Breaking Down Election Week In The US: Security, Technology, Data + Beyond

It’s been a roller coaster of a week in the U.S., with an election on Tuesday that we figured would be a nail biter. A lot of things came into play — pollsters getting it wrong, social media insanity and propaganda were commonplace, and the importance of data and analytics for projections has never been more important. On this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I’m joined by my colleagues and fellow analysts Olivier Blanchard and Ron Westfall as we take a look at what went down, what we saw from an analysts’ point of view as well as a look at the impact of the election on the market this past week.

A Quick Look at Election Results and Why We Wait

We started with a look at where we are, which is, as predicted, in a state of limbo, waiting for results. We discussed the fact that one of the key things that has impacted this election is the fact that different states have different voting laws. Add to that the “small detail” of the coronavirus pandemic, and people being understandably nervous about getting out to vote in person, and the tsunami that we’re currently wading through in terms of getting votes counted is totally understandable.

Journalists and news organizations have warned us for weeks that it would likely take days to figure out the winners, but of course they didn’t always follow their own advice on election night and in the days to follow. Everybody loves making predictions.

Voting laws are complicated. State officials said that even unofficial totals in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA wouldn’t be available until later in the week.

We took a quick look at some of the differences in key states where we’re waiting on results, including:

Pennsylvania, which doesn’t start processing absentee ballots until Election Day morning. There was never any way all those votes would be counted until Friday (today) at the earliest. For anyone frustrated about this, note that this is the result of deadlocked negotiations between the Democratic Governor Tom Wolf and Republicans who control the Senate.

Arizona was another state that’s complicated. The state generally has high turnout, and a robust history for voting early that often leads to late results. This is not new. In the 2018 general election it took six days before Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner of the U.S. Senate race. In 2010, it took voters 12 days to learn they had legalized medical marijuana. This year, an estimated 88% of the primary vote in August came by mail, and in Maricopa County alone, almost 2.1 million people asked for a mail-in ballot out of 2.6 million registered voters. But here’s the thing. Mail-in ballots aren’t always mailed in, and they are not always early. Some voters wait until Election Day and take their mail in ballots to the polls, to be sure they get there. They are largely set aside until Election Day votes that are made in person are taken care of.

What’s happening in Georgia? At about Noon Central Time today, Georgia reported that thousands of military, overseas, and provisional ballots that will soon be added to Georgia’s vote count, and that roughly 8,100 absentee ballots were still pending.

And last but never least, North Carolina is waiting to see if 116,000 outstanding requested absentee ballots are returned by November 12th. It’s a waiting game, in so many places. And again, that’s nothing new.

Election Security and Voter Trust in the System. Our conversation then turned to election security.

We explored the fact that voting machine and voter database security is an issue, and why that’s a reality during election seasons.

We had instances of databases being accessed and voters receiving threating letters in the mail if they voted a certain way.

We explored an example of a voter intimidation campaign that targeted voters in Alaska and Florida.

And we covered the fact that Federal authorities were somewhat optimistic that we we had managed to make it through the voting season without a major cyberattack. They pointed to huge turnout by Americans that showed confidence in the security of their votes. It’s reported that the American operatives went on the offense, “hunting forward” in an effort to surveil the work of Russia, Iranian, and other cyber-operatives, identifying targets selected in the U.S. and working to bolster cyber-defenses at home.

USPS. We touched on the challenges the USPS faced, which definitely played a role in this election. The concern about the Postal Service’s ability to handle the massive increase in mail volume also led to so many people voting absentee in advance, and also taking their ballots in person to drop offs wherever possible.

Let’s talk about data. Our conversation turned to data, where we explored

• Data’s impact on polling
• Data’s impact on messaging
• Data’s impact on targeting
• Data’s impact on vote count projections

We explored how AI models underperformed in the 2020 US election where we saw firms like KCore Analytics, Expert.AI, and Advanced Symbolics claim algorithms can capture a more expansive picture of election dynamics because they draw on signals like tweets and Facebook messages. But there are dangers associated with that and overall, it’s still very unclear whether AI proved more or less accurate than the polls.

Let’s talk about the market. Finally, what’s up with the market? Why are the key U.S. market indexes up? While it might seem counterintuitive, US equities have performed the best when political power in Washington is split between Democrats and Republicans.

In summary, it’s been an interesting week. Check out the webcast here:

or grab the audio here:

As always, thanks for coming by and for spending time with the Futurum Team. If you have thoughts on any of these things as it relates to the US elections, specifically related to security, technology, data, and beyond, we’d love to hear them.

Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.

The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.