In a public policy seminar, Caulfield’s professor assigned his students a research project: How big, precisely, was the U.S. In a school full of whiz kids, Caulfield was a Whiz Kid, graduating summa cum laude.ĭuring the final semester of his senior year, he inherited a puzzle that would torment him for five years. In 2014, he took an unusual internship at Third Way in Washington, where he co-authored one of the early policy papers on a quirky phenomenon called Bitcoin. But by the end of sophomore year, Caulfield found himself drawn to policy. He arrived on campus with an interest in investment banking. Seven years later, that’s precisely what he did. In seventh grade, he calmly decided he would go to Wharton, the prestigious business school. Instead, it was a student at the University of Pennsylvania named Matthew Caulfield.Ĭaulfield grew up in Ocean City, N.J., where he attended public schools. It wasn’t a White House lawyer, or a senator, or the chair of a Washington commission. “I mean, it’s sort of demanding of an explanation.” “That struck me as strange,” Bollinger sighed. What was going on in the black box? In the end, even Bollinger’s commission would not quite crack it open. “I could tell from the beginning-and this may not be an entirely appropriate metaphor-but the kind of ‘black box’ quality to this whole arena was a mystery to me. “The discussion about voting machines was fairly striking to me,” Bollinger said, recalling the early sessions in which he first grappled with the private industry. In 2017, Bollinger co-chaired a commission by the National Academies of Sciences to study reforms to America’s election system. One of them is Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University. Long before 2020, experts have been concerned, even flummoxed, by the voting-machine industry. Relative to their importance to society, few technology sectors are less well understood than the voting systems market in the U.S. As one CEO, Tom Burt of ES&S, politely explained, “Congresswoman, we’re a private company, so we’ll keep that information private.”Īs 2020 fades, a growing vanguard of academics, good-government advocates and even Silicon Valley executives are turning their attention from the security of voting technology toward the companies who build and sell it. Susan Davis, a Democrat from California, asked each of them if they could share their annual profits. Last year on Capitol Hill, when CEOs from each of the three major voting companies testified before Congress, then-Rep. It is an industry funded entirely by taxpayers, and administered mostly by private equity, on whose work democracy completely depends-and which even committed analysts have struggled to understand. Relative to their importance to society, few technology sectors are less well-understood than the voting systems market in the U.S. And when it came to voting machines, it was also ironic: Precisely thanks to the serious efforts of Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, the 2020 contest was, at least technologically speaking, the most secure election in modern history. It was obvious the Big Lie about the election was patently absurd. The wonky set of experts and academics who actually study U.S. Week after week, Trump’s lawyers cast them as the hub of a grandiose conspiracy to alter the vote, one machine at a time. Over the winter, Trump publicly harangued Dominion Voting, a small company with a headquarters in Denver, and another company called Smartmatic, which barely has a footprint in the United States. But he saved his most spectacular accusations for a more obscure and implausible target: The companies that make America’s voting machines. When President Donald Trump began spreading the conspiracy theories about why Joe Biden beat him in November’s election, he swung at all the glitzy targets: The media, Democrats, China.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |