 So today, very pleasure to introduce Matt Bernard and Alex Harderman. Matt is a PhD student and Alex is a professor at the University of Michigan. Both of them do security research, and they have a focus on e-voting and its security implications. Today, they are going to talk about Recount 2016, an uninvited security audit of the US presidential election. Please give them a very warm welcome and a huge round of applause. Thank you. Both of them are students at MIT, Michigan University. Please welcome them. There we go. Hello, everyone. I'm Alex Harderman, and it's wonderful to be back here at the DCC. I've spoken in recent years about areas of work like geographic attacks, for example, graphic attacks on TLS, Zoom, mapping, as well as post-canning. But today, we're coming to an issue that has been contributing to my heart, and that is the issue of integrity in elections. It's the main theme in the United States. We've seen some unprecedented things during the presidential election in the US. We've seen things that had a great privilege of taking over in what essentially are a line of hack of this election, a lot of things we can do to find out, for sure, whether the election outcome was genuine. This is our first time speaking in front of giving a full election, and the Recount Projects and what we've found in a better place than here at the DCC. This is the place where we're going to present this report or, in principle, the best place in the world where we could present it. Thank you, Alex. As some of you may have heard, some of you have already heard. In the US, elections were held. It was a contest largely between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and his pretendent was Trump and Clinton, and Trump won. And for many, it was a surprise, because Hillary Clinton winning 71 points was a win. The New York Times gave her an 85% chance. The New York Times said that she had an 85% chance. Sam Wang, a well-known blogger, said that she had 99% chance to win, and generally, the general consensus was that Hillary Clinton was going to win this round. But despite all these polls and posts, Hillary didn't win the election. And here we see one of the leading Sam Wang, a well-known person on television. Trump won the Electoral College in the United States during the direct democracy we have. This thing called the Electoral College, where every state gets a proportion of those top-election elections, and the election is decided. In most states, it's the majority. The candidate that wins the majority of votes in that state gets all of their electoral votes, which turns out to be so important in the way that Clinton won the election. He said that however Clinton won more than 40% of the popular vote in the election in that state, he didn't vote. So this gives you an idea of how Clinton got about 3 million votes. Donald Trump, of course, insists that he won the Electoral College in a line of slide, which is quite true. In fact, he had the 48% of the Electoral College in the Electoral College in U.S. history right behind Harry S. Truman. So he'll go a little long. But what happened? There are two main reasons why it was so wrong. Why was this such a surprise? One is that the whole thing is systematically wrong. Nate Silver at 538 said, and many others have just said, you know, the results were higher unsurpassed than we anticipated. And this is the other explanation is that the election was rigged. It was a position that prior to the election was not supported by the election. This is probably unlikely. The other one was rigging feasible. How would we even know, you know, how are we going to determine whether it was just the polls were wrong or whether or not it was rigged? That is, the first one is that the polls were wrong. The second explanation is that the results were wrong. And now we're going to go through these just such options. So elections in the United States are really quite complicated to pull in. We have a massive scale with about 200 million registered voters. Because we operate in general, mostly the work of running an election has a state that can do local municipal work. And there's a lot of complexity in the process. Sometimes ridiculous and complicated. Loaded with local races unique to each jurisdiction. And all these difficulties change from one jurisdiction to another. So whenever we look at them, we need to get the results basically on election night where people just find the results. So in the same time, there are 30,000 different voting jurisdictions that are making decisions on how to implement elections. So they're running elections more than 187,000 voting locations or regions. And our technology well, we have 52 different models of voting machines in the U.S. And the choice of which to use is left up to the counties even in some particular cities. This is just to illustrate a little bit of this diversity. You see all kinds of different systems that are comfortable to see and DORE paper. You see different parts of the country. So this is Arkansas. And you can see just the density of the variety can be super small. There's long complicated ballots on engines. There's a lot of Dallas, Texas this year. It's an example of the ballot. This is a great example asking you for your party and your presidential elections. There's the second way. And our system of voting and so on. So we've been trying to count a ballot like this by hand would be a good time if you have to go through each individual race. The fastest way to count the ballots is just to short them to go through a huge amount of ballots and just sort them out and then re-count them. And you can count 185 questions in each ballot. So we use two primary styles of voting machines that those 52 models are usually two large types. One is optical scan voting where the voter kills a particular machine and runs it through a machine and then spits it back out as they say. Remember how complicated these ballots are. We need the computers to help us. The second style is direct recording electronic for the DRA. And this style of voting machine is a direct recording of electronic terminal. It's a direct recording of electronic memory and sometimes the computer prints a piece of paper that the voter can see that is saved for later when it makes a physical memory. And for the first time it may seem to me and including Rob have criticized those early voting machines in particular because they're fully electronic and those with their soul can change their background because in this case everything is on the program. Let's take a look at the D-Bolt which is an electronic machine for voting machines. It was the most common machine for voting machines 10 years ago. One of these machines was made by Audit Safety and I also took part in it. And we came to the conclusion of the next one. In these machines there was a memory card that could be pulled out. This card is taken after the voting and it takes part in the voting process. But what became known was that the people who had access to this card could break the voting machine using a buffer and other vulnerabilities. The second thing we found was that malware well, let me show you here's an election we ran these were the elections that we did as a demonstration of this machine. George Washington against Benedict which was a traitor of the American Revolution and as we voted Benedict Arnold always won. Because no matter how we voted, our campaign would change the voice in such a way that our candidate would win. We need to mention that about 10 machines participated in this case. This voting machine was not. But what about other machines? Let's look at other machines. We studied different models and independent researchers of security and scientists at universities in all cases these machines could be used using a memory card in such a way that the voting results would be wrong. It's not just a machine like DRI which is an electronic program. But also the optical machines with optical scanners are also moving in a different way. The problem is that the paper with printed results could be written correctly but the vote that has been subjected to rigorous independent security has been found to be susceptible to the use of malware spreading on the memory cards to introduce a vote stealer. How do you use this? There are three main ways that we could hack the election. This would undermine the credibility of the election even if it was detected or obviously we could get it wrong and collect it. We could call the denial of the service at the time of the voting. We could take the lines of all really long of what we've encountered and there should be a real interference. Let's say that I can't if I don't like it running I can go about a cyber campaign where the voters would be able to count all the results at the time of the voting because the results can be broken after the election. In the night before the vote and during the vote at that time, you could either interrupt the vote or read the votes incorrectly. We know that in Ukraine there were such problems. In Arizona the campaign manager Hillary Clinton also had his emails hacked. And in almost all of these cases, the U.S. government has formulaed to be electronic. So we know that these kinds of attacks happen. What about other attacks, what about invisible attacks? Let's say we want to influence some other way. And in all these cases, all the time we need to overcome the diversity centralized technology that Alex just mentioned. But this is easy because we do like to call it to be able to cope with these very few states and a very small margin of votes to give you an idea. In this election, you would need to flip the results in two different states, both of which had margins within 1%. First, when you just need to change the result of one state to another, a state where there's not much of a difference and when you ask how they're connected to the internet, as I'm sure many of you know, you control the machines that are not connected to the internet. There's no problem here because they're all programmed with central computers. And so all you have to do is put a virus on this thing and every part that is programmed with the virus that everybody's getting into will become infected. All the electronic voting machines with which it had a business will also be infected. But how likely is this? In the United States, there are a lot of jurisdictions outsourced ballot programming to these sources. For instance, in Michigan, the third company is used, both of which have fewer than 20 employees. This is governmental business solutions, one of which is a small business company that doesn't even have their own website or their own website, like it's called TLSSSL. There are four or five different states and this is their warehouse. You can look at one of the slots of these electronic machines. It wouldn't be that hard to infect these machines in large volumes. The next challenge is... This paper is sort of akin to a paper infrastructure system. We want to have some kind of safe option in case the electronics are not working effectively. The major caveats to be are slow and inexpensive to tally, as Alex mentioned, whereas memory is fast and cheap. Every paper record is available by the computer. You can also scan ballot that the voter fills out and checks before they feed it into the machine. Or it's a paper audit trail produced by the red button that says cast your vote, whereas on memory cards there's no way to verify it at all. So really what we need to do is we need to audit with paper records and this would trivially defeat most attacks. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, 70% of our recorded votes on paper in 2017 is up significantly and the result of voting over the last 10 or so years is also an election integrity to prevent fraud. But unfortunately, let's look at the paper. Unfortunately, you have this great way to defend against an attack, but you never use it. So, in short, hacking an election is actually much much easier than you think. So let's put this together. How would you... What steps before the election? Use pre-election polls like Nate Silberman's why not provide the states that are likely to be closest, that are going to be needed a percentage or so. Step two, target some large counties where their service providers can combine some of the management systems to find out how to combine such a management system by a service provider. Compromise and infect computers that manage to spread your infection to the individual warning machines. Develop an attack for one of these things that are going to be difficult and in a way you need to buy one government surplus and test it out. Finally, step four, your tax deals votes on the computer, but no one ever puts up a paper because I've shown you most states just throw away what they're looking at. So, coming back to 2016, we knew on November 8th excuse me, not December 8th, on November 8th, and at the end of the day when the election results came in we saw that the result was extremely close was surprising compared to the polling. We knew at that point that the result was actually unprecedented in American politics. And we knew that it was feasible for an attacker to change votes on enough machines to have strong deal stability. You don't think what you're saying to me and many others you've been under these circumstances possibly zero U.S. states are going to look at enough paper ballots to know what the consequences have been like. This is a mature gap in the system. The paper would provide a strong deterrent, but if even in 2016 I don't look at any paper well it might as well not be there so at this point it's between election day on November 8th and December 7th which is a deadline under federal law states to lock in the elected college votes if there was fraud that it taken place not to be exposed by this date but to change the outcome of the election What do you think that I and other elections have had the bids not together and started discussing some possibilities but really have a good solution is there any way possible to make state action with the physical evidence they had in a way to potentially detect a cyber attack? So the first question was on the 13th on the Sunday after election day I was on a flight after the election when I got a friend from Los Angeles in New York when I got an email from Simon I could join a phone call in 15 minutes to the phone campaign filling this out might be on the call wow I could go on a flight to this call to work around the airplane what can I do to find a way to dial in to call to this teleconference and the plane I had a long enough for me to talk on this first call and I can hear what they are saying Clinton herself isn't there but the deaths of her campaign manager and many people from the campaign are on this listening very carefully Clinton and Barbara and others should request a review of several key states so candidates under American law have a disability that can depend on the state not as much as Clinton can do it so there were resources the campaign brought up the first one and the most aggravating to me is they wanted to know what evidence we had that the election had been hacked what would have happened to any examination of the paper balance the evidence that the outcome would have been hacked look at the have the evidence because all we can do is say that it would be possible to have any visible evidence that we need to ensure the correct voting because we don't need to prove that the result is correct but everything they thought Trump and his brother won and there was an interesting incident that Clinton reacted to saying that something could be horrifying it's a direct threat to our democracy well there are two things he could have meant one was Trump said that he wouldn't concede but the other which is kind of a rational thing is well I don't want to accept the results until all the evidence came in to make sure it wasn't rigged all should have been made to a position that not accepting the election result immediately was a threat to democracy and so any kind of tiptoeing away from that would have been a political problem all right so that was the first conversation we had in the conversation it's not convincing but then we were asked to pass the bill but then we had a new idea this time the other election integrity advocate is a wonderful wonderful insight was that any candidate can request a recount my name is the third party is she was playing the green part of Jill Stein in the conversation with her we talked about Jill where she unbelievably was willing to help she really wanted to help she was always champion of the vote not really all that but still enough and most importantly she wanted to help this was an absolutely pivotal moment but then that same day at about six o'clock in the evening what may have been the biggest setback that is New York magazine there was a story about the conversations that we were having in New York information that had been provided by the to the press in violation of everyone's confidence by the person here and it's the candidate that got all the facts wrong to turn the question the result of the vote in three states well wait a minute where where there is a certain but that's all at this point a certain hint that may have happened wrong and at that moment my phone started to ring and it was a week I checked my voice mail yesterday and I said I'll call back on Monday so what I did to try to not have to answer the press in a way that says well we don't really have any evidence end of story in which I present the case for recounts that the only way to know whether an attack occurred is to look at it and please do not attack when we a candidate needs that so what really has been an ongoing media circus around the recounts and unfortunately this narrative some kind of secret evidence or not has been circled around and in this one show you why these recounts were essential and what evidence are you able to provide so what happened next on the 23rd the day before Thanksgiving the same day Jill Stein was going to lead an effort to recount how he would have stayed he was two days a crowdfunding campaign that Jill and the Green Party led raised more than 5 million dollars the reverse that's more money than she raised for her entire president campaign well and in a few days in two weeks she collected $160,000 160,000 individual donors it's absolutely people care patently not the integrity of our life the next question now we have the money we have to figure out where to count so in order to figure out where to count if I were an attacker where would I want to attack and as I said there are several states in the US the difference between the parties including Michigan and Pennsylvania together they have 46 votes and in general these three states could determine the voting results if both candidates were about the same but we thought our chances were pretty good so in Wisconsin to start us off the margin was just under 23,000 votes about 0.8% and every ballot that is cast in Wisconsin has a paper record and as I mentioned the candidate can demand a recount and each county in Wisconsin decides how to review can count all the votes by hand counting all the paper or you could just run the ballot and Wisconsin that decision is left up to the counties in Michigan the margin was about 11,000 votes and by the way Michigan is also where we live so it was sort of convenient 10,000 votes and Bowell states that any aggrieved candidate can pay a statutory fee in this state any of the candidates can ask for a recount by paying a certain amount of money to decide how the recount will be done and the local committee will decide how the recount will be done unfortunately in Pennsylvania they used this machine like DRI that doesn't leave any trace on paper three citizens from every precinct that wants to be recounted must post a bond swear that there is fraud and and I have to get a recount done in Pennsylvania and I have to get a recount done in Pennsylvania and I have to get a recount done and I have to get a sanitary and I have to pay a certain amount to ask for a recount unfortunately if the margin is less than half a percent but unfortunately the margin was just shy of that in Pennsylvania other states where Donald Trump allegedly has heard tales of fraud and so the three he pointed out Virginia, New Hampshire, California to get a recount done past six days after the election six days after two weeks after the election it's actually illegal to recount an election if the margin of victory was greater than 1% in the state of Virginia generally forbidden to conduct a vote vote if the difference between the candidate is at least one percent and all of this is to say that Trump could have also every candidate is entitled to initiate recounts in the United States so if he really cared about voter fraud he would have initiated recounts some country to kick out out of that. Alright time to let the recounting begin. Now I'm going to give a day after that giving November 21 is when this was the day in the state of Wisconsin began a formal recount and this is just two days after the recount initiative after the recount initiative was announced and then the next day after the next two weeks before that December 13 deadline. So two and a half weeks after the election President Trump was not elected and I say that I hope that elections and election security in countries around the world and I can say that no one in the United States actually in one of the countries of the world has used to vote against all these crises and I'm sure this should be on the other end of the election and Donald Trump and I can tell you a little bit about what we have but we have what we have. So Trump alleges among other things that this is all just a scam to help the Green Party its lawyers would continuously oppose these people that was in all three states in an attempt to stop the recount from beginning and halt them once they started. Now Matt and I at this point basically just raises a winning role while others did the real work. Put it in the army that the Green Party volunteers more than 10,000 volunteers or the individual will read out centers of all the states to observe who provided legal assistance on the ground of all the system-wiling petitions in Pennsylvania. And also and critically in connection with voters. We are still lucky that we had a great lawyer, Brinker Hoff, Matt Brinkenhoff, who is a specialist in specialization for topics like civil rights and election law. And those who have been involved in the recount efforts in one way or another. And over the course of about a week and a half, they had a thousand different court actions in state federal court in support of the recount efforts. We also test the army of leading electronic voting experts who helped us to be the experts. So what does a recount look like? Well, I don't know that it's exciting. It's a bunch of people sitting around looking at that type of data. Matt and I went and acted as recount observers in Washington accounting measures and actually got to be a part of the process for a while. So basically what happens is that they recount one presentation to two people who look at the views of the county, who look at the results, they count the votes, then they divide them into stacks according to who the Mark candidate was, then they count the stacks. All the while, there are observers from any political candidate on the ballot who wants to have observers present who are watching to make sure everything's right, and they can raise a challenge if they see any kind of error in the process. That's the same. The floor of the process takes any of the four hours to recount a precinct that will be of about 2,000 ballots. But with parallelization, you can see a lot of people here at the end of the day, so most people finished and gone home, can actually recount this process fairly quickly. It's nothing like the floor of 2,000 votes in Washington to be able to recount. It's not what's in Florida where you need to recount it. It's also like this. Endless litigation. Well, unfortunately, in all three states, as I said, we had opposition from each party. So we were in some cases from the state governments, the states, and had to go to federal court, to federal court, to the state Supreme Court of the United States, to the same Michigan, to be able to recount the vote. This is Michigan, where the voters substantiated the vote in whole state recount before it was completed. This is a Green Party protest in front of the state of the court in the middle of the war. This is a mention that there was a media circus in the news just about every day. I, at one point, it's just so ridiculous, had a camera crew, a photographer, a writer, a lighting guy, another photographer, a sound person, and a director following me around in an elevator as I was going from court to court. And it looked like this. So I think it's probably Philadelphia, where in Philadelphia, the federal court, to convince a judge to recount the vote in all states, or at least in some circles, because this thing didn't provide any mechanism that we could use to directly petition for it. So recounts also look like this. And how moderately people do what they think is right. Many men are working together. But ultimately the recounts ended. And Matt's going to tell you what the results were when the elections ended. So as you know, Donald Trump won the electoral college on December 19th, submitted its votes. What's more to say? No state actually finished a full-hand recount when all of a sudden done. Wisconsin, almost all of their counties were hand-recounted. But as I mentioned, they counted almost all of their hand-recounted votes, and all told about 400. They ended up having it after about three days. And then legal arguments over the term agreed. So what did we learn? Or what are the takeaways here? Wisconsin was a state-wide recount. It did complete hand-recounted by the U.S. and then 21 hand-recounted by the U.S. There were 11,000 83-ballot corrections found in the recount. And this was, by the way, 11,883 changes left over. They got to come election night. And by the way, that's more than half of the margins of the elections. And the result in Wisconsin would have flipped by the time they weren't only about 397 votes changed. And all told, they didn't have any, as I said, any evidence of attacks that didn't actually happen here in Michigan. They didn't finish a full-hand recount. And so we know about where we counted, which is what we're sending out, and how we count it. And what's the actual data? The results were calculated. That is, 43% of all the votes come in. But in Pennsylvania, the recount got off-ground. Because the view to go forward, one county actually even showed as I know about 167, they only recounted 143 of their 228 precincts. They have not published results, but only in one district it was read manually. And only 143 out of 228. That's what we learned. In Detroit, in Wayne County, Michigan, there were huge systemic issues. In fact, 7% of precincts they found more votes for president than there were actual ballots cast just out of that factor. And there were more ballots than, in fact, voters. With this, basically, there's this notion of recountability where, in order to recount a ballot, poll workers have to... There's this notion of recountability until when the ballot being recounted was upheld. And this includes things like poll book logs, tamper proof seals on the bags that have ballots in there, and they had to look at the hacker. And they had to look at the stamp that had the same seal on the documents, and they had to look at the polls off of the bags to tear open the ballot bags. And, you know, no one will ever find out that you know. So, you know, we'd find evidence maybe from the wrong wrong, nobody will know you will know. Do you even read the evidence that we did get from the recounts? We tried to do it, but what we really like to do is look at the statistical risk that we could use randomly across a state or across a county or however you would like to do it. And you hand count them, and you can choose those that hand count resolved to verify what it seems to us. But unfortunately, most law states and I think no state actually have a law that maybe one. What we actually wound up with, of course, was in one random county with samples. So what do we do? How do we draw conclusions from that? Well, we can rule out some attack scenarios for instance in statewide fraud. You know, it's unlikely that we have any evidence that every time a story were about to happen, what about the scenario? So we're still waiting for a complete analysis. We didn't even want to test for a probable attack on a state level. So our model is some subset of random to presume that the attack would be an opportunity to get to it. And basically we sample counties at random and change 10% of the votes until we have enough to flip the election in that state. If the random numbers were recounted by hand then we consider that attack detected. So what we find is that in Wisconsin we're able to change 10% of the state. What we find is that in Wisconsin you only need to honor that and have enough to throw results. And fortunately, because Wisconsin had almost all counties do a hand recount, the chances of being undetected are pretty pricy. In Michigan there's much tighter margin, much tighter margin of thought about those. So you need to know what's your chance to flip through the results of a full vote. And because the Michigan recount didn't actually finish the chance of the attack going undetected is higher than it was before. It's a little bit higher than it was before, but actually we counted by hand. In Pennsylvania we threw the results and we got a higher margin and we part of one nation did a hand recount. So the chance of going undetected there was very high. So what do we look overall? The recounts support that the election outcome was correct. I can sleep at night knowing that Donald Trump won the election and having no doubt. There is not strong evidence that Donald Trump won the election. We have no clear evidence that the election was changed. So, like we said cyber attacks already happened before. If any of the attacks happened before because of the presidential investigation we got intelligence agencies that really influenced the outcome. But overall we can sleep at night but we can't completely rule out fraud. So, the recounts were complete. What I thought at the beginning is that the election was that well the election probably wasn't hacked. We were looking through the cants what we learned that the election was not hacked. What we learned that the election wasn't hacked we get additional basis for confidence in the election. But at the same time there was more confidence in the result of the election. What I found that hacking the election would be well even easier than I thought if someone wanted to break it it would be much easier. But how central the points of attack are that control voting machines and such small businesses well, that was news to me and many others. So, finally states are to look at it with the paper even in a surprising and complex way. But with the recounts at least we had some enough to gain some amount of statistical confidence. Even if a candidate can force the recount and this is probably the most challenging of our experience well, there are opportunities for the apparent winner to try to stop it. There are many, many opportunities and there are a lot of barriers to stop any machinery. So unfortunately although we have some amount of physical evidence we will probably get the chance what we need in the United States we will never have a 100% chance to exclude this. We need this because even if the 2016 election was the 2020 election might well be the 2016 election was not broken but who knows maybe the next election will be broken in 2021 we need some time to think about the effective protection process of elections of course we need to work on our safe technology to make it less moving in the sense that the paper will say common sense of security by having a paper record in place for every vote we have to go beyond the 100% and there are still a lot of states that need to pay back to do so but most of the people would have to make sure that they have to stay actual means to use all that evidence and to do that we need not recounts recounts are a hack to take place after every major election but she an easy to use mechanism that stays reduced to make sure they elect on a always a right by looking at a knot in the paper states need to act now to make sure that these are going to be in place all of these reforms in time for 2018 and 2020 but it's going to be now unfortunately because of our distributed federal system voting system I think we're unable to see federal legislation to the same electoral commission states I am federal commission we have some time for questions we have a lot of time for questions okay, perfect we have about thanks a lot we have about 10 minutes if you have questions you can ask and I think we'll just start off with microphone 1 I do not believe in paper voting all the same because I lived half of my life since Soviet occupation I have seen many paper voting that ended 99 my portion is the whole 9% of the Communist Party how to make governments to make elections better I have some suggestions how to make the best voting system unfortunately I was not on your previous report about voting in Estonia but I remember that professor Holemann was offered a political party that in the next I don't know whether they got or not proved that they asked for Putin's money absolutely and then we compare the definition of terrorism can I answer your question sir let me address a point about paper is also vulnerable and that's absolutely true we have long history of paper also being hacked it means that we have an opportunity now because we're combining computers paper that's the principle of voting and that's the principle of voting we check to make sure they agree if we don't check that they agree because they need to make paper and electronic system I mean I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure my undergraduate security course could have changed the outcome of the presidential election this year it really is that bad thank you I'm sorry can we please one question do you want to ask questions I'm ready to talk to you one on one afterwards I'm ready to talk to you one on one afterwards if you really have to leave right now please do so as quietly as possible so we can if you're asking a question please make it precise and short if you're asking a question please make it precise and short I want to ask if it wouldn't have been easier to get on the hardware on the hardware on the hardware or if it has been compromised to take care of get your hands on well we did try to get Pennsylvania to get access to the hardware and that's all that's been offered is the one that's made in the government's memory in Pennsylvania that would have been very difficult to get access to the hardware and that would have been very difficult to get on the hardware and only on the hardware and only as looking at the hardware you have access to paper records too but absolutely I support the success of the government too I think that's just another kind of physical evidence my favorite Mike 4 please thank you in the history of the world the history of knowledge it's never been a case where there was a deletion process because it was proven it was proven there's a first time for everything we got a problem in the system in the system of voting no, I don't know but it's always the first time it should have some requirements that will make it unfit for other countries than the U.S. if there's a statistical Yes, it can be done so that if the demand is not for it to be used just about any way that they could count. And then it can also be used, it's not strictly the first pass, the post voting method that we use in the States, it can be used for any of the methods that you use in the same statistical analysis, they are applicable to other countries. And we have a question from the people on the last stream, and we have two questions. Why is the not always done a recount? Good question. It is a really good question. It should always be done some kind of risk limit on it, and it should be done in any way that they could be used. But in the course, because the law is not restricted, right? Yes, we always have a good idea, and we always have to do a recount, even the voting that was clearly passed, as an additional acceptance of security, and especially such hackable technology. And even more so when we use an electronic machine. But we don't have that yet, because the legislation has not yet sung for technology. Second, it would not make sense to, in your opinion, to, in all the states, the legislation on voting was brought to a certain level. One of the issues is the United States as a federal system, so the state will do most of the rights over what they can do. And so there are, it's like the federal recognition that you're right to do. And at a federal level, it would cost, but it's much, much more than a constitutional issue. Just saying all votes will be done this way. Believe it or not, in the United States, the constitution doesn't even say that the states have to have an election to decide who their presidential votes will go to. They can just pick it by whatever method the legislature decides. So we really do have to go and say by thing. What do you think the federal system has to do with the one that was brought to a vote? The federal system has to do with the one that was brought to a vote. All right, so, what do you think the federal system has to do with the one that was brought to a vote? It looks to me that the reform is itself a political process, so perhaps how your efforts to improve the technical aspects of acting on voting have to do with the wider issues that other people are struggling over, such as factor suppression due to felony convictions, and positioning of ballot boxes and all the rest that's well-known in the U.S. Well, there certainly are a lot of issues with elections in the U.S. and in many other countries. And as you say, those are a number of other ways that people's votes are sometimes being suppressed or are not being carried out. Our expertise lies in the technology, and so that's the primary area. And I think what you do get to work with some election integrity advocates who work in certain parts of the country, but I agree with you, the politics and the election security are so much better than what you want. I don't think it should be related to whether our votes are going to be checked to make sure they weren't hacked. We should all want to make sure they're checked, whatever our political affiliation is, but unfortunately, there's always resistance wherever the opposition is. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Mark, phone six please. Thank you very much for your talk. Thank you very much for your report. One question you haven't looked at is the particular hacking can mean a lot of things. There were an awful lot of machines in Detroit that just didn't work or were mainly calibrated. Do you appreciate how much we need to contribute to fix the entire part of the system? Well, we touched on systemic failures, particularly in Detroit, and I think that the solstice to defend failures and end of things like voter suppression due to lack of funding in a district are thought by the state government, but it's not enough to provide funding to buy better voting machines. So beyond that, it's much more complicated. I can't believe it. All right, look for two please. Thank you for your work and talk. Moving away from the Donald Trump scenario, you said most to all winners oppose recounts. So the question is if they can be confident that they would be confirmed as a winner, why do they hold recounts? Well, it's a good question, and this has been my empirical observation. Every country where I work on life and security, and I think it's been a near suggestion that they might have been all done by themselves, that they would be down with the Trumps. Well, it's one of the time and effort of their lawyers opposing that possibility smaller. I think people seek to move past an election so quickly after the votes have come for the first time. But there are really crazy times that they have to seek evidence to have the other candidates and that's taking a constant to moving on is part of the problem. It really makes the whole issue so much more difficult to deal with. I think we only have a little amount of time left, so please be quick with your decision. I think there's value in end-to-end verifiable elections and cryptographic techniques to interact with people. Absolutely. But the complexity of the system might be so difficult to deal with after local election officials will be out there and it won't be easier. Right now I have that. I think it's difficult to deal with after local election officials will be out there and it won't be easier. Right now I have that. Okay, I think we have a lot of time. Yes, they have such techniques, but unfortunately it will only make the system more difficult. Please, applaud the speaker.