 Good morning, welcome everyone to the first of three special panels for the Center for Security and Politics at the Goldman School of Public Policy in conjunction with SIGA. Today we're hosting three panels on three different aspects of elections and election security. I'm Janet Napolitano. I'm a professor of public policy at the Goldman School and the head of the Center for Security and Politics. The first panel will be moderated by Professor Susan Hyde, and it will discuss some comparative examples from other countries. The second, which I will moderate, will be a panel with state elected officials who were on the front lines during last November's election. And finally, the third panel to be moderated by Dean Henry Brady of the Goldman School will focus on some of the more technical aspects that can improve election integrity. Each panel will have a Q&A session and you're invited to participate in one, two, or three of these important discussions. So now, without further ado, let me introduce Professor Susan Hyde, who is a professor of political science, SIGA affiliate, and the interim co-director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Take it away, Susan. Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure to moderate this panel on election security with a very ambitious goal of covering in a mere 90 minutes what the U.S. can learn about elections from the rest of the world. First, thank you to SIGA and to Berkeley's New Center for Security and Politics for setting this up and to Professor Napolitano for kicking things off today. Congratulations to you on the new center. We're all just absolutely thrilled with everything you're bringing to campus. So thanks again for bringing us together today. Before I introduce the panelists, I wanted to say a few words about the topic of election security, as I think it's one that invites a diversity of interpretations. Today, at least on this panel, we'll be talking about election security using a relatively expansive definition. Election security, broadly conceived, is something that includes procedures for running free and fair elections, protecting elections from efforts to undermine their democratic character, which would include but not be limited to over forms of election fraud, politically motivated election violence which can occur before, during or after elections, foreign interference in elections, which would include international efforts to undermine voter support for democracy. As well as efforts to falsely undermine voter confidence in the electoral process. I'm here in part because I've been studying most of these issues for a long time, in part by looking at efforts by international actors to support democracy and elections around the world. As part of that research, I've served as an international election observer on formal delegations for elections in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, with several organizations including the Carter Center, Democracy International and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. I've also done some related work in Bangladesh and in Cambodia, and part of my research focuses on global trends in elections across democracies and autocracies. In all this work, election security is a topic that I've spent quite a bit of time on and that I'm passionate about. One of the things that's very striking about my very recent experiences covering this topic is that although for the most part focused on efforts by outside actors to influence elections around the world. For the first time in my career I spent in 2020, the US presidential election cycle, talking to journalists about how my research on election violence, election fraud, democratic backsliding and the potential resilience of democratic institutions. Might be more applicable to US politics. So, while in some ways this was disappointing as an American citizen, it's also something that for those of us who do focus on elections around the world and international standards for democratic elections has probably been a long time coming. It is the case and where it's the case that some Americans, perhaps even some in the audience or many in the audience have bought in deeply to this idea that American elections and American democracy are exceptional and perhaps beyond reproach. One thing I wanted to begin by emphasizing is that it has been clear since well before I started working in this area roughly 20 years ago that US elections and election administration have long fallen short of what are now international standards for democratic elections. The US is, for example, the only country in the world that explicitly allows for partisan administration of elections. It is strange for other people in other countries to hear that we allow elected secretaries of state to both run elections and be candidates in those same elections. That's something that's relatively unique to the United States. Voter identification has become a very partisan issue in the US, whereas in most countries around the world it's pretty normal for the burden to be on an independent election commission to make voter identification and voter registration accessible to all eligible voters. Of course this issue has become heavily polarized and partisan in the United States. As many in the audience will remember there were calls for reform after the 2000 US elections, including for example by the National Commission on federal election reform, led by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Much of this was reflected in the help of America vote act passed shortly after they released their conclusions. And this did I think lead to some limited areas of progress. It was followed by another commission, the Carter Baker Commission, which made further recommendations. But it is clear to me from reading about and having heard speak individuals like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, in part because of their prior experiences in both US politics and in promoting international standards for democratic elections that there's a long list of changes that they have advocated for and that have been reasonably clear would help with US election security. When when I talk about these issues, many people are surprised to learn that the US has invited international election observers since 2002 invited and had international election observers since 2002, most prominently from the organization for security and cooperation in Europe. For the 2020 US elections, their preliminary post election statement congratulated election administration in in the US elections and congratulated their successes in running an election during such a severe part of the global pandemic, but also highlighted some of the problems and I wanted to mention those problems that they highlight because it does set up some of the conversation that we're having today, including political polar polarization that eclipsed substantive debate, unequal access to voter registration. There are some finance laws that are easy to circumvent, as well as the stunning amount of money in US politics. And partisan efforts aimed at voter suppression, including what they document as 10 million voters who received automated disinformation phone calls aimed, I think at suppressing their vote, or just waiting them from turning out. This criticism, however, in this preliminary report, at least in my reading of this report was the effort by the incumbent president to falsely undermine the integrity of an election. These are all very hot topics. One of the challenges in approaching this topic is that the consequences of problematic elections can endure beyond that election. The problems with election security were not severe enough to change who won an election. For example, if the election outcome is not that close, a voter who is turned away from the polls in one election may never try to vote again. On the other hand, they could also be mobilized into activism. The experience with fraud has been shown in other contexts. For example, in Mexican elections to make some voters less likely to turn out for several subsequent election cycles. And we know, as I mentioned in other cases, experience with problematic elections can also mobilize voters and make people more likely to participate. So judging the some effect of violations of election security over the long term can be very difficult. Without politically motivated efforts to undermine elections, which is something that does happen in lots of countries around the world, one of the things that is clear is that some actors attempt to undermine elections without getting caught. And one can try to undermine voter confidence falsely without necessarily changing the real quality of the election or the real conditions on the ground. They may seek to maintain plausible deniability about the legitimacy of their actions. And except under some very specific circumstances, they don't usually admit to what they're up to, even when in some cases they're recorded taking actions that look very suspicious. This can make the academic study of election security very challenging at times, right? This is an illicit behavior in many cases. And so sometimes, or another thing that I wanted to bring into this conversation is that a lot of the terminology surrounding election security also becomes politicized, which is yet another challenge for those of us who are working in this space. For example, the term election integrity, which until this year was relatively benign. Most people up until this point wanted elections with integrity has recently become pretty politicized as something that's now being used to justify widespread efforts to pass new legislation that's aimed at suppressing voter turnout in the future. With a fairly obvious objective of suppressing votes that are not for one of the political parties. There are also a number of other violations of election security that may affect the outcome of the election, but may come about through administrative incompetence or other issues that are not necessarily partisan efforts to deliberately undermine democratic elections. And again, those things can also undermine voter confidence, as we'll talk about in this session. So as we talk about lessons from around the world that may be relevant to understanding the potential for democratic backsliding in the United States, as well as improvements to and violations of election security. It is important to keep in mind that there are a number of different relevant actors at play, the government in power, the bureaucracy, including election administrators, voters, political parties, all of which may have different preferences and different ways in which they may go about either working to protect the vote, or working to subvert it sometimes at the same time. It's now my pleasure to introduce our panelists, each of whom are exceptional in their fields, and bring with them not just wide ranging substantive knowledge about elections in many countries around the world. I've also been at the cutting edge of bringing rigorous research methods to policy relevant questions that are connected to elections and the potential for electoral reform and election security. You'll note, and I'll just flag this, that some of their expertise is relevant to efforts to engaging in reforms that are aimed at improving efforts within relatively democratic contexts right so making democratic elections better in some form. The panel also includes individuals with expertise in areas that I would classify as efforts to undermine election security but also potentially democracy. Right, so we're both talking about how to improve elections within a democratic context, and ways in which some of these violations of election security might not just be problematic for the election, but might be problematic for democracy more generally depending on the context. I'll now go through and introduce our panelists very, very, very briefly. There's more extensive bios in no way summarizing all of their impressive qualifications. First, Catherine Casey is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research explores the role of information in enhancing political accountability. She brings extensive experience working on these issues in the particular context of Sierra Leone, and has worked elsewhere as well. Thomas Fujiora is an associate professor of economics at Princeton University. His research seeks to understand why elected officials fail to provide adequate services, and how the design of the electoral process can influence policymaking. He's worked on elections broadly in Benin, the Philippines and Brazil. John Siliota is an associate professor at the University of Pompo, Fabra. His research studies the determinants of voter participation, and the way public policy interventions affect different dimensions of voter and politicians behavior like turnout, vote buying, accountability and election. His work focuses on Peru, Paraguay, and Austria, among other countries. And last but not least, my colleague Isla Matanaka is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which political violence and elections intersect, and she has worked on these issues in, among other places, Columbia, Myanmar, and, and may touch also in her remarks on Sri Lanka. I've asked each of the panelists to open our conversation with a lesson or two from their own experiences that may be relevant to understanding US elections and the potential for reform. So as, as we open things up, I'd like to invite a Kate, Professor Casey to go first. Great. Wonderful. Thank you so much for the intro. It's fantastic to be here. Well, I'm coming from the perspective of work we've done in Sierra Leone. So this, in terms of Susan's categories, this is in how can we make democracies work better, so to really deliver for citizens. And I want to focus on, on two kind of common problems. So, you know, elections around the world face a number of challenges that are fairly universal. So what I want to focus on are how do we make sure that voters have the information they need to make good choices. And the second one is how do we get great people to run as candidates for elected office. So I think these are universal challenges and the solution is likely going to be very context specific. So things that work in Sierra Leone, very low income West African country are probably not the solutions that are going to work here in the United States. But the message from Sierra Leone is about how you get from the problem to the solution that works in your context. And the message I want to, I want to share is one of bold experimentation. Right. And so it's trying new innovative policy reforms, and then evaluating them very rigorously to see whether they're working better than what you're already doing. And so I want to share two examples of bold experiments I've been involved in with civil society and the political parties in Sierra Leone. And there's one each on each of these two, these two questions. So the first experiment I want to share is one about this question of how do you get voters the information they need to make, you know, great choices. There's a little bit of context just to start so so Sierra Leone is very low income country so a lot of voters are illiterate they haven't had access to public education. There's also in terms of media, there's just not a lot of great sources of reliable unbiased political information. And you can think about some pretty rural farming communities who are going into an election who may have very little idea about how the office works, you know what the qualifications are and who the candidates are that they're choosing between. So, so both this one and the next experiment I'm going to talk about are in the context of the Sierra Leone Parliament. And so the US analog you should have in your mind is the House of Representatives so the US House the elections are structured exactly the same way. So, this question about how you get information to voters so imagine you're in a rural village and people really have very little idea of what their options are. So the kind of bold solution that civil society partners want to test was what if we could expose voters to these very engaging debates right so you could go and see a debate between parliamentary candidates, and really get a sense for who they are what they stand for and what they're meant to be doing in office so this is exactly what we did so so picture like a drive in movie theater, except you're not going to drive there you're going to walk there right so big public gatherings and you're watching a video of the candidates running in your area. You know debating each other on merit right so how do we know whether this works, well where these drive in cinemas or these walk in cinemas are happening is kind of randomly allocated. So I can look at voters who got a chance to watch the debates versus those who didn't and I can follow their behavior right through the elections. So, what we found is these debates were incredibly successful at building voter knowledge right. They gave voters a sense of what elected parliamentarians were meant to do what the resources they had available to them, and what policies they had and all of this information actually changed people's voting behavior so voters start to shift to higher performing candidates and, and I want to say a couple things about these debates you know Susan raised some points about, you know, sort of party politics eclipsing substantive debate and voter misinformation. The candidates are moderated by a very trusted member of civil society, they're 11 level playing field so everybody running got equal airtime they're focused on substance and on merit right so they are really talking about the nuts and bolts of government and policy and what these candidates are doing. So that's, so that was one experiment on the voter side that was very successful. And the second experiment I want to share is on this question of you know, how do you get great candidates. For this one that the thing you need to know about your down is in the status quo the parties, they select their own candidates so think about a party you know, choosing all the candidates to run around the country. It's a very internal and from the outside pretty opaque process where you know party leaders are you know nominating and appointing candidates to run. The thing that is absent in the status quo is really any space for voters. And I was going to say Sierra Leone here is much more representative than democracies around the world in the US system. And so what the political parties themselves are saying and both major political parties participate in this experiment was, you know, how can we create more space for voters to have a direct voice and selecting who's going to run to be the candidate in this area. And what they did is pretty unusual is that they, they took huge, large representative surveys of all registered voters is not just who shows up for a primary, or who has the means to access of the polls to representative opinions of all voters and that's them. Of these four potential candidates who do you want the party to pick to be your candidate in this area. And so they aggregated that information and incorporated it with their own information on these candidates to select different types of candidates now how do I know the candidates are different, because again, this is a randomized experiment so these parties inside their own system are experimenting across different races with different ways of selecting candidates. So we can compare what the actual candidates look like. Once we get to the election. What they found is actually when they created more space for voters they were getting better candidates and particularly they're getting candidates who have been involved in providing a lot more local public goods in the past and this is something that voters in this context, really care about I think there's universal challenges. What exactly the solution to these challenges look like is going to vary a lot across countries but the message is bold experimentation and what does that take well it takes, you know, acknowledging that there's a problem, thinking about an innovative bold solution and then really be willing to test it rigorously and learn from this new experience. Thanks. Thank you. Next, I'm going to turn to you, Professor Leon Siliota. Thank you very much for the invitation and for the gentle introduction. So, as you mentioned, a large part of my research concentrates in studying the causes and consequences of electoral participation right and then so by reveal preference I think that electoral participation is a key element in the functioning of democracy and a key element also for boosting electoral integrity and trust in democratic outcomes. So my work has focused in several countries in Latin America with a particular focus in Peru and while as Kate mentioned, there are wide differences between the Latin American context and the US context there are still some universal lessons to be learned from comparative research. So just to put things into perspective, we have to notice that the electoral participation in the US is low, right? In the 1980s and 90s it was hovering around 50%. Since 2004 we've seen a relative increase and by the last presidential elections turned out reached a record high of 62%. This is still quite low in comparative terms. In most of Latin American or Western European countries you see turnout rates that are somewhere around 75%, 80%, similarly for some countries in Southern Africa. So a bunch of my research has been on trying to understand who do we bring out to the polls when we enact national and blanket policies to try to incentivize electoral participation and what are the consequences for representation. So there are two big messages that we get from this research. One is that you typically end up with these blanket policies, you typically end up drawing to the polls voters who are usually uninterested in politics and who are set. So therefore getting them into the polls do not have effects on what the policies that are get enacted are, but rather have implications for how they feel about the election and this is important for when we're talking about election. So what are the implications of these types of policies for electronic therapy? First there is habit formation in voting. So consistently having voters who are left out of the electoral process can generate pockets of these affected voters who first are completely left out of the political process and hence whose policies preferences are not represented in policymaking. Therefore they are not going to identify with elected offices. When they decide to participate, hence they may be more likely to be attracted by public claims rather than candidate valence or programmatic politics, which is the discussion that we really want to be having in any democratic process. In contrast, people who consistently participate are more likely to be part of the political discussion, acquire information, be much more engaged in serious conversation about programmatic politics. So in general, the findings from the literature leads us to think that participation in elections provides legitimacy to the process. The more people participate in elections, the more people I see around me participating in elections, the more we perceive them as being fair. So just as an example, last night I downloaded data on electoral participation around U.S. states and how much the absentee voting was happening in the last elections. And you see the facts just jump at U.S. So places with higher turnout have massively higher rates of usage of these absentee ballots. Unfortunately this is a correlation, but I think it goes in line with what we are finding in the literature. So what policies can help increase political participation? In the U.S., there is a lot of experience with get out of the vote campaigns, either led by political parties or other campaigns, and they do help in increasing turnout. So the objective of these different types of campaigns is to generate a gap in the participation between voters from different parties. So no, that doesn't contribute in increasing the legitimacy in elections. Similarly, enfranchisement is helpful for widening representation, but again, here we are focusing on a specific set of voters. In the U.S., clearly mandating to vote, like we've done in many Latin American countries and some European countries, is a no-go. But there are some hard and soft policies that can be relatively easy to implement. And here I would agree with Kate that we need to start experimenting in what works and what doesn't, and the decentralized organization of elections in the U.S. So some ideas just to trigger the discussion, automatic registration, which has been implemented in several U.S. states, voting on a Sunday, stuff that is really, really easy to implement. Alternatively, what we see in some countries is that even without the mandate vote turnout is around 80%, 85%. And this is mostly because people perceive voting as a citizen duty. So non-partisan campaigns in this direction can also be really helpful. So I'll just leave it there and we'll keep discussing later. Thank you. Great. So now let's turn to Professor Fujiwara. Thanks to everyone at Sega, the Goldman School, and Berkeley for the opportunity to talk here. So I'd like to start by sharing some lessons from Brazil, so the world's fifth largest democracy. And in particular, how Brazil has quite successfully administered its elections using electronic voting devices for over 20 years. And it has done so without any credible evidence of fraud and broad trust and support from the electorate. So the Brazilian electronic voting system is popular with no Brazilian voters since it's easier to use than the previously used paper ballots. And it also allows election results to arrive quickly. So usually polls on election day close at 5pm. And in the same evening, the same night, the full results from almost 120 million votes cast are made public, which is an important part of electoral integrity because it's in dispute between polls closing and actual election results not being clear to everyone that a lot of threats to electoral integrity or even democracy can occur. So the transition from paper ballots to electronic voting in Brazil happened in the 90s and it was successful in large part because Brazil actually already differed from the West in some dimensions. So Brazil had a centralized national electoral authority. They had a lot of power to oversee and even coordinate or even actually tell what to do to the state level electoral authorities. And the whole electoral authority system at the state and national level, it is part of the judiciary branch, which is by definition independent from the executive and the legislatures. And that has been historically trusted and perceived as independent by the population, more so than most state institutions, right? And so on top of that, the Brazilian electoral authority also made a clear effort to have transparency regarding the voting process. Election data is made publicly available in a way that's actually much easier for another average person to access data on elections than it is in the United States. And procedural documents are made public, all in a kind of centralized place. Well, the average Brazilian can actually go to the electoral authority website and collect all sorts of information that it's actually more difficult even as a researcher to find in the US, right? Another interesting lesson that while the electronic voting devices in Brazil they are what we call direct record, which means the vote telling process happens without anyone actually handling pieces of paper. The electronic voting devices, they do produce ballot level printout of results. So for each ballot, which you know the votes of say 200 to 500 people, it will print out what are the results of people that voted right out when the polling station closes. So that creates a paper trail that can be used to audit results and could address potential issues regarding say a cyber attack on a central vote telling system. There's also some downsides to the Brazilian system which are not inherent to the system but it is the way Brazil has implemented these downsides. The first thing that it does not allow absentee or male voting, a voter can only cast her vote in the polling station she's registered to vote, right? Currently the country is rolling out biometric vote information via fingerprint which also has some or can have some negative effects on voter registration and turn out since it requires you know every single voter to re-register to vote and provide a fingerprint to the authorities, right? These issues however they are counterbalanced by a system of mandatory voting much like Gianmarco talked about before me and by having elections on Sundays which are kind of clearly a day set out for everybody to go vote, right? And lastly, just to kind of put things in context in compared to the United States, I should give you some context that since Brazil really democratization in the 80s, right? The major parties are deleting presidential candidates, they have been committed to respecting electoral results. I think Brazil sort of leveraged a system where the main political actors were committed to respecting electoral results. There was a central independent electoral authority, right? And now these things are changing. The current president, Jorge Bolsonaro, has been making claims of electoral fraud without producing any evidence whatsoever to back it up. The claims had little consequence in last year municipal election, but you know Brazil is actually about to face probably its biggest threat when it comes to electoral integrity and when it comes to federal elections next year. So I think there's interest power to observe how it will be handled there and how the US can learn to handle things here. Thank you. Great. Thank you. There's so many interesting things we will touch on but basically from this point forward I'll be posing questions to the panelists. It'll be a little bit more conversational. We have some prepared questions and then we'll turn to some questions that we've received from audience members and from people who submitted questions prior to the panel. Yeah, this is, this is my greatest fear is that I would forget someone and I just about started to do it. Eila, please go ahead, Professor Matanak, sorry. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me and thanks so much for organizing on this topic. So while there are many different challenges to electoral security, I'm going to talk about violence around elections specifically starting with ties between politicians and armed groups. At times politicians and armed groups have become really closely linked. My cross case based cross country case based research with Paul Stanley and has shown that ties between politicians and armed groups are not unusual. Most armed groups actually do engage in some type of electoral participation, whether supporting particular candidates or coercing others. And many politicians are also open to this type of influence. So my cross national data tracking the most overt types of these links shows that these ties between politicians and armed groups often become endemic in really different context so different levels of democracy different levels of development, rather than focusing in on one case for this particular type of research we've really looked across a set of cases and I've collected data across a set of cases. So I think these links form between politicians and armed groups because simply put, they can benefit both of them. So armed groups can use ties to tilt outcomes towards positions that match their own political aims and agendas, as well as to recruit, organize and attack more openly with sympathetic politicians in office. Politicians though also can use this tool in much the same way that they use other types of violence, one sided repression communal communal violence. The illegal activity can mobilize some of their most enthusiastic supporters, but it can also deter legal activities so intimidating politicians to do less campaigning and legislating dissuade citizens from voting or supporting their preferred candidates and blocking civil servants from trying to do their jobs. So these ties between armed groups and politicians have the potential to undermine democracy. And we've been talking about them increasingly in the media recently. I think, you know, in terms of suggestions going forward once politicians become tied to armed groups, separation is not always so simple. Our work suggests that there are a few things to do beyond law enforcement that rely really on civil society and citizens. So first, monitoring and identifying these ties throughout the electoral cycle is really crucial government officials but also journalists analysts academics can help do this. The important thing here is that many of the links between politicians and armed actors are covert. And even when the ties are out in the open the specific language often allows politicians to deny them if pressure. This occurs across the cases that we look at calling them out and identifying patterns can help mobilize action. So once identified how do we hold politicians or armed actors accountable law enforcement of course has a crucial role in this the police and the judicial systems. Consistent response keeps armed groups framed in based on our work in the US and other contexts however we're a little bit concerned that politicians can at times push for uneven policing. And sometimes law enforcement bias and even open sympathies can actually be part of this violence. Beyond law enforcement, most of the ties to politicians also require a different approach, approach because they're often not verifiably illegal, even if patterns and other evidence exists. So holding politicians accountable for their ties to armed group can can involve things like political processes such as sanctions or impeachment, funding cuts by campaign donors, social media or other media companies enforcing policies about language, and ultimately disapproval expressed by voters by constituents. So recently Martha Crenshaw, drawing on her decades of research on homegrown tourism route that this break really happens when quote the community that they claim to represent rejects them that is rejects violence and that seems to be really crucial here too. So I would say that in terms of the spectrum this is more on the how do we avoid some of the really negative outcomes so we see in other places we have seen sort of broad based efforts to reject violence in different contexts. So even though our work shows that these that many elections feature violence and that because there are these benefits involved these cycles can be really hard to break. I am hopeful that we may find some solutions going forward. So I'll leave it there and look forward to the rest of the conversation. Wonderful that there are so many interesting things here. I think the questions you're raising are really fundamental right now, and do connect to these ways in which the US is experiencing things that hasn't experienced for a little while. And so therefore we have this need to draw on examples from other contexts highlighting the conversation we're having today. The next question I like to follow up with is just to ask our panelists to perhaps join some of our audience members and thinking about why it's a little bit difficult to compare the US to other countries and to think about both similarities and perhaps differences between the cases that you're familiar with so in what ways. Should we think about surprising similarities between the US and other places and in which ways should we think about differences that are maybe really important to emphasize ways in which the US just isn't like other countries and doesn't have good comparisons that we should should be making to other cases. Let's see I'll ask. Professor Casey to go first. Okay, well, since I'm, you know, talking about Sierra Leone, which is, you know, very low income West African country, I think you can think of a lot of differences that you know some are surprising some are not but I want to talk about the similarities. Sierra Leone has a fairly stable two party system like the US so the two parties that are the major parties now are the same parties that were formed around independence in the 1960s. And one thing I think is interesting is because they're there are affiliation sort of regional sorting. So there's affiliation there's kind of two major ethnic groups and two major political parties and they're wanted in the north and ones in the south so they're very stable, kind of they each have sort of equal sized support. But what this means this geographic sorting is that when you come down so present elections are super competitive right because each party has kind of equal shares. When you go to the sub national level like thinking about you know US House of Representatives, you get these very kind of homogenous local districts right and what does that mean that means like local elections are a landslide for one party, or the other. For example, I'm at Stanford. It's in Palo Alto. So if you think about our health districts, you go to the general election, the whoever the Democratic candidate is almost doesn't matter who that person is, they're going to the 75% of the vote versus 25% of the vote for the 50% of the vote spread and that just happens again and again and again. Right. The same thing in Sierra Leone so that's pretty much Palo Alto would be pretty much the median distribution in terms of how how uncompetitive a local election is. And so, you know, there's also there's two political scientists, Jim Snyder and Shigeo Horano wrote this beautiful book on US US primaries but this is one of the things they were pointing to is that it's not just Palo Alto like if you look at all US House elections over the last 70 years. A majority of them were decided by more than a 15 percentage point spread right that is a landslide. And so most of the US House elections anyway are also very, very lopsided. So this kind of ties back to like why I wanted to talk about that second experiment on how you select candidates because in a place like Palo Alto, the general election doesn't really matter right you know the Democratic candidates going to win so the question is, who is the Democratic candidate and how is that person selected and you know who had to say who turned out who participated. And I think that's where, you know, that's why it's really important to think about who's putting themselves forward and who's who's participating in that process of winnowing that group of potential candidates. And I just want to say so one surprising difference and this comes back to Gianmarco's point, and as a shout out to voters in Sierra Leone, turnout is not mandatory in the Sierra Leone the last two general elections, it was 84 87% turnout so that's, you know, not mandatory and it's just a phenomenal level of voter participation. That is truly impressive. Let's see. Professor Leon Siliota do you want to get in on this. So one thing that really got me thinking about the similarities between Latin America and the US is the use of political trials, right, so, so, I mean, after the last couple of engagements of former person Trump, and political trials are useful instruments for democracy to punish misconduct by elected officials outside election people. So we typically have very little tools are at our hands outside election periods to punish politicians, right. And however, this institutional safeguards at times can be a double edged sword. And this brings me back to a project I was working recently in Peru where there are recall elections for mayors around the country and they happen very often. The problem here is that there, there is a fine line when you are trying to punish an elected official for having misconduct, and when you're using these institutional tools for political purpose. Right, what I found in that in that project in Peru is that when potential candidates perceive that that a political trial is used in a with political motives that ends up deterring potentially very good candidates basically people who are thinking about entering politics, see that that they may be kicked out because of political motivations, and they say, Well, I may as well stay in my well paid private sector position right so so what was that was a parallel here. I mean, when you when you have such often happening in pitchments like what we've seen lately. And, and when you have voting in this case in the in the house and in the Senate, completely split against party lines. This underminds the objectives of this political trials in the in the sense that one of the benefits of having the discussions in public is airing some potential facts that that may document a wrong doing by elected officials. And when voting in the house and in the Senate is completely split along party lines. These these underminds the credibility of these these facts and completely raises the potential usefulness of these of these political trials right and this can have potential downward effects on the selection of people who decides to enter the political race at different stages. The quality of candidates is a really interesting theme that's coming out of some of these reforms. Professor Matt knock. Will you jump in on this question to. Yeah, I was also thinking about sort of the response to these different types of threats and especially thinking about electoral violence and so picking up on some of John Marcos comments just now you know thinking about. There's a wide range of what we think the government will do in response to this at times, the political violence is so deeply ingrained and linked to the judicial sector the policing sector that there's really no hope in some countries that there will be sort of any type of response from those bodies and in other cases there's much more hope and I think the US has shifted between those different opinions over the course of recent events and so you know there's there are cases that look a lot more like the US like there's an incident with para para politics in Colombia where there were links between paramilitaries and politicians in the legislature and there were investigations or court cases brought about the collusion between these politicians and the paramilitaries but there were also important roles played by politicians who tried to pass more legislation to sort of sanction this. It was sometimes blocked, but also through activists. So there were widespread protests, lots of different organizations wrote about this and then also there were journalists and others who actually uncovered some of these links Samana magazine was one of those that was sort of responsible for doing a lot of this work. So I think in these cases we can sort of see this like universe of responses it's not clear that all of those might exactly apply to the US, but it certainly fits somewhere between the spectrum of like places where the government is completely involved in this type of violence and places where it's like not at all involved. And so thinking about sort of the most effective response to it is likely going to fit somewhere in the middle and encompasses some of these reactions and responses that we've seen in other cases. Great. Thank you. And then, Professor, would you are will you jump in a little bit here. Yes. So I think what I'll say, echo the bit what John Marco also said is, I think in. So what are the things in any country expect a little bit is is that at some point there's some independent authority who make a call on what results are so right so there's like in in in the United States there's this that is independent or the in the United States this role would be the judiciary will be courts right and and if it gets there will be eventually the Supreme Court I was remembered from the 2000 election right and I think that's a good example because it was clearly in 2000 there was a ruling and then one candidate said okay that's the ruling right I'll go I said that's it right I'll concede right so. I think you were like two things that are perhaps a little different in the United States from other countries is is that the judiciary is not perceived by I think big part of the population with good reason as independent right because judge federal judges are appointed by the federal government and because you know state judges are appointed by state governments, because people look at the Supreme Court and they can clearly attach each judge to a particular party right. You create the system where it's sort of, you know, like the population expects and then the kind of independent referee to come and call things one way or the other, which is kind of difficult. So, going back to the example in Brazil, I think that's a country that can't handle this well because because the left authority is part of the judiciary and they're not appointed by particular parties, they can sort of play this role of being perceived at least by the population as a non political actor. And not only that I think they navigate this in ways that are complicated like going back to the political trials that your Michael say like say, they are responsible to say, make claims about does the sitting president broke electoral rule by say, taking off the book campaign donations right, and I think a lot of times they shy away from making rulings there because they know what the moment they step in they'll be perceived as political so it's a very difficult trade off people have to navigate but I think I think the United States has this particular idea that kind of permeates it is that once the judiciary is perceived as also as political and partisan it's hard to for the population to see, you know, their decisions as kind of being independent right but kind of as a kind of fair referee calling which way the election went. I think I'm going to circle back in a second to a question that's very much related to what you were just talking about but for now I do want to think about a question that's been on my mind as we've prepared for this panel which is that when we talk about the potential for reform in the US if you're just reading public commentary and whatnot. There's a lot of pessimism right there's a lot of a sense that it's hard to get multiple political parties on board. Kate one of the things that was struck by in your comments was just that all of the parties are willing to participate in these efforts to make the process more inclusive for voters. And that was true across apparently the entire political spectrum right. That just seems to be not the case right now in the United States and so I wanted to give our panelists a chance to say a word or two about whether anything from their experiences that suggest ways in which countries can move from intense polarization perhaps even in post civil war contexts to moments in which there's a willingness to adopt reforms and to move towards improvements in electoral processes. Ila or sorry for some of that. Let's go first. Sure. Thank you so I'm afraid I'm going to be relatively pessimistic on this front in terms of electoral violence I think there's really this possibility of getting very stuck in these cycles and so you know I mentioned some of the ways in which we might get out and I think in this country that is in this cycle might get out of it. But I think there is this big question about who politicians or who can who can hold politicians accountable in these contexts where they're really acting outside of the system, whether it's through something like electoral fraud or electoral violence which happens to be what I study. There are super interesting other you know political science works on this that suggests that the you know people who are closest to those who are using these social media channels so political allies or advisors might be most in the position to like call out or sanction this both because others will be most persuaded by their messaging because it's surprising right it's coming from the people who are closest and also because it sort of signals that they have the same interests, but they're willing to use a different mechanism. And I think that there are cases in which political violence is used especially by politicians because it's benefiting them right and so it's in some way that we need to break the cycle of benefits from these mechanisms whether it's fraud or violence or something else in these contexts. And I think that can be hard to do. I do study post conflict elections and I think there are ways in which that you can sort of shock the cycle in a way that resets the equilibrium. And then you have sort of a new playing field that eventually improves gradually, but I think these gradual institutional changes is something that we actually have less of an idea about how they occur in some of these contexts in a way that that's really positive so I would say I'm on the pessimistic end of the spectrum but I'm hoping my colleagues have other suggestions that are that are more optimistic. Yeah, well we can always hope. Thank you, Professor Leon. Sorry, I was trying to get to my next question. So let me put the more optimistic side here. So once again, when we've seen big packages of electoral reform trying to get passed in Latin America, they have been blocked by national forces. So in general, getting passed big reforms to electoral systems is hard. One advantage that the US has with a very, very decentralized organization of elections is that it allows for what Kate was saying earlier. Right, it allows for bold experimentation. And we know that once one thing works, it is much easier to push it higher ups in the political discussion. Right, so that's one thing that I would highlight that we should push local administrators to try to dig deep and come up with some creative solutions that can be scaled up to national policies. Great. Let's see, Thomas. Yes, I just want to follow up. I think, yes, there's the, I think I'm more optimistic because the United States has this decentralized administration, there's much more room for the bold experimentation. And one thing, one aspect I think in the pessimist view that I think is people are overestimating is that it, that you know how certain it is that each reform will kind of have the effect that the people pushing for the reform are taking. So there's a lot of unintended consequences in this reform, right. So, to give a current example, let's say there's a, in some state, the Republican Party is pushing to curb, say, mayor voting because they think that will help them in elections. But that's actually a very uncertain thing. They're probably basing on something that happened in this last election during a pandemic, right. It's not obvious it will happen. So, like, I wouldn't say take a bet that every time that you curb mayor voting that increases the Republican vote share, right. In a sense, I think it's as states will do the things, some reforms, even if they are kind of, say, being done with the intent of kind of tilting things down one party, it may kind of backfire by not happening. So then there'll be kind of this back and forth, right, so that there'll be it's there'll be room for improvement, right, especially like, you know, to returning things up for the way they were, maybe some changes will kind of stuck around because voters like it. It's actually, you know, I think there's a part of an optimistic. It's, it's not as easy to kind of, you know, tinker with electoral demonstration to get the things to go, you know, kind of tilt the scales in the direction of one party versus the other, right. I guess in the researcher from all of all the other panelists here you can see there's a lot of kind of unintended consequences things that kind of happen the way you don't quite expect it exactly to happen. There's something very interesting there which is one of my favorite article titles that has nothing to do with this is called driving with the rearview mirror. Because there's so many ways to undermine elections and so many ways to try to counter those methods of undermining elections reforms are aimed at the problems of the last cycle. Not attempting to try to guard against what are the most likely problems in the future cycle and if you're really intense much like a burglar or something like that if you're really intent on getting into the house. You might not go for the method of getting into the house that the that you know the person just set up security for right you might come up with a new method and so there are some very interesting aspects to this. Kate did you want to follow up on this too. Yeah, I will. So, I mean, I think, I think the kinds of things that the parties in civil society have been doing in Sierra Leone are kind of inherently an optimistic example but I wanted to like some pragmatic aspects of this kind of idea of experimentation is what you don't have to roll out a national reform that changes everything right I think John Marco talked about this you can start small start with a pilot this is really inherent to learning right you need to try some things and compare it to others. You can also, when you're thinking about a pilot you also you need to think about what are the strategic considerations of the people that need to participate. So let me just give you coming back to my two experiments are pragmatic ways to think about so we think about the debates between candidates that are, you know, then broadcast all these voters. So once you have one candidate signed up and a neutral party committed to broadcasting that candidates perspective. The other candidate, the cost of opting out now becomes really huge right so now if I don't participate my rival is going to get all this free campaign advertising. It's going to be particularly going to come in didn't want to show up right away, but then Jesus the challenger is going to be broadcast to thousands of voters, like you know basically no cost for that candidate I'm not going to miss this out. And then you have this coordination, or you can kind of corral everybody him right so that's kind of strategic considerations facing candidates on the campaign trail. And this idea of piloting. So that experiment where we're with the parties themselves are experimenting in how to select candidates. That did not roll out across all races at one go right so very first important steps so first of all we worked with political price registration commission which again is this is part of the government that is the regulator of party so again it's a non partisan platform. The first thing they said is you know we only have limited budget so which races would you be even willing to experiment with this new selection mechanism. Right, so then the party leaders themselves can hive off races that you know are too contentious to politically sensitive, where they are not ready to try something new, and they can pick a set of races where they are willing to experiment. And then you're the research team could come in and randomize which of those can be the new ones which are going to be the status quo right so it's kind of this idea of you know what are, what are people strategic incentives to try something new and when you're starting things from a pilot and stealing them up, you can make these strategic accommodations and compromises that is then sort of incentive compatible for everybody to participate in it. I really like that point I think that's very social scientists sort of contribution but I think it's important to think about in this context and in this conversation. I wanted to follow up on these issues associated with sort of trust and neutrality and polarization. These are issues that have come up in other countries I remember when I was election observer in Venezuela in 2004. We were basically being timed outside of polling stations and if we talk to one, one voter for 30 seconds longer than you know who's wearing a partisan color than another voter. You know, at one point we almost got arrested for for some slight difference in the time we were spent talking to different voters and these things get to a point where nobody trusts anybody. As international observers are put forward as a sort of neutral judge of the quality of elections. We've also brought up independent election commissions as a potentially important actor, several of you have mentioned this trusted organization from civil society or something like that and I wondered if you could just say a bit more about who these actors are in the context in which you've worked who is trusted who is legitimate. And when there are issues with voter confidence in the electoral process. It can that be addressed in any way that that would be useful for folks to hear about in relation to the US elections. Let's see I like going. Great, so I'll start with just a couple of comments about this I think you know I've mentioned that there is sort of this these interesting political science studies about how people can be most persuaded by by messengers with whom they share common values right so there is a reason why parties send their own observers to monitor elections and it's not just because if things go wrong they want to have been there but also because if things go right they want it to sort of be the people saying yes like this was a legitimate election right and so I think there is sort of this like, especially on violence there is this question about getting the people who are closest to the particular audience that you're targeting to reject violence to reject electoral violence right those are the most those seem to be the most trusted sources. Based on sort of like de radicalization literature and preventing the use of violence in electoral context in general I wanted to actually bring up the point that you just mentioned Susan but specifically with with relation to electoral violence which is that there have been some really interesting studies which you know well but perhaps others don't about electoral violence actually being displaced by having international monitors so that in some context international monitors can actually provide, you know, a check on these elections and so you actually are getting a displacement of violence as a strategy and I think it's important to think about like what violence is doing what a lot of these other disruption strategies are doing right. Fundamentally, they're about political exclusion, whether it's like in the initial phases where you're trying to get people not to participate in the electoral cycle, or whether it's in the later phases where you're trying to get a change in the outcome in terms of who actually comes into power and so having this, you know, observation, this third party observation can be really useful. Now that said, in some context, including in the US only certain parties really trust particular outside actors as being neutral and we've seen some cool ways that they work on this in recent years, both in the US and Tunisia by people like Sarah Bush and Lauren Prather and so I think there's really great evidence that this can at times work and it can displace violence. But who the trust for the sources are for this outside intervention or this outside of observation specifically, you know, I think might vary by context is something we would need to assess in each in each election. Yes. So on this issue of like building trust and our view of neutrality, I think we could talk a lot about like, you know, like specific steps and like authority can do to make it transparent to make it clear to make it like the you know, the ballots and the envelopes all make look trustworthy. But in, I think there's a natural limitation where at some point, you know, like, you know, the outside forces can outside the entities have to tell people these are these are valid results. I think then you really realize it say on the media on the media being perceived as independent and telling this is what the results that happened this is like this is or this was a free and fair election. And I think there's another entity we don't talk about it but it's the politicians themselves are like I think a lot of like what make a functioning democracy works is a system where the party is on their own will concede and always kind of say, this is what I lost like my my my challenger my opponent one in a free and fair place. So, you know, it's kind of easier said and done like I can say here, well, we should have an independent media that kind of makes this this work for us we should have politicians and parties that will behave. But I think it's as actors and all everybody's a political actor to some extent I think that it's important to always push on that you know let's say, of the disagreements when you see know when you see different candidates different parties taking some different positions you know that you know you can agree to agree. But I think everyone has voters as donors as civil society. We should understand like when somebody makes statements that kind of crosses the line into you know undermining election. They're really crossing a line that is very different from others right is something they know kind of undermined the democracy. So let's say, I think a lot of it makes the things work in other countries is that parties are kind of able to push out the candidates or its members that actually would be willing to make this claims I don't say when one candidate loses he can say, Oh, I didn't win for your family but maybe his other members of his party said no like you have to concede because you know next year will be next election will be someone else and we want this system to keep running the way it is. So I think there's a lot of that like it's just policing and punishing the people to try to deviate from making unfounded claims that the elections that are free and fair are not free and fair. Thomas yesterday in our planning meeting you mentioned one way in which the Brazilian government has increased trust in the electronic voting systems in Brazil. And you mentioned the hacker competition will you tell us a little bit more about that. So the Brazilian electorate. They also they try to make all the steps to make the electronic devices. So one kind of clever thing they did is they hold an early kind of hacker competition so they say like, we'll give an award to the person who come up with the most effective way to hack into the machines right. And, and I think, and then I think that's creates kind of trust in the thing a because you know they can they can show we're actually you know asking people to do their best job to undermine security so can defend it. And also because the winners of this hacking competition, they are so convoluted and so kind of they come up with things are so complex to do that it almost I say will be impossible to do right so usually it involves somebody. Say, oh I'm gonna hook up a cable to the device which obviously you know the election workers will say, oh I'm gonna kind of set up a big radio that has to be within, you know, half a yard from the polling device and then I'll interfere with the And the kind of it also shows like how hard it it would be to kind of actually engage in this right the system is very right it's not a design in a safe way right it doesn't right it's not like every device is linked to the internet and somebody can hack it is actually much more complex and it involves you know very complex ways of going about it I think that these ways of establishing confidence are really, really important and one of the things that several of you have highlighted in your comments it's just all of the ways in which creating doubt and sowing doubts about these more reliable actors can be very destructive to Democratic elections until election security so I think that's another theme that's coming out of this. Yeah, I just want to make a quick comment going back to the to the original point that that I made about turnout being one important determinant of trust in elections right and generating voting confidence so I was mentioning that there is some time persistence within individual right when you vote one time you're very likely to vote one time again the the second dimension of correlation is in the cross section right when you when you see more people around you doing something, you're also you think about it, much more carefully right and we see, we see this with vaccines right now, right, the numbers on of people who who were starting to receive a vaccine has gone in the complete opposite trend as a way vaccination has moved right and this is as some some people say that this is mostly due to the fact that once you know something who has taken up this vaccine I'm more likely to trust it. Similarly we with elections right when you see that more people are going to vote that implies that they trust the system when more people vote that that transmits much more trust. Let's see Kate you wanted to jump in on this too. I just wanted to just close out just by sharing a story about Sierra Leone so Sierra Leone was involved in a very brutal civil war that ended in 2002 and given what I some of the background I gave you about you know very intense two party rivalry and competition. So there's those first elections after the war was over work like extremely high stakes election. So the story on tell is just one about the power of individual leadership, and particularly the head of the newly formed National Electoral Commission again which is an independent government agency that oversees elections in Sierra Leone. The first director of that was a Dr. Christiana Thorpe so I'm she's just an amazing person, and a lot of ways she's worked in human rights advocating for girls education but she's also a former none and just her substance and her reputation and her leadership style, I think was just incredible for overseeing those first very contentious very high stakes elections and, and just a sense of like some of her accomplishments was there were, you know, different local elections that would be contested some with the ruling party some with the opposition party and she was seen as a fair arbiter and you know making calls and you know for the right outcome regardless of which party was contesting. And just as a sign of her accomplishment, like there's peaceful transitions of power, more actually even beyond her multiple transitions of power between the ruling party in the opposition even at the presidential level since, since the end of the war, which is actually very exceptional, just in the neighborhood of Sub-Saharan Africa. So, you know, it's a story it's not an experiment but it's, I think there's a lot of potential for people's trust in a particular leader and their reputation and the approach they bring to the office that they have that can, that can really do, can really do a lot in terms of building trust and legitimacy in the system. I think that's, that's very much interesting. And it's curious for me to think about just from what I know of US elections just who who might be able to play that role in the context of the US elections we did get a question from from the audience about whether this from Michael campus about whether international election monitoring should be used now more than ever when questioning election security and whether it should focus less on their assessment with an eye towards an international audience for that assessment and more towards the domestic population. That does seem to be like a question that is too cited. Sure, the international election observers can target their assessment towards domestic audiences, but that doesn't mean that they'll listen. And so this notion of sort of credible actors and thinking through, you know, who, who US audiences who audiences around the world when you're in a political context in which mistrust has grown distrust has grown very high. How can you reestablish trusted sources of information and I do think I want to throw out here at the risk of throwing our panelists off off guard a little bit. One of the other questions that we got from the audience which is from Ben Greenberg from vote shield. And the question is that disinformation around election fraud, even when no evidence exists is a relevant issue for the US and other countries. How can governments maintain public trust when their legitimacy is threatened by an unprecedented media ecosystem. And so just if I can just expand slightly on the question and say that I know that the current media environment is something that is also affecting elections in a lot of other countries around the world. There's, you know, micro targeting of disinformation from abroad, there is efforts to sort of splinter and discredit the media. A lot of the things that are happening in the US are happening in other countries as well. Including this issue raised by Ben Greenberg about about disinformation around election fraud, which can of course come from domestic sources or international sources and so it is a follow up question on this question of trust, but specifically related to the media ecosystem so I don't have any of you want to chime in on this or if I'm if I'm allowed to see if any of you want to want to jump in. I guess, I almost want to ask our distinguished host Janet Napolitano she has evidence on this but she's, I don't want to put her on the spot. There's a lot of, there's a lot of ways in which the media environment I think is changing in a lot of countries in the world in which scholars are still catching up with so Yeah, I think maybe I think yeah I think what I think was hard for us to kind of jump in and talk is is because it's unprecedented social sciences still kind of grappling with like, what is like how like how this is different and how to deal with that and I think how to kind of push back on this I say like so what is the best way to fight you know the spread of this information online right should be like use spread fact checking back to people online. Can we kind of rely entirely on on the traditional media to kind of say no these things that we know are circulating in your social media groups are false right, but I think because it's new it's we're still kind of grappling a lot with how to deal with this right. Well, I'll chime in and say, you know, one of the very earliest reports from an international observer group that I've that I've located is from the 60s, an observation mission by the organization for American states I believe it was in the Dominican Republic includes basically a complaint about a disinformation effort that there was a rampant rumor going around that these ballot envelopes that voters had to open to sort of access their ballot contained a flammable powder, so that they would like explode in their face and this is in the 60s right this is. And it was apparently disinformation and a rumor as far as the report could tell so in some ways some of these trends might be just more prevalent in terms of the damage that disinformation can do so this was, you know the thing I'm talking about in the Dominican Republic is just an isolated incident. But, but in some ways maybe the new thing is is how expansive it is and how many people it's influencing Isla. Yeah, I was just going to say that I do think there is a particularly important role for the media in a lot of these electoral processes and thinking about election violence in particular, you know these ties between politicians and armed groups. And others have written, you know, in the US context, for example, that these are often left. So, so Paul standalone and I were in our work we just find these as being either over or covert links and often both politicians and armed groups want to keep them covert. And then also in terms of like whether it's direct or indirect support so indirect support might be something like targeting a particular politicians opponent. Right, versus like actively supporting that politician by giving them funds or something so if you have indirect participation, and it's covert. The only way to find this is by producing more information right and so there are certainly government structures that sometimes investigate this but we've also seen a lot of these cases around the world be identified through the media. So there is now this like unprecedented media ecosystem as the questioner says but there is also this really important role for the media to play in many cases in sort of identifying some of these links. And, you know, and actually bringing them to light and so it's kind of a fine line and as Thomas says I think we're still sort of in the early days of figuring out exactly what the role is there and how to get sort of the best role in terms of strengthening democracy. There's so much that we could cover and I think that there's another question I kind of want to circle back to that touches on a lot of things that you all have brought up already. But I'm again just trying to push push along this comparison with with us and thinking about problems that, as I said in my introductory remarks, feel like things that people are paying attention to again in the US as problems that are that are new ish that the US had historically but is experiencing again. And these are problems associated with foreign interference in elections in the past few election cycles, false accusations of election fraud concerns that election violence would disrupt the pre election concerns before the election that election violence will be used to disrupt election day and violence in the post election period and so I'm wondering if our panels can turn to this question. Yes, so foreign intervention in elections can have effects, negative effects on two dimensions, one on on whether they are actually effective at affecting the election outcome through different ways, hacking or whatever. But second on on how it triggers public discourse right and here I think we have something to learn from the experience of Latin America in the past like 60 or 70 years, right so so in the in the past few few elections. And whenever there is a leftist candidate fielded, there are always claims about financing coming from from Venezuela in the in the past, going back to the 60s, 70s, 80s associations with Cuba. And, and the danger with that is is that it drives the focus away from from what we should actually be focusing on right so so it triggers a debate based on on basically what what could be considered as a rumor so and in here the hard question is again how can we go back from these discussions about rumors to to programmatic politics right and and there some experiences from from other countries I mean Thomas has done fantastic research in Benino on on on how like encouraging politicians to discuss a programmatic issues to generate much more trust among people increases turnout and so on I mean he can tell his business much better than I but we should not only focus on on on trying to to get at the point of the intervention right so we're talking about about Russian hackers. So we put together the correct safeguards, but also all the stuff that is coming up in the media later that they've heard us from from discussing substantive vision. You know, I do want to connect the answer this question to things, things that I was already talked about and we have a few other questions from from the audience I just want to introduce very briefly. I can address some of them and we'll see if the panelists have things to say. The first is from on COTO from the Zambia statistics agency who asks whether there are machine learning applications that could be used in advance to prevent election fraud. I'll start I guess by saying that. That's one other question to I'll just put you out. This is from Grace Gordon from UC Berkeley. How do countries around the world handle the harassment of election officials. I'll say that I have, I'm part of a group, thinking about how to push for nonpartisan election administration in the US and the reports back from election officials are that there are experiencing significant harassment in this cycle or that this is something that's a really major problem, and many going back to some of the comments that the panelists made earlier about good candidates running for office. Anecdotally what we're hearing in the US is that a lot of pretty good election administrators are quitting right that they're they're saying they've had enough of their families being harassed and targeted with threats of violence and really being accused of being partisan when in fact they're they're doing their job by most accounts. So I wanted to throw those two questions out there on the on the first question about machine learning I wanted to also mention that one of the more terrifying statistics I've heard about disinformation is that because it can be produced. Using AI and using various algorithms that you can have like just the amount of disinformation on YouTube about elections around the world. That's auto produced is is more than any of us could like then humans can even listen to write the volume far exceeds human capacity to monitor it. In that sense, it's not election fraud it's not directly addressing the question but I do think it's interesting to think about the problems associated with elections in which machine learning applications as well as some some other forms of more advanced technologies might be very helpful. And that's one area that the sort of combating disinformation where it just seems necessary because humans are not going to be able to deal with it. I do think that there's there's a lot of things that we could talk about here, but let's see Kate do you want to reference some of the election fraud. Sure. Yeah, I mean I think to our colleague from the the the statistics office. So this is not directly in response to the role of machine learning but just is kind of a slightly lower tech example like there have been a lot of studies where kind of the more classical election fraud like ballot stuffing and you know just, you know, a wholesale theft has been detected after the fact really by sort of statistical anomalies like, you know, there's too many people have ordered or the kind of patterns of numbers like there's too many numbers that actually had random numbers between one and nine maybe sort of uniform distribution but when people make up numbers like to report numbers they tend to like overstate certain numbers so you can kind of, there have been these studies that sort of these forensic statistical studies that sort of can detect fraud after it's happened I know your question is more about preventing fraud but I think one of the kind of promises of, you know, just sort of data you know big data and data analysis in general is it can be done very quickly right so if you can think of ways that it can be happening in real time. Maybe it doesn't prevent someone from trying but you could probably pick it up and coming back to like Thomas's points about electronic voting like there's a lot of analysis that can be done in real time. And if you know you had a monitoring team that could come in, you know, very quickly, it might have a preventative role as well as but in addition to sort of this complimentary exposed kind of forensic analysis. Yeah so I was going to say related to this not exactly addressing that question either but thinking about in general how we get like data on what's going wrong in elections I think electoral violence can be one of the things that's actually most difficult to get data on and so we actually have a large scale where we're looking at different mechanisms for doing this we're looking at household surveys, surveys of leaders, and then also like monitors sent to different places, plus what's widely available right now is like media reports on where there's electoral violence just even how do you actually measure and get a grasp of violence, let alone fraud or these other types of inherently hidden influence is I think really one of the trickiest questions and one of sort of the places that I hope the field is going to spend more time thinking about. And definitely something that now is newly relevant to the US I think you know as as you mentioned Susan I think we're all being asked to think about the US elections. For the first time, perhaps in our careers, because some of these issues really do pick up but I think actually detecting not only fraud but all of these other types of like influence the elections can be really difficult we see cool protest data now collected in a variety of ways and I think we'll be seeing more of this on electoral violence specifically committed by the state as well, going forward. Thank you, Ila Jean Marco did you want to add to this. Yeah, I mean, I don't have much to say about machine learning applications but I wanted to comment on on Kate's point about the analysis of electoral data and how can that help us detect early election fraud by bringing up the example of the last Bolivian election right so so they data can be very useful, but it has to be used well. It can be extremely dangerous if it's not right and the example of the Bolivian election I think is is very informative. What happened is that Evo Morales was running for for reelection. I think that by the evening of the election, he was losing by quite a bit. Suddenly there was an information shut down for a few hours when when information started flowing again. Evo Morales ended up winning by a relatively large part. No one stopped and did a very careful data analysis is the one Kate was suggesting, but but some electoral observers and not only the Organization of American States, if put out a statement saying this this change in the in the results in so few hours is is suspicious and that was used as a as a data point to to push Evo Morales as a as a Evo Morales selection as a fraud and to dismiss the whole process. Actually, there's been studies from researchers at the University of Houston showing that that it was not the case right the distribution was quite uniform. I've seen a lot of backing forth among academics on that election in particular. We're we're nearly to the end of our time here and I wanted to bring up one potential elephant in the room that we haven't addressed very explicitly but is definitely coming up in some of the questions we're receiving from the audience and it. It relates to the sort of utility of focusing on reforms in elections. When one of the political parties is refusing to abide by democratic rules and norms and is really going hard in the direction of authoritarianism. This and other trends that are really more related to democratic backsliding more than they are related to election security are of great interest to many of us to me to me. And it is perhaps a good closing thought to think about lessons that the US can learn from the rest of the world, not just about getting election procedures right, but also the ways in which at the same time there's a need to focus on what can be done to combat this problem associated with a major political party and or large swaths of voters just themselves no longer carrying that much about democratic elections or democracy. If you get the procedures right and that other phenomenon is going on. It's hard to think that the procedures and getting the procedural aspects right are going to save us so I wanted to close with that somewhat depressing but I think very important and please join me and in thanking our panelists and thank you and Jonathan for bringing us all together as well as the staff and see who ran all of this. Thank you. And Susan, I want to thank the panelists to this was great that fascinating discussion. I appreciate all of your participation and some of the questions raised and issues discussed. Good afternoon. Welcome everyone thanks for joining us today for the keynote panel of our free and fair elections symposium. I'm Janet Napolitano, former president of the University of California and Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona. I'm now proud to be a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley. And we are establishing there a new center on security in politics. And coming to the university this past year I founded the center in order to connect the security studies that are being done by the amazing faculty at Berkeley with policymakers and elected officials who can ensure real world change. Today symposium brings together those on the front line of the critical nexus between election issues and the conduct of our elections which really goes through the fundamentals of our democracy. Following the speakers we will take questions so submit those via Facebook or use the form on the website you use to register. This panel features election officials and some of the key battleground states from the 2020 election. Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan will also be hearing from a leading official from the Department of Homeland Security. Last November, all eyes were focused on today's panelists and how the elections in their states were being conducted. Officials not only faced intense scrutiny, but had to confront a series of unsuccessful lawsuits, among other things. Today we'll take a look back at this incredibly turbulent time and look ahead to see how we can confront pending legislation in the states and across the nation that seeks to change the way we conduct elections, and ultimately think forward to 2024. So it's my pleasure now to introduce our outstanding panel of experts. Jocelyn Benson is Michigan Secretary of State, where she works to ensure that Michigan elections are secure and accessible. Jocelyn is the author of State Secretaries of State Guardians of the Democratic Process, the first major book on the role of the Secretary of State in enforcing election and campaign finance laws. Katie Hobbs is the Secretary of State from my home state of Arizona. Previously, Katie served in the Arizona House and in the Senate as Minority Leader, and she now focuses on ensuring that Arizona elections are secure and fair and efficient. Josh Shapiro was elected as Pennsylvania's Attorney General in 2016. Josh previously served three terms in the Pennsylvania State House and was twice elected to County Commissioner in Montgomery County. And Matt Masterson is a non resident policy fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory. He recently served as Senior Cyber Security Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he focused on election security issues, and he also served on the US Election Assistance Commission. So thank you all for sharing some time with us this afternoon. So let's harken back to last fall when you were preparing for the 2020 elections. And I'd like to explore with you two things. One is, did you take any special actions in light of then President Trump's contention that the only way he could lose the election was if it were rigged. In order to make sure that you could prove the opposite if that were the case. And the second thing I'd like to explore with you is how you dealt with COVID and changes in your states on election procedures. So Secretary Benson, why don't we start with you and the great state of Michigan. You want me to take both those or just the first right now. Watch take the first one. Okay, so yeah, I mean we saw early on that there were going to be that misinformation was really going to be the biggest threat to election security and misinformation particularly perpetuated by those in our country with perhaps the largest platforms of anyone. This question of how you protect voters minds from being infiltrated by lies, in a way that would ensure that still be able to have confidence rightly place confidence in the security of the elections was one of the most significant things that we were planning to tackle throughout the year of course things changed a year ago today when we got our first cases of the coronavirus reported in Michigan about two hours after the polls closed and our presidential primary which was also a year ago and I'll talk about that later with regards to the misinformation coming from the president at the time and the threats and the challenges which we in Michigan really experienced multiple ways throughout the last the past two years. Our focus was really on three things number one building the infrastructure to ensure that our elections were successful. We made decisions to particularly post COVID make sure citizens knew their options to vote that they had confidence in exercising those options and that the infrastructure itself was secure, and the tabulation process as well was efficient and secure. The second pillar was to make sure that we educated voters about that infrastructure so that they knew proactively what their options were to vote and also that they could have faith and know everything we are doing to secure their vote. That enabled us to prepare for the third pillar which was countering misinformation and overall securing that the process and in many cases leading up to the election efforts to put robocalls and robocalls to our voters and things like that didn't land in Michigan because we had already effectively educated so many voters about how to vote absentee for example or vote through the mail that efforts to deter that were not really successful and that were quickly reported to us so that we could hold those bad actors accountable. But finally, the biggest challenge was really after the polls closed and we knew from the moment the polls closed to the moment we had our unofficial results announced in Michigan that there would be a space for bad actors, particularly the then president to sow seeds of doubt quite intensely about the results of the election or to question it or to declare victory. And so we planned for that by with transparency and with efficiency, we threw out every step of the way every moment from when the polls closed when we had our unofficial results which is actually only about 24 hours before work to increase the efficiencies of the tabulation process. We delivered content to the national and local media through social media to our voters about exactly what was happening exactly what we were doing to tabulate and protect the vote. And so that we were able to also announce the results the unofficial results two days sooner than we had predicted and then everyone was anticipating. So that at least in Michigan really stymied the efforts of bad actors to use that period to sow seeds of doubt of course we know after the fact that the full two months or three months remaining were used in very creative ways to through a PR campaign and other ways just to file lawsuits to without any evidence to try to undermine again the people's voices in the process. But the work throughout the year that we had done to really solidify the process and sure it was secure ensure people had faith in it and participated in it and then ensuring that's particular moment that we maintained control of the narrative and push the truth forward with to the security of the vote in the tabulation process that enabled us to do it successfully and really again though the the months that followed you know from the time when people showed up outside my home to you know protest and all the rest were quite challenging but we always had the truth on our side. We always had the voters and their voices to protect and also helped carry me and others through that very challenging stormy moment in November and December because of the work we had done the truth was on our side the votes had been counted securely and we knew that ultimately democracy would prevail. That's great Katie. Um, you know, as the elections are very different from state to state but I imagine a lot of our preparations look very similar and Secretary Benson touched on a lot of the preparations they were doing in Michigan and we were doing the same things here in Arizona. She also mentioned going into the election knowing that misinformation was our biggest threat to election security. We had the same focus in Arizona. And so it was really important that we were focused on what we were going to do to combat that we engaged very early with the National Association of Secretaries of States trusted info campaign to help make sure we were pointing voters and the public to those trusted sources of information and that they knew where to get the accurate information and we continued throughout the entire process from our presidential preference election all the way through beyond the election in November, continuing to put out information through social media and other avenues to to give voters information to explain the processes to show all the ways that we were transparent and that people could participate in the processes so that they part of how we keep them fair. And, and then we created a series of resources after the election, focused on what was happening to demystify the process and really just continue to combat all of that information and and quite frankly, we say misinformation but it's lies there were so many lies about the election and, and that is still happening here in the state of Arizona. And so, so really putting together a robust public education campaign was one of the most important pieces of election preparation, particularly when you put the COVID pandemic on top of that, which I think really serve to amplify the misinformation and the potential for voter confusion. Yeah, that's, that's, that's right. We'll circle back to COVID in a minute. Josh, you were the Attorney General. What were you doing before the election to prepare and were you working with your fellow state attorneys general? Was Daga involved or Raga or can you tell us what was going on? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, it really is just an honor to be here with everyone. I mean, we, we saw in this last election, just how fragile our democracy can be. And, but for a handful of secretaries of state judges and attorneys general and governors across this country, the results really could have been catastrophic. And it really is just an honor to be with these great defenders of democracy. And I watched them enough on TV. It's really wonderful to now be with them for this conversation today. And for us, you know, we were dealing with many challenges. Madam Secretary, you touched on these at the beginning, right? For us, the four big challenges were of course COVID, which everyone was dealing with. Trump and his enablers willing to just lie and Katie's right to call it what it is. These are lies, not just disagreements or misinformation. We had another challenge in Pennsylvania in that we were dealing for the first time with a new law that allowed for vote by mail. Other states were far more advanced than we were on that. And so for us, you know, we recognize coming out of our primary, which was pushed back. It was in June, very late primary due to COVID. And we needed to really get our house in order and get prepared for what I expected to be certainly an onslaught of lies, but also an onslaught of litigation leading up to the election before any vote would be cast. And so I took my team together, both the folks who do affirmative litigation are appellate folks are criminal folks, as well as our civil folks and we established three teams leading up to election day. We called them team A was the team that would take us until 659 a.m. on election day. Team B was our election day team to ensure that we had a safe and smooth elections, primarily our criminal folks. And then team C was going to be the folks who are going to have to likely litigate the results. So first we wanted to secure and protect every vote leading up to election day, ensure that people had a smooth day on election day, and then post election day make sure that all votes were counted. That that team worked diligently we communicated multiple times every single day, we're needed. I relied on my colleagues across the country, including the amazing Dana and Nestle from Michigan and many others who were dealing with some of the the same legal challenges that we expected to be dealing with in Pennsylvania and ultimately did we had to beat back 19 lawsuits from Donald Trump and his enablers before a single vote was counted. Pardon me cast, and then we had to deal with another 21 lawsuits, once those votes were cast, including some lawsuits that took us all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. At the end of the day, we had a safe and smooth election. At the end of the day, each and every legal vote was counted here in Pennsylvania. But I think it's also a truth that at the end of the day. There's some real damage that was done to our democracy. And we've got to do some truth telling here in Pennsylvania and across this country to repair the damage that was done by Donald Trump and his enablers who are still working to not just repair what happened in 2020, but make it harder for people to vote going forward. I'm sure we'll get into all that but you know that's, that's how we prepared going forward with those three teams. And ultimately, we proved to be successful in making sure every single legal vote was secured protected and counted here in the Commonwealth. You know, we've been talking about the pre election contentions by President Trump and his enablers, but I think before the election, the some thought what were the Russians going to be doing, had they just gone away since 2016. Matt, can you kind of bring us up to speed about what was going on in that in that score. Absolutely. And I want to echo what the Attorney General said this is such an honor for me to be on this panel with folks that I had the privilege to work so closely with like Secretary Hobbs and Secretary Benson. This election, in many ways is is a tribute to the incredible integrity of our election officials both the secretaries of state but the thousands of election officials at the state county township city levels that knew their job. They knew that it was up to them to uphold our democracy and did so with courage with bravery in the face of threats lies and everything else and so I hope as we reflect on 2020 there's obviously that the incredible negatives, but also the negatives of the professionalism integrity and bravery of our election officials, including the two secretaries of state here, including Secretary Sugasky in Nevada, or Megan Wolf in Wisconsin, or Tina Barton in Michigan I mean there's just so many that stood up and fought for the negative of the process to get to your question. It really is the perfect lead in. For three years, those of us at the Department of Homeland Security at SISA worked closely with the secretaries of state state election directors local election officials to prepare for what we thought and anticipated would be foreign interference in the election whether that's in the form of targeting election systems right trying to hack systems or dis info or a hybrid of the two right claiming that they had access to things and spreading misinformation, and it turned out all of the communications channels all the preparation, the amount of red teaming and tabletop exercising that we did with the state and local election officials proved to be invaluable. In our experience at SISA in combating the domestic disinformation that we ended up seeing around this election. The channels of communication we established where we had, for instance, an information sharing and analysis center that can reach 3000 plus election officials and virtually real time with information about threats risks. Narratives was coming about proved to be critical for us, not just to secure the infrastructure as Secretary Hobbs talked about, but to share information about what were the growing narratives and to push facts about the process. So, Russia had an ongoing continues to have an ongoing campaign to undermine our democracy. That's not going away in fact, you know, it's more brazen in many ways because of what's happened in 2020 and the narratives that they can build off of from this most recent election in the We saw Iran get involved in the lead up to the election sending messages directly to voters trying to discourage them from voting, purporting to be from the proud boys. And those are all things that we prepared for and talked about with state and local election officials and as both Secretary Benson and Secretary Hobbs talked about the establishment of election officials as that trusted source of information that trusted info 2020 campaign proved to be absolutely critical, not just in the lead up to the election but afterwards to rebuff that the lies, the misinformation that was being spread about the election and for those of us at the Department of Homeland Security. Really, our job was to raise up those voices to support those state and local election officials regardless of where the misinformation was coming from and to push the facts so for instance, in the aftermath of the election we established it's just something called a federal where we were really just publishing facts about the elections process based on emerging narratives that we saw and the best example came from Secretary Hobbs state with Sharpie gate. The claim that Sharpies that were handed out in Maricopa County were intentionally being used in validate. In this case Republican ballots, when in fact Sharpies were the preferred marking device to ensure that votes were counted had no impact on the result but we saw that narrative take off when blue check marks picked up on it and started pushing that narrative and so we put up on our electoral facts that your vote would be counted that Sharpies are an appropriate marking instrument and that in fact that the election officials across the country ensure that those votes would be counted and for us at CISA that was our role. That was our job to support those election officials that for three years we had been grinding away to build security to build resilience but more importantly not just do the work but talk to voters about it and election officials over and over and over again in the lead up to the election talked about how the process may be different but the integrity of the process remains that the votes will be counted as cast and that you could have confidence in the results of the election and I'm really proud of the work we did together. It wasn't necessarily the Russians or the Iranians in the end that we were pushing back against but all that preparation and work was critical in being able to push back against the lies in this election. That's really interesting so you were using the tactics that you had designed for foreign interference for domestic interference in a way. Go ahead. I mean, yeah, certainly, I mean that dis info or miss info, you know, lies or lies right. And so being able to push and really pre bunk and the job that state local election officials did just messaging over and over again about how the process worked, what changes took place, what steps they've put in place to secure the election were really critically important in pushing back against the narratives we saw emerge, whether regardless of where they were coming from right and so, you know, it was that proactive work by the election officials that the constant appearances and messaging to voters that proved to be really critical in the end. If, if I can just jump is it okay to go ahead, Josh. Because I think it's a really important point that brought up and and that was really important work but I want to give you an example of what happened here in Pennsylvania. Notwithstanding the good work that many of the folks who worked in the federal government we're trying to do, we were facing just a tremendous amount of misinformation coming from the White House officially and from the present. This is a concrete example in Luzern County which is in the northeastern part of our state. Before we could figure out what was really going on. The president former presidents, I guess, I don't know whatever she was called the press secretary communications director. Acting in her official capacity in the White House complained about how a dozen or so ballots that were cast for Donald Trump were thrown away in Luzern County. And immediately we were facing this firestorm of, of, you know, what turned out to be misinformation but where we were trying to get a handle on what it was that they could possibly be talking about. We manipulated at the Department of Justice, the process of communicating with the public about what was going on there. Clearly his spokeswoman manipulated what was happening that the blue checks is Matt talked about, you know, we're working over time, when in fact, when my office was able to get involved talked to the local district attorney's office, talked to the local United States Attorney's office. And they thought that we had a, you know, basically an overzealous volunteer who accidentally tossed out a ballot when they thought they were tossing out the application, and they were immediately instructed by these good workers in the county to leave all of the information right there in the receptacle until law enforcement could come and determine what actually happened and make sure that no votes were ultimately thrown out, which is what occurred. So that's the kind of misinformation that we were dealing with day in and day out that we had to have units, not just of lawyers but of communications professionals, pushing back on that so that we could make sure people had faith in the process faith in our institutions in Luzern County or through the Secretary of State's office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and, you know, imagine going through that not dealing with foreign actors who wanted to try and undermine our system. But, you know, one of the key principles who was on the ballot, trying to, you know, push forth this misinformation in order to to sow a narrative of doubt in order to, you know, try and enhance his his electoral standing. Yeah, I remember hearing about the 12 ballots in Pennsylvania. So, so in the midst of this kind of swirl of misinformation and preparation that you all were doing COVID hits. And I think it would be interesting to hear what impact that that had that change your dates for ballots, did it change your mail in procedure. How did, how did you handle COVID. Sorry, Secretary Benson, maybe. Yeah, as I noted, one year ago today, we had our presidential primary in Michigan. And one year ago at 10pm Eastern about two hours after the polls closed and we had a very successful election with high turnout and all the rest. Governor called and said she was about to announce the first two cases of COVID had come to Michigan. And from then on everything changed and notably we had three subsequent elections scheduled in Michigan local school board elections in May and about 10% of the state, a statewide primary in August and then of course November. And so we had to make two immediate decisions. One, really to adjust and adapt, but two, to not postpone me knowing that everything we did was going to set a precedent for how democracies reacted in times of in times like these in times of crises. And so importantly, we, I knew I felt that if we postponed an election or canceled it as many called on me to do for those May elections, we would be creating a precedent that that's what you do in times of crisis and I felt it was important at a time of great uncertainty when so many things were changing to be able to give voters the clarity and the certainty that their elections would proceed. And I did that not only with an intention of May and making sure we also used may as an opportunity to learn how the success to pilot things it was a local election. Let's, we made a decision to instead pilot multiple ways of cast of sending out ballots and returning ballots and tabulating ballots in a way that would adjust to this new life under the pandemic. But also to give voters the confidence it gets back to the misinformation we were thanks to the folks at CISA and the federal support. We were in a constant state of preparing for an influx of misinformation to come to our state. And we anticipated the pandemic would just make that even more of a fertile ground. And so I didn't want November to come and have people put out misinformation that the election was going to be canceled or postponed and for people to believe that because they had experienced it in previous months. So that was really important and then the second thing we did was just really double down on voter education also in line with giving voters the confidence and certainty that they could vote without risking their health providing PPE for all of our election workers in the and beginning to acquire the resources to do that early on for all three elections that we had educating voters about how to vote from home, which thanks to the voters actions in 2018 where they amended our state constitution to give themselves a right to vote absentee or vote from home. Without a reason we just doubled down on our efforts to educate citizens about how to access that right because it was new so I mailed every registered voter an application on to to vote on with information on how to request their ballot to be mailed to them. Was that controversial to raise. Well interestingly at the time where we said let's just mail everyone an application, because others were doing that in other states but also because the data showed that was the best way to educate someone about how to request to vote by mail, how to vote absentee, we thought well what if they get this mailing and they don't know they're not thinking about an election they're not thinking about November. And we don't really it has there's no context for it and it therefore just lands and doesn't really impact or educate. And thankfully, quote unquote, the president at the time decided to tweet at me getting you know lots of national fervor about sending out these applications and that actually worked to educate voters about their ability to vote. I think we've seen with a lot of more misinformation that we've encountered, but notably, more people voted absentee in our November election than ever before 3.3 million of the 5.5 million who voted, and we have those those who amplified that option through various means to make for making sure voters knew how to vote from home safely and also that if they chose to vote in person because they had that option that that be met with PPE clerks and election workers and with PPE to protect their health and safety if they voted in person so you know also in your constant conversation with other secretaries around the country we have weekly calls with the other secretary sharing best practices sharing what we were learning as we were managing the elections really put us all in a position to have a successful election in November because we had to engage every day every month every election as an opportunity to prepare and learn and really perfect for the lack if you can say even that it's like you know really put us in the best position possible to succeed in November with all that we learned and really focused along the way. So the former president gave you a hand. Well, yeah, I don't. All I can say is that it was not without its challenges I certainly didn't welcome that attention or that those threats that really just escalated throughout the year in a way that was, which was, you know, not enjoyable. But I tried always see the bright side and so notably it did amplify this right that citizens had in Michigan to vote by mail and vote absentee, and really, I think was part of what led so many people to ultimately decide to do so throughout the year. Yeah, yeah, Katie how about Arizona. As long as I'd vote by mail for many years but did did you make any changes in light of COVID. And well our top priority, the top priority of my administration has always been to increase voters ability to participate in democracy. And so that didn't change with COVID it became more pressing, because on top of of ensuring that we were expanding that process, and we wanted to make sure that voters didn't have to choose between that participation, and their health and safety. And so vote by mail was a was a key component of of what we did in terms of the, the election and the pandemic and health and safety. So, so we've had no excuse absentee voting in Arizona since the early 90s, and voters in Arizona can either request a one time early ballot for whichever election they prefer, or they can sign up for our permanent early voter lists about 75% of registered voters of both parties are on that permanent early voter list so they're sent a ballot by mail for every election that they're eligible to vote in. And so we asked the legislature early on while they were still in session to give us permission to, to basically implement universal vote by mail for the November for the August primary in November elections and the legislature wouldn't sign up for that conversation. But what we did was ensure that every single voter who wasn't already signed up for the permanent early voter list received communication either through our office or their county elections office, getting that application to either have the permanent early voter list, or request their early ballot for the August and November elections and so every voter was getting that information. So, as an option to to vote by mail and vote safely. But we also coupled that with looking at other ways that we could expand early voting opportunities in our state, along with voting by mail we also have early voting that starts seven days before the election. And there's a lot of areas of Arizona that are very underserved by the Postal Service and so we knew that making early voting more accessible in those areas was going to be really critical in order to not disenfranchise voters in those communities and so we expanded the early the secure early ballot drop off options. And I think we purchased about 84 new boxes for the state so that was on top of what counties already had in place. And, and, and then, as Secretary Benson mentioned of course we work to secure all of the necessary protective supplies for voters and poll workers. And, and Secretary Benson also talked about, you know, learning the lessons from the one election and applying it to the subsequent election so by the time we got to November. I think we were experts at election, conducting elections during a pandemic we also had our presidential preference election almost a year ago is the 17th so a week from from now a year ago and have three elections in in 2020 and I would say that the work that we did with all of those preparations and ensuring that voters could vote safely was successful evidence by the the record turnout in all three of those elections. And, and none of those preparations would have mattered if we weren't able to continue to educate the public about what we were doing and how they could participate safely and just continue to push back against the misinformation because, as I said earlier, the pandemic really served to amplify the amount of misinformation that we were having to deal with. Yeah, yeah. Josh what was going on in Pennsylvania and I have a particular question now, wearing your attorney general hat. There is a legal dispute as to whether anybody other than the legislature can make changes to election procedures and the conduct of elections and even in the circumstances that we had last year with with the pandemic. Did Pennsylvania have a lawsuit that raised that issue. Yeah, and I'll give you a little bit of background on that that's, that's a great question. So, so first I mean that the underlying issue of cove it is directly related to the question. You just raised actually just stepping a half a step back in 2019 prior to coven our state legislature with more Republican votes than Democratic votes past act 77 our vote by mail statute and so it allowed people to cast their ballots from home or wherever through through the mail. And a few months later, coven hits are primary, which would normally have been in April was pushed back until June, many people voted safely and securely by mail. Following that, we faced a couple more challenges. What happened was, we got notification from the United States Postal Service that they would not necessarily be able to deliver election mail on time. That was within the framework that was required upon hearing that there was a legal action taken by the governor, appealing to our United Pardon me to our state Supreme Court, asking to make sure that ballots that were post legal ballots that were post marked by election day could be counted so long as they were received by the Friday after election day. And the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, relying on state law and relying and dealing with the reality that the US Postal Service had laid out for us indicated that those ballots could be received and could be counted so long as they were post marked by election day. That's the subject of some litigation that went up to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices refused to step in and overturn the state Supreme Court on multiple occasions. But it turned into a talking point for Donald Trump and his enablers back to the point that was making before about, you know, the disinformation allies campaign. And so they were able to spin that as a tale suggesting that somehow this was going to be the reason why the election should be overturned from a pure mathematical perspective there were more than 7 million votes cast. And so Biden won the election here in Pennsylvania by over 80,000 votes, and that batch of ballots that was post marked by election day and received, you know, up to that Friday afternoon during that three day window during that three day window was less than 10,000 votes. So even if all of those votes happen to be for former President Trump, it would not have altered the outcome of the election. So that's what that, you know, that sort of manufactured controversy is all about. Now, the legislature is obviously now re looking at all of our election laws, I would argue they're looking at it to make it harder for people to vote but certainly if they want to look at this issue and address it legislatively they certainly can but our state Supreme Court ruled the United States Supreme Court refused to step in those ballots were legal but ultimately they were not material in terms of the overall vote total or vote difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Yeah, yeah. And we've been talking a bit about the amount of disinformation that was floating around, but I think it's fair to say that emotion emotions were running higher and higher as we got to the election and in the immediate aftermath of the election. What, what was that like were any of you ever the subject of potential violence or threat of violence. Jocelyn I think they, I think they came to your house didn't they. Yeah, I remember, you know, actually Secretary Hobbs I remember was the first that I recall making a statement about that about the threats and it was really something that we all experienced in varying ways but of course in Michigan, it really began in the spring when we had armed protesters to send on our state Capitol building with, you know, machine guns and the like and AK 47s, you know, in the chamber in the legislative chamber. So we'd been in this heightened state of intense threats and of course that you know in October, though there had been may there had been death threats made against the Attorney General myself the governor legislators. It really culminated in the kidnapping plot that was that emerged in October. So it was almost this, this, this odd normal in our state of, despite our all of our calls to the then president to really dampen down and really lead in trying to turn down the heat. So we were just getting turned up as we got closer and closer to November. And then, you know, two things happened after the polls closed one, it became very clear I was I was very, our estimates was that we'd have the election results by Friday. And what math told us with you 3.3 million absentee ballots and you have this many machines it'll take 80 hours to tabulate them we were able to increase machines and people so that we could cut that time in half and have our results in 24 hours after the polls closed on Wednesday. But notably I think there had been plans in place for violence people showed up at outside the place where the ballots were being tabulated in Detroit they showed up in Philly they showed up in Phoenix as well. And by that point, they just didn't realize that yet we had already we had created some shifts and other things to make sure that the tabulation was done earlier than planned and earlier than announced to essentially curtail any efforts to use Thursday or Friday to try to interfere with the process. Yeah, so that violence really was something that we had anticipated that we have the threats I should say a violence that occurred in Detroit, that we had really kind of tempered a little bit. But of course then it then manifested in various other ways including people showing up outside my home one Saturday night in December. And that was particularly challenging because it took state police 40 minutes to show up, even though they knew at 8pm. People were going to show up at my house at 9pm and they had intelligence warning us that they still didn't show up until closer to 10, despite our calls and it was really the attorney general who I was, who was most helpful in, in helping us get through that that was the mayor of Detroit and the chief of police in Detroit, but it was really unnerving until I realized that these folks outside my home these folks outside TCF center in Detroit. They weren't protesting me they weren't they were protesting democracy they were protesting the results of an election they disagreed with. And so immediately I, especially in that moment in December was was emboldened to stand proudly in guard of our democracy even if that meant increased attacks towards me as a person because again it was. There's the people the millions of people who voted in our state that I had to essentially protect against those angry individuals. And, and so that kind of gave me a sense of fortitude to get through it but of course that didn't stop the escalation of the threats all the way up until what we saw happen in our capital in January 6. The bottom line for me and all of that is that this can't become everything that happened after the election in particular all those shenanigans so I can sort of call them lots of things but that's a lot of what it was it can't become the norm and our democracy we have to on both sides of the aisle define what happened is wrong, hold those accountable, who led those bad actions to fruition and really ensure that, regardless of who wins an election that we can all come together and respect the will of the voters in the future. Yeah, yeah, I'm peaceful transfer of power, no doubt. You know, Katie what was going on in Arizona. Well, a lot of the same things that Secretary Benson mentioned we had armed protesters show up at the tabulation center in Maricopa County. And for a while, they were, you know, in the parking lot between the door and how staff members got to and from their vehicles and because it was right after an election and we were tabulating ballots, and they're pretty much staff working for 24 hours. So it was very disconcerting. We had national figures who were there, inciting the crowd, very potentially inciting violence, and then when the tabulation wrapped up they decided to, you know, show up at my house and do the same thing at my house. Again, very disconcerting, but I think Jocelyn really articulated something that's been, you know, a really difficult piece of all this is that these attacks on officials and it's not just those of us in high profile positions but it is all the way down to all the staff, the poll workers, the people that work in the offices. And it is, I think a sad state of affairs where we live in a world that we have to be concerned about all of their safety but what that is really about is the safety of our democracy. And I have always known that I stood on the right side of what everything that happened in the election, that we did everything by the book and I have no concerns about the conduct of the election. And that is also what emboldens me that we did everything right and that it is our job to stand up for the truth of what we did. So while it has been very disconcerting, I have not let it deter me from what I the job that the people of Arizona elected me to do. Yeah, for sure, for sure. You know, after the election. We learned all about how ballots are certified. And the count is certified and the electors are actually chosen. I was just wondering whether any of you think there's a better or more streamlined way to get to finality there, so that there aren't all of these opportunities to, you know, intervene, so to speak. I'll jump in on that, you know, I've, I've served as an elector now three times twice for Barack Obama and now once for Joe Biden. And I've even been in the US Capitol for the, what used to be sort of the somewhat quaint and an interesting process of certifying the electors in this case on January the 6th. And, you know, one of the reasons why the system has worked in the past is because people of both parties have respected the norms in our Constitution. And no longer is that the case. In this last cycle it was Donald Trump, and who knows who it could be in the future, and who knows whether these problems will only attach to one party I'd like to think that the party that I'm proud to be associated with the Democratic Party wouldn't engage with that but what we have seen is that those firms are violated and are willing to be violated and that the oath of office people take to the Constitution is clearly not something that they are willing to honor when their job is on the line or when their buddy's job is on the line. And so to the conclusion, notwithstanding that long history, I've had of being an elector and participating in this process that we can no longer trust those processes that I think people sort of thought were quaint in the past. First off, they're a relic of an age where at least, you know, three of us on this call vote wouldn't even count in the first place. It's a relic of an age where the system was set up and designed to work for certain people and not to really include the voices of others. And so I came out very forcefully, even after serving as an elector in this process, with abolishing the electoral college I recognize that is going to take time and it's not a realistic thing that would be in place in the short term but I think it speaks to the broader issues which gets to the heart of your question which is we have to have a direct, you know, popular vote based on the certification by these issues of state in the various states and say that's the finale that's the end of it. When Michigan says this is what the vote is, and the Secretary of State, and or the governor depending upon the rules that state certified. That's it. And we shouldn't have all of these other steps where you can have abuse I'd like to think that going forward, we won't have actors that will abuse the process, but it's clear that in this case we did. It's clear that the guardrails just simply don't exist to prevent that from happening again in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Councillor Katie you want to hop in on that. Well, I will just say, I do agree with Attorney General of on abolishing the electoral college, but I also want to say that our, our democracy was stood the challenges. While I have concerns about the opportunities that there were for attack at the various steps along the way, we are strong and we withstood those challenges. I, and I think we learned a lot of lessons that will prepare us in the future of, should we face these challenges again, we, we know what to do in the face of them. Yeah. Secretary Napolitano, can I just briefly, I mean, really interesting points raised, but I think we have to deal with the fact that you have to get to certification by the states first right and you raise the time aspect secretary which is totally fair. But, but dealing with the facts and this is probably always going to be the case but viewing this as a horse race rather than than getting to the end of the process drives that, that urgency and, and what anxiety about it instead of understanding and opening up the process to those ballots, the count didn't, it wasn't delayed, for instance, the counts in these states weren't delayed. They were going through the process to ensure that every valid vote was counted and counted correctly, right. And so understanding that as we look at the process as a whole that states have a job to do in certifying the election that includes the necessary controls and checks to ensure the integrity, the access and the security of the process that's needed to get to that certificate before we ever get to an electoral college or anything like that. And how much detail goes into it if you look at Michigan and what Secretary Benson and the local officials over 1000 local officials in Michigan do they check the township state then go up to the county and check the totals to the county then check the totals all the way up to the state. And so I think what we need to do as a profession as election officials are now put in the position to have to rebuild trust unfairly put in that by the lies we have to begin to look at what can we do to build greater transparency and open up the process so that folks can see all of the controls that are in place and I give a lot of credit I had the pleasure of serving on Secretary Benson's security committee that that looked at this it can't just be a post election audit like we saw in Georgia. It needs to be full opening of chain of custody and understanding ballot processing and registration records and how we maintain lists so that voters don't have to take anyone's word for it but in fact can see the evidence have the evidence to have confidence in the process and that means more resourcing for election officials. It is untenable to ask them to go quickly to do it effectively efficiently and do it transparently without supporting them investing in the infrastructure in a way that allows them to do that and they'll embrace that role election officials have long said it's our job to convince the loser they lost I think that's changed now it's now the job to convince the voters of the accurate result even if the loser doesn't accept that they lost and that's a higher bar and a greater challenge that we need to accept embrace and invest it. Right so we've got some audience questions and one is pivots right off of your comment Matt which is even given all of these checks in the systems and the accuracy and the confidence you had in the integrity of the count a significant percentage of the population don't believe it. They think former President Trump won the election. What ideas do you have for how we build trust and not have this kind of a situation which is really counter to our democracy. Yeah I'll go first just just very briefly and then open it up but it's got so the advantage one of the large advantages we have is the fact that we run elections at the state and local level and I think that's a real asset in this case because voters can engage directly in the process engage directly with those who run the process in order to understand to have their questions answered to gain transparency. The reality is in all of these states represented here in all the states. There are opportunities for voters to get directly engaged obviously the most productive way would be as a poll worker but there's a number as poll watchers and pre-election testing is public all of these things and then as election officials finding new and creative ways which I think election officials did during covid to open the process up so that voters can see exactly how each step is done how those reconciliations the amount of detail and minutiae that goes in election officials are detail oriented professionals that have these controls and so whether it's a post election audit and opening that up or offering the types of evidence around chain of custody ballot storage ballot custody. We have to continue to engage with voters and it's it's going to be a slog and unfortunately election officials have unfairly been put in that position to have to begin to do that and it's it's going to take real time investment and sort of just being the water just constantly providing that steady stream of information and evidence but the other part of this that that I think several brought up that's critical there has to be accountability for the lies the reality is if that those were who are pushing the lies would just stand up and say this election was fair it was accurate it had integrity that would go in incredibly long way but but I don't think any of us anticipate that happening and so we've got to deal with the reality that we have now. I think I'll add two things on that one I agree on the accountability point and I'll talk about that in a second but first. The issue actually is really quite heartbreaking you have citizens who were lied to by people they trust elected officials they supported that they voted for then turn around and lied to their supporters about their votes and the process in a way to further their own political agenda and and their own partisan gains and their own egos. So I think you know citizens that have the facts and the evidence that secretaries like myself and secretary Hobbs and others have worked to provide and is the court cases actually did demonstrate as the attorney general attorney general Shapiro can can underscore and so the evidence is there to withstand any amount of scrutiny the truth is is available for anyone who chooses to see it. But I think first recognizing I think citizens need to recognize that these folks these leaders lied to them about the election it was actually the most secure and accurate and and highly participated in the election that we've seen in recent history. And that gets to the second point of accountability because what we really need is for leaders to stop lying to their citizens to voters about the truth of the elections. And the only way we get there is by adding you know making sure that they don't they not only don't benefit by those by perpetuating those lies but there actually is some accountability there. And so in Michigan we proposed an anti deceptive practices act actually criminalizing the intentional spreading of misinformation and lies with the intent and so the knowing spreading of that information with the intent to disenfranchise someone to and there's multiple ways you can narrowly tailor it so that it withstands any strict scrutiny under the Constitution and doesn't infringe on You've got a First Amendment issue. Yeah, but but we have to I think really dig deep and look into how to protect our voters just the way that we protect customers against false advertising. We can protect voters against those who would seek to lie to them about their rights intentionally so and that's the type of legislation that we proposed and we hope other states do as well. I want to pick up on a few of the points that you're on mute. Josh Apologies, I want to pick up on Jocelyn's point and and Mads and come back to something Katie said a few minutes ago. I agree with the points that that were made by Jocelyn and the type of legislation that needs to be put forth and hopefully adopted. I also think it's critically important through our political process that the next nominees for Republicans forget president but the elections that are going to come up in a couple years for Senate and governor and Secretary of State and all these other offices that the Republicans were nominated aren't rewarded for perpetuating the lots I think that there is a political component to this as well that that really needs to the needs to still play out. But I want to come back to something Katie said which you know I tend to be a glass half full guy but I feel a little glass half empty I listened to Katie talk about how our democracy held with which it did if you sort of look at the bottom line which is on January 20 Donald Trump walked out Joe Biden walked in right, but there was just such an extraordinary amount of damage that was done to our democracy. And furthermore, I fundamentally believe and this is one of the catalysts for me that led to me reaching the conclusion we have to abolish the electoral college. I fundamentally believe that if Kevin McCarthy were the speaker and Nancy Pelosi was not and you combine that with Mitch McConnell at the time who was the majority leader majority leader. I have no doubt in my mind that they would have attempted to steal the election and not certify the votes from places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona and try and hand the presidency to Donald Trump. And I don't know if they would have been successful, but I sure as hell know they would have tried given the fact that there were no guardrails for them anymore that they were complete sick of fans who were spineless when it came to Donald Trump. And so, but for the fact that Nancy Pelosi was the speaker and had a majority and thus was able to run the floor and, and, you know, control the votes and the apparatus there in the house. This could have been a very, very different outcome. I do not believe that there was enough control within the Republican caucus in the house or the Senate of the United States to prevent the type of stealing that that I know they wanted to do the guys like Holly and Cruz and other people. And that's what the voters attempted to do and so I think we have to come to grips with that reality. We have to educate in our schools and through our politics, we have to, you know, carefully nominate certain people and we have to make the kind of structural changes that are about a moment ago. You know, yeah, well said. And Josh, after the election there was, you know, so much litigation but one case that caught my attention was the case filed by the Attorney General of Texas. And he had, I don't know how many Republican attorneys general on the case they wanted to throw out your ballots and Jocelyn your ballots and and can you explain to me what possible issue they had and and the role of the state attorneys generals. I was a state attorney general. In 1999 to 2003 so it's a while ago. And there's an association called the National Association of attorneys general nag, not a great acronym but not a great name. No. But while I was attorney general and when I while I was attorney general when I started the idea was that attorneys general were somewhat politically neutral. They weren't enforcement officers and prosecutors, but we weren't particularly partisan. During my term, the Republican AGs broke off into what has now become raga. A few years later the Democrats had to do the same thing and we had daga so kind of fundamentally changed the job of being an attorney general. And so I was sad to see but not surprised to see that with with the lead of the AG from Texas that the Republican AGs from across the country were trying to throw out other state balance what do they do. Can you explain what their theory was. Well I can explain their theory but I can explain what happened. I don't I don't think they had a particularly honest theory. Look, this. This was one of the saddest days of my time is as the attorney general Pennsylvania, a job I'm just honored to hold when that lawsuit was filed and in a nutshell what the Texas Attorney General was saying, was that the Supreme Court should step in and invalidate the votes here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, because he didn't agree with the choice that our citizens made that was effectively what he was saying. And, you know, I'll tell you, Secretary Napolitano, we, we reviewed their lawsuit over and over and over again to try to understand what the legal rationale was for what they were doing. And ultimately we concluded there was none. You know, sometimes you're, you're on opposite sides of someone in a lawsuit, you know this and you really disagree with them but you understand their perspective and you understand the argument they're saying and you, you battle back and ideally, you know, you win. In this case. I just kept going back and forth with my team saying that I really thought this was an active sedition that they were really trying to undermine our representative democracy and end it as we know it, because if they were successful take it to its logical conclusion, any state couldn't validate the votes in any other state, just because they didn't agree with their political choice. I was sad that, that they did this because, frankly, I've worked in a really bipartisan manner with my colleagues, especially on the opioid litigation so many other things that we've been dealing with over the last number of years. But I was especially sad when 17 of my colleagues signed on to that lawsuit, demonstrating their lack of respect for the rule of law, and I've spoken to them privately about that and been very direct and pointed with them in terms of how I feel. The idea that they would go through with that was very sad. I'll tell you I was a little bit concerned given the makeup of the new United States Supreme Court that somehow they might entertain it but I just kept saying to myself, there's just no legal rationale for this they can't possibly take this up. And at the end of the day notwithstanding the new look of the US Supreme Court they still adhere to the rule of law, and they threw the Texas suit out fairly quickly. I will just tell you from kind of an insider perspective, it's really poison the well amongst the attorneys general. It's very, very hard to work with a colleague that believes that the residents of your state don't count, and that they somehow know better than in my case the 7 million Pennsylvanians who cast votes for Donald Trump and some for for Joe Biden. And I thought it was seditious. I thought it was, it was unethical, what they did. And I think they simply are not fit to serve as attorneys general anymore given the role that they play in trying to undermine our democracy. Yeah. It may also been the way I looked at it is it was more for the press attention than the than the legal validity. Even in those cases I mean we all recognize that the power of the media to amplify our point of view. But I think we all recognize, I mean there's certain lines you don't cross and one of those basic lines you don't cross is you don't violate the oath you take to the Constitution. In this case the Texas Attorney General did and encouraged others to join him. He is absolutely unfit to serve and and certainly violated his oath in an attempt to merely suck up to a corrupt president. Yeah, yeah. Well thanks for that and while we're talking law Katie, we've got a question from the audience. The Supreme Court upholds the Arizona voting statutes at issue and Burnovich versus DNC. How will that affect future elections. Are there ways of improving voter access, even if those statutes are upheld. That is a great question and let me tell you my concern about this case is not necessarily the impact on these laws and Arizona these are this this lawsuit is old it was brought in 2016. These are laws that have been on the books in Arizona. I would like to see them go away and would be happy with a ruling that did that I'm not hopeful that that is going to happen but what is more concerning. That was just a little more background the oral arguments it's it's DNC versus Burnovich and the oral arguments were last Tuesday in front of the Supreme Court. And in the context of all of this voter. The legislation we're seeing across the country in unprecedented numbers Arizona leading the way in that that would restrict voter access and rollback voting rights. The arguments that were made to try to convince the Supreme Court to weekend section two of the Voting Rights Act will impact and across the country, people's ability to bring court challenges in the future on discriminatory vote voting laws. And that is to me what's more concerning and about the court case because that impact obviously is far beyond Arizona. Now I think that the court could decide to rule narrowly and just uphold the Arizona laws and not tackle the attacks on the Voting Rights Act. I am and I don't know what they will do and so that should be concerning to everyone in terms of future ability to use the court to challenge discriminatory voting laws, because we are seeing them being proposed and unprecedented numbers right now. Yeah, yeah. Well we'll find out when the when the court hands down it's an opinion. No question this is for you Jocelyn. In Michigan where any devices in Antrim County hardwired to the internet or otherwise connected to the internet. We've actually done a entire, what happened in Antrim County in Michigan was actually the result of a clerk not updating the software actually for this particular technology. But, you know, knowing that it was then utilized to spread this sort of false information and calling the question the results of the entire election not just in Michigan but nationwide. We, we actually did a full audit of the of every ballot every paper ballot and our citizens vote on paper ballots in in Michigan just like the majority of citizens in the country. And so what that then enables is for an audit to happen of the paper ballots to affirm that they were accurately tabulated by the voting machines and indeed that's exactly what the audit showed. And it's interesting I think once the all is said and done that that sort of case study emerging out of Antrim County will be very illustrative of just how much bad actors can try to leverage different pieces of misinformation to really create an entire conspiracy theory about an entire election. But we simply just responded to all of that with the again the truth and that's again why a verified paper ballots which we have in Michigan which most states have are so important to protect because as CISA's former leader Chris Krebs and many others says you can't hack paper. And through those paper ballots were able to verify the results and the accurate results of the Antrim County elections but again, it was and I'm sure Matt may have additional to add on this whole saga, but it was really illustrative of how really innocent administrative errors can be falsely and wrongly extrapolated and used in a way that just furthers and feeds false information and conspiracy theories and really is wrongly used to undermine people's faith in the process. Matt, you want to add anything there. Yeah, no secretary Benson is exactly right and it's sort of fascinating slash depressing to look at sort of how these conspiracy spread that the one related to Dominion voting systems was really the combination of three or four very frankly in my experience being in elections since 2005 have sort of been around the fringes for a while. This idea behind Hugo Chavez and Venezuela being involved in voting systems that that's been around since 2005 2006 that the theories around site L and results reporting in Barcelona and the relationship between President Obama and and that company and George Soros has been around since 2008 2010 all completely false all completely wrong all not based in fact what we saw in this election was incidents like Secretary Benson described in Antrim County incidents in Georgia that happened in every election by the way where humans are involved and mistakes are made and quickly rectified Antrim County quickly rectified once identified to them what what the issue was had the auditable records right there could correct the answer but we saw this combination into this broader conspiracy that included at times the CIA included DHS putting isotopic watermarks on ballots to be able to track them to look for the fraud and to me perhaps the most disturbing part is these took hold and spread very very quickly as the attorney general talked about and despite the best efforts of all the officials the loudest voices a recent report I know I'm not supposed to push a report from Stanford on a cal broadcast but a recent report from the election information project which includes Stanford Washington Graphica some other partners shows that that really 20 to 25 major influencers just jumped on this misinformation pushed it broadly and the result was you know death threats threats to election officials and then eventually January 6 and to me the loss of a transfer peaceful transfer of power and that's a loss of the very core of who we are as Americans and we we're now going to have to come to grips with the fact that we we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power and what does that mean for us moving forward to begin to deal with that all based on just insane theories that that word you know every good piece of dis info or effective starts with a little nugget of fact it answered county have a problem yes answer county had a problem but none of the rest of the facts around that were correct we had the paper ballots I mean the easiest example I can give you 5 million plus ballots in Georgia have been counted then hand recounted by hand without any machines and then recounted again all coming to the same result and we still have people saying that that the result in Georgia was incorrect and we've got to come to grips with that and begin to really ask ourselves some challenging questions both about our information ecosystem our election ecosystem and what evidence we can continue to provide and how to hold people accountable and I'll just chuckle a little grenade in the middle where the previous conversation about the courts we've got to come to terms with the fact that the courts were used for dis info as well and the way that the courts were used on how we can begin to respond and recognize the use of the courts in that way as well. Yeah, Josh do you agree with that you think the courts were used as a dis information device. I think the the courts were used by attorneys who were willing to act in an unethical manner as a way to spread their dis information I'm pleased to see. You know, Jocelyn's colleague in Michigan and my good friend and colleague Dana Nessel, you know seek sanctions against some of the attorneys who were involved in those cases and we're certainly looking at that as well and in Pennsylvania. The good news that at least from our perspective is both the state and the federal courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court and our state Supreme Court did hold I mean they they saw through that misinformation. And they sided with the truth, but we have got to, we can't let that become a norm where the courts are used as a way to spread this misinformation the way actors like Giuliani and you know some of those, you know the other you know the other nutballs that were associated with him did, you know when it came to the, you know, the federal and state courts. Yeah, yeah. It was amazing to watch as a as a as a lawyer. I must say it was almost it was it was embarrassing actually to see fellow members of the bar. I'll do that. And by the way, I think, I think there's serious questions not just about those lawyers who were acting on behalf of the president but some of the attorneys general we talked about this before when it came to the AG of Texas but you know at what point does you know that the that the AG's are on they probably have a little bit more latitude than a private attorney but at what point do they go too far and can they be sanctioned or disbarred and I know that there are some in Texas seeking to disbar general Paxton I would encourage them to continue to move forward with that process but you know that's another issue these these government actors, including some who are working at DOJ and trying to work directly with the president former president to overturn the election at at what point you know where they held accountable as well it's not just the private attorneys, some of the government attorneys as well sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, no, no good really good point. And I'm going back to an audience question it's somewhat related. One of the panelists on our first panel this morning. I brought up the that in other countries. Those who are responsible for conducting the election are not themselves partisans. I gather civil servant types. And if, if we had that sort of system in the United States, do you think it would increase the perception of fairness of our election system. Two things one, and I wrote a whole book on this where it really you looked at the secretaries of state as guardians the democratic process local election administrators as well. And also whether someone should be appointed or elected as in Pennsylvania you have an appointment of secretary of state in Arizona and many other states, like Michigan you have an election. And one nonetheless, local level clerks are elected in Michigan to administer elections. And really what I think a lot of the research and what my experience is really underscored is just it's just all about the person. And yeah we exist in a political ecosystem where there are pressures, but at the same time. I know for myself as an attorney and as really someone who's been a voting rights and election attorney throughout my entire career. My allegiance is to the Constitution and to the voters and that's why I ran for this office and I think I intentionally, you know, I don't endorse candidates in any election. I don't even endorse appointed people seeking appointments because they're asking elected officials to appoint them, and that also creates a potential conflict. And I think one voters demand that elected secretaries of state or election administrators in particular act in a non partial impartial manner. They don't elect those who seek to do so, and, and don't elect those who use their office to put their thumb on the scale and there are some that do. Then we'll see, you know, be in the best position possible but I don't think the infrastructure itself there's no infrastructure that really can lead to a place where you have non partisan election administrators you just simply have to put them in place and Now I do think and I have talked folks about having a code of ethics for election administrators secretaries of state much like we have a code of ethics for judges that they must abide by or perhaps lose their ability to perform that job I think it is important to get those administering elections do so as referees not as members of a particular team that's on the ballot, but again it all gets back to voters selecting and electing good people in these positions and advocating and supporting them and those good people can be Democrat or Republican they simply have to be beholden to voters first country above party. Yeah, well said, well said, anybody else want to chime in on that. Just real quick, just to drive home, I agree. In my experience at the state local level, working in election administration is as soon as you become an election administrator. You stop caring about the results and you just care about the integrity of the process and that's just not that local election administrators don't want to see themselves in the news and want to know that they carried out their job with fairness. And we need look no further than this last election. You had Secretary Rathausberger in Georgia, a Republican, you had Secretary Sigarski in Nevada, a Republican, you had Tina Barton in Michigan standing up Republicans taking accountability and owning the process because that was their job that was the oath that they took. And that's consistent with my experience in elections over over now 15 plus years I'm getting old in in working with these folks as soon as they take that oath their commitments to the process to our democracy. And we saw that play out in this election that doesn't mean we shouldn't have checks we shouldn't recognize that a bad actor might not end up in that position and that's why the process has checks balances and ways to hold people accountable. But in the end, I think we saw in this election that the goodness of election officials was critical to us having a successful election. Yeah, just wonder Katie were you in touch with some of your Republican colleagues in the aftermath of the election. Yeah, we talk weekly. We have weekly meetings every every week. But in addition to that, particularly myself, Secretary Hobbs, Secretary Sigarski, and Secretary Rathausberger were in close and sometimes nearly daily contact with each other as well as Secretary Bookfar. They're then Secretary of State in Pennsylvania, where we talked often about our unique challenges supported each other and several of our colleagues did as well. I mean, Katie, I know, you know, you and I were shared a lot of experiences throughout the whole process. Well, we're, we are almost out of time. This has been a terrific discussion. I'm going to do a last lightning round as it as it were. Based on your experience and what you saw last November. What would be the number one change to improve our election system you would recommend. Matt, we'll start with you. We'll start with the feds. Well, not having the feds tell the states no that without question having full audit ability votes at this election had 9495% of ballots cast were on auditable paper records. We need to ensure that 100% of votes cast in the upcoming election has that and not only that that we're doing good, efficient, transparent auditing of those results so that voters can interact and understand, look at the evidence to have confidence. And then the second one I'd say is elevating election officials voices. We need platforms like the social media platforms and Google to ensure that the trusted info from election officials is prioritized is pushed if I do a Google search about Michigan elections. I should get secretary Benson's websites and the facts, not some of the conspiracy theories so that those are the two that I'd start with. Katie. Well, I think Matt brought up some great points. I would love the ability to just make voters listen to what I had to say and to listen to the truth. In the absence of that I think I'm investing robustly in public education campaigns, giving election officials the ability to communicate directly with the people that need the information. You're good, Josh. I would note for the record you've asked all of us for one thing and Matt gave at least two or three so I'm not going to be bound by, by the way, I agree with the, the comments my colleagues I think above all else. Leaders need to speak and act with moral clarity, and we lost that for quite a bit of time and that's not about your perspective on one issue or another it's, it's about speaking with moral clarity adhering to our Constitution and so I would say that is above all else the most important thing. There are certainly some changes to our election laws here in Pennsylvania that we need to make, but overall I think we need to get back to, you know, a common set of facts and actors who are willing to act with moral clarity. Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I of course agree with everything that's said and to me it also underscores the need for sustainable funding and resources to invest in our elections, whether it's about educating voters, countering this information or just supporting the infrastructure of a secure and accessible democracy. It is to me, ridiculous that the most important thing we do as a country hold elections to ensure and select who has power to make every other decision on our behalf is so severely underfunded. And every so many of the challenges from educating voters to auditing the election and everything in between that we encountered this year could have been significantly avoided or or eliminated with appropriate funding and we asked for it from the federal government. I don't work from our states but I do think every single leader who has a state in ensuring our democracies are accessible fair and secure must put resources behind that and really invest in our local and state election administration so that we can do the job that we've been elected or selected to do of educating citizens about their rights making sure they have the tools and resources to exercise their vote and then supporting and investing in our election administrators as they tabulate and secure the process. Very good. This was excellent I'll just close by saying on behalf of a grateful nation. I am so glad you were in your roles. During this turbulent period. You were really needed and you stepped up to the plate beautifully and I'm grateful. And I know lots of other folks who are very grateful so thank you for joining the panel today. And I hope our paths cross again. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Everybody. Good afternoon. Welcome everyone. I'm Janet Napolitano. I previously served as the president of the University of California Secretary of Homeland Security. But now I'm a professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, where we are establishing a new center for security and politics. I'm excited to host today series of events on the timely and important topic of free and fair elections. Our third panel today focuses on what new or existing tools and strategies can be deployed to further improve the integrity and security of us elections. And I'm going to be moderated by Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, a leading expert on the practice and politics associated with the US election process. Henry, thank you for leading us in such an important discussion. Over to you. Thank you, Janet. It's great to be here. And it's wonderful to have you as part of the Goldman School. It's great to have this new security in politics center at the Goldman School dealing with such important topics. Before I introduce our distinguished speakers, let me note that you can ask questions for those out there watching. And you can do that by submitting them using the form on the Goldman School's website that you use to register. So please submit questions. For the distinguished panelists, let me start and go through them alphabetically. Our first panelist can be foot is currently serving in her third term as the clerk recorder and registrar of voters in Inyo County, California. And during her long tenure in public service, can he has testified before the California legislature and the little Hoover commission about improving elections. I mean, I think I'll go to you and then I'll introduce each speaker as they come up. So please tell us about your experience there but before doing that actually let me just do a short introduction and talk about trust in elections. First of all, who am I, I'm the Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. I was involved with the butterfly ballot episode in Palm Beach, California and Palm Beach, Florida in 2000. In 2003, I was involved with a court case to get rid of voting addict style punch cards in California. And that case temporarily delayed the 2003 recall for a little while because of worries about the voting addict style punch cards. And then on April 18 2005 I testified before the Carter Baker Commission to try to improve elections in America. So I've had a long experience for the last 20 years with elections. Let me just say what the basic problem is here. The basic problem it seems to me is loss of trust. We've seen a loss of trust in government. And now we're recently we're seeing a loss of trust in many different kinds of institutions, including science, higher education, the press, religion, medicine, and now elections. And it's not that there's been suspicions about elections in 2000 there were certainly those who worried about whether the election results were fair and right. But if you go look at the data from that period people were much less untrustworthy, they were much more trusting of the election result than they are today. That's the polling firm morning consult in late January of this year, found that only 60% of voters trusted the election, either some or a lot 40% basically didn't trust the results. And that was 82% of Democrats trusted the results, not surprisingly, President Biden one and 33% of Republicans only 33% trusted the results. And this demonstrates what's even worse it's not only that trust in institutions is declined. It's that it's become polarized. One side believes in particular institutions, and the other side doesn't. Democrats tend to believe in science higher education in the press Republicans believe in religion the military and institutions of that sort. And now we have this division between the two parties with respect to elections, and a really deep seated distrust on the part of Republicans. Let's say another word about what is an election. We sometimes think well that's just people going to the polls, or they're filling out their mail in ballot. In fact, it's much more than that. It also involves a period after the election generally called the canvas, or the certification of the results. And in this period, all the results are checked, corrected, and finalized. And the period for this can be quite long. The states do it in a week. Vermont, South Dakota had deadlines this last election, a week after the November 3rd election, but some as much as five weeks later, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, and California is one of those And what's the reason for this. The reason is it's really difficult to count all the ballots on election night. The only reason we even try is because the media have historically wanted results quickly. And in fact, television really pushed for this. And television is one of the reasons why we introduced automatic style punch cards, which allowed computers to count the votes, and why we have continued to invest in technologies that will count things quickly. But there's no reason to think that counting quickly is necessarily going to get the right result, especially now when we have so many mail in ballots, and all an early votes, and all sorts of other modalities by which people vote. So in fact, it makes sense to think it'll take a little while to figure out exactly what the right count is. Now, what do we want to do with the right count. Well, first and foremost, most you want to convince the loser that he or she lost. Typically, the winner is convinced that he or she won, rather or not, that person did for obvious reasons, but it's the loser that has to be convinced. Now increasingly, we also have to convince the public. And that's a much bigger job. And how do you do that. Well, one way is just to invoke the authority of the government, but we see that that's no longer probably enough. Another is the cultural belief that the society would not let fraud occur. That's been destroyed by communications, which have undermined trust in elections. A third way is that norms have been met, such as lawsuits have been submitted, they've all been rejected and therefore since the norms of the legal system have been met, the election must be fair and correct. We see that that didn't work so well. So now we're going to talk a lot today will not exclusively about the performance of this system and how we can prove it to be adequate. And the question is, how can we do that. How can we reestablish trust in elections. And let me start with Kami who I just introduced a few moments ago, who is the clerk recorder and registrar of voters in in New County, California. And then we'll go to our next speaker. Thank you so much for having me. So a little bit more about the area where I administer elections in New County, the second largest county geographically in California with over 10,000 four miles. And we have a little less than 11,000 registered voters. So we're very dispersed in nature. And as an election administrator, I've directly overseen 22 elections, including this past November election. Prior to that I was a poll worker for several years. We also have five major American sovereign nations within our county boundaries, the made up of the Bayou Shoshone and the government. And we are the one of the most purple counties in California, I would argue maybe even in the nation, their 14 vote difference between President Biden and former President Trump and the presidential election. So while the accusations of vote reading and machine manipulation are fresh in our minds. In this last election cycle, I had more voters also ardently believing that Russian voting directly led to the outcome of the 2016 election. So because of the nature of the area that I served of small men and politically diverse communities who are often remote and distrustful the government in general. It's necessitated that I seek out ways to demonstrate to voters that the elections were connected properties, regardless of trust. So essentially taking trust out of the equation completely. With that as a backdrop, I'd like to talk about the information pathways and data consumption. This is something that we've been talking a lot as an election community and as a nation in the form of disinformation. And then I want to talk about a few additional steps that we can do now across the nation and every election jurisdiction to actually secure the integrity of election administration itself. The reason I think it's important to start with how society consumes information is because we hear the same thing brought up over and over again about misinformation and disinformation. But there's not a lot of talk about what we can actually do to solve the problem. But addressing this issue is really the largest security threat to elections as far as I can tell. So it's important to understand the mechanisms that are manipulating the flow of information. Because this problem permeates broader society, as we just heard it's not exclusive to elections, it's infected public discourse and policy in all areas of modern life. It's important to look at it from a holistic and systematic approach rather than just focus on election specifically. Because until we address this larger problem of partisanship and divisiveness that has gripped our culture on both sides of the flow while it's going to be almost impossible to have honest conversations about meaningful election reform. But we all know free and fair elections should not be a partisan issue. We should all agree that if you cast your vote for candidate A, it should be counted it for candidate A. So I personally believe that the first test to fix this problem is going to be something akin to a internet bill of rights. Something that we can use to protect voters in the general populace from predatory behaviors of nation states and campaigns and domestic troublemakers. All of the people and organizations that have been data mining, what we like, what we love our habits, who we communicate with and taking that information to exploit us so that they can feed us. This and disinformation that's convincing to us personally that feeds into our own biases, fears and anxiety. I think that we also need to be looking at things that surround the FCC regulations, things that were repealed in the 80s during the Reagan administration under this libertarian mindset. One of the things that was repealed during that time, I think if you grew up in my generation, you maybe saw commercials on television about schoolhouse rock how bill becomes law or the way that the government structured. That was because regulation required that every media outlet that aside certain amount of time for public education. And those are the kinds of reform. But I think we're going to be needing to address in order to focus on the misinformation and the way that we consume information, the way that we share information, and the way that we communicate with each other in this world of instant, instant thought and instant connectivity. So now I want to pivot to what I will call my top 10 practical things that we can do an election administration now in every election jurisdiction across the country to help secure the administration itself. Improve to the voters that the election is secure. Again, taking trust out of the equation. To begin, because voting systems are certified at the federal and state levels, we need to demand the highest level of security and transparency around the point of certification, including exploring ways to incentivize open source publicly on voting systems. Because even though the software may be perfectly fine and all of our voting systems now it might. As a local election officials, I can't prove it to the public because they're proprietary. So I really think we need to start focusing on the point of certification so that we can use the public will accept and trust. At the local level all election officials, they can become members of the election infrastructure information sharing and analysis center that's a lot of words, we call it the EISAC for short. It's free to join. And this is allows information sharing across federal, state, tribal and local government. We have access to credit information in real time, including resources to help mitigate the stress. The 11th election administration, excuse me, election systems have been designated as critical infrastructure. We now have access to things like penetration testing, phishing testing, cyber hygiene, Albert sensors, all kinds of information and resources from the Department of Homeland Security and no additional cost accounting. So there's no excuse for any election jurisdiction in the country to not avail themselves of these resources today. Every staff member should be trained in cybersecurity from beginner to advanced. That's something that my staff and myself have been through that those courses, we need to be able to recognize appropriate ways to behave online. Anyone who works with transports, counts ballot should maintain strong chain of custody documentation to prove that procedures are being followed. And these documents should be made public. They should be published on our website if possible. They should absolutely be made public to anybody who asked for them. This should also include inventory tracking of election equipment, fund drives, all components of ballot counting. Also with so much reliance on technology and the growing threat of rolling blackouts, fires, power safety shut off, any possibility that can take down the power grid. Power backup generators should be the standard, not the exception. We installed them all of our polling places in the last election and they will remain. We should also be forensically monitoring our networks so that we can prove that no intrusions occurred. And if they did, we can discover what was accessed when we did that in Año County through the entire 2020 election cycle. We knew when there was any issue with our internet connected systems, any of our networks we were informed immediately. I also believe that hand-marked paper ballots with ballot-marking devices only for those that need them are the best method to ensure voter intent. You're going to be hearing from another panel today who's probably going to talk a little bit about that. And instilled some work to make sure that election officials like myself understood the threat with anything other than a hand-marked paper ballot. Scanners should be equipped with imprinters that stamp the identifying information on ballots such as the date, the time, the batch number, and the ballot order within the batch. As they're being counted, we did that in Año County. This prevents even accusations of the same batch of ballots being fed through the scanners more than once. And finally, at the culmination of documenting every other area of the election, once the candidate is complete and every voter record has been reconciled, every voter ballot has been counted, we should be adopting risk-limiting audits, which are the gold standards for audits. So this is a non-exhausted list. Funding is always an option, but if we can do it here in Año County, you can do it anywhere in the United States. We're a very cash-strapped county, we're very rural in nature, but it doesn't prevent us from having the highest level of securities that are available to us. And I just will leave you with one final thought, that although I'm speaking to you today as a person who conducts elections, the most important position to hold in a democracy is that of a citizen. We as election officials serve you, the people, and without your advocacy and engagement demanding evidence-based election systems and the highest security standards and funding priorities, we're going to continue to struggle with these questions about legitimacy, like we did in 2000, 2004, 2016, and yes, most recently in 2020. So let's work together to improve election security to avoid a happy to go through this in the country again in 2024. Thank you. Thank you, Kami. That was great. So we're going to talk more about risk-limiting audits and train of custody and the regulation of various machines and how those all interact and why they might be important. So if a lot of that seemed a little like some jargon, it is, and we're going to do some of that today here, but we'll try to explain it as best we can. Next speaker is Wayne Williams. He's the former Secretary of State of Colorado, ending his term in 2019. Wayne also served as a county commissioner in El Paso County and was then elected to the role of county clerk and recorder. And by the way, this is a role that's sort of standard across the nation, and often what happens is the person who's the county clerk and recorder does elections but also records deeds and things like that. That's a fairly standard thing. Wayne, please. Thank you for the opportunity to participate today. I apologize for being a little bit late like Secretary Napolitano. I am a former Truman scholar and was chairing our regional panel and it went a little bit late today. But let me talk about why the elections matter. Let's, and then I want to talk about some of the things we did in Colorado and I'll try and emphasize what I think are the most important parts of that. I first got actively involved in elections in 1997 when I served on a canvas board, I was one of our county's three members, and we had the punch card balance. And we had specific standards that said what counts and how many chads and how closely they have to be hanging at all of those things. So a few years later when I am watching the process in Florida, where different people were advocating to change standards mid course. It began, what I think has been a series of things that have undermined the confidence in the election systems. And so, you know, one of those things is that as election officials, we want to make sure those standards are set well in advance so that everybody knows what those rules are going to be. And then I've got six. So, so Cammie is, you know, from California they count higher than I count in Colorado, I've got six general things but they're pretty broad. The first is something that impacts anyone who's ever walked precinct or reviewed a voter list and that's that you need an accurate voter list. That's particularly true in a state like Colorado where we mail ballots to people. And so we use a host of different processes to make sure those are accurate from gathering information from other government agencies such as when you get a driver's license update, or your car registration changes. From looking to make sure that folks who have passed away, whether they're from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment or the Social Security Death Index that they are removed from the voter rolls. We work with the Department of Corrections for those who are currently serving a sentence for a felony conviction. We also check to make sure non-citizens are not registered. So these are objective things that counties and states can do. We actively participate in a cross-reference of our database with the Electronic Registration Information Center. So we're comparing our information to other states so that we can first be accurate on our list and second ensure that that person who moved gets the correct information going forward. And that's critical because that's something that's publicly available. And so if you get a publicly available voter database and you see that it doesn't match who lives there, that undermines that confidence. And so that's one of the reasons why that needs to be there. The second part of it, and Kami already talked about this, is having voter verifiable paper ballots. And that means a ballot that the voter can actually look at and ensure. And this was one of the reforms that we adopted when our Secretary of State of Colorado, ensuring that we had a voting system that actually provided a paper record. Even if you voted on an accessible device, there was still a paper record that could be verified by you, the voter. And by someone who wanted to audit results later. Absolutely critical. The idea that was at one point popular, that you would trust the ether, or what is on a computer card, is not something that provides that evidence you need to ensure that the voter gets the correct information. What is on a computer card is not something that provides that evidence you need to ensure the election was conducted accurately. Ultimately, I adopted standards that required that voter verifiable paper ballot. Not everybody was happy. Some companies that didn't make sufficient machines sued a couple counties sued the legislature reviewed it. And when it became apparent four or five years ago now that foreign governments were seeking to interfere in elections, all of a sudden other people began to recognize that it's there. Those of us in the election community are dealing with this on a daily basis. Some people only pay attention when there's a crisis. And so we have to make sure that we are engaged and that we can explain what we're doing. The third thing you need is a secure ballot return system. Someone needs to be able to assure their ballot gets back there because and this is one of the challenges in a state like Colorado that does vote by mail. We had predominantly, you can only mail it. When I was secretary we began to have drop boxes around the state. These made it much easier and ensured that the geographic disparities and mail service deliveries were evened out. We also made it so that you could have total confidence because those drop boxes are under 24 seven surveillance and the ballots from them are picked up by bipartisan team of judges. And so that secure ballot return for a mail ballot state like us is important. And that's the perspective by the way I'm talking about in Colorado everybody who's a active voter is meld a ballot. There are some in person options. And that's the perspective I'm talking about as I go forward. The fourth item in a mail about election is some form of verification at the present time I believe signature verification is the strongest one, where we actually are able to say this was the vote cast by this person. The fifth item is a series of procedural protections and one of those I alluded to already which is at every step of the way we have bipartisan judges. Notice of whether the clerk and or the secretary is from a particular party. The judges need to be across from across the political spectrum and you need someone, you need Democrats and Republicans who are both there, verifying the process every step of the way. And we also have watchers in Colorado in addition to the judges. We, we changed the regulations when I was secretary to ensure that the parties were the ones choosing those judges so it's not. So so an election official can't just choose a friendly person from the other party to them. The parties are actually part of that, so that they can have confidence. I had a discussion recently with a Republican Party executive committee and, and they were raising questions about the election and I looked at the chair and said, who did you appoint to test the machines. And pointing out that yes, this process is one that is conducted by the election official but always with bipartisan teams of judges throughout that process. It also means that those those procedural protections include not connecting machines to the internet, and ensuring that the security and can we talked about some of those issues is there, so that those are not tampered with. And then this the sixth item, and can we refer to this as well is making sure that those results can be and are audited. And the purpose of all of these protections isn't just to make sure it's done right. It's also to be able to show people that it was done right. And as Henry was talking about in that interest in those introductory remarks. It's not the winners you have to convince it is the people who lost the election and their supporters, and you need to have the evidence to back that up. One of the other changes we made in Colorado is we made all of our ballots subject to the open records loss. So, we aren't playing a no you can't see that no it's hidden trust us we got it right it is a process that is open and verifiable both through in a formal audit so we adopted the nation's first full statewide risk limiting audit. But it's also available. If you wanted to request every single ballot in the state and do your own hand count by golly you could do that in Colorado. And so we want to be able to make sure that that process at every step of the way is verifiable you've got bipartisan judges you've got video surveillance, and you've got voter verifiable paper ballots that are audited and are open. So those are some of the things we've done in Colorado. And certainly for all of us around the country, we're all going to conduct the elections a little bit differently. And that's fine but all of us need to be able to show and demonstrate that those are that that process is accurate and we need to be able to prove it not just say trust me, or as President Reagan used to say trust but verify. Thanks. Great. Thanks, Wayne. Jennifer moral our next speaker has alerted me to another bit of jargon. I think Wayne when you say judges you would, you're really meaning what we would call in this state at least poll workers is that right. That is correct so thank you. Nice. We sometimes luncheon so poll workers, or people who help count the ballots, or who do any of the processes in Colorado, a county, you know, our largest, our largest population county has about, you know, 7800,000 people. We've got an election staff of a dozen. And so there's no way they're doing it so all of the work in the election. So whether you're called poll workers or election judges, or whatever the case may be those individuals are citizens from the community who come in and help. That's what helps make the election work and none of us want a system that has so much bureaucracy you don't have that help. Plus, it's an opportunity to make sure that both parties have representatives at every step of the way. Poll workers, election judges, ballot judges, whatever the term may be so thank you for the clarification Jennifer. And I would just also add that good training for poll workers is a really important thing too. So that's something maybe we'll talk more about our next panelist is Jennifer moral, who has served as a local election official in Utah and Colorado. And as the partner in the elections group where she consults on election administration and auditing. She works as a consultant with the democracy fund, leading the election validation project, which seeks to increase trust in election. Take it away Jennifer. Okay, well, let me start first just by saying thank you, Dean Brady professor start it's really an honor to be here participating in this conversation. What a great group. A little introduction just to tell you all how I got here and maybe set the stage for wherever at now. In 2009, I was a city council candidate on the ballot for a local municipal election in Utah. Before the election was to take place things went a little sideways, and I was asked to withdraw my name as a candidate and oversee the election. I knew nothing about running elections and I spent the next 48 hours immersed in Utah's election code. And on the phone talking to anybody who was willing to give me advice on what I was supposed to do. I promise there is a much better way to be introduced to election administration, but this crash course in a long night of manually counting and recounting to ensure the totals and tallies were correct. So I left me convinced that there were opportunities for improvement, both in how elections are administered, but also reinforced that this is something I wanted to keep doing. It was, and it continues to be an exciting puzzle to solve with an endless array of challenges. So I spent several several years working as a municipal clerk wearing many different hats besides election official as Dean Brady alluded to. I was in the elections in larger jurisdictions of both Utah and Colorado. I was during my time as the deputy of elections in a Rappahoe County Colorado that I was introduced to the idea of risk limiting audits or RLA's as we often refer to them and we'll probably refer to them from here on out. The fact that no one was able to easily explain to me exactly what an RLA was, and what it did made me immediately wary of the idea. In 2018, after playing your role in the first statewide risk limiting audit in Colorado, which you just heard former Secretary Williams talk about, and Professor Stark assisted with who we'll be hearing from. I was really hooked. And I decided to leave running local elections to focus full time on pioneering election audits and evangelizing the benefits of our liaison. Some of you probably aren't surprised when I tell you that well meaning colleagues called to say, Are you crazy? No one is going to be interested in election audits. How is that even a job? I saw the impact it had not just providing a way for me as an election administrator to validate that the election had been conducted fairly and accurately. But the requirements necessary to store and organize an account for ballots as a precursor to audit meant that I had documented evidence of the number of ballots in our possession, and I could identify where each and every one of those ballots was located. More importantly, and Kami mentioned this, I could balance that against the number of ballots issued in cast. So it provided this whole new perspective to election accountability and transparency. And I also found it fascinating when I first started thinking about the broader concept of election audits. This has played a role in US companies since the creation of the Security and Exchange Act in 1934. So essentially providing a way to ensure financial records and transactions are reported accurately and a system of internal controls is established and followed. I think that's something that allows all of us to feel confident about our financial and banking institutions and we know many organizations today both public and private rely on audits to evaluate processes and internal controls. And so I started asking the question, why didn't we have similar audit standards for elections. So I set out to write some guides that would help state and local officials better understand what an RLA is, how it works, the various methods that can be used when conducting an RLA, and what is required from both the voting system and operationally to conduct an RLA. And I tell everybody that 80% of the work in conducting a risk limiting audit happens prior to the election. There's a lot of front end work that has to be put in place. So I ended up with four guides and they cover everything from policy to terms and definitions, how to conduct a pilot as a way to provide a hands on experience for learning how the RLA process works, and a guide to ballot accounting. And this is an area where there's still a significant need for improvement in most jurisdictions. And in addition to these guides I've had the opportunity to organize and conduct RLA pilot projects in several states. So speaking for a minute directly to the academic community watching this if you want to see a policy or a tool or strategy implemented. One of the best things you can do is connect with a practitioner with an election administrator and develop a pilot program where you can see firsthand what it takes to transform theory into practice. So moving forward to 2020, I along with my business partner formed the elections group and we partnered with state and local election officials who were looking to implement new programs or improve processes. And our team of election experts, all former election officials were able to quickly provide guidance and resources and direct support for those jurisdictions in need. But this new avenue of work really gave me a front row seat in 2020 to experience how elections are run across the country, but also allowed me to see firsthand some of the challenges. And it became more clear than ever that good election practices set the stage for successful audits. Despite the challenges of 2020 elected and appointed officials from both parties worked together to mitigate what really could have been a crisis, as we heard in an earlier panel today. They did this by instituting health and safety protocols recruiting and training hundreds of thousands of new poll workers and expanding early in absentee voting and other alternative voting options and processing and tabulating a record number of million ballots. And I bring this up because I think it demonstrated a remarkable amount of resiliency, which should reassure all of us. As we're thinking about the challenges that we need to tackle around mis and disinformation and improving election security and integrity that the ability is there to meet those challenges. They also became expert crisis communicators, many for the first time with limited staffing, they did a remarkable job working to inform voters and the media and other stakeholders about the facts around how to vote and where to vote and when to vote. And they were really at the heart of a collaborative effort to amplify trusted information, which is really vital for us to keep in mind is we're exploring better ways of providing evidence that the outcome of an election is correct. Jurisdictions of all sizes provided us with virtual tours, their ballot processing facilities, and created graphics and short videos explaining how each stage a ballot processing worked, how ballots would be secured and accurately counted, and what we could expect while we waited for results. So I think in addition to this being the most secure election we've ever had in many ways, it was the most transparent of any election we've ever had more local jurisdictions turned on a camera, so that the world can watch the work they were doing in real time. And I think that effort revealed a couple of things. First, for those of us that have re-elections, this is no surprise that counting ballots is tedious monotonous work. And second, and maybe more importantly, that this added transparency alone was not enough. And that we still have some work to do in educating the public on how the whole process works. And more importantly, we need to continue pursuing ways to provide evidence that the work was done fairly and accurately. So I want to end my introduction by asking a question. Why should we audit elections? And my answer is election audits and not just tabulation audits have the potential to detect voting system errors, whether that is a human error or misconfiguration or hacking. They provide accountability to voters. They can deter fraudulent activity. They help assure us that votes were issued and counted and reported accurately. And just as important, they provide feedback per process improvement, something I really valued as an election administrator. And so the question we all should be asking is why don't we have a uniform set of practices for conducting election audits across all states and jurisdictions. So there are three quick areas I'll just touch on where I think there is opportunity to further improve the integrity and security of our elections. First, every election operation should have documentation. So this includes things like standard operating procedures, chain of custody forms, ballot reconciliation logs and ballot manifest. So having a trustworthy paper record is essential and I'm sure Phillip's going to talk more about this. But having a trustworthy paper record starts by having written procedures and logs for every task that gets performed. Second, pre and post election testing and audits can provide a way to verify the work performed by staff and the many temporary workers and poll workers that are brought in to assist, as well as verifying how election audits work were functioned. So those are things like that might include, you know, regular maintenance of the voter registration databases, as Wayne mentioned, maybe someday systematic audits of those databases for anomalous changes, GIS audits of the voter district and precinct assignments, compliance audits around security procedures, both physical and cybersecurity pre election testing of the voting equipment to ensure it's been programmed correctly, and it's operating as expected. Tests of the ballot layout and design and resource planning and allocation audit, so essentially ensuring enough equipment supplies and people have been allocated to meet demand. And finally, we need to improve the way we use this documentation as a way to continue to inform how procedures work and improve how we present those test or audit results as evidence, as proof that the outcome of an election is in fact correct. And I'll leave it there and I'm really looking forward to the questions and the rest of the conversation. Thank you Jennifer that was great. Nice overview of the issues. We're now going to go to Philip Stark he's professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. He's also associate dean for mathematical and physical sciences. He's received the chancellors award for research in the public interest for developing election auditing methods, risk limiting audits that have been incorporated into law in eight states. He currently serves on the board of advisors of the US Election Assistance Commission that was set up by the help America vote act that came after the 2000 election. And he's also on the strategic board of advisors of the open source election technology Institute. Phil knows lots and lots about the details of how these methods work statistically and electronically. Phil. Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here and a delight to share the virtual podium with some of my favorite people in election integrity, people I both trust and respect and enjoy, I guess that's trust and respect and enjoy more than two things. I'm going to share my screen now. Being an academic I have to have slides to give a talk. Let me see if I can make this happen. Oops, sorry. All right, I hope that's visible. So, Henry mentioned earlier that an incredibly important goal is to improve public trust in elections. I'm not good at that. The piece that I'm good at is something that I think should come before the trust, which is the trustworthiness. And my focus in this area has been trying to figure out how to make elections more trustworthy and then leave it to others more skilled than I to to improve public trust. So I actually think that there are aspects of the way we conduct elections in the US right now that make them less deserving of trust than they could be. In particular, many of the aspects of the procedures and equipment that we use are neither tamper evident nor resilient. That is, we can't always tell whether something has been altered, whether it's been misconfigured, whether they're bugs, whether there's been hacking. And if we do discover a problem, we're not always able to recover what the correct outcome of the election would have been but for the problem. We rely heavily on computerized systems for various aspects of elections, including voter registration databases, electronic poll books, the systems that are used to mark ballots in some cases or actually instead of marking ballots, touchscreen interfaces for direct recording electronic voting systems, and then systems that tabulate, aggregate, report the election results. All of those systems can be misconfigured, they can have bugs, they can be hacked. In order to provide evidence that the reported winners of the election really won, we have to have a way to check whether they won without trusting software computers that were used to conduct the election itself. So one of the most important things is actually paper. And all of the speakers have mentioned this before, but it turns out that paper has some unique security properties that are not shared by electronic systems. It's tangible and accountable. Both Kami and Jennifer talked about this. You can keep track of how much paper you sent to a polling place and how much came back, voted, unvoted or spoiled. It's tamper evident. It's not that you can't alter it, but it takes some work to alter a voter's mark without leaving discernible traces. And finally, and kind of most important is that if you want to change a lot of votes that have been recorded on paper ballots, that requires physical access to the ballots and it requires accomplices if you're going to change many, many votes at all. That's very different from the electronic world where a single individual can change an arbitrarily large number of votes without any accomplices necessarily. But how the paper is marked curated and audited is crucial. And if we create the paper trail using untrustworthy technology, then it's not clear what the paper trail is really providing us. Handmark paper ballots are the best choice right now because they're a record of what the voter did. There are a lot of states that are moving to universal use ballot marking devices. So that's where voters interact with a touchscreen and the touchscreen then prints a record that's supposed to be a record of their selections. The problem with that is it's a record of what the machine did, not what the voter did. Voters by and large don't notice if what's printed is different from what they intended. And even if they do notice there's no way they can prove to a poll worker or election official that the machine misbehaved. And if the election official is convinced that the machine misbehaved, there's nothing the election official can do to figure out what the right outcome of the election actually is. So there's a lot of security problems with those. They do provide additional accessibility for voters with some kinds of disabilities. And that's an important thing. There's some evidence that many of these devices in fact are not very accessible. And I think this is an area where we really needed to note a lot more research and attention to building accessible ways of marking a paper ballot for voters who can benefit from technological interventions there. If we don't keep the paper trail demonstrably secure, it's not clear why we should why having that paper trail should increase our trust in elections. Jennifer and Cammie both spoke about this actually, Wayne as well. And of course, if we never look at the paper trail after tabulating the votes, it might as well not exist. And so that's where the auditing comes in. So this is kind of like the carpentry slogan of, you know, measure twice cut once. This is sort of, you know, count twice, certify once. You don't really need to count twice, but you do need to count a little bit more than once. And that's what that's again, what auditing is about. So I would categorize the way we run elections in the United States right now as procedure based rather than evidence based. So what the way the rules work, the way things are is states have various procedures for certifying equipment. Many rely on federal certification by the Election Assistance Commission. And then there's rules to follow for how to conduct the election. And at the end of the day, basically the assertion is I use the certified equipment. I follow the rules. Therefore, the outcome of the election is right. And I liken this to a brain surgeon saying I used a sterile scalpel. I followed proper surgical procedure. Therefore, the patient is fine. I think we need to look at the patient to figure out what the patient is fine or not. And similarly, I think we need to look at the way the elections are conducted and look at the paper trail in order to determine whether the outcome really is correct. Some years back 2012, David Wagner, who's in the ECS department here at Berkeley, and I published this paper called evidence based elections. And the basic idea is that it's not enough for elections to identify who really won. It also needs to provide affirmative evidence that it really did find who really won. And that evidence basically is a function of having auditability that is having these paper records, keeping track of them and so forth, and then actually looking at them, auditing. So what is a risk limiting audit? The term has come up a number of times already today. It has a relatively simple definition. It's any procedure that has a known maximum chance of not correcting the reported election outcome if the reported election outcome is wrong. And moreover, it never makes a right outcome wrong. So that's a straightforward idea, I think. I mean, there's a lot of words there. It's a little bit tortured, but big chance of correcting the outcome if the outcome is wrong. Only a small chance of not correcting the outcome if the outcome is wrong. What's the risk limit in a risk limiting audit? It's the largest chance that the procedure won't correct the reported outcome if the reported outcome is wrong. Typical values used as risk limits in actual election audits are 10%, 5%, some cases smaller than that. It turns out that the amount of additional work you need to do to attain a smaller risk limit is not always that much in addition. So what does wrong mean? Wrong means that if you accurately tabulated the trustworthy paper trail, you would find that someone else had won. Figuring out whether the paper trail is still trustworthy at the time of the audit involves other processes. And I call them generically compliance audits. Jennifer mentioned a number of the things that one would want to do to ensure that the paper trail is trustworthy. And these, of course, are not the only things that you would want to audit. I think Jennifer also mentioned auditing things like ballot layout. We want to make sure that ballots are usable, that the instructions are clear, and so on. Making sure that eligibility determinations have been made correctly. This is related to things that Wayne spoke about, making sure that you have accurate voter lists and that you check things against them. Right, so risk limiting audits have been pretty widely endorsed. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, Presidential Commission on Election Administration, the American School Association, legal women voters, common cause verified voting, and others. There have been on the order of 60 pilots in a bunch of states and Denmark. They've been routine in Colorado since 2017. It was under former Secretary Wayne Williams that they were actually implemented. There was a tortured time of, I think, more than five years between when a law was passed and when they were actually rolled out. There have been statewide audits in a number of states that were actually orchestrated by Jennifer. And there was most of a statewide risk limiting audit in Pennsylvania quite recently. There are laws in a number of states and there are methods that can be used to do risk limiting audits of all the social choice functions that are currently used in U.S. elections, including plurality, multi-winner plurality, supermajority, instant runoff voting, and things like that. So to distill this all to a relatively short list, what do we need to have evidence-based elections? What do we need to be able to produce affirmative evidence that the reported winners really won? The voters have to create a complete, durable, verified audit trail. The local election official, there's another acronym there, LEO, needs to care for the audit trail adequately to make sure that it stays complete and accurate. We need some compliance audits to check to confirm that the paper trail really is trustworthy because auditing an untrustworthy paper trail can't tell us whether the reported election results are right. And then at the end, we need risk limiting audits that will check or correct the reported results. I'm going to stop sharing my screen now. And there, turn it back over to Henry. Thank you, Phil. That's great. That's a nice distillation of what's actually a very, very sophisticated technique to make sure that in fact risk limiting audits, for example, can be done most expeditiously and efficiently. Because the whole point is that it doesn't require that you actually look at every ballot, you can just look at a certain number and then at that point you say, well, there's almost no chance that we got it wrong and therefore we can go forward and assert that we've got it right. So we have a great set of audience questions. One of my favorites here is, given the election security concerns raised by Professor Stark, will we ever be able to have voting by computer? That was a big word, but will we ever? I'm sorry, I missed the preamble to the question. I mean, we do use computers to tabulate votes and we use computers in many parts of elections. But we can't trust them to do the right thing. So we need to check whether they got the right answer. And that's where having this trustworthy paper trail comes in. It lets us do some manual work, visually inspecting some often relatively small number of ballots to confirm that the reported winners really won. By looking at just a random sample of ballots, we're not going to be able to tell whether the tally is right down to the last vote. But that's not the point. We don't need to get the tally down to the last vote. What we need to know is, did the reported winner actually win? It's a much lower standard of accuracy. And that's what makes it possible to do with a relatively small inspection, by manually inspecting a relatively small sample of ballots. Yes, so let me follow up and address what I think also might be part of the question is, can you, at the present time, we do not have the technology sufficient to ensure that the person at the other end of the screen is who they say they are, and at the same time be able to ensure the anonymity of their vote. So this is different in elections than banking or anything else, because in banking, they're perfectly fine knowing who you are and what you did. In fact, you want a report of exactly the transaction you did. So doing banking online is a different thing. In elections, we need two things. We need to know it's you and that you did it, but we also can't have the government know how you in particular voted. And right now, the technology does not exist in a way that is secure and verifiable to do both of those things at the same time. The question was ever, look, my grandfather was born in 1899 when there was horse and buggy and by the time he died, people were landing on the moon. So certainly things can change, but it's going to take a lot to convince and it should take a lot to convince that something can be completely secure because computer security is a never ending battle. As soon as you if look, you've got a computer it every few weeks or sometimes more often it gives you an update because they found some security vulnerability that needs to be addressed. You can't be doing first that computer can even be connected to the internet if you're doing it right in an election. And so we just do not have that technology or ability to provide that completely secure system. We're comfortable with a few errors made in banking. It's part of the process they use and they ensure against that and they plan for a certain amount of loss and when you call up and say hey that wasn't me and they reverse the charges on something. You can't do that in an election and so we're not at the point yet with our need for 100% accuracy and verifiability at the same time as we have anonymity. Those are at least my thoughts. Thanks, I'm trying to think if there's any votes that I'd like to have reversed historically as I think back through my voting career but nevertheless. Let's go to the other end of the process. How can we make it easier for people to register and what role does computer do computers play there and what are some of the security concerns we have. When we use computers for people to register online for example, is that doable is that sensible and can we use that as a way to make sure we expand voting instead of constricting it. So, so it's, and I apologize for jumping in here again but it's absolutely doable and it's being done now. There are several security precautions you have to ensure one of those is that ultimately no changes are made in a voting record unless a live person approves it. That's the model that Colorado uses for that live person to use it they're using two factor authentication where you can't just get in through a hacked password. You've got steps along the way that verify frankly the fact that voting roles and most states are open to the public is another verification source so that anyone can look at it and say, yes, I know Bob Smith he lives next door to me, or they can look and go, Bob Smith, that's a vacant lot and so there are a host of processes you use. Most states have some form of online voter registration. It can be done. There are precautions you need to take in place and to ensure it actually is that person, but those same precautions need to be in place with respect to a paper signature verification that submitted. So it can I think it can be done and most states are doing it at the present time, but you have to make sure you've got those precautions there were in the 2016 presidential election. There were efforts to get into the voter registration databases of multiple states that continued through 2020 and 2016 I think there were two that had a potential vulnerability. One was in Illinois and one other. And so we want to, you know, there are precautions you have to take us one of the great things that Homeland Security's efforts in this area have provided to help states and localities make sure that they're secure. Jennifer and coming you have any additional thoughts on that. A quick thought there. There's a real opportunity still, we talked about, well, first of all, let's just answer the question. I think, as we mentioned, having online registration is essential. And I'm a big fan of the states and jurisdictions that have adopted automatic voter registration but one of the one of the nice things is when you're able to tap into other state and federal agency data. That kind of adds to your ability to sort of verify or validate that data. So there's a really nice effort. I think Wayne mentioned it, the electronic registration information sharing, but I would just add the convenience is great for those that are nervous about that are nervous about this idea of online registration or registering registering at different agencies. The more we sort of can share data on when people move, death records, marriage records, incarceration, those sorts of things. That's where we can improve the integrity. And how about same-day registration, by the way? Is that something we could do? Cami, you were going to jump in. We have a version of same-day registration in California. It's called conditional same-day registration. It allows us, it's sort of like a provisional ballot process. I think the ability to register on election day is important, especially for people who have moved. We don't want to disenfranchise voters. We want to invite voters into the process. But to just talk about a little bit of the caution on online registration, although I do think that it has expanded the number of people in our voter rolls. There are issues that need to be addressed still. Historically, this is done through Department of Motor Vehicles signature match. Signatures under license are not very readable. They usually do not look like they would on a ballot that you're returning by mail. And there have been security breaches. There have been additional issues that states that are considering adopting it do need to look at. And we should be continuing to look at security in that area to make sure that we're not unintentionally causing more problems for voters than they would if they registered with a paper ballot. And then your very first question about how we can make it more accessible. We also need to be really careful that there are a lot of people in this country that still don't have access to the internet. There is still a very real digital divide between rural and urban. So we need to ensure that we're still providing those in-person opportunities to register to vote in the traditional methods. And signature verification. Is that an issue? Phil, looks like you might have something to say about that. I was going to chime in briefly on the question of online voter registration and online voter registration databases. So they are vulnerable, but there are best practices to secure them, including very frequent backups and then checking for differences between today's record and yesterday's record to make sure that you didn't have 5 million records changed and so on. So there's no way to get rid of the vulnerability, but again, there's a way to make end runs around the vulnerabilities to ensure that you can detect problems if they occurred. Signature verification is really troubling partly for the reason that Cammy mentioned that when you capture signature on a tablet, when someone is renewing their driver's license, that doesn't look like a wet signature. People's signatures change over time. There are not good standards for comparing the signature on, say, an absentee ballot to the signature of record. Some of those, some of it is done in an automated way. They're automated signature verification things. There's no standards for those. Often the people who are doing this aren't necessarily trained well. And there isn't a lot of work that's been done to even measure sort of the type one and type two errors. That is the false negatives and false positives. So I see that as an issue. There are states in which it is now illegal to check the signature against a reference signature. I guess because it had been done so poorly in the past. All that officials are allowed to do is check that there is a signature. And then similarly we're talking again about absentee voting rather than voter registration. Georgia is poised to pass a new legislation involving taking a photocopy of driver's license and says isn't getting an attestation to this and that and it's just, it's not, it hasn't been well thought out. It's probably going to reduce security rather than increase security. There are just complicated problems around around all of this. Signatures are just they're not a great way to verify who people are, but requiring photo ID can have the effect of disenfranchising some groups. It's, it's, it's problematic. I don't think we have a really good answer. The best answer historically that we've had is in person voting in local polling places where it is your neighbors who are checking you in in the poll book, and they know you. They recognize whether you were the person who goes with that name. As we move to things like vote centers and whatnot we're actually losing that security that comes from, you know, eyeballs familiar eyeballs on other people. So just, let's talk a little bit about the overall security of mail in ballots that of course was a big issue in this last election. Mail in ballots, of course, to some extent were made necessary by coven, but nevertheless that's clearly been one of the claims of the Trump administration and those in league with him. And what do you think I mean is it possible to make mail in ballots, sometimes called absentee ballots, actually secure. I would say absolutely. There do. Again, we need to be able to make sure that we are going to mitigate training of the vulnerabilities, but people who want to vote by mail should be able to vote by mail. We should be able to come up with systems that we can verify and that the voter can verify that we receive the ballot. And if there's an issue with the validation, they should be contacted and given the opportunity to correct what that issue is. There are systems that we have in place, at least here in California. There's even if a voter received two ballots in the mail, oftentimes it's because they re registered during that six to eight week voting period. We can only check in one ballot per voter. So we do have protections in place for all of the vulnerabilities that we know about. And I think people who choose to vote by mail should be able to have confidence that their ballot is going to be counted and counted. And I'll just tack on to that. Agree with that Kami. And in addition to those, some of those things that she talked about in terms of like the front verification of a voter's identity, the signature matching that we just talked about. This is where that that chain of custody, the standard operating procedures, those reconciliation logs, those batch control logs really come into play where there's an opportunity from the time that that ballot arrives in the election facility, or is put into a ballot box as the election official, you can track that account for that. Wayne mentioned the bipartisan teams. So all the way through we have we have the ability to sort of verify as ballots move right we take some out of the system because of signature issues. Some have to be removed to be duplicated. There are different reasons why those numbers are changing. But there actually is some pretty easy sort of basic principles to account for those as we get all the way through the casting and counting of those ballots. So from from the back end from the operational end, I would say, absolutely. It's a it's a pretty secure process and just one little note on the signature verification piece states that have been doing mail ballots for a while, Colorado, Washington and others actually have done a pretty fair job I recognize all the problems. And I don't discount those but they've done a great job in sort of thinking about tiered verification audit so taking samples to something Colorado did. It requires you to sort of pull a sample of signatures to make sure that the people or the equipment that are verifying those are doing that accurately, creating some sort of standards when it comes to training, working closely with local FBI and other partners to sort of understand what that training might look like knowing that again signature verification, sometimes less of a science and more of an art but I think there certainly are good practices that should help voters feel confident that once that ballot reaches the election office or is put into a box that it's going to be secured and accounted for. Let me let me follow up with what Jennifer just said so Colorado is one of the three states that mails a ballot every voter. So we've been and we've been doing it for longer because we had no excuse absentee and then we have the option to become a permanent mail and voter. And because of that we did adopt standards and Phillips right if you don't have standards if you don't have training, then it's not as secure as it needs to be. So Colorado does have those standards we do have that training. We also require election judges or clerks rather to update that signature so after every election. As Philip pointed out signatures do change over time so one of the things we do is we keep a running record and election judges can go back and review those past records. So all of that are part of what we have in our database that makes our elections in Colorado work. I will say that if you do not have some way of verifying who sent that ballot a system that simply says as long as there is a signature on the signature line is not secure. Because at that point right that's where the stories come from of hey there were a bunch of ballots at the post office someone grabbed the envelopes and turned them in. And if you don't check signatures, that's a huge issue. But in Colorado, we have our processes in place and it is there and as Jennifer pointed out, we established audit standards for both people and for automatic machines that do. And we limit the number that can be accepted. And we verify that those are accurate. Is it possible that someone can forge a signature. Absolutely, so it's not perfect. But it's also very possible for someone to walk into a polling place and say that they are an individual. And while the wonderful idyllic world of I know all my neighbors in a precinct might have once been the case in the United States. And they'll tell you there's lots of places where people don't know the other people that live in the apartment building and the person next to them pulls into their garage. When they get home and they wouldn't they don't even know who lives there. And so that that that idyllic view of the way elections used to be conducted. And we have verification right if this is my brother I know him he's here. I'm related to everybody in the precinct I know all of them. But that's not the reality of American society today. And so we as election officials can't. We have to adjust to changing times, but we have to have standards that are followed up on and if there are improvements we can, we need to adopt those. Are there ways going forward that we may look at different things sure there may be some other biometric that can be used there are other things that may be there at some point in the future, but whether you walk into a polling place or return a ballot. We do need to have some verification process that takes place. So let me just talk a little bit about this issue, which is that some people are asking whether we need national standards in this area. We could even think about going as far as places like India where there's a national agency that takes care of all the voting systems. I want to talk a little bit about national standards. And at the same time whether it's a good thing that we have such a decentralized system, and how much more centralized should it be should it be just at the level of standards, or should it even go further than that. And what are the strengths and weaknesses of this system that we have, which is 3000 counties and maybe 10,000 election agencies in the country. I can weigh in here. So there are sometimes areas that would lend itself to federal standards. I think the health America vote act with guaranteeing provisional ballots, and making sure that we request and need to verify driver's licenses and social security numbers on the front end of voter registration. I think that's a good example of the compromise that was made in 2002 after that contentious election that you were involved in Henry. But as far as national federal elections, it's just way too difficult to be United States, because even in California, voting in Los Angeles is very different than voting in a new county. And so trying to come up with a system that will work for all of us in the different areas that we live, the different ways that we communicate, the way whether we're very rural and we're living close knit in an urban community, it's going to require flexibility. And so it is something that the country should be looking at for certain standards, I would say, but it should not be federalized as well as the decentralized nature does lend itself to this issue of trust that we talked about in the beginning. My voters know me. I can go into my community. I see them in the grocery store. Our kids grew up together. So when I have heard these accusations of vote rigging in the 2020 election and the 2016 election, oftentimes what I hear is, well, we know that we trust you. We know that you did it right. You could prove it to us. I'm not sure about everywhere else in the country, but we have a lot of faith and confidence in you as a community member. So if all of the election officials could cultivate that relationship with their communities, that's how you're going to build trust across the nation. Yeah, and I don't, I've been involved with the National Association of Secretaries of State and a host of other organizations. I don't think you want the federal government trying to micromanage how things work in each community. And I'll give you two really contrasting examples. Colorado, where we mail about to everybody in New Hampshire, where it's really hard to get an absentee ballot normally and everyone votes in person. Both of those states are amongst the nation's leaders in voter participation. And what works in New Hampshire would not work in Colorado and perhaps vice versa. But we have complicated ballot issues in Colorado. We trust our voters to make debt decisions and tax decisions. And so people like to get a ballot, they can review those on ahead of time, whereas some states don't, you don't have complicated ballot issues. I was at the Alaska elections office in the midst of one of their primaries, and they were getting ready to send out ballots, and they had to do it on a particular day, because the community only got mail delivery once a week. And so that's something that most of the rest of us aren't having to deal with because we have roads that go to our towns, you don't have to get it into the weekly plane that goes there. And so I want to get people in here, by the way, because he's been trying to get in as well. Okay, so, but that's, so there are some minimum standards that are appropriate. But I will point out, for example, HR one currently, that I think just passed the house would strike down Colorado's mail ballot process. In terms of signature verification and some other issues, it would cause some excessively long delays before you knew results, which as we know, the longer it is before you know results, the more concerned that you get. And so those are some of the things that that make it so I am not interested in the federal government is telling me everything I need to know. But when I look at the voting rights act and help America vote act, there are certainly some appropriate levels for the federal government. So, I'm sorry, so I was going to say I think there's ways in which we're airing too far in the other direction. For example, the election assistance commission is reluctant to even enunciate best practices for use of equipment. Because that's perceived by states is infringing on states rights, even if they don't say you must do this and they just say, here's a really good idea about how to use this equipment and this would be this other way of using it wouldn't be as secure. I hope that we get some federal legislation around auditing and around ensuring the trustworthiness of the paper trail. I mean, I completely agree with everything Wayne said that we need flexibility to run elections in a way that accommodates the logistic restrictions of, you know, the locations in which we run the elections of individual jurisdictions. But that said, we need to make sure that at the end of the day we have elections that we can trust. And that may require so an unsteadying principles at a high level maybe the way to get there rather than micromanaging. How about this question. You may want to also discuss what we've been discussing but are we risking voter suppression in our effort to make elections more perfectly secure. What's the trade off here. We all want to make sure that we have a real democracy where everybody gets a chance to vote. We already know that the disparities are really unconscionable. Don't we have to worry about making them worse. Yeah, I think we absolutely do and I think it would be on wise to say that best adopting national standards for best practices means we have to give up local control or our decentralized model I think both can exist together. You know, in a really good example of that talking about, you know, making sure that we don't disenfranchise voters is it's generally accepted across all 50 states that if a voter comes into vote in person, and their name can't be found in the pull for their information. There's an issue with their information that they'll be issued a provisional ballot and that that will be researched and determine determination made at a later point so I think there are certainly ways that we can continue to put voters to ensure. And I'll say it people cringe when I say easy access but I think we need to make it easy to vote. I don't think that we have to sacrifice that for better security for audit ability for trustworthiness. We certainly have really good examples of entire states and jurisdictions across the country who to do both really really well. I want to ask a big question here, which is fill usefully made the distinction between being trusted and being trustworthy and argued that in fact he's not sure that the systems right now are as trustworthy as they might be and we have to improve them. On the other hand, trust is a complicated thing and it's not just a function of trustworthiness of the system. It's also as others have pointed out like me. It's a function of the trustworthiness of the people involved. My question is, what's the right mixture of things that we've got to have here in order to increase trust. I trust Kami. Obviously, she just looks so trustworthy. And I frankly don't care that much about the procedures because they're too complicated. And so, maybe that's enough. I am here since you invoked my name. I, when I, when I say that my community trust me, I've run 22 elections here. I, and I do it with that concept of evidence based election that's a new language that I'm using thanks to Dr. Stark and others, but that's, that was the idea all along is, you don't have to trust me, let me show you. Usually the people who are the most vocal of my community that are concerned about whether or not the election is going to be conducted properly. The first thing I do is invite them in. Come on down, use my process, be a poll worker, help me count on election night, come and help me process absentee ballots behind the scenes. And that is how you cultivate trust over time. So my community, hopefully the majority of them think that I'm trustworthy because I've proven to them over time that the elections have been conducted properly by showing them through evidence and then eventually they build that, that relationship to where then they might not have to check the evidence that anyone's new in the community or anyone outside of the community. This questioning why there's only a 14 to vote difference and did we actually read the election here and in your county. I can show them that we didn't. So these factors interact. Phil, what's your thought. Well, I think that the gold standard would be to for elections to provide public evidence that justifies trust. We shouldn't have to trust individuals in to in order to have trust in the outcome of the election. I think I should mention at least the existence of end to end cryptographically verifiable voting systems which I think are not yet really ready for prime time. Generally, there haven't been found to be terribly usable but they do provide another way of making an end run around the trustworthiness of the system to have some trust in the result. I think you exactly the same kinds of guarantees that a paper based system would but they're very similar. So one thing I think it's important also to mention is that transparency doesn't necessarily inspire trust and radical transparency isn't needed to justify trust that there are key things that one needs to know at various steps along the way. So I think that the evidence that the paper trail was really kept secure. How do you do that. Well, you have two person chain of custody rules and maybe a video camera on the cage where the ballots are kept. You have appropriate use of seals etc and you document it all and you make all of that available to the public. That doesn't mean that that a member of the public has to accompany the ballots for every stage of the process. I think that the Cami piloted very recently is a way of convincing the public that the electronic vote records that are used as part of the audit as sort of auxiliary data for the audit are and do indeed reproduce the outcome of the election and are indeed the ones that were used in the audit. Without revealing the an entire cast vote record like the whole list of selections that any individual made because there's a possibility that revealing that could compromise voter privacy. So she used a novel cryptographic approach to doing that that may that that again means that anyone who wants to check the audit can check can check it without necessarily having access to all of the underlying data. We don't need radical transparency to have enough information to justify a trust. So we're going to go to Wayne in a minute but let me just first say that I think one of the goals here might be to involve as many people in the process so that if you were really trying to do something to manipulate it. There might be at least one of those people who would speak out and say, I was approached and asked to do something that I really can't do because it's not right. We would have a human who would like testify as to what the difficulties were. Wayne, your thoughts. Yeah, so I wanted to follow up first. Phillips right. Absolutely. The EAC should not be afraid to tell people what best practices are. We need that certainly we've had Homeland Security do that in terms of a number of security issues we need the EAC to do that. I am not opposed and I support them providing that information. I just don't want the mandate. You asked a question though about vote suppression that I think is really important. There is an impact with respect to vote suppression if people don't trust the election system. So one of the critical reasons why we're having this discussion about evidence based elections is we want people to have confidence in the elections. They are more likely to vote. And the easiest way to suppress somebody from voting in this day and age is to tell them their vote doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how you vote it's it's already been determined what's going to happen. And so we have to have processes that provide things and so in response to your question. I would say that not providing election security is actually what suppresses votes, because people are less likely to vote if they don't think their votes can account. Jennifer we're going to end after hearing from you and what are your thoughts to end us. Okay, I love that you brought up. This is a citizen based process, and I think you're absolutely right. I think when we have citizens and we saw this sort of remarkable recruitment effort this year, who are willing to step up and whether they're hoping in a central count facility, working and as a poll worker administering voting in person. Those are those hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the credibility and the reliability of the process is at 100% perfect. Because it's a human process, and we're always going to have issues or errors. That's why we need some standards around audits, but I certainly would echo what you said and and the other panelists that people are concerned if they legitimately feel like things aren't running the way they need to be step up and volunteer step up and help. This has really been a terrific panel I wish we had more time. It's partly I'm an election group groupie and I love this kind of discussion and I think it's extraordinarily important. And I love the way you ended there, General I think the idea is that this is about people getting involved seen it up close, recognizing that in fact, it is a process where people are trying to be as careful as they possibly can be. And that will create more trust in elections, and hopefully more trustworthiness as bill would hope for. So thank you everybody let me thank Kami foot Jennifer moral Phil Stark, and Wayne Williams. Thanks so much. I want to thank Janet Napolitano and her Center for security and politics, which has had just an absolutely terrific set of panels which really have run the full gamut of what the is going on in elections in America right now and actually in the world because the first panel did that as well. And thanks to the audience for tuning in. Thank you for being here. A great set of questions you put forth. And then we just finally say there will be a recording of this event, and the others included in this symposium and prior events sponsored by the Center for security and politics, and they'll be available at www dot uc TV slash public dash policy. So that's www dot uc TV dot TV slash public dash policy. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks to our panelists. Thanks to Janet Napolitano Center. Thanks for all the great work you're doing. And thank you for trying to make, and helping to make elections more secure in America. Thank you. Thank you all. Great panel.