High Road NYC Stays in Motion
The 24 High Road fellows look at a map of the United States. They see 50 states, with Alaska up high, the Pacific out west, the Atlantic in the east, Ithaca, where Cornell is, and New York City, where they are now. But Joy London sees 3,140 counties and 10,072 election jurisdictions, each with its own voting system.
It’s an immense Rube Goldberg machine; a quiet tick or tap on a ballot sends a domino leaning, toppling into another, then another, inertia steadily building, sending bells and whistles firing, pulleys whirring, scales tipping, balls rolling, hammers swinging, alarm clocks buzzing off tables, until, way down the line, the contraption abruptly ends, and someone, once a tick, plops down in the Oval office.
“Why are the Russians interested in the voter registration databases?” London asked herself one day. “And when I started to think about it, my mind looked like this,” a Rube Goldberg machine flashed on the screen. “I needed to make sense out of it.”
Life for London unfolds like this: bit by bit, accelerating toward clarity, security and understanding. The fellows, too, are learning how their efforts, however small or tedious, breathe life into a vast system.
London spent 31 years at international law and Big-4 consulting firms before momentum ran out. She changed direction and became an expert in critical democracy infrastructure and election security. Today, London serves as the associate general counsel and director of international development at the OSET Institute. She spoke to the High Road fellows last year, but this year is different; it’s an election year.
“What makes a county more vulnerable to election tampering?” asked a fellow. “I can’t answer that,” replied London, bound by NDAs and confidentiality agreements. “But I can tell you that I’m very busy.”
Today, London is high-level, but there was a time in 2016 when she had to start small. She would read the newspapers each morning and highlight certain words in yellow and others in red. “Everybody was calling it ‘meddling,’” she noticed. “I thought that was an interesting word.” She quotes Socrates: “‘Wisdom begins with a definition of terms.’ So my point here is, as you begin to study anything, really dig deep because words really do mean something.”
Yuchan Son ‘26 dug deep. He has spent the summer working at Manhattan Community Board 10, delving into the ‘City of Yes’ housing proposal. “It’s a housing, zoning reform being pursued by the city right now, and basically, it’s going to change a lot of different things about those zonings,” said Son. “It’s honestly very complicated, and there’s just so much. The zoning tax amendment is 1,300 pages. No one is going to read that.” But Son, hesitant to admit it, did.
“It’s a lot of law language; that’s not the important part; the important part is what it means for people,” said Son.
Son explained that he and Fiona Yin ‘27 had been tasked with informing the board members on the policy. Last night, at a committee meeting, Son and Yin presented a summary of their findings, setting a contraption in motion that could plume into real change for real people.
“At every community board in the city,” began Esta Bigler, “there were meetings about that proposal.” The 1,300-page document has drawn a gargantuan effort from Yin, but Bigler and London have reassured her: “It really is a very important thing that you'll be doing. I know it feels laborious, but this important stuff.”
The fellows are as ambitious as they are impatient, eager to see the machine’s big song and dance caused by their wobbling domino. In between answering questions of national security, London has shown the contraption's cause-and-effect and the patience change requires.
The fellows thank London and head to the subway. They filter through the turnstiles and are deposited into the underground circulation. The blue-veined A/C/E and blood red 1/2/3 pump up and down Manhattan before they’re tipped out onto the platform, spun up the escalator, and Ding! arrive home.