 Next up, we have, let me sure I'm reading the right one, yep. 30 years behind the ballot box, a first-hand look at the multiple factors preventing fair, effective, and secure elections in America, featuring Ion Sancho, who served 28 years as supervisor of elections of Leon County, Florida, elected in November 1988. Sancho was sensitized to problems in elections where 5,000 voters were disenfranchised in a 1986 state and local primary election due to the misprogramming of the voting machines. Sancho was candidate in that election and since then has dedicated his professional career to properly administering elections in Leon County, working for fair, accessible, and verifiable elections nationwide. Concerned by voting machine security, supervisor Sancho sanctioned a number of red team attacks on his voting system in the spring and summer of 2005, captured in HBO's 2007 Emmy-nominated documentary, Hacking Democracy, showing how the system could be hacked to alter the outcome of any election without being detected unless the paper ballots themselves were audited. Ion Sancho retired after the 2016 presidential election. He has remained active in elections field, appearing as an expert witness in election cases and working with public and private entities, heightening awareness to the threat of foreign intrusion to the American voting process, particularly the critical need for audits. So please welcome Ion Sancho. I'm a wanderer too, so I'm going to use this. Someone killed the public screen and I was glad to listen to the presentation by Amer McReynolds because when I talk to jurisdictions and activists around the country, Colorado is one of the states that I point to that are doing it right. And that's a rarity because they, I come out of a completely different environment, completely different environment. Richard Hason, I think is the best writer right now in terms of election issues on the internet, wrote a book called The Voting Wars. I'm a warrior in that war, and I've got the scars to prove it. As was mentioned, I was a third-year law student, Florida State College of Law, and I wanted to implement environmental regulations in 1986 that the Florida legislature had passed. I decided to do that to run for my local county commission. And something happened that election that completely changed my entire professional career and my life. And that was the local election official, misprogrammed the voting machines, lever voting machines, which were invented in the 1880s by the way, and many jurisdictions in the country were using lever voting machines in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, it wasn't until the 2000s Florida election, which I'll get into in a little bit, that in fact the lever voting machines were barred. And what I found out after having this veil of the assumption that every time I had voted, that vote would count the way I had cast them, was the fact that I couldn't trust what was going on in elections anymore, and that I sued the supervisor of elections office in Leon County, trying to have that election set aside. When 5,000 people are forced away from the polls and unable to vote, I thought, was it no brainer? You got to have a new election? Well, the judge told me after a three-day trial, you got to show me a precedent for this. Well, an election with 5,000 people turned away from the polls had never happened before in the state of Florida. I couldn't show the judge precedent. So Judge Hall looked at me on the final day of the trial and he said, Mr. Sancho, you don't have a legal remedy. Your own remedy is political. So as soon as I graduated from law school, I ran for and captured the position of the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office. Because I'm the kind of person that, well, let's put it this way, I don't take shit. I don't. I've been a fighter my entire life. I was a Puerto Rican growing up in a white suburban neighborhood. That is a whole other subject. So I started in the office of Supervisor of Elections in Columbus, Ohio. And the very first thing that I found was, well, okay, I've got about 150,000 voters and we had about six employees in the office. Wow, how does this work? Well, one of the things that I immediately discovered is that the local election agency in every jurisdiction is the least important governmental agency in that jurisdiction. You've got fire departments, emergency services, water, power, utilities, all of those rate higher than elections which most local officials and citizens believe only happens every couple or every four years. You can do it okay. You don't need any money. And we didn't get any money. And that's the case in terms of most jurisdictions in the United States of America. They don't have the resources, so they're resource restricted right off the bat. Secondly, I found out is they're overly dependent upon the vendor. When I started, and again I mentioned we use lever voting machines, and off the bat, I wanted to get rid of those because interestingly enough, a lever voting machine has a similarity to a touchscreen or a DRE, Direct Recording Electronic. They are verb accumulators. It is impossible to do a recount on a lever voting machine or a touchscreen voting machine. It's impossible. They aggregate the numbers. If you ask a touchscreen to do the recount, it'll give you the exact same number that it gave at the outset. And you cannot break down the individual votes that make up that number. It's impossible. So I started going around to the trade shows where the vendors always had operations. And they made every kind of promise. They promised the moon. But I tried voting on these systems. I couldn't figure them out. It reminded me the first time that I tried to use a microwave oven. I couldn't figure it out because no one had taught me how to use it. And an old twist knob, it was 1975. It was the size of a small oven. But again, it was not user friendly. As Amber McReynel said, it was clearly not voter centric. It was basically what the manufacturer could cobble together. I went to every trade show in the country. I went to every organizations to go to other trade shows. The election center, IACREOT. These are organizations that bring election officials together. And I found out something else. Election officials are very risk-aversive. They believe that no press is good press. In fact, they don't like the press at all because the press finds out their problems. They find stories about great turnout, no errors. The press writes stories about when there are problems in elections. When something melts down. So election officials like to hide from the media. They don't like to be open to the media. And this is the second time I've been to the state of Nevada. The first time is when I went to an election center meeting in Reno. It was a new supervisor of elections. I went to this election center meeting in Reno, Nevada. And there was only one other Florida person there. It was the individual in charge of the legislation committee for our state. And she took me out to lunch. And immediately told me, you're a smart fellow. If you play along with our organization, we'll advance you in our organization. And I looked at her and said, well, it depends. What are your priorities? What do you want to do? My job and the reason that I ran was because I was experienced in an election that was a complete meltdown by an incompetent supervisor of elections who didn't properly administer his staff. And my goal running for this office was to fix that. That's my number one priority. And whatever that leads me, that's where I have to go. And I'm not going to support the association just because it's the association. Well, that was the end of my leadership opportunities in the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. When we had the issue of the very first major political issue that I was involved with was called the National Voter Registration Act. More commonly known as Motor Voter, a concept that was started in the west of the United States, Colorado, Washington, those states that actually are concerned about voters voting. And I will tell you that I found that Florida officials and many election officials really didn't have much concern about voters. In fact, when I went to these official meetings with only election officials, oftentimes the conversation wrapped around to those stupid voters. They make mistakes. They make our jobs complicated. That's what I was hearing from election conferences. And this infuriated me. This really did. And it kind of pushed me in directions that I... If I think back on it, it wasn't because I planned to do it. It was because I knew these people didn't have the interest of the citizens at heart. They didn't. They had their careers at heart. They wanted to be safe. And they were clearly over dependent on vendors who really didn't even know the products they were marketing. Let me give you an example of that. Following the meltdown in 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act with appropriations up to $3 billion, they said. That enticed the largest ATM company in the world, Deebold, to get in elections. There's free money here. Let's get into that business even though they had not a clue. Not a clue about elections. They purchased an elections company, Global Election Company. They bought it, lock, stock and barrel. And then they started marketing their machines. Well, there was all kinds of disquieting pieces of information coming out from around different parts of the country and from Europe. In 2004, I was approached by two journalists from Great Britain who said that the Deebold machines that had been used in elections in Great Britain had weird results. They didn't trust them. And so they came to me knowing that I was kind of a black sheep to some degree and interested in technology. And they said, Mr. Sancho, we would like to test your voting machines to see if in fact we could steal elections on them. And I will tell you that my staff was outraged. My technical staff said, it's crazy, you can't do that. But I will tell you that having had the experience that I did in 1986 and 2000 when I watched how the state cooked the books in the elections of that year, I adopted the slogan of X-Files, which is trust no one. I even went to an elections conference in North Carolina and I found an X-Files t-shirt and I bought it and I would wear it to elections conferences, trust no one. And so when I was challenged by these journalists saying, we think the system can be hacked and steal elections. The system that has been used in many jurisdictions, Florida, Ohio, all across the country, the system was used. My decision was, I want to find out. I want to know if my system can be hacked and steal elections. So again, we engendered the first series of red team attacks in the history of the United States on a voting system without the permission of the vendor. And by the way, after my tests were done and the controversies, all of the voting machine manufacturers changed their contracts to prohibit election officials from doing this. It is illegal to do this what I did in 2005. But this is before the vendors got wind of what people could do. And so the tests were showing that what the default company had told me that every action that you did on this optical scanner would be notated in a log. It would be there. No one can manipulate this machine, touch this machine without being recorded in a log so you could find out if your machines were manipulated. Well, I soon found out that it was complete falsehood. One researcher was able to penetrate, go completely around every safeguard in the device because the device was loaded with software that allowed you to go through the software and come in through Microsoft and bypass every safeguard that the default company thought existed in their equipment. And on our first tests, the voting machine, when it was turned on, normally produces a zero total tape showing to the election administrators, the poll workers, that in fact, there are no votes on the machine. Zeroes come across everywhere. Except after this researcher penetrated the machine, the paper tape said this, is this real or is this Memorex? That is what my vote tabulation tape produced with no evidence that it had been tampered with. Hari Hirsti was one of the attackers. He wanted to go directly and do a full-blown test on the server, essentially creating an election, a real election and manipulate it and see if he could steal it. He was confused because in fact the server is in fact secure. Irrespective of what they've shown me on the memory cards and on the scanners, I in good conscious could not let them have access to the server because again, I didn't trust them either. But once I produced these partial results of the red team attack, the default corporation told me, we are not selling you the necessary upgrades for you to be able to use your voting machines anymore. They're cooked. Well, I wasn't too worried about that because the other two voting machine vendors in the state of Florida had been pursuing me for years because Leon County under my leadership had this reputation of being on the cutting edge of technology. After all, we had brought OpticalScan precinct-based voting, a system which really I thought was the most secure at the time. And I also baited the first Windows voter registration system in the state of Florida, a company called VR Systems, which the Russians penetrated in 2000 and I believe 2016 as the reports from the intercept and the mall report indicate. So they... I had a $2 million contract with ESNS. They were willing to take me on as a client. We had signed the contract. I had it in black and white. And over the Christmas holiday of 2005, I got a call from the president of ESNS. Mr. Sancho, I'm concerned about this test that you did on the D-bow voting machine. A competitor, a direct competitor. And at the end of that conversation, you told me we're going to refuse to sell any voting equipment to you. You will not buy any ESNS equipment from us. Okay, there's one other. It's the Sequoia system. Talk to Mr. Kramer, representative from Sequoia and Florida. Yeah, we'll sell you the machines. Then I get a call with him within a week. We can't sell you any voting machines, Mr. Sancho. We can't sell you any voting machines at all. So there's a federal law that goes into effect on January 1st of 2006 under the Help America Vote Act. You had to have machines able to do X, Y, and Z. Well, all of a sudden, my machines couldn't meet the state standard or the federal standard. Why? Because I was essentially being blacklisted by the only three certified vendors allowed to sell voting equipment in the state of Florida. That was pretty, that was worrying to me now. I hired a lawyer who was the head of the Miami-Dade Election Coalition. The state didn't know she was a lawyer, which much to their chagrin because the state began hearings to have me removed from office for failing to provide the legal equipment necessary to run elections. Even though the reason I didn't have the equipment was because I'd been blacklisted by the voting machine vendors in the state of Florida. So the story gets even weirder. ABC News picked up the story. They were the first national entity to pick up the story. And they put me on national radio, an ABC national radio on one of their Sunday programs. And that went really great until I got a call from the reporter who put me on the radio from ABC. And said, you need to talk to our counsel. He has to talk to you. And the counsel gets on the telephone and says, Mr. Sancho, we can't cover this story anymore. We can't report on it. I'm sorry, but we can't talk about your story anymore on ABC. Okay. What's going on here? What is really going on here? And my attorney found out that the White House was pressuring entities to have me fired. And they tracked it to Harriet Myers, the general counsel for George Bush in the White House. He was trying to have me removed from office. Well, this is really a strange story. Why am the White House interested in this? Except that you have to realize that Ohio used those voting machines as well as Florida. So I thought, frankly, that I'd almost run out of my range of options. And I actually had convinced myself, had conversations with my family that I might be forced out of the job. But that it was okay. I had a law degree. I was intelligent. I could provide for the family. And then on Valentine's Day, I get a call from some individuals that wanted me to fly to San Francisco. They said they had something that I had to see. And I was actually at an elections conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So I jumped on a plane in Albuquerque and I flew to San Francisco, where I met a group of people who were very interested in elections. They had an organization called the Electronic Verification Network, EVN. And members of that group that were on a technical advisory panel advising the Secretary of State in California about election issues had independently taken my tests from my description on the Internet that indicated this flaw. They found the flaw that we found, the so-called heresy hack. Not only was that existent, there were 16 other vulnerabilities that the technical counsel found with this equipment being used all across the United States. They called the Florida Secretary of State's office. Officials flew to California. They came back. The state stomped their attack on me. No apologies, nothing. They did put out in a technical advisory saying in every county in the state of Florida one person cannot program these voting machines. You need multiple individuals, at least two have to program these voting machines. Why? Because one person doing it alone could steal the election. At that point, Deebold, who had been really trying to remove me from office, to the degree they sent their general counsel to the Leon County City Commission, or County Commission, and said independently of me I didn't know they were in town, they met with the staff of the Leon County Commission and said if you remove Mr. Sancho from office we will sell you the needed software to do your voting machines. And the county attorney laughed at them. Mr. Sancho is a duly elected official, a constitutional officer. We cannot remove Mr. Sancho from office. Which was probably not the answer that Deebold wanted to hear. So the upshot was that once the verification of the flaw was identified they basically had to sell me the equipment. Because one other thing happened. The Attorney General of Florida issued an antitrust subpoena to the three companies demanding all emails, telephonic communication that had my name in it in discussions among themselves with the three voting companies. And with that subpoena the voting company sold me the patches to be able to continue to do elections in 2006. We did that 2006 election and then what we ended up finding was jurisdictions all over the country were dropping the Deebold voting system like a hot potato. In fact, business got so bad they had to change their name. They changed their name to the premier voting company. And that didn't help because we opened the door to a whole series of tests that were done in the Midwest, East, and essentially the Deebold optical scan equipment simply would not meet basic tests on the security issue. And so that company was forced out of business. And what they did try to do is they tried to do a sweetheart deal and sell all of their equipment to ESNS which would have created one company controlling 80% of the voting market in the United States. They were forced to join a group of individuals to bring an antitrust case against ESNS. And with the help of Senator Schumer the Justice Department antitrust division we were able to force ESNS to divest itself of that equipment. It had to go to the second largest company so there would be competition and that was Dominion. That was at an elections conference listening to Kathy Rogers who was vice president of ESNS and by the way before Kathy Rogers was the vice president of ESNS she was the director of elections for the state of Georgia. And this illustrates another problem this revolving door. You do a good job selling their products for them and they'll pay you. They'll put you in positions of power. And I've seen that over and over and over again. For example ESNS is a very intelligent company when after the 2000 election Florida independently decided to get rid of all of its touch screen lever voting machines and central count optical scan systems they hired the former secretary of state and chief of elections in the state of Florida Sandra Mortham to be their lobbyist. Sandra Mortham had also at one time been the running mate of Governor Jim Bush. Sandra Mortham was also the chairman of the Republican campaign committee in charge of raising funds for all the Republican legislative candidates in the state of Florida. So they picked somebody with political clout they picked somebody with knowledge and when the state of Florida decided to adopt systems they adopted two kinds of systems you could have a touch screen paperless system or you could have a precinct-based optical scan system both were available and they even asked me did I have any objections to the touch screen and at that point I had no evidence so I said I don't have any I don't have any information to be able to challenge your decision today I can challenge that decision now but then I couldn't but one thing I want to talk about in terms of complimenting Colorado Colorado and Utah come from states where the voting wars is not very hot Florida Georgia, Tennessee, Texas the voting wars are very very very hot in those states election officials were ducking for cover wherever they could because the laws that were being passed were not asked by election officials and in fact if you look at a lot of the laws that were passed during that decade one of the things that you'll find unique to all of them is the recommendations for these new laws did not come from those state associations of election officials they came from the party just as when we found out in 2010 when I was meeting with Kurt Browning the secretary of state and Governor Rick Scott introduced a bill banning Sunday voting in early voting the most popular day of early voting in the state of Florida and let me have to give you some statistics why they did this it seems that in the 2008 general election the one that President Obama won 56% of all of African-American votes were cast not on election day not by mail ballots they voted in early voting African-Americans took to early voting like ducks to water in the state of Florida because one they were concentrated in the urban areas and urban areas had the most difficult time processing the large number of voters coming through and one of the things that you'll see in many states is they have laws that are actually biased in favor of rural jurisdictions versus urban jurisdictions for example with mail ballots there was a law in the state of Florida that said if a voter has made an error on a mail ballot the supervisor of elections shall notify that voter to have that fixed well in the rural jurisdictions and I've talked to my peers there they would actually go door to door they would deliver the ballot to the voter and have them fix it no urban election official could do that impossible impossible so again what I saw over and over and over again is that partisan politics was a critical element to what is going on and I know you've heard people say well I don't get into the politics of it well in Florida you had to you had to and what you find is that what I call regulatory capture has occurred in the United States by election officials they actually have to depend upon the vendors this puts them in the position of defending and changing the laws to benefit the voting machine companies because that's who they're using they've got to trust them that's their mentality so for example in this past legislative session when ESNS only has a ballot marking device as it's disability voting that violated the state of Florida's optical scan laws that were passed in 2002 and ESNS had the election officials their clients contact the legislative members on the committee and they changed the definition of what an optical scan ballot now is in the state of Florida not only did they change it to allow for ballots marked by BMDs they put in the statute that BMD ballots were voter verifiable it's in the statute well BMD ballots are not voter verifiable unless you can read QR code or barcode which you can too so again these are some of the things from the underside of being an election official involved with serious voter wars and realizing that at the state level and in many local jurisdictions elections are not voter centric they're not voter centric so with that I'm going to stop my presentation