politico

Great question. If I knew the answer I would be rich. Seriously, though, we are now in a waiting period – one that I’d say will take months, not weeks -- while Attorney General William Barr and his aides go through the weeds of the report looking to remove classified and grand jury information that is not allowed to be made public. In his letter yesterday, Barr said he’d be consulting with Mueller to help find all that information “as quickly as possible.” He also said he needs to be cognizant of other “ongoing matters” like open investigations, so that will slow things down a bit, since he doesn’t want to release a report that undermines potential prosecutions. Barr reads the papers and knows there’s lots of clamor for this document. So he’ll be under pressure – especially from Democrats - to get something more out. – Darren

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(Quick update on 3/27: A DOJ official said Tuesday [the day after this AMA] that Barr’s review would take “weeks not months” so that could mean around mid-April is when we go through this whole routine again without maybe as much of the anticipation.)

One of the things that experts tell me all the time is that we don't know how to do anything over the internet with the level of security that we expect from our elections.

Supporters of internet voting often point out that we trust the internet for other sensitive applications, like banking. But you can dispute a transaction and get your money back. There's really nothing happening online that's comparable to elections, in terms of the stakes. So the inherent vulnerabilities in the internet raise more serious questions for voting than for any other application.

—Eric

Internet voting systems tend to be fragile. A few years ago, Washington, D.C. built an online voting system and invited anyone to try to hack in during a mock election. It took me and my students only about 48 hours to gain full control and change all the votes, and the election officials didn't notice anything was wrong until somebody noticed a musical "calling card" we left for them to find. More here:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2010/10/05/hacking-dc-internet-voting-pilot/

More recently, a colleague and I found exploitable vulnerabilities in an Australian online voting pilot during a live election:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/03/22/ivote-vulnerability/

—Alex

Julie here: I generally agree with Darren, but think that the pressure from Congress to receive the full report is going to be substantial and Congress is not going to want to wait weeks or months. One possibility is that DOJ could file a request with the Court to have all (or some) of the Grand Jury information in Mueller's report made available to the Congress so that the full report could be sent to Congress for their consideration. This is what happened for the Starr report. If the full report is sent to the Hill, Congress could release (or leak) the report very quickly.

John here: I agree with Darren -- this will take a lot of consulting, including with intelligence agencies, so it will take at least weeks, I' think.