 So thank you for coming. This was really, we talked about doing this for the media, specifically because we know come Monday and Tuesday, we're gonna get a lot of calls and questions, right Wilson? So we thought we'd do this, but open it up to legislators if they can get out of their committee assignments to come down. First I wanna read just a quick Twitter quote that came out from David Becker this morning. David Becker used to be with the Pew Charitable Trust. He was in charge of the elections division for them and he now started his own company called the Center for Election Innovation Research. And he's very, very knowledgeable in the area of elections. He's out of DC. Today he tweeted widespread doubts about our elections are the result of a concerted campaign, largely by domestic actors amplified by Moscow to sow doubt in our democracy. Despite widespread improvements in election security and election practices, these efforts can cause voters to doubt our elections. And that's kind of where we're gonna go with some of this, specifically when we're talking about disinformation and misinformation. It's important to emphasize that the media are our partners, we recognize you as our partners in combating this. The media should work with us to identify misinformation and to provide for monitors with the facts and trusted sources. You play a part when they amplify misinformation and need to be diligent not to do that. We have a constant battle, we'll talk a little more about it with social media platforms because as you all know, something that gets out on social media within minutes, it can be in tens of thousands of people's hands and that's a real concern. Having said that, so defending our democracy. So we're gonna start talking a little bit about election security first. This has been a big topic for the last three years for our office and across the country. And I've been heavily involved with it at the national level. So protect, detect, respond and recover is the mantra that we use. On the area of protect, we have multi-factor authentication for any individual that has access to our Vermont election management system. Essentially, it's my staff and it's our city and town clerks. So they have to, it's similar to an online banking, they have to use a multi-factor authentication in order to get into it. We also do secure the human trainings with our town clerks across the state. We've been doing these now. We did it just before the 18 election and we've been doing them ongoing as part of our elections training process with the clerks. Lori and JP were actually in a training last week. Couple of trainings in the last week. We have web application firewalls in front of every door going into our election system. We do annual penetration testing and vulnerability and risk assessment, security assessments. On the area of detect, we have constant monitoring. And I'm sorry, did you introduce John? John's our IT director. So we do constant monitoring of all our traffic to our systems. We since, just prior to like October of 2016, we have been doing, we took a DHS, Department of Homeland Security up and have them do a weekly cyber hygiene scan. A cyber hygiene scan, the simple way to describe it is like someone walking up to your door in the middle of the night and trying the door not to see if it's open. And that's what a cyber hygiene scan does. It's a remote access type situation and they work, we've been doing it on a weekly basis since October 16. We also have installed a DHS Albert monitor. The Albert monitor is part of a nationwide system where every state actually has Albert monitors. Here in Vermont, our election side, we also have our own Albert monitor. And what the Albert monitor does is it tracks incoming traffic on the internet coming into our system. It doesn't do anything with it except send it back to the Center for Internet Security which we use it and within minutes can let us know if they suspect any kind of attack occurring. All 50 states are set up on this and it's really, it's just an additional thing that we have in place. So in the area of respond, we have a comprehensive incident response plan. We developed that right after the 16 election and actually Chris was just updating it this past week. We've worked with the Harvard Belfer Center with CISA which is a division for the cybersecurity unit out of DHS and with CIS to prepare that. So we have a comprehensive system. I know that John has been to the National Association of Secretaries of State IT Directors meeting to have further discussions. But we've opened up tons of communication channels which we never had prior to 2016. And that is the biggest change since 2016 is that we have communication channels with DHS, FBI and EISAC which is Election Infrastructure, Information Sharing Analysis Center. Election Infrastructure was that designated a critical infrastructure in January of 2017 and it has helped provide many thousands of dollars of resources to us including the cyber hygiene scan, fishing campaigns, things like that. Our team has participated in at least three Chris, three tabletop exercises on the national level. We have done, basically you practice with worst case scenarios. They throw a scenario at you and your group decides how you're gonna overcome that serious situation. We have internal threat mitigation measures in place that limit the amount of damage a bad actor can do in a worst case scenario. And the last one, the election day threat dashboard is something that DHS started up, I think it was just prior to the 18 election and it's basically a dashboard electronic dashboard that we all are connected to. John's team is on it all day long on election day and it provides real time input from other states so we can tell if something's happening someplace else whether it's Oregon, Texas or Michigan or whether we're having a situation that develops we can also report and get it out to others as well. And it's really been a good thing to have with just another communication tool that we have. Under the recovery bullet we have built-in resiliency. We have a brand new election management system that was installed in the fall of 2015 and part of the requirements was to have some resiliency in there. We also use the time-honored and non-technological tool paper ballots. So you can't hack the paper ballot, you can't hack the pencil that you use to mark that ballot. We do post-election audits within 30 days of the election. We've been doing those since 2006. We have ramped them up and doing more and more every election cycle. When we do an election audit, we do 5% of the, randomly selected 5% of the towns in Vermont. We do 100% of the ballots that are in that bag for that town and we do 100% of the races. So it's a very comprehensive audit that is completed. We also in Vermont have automatic voter registration. We do a daily backup of our voter registration database. So if anything were to happen to our database, if someone were to break into it, reach it and destroy it, we would go back 24 hours and reset it. That backup is kept off-site. It's not anywhere near us. So we have full access to it. And the last thing is in 2017, the legislature approved same-day voter registration, which means that no eligible Vermonter will be denied the right to vote on election day. In protecting the integrity of every vote cast, first thing I want to say is we have a paper ballot for every vote that is cast. Elections are decentralized, nationally elections are decentralized. And this was something DHS didn't understand when they first contacted us when Secretary Jay Johnson called us to a conference call in August of 2016 and to tell us that they're thinking about naming us as a critical infrastructure. They thought that we were all interconnected. They didn't realize that elections are actually decentralized to the states and in some states even decentralized further going down to the counties or even the towns. Here in Vermont, we use optical scanners to read a voter-marked paper ballot. That optical scanner, all its function is is to read that paper ballot and nothing else in tally it. The vote tabulators are in 54% of our towns putting it in numbers. It's about 135 towns of the 246 that have vote tabulators. The legislature a few years ago mandated that any town of 1,000 voters or more had to have a vote tabulator. Our office pays for that tabulator using our Help America Vote Act money. Our tabulators are not connected to the internet by hardwire, wifi, or remote access. They're completely free and air gapped. We have a strict chain of custody for the tabulator memory cards and the equipment. The town clerks maintain these in their vaults and to put it bluntly, if someone wanted to actually change vote totals by affecting the vote tabulators, they'd have to break into town hall, break into the town clerk's office, break into the vault, find the equipment, find the memory cards, change them, reconfigure them, and get out before anybody knew it. And here in Vermont, every town clerk is roughly, with the exception of a few of the larger towns, every polling place actually I should say is about 4,000 voters. So it would take an army of people to really affect the vote. The clerks do a routine testing of logic and accuracy about 10 days before the election. They do not receive their memory cards until about three weeks before. At 10 days, they do this logic and accuracy test to test if they run ballots through to see a number of ballots. And then on election day, they turn on the machines, make sure everything is zeroed out and check it again and then start working it. About a year ago, I think it was, the Secretary of State's office received authority to mandate hand counts. So if, by any chance, I suspected that there was a problem, that we somehow had a breach of some protocol, I could always order a mandatory hand count of all ballots across the state. Election security funding, in 2018, we received the federal government authorized $380 million, of which Vermont got $3 million in 2019. And actually, we just received our money in the past two weeks. Congress appropriated $420 million and we received again $3 million to be used on election security and election Help America Vodak money. That first $380 million was the remaining 10% from the hanging chad money of 2004. So in 2004, Congress had appropriated $3.8 billion, I'm sorry, they didn't appropriate, they approved $3.8 billion for Help America Vodak money, following the Florida debacle of 2000. They had appropriated all but 10% of that money. So I worked with Senator Leahy and his team to get that $380 million, which was the fastest way they could get money to us because they didn't have to go through a whole rigmarole. It had already been approved by Congress, it just had to be appropriated. So that happened in late 2017 and into 2018. And then again, Congress appropriated additional $420. So what's next for Vermont? We plan on improving our multi-factor authentication system, we're gonna go to the next level, which will be a much more secure system. We'll continue to invest in pen testing and patching. We will continue, we'll prepare for and put out an RFP after the 2020 election for new optical scan tabulators. We will continue training for local election officials at the town and city clerk level plus the BCAs. We have improved our internal threat detection capability, we'll continue to work on that, and we will continue to complete our migration to dot gov domain, which is a much preferred domain for municipal, state, and federal government. The work never ends. In fact, you folks may have heard me say it, but cybersecurity is like a race without a finish line. It's our new normal, it'll be what we do in day in, day out, going forward. Social media disinformation and misinformation. If they can't actually attack our actual results, they will attack the public faith in the integrity of our elections. And that's what they learned, that's what we learned that they learned in 2016. They figured out very quickly that they could not affect actual election result manipulation. So what they started to focus on was, how could they do something different? And they worked on influence campaigns. Secretaries nationwide, following the 2016 election and working with both Twitter and Facebook, we have portals so that we have direct access to both of those companies to provide them with information if we suspect or detect any disinformation or misinformation. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, social media misinformation can spread rapidly. If something's up for 10 or 15 minutes, it could be seen by a million people in seconds. It's just unbelievable how fast. Well, we're asking that our national association started a campaign, the hashtag trusted info 2020 to look to your trusted official sources, which is the Secretary of State's office, the city and town clerk offices. We ask you as media partners to, if you have questions, don't go buy something you see online. Check with us first before you report it because it may be false information. One of the things that we've seen or have seen, not here in Vermont, but elsewhere, that has been posted is because of the geo-targeting that they can do now with social media platforms, they could actually pinpoint a particular polling location and say, oh, there's a blackout at that polling location, polls are closed until seven o'clock and they'll reopen after seven. Well, that's not gonna happen. Polls are closed at seven o'clock, period. So I think it's just stuff like that that we want to watch for and be careful of. If something does seem suspect, please contact our office. It will provide contact information for you at the end. It is important, again, about the trusted info. If you see something and you're not sure that it's true or not, you can call us and find out. We'll tell you. In the area of voter registration through the elections process, we have same-day voter registration, which means there is no deadline to register except 7 p.m. on election day. But we also say to people, why wait? You can go out to our online voter registration module or you can call your town clerks or walk into your town clerk's office and actually register on the spot and vote at that same time. We also have automatic voter registration which started in January of 2017. And we've actually since that time through automatic voter registration added 63,000 voters to our rolls. But we've also, what's even more important is our voter rolls are far more accurate than ever before. People have a habit of not going to their town clerk's office to change their voter registration when they move. But they do remember to go to DMV to get their driver's license changed. This has taken care of it since they already have the information. Are you a US citizen? Are you a Vermont resident? And are you 18 or over? We also have what we call the My Voter page. It's pretty unique, but other states are starting to use a similar model. But we have this My Voter page which you can actually, all your information, it's a unique page to every registered voter in the state. And all your information is there. Your address, you can actually change your address there. But you can also request an early vote ballot to be mailed to you and you can track it. So it'll say the clerk received your request on such and such a date. Clerk sent it out on such and such a date. They received it back on such and such a date. You can also locate your polling place. It'll give you an address. You can actually, if you're not familiar with the area, it'll provide a Google map to get there. You can update any of your registration information and you can view your sample ballot. It'll give you, it'll tell you who your town clerk is and how to contact them. Our election day procedures. I'm sort of, I laugh, I think the team laughs when people talk about, well, it's almost election time. For us, election time never ends. And if you think about this year, our Vermonters have been voting and I'll give you some updated numbers, but Vermonters have been voting since late January for the presidential primary. And as soon as this one's over, we start preparing for the August statewide primary and right after immediately after that, we'll start preparing for the general election. We're on, we're on call. We're working on this day and night. It's just a constant update of information. We have worked with the town clerks. As I said earlier, we've had trainings with them. We will do additional trainings later this summer with them prior to the August primary. You can go to our website and see all the polling place hours and locations. You can see the presidential primary declaration process procedure. You can see how we do the tabulators and counting and reporting processes. We go through all of these things with the town clerks prior to the election. Polling place rules that are in the place, our guidance and legal requirements, we provide, there's always questions every time about poll watchers or elections observers. There's any election complaints should be reported to us. There's an election day hotline, 1-800-439-VOTE. And we have a constant contact with FBI, DOJ, the U.S. Attorney and Homeland Security partners on election day. Election night reporting. Polls can open as early as 5 a.m., but they must be open by 10 a.m. They, all the polls will close at seven. As far as the opening goes, we know of nobody that's open at 5 a.m., but we know of at least two towns that are open at 6.30. Most towns open at seven and then a few open at 10. All polls will close at 7 p.m. And after 7 p.m., unofficial results will begin appearing on our secure site as the clerks report to us. When can you expect to see them? Well, I know that some of the media, the national media will make some declarations about who won the primary, probably at 7-0-1, 7-0-2. Unfortunately, we can't do that. We won't have that information. And I would suspect we might see it start trickling in within an hour of the closing of the poll, so closer to 8 o'clock, we'll start to see some information coming in. Our election night reporting site is updated every five minutes. And they are unofficial. And I want to clarify this, because they're unofficial until that we certify the results at the canvas on Tuesday, March 10th, which is seven days later. That is at 10 a.m. in my office. And the chairs or designees of the major parties will, along with me, will certify those results. If you're interested in particular races like City of Burlington or South Burlington or whatever, you can go to those clerks and try to access. They may or may not, for their local races, be using our election night reporting site. The election night reporting site is heavily used for the state races, legislative races, county races, but not generally for the local races. There is, and any of your operations can have access to our RSS feed, which provides a direct feed to you of our election night reporting stats as they come in. And I think that information is just online or they contact you. We will not have any voter turnout information. This is probably one of the biggest questions I get all day long on election day is, so what's the turnout been? We have no idea. We will not know until actually weeks later what the actual, actually we will know somewhat what the voter turnout is at the canvas, but that's a week later. So we will not, if you wanna know a particular town or a particular city, contact them and see what their turnout is. But anything we give you would be only anecdotal and we prefer not to give out that kind of information. So as far as where we are right now, registered voters, so far, we have 484,000 registered voters compared to 443 on primary day in 2016. We have absentee ballots requested and returned. You can see the 2016 and the 2020 numbers. So for the presidential primary, there in 16, it was 24,200. Right now we've got 23,145 in 2020. I think the real difference is really around the Republican ballot, primary ballot. When you look at those numbers, you can see that there is a difference there and that's probably, again, when people ask us about what is the primary turnout gonna be, whether it's a statewide race or not, it really comes down to what are the contested races and how contested are they. And that's what the situation that we find ourselves in here. You've got, again, heavily contested democratic race as it was and then although it was only two people early in 2016, in 2020, some of the candidates who have now dropped out are still on the ballot because they dropped out after the ballots were printed. But the big difference I think is between in the Republican side where there seems, there actually seems to be an increase on the Republican side even though there's really only three names on that ballot. You can see the difference right here. This is 22,000 of those ballots, of these ballots have already come back in 2020 versus 24,000 and 13 back in 16. It's really, is that right? It's reversed, because it reversed. What's reversed? So the 16 is actually the 20. The 2016 is the 22,371 that will return and the 2020 is 13,000. So these two numbers are reversed. And we think that what's happening, since this is the 2020 race, we think that what's happening is and that difference between these numbers is basically that on the Democratic side, people are still not sure who they're voting for. Although we expect to have a strong Bernie vote, we still think that people are still waiting to determine what they're gonna, how they're gonna vote there. Any media inquiries should be directed to, for the Secretary of State's office, should be directed to Eric Covey, my chief of staff. Any general election inquiries can be directed to the elections division. You've got the number there, as well as emails. And I'll take any questions. So keep in mind, so in 2018, when they gave us the first $3 million, we have five years to spend that. And we had to submit a plan to the EAC, which is posted on the EAC website. It's all public for every state. So that information is out there. Part of it, what we did immediately was input the multi-factor authentication, which wasn't in place before that. So that we now have that in place. We continue to do penetration testing and other shoring up of our systems as we go. Again, this is an ever-evolving field. And just because today we're in good shape doesn't mean that tomorrow we will be. We have to try to evolve and stay ahead of them. I know this drives John crazy, because I'm on his case all the time about this, but it's really a difficult situation. I never thought when I first was elected as Secretary of State that I would even be thinking that much about cybersecurity, and now I breathe and sleep cybersecurity. And as does most of my team. And it's something that we're doing every day. John's constantly looking at how we can make things even stronger. We feel pretty good. We've done significant penetration testing where we hire white hackers to actually try to get into our system. And they tell us what they found. And if there is a vulnerability, we shore it up immediately. Don't ask the next question of what vulnerabilities have you found, because I can't tell you, or I won't tell you, because if I did, I might as well package it up in an envelope and send it to the Kremlin. It's just, we're not, this is stuff that we have to protect against. And it's an ever-evolving field. Some of this money will be spent on new tabulators for our town clerks to use. There's also, if the legislature makes some changes, it could be that they want us to put a tabulator in every town. We don't know what they will do. So this money can be used for anything election related, and it has to be federal election related from that standpoint. Well, for us, yes, so far. But let me put a caveat on that. Because I have spoken, I testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in Congress, I also testified before Senate Rules, and part of my statement to them was that we need ongoing sustainable funding going forward. Getting this money, a pot of money once every 10 years or so is great. It helps us, but we need ongoing sustainable money going forward because we don't know what we're gonna be up against. And I'm not asking for three million every year. What I'm asking for is some smaller number that we can count on that we know we're gonna get so that we have some kind of sustaining funding that will help us attack the situation and stay ahead of the bad guys. There's no question. The Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese are trying to influence our elections. What they wanna do at this point is make us look bad. They wanna make democracy look bad. So that's the thing we have to try to prevent is to, you know, we're considered the greatest democracy in the world, in history. And we have to try to stay ahead of that. Do you know that incident last summer or the years we're together here? Have you been probed again? We are probed every day. I mean, beyond the knocking on the door, there was the one that most of it was a specific two, wasn't it? It was two or three, and you reported on it, I think, Wilson, on the national level. But I think it's, in August of 2018, John Cain came to me and stuck a piece of paper in front of me, and it was from our WAF log, WAF's web application firewall. And on that log, it said, country of origin, there were two or three attempts by Russian Federation. John immediately went and reported it to the Center for Internet Security, and my call was to the Department of Homeland Security. Within 24 to 36 hours, they issued a nationwide alert to everybody to be on the lookout for these IPs. Even though we know that they can mask them, it was still important enough after they did their due diligence that they reported it to everybody across the country. But we are scanned tens of thousands of times a day. Have you ever figured out what we did in that? No, we don't, I mean, we're just assuming it came from the Russian Federation, but that's- The Gion is very good. Well, we don't know that, but that would be one of the suspicions. Have you ever had any similar, I mean, that's beyond just the shroud of the doorknobs for the Gion. Right. I mean, have you had any beyond the routine rather than the doorknobs, it's constant, but it's always being stopped. It's, they're still relevant. We have multiple layers, and it gets, if it gets, should it get by one of the layers, there's another layer that's gonna block it as well. Have you had any others that elicited the same response that you just described to those two or three of you that didn't happen? No, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. If you could see the digital TV boards that the Center for Internet Security have, they can follow an attempt that comes from Russia over to Houston, Texas, and then by the time it goes up to New York City or something, it's green-lighted, meaning that there's no concern. It starts out red and then ends up green because they're bouncing it off of different servers, and that's something we just try to stay ahead of. Have you seen any examples of social media discussion that you were talking about with social media disinformation? Well, I think it's specific from our election. I think if you really get down to it, a lot of the social media stuff about Bernie Sanders, I think is probably, some of that is, it's elevated. So you'll see a negative, someone here in the United States might post a negative meme out there. And then what will happen is the Russians could take it and then they elevate it even further and push it out there to other areas to try to denigrate Bernie Sanders, but also to denigrate his race. Even some of this stuff, I mean just today it was reported, I think it was this morning down in South Carolina, I saw a thing on Facebook that South Carolina GOP is pushing Republicans to vote for Bernie because they think he's the weakest candidate against Trump. I don't know whether that is true or not. Disinformation, like targeted social media disinformation campaigns to address, to the prosecution about polling places in Vermont. No, we haven't seen anything specific in Vermont at this point. That doesn't mean it can't happen. And do you make clear to it can be on both sides, propping up a candidate for equally bashing them down so the specific example could be of Kendoa, both sides to just create division? The whole idea of the Russians and others is to create division, to create chaos, to divert our attention away from the facts. That's what their whole message is trying to do. Did you have a question? Yeah, despite the bill to vote for security measures, do you have any concerns about interference in the election? I always have concerns about interference in the election. Whether it's cyber security or physical security, we're always concerned about what is occurring out there. We're, you know, J.P. and Lori could tell you that they're in contact with the town clerks on election day about questions of, can someone come into the building with wearing a tag or something or, you know, this kind of stuff or, you know, we're just constantly aware of what's going on on election day and we try to stay ahead of it. Again, that goes into the training that we do with the clerks as well, but we're there as a resource. Keep in mind, our town clerks are some of the hardest working municipal officials that we have out there. They, on election day, will be in their offices before 5 a.m. and they won't go home until after midnight as they're administering to this election. And then they have board of civil authority meeting representatives from their towns who assist who are election officials to help with those elections all day long and they're taking, you know, they're dealing with all the problems at the local level but they're running them up to us if they can't make the decision what to do there. We have inputted some changes over the last probably five to seven years, whereas before I had no ability to change. For instance, if there's a problem at a polling place, if there was a fire at a polling place before, I had no authority to actually sail cable even though it's burned down, you have to move it to another location. I couldn't even do that. Now I can. So we've put in place some mitigation at the statue level so that I do have that authority. Can you give us a private, we just happened to be four years and how important is going to be some change that I missed? What are the mechanics of the actual primary vote? Okay, so the primary vote, and this is an important, that's a great question, Wilson, because this is really important for people to know because we get this call all day long and we've been getting it when people are upset because they have to declare Republican or Democrat when they get their presidential ballot. The only race, once every four years where you have to actually request a ballot of a particular party is the presidential primary. Other than that, at the statewide general election every two years, I mean the primary election, you will be given three ballots, one for each of the major parties, and you can vote on one and discard the other two, they all look the same, we can't, nobody can decipher by looking at them from a distance which ballot you're voting on. The presidential primary is not declaring a party, it's requesting the party ballot for Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. It doesn't mean you are a Republican, it doesn't mean you are a Democrat, it just means that's the ballot you want to vote on. That is recorded by the town clerk. That was an agreement that was done between the major parties and the state legislature probably around 1980, because the major parties frankly wanted us to have party registration. And for my being independently minded said no, we don't want party registration, so this is the compromise was this one race, you have to declare which ballot you want, doesn't mean you're a Democrat, doesn't mean you're a Republican, that's just the ballot you want. And how are the early few days, this is what I can't remember, didn't change, is the primary vote binding on how the parties distribute their vote? Well we don't get into the delegate process of the parties, but I can speak somewhat to that, I think it's 15%, you have to get 15% of the vote in order to get any delegates. What happened in 2016, Bernie Sanders got 85% of the vote, or 86%, I forget exactly, and Hillary Clinton got just less than 15%, so she had no delegates from Vermont, all 10 of the delegates that Vermont had went to Bernie that year. But that's just, and I don't know what if their process has changed any, because we're not involved in the actual process of the delegate choices or designations, you have to check with the parties on that. What new kind of fact you're seeing here in 2020 that you weren't seeing in 2016? I think there's a bigger focus on social media, disinformation and misinformation, I think that's really, that's what all the secretaries of states, both ours and these across this country are concerned about right now, is fighting misinformation and disinformation. As I said earlier, they're gonna have a really difficult time trying to manipulate the vote totals, they may try to change vote totals on election night reporting systems, but those election night reporting systems, it clearly states ours, flashes in red letters, unofficial vote, unofficial results, so we make it very clear that these numbers will may change, the clerks on election night will input their data from, of all the major candidates, they may not put in the right ends, they may just put total right ends, or just not even put in right ends that night, but the next day they come into their offices and they certify to make sure they've got the right numbers correct, they go back into the system and make sure that the numbers that they're reporting are correct, and by Friday we usually have the numbers all updated within our system and then we have to prepare for the Tuesday canvas, which is at 10 a.m. at our office across the street. To the disinformation campaigns that definitely stepped up in the last few years. Oh yeah, and it's improving, I mean when I say improving, their capabilities are improving of what they can do, and from our standpoint, that's why we started the hashtag trusted source, trusted info 2020 campaign, that's why we're working with both Facebook and Twitter. We're not always happy about how they approach it, but it's a start and we're working with them. We have constant monitoring by Homeland Security, so there's a lot more things in play today than we had in 2016, and the biggest difference between our federal partners and our state partners, communication. We have far superior communication channels than we ever had before. I mean we literally didn't talk to them prior to 2016 and now we get a weekly, sometimes daily update from them. It's just constant information and as I said, we have that election day dashboard that we monitor. Each state is monitoring to see if something's happening someplace else. What are your critiques about the way that Facebook and Twitter are handling the information? Twitter's been better at it, but Facebook, as I understand it, their claim is that First Amendment rights, and that if somebody is tweeting, if we can tell them this information was wrong, correct me how that works. You know those, because you've talked to them more. We have a direct reporting channel and they have teams that go in and do their own, I don't know if you call them investigations or assessments in order to determine whether or not it needs their community standards and a threshold in which it takes some sort of action. In the past, we saw very plain or no responses for them in some states. For Louisiana, Louisiana had a big problem. There was some very deliberate disinformation designed to suppress voters that wasn't acted upon. And so I think it's an ongoing discussion, but. But what are your concerns about the way Facebook is handling this? Why is Twitter better than Facebook? Twitter is, they're both taking down fake accounts all the time. In fact, I think, I just heard on the radio yesterday, I think it was on NPR that Facebook has taken down some two million accounts in recent days or something. But they're making, Facebook's making a distinction as to whether if John Smith, living in the United States, decides he wants to say Bernie Sanders is a crook, he can say that. They won't take down the original, but they will take down if they suspect that a unauthorized or fake account is trying to promote it. So, but it almost defies logic that, okay, so on the one hand, you'll take it down over here, but you won't take it down over here. You're still the same message. And that's the problem that we see out there is how they're gonna deal with that. But that's why we have the channel protocols now that we have, we didn't before at 16, where now we can communicate with them and say, hey, this is clear misinformation or this is clear disinformation and should be taken down. At least we have a little more weight. So. Facebook's policy is still developing. I think it was even last week they came out with some changes maybe the week before and how they're gonna address certain content. But it's compared to Twitter or Facebook when it really hands off the wheel. And it said, unless it's a clear violation of our existing community standards, even if something is misinformation designed to suppress, quote, or turn out, there may be cases where they would still allow that. I mean, it's not their job to assess free speech issues. Has any of that $6 million been used for things like media literacy, trading or anything like that, helping people understand and identify across? Well, no, not directly. I mean, we're doing that on an ongoing basis, but we don't have a specific program for that. That may be something we look at in the future, but right now we're just trying to make sure everything is short up and protected and that we have the latest equipment that we need and that the intent is that we will have new equipment after this election. But we have a procurement process that we have to follow. It's taxpayer dollars, whether it's coming from the federal government or not, it's still taxpayer dollars. We're not gonna spend it freely. We wanna spend it in a frugal way that is accountable and we will continue to go through that process. So for instance, when we go to put out for an RFP for new tabulators, we will have gone through probably a six to nine month investigation, if you wanna call it on our side, request for information, trying to find the latest and greatest. Keep in mind, here's where we kinda ran into the problem back in 2004, which was post-hanging Chad 2000, at that time in 2004 when they gave that first slug of money out to the states, the states were encouraged to go out and purchase DREs, the basically the paperless voting machines. Today, we're slamming people that have those. So it's, you wanna be careful about what you do, so you wanna be diligent and make sure you do your research as you go, but it's really important that you make wise decisions based on the best technology. People wanna know when we're gonna vote on these things. I keep telling people, probably not gonna be in my lifetime, but it's West Virginia is piloting a system right now for overseas and military votes on their phone, but there have been vulnerabilities found, and that's a concern. So there's always, we always have to do that back-end investigation to make sure that anything that we're buying or purchasing or installing has the proper security involved. Very quick, can you just wanna speak to the saying that it's a county day, and what it means to have a county day on the same day as the primary? It was actually the other way around. The county meeting day has always been the first Tuesday of March. I don't know when it was that the Vermont actually moved their presidential primary. I think it was done pretty much because we're already voting on that day, and it makes sense for us to, we don't have to go out and spend additional money to vote on a different day. I think what you've seen this year between New Hampshire and Iowa, there may be a further concern in the future to perhaps change the way we do that. I suspect there are less and less states that are doing caucuses, and I doubt that in 2024 that we'll see caucuses, at least it'll be very, very few states. And there's always been talk about doing regional. Having New England or the Northeast vote as a block on a particular day, and maybe the Southeast, the Southwest, and that may come back up again. I think it happens after every presidential election cycle, just because people are unsure. I mean, my colleagues in New Hampshire are very protective of their first in the nation primary, and kudos to them, but it also doesn't make sense. That's the concern. Anything else? All right, thanks again. If you have any questions, please contact our office.