In the Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania, rural farmers are using an AI-assisted app called Nuru that works in their native language of Swahili to detect a devastating cassava disease before it spreads. In South Africa, computer scientists have built machine learning models to analyze the impact of racial segregation in housing. And in Nairobi, Kenya, AI classifies images from thousands of surveillance cameras perched on lampposts in the bustling city’s center.
The projected benefit of AI adoption on Africa’s economy is tantalizing. Estimates suggest that four African countries alone—Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa—could rake in up to $136 billion worth of economic benefits by 2030 if businesses there begin using more AI tools.
Now, the African Union—made up of 55 member nations—is preparing an ambitious AI policy that envisions an Africa-centric path for the development and regulation of this emerging technology. But debates on when AI regulation is warranted and concerns about stifling innovation could pose a roadblock, while a lack of AI infrastructure could hold back the technology’s adoption.
“We’re seeing a growth of AI in the continent; it’s really important there be set rules in place to govern these technologies,” says Chinasa T. Okolo, a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, whose research focuses on AI governance and policy development in Africa.
Some African countries have already begun to formulate their own legal and policy frameworks for AI. Seven have developed national AI policies and strategies, which are currently at different stages of implementation.
On February 29, the African Union Development Agency published a policy draft that lays out a blueprint of AI regulations for African nations. The draft includes recommendations for industry-specific codes and practices, standards and certification bodies to assess and benchmark AI systems, regulatory sandboxes for safe testing of AI, and the establishment of national AI councils to oversee and monitor responsible deployment of AI.
The heads of African governments are expected to eventually endorse the continental AI strategy, but not until February 2025, when they meet next at the AU’s annual summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Countries with no existing AI policies or regulations would then use this framework to develop their own national strategies, while those that already have will be encouraged to review and align their policies with the AU’s.
Elsewhere, major AI laws and policies are also taking shape. This week, the European Union passed the AI Act, set to become the world’s first comprehensive AI law. In October, the United States issued an executive order on AI. And the Chinese government is eyeing a sweeping AI law similar to the EU’s, while also setting rules that target specific AI products as they’re developed.
If African countries don’t develop their own regulatory frameworks that protect citizens from the technology’s misuse, some experts worry that Africans will face social harms, including bias that could exacerbate inequalities. And if these countries don’t also find a way to harness AI’s benefits, others fear these economies could be left behind.
“We want to be standard makers”
Some African researchers think it’s too early to be thinking about AI regulation. The industry is still nascent there due to the high cost of building data infrastructure, limited internet access, a lack of funding, and a dearth of powerful computers needed to train AI models. A lack of access to quality training data is also a problem. African data is largely concentrated in the hands of companies outside of Africa.
In February, just before the AU’s AI policy draft came out, Shikoh Gitau, a computer scientist who started the Nairobi-based AI research lab Qubit Hub, published a paper arguing that Africa should prioritize the development of an AI industry before trying to regulate the technology.
“If we start by regulating, we’re not going to figure out the innovations and opportunities that exist for Africa,” says David Lemayian, a software engineer and one of the paper’s co-authors.
Okolo, who consulted on the AU-AI draft policy, disagrees. Africa should be proactive in developing regulations, Okolo says. She suggests African countries reform existing laws such as policies on data privacy and digital governance to address AI.
But Gitau is concerned that a hasty approach to regulating AI could hinder adoption of the technology. And she says it’s critical to build homegrown AI with applications tailored for Africans to harness the power of AI to improve economic growth.
“Before we put regulations [in place], we need to do the hard work of understanding the full spectrum of the technology and invest in building the African AI ecosystem,” she says.
More than 50 countries and the EU have AI strategies in place, and more than 700 AI policy initiatives have been implemented since 2017, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s AI Policy Observatory. But only five of those initiatives are from Africa and none of the OECD’s 38 member countries are African.
Africa’s voices and perspectives have largely been absent from global discussions on AI governance and regulation, says Melody Musoni, a policy and digital governance expert at ECDPM, an independent-policy think tank in Brussels.
“We must contribute our perspectives and own our regulatory frameworks,” says Musoni. “We want to be standard makers, not standard takers.”
Nyalleng Moorosi, a specialist in ethics and fairness in machine learning who is based in Hlotse, Lesotho and works at the Distributed AI Research Institute, says that some African countries are already seeing labor exploitation by AI companies. This includes poor wages and lack of psychological support for data labelers, who are largely from low-income countries but working for big tech companies. She argues regulation is needed to prevent that, and to protect communities against misuse by both large corporations and authoritarian governments.
In Libya, autonomous lethal weapons systems have already been used in fighting, and in Zimbabwe, a controversial, military-driven national facial-recognition scheme has raised concerns over the technology’s alleged use as a surveillance tool by the government. The draft AU-AI policy didn’t explicitly address the use of AI by African governments for national security interests, but it acknowledges that there could be perilous AI risks.
Barbara Glover, program officer for an African Union group that works on policies for emerging technologies, points out that the policy draft recommends that African countries invest in digital and data infrastructure, and collaborate with the private sector to build investment funds to support AI startups and innovation hubs on the continent.
Unlike the EU, the AU lacks the power to enforce sweeping policies and laws across its member states. Even if the draft AI strategy wins endorsement of parliamentarians at the AU’s assembly next February, African nations must then implement the continental strategy through national AI policies and laws.
Meanwhile, tools powered by machine learning will continue to be deployed, raising ethical questions and regulatory needs and posing a challenge for policymakers across the continent.
Moorosi says Africa must develop a model for local AI regulation and governance which balances the localized risks and rewards. “If it works with people and works for people, then it has to be regulated,” she says.
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
So far, electric vehicles have mostly been discussed in the US through a scientific, economic, or environmental lens. But all of a sudden, they have become highly political.
Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the security risks posed by Chinese-made smart cars, which could “collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China,” the statement from White House claims.
While many other technologies from China have been scrutinized because of security concerns, EVs have largely avoided that sort of attention until now. After all, they represent a technology that will greatly help the world transition to clean and renewable energy, and people have greeted its rapid growth in China with praise.
But US-China relations have been at a low point since the Trump years and the pandemic, and it seems like only a matter of time before any trade or interaction between the two countries falls under security scrutiny. Now it’s EVs’ turn.
The White House has made clear that there are two motivations behind the investigation: the economy and security.
Even though the statement didn’t explicitly mention EVs, it’s undeniable that they are the only reason Chinese automakers have now become serious challengers to their American peers. Chinese companies like BYD make quality EVs at affordable prices, making them increasingly competitive in international markets. A recent report by the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an industry group, even describes EV competition as “China’s existential threat to America’s auto industry.”
“The issue of Chinese EV imports really hits on so many major political factors all at the same time,” says Kyle Chan, a sociology researcher at Princeton University who studies industrial policies and China. “Not just the auto plants in swing states like Michigan and Ohio, but the broader auto manufacturing sector spread over many important states.”
If the US auto industry fails to remain competitive, it will threaten the job security of millions of Americans, and countless other parts of the US economy will be affected. So it’s no surprise Chinese EVs are seen as a major economic threat that needs to be addressed.
In fact, it’s one of the few issues everyone seems to agree on in this election cycle. Before the Biden investigation, Trump drew people’s attention to Chinese EVs during campaign speeches, vowing to slap a 60% tariff on Chinese imported goods. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator and a longtime China hawk, proposed a bill last Tuesday for a whopping 125% tariff on Chinese cars, including Chinese-branded cars made in other countries like Mexico.
But the new action taken by the Biden administration introduces another factor to the discussion: security threats.
Basically, the argument here is that Chinese cars—especially the newer ones with smart features that collect information from the environment or connect to the telecom and satellite network—could be used to steal information and harm US national interests.
To many experts, this argument is a lot less supported by reality. When TikTok and Huawei were subject to similar concerns, it was because their products were widely used in the US. But the majority of Chinese-made cars are running inside China. There are barely any Chinese cars being sold in the US today, let alone the latest models. That makes the White House’s position look slightly bizarre.
Lei Xing, an auto analyst and observer of the EV industry, has very strong opinions about the security accusations in the Biden administration’s announcement. “It is full of subjective and inaccurate statements trying to paint a picture of threat and security risk that is much greater than it actually is, and is obviously aimed at gaining voter favor as the presidential election race heats up,” Xing tells me.
Nonetheless, fears over data security are shared across the political spectrum in the US. “There has been almost an emerging consensus in Washington, across party lines, that is much more concerned about Chinese data collection through potential technology channels,” Chan says.
This lens has now been used to question almost any technology product with Chinese connections: whether it’s Chinese cars, Chinese e-commerce apps like Shein and Temu, social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat, or smart home gadgets, the sentiment about data security remains the same.
Having watched these other technologies come into the geopolitical crossfire from afar, Chinese EV companies were mostly prepared for what was announced last week.
“I think the Chinese EV firms have already baked this into their calculations,” Chan says. “As they’ve been ramping up more joint ventures and partnerships and entering other markets of the world, I’ve noticed a very clear reluctance to put that much investment into the US market.”
Recently, BYD Americas’ CEO said in an interview that its new planned factory in Mexico will serve the domestic market rather than exporting to the US; Xing learned recently that NIO, another Chinese car company, removed the US from its initial plan of entering 25 markets by 2025. These are all signs that Chinese EV companies will shy away from the US market for a while, at least until the political animosity goes away. Being unable to sell in the world’s second-largest auto market is obviously not good news, but they have a lot of potential customers in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
“[The Chinese auto industry] for now will remain in a ‘watch and study’ mode and strategize accordingly. Mexico will be an important market and a critical production hub for the Americas region whether [the industry] eventually enters America or not,” says Xing.
I had been counting down the days until we’re able to drive Chinese EVs in the US and see how they compete with American cars on their home turf. I guess I’ll be in for a very long wait.
Do you think this move will help or harm US domestic automakers in the long run? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.
Now read the rest of China Report
Catch up with China
1. China started its annual parliamentary meeting today. It’s the highest-level of political meeting in China, and it’s where economic plans and other important policy signals are often released. So watch this space. (NBC News)
For the first time in 30 years, the country has scrapped the annual tradition where the premier briefs the press and answers questions. It was one of the only moments of access to China’s political leaders, and now it’s gone. (Reuters $)
2. A deepfake clone of a Ukrainian YouTuber is being used by Chinese people to express pro-Russia sentiments and sell Russian goods. (Voice of America News)
3. Hundreds of North Koreans are forced to work in Chinese seafood factories while enduring frequent beatings and sexual abuse. These factories supply major US retailers like Walmart and ShopRite. (New Yorker $)
4. The US government wants to stop data brokers from selling sensitive data to China and a few other adversaries. (Wall Street Journal $)
5. In tiny New York studios, American TikTok influencers are learning the tricks of livestream e-commerce from their Chinese counterparts. (Rest of World)
6. The US Department of Justice accused a Chinese chipmaker of stealing trade secrets five years ago. The company was just found not guilty in court. (Bloomberg $)
7. The number of patents filed by inventors in China has been growing rapidly—surpassing the US figure for the first time ever. (Axios)
Lost in translation
When a Chinese college graduate named Lu Zhi moved on from her first job after eight months at PDD (the Chinese e-commerce company that owns Temu), she didn’t realize the company would ask her to pay $36,000 back as a noncompete compensation. As the Chinese publication Caixin reports, Chinese tech companies, particularly PDD, have sparked outrage for how broad their noncompete agreements have become.
It doesn’t just affect key personnel in critical positions. Almost any employee, no matter how junior or peripheral their role, has to sign such an agreement when hired. To enforce the agreement, PDD has even hired private detectives to follow former employees around and film their commute to the new workplace. People are questioning whether these companies have gone too far in the name of protecting their trade secrets.
One more thing
The new Dune 2 movie is barely out, and people are already making memes comparing the plot to the real-life geopolitical situation between the US, China, and Taiwan. Is it accurate? I’ll report back after I watch it.
Forty years ago, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of deserted warehouses and dying low-tech factories. Today, it is arguably the center of the global biotech industry.
During my 30 years in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, I witnessed this transformation firsthand, and I know it was no accident. Much of it was the direct result of the Bayh-Dole Act, a bipartisan law that Congress passed in 1980.
The reform enabled world-class universities like MIT and Harvard, both within a couple of miles of Kendall Square, to retain the patent and licensing rights on discoveries made by their scientists—even when federal funds paid for the research, as they did in nearly all labs. Those discoveries, in turn, helped a significant number of biotechnology startups throughout the Boston area launch and grow.
Before Bayh-Dole, the government retained those patent and licensing rights. Yet while federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health heavily funded basic scientific research at universities, they were ill equipped to find private-sector companies interested in licensing and developing promising but still nascent discoveries. That’s because, worried about accusations of favoritism, government agencies were willing to grant only nonexclusive licenses to companies to develop patented technologies.
Few companies were willing to license technology on a nonexclusive basis. Nonexclusive licenses opened up the possibility that a startup might spend many millions of dollars on product development only to have the government relicense the patent to a rival firm.
As a result, many taxpayer-financed discoveries were never turned into real-world products. Before the law, less than 5% of the roughly 28,000 patents held by the federal government had been licensed for development by private firms.
The bipartisan lawmakers behind Bayh-Dole understood that these misaligned incentives were impeding scientific and technological progress—and hampering economic growth and job creation. They changed the rules so that patents no longer automatically went to the federal government. Instead, universities and medical schools could hold on to their patents and manage the licensing themselves.
In response, research institutions invested heavily in offices like the one I ran at MIT, which are devoted to transferring technology from academia to private-sector companies.
Today, universities and nonprofit research institutions transfer thousands of discoveries each year, resulting in innovations in all manner of technical fields. Many thousands of entrepreneurial companies—often founded by the researchers who made the discoveries in question—have licensed patents stemming from federally funded research. This technology transfer system has helped create millions of jobs.
Google’s search algorithm, for instance, was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page with the help of federal grants while they were still PhD students at Stanford. They cofounded Google, licensed their patented algorithm from the school’s technology transfer office, and ultimately built one of the world’s most valuable companies.
All told, the law sparked a national innovation renaissance that continues to this day. In 2002, the Economistdubbed it “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century.” I consider it so vital that after I retired, I joined the advisory council of an organization devoted to celebrating and protecting it.
But the efficacy of the Bayh-Dole Act is now under serious threat from a draft framework the Biden administration is currently in the process of finalizing after a months-long public comment period that concluded on February 6.
In an attempt to control drug prices in the US, the administration’s proposal relies on an obscure provision of Bayh-Dole that allows the government to “march in” and relicense patents. In other words, it can take the exclusively licensed patent right from one company and grant a license to a competing firm.
The provision is designed to allow the government to step in if a company fails to commercialize a federally funded discovery and make it available to the public in a reasonable time frame. But the White House is now proposing that the provision be used to control the ever-rising costs of pharmaceuticals by relicensing brand-name drug patents if they are not offered at a “reasonable” price.
On the surface, this might sound like a good idea—the US has some of the highest drug prices in the world, and many life-saving drugs are unavailable to patients who cannot afford them. But trying to control drug prices through the march-in provision will be largely ineffective. Many drugs are separately protected by other private patents filed by biotech and pharma companies later in the development process, so relicensing just an early-stage patent will do little to help generate generic alternatives. At the same time, this policy could have an enormous chilling effect on the very beginning of the drug development process, when companies license the initial innovative patent from the universities and research institutions.
If the Biden administration finalizes the draft march-in framework as currently written, it will allow the federal government to ignore licensing agreements between universities and private companies whenever it chooses and on the basis of currently unknown and potentially subjective criteria, such as what constitutes a “reasonable” price. This would make developing new technologies far riskier. Large companies would have ample reason to walk away, and investors in startup companies—which are major players in bringing innovative university technology to market—would be equally reluctant to invest in those firms.
Any patent associated with federal dollars would likely become toxic overnight, since even one cent of taxpayer funding would make the resulting consumer product eligible for march-in on the basis of price.
What’s more, while the draft framework has been billed as a “drug pricing” policy, it makes no distinction between university discoveries in life sciences and those in any other high-tech field. As a result, investment in IP-driven industries from biotech to aerospace to alternative energy would plummet. Technological progress would stall. And the system of technology transfer established by the Bayh-Dole Act would quickly break down.
Unless the administration withdraws its proposal, the United States will return to the days when the most promising federally backed discoveries never left university labs. Far fewer inventions based on advanced research will be patented, and innovation hubs like the one I watched grow will have no chance to take root.
Lita Nelsen joined the Technology Licensing Office of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and was director from 1992 to 2016. She is a member of the advisory council of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, a group of organizations and individuals committed to celebrating and protecting the Bayh-Dole Act, as well as informing policymakers and the public of its benefits.
While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room gasped. They whispered, “No way.” They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner weigh? Are any of its parts made in China? Does it use the JSON data format?
The answers weren’t trivial. Based in part on these presentations, many would be making a once-in-a-decade decision.
These New Hampshire officials currently use AccuVote machines, which were made by a company that’s now part of Dominion Voting Systems. First introduced in 1989, they run on an operating system no longer supported by Microsoft, and some have suffered extreme malfunctions; in 2022, the same model of AccuVote partially melted during an especially warm summer election in Connecticut.
Many towns in New Hampshire want to replace the AccuVote. But with what? Based on past history, the new machines would likely have to last decades — while also being secure enough to satisfy the state’s election skeptics. Outside the event, those skeptics held signs like “Ban Voting Machines.” Though they were relatively small in number that day, they’re part of a nationwide movement to eliminate voting technology and instead hand count every ballot — an option election administrators say is simply not feasible.
Against this backdrop, more than 130 election officials packed into the conference rooms on the second floor of Concord’s Legislative Office Building. Ultimately, they faced a choice between two radically different futures.
The first was to continue with a legacy vendor. Three companies — Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic — control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public.
The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.
“Why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software at all?”
At the Concord event, a representative for ES&S suggested that this open-source approach could be dangerous. “If the FBI was building a new building, they’re not going to put the blueprints out online,” he said. But VotingWorks co-founder Ben Adida says it’s fundamental to rebuilding trust in voting equipment and combatting the nationwide push to hand count ballots. “An open-source voting system is one where there are no secrets about how this works,” Adida told the audience. “All the source code is public for the world to see, because why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software at all?”
Others agree. Ten states currently use VotingWorks’ open-source audit software, including Georgia during its hand count audit in 2020. Other groups are exploring open-source voting technology, including Microsoft, which recently piloted voting software in Franklin County, Idaho. Bills requiring or allowing for open-source voting technology have recently been introduced in at least six states; a bill has also been introduced at the federal level to study the issue further. In New Hampshire, the idea has support from election officials, the secretary of state, and even diehard machine skeptics.
VotingWorks is at the forefront of the movement to make elections more transparent. “Although the voting equipment that we’ve been using for the last 20, 30 years is not responsible for this crisis,” Adida said, “it’s also not the equipment that’s going to get us out of this crisis.” But can an idealist nonprofit really unseat industry juggernauts — and restore faith in democracy along the way?
For years, officials have feared that America’s voting machines are vulnerable to attack. During the 2016 election, Russian hackers targeted election systems in all 50 states, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee found no evidence that any votes were changed, but it did suggest that Russia could be cataloging options “for use at a later date.”
In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure as “critical infrastructure,” noting that “bad cyber actors — ranging from nation states, cyber criminals, and hacktivists — are becoming more sophisticated and dangerous.”
Some conservative activists have suggested simply avoiding machines altogether and hand-counting ballots. But doing so is prohibitively slow and expensive, not to mention more error-prone. Last year, for example, one county in Arizona estimated that counting all 105,000 ballots from the 2020 election would require at least 245 people working every day, including holidays, for almost three weeks.
That leaves election administrators dependent on machines to tally up votes. That August day in Concord, VotingWorks and two of the legacy vendors, Dominion and ES&S, were offering the same kind of product: an optical scanner, which is essentially just a counting machine. After a New Hampshire voter fills in a paper ballot by hand, it’s most likely inserted into an optical scanner, which interprets and tallies the marks. This process is how roughly two-thirds of the country votes. A quarter of voters mark their ballots using machines (aptly named “ballot-marking devices”), which are then fed into an optical scanner as well. About 5 percent use direct recording electronic systems, or DREs, which allows votes to be cast and stored directly on the machine. Only 0.2 percent of voters have their ballots counted by hand.
Workers in Hinsdale, New Hampshire count each of the 1799 ballots cast after the polls closed on election day in 2016. Hand counts of ballots are prohibitively slow and expensive, and less accurate than machines.
KRISTOPHER RADDER/THE BRATTLEBORO REFORMER VIA AP
Since the 2020 election, the companies that make these machines have been the subject of intense scrutiny from people who deny the election results. Those companies have also come under fire for what critics on both sides of the political aisle describe as their secrecy, lack of innovation, and obstructionist tendencies.
None of the three companies publicly disclose basic information, including their investors and their financial health. It can also be difficult to even get the prices of their machines. Often, jurisdictions come to depend on these firms. Two-thirds of the industry’s revenue comes from support, maintenance, and services for the machines.
Legacy vendors also fight to maintain their market share. In 2017, Hart InterCivic sued Texas to prevent counties from replacing its machines, which don’t produce a paper trail, with machines that did. “For a vendor to sue to prevent auditable paper records from being used in voting shows that market dynamics can be starkly misaligned with the public interest,” concluded a report by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Verified Voting, a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, works to promote “the responsible use of technology in elections.”
The companies tell a different story, pointing out that they do disclose their code to certain entities, including third-party firms and independent labs that work on behalf of the federal government to test for vulnerabilities in the software that could be exploited by hackers. In a statement to Undark, ES&S also said it discloses certain financial information to jurisdictions “when requested” and the company shared approximate prices for its voting machines, although it noted that final pricing depends on “individual customer requirements.”
In Concord, officials from some small towns where ballots are still hand-counted were considering switching to machines. Others were considering whether to stick with Dominion and LHS — the New Hampshire-based company that services the machines — or switch to VotingWorks. It would likely be one of the most expensive, consequential decisions of their careers.
“For a vendor to sue to prevent auditable paper records from being used in voting shows that market dynamics can be starkly misaligned with the public interest.”
Throughout his pitch, the representative for LHS emphasized the continuity between the old AccuVote machines and the new Dominion scanner. Wearing a blazer and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, Jeff Silvestro knew the crowd well. LHS is the only authorized service provider for the entire state’s AccuVote machines, and it’s responsible for offering training for the towns’ staff, delivering memory cards for each election, and weathering a blizzard to come to their poll site and service a broken scanner.
Don’t worry, Silvestro reassured the crowd: The voter experience is the same. “Similarities,” Silvestro told the crowd. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
Just down the hall from Silvestro, Ben Adida laid out a different vision of what voting technology could be. He opened by addressing the “elephant in the room”: the substantial number of people who distrust the elections. VotingWorks could do so, he said, by offering three things: security, simplicity, and transparency.
Adida first started working on election technology in 1997, as a computer science undergraduate at MIT, where he built a voting system for student council elections. After earning a Ph.D. from MIT in 2006, with a specialty in cryptography and information security, he did a few more years of election work as a post-doc at Harvard University and then transitioned to data security and privacy for medical data. Later, he served as director of engineering at Mozilla and Square and vice president of engineering at Clever, a digital learning platform for K-12 schools.
In 2016, Adida considered leaving Clever to do election work again, and he followed the progress of STAR-Vote, an open-source election system proposed by Travis County, Texas, that ultimately didn’t move forward. He decided to stay put, but he couldn’t shake the thought of voting technology. Adida knew it was rare for someone to have his background in both product design and election security. “This is kind of a calling,” he said.
Ben Adida, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, with a specialty in cryptography and information security, is the co-founder of VotingWorks, a nonprofit that builds open-source election technology.
The voting machine built by VotingWorks is made from off-the-shelf electronics and open-source software that the company posted on GitHub.
Adida launched VotingWorks in December 2018, with some funding from individuals and Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator. The nonprofit is now unique among the legacy voting technology vendors: The group has disclosed everything, from its donors to the prices of its machines. VotingWorks machines are made from off-the-shelf electronics, and in the long-run, according to Adida, are cheaper than their competitors.
The day of the Concord event, Adida wore a T-shirt tucked into his khakis, and sported a thick brown mustache. When he started discussing the specs of his machine, he spoke quickly, bounding around the room and even tripping on an errant wire. At one point, he showed off his machine’s end-of-night election report, printed on an 8 ½ by 11 piece of paper, a far cry from the long strips of paper that are currently used. You don’t have to have “these long CVS receipts.” The room laughed.
Adida and his team are staking out a position in a debate that stretches back to the early days of computing: Is the route to computer security through secrecy, or through total transparency?
Some of the most widely used software today is open-source software, or OSS, meaning anyone can read, modify, and reuse the code. OSS has powered popular products like the operating system Linux and the internet browser Firefox from Mozilla. It’s also used extensively by the Department of Defense.
Proponents of OSS offer three main arguments for why it’s more secure than a locked box model. First, publicly available source code can be scrutinized by anyone, not just a relatively small group of engineers within a company, increasing the chances of catching flaws. Second, because coders know that they can be scrutinized by anyone, they’re incentivized to produce better work and to explain their approach. “You can go and look at exactly why it’s being done this way, who wrote it, who approved it, and all of that,” said Adida.
Third, OSS proponents say that trying to hide source code will ultimately fail, because attackers can acquire it from the supplier or reverse engineer it themselves. Hackers don’t need perfect source code, just enough to analyze for patterns that may suggest a vulnerability. Breaking is easier than building.
Already, there are indications that bad actors have acquired proprietary voting machine code. In 2021, an election official in Colorado allegedly allowed a conspiracy theorist to access county machines, copy sensitive data, and photograph system passwords — the kind of insider attack that, experts warn, could compromise the security of the coming presidential election.
Adida and his team are staking out a position in a debate that stretches back to the early days of computing: Is the route to computer security through secrecy, or through total transparency?
Not everyone is convinced that open-source code alone is enough to ensure a secure voting machine. “You could have had open-source software, and you might not have found all of the problems or errors or issues,” said Pamela Smith, the president of Verified Voting, citing the numerous lines of code that would need to be examined in a limited amount of time.
Adida doesn’t expect anyone to go through the hundreds of thousands of lines of code on the VotingWorks GitHub. But if they’re curious about a specific aspect, like how the scanner handles paper that’s askew, it’s much more manageable: only a few hundred lines of code. Already, a small number of coders from outside the company have made suggestions on how to improve the software, some of which have been accepted. Then, to fully guard against vulnerabilities, the company relies on its own procedures, third-party reviews, and certification testing at the federal level, said Adida.
Miami-Dade election workers check voting machines for accuracy by reviewing scrolls of paper that Adida likened to “long CVS receipts.”
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
In addition to security, any new machine also needs to be easy for poll workers to operate — and able to perform reliably under the high-stakes conditions of an election day. In interviews, election officials who use the technology in Mississippi raved about its ease of use.
Some also love how responsive the company is to feedback. “They come to us and say, ‘Tell us in the field what’s going on,’” said Sara Dionne, chairman of the election commission in Warren County, Mississippi, which started using VotingWorks in 2020. “We certainly never had that kind of conversation with ES&S ever.”
To expand VotingWorks’ reach, though, Adida must pitch it in places like New Hampshire, where election officials are navigating tight budgets, fallout from the 2020 election, and misperceptions about voting technology.
New Hampshire is a swing state, and, after the 2020 election, it has a small but vocal faction of election deniers. At the same time, Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan has done little to marshal resources for new machines. Last year, Scanlan opposed a bill that would have allowed New Hampshire towns and cities to apply for funding from a $12 million federal grant for new voting machines; Republicans in the legislature killed the bill. (Asked what cash-strapped jurisdictions should do if they can’t afford new scanners, Scanlan told Undark they could cannibalize parts from old AccuVote machines.)
Some critics also say Scanlan has done little to dispel some conservative activists’ beliefs that New Hampshire can dispense with machines altogether. At the Concord event, a woman told Undark that Manchester, a city with 68,000 registered voters, could hand count all of its ballots in just four hours. Speaking with Undark, Scanlan acknowledged that this estimate wasn’t correct, and that hand counting is less accurate than machines. However, his office hasn’t communicated this message to the public in any formal way. “I definitely think that he is complicit in allowing [misinformation] to continue to flourish,” said Liz Wester, co-founder of 603 Forward, which encourages civic participation in the state.
The VotingWorks model won over some machine skeptics at the Concord event, like Tim Cahill, a Republican in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Cahill said he’d prefer that all ballots in the state be hand counted but would choose VotingWorks over the other vendors. “Why would you trust something you can’t put your eyes on?” he told Undark. “We have a lot of smart people in this country and people want open source, they want transparency.”
Poll workers use the Accu-Vote machines to scan absentee ballots in Fairbanks, Alaska.
ERIC ENGMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Open source has found fans in other states, too. Kevin Cavanaugh is a county supervisor in Pinal, Arizona’s third most populous county. He says he started to doubt voting machines after watching a documentary, funded by the election denier Mike Lindell, claiming that the devices have unauthorized software that could change vote totals without detection. In November 2022, Cavanaugh introduced a motion to increase the number of ballots counted by hand in the county, and he told Undark he’d like a full hand count. “But, if we’re using machines,” he added, “then I think it’s important that the source code is available for inspection to experts.”
Back in Concord, Adida appeared to be persuasive to the public at large — or at least those invested enough to attend the event. Of the 201 attendees who filled out a scorecard, VotingWorks was the most popular first choice. But among election officials, the clear preference was Dominion. Some officials were skeptical that open-source technology would mean much to people in their towns. “Your average voter doesn’t care about open source,” said one town clerk.
Still, five towns in New Hampshire have already purchased VotingWorks machines, some of which will be used in upcoming March local elections.
Two main factors determine whether someone has faith in an election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at MIT who has written extensively about trust in elections. The first, which affects roughly 5 to 10 percent of voters, is a negative personal experience at the polls, like long lines, rude poll workers, and problems with machines, which can make the public less willing to trust an election’s outcome.
The second, more influential factor affecting trust is if a voter’s candidate won. That makes it supremely difficult to restore confidence, said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County and the current CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials. “The answer on election administration — it’s complex, it’s wonky, it’s not pithy,” she said in a recent press conference. “It’s hard to come back to those emotional pleas with what the reality is.”
Adida agrees with Stewart that VotingWorks alone isn’t going to eliminate election denialism — nor, he said, is that his goal. Instead, he hopes to reach the people who are susceptible to misinformation but haven’t necessarily made up their minds yet, a group he describes as the “middle 80 percent.” Even if they never visit the company’s GitHub, he says, “the fact that we’re putting it all out in the open builds trust.” And when someone says something patently false about the company, Adida can at least ask them to identify the incriminating lines of source code.
Are those two things — rhetorical power and a commitment to transparency — really a match for the disinformation machinery pushing lies across the country? Adida mentioned the myths about legacy vendors’ machines being mis-programmed or incorrectly counting ballots during the 2020 election. “What was the counterpoint to that?” he asked. “It was, ‘Trust us. These machines have been tested.’ I want the counterpoint to be, ‘Hey folks, all the source code is open.’”
Spenser Mestel is a poll worker and independent journalist. His bylines include The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Intercept.
The other day some preschoolers were pretending to be one of their favorite Sesame Street characters, a baby goat named Ma’zooza who likes round things. They played with tomatoes—counting up to five, hiding one, and putting it back.
A totally ordinary moment exploring shapes, numbers, and imagination. Except this version of Sesame Street—called Ahlan Simsim (Welcome Sesame)—was custom made for children like these: Syrian refugees living in camps in Lebanon who otherwise don’t have access to preschool or, often, enough to eat.
Educational interruptions due to the pandemic, climate disasters, and war have affected nearly every child on Earth since 2020. A record 43.3 million children have been driven from their homes by conflict and disasters, according to UNICEF—a number that doubled over the past decade.
And yet, points out Sherrie Westin, the head of the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, “less than 2% of humanitarian aid worldwide goes to the early years”—that is, specifically supporting care and education, not just food and medicine.
Sesame Workshop created the TV show Ahlan Simsim (seen on screen) for children who have been displaced from their homes or experienced conflict.
RYAN HEFFERNAN/SESAME WORKSHOP
That may be about to change. The Ahlan Simsim program is the largest-ever humanitarian intervention specifically intended for small children’s development. Sesame Workshop partnered with the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian-aid nonprofit, to win a $100 million grant competition administered by the MacArthur Foundation. The results, released in May 2023 but not yet peer reviewed, have been startling: they have provided the first evidence that 100% remote learning can help young children in crisis situations. And the format has already been successfully copied and used in other crises.
The program combines video content produced by Sesame with services from the IRC, which employs a combination of volunteers from the affected community and professional teachers and parent educators to work locally with families. Over the past few years, 2 million children and their caregivers watched Ahlan Simsim and received coordinated services, some of which were provided entirely over mobile phones. Another 25 million simply watched the show.
In 2023, Hiro Yoshikawa and his team of researchers at New York University showed in a randomized controlled trial that Syrian refugee children taking part in an 11-week, fully remote learning program, combining Ahlan Simsim videos with live support from local preschool teachers over cell phones, showed progress in learning that was comparable to the results from a year of standard in-person preschool.
And the learning they measured wasn’t just academic. Children made progress in overall development, emerging literacy, emerging numeracy, motor skills, social-emotional skills, and even the quality of play—like pretending to be Ma’zooza the goat.
“I’m pretty impressed,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, an expert in early child development at Temple University, who was not involved with the research. Compared with in-person preschool, “this is probably not the full nutritional value,” she cautions. “But nicely done—to even bring them anything in this setting is kind of amazing.”
Sesame and IRC hope that holistic intervention can help the world’s most vulnerable kids cope with toxic stress—the kind that can, if unchecked, change the architecture of a developing brain. “We see so many children that just because of the circumstances of their birth—born into crisis, into conflict—the odds of them achieving their full potential are reduced,” says Katie Murphy, the director of early-childhood development and strategic initiatives at the IRC, who was closely involved with the project. “Our work tries to reduce that gap.”
With the right support from caregivers and communities, Murphy and her colleagues believe, more children around the world can grow up resilient amid crisis, displacement, and war.
Coping with discrimination, conflict, and hunger
At a refugee camp in the agricultural Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, Amal, Hana, and Mariam, three Syrian refugee mothers who participated in the program, sat on a carpet in a nearly empty tent, wearing headscarves and patterned robes. Hana’s four-year-old son reclined on her lap. There had been a recent security incident at their home camp, so we Zoomed from a neighboring camp.
As the economic crisis worsens here, the mothers I spoke with reported feeling growing resentment and sometimes discrimination from their Lebanese neighbors. They said they are nervous just using their UNHCR aid cards—which mark them as refugees—to buy food at the supermarket. And their kids are sometimes bullied as well.
“There are children who are saying ‘Oh, you are Syrian,’ and they want to fight with them,” Sou’ad, a refugee with four children under seven who also volunteers for the IRC, told me through an interpreter in a separate interview. “The sense of belonging is needed. The children don’t know which country they belong to—to Lebanon or to Syria. They say, ‘This is not our country—this is the country of these other children, so that’s why they are fighting us.’”
Syrians are the largest displaced population in the world. Seven out of 10 fled or were forced from their homes at the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. The women I’ve spoken with have been here for around a decade; their children were born in Lebanon, but they aren’t permanent residents and have no path to citizenship.
In August 2020, a giant explosion at the port of Beirut complicated and worsened Lebanon’s brutal economic and political crisis. The country is currently without a president, and tensions have only increased with the Israel-Hamas war. As of October 2023, one-fourth of Lebanon’s population was food insecure, including 36% of Syrian refugees.
These days, the mothers at the camp tell me, there isn’t enough money even to give the children milk or labne, the local variation of yogurt; they say they have only rice, pita, and a little za’atar spice to sprinkle on top. Children as young as eight are going to work in the fields for food.
Pivoting under pressure
When the pandemic hit, the remote-schooling intervention in Lebanon had to be redesigned from scratch. The original plan was that IRC would provide in-person preschool, and Sesame would create complementary TV episodes and short videos featuring Ma’zooza the goat alongside Jad, a yellow monster, and Basma, his purple friend. But in early 2020, when schools around the world had to go remote, the project did too.
Remote-learning programs during disaster and war are nothing new. During World War II, BBC School Radio broadcast lessons to up to half the students in Britain. But the advent of mobile 4G and 5G networks around the world has presented whole new opportunities for learning in crises. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created one of the biggest and fastest displacements of families in history; Ukraine declared just a two-week school holiday before resuming public education online, with many students joining in on mobile phones from across the country and around the world.
After covid lockdowns ended, the International Rescue Committee and Sesame resumed their in-person preschool program, where Lebanese children learned alongside Syrian refugees.
But that’s a tall order in Lebanon, where telecommunications infrastructure and the power grid have deteriorated along with the economic situation. As of January 2021, about two-thirds of the population had a mobile connection and 78% were internet users, according to Datareportal. The Syrian refugees reached by IRC programming typically had one prepaid mobile phone per household; the group gave them recharge cards to cover their data services.
Nevertheless, the approach was “extraordinarily successful,” says Yoshikawa, the lead researcher in the study. He points to the unusual level of commitment from family members, primarily mothers, who took time out of their household duties for a rare and prized opportunity to focus on their children’s learning. “When we interviewed the caregivers,” he says, “they really perceived this as the chance to have full access to preschool, which Syrian refugee families typically don’t have.”
Preschool teachers dropped off basic writing materials and art supplies. They called groups of five or six families at home three times a week. In these calls, they spent about five minutes greeting and engaging the children directly, and the rest of the time instructing caregivers on how to convey lessons and lead activities with the children. Families could message the teachers, as well as each other, for support. And families would send videos back to the teachers via WhatsApp, documenting what the children had practiced.
Caregivers reported going up to their roof for a better signal. They charged smartphones at neighbors’ homes when the power went out, and when they ran out of data they borrowed phones from extended family members so the children could keep watching assigned videos.
More than a third of the mothers were illiterate, so often the teachers would have to show them how to write basic letters to teach their children, or send them voice memos if they couldn’t read messages. “We were empowering them both,” says Awada, one of the teachers.
“That interaction with their children, I believe, was one of the reasons the study’s results were so powerful,” says Westin.
Dima, a refugee and mother of three who also works as an outreach volunteer with the IRC, helps recruit and support families to engage with the Ahlan Simsim program. She says most children had no previous access to the sort of educational materials provided—things like scissors, tape, and crayons. The IRC also distributed necessities like soap, lice medicine, and toothbrushes.
Mariam, one of the mothers in the camp, has two girls, five and four years old, and her greatest wish is that they get an education. She herself stopped her schooling at the sixth grade. “Reading and writing,” she said through an interpreter, “is the most important thing in life.”
A focus on resilience
Sesame Street premiered in the United States in 1969 with a social mission born out of the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: to level the playing field for poor kids by bringing early learning into the home for free.
The show debuted its first foreign-language co-productions in Brazil and Mexico just three years later; there have been a total of 42 international co-productions over the years. A meta-analysis of studies with over 10,000 children in 15 countries found that these programs have had significant positive effects on children’s mastery of reading and basic math concepts, as well as their social-emotional skills and attitudes toward out-groups.
An Arabic version of the show (Iftah Ya Simsim/Open Sesame, which many of today’s parents in the region grew up with) ran from 1979 to 1989. But Ahlan Simsim is the first production created deliberately for children affected by crisis and conflict, and that necessitated some special sensitivity.
The social-emotional curriculum for the show had to be designed from scratch for the cultural context and needs of these children, says Shanna Kohn, the director of international education at Sesame Workshop. “We went in with the idea of a show that focused on resilience—a beloved Western concept. And we brought that to this team of academics and Arab advisors, and there was a lot of skepticism. There isn’t even a clear Arabic translation,” says Kohn.
So the team backed up and started with the basics. They had to figure out how to present relatable stories—about Jad leaving home and feeling different from his friends—without introducing situations or concepts that might be triggering for young viewers.
Elmo with children in
a classroom in Saida,
Lebanon.
RYAN HEFFERNAN/SESAME WORKSHOP
“Boats are usually a go-to for preschool children,” says Scott Cameron, who has been with the company for 25 years. “We avoided things like that, for obvious reasons.” They also avoided loud noises, like thunderstorms. They skipped nutrition lessons, because kids who are barely getting enough to eat can’t use reminders about fruits and vegetables.
Kids who are traumatized often respond with an outward numbness; the research team found that the children were using only two or three terms—happy, sad, angry—to describe their feelings. To help them process these feelings and frustrations, the show defines the Arabic words for nine emotions: caring, fear, frustration, nervousness, hope or determination, jealousy, loneliness, and sadness. Jad and Basma model emotional coping strategies: belly breathing, counting to five, “moving it out,” “drawing it out,” asking for help, and making a plan.
Sesame and the IRC are hoping that the evidence from this study becomes a mandate. The Lego Foundation supported a version of Ahlan Simsim for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Sesame and the IRC have piloted the remote preschool program in Iraq and hope to scale it in that country, where there aren’t resources for in-person preschool.
And they adapted some of the video content for rapid response to 2023’s floods in Libya and earthquake in Morocco. Westin’s hope is that the world will begin to see both the need and the opportunity. “Those who have the most to lose,” she says, “receive the least and have the most to gain if we can reach them with nurturing care and growth.”
Anya Kamenetz is a freelance education reporter who writes the Substack newsletter The Golden Hour.
