guaranteed income, everyone would love socialism. But socialism continues to live in the heads of the Left, not in our homes, communities, or workplaces.

Too often, when we engage in electoral politics we prioritize candidates over organizing. A smattering of progressive or even left candidates, without a strong base that demonstrates a mandate for change, does little to interrupt a political machine that enjoys hegemonic dominance due to lack of a clear, viable and sustained alternative.” – Alicia Garza

There are many brilliant people who have written incisive critique of how electoral organizing can be extractive when campaigns abandon communities in between elections. Others have written at length about why organizers shouldn’t neglect electoral organizing (including this comprehensive history on the relationship between community organizing and electoral politics). The urgency I feel at this moment isn’t about the tension between electoral and community organizing, but about the impending catastrophe in how we administer elections.

Among the many shortcomings in how we currently run elections, two stand out in particular: the gaps in people capacity and technology capacity. The estimate for the resources it would take to overhaul the technology, facilities, and staff required to run elections in this country is in the tens of billions of public dollars. Neither party is particularly interested in this undertaking.

First is a dire need for more robust pipelines for new and young people into public service work, and in particular into election administration jobs. I’m not talking about volunteer poll workers, rather the people at the state and local level who are responsible for conducting elections: maintaining voter registration records, setting up and testing voting machines, counting ballots, recruiting and training poll workers, preparation for emergency situations like a shortage of ballots, polling places that are locked on election morning, power failures, road closures, etc.

Managing an elections office is a full-time job with an incredibly complex list of responsibilities expected of a public servant. The average age of people in these jobs is 55. Most of us don’t come into contact with the people who run our elections, and most of us don’t even know these jobs exist.

The trauma and stress these public servants faced during the last presidential election on top of the aging demographics of this group has resulted in a mass exodus of people from these roles. More than 40% of election officials working next year's election will be staffing their very first presidential election. That’s bad news.

The situation becomes even more dire when we turn to technology capacity. In many counties all across the country, our elections rely on software that can only run on Windows 7. This operating system was launched in 2009. I’ll jog your memory—this was the year when Motorola Razr’s and BlackBerry phones were widely popular. Floppy disks were still being manufactured. Dozens of states today are still relying on technology that is no longer receiving security updates. 

On top of the crumbling infrastructure, far-right conspiracy theorists have pushed dozens of states to abandon the Electronic Registration Information Center, a critical data-sharing consortium that keeps voter rolls updated. The withdrawals are weakening one of our best tools for accurate voter information and secure election administration. Only 28 states remain in the consortium.

None of these election problems can be solved with policy alone. Policy wins don’t mean much without robust implementation—as an example, it’s been thirty years since we won the Americans with Disabilities Act, and yet 60% of polling places today are still not ADA-compliant. Instead, experts at organizations like the Institute for Responsive Government and the Center for Tech & Civic Life are urging for massive implementation efforts and investment in our elections administration.

The people we focus on during an election are usually the candidates on the ballot. But we can’t lose sight of the systems and the people who do the work of running these elections in the first place. Not just to celebrate them, but to give them resources to do their jobs and to encourage the next generation to join their ranks to stave off the authoritarians.