Technology

Ita mark of 2020 that the image of throngs of Americans flocking to polling places to exercise their right to vote, once a heartening symbol of democracy in action, is now a nightmare scenario that could visit widespread death on unsuspecting communities nationwide.

In the midst of a viral outbreak thatinfected more than half a million people and swiftly claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone, the country is grappling with the question of how Americans will safely cast their votes in Novemberelection — and time is running out.

A number of state officials have pushed back their primaries to protect residents, but last weekWisconsin primary, with its long lines, uneven protective measures and shuttered polling places, demonstrated a worst-case scenario for what Novembergeneral presidential election could look like if states don&t quickly implement a Plan B.

But a handful of lawmakers pushing for a more equitable voting system don&t believe we need a full-on Plan B to rescue the election, just a scaled-up version of systems in place that millions already use to cast their ballots each election cycle. Early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting have all ticked upward in the last 20 years. Five states now use vote-by-mail as their primary way of voting: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. The military also relies on mail-in absentee voting for those deployed overseas. In 2018, one in four Americans who cast a ballot did so through the mail.

Residents wait in long lines to vote in a presidential primary election outside Riverside High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 7, 2020. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

With the economy still frozen in place, Congress is working on another big coronavirus relief package, though efforts are at a political standstill for the moment. Proposing their own bill, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden are striving to get vote-by-mail provisions into the next relief package. &Americans shouldn&t have to choose between their health and casting a ballot,& Klobuchar said in a bipartisan call on vote-by-mail efforts. &And it is wrong to shortchange our election officials as we provide relief to address the effects of this global pandemic.&

The bill, called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act (NDEBA), seeks to provide 20 days of early voting for all states, a guarantee that all voters can request to vote with a no-excuse absentee ballot, accommodations for voters who don&t receive an absentee ballot in time and additional funding for the Election Assistance Commission to make the changes.

&We are gonna fight like hell to get our bill in the next COVID-19 package,& Wyden told TechCrunch in an interview.

States take the lead

Republicans in Congress have yet to show any support for expanded mail-in voting, but a swath of Republican state officials close to the election process have turned to mail voting systems to keep residents safe, including the secretaries of state in Kentucky, West Virginia and Georgia.

On the bipartisan call led by Sen. Klobuchar with secretaries of state last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner was skittish about the idea of a permanent, expanded vote-by-mail system, but agreed voters should be allowed to cast their votes safely through the mail during the COVID-19 crisis. He previously announced that all West Virginia voters would be sent application postcards for voting through the mail.

&The governor, attorney general, county clerks and I have zealously worked together within state law to balance health concerns with the ease of voting,& Warner said. &We have determined that the absentee voting process is the safest method… Your ballot box is as close as your mailbox.&

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, touted her stateown system in the bipartisan call.

&Washington statevote-by-mail system is accessible, secure, fair and instills confidence in our voters,& Wyman said, encouraging officials &across the political spectrum& to unify around keeping voters safe and stressing that expanded absentee voting and vote-by-mail &must be options on the table& for 2020.

On the call, secretaries of state around the U.S. emphasized the need to act quickly to scale up absentee voting systems, stressing that funding, organizing and putting new systems into practice will be a scramble over the next seven months.

President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail systems in recent White House coronavirus briefings and tweets, but there is no evidence that voting through the mail is &fraudulent in many cases,& as he has claimed. Trump himself uses mail-in voting to cast his absentee ballot in Florida.

The presidentattacks on expanded vote-by-mail also contradict the CDCown guidance for safe elections during the pandemic, which encourage expanded mail-in voting to &minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.&

Out of the billions of absentee votes cast through the mail in the U.S. over a 12-year period, an examination of all known instances of voter fraud found only 491 cases involving absentee voting. With those numbers, Americans are less likely to commit voter fraud than they are to be struck by lightning. In states with vote-by-mail, safeguards built into the system can catch or deter anyone who might tamper with a ballot. In Oregon, which uses forensic signature matching to secure its vote, a poll worker was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine for tampering with two ballots.

Politics aside

Republicans today mostly believe that Democrats would benefit from any effort that might broadly boost voter turnout, a perspective that the president echoed in a recent Fox News interview discussing the early coronavirus relief bill. &The things they had in there were crazy,& Trump said. &They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you&d never have a Republican elected in this country again.&

That package included $400 million to safeguard Novemberelection — an amount Democrats argue is insufficient — and no requirements that states implement vote-by-mail. But the conversation around vote-by-mail hasn&t always broken down along todaypolitical lines and the political reality of a broad mail-in voting system is likely nuanced, though untested on a national scale.

An early and vocal proponent of vote-by-mail, Wyden explains that those lines have been redrawn over the years as attitudes toward implementing vote-by-mail have shifted.

&You have to put this in context of where we are,& Wyden said, noting that the debate around vote-by-mail was an &academic thing& two decades ago, with political scientists hashing out which party stood to benefit. In Oregon, other Democrats initially opposed vote-by-mail efforts, believing that because their voters skewed older, Republicans would benefit.

&After all this bickering back and forth on who would benefit, Oregonians put it on the ballot.& In 1998, 69% of voters supported the ballot measure, which passed easily.

In the U.S., implementing any voting changes across the country is politically challenging due to the fact that states oversee and administer their own elections. Even the oversight process varies widely from state to state. Differences aside, many states have expanded absentee voting in recent years.

&Back then when I was introducing those first bills, you didn&t have the number of people voting absentee that you have today,& Wyden said. While voting absentee once required a justification, a &big chunk& of those excuse requirements have given way since then, allowing more people to vote by mail.

&Absentee voting is enormously popular,& Wyden said. &Basically what I tell people… is what we&re really doing with our legislature is kind of upscaling what is already going on — not reinventing the wheel.&

Wyden warns that we&ve already seen the worst-case scenario play out in Wisconsin. &You have older voters waiting in line to talk to older poll workers… some had masks, some didn&t.&

&[In] Wisconsin… the legislature said ‘we&re going to put the lives of our people at risk.& I thought that was very troubling,& Wyden said.

&All I can think of was at this point in the middle of a pandemic, I don&t think this is a partisan issue.&

Price Technologies, the operator of the comparison shopping website Price.com and its related browser extension, is adding a feature to show product availability for a few essential items that have had supply issues caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S.

Products like aspirin, acetaminophen, facial tissues, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen, rice, soap, soup, toilet paper and other items are going to be shown on the companywebsite with their availability at online vendors.

&We&ve been tracking howessential COVID-19 supplies are becoming difficult to find online,& the company wrote in a blogpost. &Therefore, we are now updating the product availability in real-timeforthese essential items. We are launching an early version of this feature and plan to continue to expand/refine this featurefunctionality in the following weeks.&

Launched in 2016, Price.com is somewhat of a competitor to services like Honey, the online discount shopping service acquired by PayPal last year.

According to Crunchbase, the companybacked by a slew of early-stage investors, including Dave McClure, (the founder of 500 Startups), Plug and Play Ventures, Social Capital and VentureSouq.

Adobe was scheduled to hold its annual conference in Las Vegas two weeks ago, but the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to make alternate plans. In less than a month, its events team shifted venues for the massive conference, not once, but twice as the severity of the situation became clear.

This year didn&t just involve Adobe Summit itself. To make things more interesting, it was also hosting Magento Imagine as a separate conference within a conference at the same time. (Adobe bought Magento in 2018 for $1.6 billion.)

Originally, Adobe had more than 500 sessions planned across four venues on the Las Vegas Strip, with more than 23,000 attendees expected. Combining all of the sponsors, partners and Adobe personnel, it involved more than 40,000 hotel rooms.

Once it became clear that such a large event couldn&t happen, the company reimagined the conference as a fully digital experience.

Plan A

VP of Experience Marketing Alex Amado is in charge of planning Adobe Summit, a tall task under normal circumstances.

&Planning Summit is a year-round endeavor,& he said. &Literally within weeks of finishing one of those Las Vegas events we are starting on the next one, and some of the work actually is on an 18 or 24-month cycle because we have those long-term hotel contracts and all of that stuff.

&For the last 12 months, basically, we had people who were working on what we now call Plan A — and we didn&t know that we needed a Plan B and Plan C — and the original event was going to be our biggest yet.&

2019 Adobe Summit stage in Las Vegas. Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch

After the team began to wonder in January if the virus would force them to change how they deliver the conference, they started building contingency plans in earnest, Amado said. &As we got into February, things started looking a little scarier, and it very quickly escalated to the point where we were talking really seriously about Plan B.&

Frank, a New York-based student-facing startup, has raised $5 million in what the company described as an &interim strategic round& that Chegg, a public edtech company, took part in. According to Frank founder and CEO Charlie Javice, previous investors Aleph and Marc Rowan took part in the round alongside new investor GingerBread Capital.

The education funding-focused startup last raised known capital in December of 2017, when it closed a $10 million Series A. Frank raised a seed round earlier that same year worth $5.5 million.

According to Javice, her firm closed its round in early March, before the recent market carnage. Bearing in mind that there is always lag between when a funding round is closed and when it is announced, the new Frank round is on the fresher side of things. Most rounds are a bit more like Shipporecent investment (closed in December, announced in April) than Podiumrecent deal, which it started raising in mid-February of this year.

Timing aside, what Frank is doing is interesting, so lettalk about its business, how it approached 2019 and how itfaring in todaychanged market.

Everyonebroke

To help keep student debt low, Frank is a bit akin to TurboTax for college money, as TechCrunch wrote when covering its Series A, helping students get through a thicket of forms and aid to collect as much aid as possible while avoiding borrowing.

American higher education is too expensive, and applying for financial help is irksome and byzantine. I can safely report that sans quoting an expert, as I had to go through it as a student and only finished paying my student loans last July.

Frank wants to help make college more affordable, with the company noting in a call with TechCrunch that therebeen a good number of companies working to help students service debt in a less expensive way after they&ve hired the money; it wants to help students avoid taking on so much red ink in the first place.

According to Javice, lots of students fail to finish signing up for federal aid programs, and some students wind up dropping out of programs before finishing them, leaving them saddled with debt but no degree. Thata hell of a trap to wind up in, as student loans are the barnacles of the financial world — incredibly hard to get rid of.

According to Javice, Frank was a little early to rethinking its own growth/profit trade-off than the rest of the startup world, which woke up when WeWork filed to go public and was quickly booed off Wall Street. In mid-2019, Frank slowed growth to get closer to the margins it wanted. (Thinking out loud, this is probably how the startup managed to survive so long off its December 2017 Series A.)

Indeed, according to FrankCEO, it was in a comfortable cash position before this round, which she described as more a vote of confidence than a round of necessity.

Which brings us to today, and the new, COVID-19 world. In an email to TechCrunch, Javice said that &like everyone else,& her company is &adjusting to the new realities.& She added that college and university attendance &has typically been countercyclical& and that her company is &seeing a large demand for higher education and specifically financial aid.&

If the new economy winds up creating a little tailwind for Frank, it won&t be the only startup to accrue help; Slack and Zoom and other remote work-friendly companies have also seen their fortunes turn for the better in recent weeks. And now with $5 million more on hand, it can certainly meet new demand.

Update: An earlier version of this article listed Chegg as the roundlead investor; it did receive a board seat in the transaction but Frank does not consider it a lead investor. The post has been amended.

Last week, Apple and Google announced a partnership that will soon let users opt-in to a decentralized tracing tool, designed to help determine if a person has come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

The opt-in system uses Bluetooth to transmit a randomized and anonymous identifier to nearby devices. A user can then choose to upload their anonymized data, which is then broadcast to other devices. If a match is found based on time spent and distance between nearby devices, a user will be told that they may have been exposed to a person — whose identity is not shared — with the virus.

Ita similar system to one conceived by MIT researchers, which also uses Bluetooth to anonymously inform others of potential infection. The system, like Apple and Googlenew effort, also sidesteps the use of location data.

Contact tracing has proven somewhat effective in some parts of the world, helping authorities understand hotspots of infections. But privacy groups and security experts are concerned that privacy would take a backseat over peopleindividual rights in an effort to contain the spread of the virus. Apple and Google said the service is privacy-focused. The system doesn&t use location data, the userrandomized identifiers change every 15 minutes to prevent tracking, and any data collected is processed on the device and doesn&t leave a userphone unless they choose to share it.

But security and privacy experts were quick to point out the possible flaws in the system. Former FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani warned of false positives but also false negatives. Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the Signal encrypted messaging app, also expressed concerns that the system could be abused.

TechCrunch joined a media call with Apple and Google representatives, allowing reporters to ask questions about their coronavirus tracing efforts.

Herewhat was discussed on the call.

Which versions of iOS and Android will get the feature update?

Apple said it&ll roll out the update to the broadest number of iOS devices as possible. More than three-quarters of iPhones and iPads are on the latest version of iOS 13 and will receive the update. Google said it will update Google Play Services, a core part of Android, with the feature so that the contact tracing system can run on the entire fleet of Android devices (running Android 6.0 or newer) and not just the most recently updated devices.

When will this tracing system be available?

Apple and Google said they will roll out software updates in mid-May to begin support for contact tracing. Public health authorities will incorporate the contact tracing API into their apps, which can then be downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores. The companies said they will bake the contact tracing feature into iOS and Android in the coming months, so that users won&t even have to install an app. The companies said this would help get more people using the system.

Even when the contact tracing feature is baked into the OS at the system level, any detection of a positive match would still prompt the user to download the relevant public health app for their region to receive more information about what the COVID-19 contact tracing process is, and next steps.

Can anyone else use the API?

The companies said only public health authorities will be allowed access to the contact tracing API.

This limited API use will be restricted in the same spirit that you restrict individual healthcare to licensed medical professionals like physicians. In the same way, use of the API will be restricted only to authorized public health organizations as identified by whatever government is responsible for designating such entities for a given country or region. There could be conflict about what constitutes a legitimate public health agency in some cases, and even disagreements between national and state authorities, conceivably, so this sounds like it could be a place where friction might occur, with Apple and Google on tricky footing as platform operators.

Will any of the data be stored in a central database?

Apple says the data is processed on a userdevice and that data is &relayed& through servers run by the health organizations across the world, and will not be centralized. The tech giants said that because the data is decentralized, itfar more difficult for governments to conduct surveillance.

Does that mean Apple, Google or the public health authorities can access the data?

Apple and Google admitted that no system is completely secure — ita widely known concept in cybersecurity that nothing is &unhackable.& Servers can get breached and data can get lost. But in decentralizing the data, it makes it far more difficult for anyone with malicious intentions to access the data, they said.

How are you preventing people from producing false reports?

The companies said they&re working with different public health organizations to confirm diagnoses, like public health authorities, to do the validation. Apple and Google said they want users to trust the system, and that includes users knowing that the system is reliable.

How is a confirmed COVID-19 case identified?

Apple and Google point out that while a positive test result is likely the best means of identifying a case, it isn&t necessarily the only way. Ittrue that a diagnosis by a medical professional doesn&t actually require a confirmed positive test result specifically identifying the presence of the virus — theoretically, a public health agency could set a lower bar, requiring just a diagnosis based on symptom presentation, for instance.

Both tech giants concede that for contact tracing to be effective, there needs to be a high degree of case identification within a population, but left the door open to the possibility that a high degree of case identification doesn&t necessarily translate one-to-one to widespread testing, should other means of identifying cases be deemed reliable enough by local health authorities in any given area.

Should you trust this system?

Thereno easy answer. It seems like Apple and Google have made a system thatbetter than nothing, but ita system that requires considerable user trust. You have to trust that Apple and Google have built a system that can withstand abuses — either from themselves or governments. But no system is foolproof or immune to abuse. If you don&t trust the system, you do not have to use it.

An earlier version of this report incorrectly stated the Android 4.1 versions and higher that will get the update. ItAndroid 6.0 and above. We regret the error.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to different outcomes for different businesses. While some have stood to benefit (think Zoom, Facebook and bidet startup Tushy), others have been hit hard and laid off employees in order to survive. But there are some that fall somewhere in the middle. Autonomous driving startup Voyage believes it is not explicitly benefiting, but itnot at risk of going under either, says CEO Oliver Cameron.

Cameronresponse to the pandemic centers around three areas: passenger operations, technology and company-building. While operations have halted, Voyage is moving forward with its technology and has shifted the company to a 100% remote-work environment. With a post-pandemic world in mind, Cameron envisions more demand for autonomous vehicles.

Before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Voyage had already paused its consumer operations, which primarily serve seniors in retirement communities.

&We did that because, obviously, seniors are disproportionately impacted by this and it would be horrific for Voyage to be patient zero in the retirement community and this is something we were operating out of an abundance of caution,& says Cameron. &So we paused our operations from a consumer service perspective very early and we won&t open those up for quite some time. Ittough to say at what particular point because it seems like the consensus is it will be a progressive opening up of the economy, meaning some populations will be fine to go back to work and there will be some that are significantly impacted, like seniors, that are effectively locked down for an extended period of time. So we&re not in a rush to get that back up and running until we hear from the community itself that itOK to do that.&

Despite the hiatus in operations, Voyage is still running simulations and using a variety of automated testing tools to determine if it is making progress. For example, Voyage uses automation to test for regressions in perception. A challenge in perception is false positives and false negatives — that is, seeing something that isn&t there or not seeing something that is there, Cameron explains.

&And we have this pretty cool tool that enables us to monitor with each perception release if we are seeing regressions based on perception performance in the past,& he says. &We don&t need to be there in the real world to see that. We can just tell instantaneously if that is the case.&

Voyage also has a way of testing different permutations of environments to see how its planning and prediction software can handle different scenarios. Then, of course, it uses more traditional simulation tools provided by Applied Intuition.

&But we don&t fool ourselves into thinking that simulation or automated testing makes up for all that real-world testing brought to the table,& Cameron says. &It doesn&t, and theredefinitely going to be some time that we have to spend once we do get back on the road, fixing issues that we just couldn&t find as a result of not being on the road.&

From a company and personnel standpoint, Voyage has also transitioned into a remote-working company. It hasn&t been a distraction, according to Cameron, since Voyage embraced remote work some time ago.

&We&re lucky that we are able to weather the storm,& Cameron says. &We&ve got a good chunk of cash in the bank and, luckily, we raised at a reasonable time — at the end of last year — so we&re going to be fine.&

Many companies in the tech ecosystem have been forced to lay off employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Voyage, however, will seemingly not be one of them. As Cameron noted, Voyage raised a $31 million round in September.

&Therebeen a lot of discussion about great companies will weather this and the companies that were going to die anyway will die. I&m sure there is some truth to that, but some of it is just luck. Some of it is that you raised at a time you didn&t know was important, but turned out to be quite important. And, you know, our burn has always been low compared to others in the space. For us, we&ve always been frugal, and it turns out thatquite important in a pandemic.&

Despite Voyageuse of simulation, its automated testing and healthy bank account, the pandemic is still a major complication.

&I think itgot to set everyone back,& Cameron says. &I think there is a spectrum and there are companies that stand to benefit from this. We&ve seen with Zoom they stand to benefit from this. Remote working tools, they stand to benefit from this. And then you go all the other way to the end of the spectrum — those that are actively impacted like airlines, ridesharing, scooters and I believe we&re somewhere in the middle. The reason we&re in the middle is because in a post-virus world, I&m pretty sure behaviors change. ItTBD on how long those behaviors last, but itclear that behaviors are going to change.&

In that world where behaviors change, Cameron bets that driverless cars will add more value than traditional ride-hailing services. In a world where people may still be hesitant to get into a car with strangers, a driverless car would mitigate those fears, he says.

&In the short term, everyoneimpacted,& he says. &Therea slowdown in everything. In the medium and long term, we&ll be fine because I believe the demand is still there for driverless vehicles and even more so for those disproportionately impacted.&