Okay, it's Thursday, October 31st, happy Halloween, and we will be releasing this maybe one day,

maybe on the day of the 2024 general election. What are we going to be talking about?

Well, Roman, are you familiar with NIST? No, can you spell that for me?

N-I-S-T. Well-I-S-T, no.

No surprise.

NIST is short for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

It was founded in 1901, and it's a federal agency within the Commerce Department.

And it's one of the nerdier agencies.

It's dedicated to doing things like producing scientific inventions

and developing technical standards and measurements. So the atomic clock, thank NIST.

Close captioning on TV, also NIST. The very first spreadsheet program called OmniTab, also thank NIST.

But in 1988, one notable NIST production wasn't a

scientific invention or a measurement standard. It was special publication 5-0-158, also known as

accuracy, integrity, and security, and computerized vote-telling.

And this 132-page report was written by a NIST analyst named Roy Saltman.

And Saltman went into methodical detail about modern systems, modern by the standards of the

1980s, of voting and the potential problems that could arise from

their use. And Saltman discussed everything from hardware to software to operational procedures

that were changing voting standards in the United States. And while the 1988 report assumed

that the use of computers and voting would continue to grow,

it did call out one particular practice to be ended.

When you use a punch card system for voting, the cards are usually pre-scored or already partially cut in the places where voters are expected to take a stylus and then punch out the

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