 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Kellogg-Hurford Library. The microphone is set up for a taller man than me, so we'll see who our speaker's taller than him. I'm Tom McCown, Executive Director, and it's great to have you here at the library, and it's really nice to be starting our fall adult programming again. During the summer we go hog wild with children's programming, and that's great, and it's a lot of fun. It's fun for the adults too, but we don't do very much adult programming in the summer, so it's really great to have this started again. And I'm so pleased that this is the third year we've partnered with the legal women voters to provide speakers. Last year we had a terrific series about constitutional freedoms, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Those used to be hot topics for like 200 years, and then we had the speakers last year resolved everything. They haven't been in the news much, perpetual issues. But this year was a different theme for the series, and I'm going to introduce Kate Rader from the League of Women Voters, who will tell you about this year's series. Would you please welcome Kate Rader. Thank you, and thank you for coming. Since Tom introduced the topic, I will say we started out when we were planning this series to talk about good government, and then it turned out the things that we were talking about were the threats to good government. And so we renamed the series constitutional prices with a question mark. Tonight, of course, is Jim. In January we will be discussing does your vote count to learn about gerrymandering and how partisan gerrymandering is making our voices, our constraining our voices. In March it will be liberalism and conservatism. What do these words mean historically, and what do they mean now? And in May, single issue politics. Are single issue politics useful, ethical? Does it matter if we talk about parties or individual voters? So I hope to see all of these. And meantime, to start tonight, Jim, as you know, is our Secretary of State. He gave this talk at a regional League of Women Voters meeting in Maine in April, and Vermont was the envy of the other states there because of our wonderful Secretary of State. Jim? Thanks very much. Let's see if I can get this stuff just up a little bit. So in case no one noticed, about eight weeks from now we've got an election. And the time is now that we're beginning to ramp up. We've been focused on this for since May, and we will continue to be focused as we go forward. As your Secretary of State, I'm actually very concerned about one thing that I've seen across this country. And that is, it really does distress me. And that is the suppression of voter participation across the country, all in the name of stopping voter fraud. Many of you in this room are well aware of what has occurred since 2010. Let me give you a little background, though. We as a nation have always struggled with the issue of voting rights for a good part of our history. Always, though, the priority has been about improving voter equality and voter participation. Since the early days of our founding, when our electorate was limited to white male landowners only, we've had at least 10 either amendments or acts by Congress to actually expand voting eligibility. Let me just name a few. 1870, the 15th Amendment prohibited the use of a citizen's race, color, or status as a slave. 1920, something important to this group, the 19th Amendment prohibited preventing any citizen from voting based on their sex. 1961, the 23rd Amendment granted DC the three electoral college votes. In 1964, the 24th Amendment abolished the poll tax. 1965, the Voting Rights Act passed, which barred literacy tests, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later, banned overt racial discrimination, requiring the Department of Justice to review and pre-approve any election law changes in states that had histories of racial disenfranchisement. In 1971, we had the 26th Amendment which set the minimum voting age at 18. In 93, we had the National Voter Registration Act, 2002 Health America Vote Act, and 2009 Overseas and Military Votes. And I know that Jim and Thomas were both heavily involved with the legislature when I was on the Senate Government Operations Committee to make sure we put a few protections into place. So we've worked really hard here in Vermont and across the country to expand voting rights, but now we're seeing since 2010 the attacks. As a nation, we should be proud of where we have gone, but we're not so proud of what's happened since 2010. Many states are attempting or succeeding to reverse the trend. Democracy and access to voting should not be a partisan issue, but it's heading in that direction. We must ensure the placing of undue burdens on our rights as U.S. citizens is stopped and reversed before our democracy is further eroded. Denying eligible voters the ability to use their constitutionally protected right to cast a ballot is the real voter fraud. Since 2011, legislation is or has been introduced in more than 40 states to limit voter participation by one, requiring proof of citizenship, maintaining photo IDs in order to cast a ballot. And by the way, they would use the excuse that it will make them free and you can just go to any DMV office in the state and get your voter ID. But then they started closing motor vehicle offices around the states. So in Wisconsin, for instance, Scott Walker approached this said, we're going to give free IDs. And then it turned out he closed half the DMV offices requiring people to actually have to drive up to 200 miles in order to get their free ID. Other things that have been attacked early reducing early voting days, sometimes from 45 days that we have here in Vermont to seven or even zero. Repealing election day registration, Maine tried to do that. Then the people stormed out and got a petition signed and actually voted it back in. Restricting student voting. This is the new one. This is the one that's been occurring in greater frequency. Especially even here in Vermont, we have, I can't tell you how many times I get calls about students voting college students. They should not be allowed to vote here in Vermont if they didn't don't live here. Well, unfortunately, there's something called the Supreme Court and they already approved it. Repealing voter verified ballot trails, ballot paper trails for all voting machines. Some states, there's still about 10 states that use what we call DREs, touch screen technology with no paper backup. I have no idea how they do an audit. I have no idea how they do a recount. And then of course, as Kate mentioned, gerrymandering, which is probably the most egregious overall because they're actually taking people's voices away. Most of the people affected by these are young adults, seniors, minorities and low income. My own mother is now 90 years old. She lives in a senior housing and she has no government, a valid government that issued photo ID. Both her driver's license and passport have long expired. In order for her to get a voter ID, we would have to go through a lot of hoops to get her. She's also not very mobile, so it would take a real process to get her there. So I tell people all the time that the very basis and core of our democracy is under siege. And I think it's time that we hopefully this is going to be that this general election will be the start of changes. In Vermont, we continue to look ways to improve access. And our approach and I'm proud of what we've done is to remove unnecessary barriers while protecting the integrity. And going back to 2002, Jim, you were there. I think it was 2002 or three that we actually put into statute that we required a paper ballot. And I think you were the one that asked for it. And we also in 2005 added general election post general election audits. And let's see 2009 we extended early voting from 30 days to 45, which we were under a mandate to have ballots ready and shipped out to overseas and military voters by the 45th day before the election. Vermont already had 30 days of early voting and they just Vermont legislature said if it's good enough for overseas and military voters and it's good enough for the rest of Vermont. So we added we extended the 45 days. And by the way, just for information, you could check with your town clerk now if you want to vote early because they may have already received their ballots. Officially, it's the they have to be ready by the 21st, but most of them are starting to receive their ballots now. In, let's see, we put lobbyist disclosure online made it mandatory put campaign finance disclosure online made it mandatory. In 2015, we added same day voter registration. It went into effect in January of 2017. This will be the first general election using same day voter registration. And we also added online voter registration in 2015 my voter page, a unique page for every registered voter in the state of Vermont that details the information that you would need. First of all, it gives you your address that you are that we have for you, and you can make an edit to that if necessary, tells you where your polling district is tells you where your town clerk is and how to contact them allows you to actually order an election. A general election ballot, early ballot through this thing and you can actually process watch the process so you can see when you ordered it, when it was sent out to you when they received it back. And if it was okay. The whole new election management system went into effect in October of 2015 and in 2017 we also added automatic voter registration which working with DMV. And then we just actually just this past primary we we put our unrolled our new accessibility voter system for visually visually impaired but it's actually fully ADA compliant and allows people with with physical disabilities to vote in private and to vote independently. So they can whatever method they can use if it's a sip straw, or if they have limited movement, they're able to vote because we've got the right equipment for for them that was all delivered prior to the general to the primary and has been used already. We don't have the numbers yet but we're going to have those soon. So again, under the guise of voter fraud. A lot of these protections are taken out. And what what we have seen is, if you look at history. Justin Levitt, who's a lawyer lawyer, Loyola, Loyola, Professor law professor in California did a study from 2000 to 2014 of about 1 billion votes that had been cast in federal state and local elections. He found approximately 31 potential voter fraud in there. And I say potential because they still had to be investigated. So out of 1 billion votes 31 potential voter frauds that's less than one per 3.2 million votes cast. Now flash forward to 2016 and what occurred in this country. First off. In August of 2016 we received a call from the Department of Homeland Security get on a conference call. We didn't know what it was about. All 50 states were on it. They told us that 21 states had been targeted. And they didn't have any more detail for us. They couldn't even tell us which states were targeted or they wouldn't tell us. We didn't find out till really a year later that and we found out that Vermont was not one of the ones that was targeted. We do know only one state was breached. That means 20 states actually defended and defended well. You don't hear that too often. You only hear about the one that was breached. And we do know that no votes were breached or changed. So what happened? What were they doing? Essentially what a scan like that happens. It's like coming up to your house in the middle of the night. The burglar tries your doorknob, looks through the windows to see if the windows are unlocked. He's trying to find a way to end. And that's what they do. They'll scan your systems. We've had several leading up to the election of 2016. We've had several conference calls. And we actually, I just had one today with the Department of Homeland Security. In January of 2017, Homeland Security designated state elections as critical infrastructure in the state, in the country. And we didn't know what that meant because they didn't tell us. They actually did it without telling us anything. We didn't find out until about June of that year of last summer before we knew what it meant. Since that time we've created a governing council of which I'm a member. We also, they now have contacts with all 50 states. They know who to touch face with to contact to let them know if something's happening that they see. Vermont actually does a weekly hygiene scan that they do for us. Department of Homeland Security does. They provide us with a lot of resources now that we didn't have before. In March of this year I testified before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And then again in June I testified before the Senate Rules Committee. Vermont was also awarded $3 million in leftover money from the hanging Chad money of 2002. And we have actually designated that. We've done some penetration testing. We did the accessible voting system. We've done two-factor authentication. So anybody coming into the system including our own staff has to use the two-factor kind of like what you do with a bank account. And the communications between feds and state has improved greatly. I also now have Homeland Security secret clearance. So if there's any classified information I can be told. It's interesting conversation the first time because we ask why can't you tell us what's going on. Because you don't have a secret clearance. And I said well how are we supposed to deal with this. How can you tell us you can just tell us we're brief but you can't tell us how or why or anything like that. Yeah. So that's why it's been so important to improve the communications between the federal government and state government. We're very wary of federal intrusion into our state oversight. Since that time actually we started in 2013. Our cyber security. Our IT system was we actually did a vulnerability assessment back then. Risk and vulnerability. We did a penetration testing. We've actually like I said implemented two-factor authentication. We've done additional rounds with last round of penetration testing was done in April of this year. We are considered to be a model that our systems are strong well-defense. We are actually considered one of the leaders in the country on elections cyber security. And now let me list the best practices. First of all are the tabulators that we use in about 135 towns are not connected to the Internet. They're not hardwired. They're not Wi-Fi. They don't have remote access software. We use paper ballots. Those paper ballots after the election are sealed in secure bags. And then we store them. The town clerks store them for 22 months which is just coming up right now for getting rid of the 2016 ballots. We do post-election audits. We have all of our IT solutions at the state at the Secretary of State's office has been have been replaced since 2012. Because of that we have better cyber security as well. We do penetration tests ongoing periodically. Like I said we do the weekly hygiene scans through the Department of Homeland Security. We have several layers of firewalls web application firewalls. We have what's through the what's called the MSISAC which is the Multistate Information Sharing Analysis Center. Federal government's really good about acronyms. So the MSISAC we have what's called an Albert Monitor. That Albert Monitor sits to the side of the Internet pipe coming in and actually monitors all the traffic, sends it real time back to their headquarters where they can tell us within 15 minutes if we're being attacked or not. We're also a member of the EISAC which has a national cyber situational awareness room. We have an election day through the Department of Homeland Security. We have an election day dashboard so we can see if there's any alerts coming or anything that's happening anywhere in the country. We blacklist Internet addresses and we actually block certain countries like Russia, China, North Korea. I forget the last one. We have the two factor authentication. We do the daily backup. We have a same day voter registration. And the last thing that we do is we've done secure the human actually working with our town clerks to do some basic cybersecurity just so that they're aware. 80 to 90% of all the breaches that are done occur because someone gave out their password to something. You know when you get those things from the banks that say, oh please, we've noticed some action on your account. Please sign in here. And that's the kind of stuff. Those are phishing emails and they're just looking to get in. That's why the two factor authentication works. I like to say that cybersecurity is like a race without a finish line. It never ends and never will. And that I will stop and take any questions. Yes, sir. Have you had help here from Norwich University? We have not, but we have been in touch with them just recently. I'm also a member of the governor's task force and they and Champlain College are both on that task force. Governor's task force on what? Cyber security. Sorry. Yes, sir. Someone were to penetrate your system. What system would that be and what damage could they do? Well, what they what we saw in 2016 and where they actually they realized that they couldn't actually interfere with the actual election results. We do have what's called election night reporting and it flashes and red letters unofficial results unofficial. It's separated out from that from the rest of the system. It's only it's designated by itself. They could possibly if they were to breach, they could get into that potentially. We don't think so because we've got it well defenced. The other place with that they did get into in Illinois was the voter registration database. And there they could make changes. They could delete. They could just make a mess. And that's why we do an a nightly backup of our system. So worst case we would lose less than 24 hours of data. So anybody new would not get be able to would not be in the system because we've already backed up everything up to that point. But we also have election day registration. So even if those people showed up, they're not going to be denied. That's part of the resiliency and redundancy. So it seems like one of the dangers of my voter pages that if they were able to break into there, they could request ballots or just monkey without a system. There's a, you know, I guess you could say that, but there's it's limited as to what you can do with that. And the last thing is the town clerk has the last say. So anything that they're doing shows up on the town clerk database. So if on their dashboard and for instance, when we send out a batch every night we receive from DMV anybody that through the automatic voter system. What we do is then push that out to the town clerks and anybody registering would show up there. If there were massive change, any changes to their to the data would show up there as well. Yes. So people can request ballots from my voter pages. Yes. But they would still need to be registered somewhere in order for those ballots to be requested. Yes. You can't get into the my voter page if you're not registered. Okay. So you have to be a registered voter to get into the my voter page. If you get that ballot and send it in the town clerk. So the clerk receives it. First of all, you have to put it in the proper envelope. There's two envelopes system. You have to put it into the inside envelope and sign it, seal it and sign it. And then that goes inside of outside envelope. The clerk receives it and just looks at the outside and says, okay, John Smith is returning his early ballot and checks off on the on their checklist that we've received back your ballot. That stays intact at that point. And it goes into a lock box. The clerks in Vermont, we do not allow the clerks to start processing their ballots until the day of the election so they can only do it on the day of the election. And what they do is typically they'll open up all the election, the absentee ballots, co mingle the ballots and then submit them into the into the tabulator if you're using a tabulator. If not, they go into whatever lock box you use. If the person shows up on election day, can they change that? No. Once the clerk receives your ballot, you're done. So once the clerk gets the ballot back. You would show up next to your signature that you have already voted them? Pardon? When you go to vote in the book where they check that you've got your time record? Yeah, it would show that you had already voted. It would show that. So their checklist that they will print, usually the night before the election or that morning before the election, depending on the size of the town, will have recorded everybody that's sent, that's received a ballot or sent it back. My voter page, somebody who's clever breaks into the system and changes my address to something else and requests a ballot to be sent to that address. And then they can vote on it and then I'm deprived of vote, right? Well, what's going to happen, first of all, is that when that request goes in, it's going to show up on the town clerk. Any change to your address will show up on the town clerk dashboard. And if they question it and say, well, Thomas Weiss didn't move, I know that. But that requires that kind of personal knowledge, which I doubt is available to every town clerk all around the state. Same thing could go, you know, someone could walk in and do the same things, just walking into the town clerk's office. There would be a process for time to contest that. If you got there and said, why didn't you vote and they said it's what you did and you couldn't. Well, and you'll be surprised how many times people have shown up and said they didn't vote, but they actually did. They forgot that they mailed in their early ballot because 45 days is a long time. It's, you know, it's eight weeks, seven weeks. So you allow them to vote and then. Not a second time. What if they said they didn't send it in? Then that would show up as a, there would be, there's a process then. There might be a provisional ballot for that, although we use very few provisional ballots in the state of Vermont. When we were working so hard to, you know, protect Vermont and dead Mark Lewis was the secretary of state. We were concerned because of massive, massive, like in Georgia where somebody could flick a switch and the whole state could go from red to blue and vice versa. You mean election fraud? You mean election fraud? Oh, did I say voter fraud? I knew what you were talking about. I meant election fraud. What are your concerns about Georgia? There's hardly ever been any voter fraud. It's true. So the election fraud, we jumped into the fray because of that potential for massive, massive change. But you've explained tonight that that can't happen in Vermont because every tabulator, not every tabulator, but every precinct is not hooked up. Not anyway. There's no remote access. We've been doing, as Thomas knows, because he's been to every one of them, we've been doing post-election audits since 2006. And in 2012, we actually strengthened it. Up from 2006 to 2012, it was enabling language that allowed the secretary or state to do a post-election audit. The secretary of state did do one after every general election. And it was in 2012, when I became secretary in 11, that I requested the legislature to make it mandatory. So it's now mandatory. And the way our system works is we do a random audit, a random selection of towns. And what we used to do prior to 2012, we would pick two races, probably a federal race and a state race, and say, those are the two races we're going to audit. And we would just do those for like four towns. So we increased it in 2012. But we also did every race from the president all the way to Hyde-Baleif. And we also did every ballot in the back. Well, the other half of my question was, the closest thing we have to the big picture in Vermont is LHS that programs everything for the state of Vermont. And the argument against my attempted safety moves was that, oh, well, they're friends of ours. We have dinner with them. They would never do that. And it's against the law. I never said that. No, no, I never said that. That's true. But I ever said at large meetings where I'm sitting on the stage and say something like that, oh, that would never happen. Well, across the country, we know what happened. People went to jail for doing it. So is there anything that the state of Vermont can do or does to make sure that LHS hasn't pulled a fast one? Well, first of all, we do do about 10 days before the town clerks will do a logic and accuracy test on that. And they can run through 100 ballots or 500 ballots, whatever, to check it. Could you tell us what LHS is? It's a company that actually does the maintenance on our machines. We purchase the machines from the tabulators, but also they do the programming of the memory cards. There are two memory cards for every machine, for every tabulator. So there's a backup in case it's needed. And the town clerks, as I said, they do a logic and accuracy test about 10 days before. And then on election day morning, they start it up and they zero it out and make sure that everything is kosher at that point. Now, I know the arguments about, well, they can program it for 5,000 ballots down, whatever. First of all, if that happened, LHS would be out of business the next day. That's the first thing I'll say. Secondly, we are going to be going out for new tabulators probably next year. The ones we have now are considered old, but actually from the DEF CON, and John Odom can tell you this, nobody wanted to touch these machines because they're so old that the technology just doesn't lend itself to being hacked. Now, I will tell you, if you have a computer, whether it's a cell phone, a laptop, it doesn't matter. Anything can be hacked and you have to prepare for it. That's what we've been doing is trying to prepare for a potential hack. I will also tell you that we're doing everything we can. I think we've done very well. In fact, our latest penetration test, the company that did it, said that we were considered a mature, well-defense agency that has probably leading better than most people, most agencies across the country. We're constantly focused on it. Taking off what Jim said, we did get the paper ballots required a number of years ago, and it seems since then the use of the paper ballots has become less and less relevant because people don't actually look at the ballots anymore. The initial audits where people actually looked at the ballots and compared them with the voting. In the audit, you mean? In the audit, sorry. Now, recounts are required to be done by the tabulators, even if they were counted by people to begin with. My question is, to give skeptics myself and others confidence in accounts, when is it going to have open source accounting software? That will be one of the things that we'll be looking at when we go forward with a new system. Looking at not requiring? There are also some problems with that as well, but I can't get into detail because I don't know all that. I'm not a tech guy, but I think I want to make clear that every audit we've done, we actually have a memory stick that has all the ballots listed. We've captured those images of those ballots, so we can tell it. I think you will remember we can pinpoint when we do the audit. It's similar to a risk-limited audit. It's not called a risk-limited audit, but it's very similar to one. There are only about five states in the country that can actually do a real risk-limited audit, and that's because of the equipment that we have. We're all looking for the federal government to step in and help us out. Actually, there's a Secure Elections Act that they're working on right now. One of the things that I've insisted on is that they have some kind of wording in the system when they talk about audits that it has to be a high statistical confidence level coming out of those audits. That's what's important, is to have that confidence. We don't use the same machines. When a town has a recount, they don't use the same machine. They use a different machine and a brand new memory card. The new memory card is prepared for that recount. Is it the same company, though? On recounts, yes. On the audits, no. It's completely different. It's a different machine, different company. It's actually a high-speed scanner. Actually, Thomas has been there. Is it still proprietary software? Yes. Yes, ma'am. Which states do you see who try to standardize something or to join forces? Well, first of all, let me say that the National Association of Secretary of States, which includes, is the oldest nonpartisan governmental entity and has, we have 50 states that are members as well as six territories. And in July of this year, I became the president of that organization. So I can tell you that I've been on the phone a lot with national press since that time and about cybersecurity. And frankly, some of my colleagues, some of my red state colleagues have been really upset with me because I said that paper ballots are a best practice. Post-election audits are a best practice. And I've listed same-day voter registration, daily backups. They don't want to be told by the federal government anything. And we've got two camps of secretaries. And it's not always red states and blue states. There's some crossover, like our state to the immediate east. He's a Democrat, but he wants no federal intrusion. And actually, I have said often that the only thing he's concerned about is making sure that he keeps his number one state, the first state in the union to have the primary for the presidential primary. And it's problematic. And I'm hoping what I did when I first became the first thing I did as president of the National Association of Secretary of States, we call it NAS, was to create a cybersecurity committee that we didn't have before so that we could have these discussions to talk about best practices. Now, we only meet twice a year, so we'll try to have some discussions in between, but we only meet twice a year. I've testified before Congress. Again, I've said that best practices are paper ballots and post-election audits. That I personally think that Congress should step in and make some mandates to the rest of the country. People don't like that, though. They really don't like that. You mentioned Georgia. They just found out today or this week, I think it is. It's been reported on the news that an incumbent state senator may have lost his race because there were more people who should have been listed in his district that were listed in a different district and vice versa, and there were more votes. He lost by 67 votes, and there were like 77 people who voted in the wrong district, which is more than what he lost by. So, you know, is there a problem there? I'd say yes. My colleague down there is running for governor, and he doesn't really care much right now about his secretary of state duties. And I'll just stop right there for that one. Any other questions? Yes. I'm worried about your mother. So is there a process for a JP to bring her a ballot, and it's JP only? No, there has to be two people, one from each party. They can't be of the same party. And I will tell you that I've worked with the South Burlington Town Clerk, and she actually takes a couple of her folks down, and they actually go to the different senior housing projects to actually work with them to register them, to help them vote. But we're really pleased with our new system. The old system was an analog phone with big numbers. The federal mandate is actually just for visually impaired. But the system we put in, we're actually cutting edge on this one, is actually a ballot marking device. So they will look at a screen and make their choices on the screen, but then the actual ballot is printed, filling in the ovals that they wanted, and they get to look at it before they turn it in. So we're one of the first in the country to have that, and it's actually an exciting... We're actually thinking that we might be able to use it with overseas as well, because there is a portal. Now you can't vote over the internet, but we actually do send ballots by the internet to people if they have an email address. So is the JV system sufficient to the needs? Well... There are enough JVs that get out in every town to cover... The larger towns have 15, the smaller towns have five, and then I think there's a middle seven or eight in the middle somewhere. And I, frankly, the town clerks also will recruit other people to come in and help if you want to call and deputize them. So they do have that ability. And what I wish, though, it says... I mean, if you look at what the duties of a JPR elections are part of their duties. And there are a lot of JPs who don't want anything to do with elections. And my opinion is that if that's the case, then they shouldn't be a JPR. Because... Exactly. Well, the JPs are part of the Board of Civil Authority, along with the legislative body and the town clerk. So deputizing is how I'll fill your gifts. Do people go out and vote on JPs or Democrats? I don't know how they... I'm not aware of how they do it. Most towns... But if all of our JPs are Democrats, then how do they... Then they can recruit. What other... Okay. I don't know what they do, but they can. They can. There was a JP in the town that was all Republican. And they went out and sought, you know, six Democrats to be JPs and six... I mean, they split it up because of that. Well, in South Burlington, where you have 15... I used to live in South Burlington. I now live down here, but they have 15 JPs. And every other election... Or every election, it flips from eight and seven to seven and eight. And so... And there's just a gentleman's agreement between the two parties to do that. So... But then you look at what Burlington has. They have 15 JPs. And they have, on their ballot, they'll have a minimum of 15 Democrats. 15 Republicans. 15 progressives. Could be up to 15 additional independents or whatever. So you might have 60 people to choose 15 out of. That's a... It's a tough ballot. They actually need a separate ballot just for that. We just did a television program recently. I'm focused on anomalies, partly. And what to do if you spot an anomaly. And I'm wondering, in Vermont, could you go over the... Those people who can request a recount, like a judge or another candidate, and then add afterwards, I found out from the Attorney General, that after those 22 months are over, we the people are not allowed to look at those discarded ballots. They have to be... That's not true. Well, that's a letter that I have from Mr. Dwayne. Says that's the case. Here's what... There was actually a court case, I think, in Thetford or something. I'm not sure exactly which town. But I think it was Thetford. And what happened was someone had requested, before the 22 months had requested copies of the ballots or whatever. What we don't do is give the ballots back. We'll make copies. You have to pay for them if you want to. But we'll make copies. Or you could... That's great. Thank you. Because that wasn't the case when I inquired. No. But what happens is that 22 months, if the town clerk has authorization to destroy those ballots at that point, if they don't and someone comes in and asks, they can't then destroy it. And that was what this case was about. So she still had the ballots. Someone came in and asked to look at the ballots. She said no and destroyed them. And that violated Public Records Act. And it compensated. And it compensated. So let me see if I understand correctly. So some election integrity experts would have said that Vermont's 2016 gubernatorial race, the outcome of that reflected a certain kind of an anomaly. Which is to say, if people remember the race was too close to call, too close to call, too close to call. And then the outcome was that Governor Scott won by an extreme number of points. So this particular election expert, Jonathan Simon, said that is the type of anomaly. And when... And this is an interview that I heard. I actually... Who's Jonathan Simon? He's a national election integrity expert. He wrote the book Code Red, which explains sort of the history of all the different kinds of... So I'm listening to this interview. And he's describing the various anomalies on this interview. And it's like, wow, that just happened in Vermont, 2016. So do I hear you correctly that if some group of citizens wanted to go into, let's say, eight different Vermont towns and look at all of the ballots for the 2016 gubernatorial race, we would be allowed to do that? Not during the 22 months, unless you got a court order to do it. That's different. That's different from what he asked. That's not anything close to what he asked. I asked after the 22 months. After the 22 months is what he was saying. So what's the process? Because... You make a request to the town clerk to view those ballots. And then you get to view them after the 22 months. After the 22 months. They're sealed. And there's a protocol as to how they can go... The only reasons they can go into that bag are one, to do the audit. If their town is chosen to do an audit. So we can break... We'll break the seal and then reseal them. Or if there's a recount. On election night, they seal those bags. And you can't get in. You're not supposed to go into them. We actually had a case where we found out... I forget when it was. I think it was a couple of years ago. Where the town clerk mistakenly put all her register tapes into the thing. And she broke the seal and pulled out. Actually it was the recount for Bob Frenier. It was Susan H. Davis. And the court just killed that recount at that point. And they basically said no, it's not going to go forward. Because the clerk had tampered with it by opening that ballot. And not telling anybody. So we could actually talk about that particular thing. And in the end, without the recount, the Republican got the seat. By seven votes. The margin of error hadn't changed in the initial recount. So there was two sets of recounts that were done. Well this is really complicated. Two and a half hour of conversation with someone who took me through that recount step by step. And it was way too complicated to go into that. Well since that time, we've actually changed the recount process. We've improved it. And it's working. It's great. We just... Actually we had two or three recounts just recently in the last two weeks. We actually... Colchester ended up with... The judge had to make a decision on one ballot. Where the woman that was running... She ran a write-in campaign. And ended up one vote behind the winner. Actually she won on election night. Then he asked for a recount. And in the recount, they were able... Voters intent. That's the process is to determine the voter intent. And there was one ballot that they questioned. But at that point, she was one vote behind. And they took that one ballot to the judge. And the problem was that the person that voted for this woman voted using her maiden name. Because she didn't know her married name. And so for 50 years, she had a married name. And then her maiden name. And then she got married like 10 years ago or something. And this person wrote her in. And there was people that came in and testified. Well, this is how we know her and all this stuff. And the judge approved that ballot. Created a tie. And two days ago, there was a runoff election between those two people. And she ended up winning 91% to 9%. Super. So you're actually making a point that I've had in mind. Because it seems like in 2016, there were three statewide races that were recounted. And I believe they all three went to the Republican. Statewide, no. Susan Hatch Davis. That was not a statewide race. That's a district race. State legislature. One of the top six. Yes, thank you. So it seems to me that it might be a very useful thing. That if a race comes within and pick the number 10, 15, 20, that that would trigger an automatic recount. Well, the language in Vermont does not make it an automatic recount. But it does allow for someone for the loser to ask for a recount. I think I'm trying to remember. I think it's 5% in the house race and 2%. It's either 5% in the house race and 2% in the statewide or vice versa. I forget which one it is off the top of my head. But there is there is a trigger. Are those, I'm glad to hear there's a trigger. And then are those recounts, hand recounts? No, not anymore. The legislature changed that, I think in 14. Something like that. But it can't be done on any of the same machines from that town or that district. So if you had, say, five towns that fed in, you'd have to go get two other machines, two other tabulators from another town away from those. And then there's a new memory card that's created for that. And it's still proprietary. But every ballot is looked at. Keep that in mind. Every ballot is looked at on an election night. It's not just what goes in because every ballot, when they go to count, they pull out all the ballots. And the first thing they do or they should be doing is reviewing each ballot to look for any discrepancies. In other words, write-ins, to look for someone that might have circled the name instead of filled it in. Because that happens. That happens a lot. And you remember from the audits that we had cases where people just died. They just rested. It looked like they just rested their pen on top of the person. But then when you actually open up the whole ballot, you can see that that's how they voted. They just put a dot on each one. So we have these systems in place for a reason. And we actually, deliberately in 2012, we made the audit has to use a different system. It can't use the same system. And we have found over the years that hand-counting ballots has actually created more mistakes than not. And I'll give you an example. The Randy Brock, Tom Salmon race in 2006, Tom Salmon lost by 180 votes. He asked for out of a quarter of a million votes that were cast, he lost by 180. When the recount was done, they found actually that there were 15, I don't have the records, but we found that there were 15 towns hand-count that made mistakes in the way they recorded their numbers. And that's what occurred. It flipped it and Tom Salmon ended up winning that race in the recount. So in the audits, is there a hand count? No. So is that what you were getting at, Thomas, by saying that the paper ballots don't matter in the audits? Probably yes. So you have a memory stick with facsimiles of scans of all the ballots? Correct. It's a high-speed scanner, different equipment, not the same equipment, not the same company, not the same brand. Is that a public record? It's actually posted on our website, I think. So a person could do their own hand-count for the audits and compare it with machine-count. Thank you. Is that facsimile identity image available for all districts? Just for the ones that we audited. Any other questions? Thank you very much.