ind of instant runoff voting works through a series of eliminations this is actually a snapshot from the last OSI election but I can actually show it to you in a lot more detail and so what happens is you gradually eliminate instant runoff algorithms to work a variety of ways this one is actually what's called Scottish IRV and so with Scottish IRV first you look for any candidates who already have above a majority threshold of votes and there are anything that they have over that majority are called excess votes and those get redistributed and if that pushes anybody over the majority they're also one of the candidates and if not then you eliminate the person who got the lowest preference and redistribute their votes and keep going from there Scottish is one of the more complicated systems for IRV most of the time you just take the lowest vote get a redistribute their votes then keep going up until you've narrowed it down to the number of candidates that you have so if somebody has the lowest number of first place votes then you eliminate them from the list of candidates and you look at what their second place votes are and you take those second place votes and you redistribute those to the other candidates and then you recalculate whose first, second, third, etc in what way how is that any different from a group of people deciding to vote for a particular person in a plurality election I'm going to say that's called voting and that's called campaigning basically the one way that political parties have rank choice voting is if it's only one, two, three rank choice voting, we're only ranking say the first three candidates they'll stuff the ballot with a bunch of likely looking extra candidates in order to prevent the candidates they don't want to win from grabbing those number two and number three spots yeah, yep now rank choice is a little bit different because first of all in rank choice you're expected to rank or for some systems give no position to every single candidate on the ballot so if there's five candidates in the ballot you do five, if there's 12 candidates in the ballot you number them one to 12 depending on the system you can have some of them have no position you can have some of them do a tie some systems allow this some don't and then but then one of your problems is you say hey this is a complicated thing of everybody's gonna have a different list of the order they prefer them in how do I compare all these to decide who is the most preferred candidate and the answer there actually comes to us from the 18th century the Marquista Condorcet so this free thinker, enlightenment thinker in the 18th century was actually thinking about how do we improve elections to get the most preferred candidate and he came up with a set of mathematical algorithms to evaluate whether or not the first most preferred candidate was chosen and we still use these algorithms today like literally nobody has been able to improve on this dude work in terms of the verification portion of this and so the condorcet algorithms are basically our test for test driven development for designing condorcet compliant voting systems when and this is something that confuses people because they say it's a condorcet election and saying something to the condorcet election is saying something like it's it's an IETF certified network protocol right as in the condorcet portion is actually the certification that the election produces the correct result given the correct inputs the actual code can be a whole bunch of different things and so what you see are documented is condorcet methods and the condorcet methods are the actual practical algorithms that can be rendered as code in order to produce a condorcet outcome most of these use pair wise preference comparisons some also do DAG evaluation where it says hey if I prefer if I prefer candidate B to candidate C and candidate C to candidate A it actually matters the complete chain of those other ones don't they just compare individual pairs you can actually see this so for example this is one of the ways of implementing this is something called the beat matrix which is you create a two-dimensional matrix of which candidate was preferred to which other candidate in numbers and so for example in here candidate A was preferred to candidate B by 38 more people than preferred candidate B to candidate A and this is a little bit easier to picture and again this is this 2006 SPI election as a graphical diagram so you can actually see right here which is and I was running in this election which is why I picked it out but like that 17 more people preferred Neil McGovern to Michael Shilstis than the other way around and that's how you decide and you add those mathematically together you calculate the matrix and then you decide who won on that basis there are other mathematical things that can go in there if you're actually writing the code so let's talk a little bit having given us our requirements let's talk a little bit about election software that's available there's a lot of stuff out there and there are actually multiple choices now which is really nice for a long time there was only one choice which is the first one that I'm going to actually go over so there's some extra steps we want to look at when we're evaluating election software for our open source projects or similar open source foundations or similar organizations one is hosting options as in who's going to host the software one is which kinds of voting tally they support because some organizations already have pre-decided hey we do our elections by Scottish IRV or by the Condorset and Max method or something and therefore they need voting software that supports that particular kind of tally and the third is which authentication options they support because there's a lot of differentiation there now for hosting our basic options here are self-hosted which probably means that it's going to be open source software that you run and host yourself second is free-hosting that you don't host yourself that someone else hosts and then third is paid-hosting that someone else hosts and there's trade-offs there it's all available to people and I'll show it to you and so on that basis we're going to go which I think kind of exemplify what's out there actually the four most popular platforms that I know of at least within the space of doing elections for open source projects so our first one here is CIVS and CIVS stands for a Condorset International an internet voting system it was probably the first practical and widely used Condorset election system in the internet age it was actually developed at Cornell University more as a demo that Condorset elections now that we all had computers Condorset elections were not a theoretical thing but can actually be a practical possibility it's been around since 2003 and there's still an instance of it hosted at Cornell University that is available for you to use for free so free-hosting at Cornell University you can use anytime or code is available on github internet and cell-host if you want to have your own instance it supports at least like eight or nine different known Condorset methods including something called proportional Condorset where you do a really complicated set of matrices where different groups of votes get calculated in their own matrices and then those matrices get compared it's complicated there's a lot of math I've never had a reason to use proportional Condorset but there are people who do and CIVS is the only one I know that's an option all of CIVS CIVS only authentication option is email authentication versus emailed tokens so advantages, disadvantages using CIVS one is it's already been localized to five different languages so that gives you different options for doing it disadvantage it's really old code if you're doing cell-hosting it's an early Perl 5 version I think it's like Perl 5.4 or 5.5 so you might have difficulty running it and certainly might have difficulty hacking it if you need to make changes if you're using the publicly hosted thing it's being run as a best effort service by Cornell University so they have not dealt with things like not getting their blacklisted by several blacklists because people have abused the service to send spam to people etc and as a result they will have a very high degree of non-receipt of the emails for voter tokens I will tell you having run several elections on CIVS I if you are an election administrator a good 40 to 60% of your time will be dealing with email problems so you don't want to use CIVS for those reasons for email things what are other options well there's Helios now Helios was created by a bunch of open election geeks who were specifically focusing on the issue of end-to-end encryption and verifiability for online elections they were really thinking about building this for public elections and they wanted to say that hey it is possible to make public elections that happen over the web secure and that's where they put all of their effort into it it's available you can either run their code yourself self-hosted it's a Django javascript application that you can run on your own or they have an instance of it that they run for free and you can use that to run elections again they're running it for free there's no paid staff it's best effort sometimes it goes down but you don't pay for it you don't have to figure out how to host it now one problem that rules out Helios for me personally is that it does not have support for any preference elections it is strictly first pass the post elections so if you are not in fact doing preference elections then Helios is a good option for you if you are it's not there are a number of issues open that show how complicated it would be to add preference election capabilities to Helios there are a couple of forks of it that have preference elections sort of half implemented the actual project would welcome that they're just not going to do the work themselves so Helios won't work for you, Civs won't work for other reasons what else do you have in there? well there's actually a whole set of proprietary elections apps that are available on a paper election or subscription basis several of which are actually pretty good the probably most popular one about that partly because it's the most reasonably priced is Opavote now Opavote is a closed earth voting system and it was created so I mentioned that a number of years ago I was a lobbyist in Sacramento for verifiable elections which is how we got paper trail on the computer voting machines is because of that lobbying well one of the other lobbyists who was there with me went off and decided to develop a voting use all of their computer engineering stuff that they did as part of the lobbying and deploy this voting company and make a little bit of money off of it so that they could actually credibly maintain it and that became Opavote only paid hosting so there's no open source option you pay per election they support several condorsate methods and several IRV methods for elections and it works through email authentication only and again email tokens the same way that we have with SIVS because it is a paid service with staff that maintain it their spam blocking problem is a lot less than it is for SIVS the one of the advantages is because it is a paid service the documentation and the hosting are relatively high quality it includes one feature that it has that was unique among the systems I surveyed was automated reminders to send out to all of the voters and this Opavote is actually localized in four languages so you have multi-lingual options there again none of these systems are designed for public elections for public government elections but none of the systems I'm covering today are designed for that scale there's a bunch of similar ones to Opavote the ones that I saw that had good ratings and good reputations were election buddy election runner and simply voting similar value proposition to Opavote slightly different detailed features like election buddy has really nice design features for your actual voting page which is not something Opavote bothers with but it has fewer voting tally options and you just figure out those trade-offs and all of these are either subscription or paid for election now the last one I'm going to talk about is the one that I worked on myself and still work on myself which is called Electo and I think we will have time for me to go through a demo of Electo yes we will so it's Electo so Electo was a voting system we specifically designed for Kubernetes and a bunch of other cloud native projects at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to support their specific election workflow and their specific election workflow involved being extremely get-op centric I'll explain what that means in a minute and this is now officially a project of Tag Contributor Strategy within the CNCF so major avow points currently only available through self-hosting it's a very simple application there's a container image available it's a Flask app requires a relational database and you can self-host it there are no free or paid hosting options that I know of somebody it's Apache license somebody could create one but they haven't as far as I know and the only authentication current that it supports is some form of OAuth the only OAuth that's currently implemented is GitHub there's a very obvious plug-in location if anybody wanted to contribute OAuth authentication to other OAuth providers but nobody has yet and actually the OAuth thing is a hard thing in the project because one of the reasons the project was developed we were previously using CIS and so one of the requirements of the electrical project was no email so we're not going to change that OAuth is using external authentication providers through their API so authenticating against something like GitHub or Google Docs or the Fedora ID or somebody else who provides an authentication API now I mentioned it's GitHub centric so the idea is that it applies into GitHub or GitLab repository and instead of using a web UI all election administration actions are a pull request or a merge against your repository and the reason why this made sense for these projects is that these projects already have very sophisticated apparatus for approval and authority for merging code and so having an election system that uses that means that how they approve elections is not different from how they approve everything else it's a very young small project it's only a little over a year old at this point the advantage of that is the super simple and portable code very easy to host yourself disadvantage obviously is it's not very sophisticated doesn't provide a lot of options one of the features that Electo offers that I realized surveying other things that other places don't offer is none of the election systems I look at allow you to have an election administration team so even OPA vote which is otherwise very sophisticated you're expected to have a single election administrator which again was a problem for a lot of open source projects where they want to have an election team there are five people so that they have distributed responsibility and avoid questions of bias of the individual election admin so I'm going to actually give you a tour of that one because it's an easy one to tour so this is the Electo interface so again like I said it works for you all so when I'm signing in I'm signing in against GitHub and I previously authorized GitHub that this Electo instance which is just our test instance is allowed to request my credentials from GitHub now that's very interesting okay maybe I'm not doing a demo yeah or maybe it can't actually reach GitHub right now for some reason yeah so okay maybe I'm not doing a demo I got zero off yep oh there we go okay now with having internet problems I am on the conference internet so okay so one of the other ideas of Electo is that these are the elections for your project and so it stores them all in perpetuity because we want to have a permanent record of the elections so this is the current election but we can actually look at all of the elections that we had previously this is our test instance so these are a bunch of random elections that we either copied from a real one or generated you know as part of our test case but the one of them that I currently have open right here is the original one that we tested the system which was naming the project because we had a number of ideas or names for the project and the way that you actually vote in that and so we'll show you here explore preference voting here right which is like maybe I like Ribamont oh yeah but it tries because most people don't intentionally do that you know you that that's the way that you can do it because you are actually allowed we're using the Schultz e-condorset method which does allow ties so you can actually have two people who are placed number two and the calculations will go through it yeah oh no it's yeah let me finish the demo and then we will field that the okay so so like I'll do here's my set of votes and then and then I have to create a past key of at least eight characters and part of this is that in order to in order to have this actually secret no one else has that past key there's no if the election administrator to recover it if I decide I want to change my ballot and I've forgotten so we go back and it's still open in that sort of thing now if I actually re-enter this who I did not type that correctly I can actually oh I apparently didn't type it correctly before though there we go um and and I can review that and if I entered my past phrase again I could revoke my ballot so that I could either decide not to vote in the election or I could vote again and again this was one of our requirements because in a lot of cases people wanted to vote early in the election to make sure their vote but then stuff would come out during the election that would cause them to want to change their vote and if we could technically support that without invalidating voter privacy we wanted to and we figured out a way to do it um yeah the um okay so now can't see the results this way so let us go ahead and do something about seeing the results now I said everything is a pull request right so this is actually the this is the definition of the election in the test election repository so what I want to do here is I actually want to go ahead and end the election so that I can actually do the vote tally because until I've ended the election it will not allow me to do the vote tally um and I'm already defined in github as one of the election administrators which you can see right here so this pull request will actually go in it does not so that's an important thing to keep in mind with changing the start and end things is it does not actually cancel out ballots by date because there are no dates on the ballots and the reason why there are no dates on the ballots is because we want to make it difficult to snoop via timing attacks the um because that's something somebody could otherwise do over the network um the um so yes I can do this because actually my vote was on the 29th and it's going to be part of the tally so just an important thing to keep in mind that the system will allow me to change the date to a time in the past but it's not something you would actually want to do during a real election well yeah all they can see is though that ballots are coming in they can't even know who are who's casting those ballots and that's the important part right is they can't know who's casting those ballots um so yep so let's go ahead and commit that so yep and it got picked up pretty quickly it's watching for the stream of changes from github so we can sometimes take 10 minutes to pick it up this time it was just really fast so since I've actually got this now this results page is actually manually generated by the admin um so it's not actually the real results page right now uh the admin has to manually enter it and actually and the reason for that is that a lot of projects have rules around how much of the election results they disclose so this actually gets typed in by the admin um so let's actually look at the real election right so we have number of winners we have four voters um you can download the anonymized ballots as a csv for archival purposes and if you have a voting geek in your project who wants to personally verify that the ballot was correct um you can say here's the csv knock yourself out um but let's just have electo do it for us and there we have electo is the condor set winner and these are rankings and and because we're using you know um you can get ties and that's been a problem in the past and and ties happen when you basically have a cycle right voter one likes b and then c voter two likes c and then b so that is our basic um and it's actually kind of a good tour obviously you can use one of the other systems because the other systems involve more options they're more complicated than electo is um the um but that gives you an idea of administering a rank choice election system so concluding for this um um you can and should have online secret ballot elections for the office near projector foundation um preference elections are preferable as both open source and proprietary solutions is various often hosting options um they're available to you according to what you need and then we'll go into questions so you had a question about ranking so ask me that question again actually here wait a minute this on tape hey look at that yeah um so as a export line native I'm super stoked about something called star voting which was developed there um essentially it is intended to be a upgrade of like rcv and other irv based methods that score than automatic runoff so the tabulation is super super simple um with rank choice as you alluded to a couple times it gets kind of hairy depending on where they want to do the scottish version or other versions and it's tricky to kind of go through the math you have to have an election geek to look at the csv to verify with star which is another kind of preference one you basically do zero through five stars just like any kind of product rating system out there and um it's super simple the top two scoring candidates are um go into an instant runoff and then it goes through every ballot and you know looks at each about each person's ballot and says which of those two candidates which ones do you prefer that's the winner of the election um I guess my question was can you include that one too? it's a great rating it's a great voting system I didn't actually look at that's that's part of a general class called rating based of voting systems it's scoring I think it's scoring based voting system and I didn't include those mostly because I don't know any widely available online software that implements them it's a problem um there's a there's a to to to that I guess there's a really interesting slack um plugin called Accord which has a whole it has a all of them it has like all kinds of cool ranking and rating and approval and IRV and RCV and etc it's it's really good so steal their code if it's open source cool cool where does the encryption between uh of the that foreign key happen does that happen in the browser that happens on the server um that's actually one of the big differences between that's one of the big differences between Electo and Helios um Helios because um solidly trustable voting was basically the sanctity of the voting booth was their primary priority they do the encryption in the browser um I it was just easier for us to do the encryption on the server side and and it wasn't that wasn't our primary um wasn't the primary problem we were trying to solve so presumably like the election but but if somebody submitted a patch to Electo that didn't on the browser we would probably accept it as long as it was sufficiently wide support for browsers um that's one of the problems you look at the code in Helios and to support sort of a wide array of browsers it's pages of code speaking of ancient developments uh Lewis Carroll wrote a book called the Calculus of Consent quite a few years ago and his point was that designing this kind of system can determine the result just as in your election that you referred to at the beginning of the you changed the voting system to change the result is that a fair thing to try to do that's a philosophical question well I don't the philosophical question I can't get a determinative answer but you know in this case changing the result was a case of the majority so seven out of the nine board members who were elected by the membership voted to make this change and these are the ones who were voted who were elected under the old system so um you know it's a question of if you believe that the old system was at least somewhat democratic um then then you know then the change is valid because the elected representatives are actually making it all of these systems are valid in a sense that's for sure but by choosing one you're prejudicing the result in some way whether you understand it or not yes and in this case we were consciously prejudicing the result that was the that was the entire intention and more importantly it did not trigger a mass walkout of the voters right the majority of the the majority of the registered voters voted in the following election I think this is one of the reasons that some countries have six thousand amendments to their constitutions because they keep changing their mind yeah just to add on to what Dave was saying um when I was a freshman graduate student uh I took a course that talked about health psychology and they talked about among other things election systems and I recall from that if I remember correctly that someone named Kenneth Arrow got a Nobel Prize for analyzing these things and essentially he came up with something which is analogous to the um I'm forgetting the name of the other thing here but basically he showed that election system uh meets all of the requirements and and not only that it's mathematically impossible to have an election system that meets all of the requirements so if you look at all the things that are obviously good you can't get it it's impossible so that means you have to choose and just get the best you can find and that depends on your preferences and so that's kind of sad and uh every once in a while something comes up in mathematics and then people commit suicide because they're really unhappy because the theoretical ideal is impossible anyhow that's the thing I think he got the it may have been in economics or something where the field that gave him the Nobel Prize but it did happen and as an example of that one of the reasons is so like I'm talking about this in the context of elections for open source projects and one of the reasons why you see IRV a bunch in actual public political elections but you never see condorset is you can only really get a bunch of computer geeks to trust complicated code algorithms they're going to calculate who won because the actual condorset code is a recursive algorithm um that operates over the ballots and I wouldn't even propose that for say California elections simply because I couldn't possibly get the public to trust it even though I feel like it produces better outcomes than IRV does I just had a quick quip about your thing yeah that's Aero's theorem which reminds me of like in the tech world you know we have the cap theorem right the oh my gosh my brain just dumped it consistency availability and performance partition tolerance it's like you can't have all three it's just not possible Aero's theorem is really similar to add a little bit more to that in the same course which surprisingly turned out to be kind of important through my whole life because it affects your mind view your world view of things the other thing has to do with the properties of numbers the concept of scaling and so a nominal scale is you know boy girl, apple, banana, whatever it's just a name and then there's the ordinal scale which is just the order but it doesn't have a it doesn't have a zero and it's not mathematic and the operations of mathematics are not really defined on the ordinal scale and a lot of these systems do require the scaling properties which allow you to mathematically and sensibly do mathematics and do multiplication and division if you can't if your data don't support mathematics and your voting system requires mathematics then you're making a big mistake in using it and so for that reason I kind of prefer the ordinal scales data because it's pretty clear who came in first, second or third like horse race data or track data some of these other systems and I haven't looked at this for quite a number of years like 40 do require the mathematics and you can comment on the kinds of scale data that are appropriate for these various systems you've outlined I would appreciate the review but I think that's a really good reason for using the ordinal data well yeah you could talk about a metric space for various things but I don't know if you want to so I'm not sure that I actually understand the terms scale data and ordinal data in the way that you're using them but yeah okay now I get it yeah but the condorcit the condorcit elections just do who's ahead of who I'm not sure because I don't recall but I'm saying that's what it is it's fair-wise comparisons who's ahead of who what he was talking about in terms of the scoring elections actually is an attempt to look at who is like twice as much as who which is a you know which is a different comparison alright thank you so I'd like to tap into your lobbying chops for a little bit if I may Josh so being on Capitol Hill you've had to convince various people of the efficacy of these voting systems that are alternatives to first pass the post I myself have tried to do the same thing in speeches and debates and I continue to run into the problem that there is a learned helplessness when it comes to systems that aren't one person one vote that is a common refrain I'd like to know what you do what easy things you say to people to convince them to give these other voting systems a try because we know they're more effective yeah well so it's a very different so when I was actually lobbying Sacramento was specifically lobbying for the requirement to have a transparent auditable paper trail for voting systems not not promoting IRV or anything the we were also trying to get the folks in Sacramento to buy into having the open the voting systems be open source but that was definitely a secondary vote goal because this was back in back in the early aughts when we got the debold machines that had no paper trail the I don't remember I don't remember what the secretary said at the time and the funny actually the huge turnaround there by the way is the primary people who at the time were lobbying to not have a paper trail was actually the LA registrar of voters and now they're going to be in the talk slide after me talking about how they're open sourcing elections so it is such a 180 degree turnaround the end it's amazing to watch so so I wasn't actually trying to convince those other things and you have here's the big challenge you have when you're talking about visions right is you are talking to people who were elected under the old system and therefore they are going to fear a change in the system because they personally might not get elected again with some way where it is to their advantage to change the system or alternately you need to build a coalition of people who are about to term out and say because we're talking about public politics you grab the people who are about to rotate out of Capitol Hill and we put together enough of those you can often get them to do the right thing even if it's not personally advantageous yeah the the and like I said you know the example is I wouldn't even try to convince anybody to use condor set or scoring based elections or anything like that in a public election system right now because they would be afraid of the math instant runoff voting is something they can understand because you can demonstrate it with a pack of playing cards which is actually exactly how I would do it is I would bring a pack of playing cards and demonstrate it not using a computer at all the for open source projects it's a little bit different right because in general in open source project you've got a group of engineers they actually trust the math and so you just need to show them citations that show that this thing is better right it's with open source programmers always you can show them the numbers they will often accept it even if they don't even if they haven't actually looked at the code advocate the pieces and I don't know how to demonstrate that simply with a deck of cards so let's put a pin in that conversation for a second so because we've got to translate speakers coming in in 30 minutes and that actually is L.A. County is going to be to Josh's point they are going to be talking about their voting solutions for all people which is actually what they've been using for the last couple of elections I personally helped them design some of the stuff they're doing so I'm really excited for that talk so please come back to see that so let's thank Josh again test test yep and I'm the chief information officer welcome we're excited to share our experience welcome absolutely thank you thanks a lot Mark good afternoon everyone as Mark said my name is Amman Buller I'm the CIO for Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder County Clerk I know that's a big name Registrar Recorder County Clerk is one of the departments of L.A. County and part of what we do is we conduct elections we provide election services to the constituents of Los Angeles County so the voting system that Mark was mentioning I'm going to show you a video that'll lay some foundation of what are we talking about that'll give you some context because there's a lot that has gone into this project so let me play the video it's not too long hopefully followed by a presentation and then we can have a good healthy conversation there you go welcome we're excited to share our experience and journey of revamping voting experience for the residents of Los Angeles County with you today my name is Amman Buller and I'm the chief information officer of Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder County Clerk and I'm Abigail Calderon and today we're going to discuss our journey of the voting solutions for all people the voting solutions for all people or VSAP is a revolutionary project that changed the way of voting forever I'm here in the VSAP operation center or VOC where much of the magic of election preparation happens this warehouse prepared and holds over 150,000 devices and equipment that are deployed all around the county of Los Angeles as part of the implementation of the VSAP model several fundamental changes were implemented to the way voting was conducted part of these changes includes the creation of vote centers which allowed voters to vote at any locations throughout the county and replace the assigned one day voting was also extended to 10 days prior to the election day to provide voters the flexibility to vote on their own terms in support of these new fundamental changes the devices housed here in this warehouse were acquired ballot marking devices were custom built by the county to replace the old punch paper ballot system with the new stand-alone and digital system these devices enabled users all around the county to cast their votes in up to 19 different languages as well as accommodated voters with accessibility challenges additionally voters were provided the ability to cast their voting options in the comfort of their own home and preload those selections on to any ballot marking device to cast their vote through the interactive sample ballot paper rosters were replaced by electronic pull pads that allowed voters to vote in any voting location due to real time access of voter information these are just some of the amazing technologies housed here in the VOC warehouse and launched as part of the VSAP implementation operations in support of VSAP program that are outside of the VOC warehouse these include operations such as Tali which created a secure air-gapped network facility to tabulate the voted ballots with new high-speed scanners and a new vote by mail facility which processes millions of incoming mail-in ballots before sending the Tali facility for processing as you can see there are many components and operations that went into the implementation of success the video we are about to show you provides a wonderful overview of the entire project the systems and the work that went into making this project successful this will help provide some context for the presentation that will be presented later on today we hope you enjoy and before election day making sure that they get full information non-partisan information on the issues prepare themselves to vote so on voting day the last thing you wanted for them to feel like they need to overcome all these challenges to submit their ballots to make their voice heard historically voting systems have been designed around the regulatory requirements with the law that's about how to deliver elections but no one had really stopped and looked at voting systems the actual equipment, the ballot design and everything around that from the perspective of the voter so VSAP flipped that on set let's start with that for 35 years voters in LA County used the Votomatic punch card system in 2003 the silence was replaced with felt-tip pins and Inca vote was how we elected presidents and school boards and decided over 450 propositions but with every election cycle it became clear that voting technology had fallen out of step with voters' needs in every election you know something's going to happen a lot Charles Stewart is the co-director of the Caltech MIT voting technology project and provided his expertise to Los Angeles County during the earliest stages of the VSAP initiative you have to be agile to this environment because there's new ways either to screw up or there's new ways for people to cast doubt on the outcome research has shown that people care a great deal about elections they're passionate about candidates and issues on the ballot but at each step of the process they are asking themselves is it worth the effort deciding who and what to vote for is just the first hurdle how and where to vote as even more obstacles where this started was a desire to create a voting experience something more than just technology and systems but a voting experience that has the ability to measure up to the significance the fact that in the act of voting that we're doing something very individualized but it has a cumulative impact you know at the end of the day we're all voters and we all face the same challenges time education access we all just want to be able to know where we can vote have it be a place where we feel safe and we can get to relatively quick and when we walk out we feel like we trusted the process that our vote has been cast the process to design a new voting system began with the open design search it cast a wide net and collected input from a broad range of experts designers and the general public so where do we stand today this is our latest prototype this is a more sophisticated prototype it's not fully functional but it is something that we can take out to voters walk them through what that voting experience would look like it started by really getting to know the voters the various interest groups the people who had ideas about what Los Angeles needed for voting and then use that to develop a set of principles and they built this slowly and carefully in a way that so few projects have the luxury of doing and so few project leaders have the patience to do thanks for coming to vote today there is a touch screen in front of you and the paper trades to the right Helen is now loading the interesting thing about the project of course I don't live inside Dean's head but I know at the beginning Dean was very interested in the user experience we literally had people in our first forum when we started this project who I would say were pretty active critics of our operation and critics of the systems that were previously used for voting we wanted them at the table IDEO is a global design company based in Silicon Valley it was hired as a design partner to work with the registrar's office and the stakeholders advisory committee to design the concept, look and feel of this voting system a modular system that could adapt over time Dean is taking a major risk and the risk isn't like that he's doing something wild and dangerous the risk is that he's doing something radical to improve a fundamental part of our democratic system but no one else wants to do that and especially a system of largest Los Angeles county excuse me do you have ink or boat? if you think about designing for equity in voting so you think about starting with the people who have been most underserved by the audience designing for the voter experience or the customer experience is actually bringing somebody in who has those needs and having them interact and realizing that it doesn't matter if it's the right height if it doesn't feel comfortable for that person or if it doesn't give them the sense of privacy or the independence that it gives any other voter our number one goal is a private and independent voting experience say like when it says the thing about customized I couldn't reach that selection as the voting rights advocate for disability rights California Gabe Taylor brought a needed perspective to the BSAP project he remembers an early brainstorming session at IDEO you know people would be chiming in with ideas like I would want greater sensitivity on the touch screen I would want larger keys on the keypad I would want and as people would suggest different ideas someone from the IDEO team would just be popping up welcome so we seem to have some technical difficulty but we can actually go to the presentation and so the video that I was showing you it actually showed you the journey of how we created LA County created a voting system of our own it took us some time because of the design elements we were very deliberate and we wanted to have a design that was inclusive of everyone and the forefront of our design was the voter and the most important user of the system so again when we talk of BSAP voting solutions for all people it's not necessarily one system it's actually a group of systems or programs or processes that we created the first one that we create that I want to highlight is the modern tally system so once the ballots are casted how do we tabulate those ballots with the LA County's population I think our bigger challenge was how do we create a tally system that's accurate and fast as you can imagine it's the election day and 8pm everybody wants to know the immediate trends that we're losing so we had to create a new modern tally system another cool thing that we implemented is something called interactive sample ballot and I'm going to show you some images of interactive sample ballot the voters of LA County and I don't know how many of you are voters of LA County but you're supposed to get a sample ballot sample ballot is nothing but it has more information it's the contests the measures the propositions for and against all the arguments so that you can in your own time you can study those and make up your mind we digitized that we made a public facing web application called interactive sample ballot a person would be able to see their contests in the ease of their own home another full front of this was ballot marking device in fact we have a ballot marking device here today we have few individuals from our staff so if you have any questions you want to see it you want to experience the voting experience yourself it's downstairs we will be happy to take you there and show you the ballot marking device we created it ourselves including the design as well as the manufacturer another big concept was early voting the voting is really not no longer limited to a random Tuesday that someone decides in LA County we give you options to vote 11 days before that what is known as official election day so that was a new concept vote centers was another new concept that was introduced so no longer you have to go to your neighborhood precinct to cast your ballot you could go to any of the vote centers in LA County and you could vote you could cast your vote in order to do that of course we had to implement electronic poll books and then we also redesigned our vote by mail ballot as you know voters have their own choice whether they want to vote in person or vote by mail by default we send vote by mail to all the voters of LA County and electronic poll books I just mentioned that in order for us to do the early voting as well as vote centers we had to implement something called electronic poll book that way people can verify your voter registration status and check you in and you could vote now when we talk of the open source components there are several things that we intend to make open source of course the software design document which is the foundation we want to make it open source BMD or the ballot marking device and the associated software there's a management software behind it that allows us to control those devices that's part of the open source strategy interactive sample ballot which is a web application so that is definitely in the purview of open source ballot layout that's another application again for internal purposes how do we lay out the ballot so there's an application that we've created ourselves tally system tally is the tabulation system and the way we've created it is now LA County may have resources to have those high speed scanners those tend to be expensive if a jurisdiction wants to use cheaper scanners cheaper hardware they should be able to use the same system so it's hardware agnostic and then there's a cool technology that we've developed enterprise signing authority that allows all these systems to handshake with each other and talk to each other remember most of these systems are air-gabbed and isolated networks so we need some way to authenticate traveling between various systems is authentic or not just a little bit history I don't know if you guys remember but we used to have ballots that looked like this something like a high school test and it was pretty cumbersome for people to vote even for vote by mail they had to match their candidates against the actual ballot they used to mark believe it or not about 3 years ago we were still using this technology this is 1960s technology very confusing and frankly speaking the ballots also had limitations right now the most recent election that we had we had about 42 or so contests with hundreds if not thousands of candidates with this system there were physical limitations on how many contests can we have in an election and here comes the ballot marking device this is the new ballot marking device that we've created it allows people to have a great voter experience it has a touch screen it started as a concept back in 2007-2008 by 2016 we had developed the specifications and in 2018 we started manufacturing these devices so we contracted with contract manufacturer to create these devices this hardware and the associated software as per our specifications 2019 we had a mock election and 2020 was the big day which coincided with the presidential primary election in March 2020 this is a touch screen in fact I would encourage you to go there and see it for yourself the actual ballot is still a paper it actually prints a ballot and that is the official ballot that gets tabulated so we're not talking of electronic voting here because state of California does not allow us to do that interactive sample ballot this is a web application and the goals were primarily to digitize the paper sample ballot that you receive in the mail now once we digitized it we also came up with an idea that how about we can expedite the experience of people who have actually studied the ballot themselves or studied the pros and cons and they have made up their mind who are they going to vote so we came up with something called poll pass screens of interactive sample ballot at the end of interactive sample ballot it gives you a QR code that has your selections the QR code can be downloaded take a picture printed go to a vote center scan it in a BMD and it pre-populates it does not cast it pre-populates your selections kind of a speeding up of voting experience imagine if there are 25 different contests and every voter starts reviewing and making their mind at the vote center that's going to slow down things in LA county with about 6 million voters that can be pretty daunting task so we have to keep in mind our operational nuances as well so interactive sample ballot and the poll pass is one way to speed up the ballot absolutely we do not capture that data the question was about do we have any statistics about the poll pass or how many people use it the answer is yes we have all that data how many people now one thing to keep in mind is that by design we do not capture voter information we don't want to capture any voter information so we don't need to know who the voter is and what choices have they made so it's by design a disjointed process and we can talk about it a little later as well another cool application that we've developed is the ballot layout application we worked with secretary of state we worked with the legal teams, the design teams we went out in the community we asked them how would they want to see their vote by mail ballot and of course we have to work with a ballot printer somebody who can print these at a mass scale so we worked with certain elements that are given on the screen every contest or every election will have a specific color that's assigned by the secretary of state by the way in California secretary of state is the regulatory and the authority over so we have to follow their guidelines the layout we made it more dynamic so that it's up to us if we want to add some instructions for the voters because these will keep changing and of course we added customization we could add pictures we could add our own text and then this was all done with mark sense technology so that there are some registration marks the system can read for many many many years this is actually one of the pictures of our old system these are IBM cards, card readers they're pretty fast but at the same time it's a primitive technology it was based on Microsoft DOS literally three years ago we were running our elections and tabulating elections on Microsoft DOS in 2020 we changed all we used to have about 40 ballot readers and the vision was how do we change that we wanted to create a modern interface for the operators as well as for the administrators and we wanted the ballots to be full face front and back these old antiquated readers could only read one side and then we also wanted to track the ballot especially when it comes to recounts when it comes to auditability we want to be able to know where is this ballot remember in all this there is no voter information voter's job is once they come to a vote center they check in that's it after that whatever happens it's an anonymous ballot we don't have any idea how to match them another cool thing that we did was ballot viewer and this is where we got some ideas from other companies that have multiple millions of transactions happening so we used Kubernetes, Docker, CentOS we created a ballot viewer that will give us all the information about the ballot it also has an image of the ballot and what system has incorporated we also added different options so that we know exactly where system has identified the marks what is the threshold is system confident enough in fact we've been doing auditing after every election since 2020 the system has actually performed 100% accurately so our confidence has gone up drastically as well thank you just a glimpse of LA County we had to come up with new facilities new operational flows we created a new facility in Downey there is a designated area where media and public observers can come in and watch our process we deliberately made it transparent because we want people to watch us, we want people to see what is being done and we also added monitors so that the operators of tally system whatever they see the public can see we also stream it online so that there is a full public transparency and we've seen transparency always triggers public trust people start trusting the system if we are fully transparent COVID was a great opportunity for us to stream because if people couldn't come in in our building they would watch it from their home these are the scanners certain salient features are scanners can scan front and back 500,000 ballots in a regular shift shift of 8 hours we have multiple I would say about 40 staff working in one shift there are document details that are shown right away and these scanners actually are pretty good if they are unable to identify the QR code they will put it in a different pocket or a different slot so that those can be validated by humans another component that we've created is the enterprise signing authority this is a critical piece we create certificate keys a public-private key combination before every election or from time to time whether it's one year or two year as per the policy and then those keys are distributed to all the systems by hand and we track where exactly these keys have gone we use iron key as a USB device so that we have full control of we can even delete that remotely in case of a breach a lot of measures and controls now when it comes to components of open system at a very high level we want it to work on the governance framework how are we going to govern as the vSAP now it's been in use for two years we are the pioneers we wrote this the intellectual property belongs to LA county how are we going to govern the code management as you all know code management is a big piece and we're gonna work on that infrastructure of course whether that's in cloud or in house that's yet to be determined but we would seek some feedback from open source community about pros and cons and licensing frankly speaking the lawyers at LA county they would work on the licensing mechanism whether we piggyback on the existing licenses in open source or something else something we are working with our council the comment is if you license it it's not open source I think there are legal ramifications there are license agreements with the open source software as well whether that's Apache or MIT whether it's copyright, copy left that's what I meant by it that we are still trying to determine so the next step is of course governance model that's something we are working very diligently very very closely with Secretary of State yes that is correct Los Angeles County doesn't want to be a vendor we are a public entity this was never we never mean to be a vendor when VSAP let me give you a little bit history when VSAP was conceptualized we knew that we have antiquated systems we knew that we have to modernize and frankly speaking when it comes to elections the entire market place is kind of control I shouldn't say control but there is a vast majority of market which is owned by a handful of vendors maybe a dozen or so and frankly speaking nobody could scale to our level they are great for smaller counties but LA County and that's when we wanted to break this dependence from the vendors we wanted to create something for ourselves if it can work in LA County it can work in any jurisdiction within the nation and whatever investments we have made for design and development we want to give that back to the election community so yes you are right our intention is to give the system this code to the back to election community so that they can use it and again it doesn't have to be all or none they can even take pick and choose they can take tabulation system for example they can still use their own ballot marking device or whatever devices they want to we want to leave it open and another benefit that we want to get from open source community is transparency and security frankly speaking if there are more eyes on the code it will be better and better especially when it comes to security so that's something we want to work with Secretary of State so that they can create certification and regulatory framework and the open source community in whatever way if you all can reach out to whoever you can and push for regulatory framework definitely something we would we would love to collaborate with you code management versioning again it's relatively a simpler thing but that's something we can work on whether we put the code in github there are several examples that we've looked at infrastructure goes with code management outreach and communication we want to be very open and transparent whenever there's a new version of vSAP we want the community to know we want our users to know and we want all the jurisdictions to know this is the new system this is the enhancement there's got to be a communications protocol and a platform there security patches and vulnerabilities I think that's a big one because imagine one version of vSAP is certified by Secretary of State in California let's say Texas wants to use it Secretary of State is not their regulatory body and there's a vulnerability that is identified how do we patch it if it's right before the election do we patch it right away so there are some nuances again not a huge thing it's not a big barrier but these are nuances that everybody has to understand and consider remember this is the first time in election industry something like this has been done so we are actually breaking ground a lot of our community doesn't understand or sometimes they are not even ready sometimes people think that if we make it open source it's going to be more vulnerable to hacks and stuff but my counter argument is that we have controls and measures in place the entire system of ballot marking devices is isolated contained in one physical location that itself has some inherent security built in licensing as I said that's another thing what happens to the third party libraries because frankly speaking there are thousands of them we built on top of open source stack but there are many libraries these libraries come with their own licensing some are restrictive licensing and some are permissive how can we frankly speaking we have to probably scan through the entire code base and start identifying the libraries that we can ship as part of our open source model or we may have to update our documentation some libraries may have their own licensing and their own terms and conditions that the consumer may have to sign just to give you an example if there's a arbitrarily if MySQL is there there might be an agreement between MySQL and the user they may have to get into or at least agree to their terms and conditions so there's some work to be done the system has worked for us it's still in its early stages I would say two years right now and we've had about three or four major elections so I think the time is right we want to go through and we want to make our software ready for open source yes questions so the question is Secretary of State Shirley Weber what are the concerns that she has when I say Secretary of State I do not mean the Secretary of State Shirley Weber I mean the office of the Secretary of State they have a team we work with them they are certification authority they have not told us if there are any concerns and frankly speaking we have gone through multiple levels of testing penetration testing we hired our own companies in addition to the certification bar that any voting system has to meet in fact we raised our bar so much that the certification testing becomes a cakewalk so I would not say that Secretary of State herself has any problems or issues because we don't interact with her directly her office we are in touch with her office and we are just working with them on the certification and the regulatory framework so the question is what type of measures and controls do we have during an election for the tally system we have several I would say more than a dozen or so different steps that we have to go through before every election the certified code which is in a repository we call it trusted build we have to reinstall the software from that trusted build always so imagine we keep conducting elections after every election we wipe out our production servers we archive them and we reinstall the software from a trusted build so that we are getting it from one source there is a hash value verification are we indeed getting the same trusted build that's been certified or not once the system is installed then we do a public logic and accuracy test this is a public event where members of public and observers can come in and watch us do a logic and accuracy test and logic and accuracy test is nothing but we go through each and every possible combination in a ballot it just goes in millions and see if tally system has read each of them, each of those combinations correctly or not and we test end to end the entire system during an election after all this testing during an election we keep scanning the ballots throughout the 11 day or 15 day election day itself 8 o'clock so by law 8 o'clock is when we are supposed to tabulate the system the ballots 8 p.m. we tabulate and then there is a frequent frequency determine every 2 days or every 3 days there is going to be regular updates and that period is called canvas period during the canvas period we do 1% annual check of all the ballots of all the contests and again it's a public event observers and campaigns are generally watching us campaigns will send their people who will be looking over our shoulders it's generally divided into a glass barrier so that people can watch us while we do our work once the election results are certified we again do a public logic and accuracy test the same test and once everything is done once the election is certified then there is a period of 30 days when people can contend the results are not accurate the campaigns come back to us sometimes sometimes they don't and then we do whatever is legally allowed and then we wipe out the production servers before wiping out we archive everything into a storage and production server so it's a rather intense activity from technology as well as from the operations but we make sure that we are doing everything possible above and beyond what we are supposed to do legally great question do we have other jurisdictions that have expressed interest the answer is yes there are many jurisdictions and you can imagine LA county being the largest in terms of population whatever we do gets highlighted very visible nationally and internationally so there are many jurisdictions within the US that have expressed interest they are just waiting for you know either get a hold of the code or some jurisdictions basically just want to take our ballot marking devices the device that you will see downstairs some they just want to take our tally system some are only interested in learning about our operations and maybe take aspects from our operations any other question yes I would say it's less than a dozen ten or so yes and as the things mature as the word goes out as the public trust is established in fact we have started seeing that people trust our system so much that the amount of questions that we were asked earlier three or four years ago the nature of the questions has changed the number of questions are becoming lesser and lesser so it just shows and then we get feedback from the public as well what do you want us to change the system is modular it's a living system we are continuing to change the system and the idea is public trust and transparency yes question great question something very near and dear to me so the question is when you vote there's a QR code that gets printed on the ballot how as public member of a public how can you know what's contained in the QR code so we've made it all transparent the QR code contains there's a chance I can show you when the ballot gets printed if you are voting for Mickey Mouse or whoever there is there is a string associated with that value in the QR code that string is contained in the QR code you can use any scanner your camera phone camera or any scanner and understand what those values are we create a database before every election and we publish it what is 25 means what is 49 means what is 2FC means so that people can independently on their own verify what is in their QR code in an instant you can also there is a human readable selections that you have made whether it's in English or other languages you can actually read what your ballot contains both from human readable as well as QR code we are being fully transparent I think there is a question here there is never going to be a discrepancy human readable human readable so the law says the intent what is the intent of the voter who are they intending to vote and we see that in vote by mail so there are rules and regulations around it yeah and that's why we test the system so much I think there is a question at the end great question it was two part question one is about the bug bounty program that is something we are working on as I said we've established a pretty well defined cyber security program and we work with a lot of agencies including DHS at the federal level and at the state level FBI and even the third party security companies as well but bug bounty is definitely on the horizon something I cannot comment right now when would it happen but that's something we are considering the second question was there is no way for voters to know who they are registered as and who did they vote for I think that's a legal question and the policy maker question unfortunately I wouldn't be able to tell you I'm a technologist I make things the democracy and how the voting happens in the United States or in California there are laws we merely follow the laws so I think it's more of a policy question rather than it's not the first time but I think and I can understand both sides of the story I can understand why things are the way they are there needs to be a privacy I mean if I'm a voter why does registered need to know who did I vote for I wouldn't be very comfortable letting anybody know it's a very personal experience right in some other jurisdictions in some other countries it may happen I cannot comment but again there are policy questions there's a question yes the question is you know if it's our intent LA County's intent to make it open source the answer is yes that is why this was the prime philosophy behind VSAP we wanted to break that dependence from the vendors because frankly speaking in vendor supported system there were a lot of flaws accessibility was something that was add-on I think that was an afterthought we didn't want that we wanted the in fact the law says in a vote center there should be one accessible device all 100% of our devices are accessible so I mean that's the kind of bar we are raising for ourselves you mentioned that there's an inertia and there are risks if we further delay it yes you're right in 2020 2020 had two major elections the primary and the presidential general so 2020 was the first year when we rolled out for ourselves we refined our processes we made enhancements we added some more languages in 2021 we had a recall election in 2022 we just finished the gubernatorial primary so I think the time is right right now and we want to make it open source it is and again for the benefit of open source community we want it to be fully transparent we want people to audit our code we have and that's the philosophy that we bring to the table even the transparency that I spoke to you about that people can actually watch us what we do we want to be fully transparent so there are as I said issues or items that we are working on I think the governance and the regulatory framework would be something big one that we would need Secretary of State to collaborate with us there are questions this is something new that we are doing this has never been done it's a breakthrough so I think the governments also need to mature and learn from the private industry and see what's going out there there are several examples at the federal level you know open data for example sure there's nothing wrong with that and I totally get it I understand where you are coming from where we are coming from is we want to make sure that all the regulatory bodies they know exactly what we are doing what are the rapid questions once it's certified another county takes a certified code do they do the certification testing or do they do operational testing do they do a functional testing because in various aspects it can be a same mirror of what we do in many cases it may be totally different it may look very different for other counties so yes you are right opening up of the source code and as part of our certification testing we have opened it up in a controlled manner to much more scrutiny than any other voting system they don't have it entities they don't do all that but we went above and beyond we invited DHS to do a critical product evaluation on our dime we invited two or three third party entities to do a security testing vulnerability testing penetration testing and all the responses all the feedback that we get and again software will have bugs there will be security issues and we are always trying to before any major version that we release and get certified we're always addressing all the security bugs and all the vulnerabilities that are found yes so there are multiple layers of issues and I'm sure we'll collaborate with the open source community and move forward that's our intention we don't want to hold back it's just that these are certain gotchas and nuances that we are working on and in government as you know things take their time but we LA County prides itself that we've done this work so fast I'm telling you I was here in 2019 and 2018 we were still using old Inca card Inca vote and the cards technology unfortunately I think I will have time for one and then maybe we can close out the session and then I'll be hanging out here if you have any questions one on one we can talk about it just one last I'm sorry I think I've had some questions I think this gentleman wants to ask something yes so the question is has Secretary of State expressed interest in publishing the code themselves unfortunately that's not the case Secretary of State's office has expressed interest that they want to make it open source they want LA County to take the lead we are working they are committed to creating a governance framework and certification framework but there hasn't been any conversation that they will publish so I think those are certain things that we are still working on with them hopefully we come to a resolution and we just make it available on GitHub great thank you thank you very much that's what you insert in your satisfactory device that tells you that these are the content that needs to be changed a lot of people people move in people move out of the county people die people turn 18 so it's a moving data right now it's coming out of 5.7 to 5.8 so vendors involved in multiple systems always been vendors were severely holding and then it's in our control all the management I don't know the percentage because many systems have different program lines so we go back central so there's a mix we are here so rel is where we are leading for we start with the planning for the next version and Red Hat we are talking with them we want to move to much more standard because frankly taking the central it has taken us this far to get the skill set to break down the standard and then there's software that controls what they have going for them we have to get the loss back so by the same algorithm there's actually a part of it that is hard so we have created these boxes or cards in which these are stored these devices are stored and these boxes and cards are relatively smarter so we shut down all the rest four devices in that card the card becomes useless if a forward device comes in so I think there are many controls and measures in place when it comes to security I'm not saying it's an end-all I think there's still much more we can do and we want to get those kind of ideas for the security community what more we can do if some jurisdiction they can manufacture it's a different software they can manufacture for the help so there are some protection obligations for the manufacturer they are the only ones right now but eventually the idea is to make it's very hard for mine but I would encourage you to work with our office it has to be done by a sector of space there's a running machine there's a running machine, one vendor but sector of space is in charge it won't just benefit any company I think we've come this way we've come far I want that I want to know that one of them is a VMD ID so once that ballot goes forward that means we run it forward we have the ballots that say in the VMD that there's one ballot if that happens we will know there's a foreign ballot now what you say oh who did it, that's the investigation that will take time so we will call the cyber experts and have the data the FBI that's involved all of those 2019 sector things


n done on purpose, so that he might have the benefit of Alan's help without the awkwardness of recognizing him. And indeed it was well thought upon, for now, suppose things to go the very worst. How could Rangkyler swear to my friend's identity, or how be made to bear damaging evidence against myself? For all that, he had been a long while of finding out his want, and had spoken to and recognized a good few persons as we came through the town, and I had little doubt myself that he saw reasonably well. As soon as we were past the haws, where I recognized the landlord smoking his pipe at the door, and was amazed to see him look no older, Mr. Rangkyler changed the order of march, walking behind with Torrance and sending me forward in the manner of a scout. I went up the hill, whistling from time to time my gaelic air, and at length I had the pleasure to hear it answered, and to see Alan rise from behind a bush. He was somewhat dashed in spirits, having passed a long day alone skulking in the county, and made but a poor meal in an ale-house near Dundas. But at the mere sight of my clothes he began to brighten up, and as soon as I had told him in what a forward state our matters were, and the part I looked to him to play and what remained, he sprang into a new man. And this is a very good notion of yours, said he, and I dared to say that you could lay your hands upon no better man to put it through than Alan Brick. It is not a thing, Markia, that any one could do, but takes a gentleman of penetration. But it sticks in my head your lawyer man will be somewhat wearying to see me, says Alan. Accordingly I cried and waved on Mr. Rangkyler, who came up alone and was presented to my friend Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson, I am pleased to meet you, said he. But I have forgotten my glasses, and our friend Mr. David here, clapping me on the shoulder, will tell you that I am little better than blind, and that you must not be surprised if I pass you by tomorrow. This he said, thinking that Alan would be pleased, but the Highland man's vanity was ready to straddle at a less manner than that. Why, sir, says he, stiffly, I would say it mattered the less as we are met here for a particular end, to see just as stunned to Mr. Balfour, and by what I can see not very likely to have much else in common. But I accept your apology, which was a very proper one to make. And that is more than I could look for, Mr. Thompson, said Rangkyler heartily, and now as you and I or the chief actors in this enterprise, I think we should come into a nice agreement, to which end I propose that you should lend me your arm, for what were the dusk and the want of my glasses, I'm not very clear as to the path. And as for you, Mr. David, you will find Torrance a pleasant kind of body to speak with. Only let me remind you, it's quite needless he should hear more of your adventures, or those of Mr. Thompson. Accordingly these two went on ahead in very close talk, and Torrance and I brought up the rear. Night was quite come when we came in view of the house of Shaw's.  It was dark and mild, with a pleasant rustling wind in the southwest that covered the sound of our approach, and as we drew near we saw no glimmer of light in any portion of the building. It seemed my uncle was already in bed, which was indeed the best thing for our arrangements. We made our last whispered consultation some fifty yards away, and then the lawyer and Torrance and I crept quietly up and crouched down beside the corner of the house, and as soon as we were in our places, Alan strode to the door without concealment and began to knock. End of chapter 29 of Kidnapped This is a Lebervox recording. All Lebervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Lebervox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Kidnapped By Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter 29 I Come Into My Kingdom For some time Alan volleied upon the door and his knocking only roused the echoes of the house and neighborhood. At last, however, I could hear the noise of a window gently thrust up and knew that my uncle had come to his observatory. By what light there was he could see Alan standing like a dark shadow on the steps. The three witnesses were hidden quite out of his view, so that there was nothing to alarm an honest man in his own house. For all that he studied his visitor a while in silence, and when he spoke his voice had a quaver of misgiving. What's this? says he. This is not kind of time of night for decent folk, and I have no trokings with night-hawks. What brings you here? I have a blunderbush. Is that yourself, Mr. Balfour? returned Alan, stepping back and looking up into the darkness. Have a care of that blunderbuss, then nasty things to burst. What brings you here? And what are you? says my uncle angrily. I have no matter of inclination to rout out my name to the countryside, said Alan. But what brings me here is another story, being more of your affair than mine, and if you're sure it's what you would like, I'll set it to a tune and sing it to you. And what is it? asked my uncle. David, says Alan. What was that? cried my uncle in a mighty changed voice. Shall I give you the rest of the name, then? said Alan. There was a pause, and then— I'm thinking I'd better let you in, said my uncle, doubtfully. I dare say that, said Alan. But the point is, would I go? Now I will tell you what I am thinking. I am thinking that it is here upon this doorstep that we must confer upon this business, and it shall be here or nowhere at all whatever, for I would have you to understand that I am as stiff-necked as yourself, and a gentleman of better family. This change of note disconcerted Ebenezer. He was a little wild, digesting it, and then says he— Well, well, what must be must?—and shut the window. But it took him a long time to get downstairs, and a still longer to undo the fastenings, repenting, I dare say, and taking with fresh claps of fear at every second step and every bolt and bar. At last, however, we heard the creak of the hinges, and it seems my uncle slipped gingerly out, and, seeing that Alan had stepped back a pace or two, set him down on the top doorstep, with a blunderbuss ready in his hands. And now, says he, mind I have my blunderbush, and if you take a step nearer you as good as deed. Very civil speech, says Alan, to be sure. Nah, says my uncle, but this is no very gently kind of a proceeding, and I'm bound to be prepared. And now that we understand each other, you can name your business.  My name is no business in my story, but the county of my friends is not so very far from the isle of Mull, of which you will have heard. It seems there was a ship lost in those parts, and the next day a gentleman of my family was seeking rec wood for his fire along the sands, when he came upon a lad that was half drowned. Well, he brought him too, and he and some other gentleman took and clapped him in an old, ruined castle, where from that day to this he has been a great expense to my friends. My friends are a wee wide like, not so particular about the law as some that I could name, and finding that the lad owned some decent folk, and was your born nephew, Mr. Balfour, that asked me to give you a bit of call and confer upon the matter. And I may tell you, at the off-go, unless we can agree upon some terms, you are little likely to set eyes upon him, for my friends, added Alan, simply, are no very well off. My uncle cleared his throat. I'm no very caring, says he. He was not good lad at the best of it, and I no call thee under fear. I, I, said Alan, I see what you would be at, pretending you don't care to make the ransom smaller. Nah, said my uncle, it's the mere truth. I take no matter interest in the lad, and I pay no ransom, and you can make a kirk and a mill of him for what I care. Who'd, sir, says Alan, blood sticketh in water in the devil's name. You cannot desert your brother's son for the fair shame of it, and if you did, and it came to be Kent, you wouldn't be very popular in your countryside, or I'm the more deceived. I know very popular the way it is. I returned Ebenezer, and I didn't see how it would come to be Kent, nor by me, anyway, nor yet by you or your friends, so let's I don't talk me, bucky, says he. Then'll have to be David that tells it, said Alan. How's that? says my uncle, sharply. Oh, just this way, says Alan. My friends would doubtless keep your nephew as long as there was any likelihood of Sillard to be made of it, but if there was none, I am clearly of opinion they would let him gang where he pleased and be damned to him. Ah, but I'm no very caring about that, either, said my uncle. I wouldn't be muckled made up with that. I was thinkin' that, said Alan. And what for, why? asked Ebenezer. Why, Mr. Balfour, replied Alan, by all that I could hear, there were two ways of it. Either you liked David and would pay to get him back, or else you had very good reasons for now wanting him and would pay for us to keep him. It seems it's not the first. Well, then it's the second, and blithe them I to Kent, for it should be a pretty penny in my pocket and the pocket of my friends. I didn't follow you there, said my uncle. No, said Alan. Well, see here, you didn't want the lad back. Well, what do you want done with him, and how much will you pay? My uncle made no answer, but shifted uneasily on his seat. Come, sir, cried Alan, I would have you to Kent that I am a gentleman. I'd bear a king's name. I am no rider to kick my shanks at your hall door. Either give me an answer in civility and that out of hand, or by the top of glenco, I will ram three feet of iron through your vitals. Amen, cried my uncle, scrambling to his feet. Give me a minute. What's like wrong with you? I'm just a plain man and no dance and master, and I'm trying to be as civil as as morally possible. As for that wild talk is fair, disreputable, vitals is you, and where would I be with my blunderbush, he snarled. Powder and your old hands are but as the snail to the swallow against the bright steel in the hands of Alan, says the other. Before your jotter-in-finger could find the trigger, the hilt would derl on your breast-bane. Amen, where's denying it, says my uncle. Hitted as you please, head your own way. I did nothing across you. Just tell me what you'll be wanting, and you'll see that we can agree fine. Trothed, sir, said Alan. I asked for nothing but plain dealing. In two words, do you want the land killed or kept? Oh, sirs, cried Ebenezer. Oh, sirs, me, that's no kind of language. Killed or kept, repeated Alan. Oh, kept it, kept it, wailed my uncle. We're heading to bloodshed, if you please. Well, said Alan.  The dearer, cries Ebenezer, would you file your hands with crime? Hoot, said Alan. They're both crime, whatever. And the killing's easier and quicker and sureer.  I'll have him keep to though, to return my uncle. I never had nothing to do with anything morally wrong. And I'm no going to begin to pleasure a wild highlymaned. Your uncle's groupless, sneered Alan. I'm a man of principle, said Ebenezer simply. And if I have to pay for it, I'll have to pay for it. And besides, says he, yet forgot the lads, my brother's son. Well, well, said Alan. And now about the price. There's no very easy for me to set a name upon it. I would first have to ken some small matters. I would have to ken, for instance, what you gave Ho season at the first off go. Ho season, cries my uncle, struck her back. What for? For kidnapping David, says Alan. It's a lie.  Cried my uncle. He was never kidnapped. He lied in his throat that he told you that. Kidnapped. He never was. That's no fault of mine, nor yet of yours, said Alan. Nor yet of Ho season, if he's a man that can be trusted. What do you mean? Cried Ebenezer. Did Ho season tell you? Why, you donnerd old runt, how else would I ken? Cried Alan. Ho season and me are partners. We gang shares. So you can see for yourself what good you can do lying. And I must plainly say you drove a fool's bug when you let a man like the sailor man so far forward in your private matters. But that's past praying for. And you must lie on your bed the way you made it. And the point in hand is just this. What did you pay him? Has he told you himself? Asked my uncle. That's my concern, said Alan. We'll, said my uncle. I didn't care what he said. He lied. And the solemn God's truth is this, that I gave him 20 pound. But I'll be perfectly honest with you. For by that, he was to have the selen of the lad in Carolina. Work would be his muckle mare, but nor from my pocket, you see. Thank you, Mr. Thompson. That will do excellently well, said the lawyer, stepping forward, and then mighty civilly. Good evening, Mr. Balfour, said he. And good evening, Uncle Abenezer, said I. And it's a bra nicht, Mr. Balfour, added Torrance. Never a word, said my uncle, neither black nor white, but just sat where he was on the top doorstep and stared upon us like a man turned to stone. Alan filched away his blunderbuss and the lawyer, taking him by the arm, plucked him up from the doorstep, led him into the kitchen, whether we all followed, and set him down in a chair beside the hearth, where the fire was out and only a rush light burning. There we all looked upon him for a while, exulting greatly in our success, but yet with a sort of pity for the man's shame. Come, come, Mr. Abenezer, said the lawyer, you must not be downhearted, for I promise you we should make easy terms. In the meanwhile, give us the cellar key, and Torrance shall draw us a bottle of your father's wine in honor of the event. Then turning to me and checking me by the hand, Mr. David, says he, I wish you all joy and your good fortune, which I believe to be deserved. And then to Alan with a spice of drollery, Mr. Thompson, I pay you my compliment. It was most artfully conducted, but in one point you somewhat outran my comprehension. Do I understand your name to be James or Charles, or is it George, perhaps? And why should it be any of the three, sir? Quoth Alan, drawing himself up like one who smelt an advance. Only, sir, that you mentioned a king's name, replied Rancaylor, and as there has never yet been a king, Thompson, or his fame, at least, has never come my way, I judged you must refer to that you had in baptism. This was just the stab that Alan would feel keenest, and I am free to confess he took it very ill. Not a word would he answer, but stepped off to the far end of the kitchen and sat down and sulked, and it was not till I stepped after him and gave him my hand and thanked him by title as this chief spring of my success that he began to smile a bit and was at last prevailed upon to join our party. By that time we had the fire lighted and a bottle of wine uncorked, a good supper came out of the basket, to which Torrance and I and Alan set ourselves down, while the lawyer and my uncle passed into the next chamber to consult. They stayed there closeted about an hour, at the end of which period they had come to a good understanding, and my uncle and I set our hands to the agreement in a formal manner. By the terms of this, my uncle bound himself to satisfy Rangkyler as to his intramissions, and to pay me two clear thirds of the yearly income of Shaw's. So the beggar in the ballot had come home, and when I lay down that night on the kitchen chests, I was a man of means and had a name in the country. Alan and Torrance and Rangkyler slept and snored on their hard beds, but for me who had lain out under heaven and upon dirt and stones, so many days and nights, and often with an empty belly and in fear of death, this good change in my case unmanned me more than any of the former evil ones, and I lay till dawn looking at the fire on the roof and planning the future. End of chapter. Chapter 30 of CHAPTER. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. CHAPTER XXX of FINAL CHAPTER. Good-bye. As far as I was concerned myself, I had come to port, I still had Alan, to whom I was so much beholden on my hands, and I felt besides a heavy charge in the matter of the murder and James of the Glens. On both these heads I unbosomed to Rancyler the next morning, walking to and fro about six o'clock before the House of Shaw's, and with nothing in view but the fields and woods that had been my ancestors, and were now mine. Even as I spoke on these grave subjects, I would take a glad bit of a run over the prospect and my heart jumped with pride. About my clear duty to my friend, the lawyer had no doubt. I must help him out of the county at whatever risk, but in the case of James he was of a different mind. Mr. Thompson, says he, is one thing. Mr. Thompson's kinsmen quite another. I know little of the facts, but I gather that a great noble, whom we will call, if you like, the D of A, has some concern and is even supposed to feel some animosity in the matter. The D of A is doubtless an excellent nobleman, but Mr. David, timio chi no cuere Dios, if you interfere to balk his vengeance, you should remember there is one way to shut your testimony out, and that is to put you in the dock. There you would be in the same pickle as Mr. Thompson's kinsmen. You will object that you are innocent. Well, what so is he? And to be tried for your life before a Highland jury, on a Highland quarrel and with a Highland judge upon the bench, would be a brief transition to the gallows. Now I had made all these reasonings before and found no very good reply to them, so I put on all the simplicity I could. In that case, sir, said I, I would just have to be hanged, would I not? My dear boy, cries he, go in God's name and do what you think is right. It is a poor thought that at my time of life I should be advising you to choose the safe and shameful, and I take it back with an apology.  There are worse things in the world than to be hanged. Not many, sir, said I, smiling. Why, yes, sir, he cried very many. It would be ten times better for your uncle to go no further afield if he were dangling decently upon a jibbit. Thereupon he turned into the house, still in a great fervor of mind, so that I saw I had pleased him heartily. And there he wrote me two letters, making his comments on them as he wrote. This, says he, is to my bankers, the British living company, placing a credit to your name. Consult Mr. Thomas, he will know of ways, and you, with this credit, can supply the means. I trust you will be a good husband of your money, but in the affair of a friend like Mr. Thompson, I would be even prodigal. Then for his kinsmen, there is no better way than that you should seek the advocate, tell him your tale and offer testimony, whether he may take it or not, is quite another matter, and will turn on the D of A. Now, that you may reach the Lord Advocate well recommended, I give you here a letter to a namesake of your own, the learned Mr. Balfour of Pilrig, a man whom I esteem. It will look better that you should be presented by one of your own name, and the lard of Pilrig is much look up to in the faculty and stands well with Lord Advocate grant. I would not trouble him, if I were you, with any particulars, and, to you know, I think it would be needless to refer to Mr. Thompson. Form yourself upon the lard, he is a good model. When you deal with the advocate, be discreet, and in all these matters, may the Lord guide you, Mr. David. Thereupon he took his farewell and set out with Torrance for the ferry, while Alan and I turned our faces for the city of Edinburgh. As we went by the footpath, and beside the gateposts and the unfinished lodge, we kept looking back at the house of my fathers. It stood there, bare and great and smokeless, like a place not lived in, only in one of the top windows there was the peak of a nightcap, bobbing up and down and back and forward, like the head of a rabbit from a burrow. I had little welcome when I came, and less kindness while I stayed, but at least I was watched as I went away. Alan and I went slowly forward upon our way, having little heart either to walk or speak. The same thought was uppermost in both, that we were near the time of our parting, and remembrance of all the bygone days sat upon us sorely. We talked indeed of what should be done, and it was resolved that Alan should keep to the county, biting now here, now there, but coming once in the day to a particular place where I might be able to communicate with him, either in my own person or by messenger. In the meanwhile I was to seek out a lawyer who was an appen steward, and a man therefore to be wholly trusted, and it should be his part to find a ship and to arrange for Alan's safe embarkation. No sooner was this business done than the words seemed to leave us, and though I would seek the jest with Alan, under the name of Mr. Thompson, and he with me on my new clothes and my estate, you could feel very well that we were nearer tears than laughter. We came the byway over the hill of Corstorphine, and when we got near to the place called Rest and Be Thankful, and looked down on Corstorphine bogs and over to the city and the castle on the hill, we both stopped, and we both knew without a word said that we had come to where our ways parted. Here he repeated to me once again what had been agreed upon between us, the address of the lawyer, the daily hour at which Alan might be found, and the signals that were to be made by any that came seeking him. Then I gave what money I had, a guinea or two of rankilers, so that he should not starve in the meanwhile, and then we stood a space and looked over at Edinburgh in silence. Well, good-bye, said Alan, and held out his left hand. Good-bye, said I, and gave the hand a little grasp, and went off downhill. Neither one of us looked the other in the face, nor so long as he was in my view did I take one back glance at the friend I was leaving. But as I went on my way to the city, I felt so lost and lonesome that I could have found it in my heart to sit down by the dyke and cry and weep like any baby. It was coming near noon when I passed in by the West Kirk and the grass market into the streets of the capital. The huge height of the buildings, running up to 10 and 15 stories, the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers, the wares of the merchants in their windows, the hubbub and endless stir, the foul smells and the fine clothes, and a hundred other particulars, too small to mention, struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise so that I let the crowd carry me to and fro, and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at rest and be thankful. And all the time, although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these bras and novelties, there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong. The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Lening Company's bank. End of chapter, end of book. Thank you for listening.