Technologygy and the center for justice to welcome you to what i consider to be a very timely and very important symposium. At these outset, i want to thank all the participants who got an incredible array of speakers participating in the form. I want to thank the guests that have taken the time to join us this morning, and i also want to reach out and say thank you to cspan for covering something that i think all of us, regardless of th whether republ, democrat, independent think it is critically important. Its an disputed people have been hacking into the elections for a long time. The evidence is indisputable. We can start with 2016, but i think that we will look back before that we might havese seed there were some people playing around inpe that arena even befe that time. So, when we decided to get together for these organizations to pull together a symposium to deal with how to make the 2020 election more secure so we are grateful they can join us this morning. Some of you in the audience might remember i talked to colleagues from the school and asked them how old they were 2001 on 9 11 most of them were in grade school and a couple of high school at the time i reminded them that it was called to the white housthe white housn the opportunity to set up the department of Homeland Security and as i look back and reflect on the time. They would attack us and attack our citizens and within a couple of months or a year or so we decided it better start paying attention to the digital attacks but this is now 2003. With Digital Tools and minimal sophistication was what we are dealing with today and clearly the frequency has been expanded exponentially. So thinking back about those days, and i think about trying to deal with physical and Cyber Attacks, and i think to myself, and this is my opinion and i share it with you i hope that you agree it is one of thes reasons behind the forum its potential to as harmful and painful to deal with the attacks of those days and is potentially harmful to the citizens and economy as terrorists, physical or Cyber Attacks would be in my judgment nothing has a greater potential to undermine for we are as a free people in Cyber Threats to democracy in a free and Fair Elections by creating doubt and uncertainty to the legitimacy of the political process and create chaos which we see today even that divides the political leaders. Is to destabilize the governmental institutions and im afraid we have to admit they are succeeding. Truth and civility in the very foundation of the Constitutional Government are the primary victims of the abuse and misuse of social media. Lets be very clear we focus a lot on the foreign influence and there certainly is a there will be some discussion about that but lets not underestimate the rule of the domestic cyber activity as well perhaps not to destabilize the process is to promote the political candidacy no matter the goal. The digital son is never going to set. Its justte going to get hottern the hyper connected world the challenges associated with Cyber Threats to the institutions of governmentf continue to grow ad expand so its forgot reason they said lets look at vulnerabilities in the electoral process endquotes to give look at the impact of social media on the process itself. Without further ado i want to introduce my friend and colleague. [applause] it is a pleasure to bee here today. I want to thank you all and welcome you to the audience. One thing thats important to remember because we are going to be talking about Election Security and about the media and money and data as a part of the undercurrent. No one here is a paid speaker or was charged emissions. No sponsor is doing this and pursuant to the grand. This is because the group of entities and individuals like you all here recognize the importance of securing the elections and the threat that come from these aspects we are going to talk about today. When we talk about politics its very easy to get personal. It is incredibly interdisciplinary and mixed in terms of the backgrounds from the speakers that have come here today. We are looking forward to working towards problem solving with youou all. I dont want to take very much time but i want to remind everybody as we frame the questions and responses and we have a great opportunity for audience participation and we want to hear from you. This is an Incredible Group of people so again remember this isnt about my politics or your politics. Its about saving democracy so lets work tmuch work to do thar and without further ado i want to turn over to my colleague whos one of the leading data scientists in the country. [applause] a personal thanks to you and the governors for your investments in bringing us here today. We are here to wrestle with a critical challenge. As i mentioned im the director of the institute for computational basis i was. We support him. If data and Computational Research at penn state and we alsopo support the rmhighperformance computing system and events such as this. The mission of the institute is to bring Interdisciplinary Research of scientific importance and advance the goal. We do that with departments all across the university. We are jointly hiring with departments such as astrophysics and engineering and such as political science, psychology, and more. And one of these intellectually intelligent and interdisciplinary scholars. The institutes culture is to bring together a diversity of experts through many disciplines professional perspectives and backgrounds in that group today. Its our tendency to limit ourselves to consideration of the facts in front of us and consider the image. This was purported to be the fire in a single day in australia. This was terrifying to me until i found out that this wasnt, it is still horrendous but thats a different story. No single expert can take on securing elections today. Its not simply a Technology Issue or a policy issue. Its an interdisciplinary problem requiring collaboration from experts in all of the specialties and more. Because elections are at the heart of the functional democracy, it is imperative that we investigate this from a multitude of perspectives bringing the best minds to bear. The Election Security is an interdisciplinary challenge but its also a data science challenge. Doubt is at the core before the vote is cast. The readily available personal and Demographic Data creates opportunitieste to provide tailored messages, micro targeting select groups through social media. While this can be a boon to business, the data mining has been readily used to spread disinformation across the electorate. Once elections take place, each vote is a crucial data point in determining the leadership of the country. How they are tabulated, how they are analyzed and communicated without bias these are important aspects of the process that must be secure. That will lead to action thank you for bringing us together. [applause] and the Brennan Center the direction of the mess the director of the program. Welcome. Thank you and thank you to all the groups partnering at the Brennan Center it is an interesting and informative conversation. I have been asked to present an overview of some of the Biggest Challenges facing American Election infrastructure. I will discuss whether or not insurmountable challenges and what we can do in the long term after 2020 to start making differenton changes to secure election infrastructure. It isnt fair but ill use iowa and the caucuses as an introduction. [laughter] i was a little bit worried about nevada but i did have to overhaul my slides there wasnt too many big disasters. But the reason why i think its not fair to use iowa before i do itiran there was no cyberattack on the infrastructure they were using as far as wes know. Of course the caucuses were run by the democrats they are not run by professional Election Officials by the states or counties as the primary czar as the general election. But there were some importanter questions going into 2020. The first is that vendors are a point of vulnerability in elections. Up on capitol hill with election infrastructure and security they talk about election official officials, states, counties, but much is supported by private vendors. They touched nearly aspect of our elections. So there are three big manufacturers of Voting Machines and they control 90 percent of the market but there are certainly hundreds of Additional Companies that maintain and program these machines and vote maintain the database for those were eligible to vote and other essential functions for our elections but yet unlike other vendors and other sectors that have been deemed critical like dams or energy or defense there are no federallas regulations in fact there has been very little federal oversight of thesend vendors so what this means we dont even have a full picture that are looking on the manufacturer we dont know what kind of screening they do we dont know who owns the maryland learned the past couple of years that vendor for the Voter Registration systems was owned by rush oligarch we dont know the supply chain practices or what kind of internal cybersecurity practices they enforce. So Election Officials can know what type of security practices they put in place in their offices but they really dont know when they are dealing with vendors to purchase product for services what they are doing. They can ask in a can trust but they really cant know. We wont get that problem fixed before 2020 but i do think there is bipartisan interest in tackling this problem. It to say this is something they want to address. Lv and we dont need to be despondent with the department of Homeland Security they have all done a lot to secure elections. And for the first time in more than a Decade Congress has provided money to the states to help secure their systems to spot vulnerabilities. And it is a weakness going into 2020 and the solution is to hope for the best. So this is the second question from iowa that a great danger of cyberattacks there are always technical problems but the reporting app in iowa had glitches only some precincts that i wouldnt be talking about iowa today but the failure was systemwide it is the danger of cyberattacks that they could be targeted for systemwide failure. It could be particularly damaging if mike can iowa those in large numbers like Voter Registration databases those that determine eligibility and of course Voting Machines. The answer is to build and redundancies with the electronic pool books if it rs attacked or failed so that you get long lines they cant use a regular ballot and then they are sent away. But to see examples of this then it would be a bigger mess than we saw the iowa caucuses. But of those states that require a paper backup for these electronic pool books that seems like an obvious solution in that its not corrupted in some way and then we have a solution for that of the database to be infiltrated inin some way the other solution is the original ballot we can people go back and check if there is problem with the data that we had unfortunately most dont have the provisional ballots we have had instances in the past where people ran out of provisional p ballots so they have recommended every polling place have three hours worth provisional materials to get through if there is a systemwide attack on the database. Of course voting machine failures themselves can be a problem there are pbl 20 states using electronic Voting Machines and again those emergency paper ballots but many states dont have minimums for emergency paper ballots for that kind of a failure or. Finally the paper backups the voters in iowa voted on the bill if there were reporting apps we really wouldve hadd problems they didnt have a record to go back to people could have trusted you may have lost those votes entirely. Unfortunately we still have states that are using paperless Voting Machines in the United States and this is despite the fact we are near universal agreement we need to get rid of these systems as soon as possible but the good news to drastically reduce the number of paperless machines have gone through 30 million in 2016 to less than 16 million coming up in this election and there is nothing in the battleground states to uset those paperless machines and the 2020 election. One challenge in addition to looking at it to check the software is reporting only half of all states require that before certification and if it is statistically significant so i will wrap up by saying the good news for 2020 is all the things that i talk about are things that could be done in 2020 to get those back up books is very accomplishable with the emergency paper ballots and provisional ballots and as we can get done in time of the november election. [applause] the states are on the front lines of the National Association of state election directors we are fortunate to be joined by the executive director association. [applause] good morning i want to emphasizeth very sad for the kids at home that caucuses are not run by Election Officials not political apart not Political Parties i just want to emphasize that so thank you very much for having me. I thought it would be helpful before we spend all day talking about election and Election Security of how elections work to help you have a more informed discussion. E ofational Association Election directors is a professional association and our members are part of the territories so we have america as samoa and guam and california and texas with everything in between and they are very different the chief election official is secretary of state represented by the National Association of secretary of th state and those 40 stays the election director works for the secretary of state the other 16 are the Election Officials so if you wonder what the director does there are Administrative Professionals implement technologies and run trainings work with local officials and so much more. There are a handful of federal laws that govern elections but when we talkli about security just remember the american with disabilities act because they have the very difficult job to make sure they are secure and accessible for all voters. Of courseti there are other laws but in general elections are run by the state so they are very highly decentralized in administrative structure most administer at the county level but there ar 12 that administer at the township level like new england and michigan and wisconsin that is somewhere between eight and 10000 local jurisdictions in the country depending on how you count every single one is responsible for elections in their jurisdiction. I use wisconsin as an example because 1853 local jurisdictions or 1900 if youre a math person you recognize that is about 20 percent of the local elections in the country many of those are parttime and one third turn over annual leave. Talk about implementing cybersecurity at the global level that so we are working with with trending with the officials who may have other responsibilities who care aldeeply about democracy and we dont want to scare them off cannot do democracy without them they are not here but i will pick on them anyway. They have trainings at the local level with hundreds of ritrainings per year for cybersecurity and election administratio administration, tabletop exercises and have implemented multi factor authentication but it is really hard because eaagain you need to make sure they are not scaringn, people off and running them out of the process. With this designatione in 2017 to take advantage of a lot of different resources working with the department of Homeland Security in very different ways they are also taking advantage of state resources to do a fishing test or a Vulnerability Assessment like those in washington working closely with the National Guard to take advantage of that expertise like amazon and microsoft but other states are doing the same thing and we have states working with colleges and universities taking advantage of the expertise they are seeing that at the local level as well that they have coeges or universities in their jurisdictions relying on that expertise something that we touched on were resources that most of you in this room they are tremendously under resourcedd certainly people appreciate that i like to remind people in 2018 its really hard to procurer state and local government especially dedicated technologies like Voting Machines you just cant go to office depot or staples to buy them off the shelf its dedicated technology and can be difficult to do. Also keep in mind with k procurement Voting Technology procured at the state level you have the buying power of the entire state and other states is done at the local level. And that can be very difficult and t again then you get into theve timeline which you get to that procurement then you have the implementation nobody wants to implement a new Technology Two weeks before an election. You need to have time to educate your voters and poll workers because an election requires all of these different people to workeq together. The thing that i will say to keep in mind going through today the best way to know what is going on with elections as you talk to Election Officials there is between eight and 10000 local jurisdiction i can guarantee youll find a local official willing to talk to you about the things they are doing. The other thing every single one of you has the opportunity to be a part of the process whether as a voter or poll worker to make sure things are going the way they should be is to participate in the process as a voter and a poll worker. If you feel more comfortable in their polling locations because they see their neighbors and they will be there and help your neighbor feel more confident in the process. Finally i will say you also have the opportunity to attend your local testing to see local jurisdictions are testing andnd preparing for an election. I talked to quite a few Election Officials in 2018 and said it anybody attend everybody talks about cybersecurity the answer is almost always know or one or two. Those are my three big ways you can get involved in the election be voter and a poll worker so thank you very much. Enjoy your day. [applause] thank you amy that was very helpful i will go ahead and bring up the panel you can sit in whatever order that works forla you we have our npr correspondent she was covering homelands security when it was just an empty desk with tom ridge sitting ad at. [laughter] weve come a long way we heard amy talk about what election directors do introduce pam next is cdp for technologist working its incredible to give us that infrastructure perspective. Danielle take it away. From the institution of our nation through the Voting Rights act of 1965 i will get no argument voting is the cornerstone of our democracy fromre Frederick Douglass to Elizabeth Cady stanton a herculean struggle as voters but the modern struggle with Voter Suppression and the obstacles to registration now accounts for the insecurity of Voting Technology. This creates failures in a democratic system, functional failureses and security failure. This panel is here to address these failures prick i want to begin talking about voter confidence and democratic failure i will give you any question about helping us understand i the fairness and the accuracy of our elections are in these failures i have listed. Thank you veryl, much we at npr and other organizations have done pulling on voter confidence in the elections and some of the results which i found quite astonishing in part because we actually had pretty good election so far there wasnt much evidence of people tampering with votes or machines breaking down but thats not how the public feels. So 41 percent of the people that we poll do not think the nation is prepared to send one fanned off an attack against our elections. 44 percent think it is very likely that many votes will not be counted. 44 percent iss astonishing and 40 percent think it is likely afford country will tamper with the votes 77 percent think that country spread false informatio information. I wonder about the other 23 percent. [laughter] and then more than half think it is much more difficult to distinguish what is true and what is not. And we did this in january before iowa and before the news last week with the news of russian and tension in the upcoming election. What i found most surprising generally that there was much surprising in the briefings but to me it was the response to the news. We had the president reportedly upset that the assessment was made that russia was working in his favor as director of National Intelligence we had Bernie Sanders c who also was informed his campaign was being held by the russians and felt that edsomebody was leaking this intentionally right before the nevada caucuses for political reasons and just one thing after another everybody is pointing their fingers at each other. As low as the confidence was before when this happened, we have to wonder what it will be Going Forward to make you outline this decline of Public Confidence not the barriers to voting but now the internal actors and candidates leads to misinformation in and of itself. Can i ask yousk to comment on the growing doubts of the validity of elections moving forward cracks what are we doing to combat this are what can be done to address this in the lakes that aba talked about that you could go to a trusted source for your information. But the problem is there is so much information out there. So just to tell you about the media, its very difficult because our job is to find out where there are potential problems. But more needs to be done to make a distinction a few years ago there were so many reports and then they Say Something nefarious is happening so its very important for the media to make those distinctions that isit something nefarious and then its up to the Election Officials to share this information and have a better idea. Now lets talk about the procurement policy. I want you to address what kind of strategies to support election innovation and atcurity because all the solutions require funding for the appropriations bill to be passed and there is Political Capital we had dozens of bills and professional hearings and usually those are strong signals that we can get something done. Unfortunately that did not happen there is a blockade in the senate and it just took so much time and effort to get a small amount of money through that there were unfair expectations how that money could be spent how to be at the state and local level to figure out how much money will come through washington and how they plan budget around that. So my take on this bill that says clearly this is the federal governments fault. And in my opinion it needs to be federal and state and local of all three are notst participating that is not stable election funding. And my belief they did a lot to create a backbone of funding several decades ago but what we see now they have created some pretty significant externalities created by the tranches of funding every ten years into the states. Part of that is the states create their own budgeting streams because routinely i would speak to state legislators to create these opportunities for the counties but we are told the feds will drop money and at the local level is even harder because now we are not getting regular access to federal dollars or to state dollars per i had to recently go into a county in the most rural part of kentucky where the county physical court was about to zero out the elections on the impending clerk i said legally you cannot do that. But i worked on their budget because theyre trying to find water bills for the hospital i said when they are transitioning from a coal based economy so that Funding Source or the tax base that was there is no longer there and they need to be able to have a Funding Source that is routine they can count on a regular basis of the federal government continues to do that every decade it will only intensify as the systems come to the end of a lifecycle at the exact same time that intensifies the need. And thats part of what larry wants to talk about because making it more interoperable so the question i want to talk about with systems is if there is that it knowledge gap, do we have the means and capacity to address that gap along with funding quick. It is a big problem you have fingerpointing with the counties or the federal government and the result is that ultimately congress has to solve that problem. They require the states to match a certainin percentage everybody is waiting for somebody else to fund it but its the poorest counties. We did an analysis in virginia a few years ago before they finally replace their equipmen equipment, and those counties they had the equipment that was breaking down and was the oldest because the wealthier counties could afford it. Actually would cost the federal government less money if they did the early installments with the federal election cycle if they did that ever encourage the states to spend more and the counties to spend more throughout the entire ecosystem of procurement. Would that help to create that it gap . Absolutely. Theres a lot of good workwh on this topic but from my perspective i have 120 county clerks who i can say every single one they are deeply invested and care and immense amount about the sanctity of our elections and democracy. But some of them just dont have the resources. Individuals and i have said this other times but what is nationals security were asked to do that with very limited resources where they are leaving to go to college or larger cities and they are not returning to apply that gap of the it and understanding. I think there is a multi prong approach that is appropriate and one of the best ways is to be out poll workers of every community that are more comfortable with technology and those that have the ability to get specificfi training because as a nation we are facing a workforce gap that could be a workplace where additional dollars canou help at the federal level and that canta take place to help encourage people to come on board and barring that longterm solution programs like the Illinois Program to have a state level small force that can be on the short term basis is a step and then to rotate them around where they can work those benefit arrangements if they are suffering from a tactic to get that initial support. Amy and pam mentioned the security failures. Can you flesh that out to have a good working knowledge of distinction . Somebody said this a long time ago anything can happen byrs accident talking about technology also has a malicious actor. This is a technical problem from election day i talk about electronic pull books they failed somewhere in every federal election but with a cyberattack to be much more deliberate in that we have a situation in los angeles with the information of the registration database. So in fact if you want to look problems we of can have the best ways to look is rare that technical failures has if they were more directed or systemic what would they lookwh like. Could you address the practices to avoid the functional failure for lack of maturity software. I definitely want to start off by saying Election Officials are some to make the contingency arrangements in case something happens not just cybersecurity threats but the Power Outages and a number of things that can go wrong on election day so we need to be prepared this is one avenue of that that we ran into last year that windows seven support would be ending and that was a great surprise over the summer even though that was published years ago so looking further down the road to make sure that as a critical piece of equipmentd software is something that needs to be kept up to date and supported. It is dangerous to have soft one software that no longer has security patches specifically like making sure it is up to date and that it is appropriately configured. I would emphasize what i spoke about in my presentation. Resiliency planning is critical with redundancy to be ready for what to do to have enough backup materials ready to get you through the worstcase scenario with 5 percent voters coming through very often those solutions are lowtech with emergency paper ballots and of course the key thing which is trading the poll workers to make sure they know what to do. I will open this to everyone talking about security failures come identify the greatest threats to Election Security vulnerabilities the role media plays in Public Confidence and we talked about that had a little bit and that election process when we had the hanging chad and what struck me as every single election. Is something different. And then to prepare for everything. And then we have this coronavirus what if something on election day and every single time is something different. And to have a focus on cybersecurity with training and communication and then the adversaries have to make it look like they have the potential to disrupt something. And that the power and they dont actually. Also is the spread of france somewhere in those that are very concerned about that it doesnt takeul much very specific jurisdictions simultaneously. And we dont know if that will happen or how that will happen. Honestly facebook and twitter are the biggest threats that we have. Andwe then to harden the systems with resiliency throughout the entire system. But talk about people have to actually show up and vote to make it work. There is a decrease for the turnout year after year and some of these polls we see a lot of people that just dont believe that their votes are counted appropriately. I was at devcon last summereepe and on thee panel but the moderator asked how many people in the room first how many of you are confident cracks and everybody to the panel raises the hand then they turned to the audience and everybody laughed freckle they thought it was a joke. We are talking about a very limited. Group with their experience and understanding of how elections work but it was disturbing because these are the peoplele interviewed on camera right now and interviewed by the media and i was sitting next to those for Election Security more than anyone else in the state he is confident it will be cast appropriately but i know a lot about my Election Security system and i am confident when i cast my vote it will be counted correctly but yet the general public doesnt have that ease and unfortunately a lot of it is the miscommunication and misinformation going out through social media. Butsi also there are incredibly dedicated journalist out there ive yet to meet a journalist who wasnt trying to help the process but the problem is unfortunately when we tell stories we can tell them that inadvertently pull them back and every time the story comes out. My biggest time for concern will start for one week and then run the first couple of weeks in march because there is such an opportunity for the operation of failures and the Misinformation Campaign with a shortened time. Im noti so confident we have the processes in place to be as resilient in a short period of time going back to 2000. We had several weeks to deliberate to the supreme court. We have a similar situation and if we have these backtoback elections that we dont really have that process to allow for the fbi investigation to take place or another local investigation if there was level of interference we saw what happened in iowa we see what happens now where we dont have 100 percent results reported and i dont know that given the number of candidates in the democratic race is if we could recover quickly we saw candidates drop out immediately after our primary senator klobuchar raised money right after iowa new ads will come out new alliances are formed. Ne if the states just had those races the timetable will be dramatically shortened. But imll not so confident that we can as a nation of states have that coordinated response to recover if there is evidence of malicious interference. The combination whether operational failures or Something Else can result in undermining the trust of elections and particularly as wek. Get even more of a challenge if you look at the polls and the Election Outcomes the losing side is much less trustful and if you add to that social media and domestically and abroad to fuel the fire there is a lot of work we have to do to get ahead of that. As the undergraduate student to help out in regardsga to voting we are curious because you mentioned facebook and twitter they are huge out in my campus for example friends or family members who were in my age range look at twitter and facebook for political content. And then to secure the election and have political opinion. So to identify trusted sources. Depending on what state you live in. Is there secretary of state cracks with the executive bubranch but understanding where that trust if information comes from to also identify someone that you think is appropriate but identify that and let somebody know. There is an instance in kentucky where somebody tweeted they had shredded thousands of absentee ballots for specific party. Thats not k true because obviously somebody tried to put Bad Information out. To identify that and then to doo that but people would repost that to say now there is commentary so we wont take that down even though it was on the saturating that message. So honestly it is understanding the consumer has control in that marketplace to notify twitter and facebook if you truly care about elections you will not take part of thet process. We have to start putting pressure on facebook and twitter and then to say you would do society a favor but i dont think they will do that realistically. [laughter] so as a society we need to put pressure on them as an organization. Hello i have a question. It seems that most of thee problem is those that have shames more dash those that have windows systems. Is it possible to remove those private actors or to downgrade to a system or should we upgrade cracks and then to accept the fact we have to consider the cybersocial engineering platforms and then use a completely different. I think the private sector to the infrastructure that is something that is true and those that are positive examplesec and is actually designing with open Source Software and then to make it more accessible and secure and accountable and microsoft puts the resources behind and to and with that partnership and some jurisdictions are going to them and with that Block Chain Technology and then to have those accessibility means but in such low numbers that its worth considering a little more risk to get those ballots back by email or fax and with the appropriate amount of investment of the new technologies and to share that information across local jurisdictions we can be in a place than how we do that now and with those Security Professionals also procurement experts coming toxp evaluatingec holistically wide is the best technology to use. Its hard to imagine the private sector to be so entwined in our elections. Even los angeles builtlt its own system working with private vendors but its not like they have to have that inhouse expertise. But i do think and i am alluding to this in my talk, we need somebody to help there are so many vendors out there. And then to identify those security risks why should we be able to figure that out cracks and then to have that federal certificationit systems so that we are not relying on the sales people who are interested in selling. That theyy are secure as possible there are ways pre contract with that performance specification that are uniform that you can actually respond to that. And local Election Officials are a lot better be and toused to provide this machine, trust. Trust us. Not only how it works in the vulnerabilities but what their security practices are. And what that protocol is. And know you said its the private sector but with facebook and twitter, i point to last week with the response of the news with the use briefings on russian interference. It was a campaign through those candidates that use their own political purposes. Is also the Public Sector and candidates as well. [inaudible] i will speak to that im also concerned with the census since my time here a few years ago it was obvious those operational benchmarks would not bebv met. So with the massive push that we will complete the process online and then to put additional pressure on volunteers they are behind with partnerships. It looks like there will be additional pressures that have a cascading effect so we are tieing potential for the public to not function it started with the amhealthcare. Gov website failure after failure data breach. These are massive hits that regular people can identify and it sticks with them that we have to show as a government we can do this right and do additional in a way that is accessible to everyone so i hope there wont be any major impact on the census but that attracts we are doing thisa to ourselves as aa coordinated attack is coordinated it will be successful. Around the census, attempts to discourage people from participating in the census. And i do think that again, the media and trusted officials have a responsibility to be out there giving good information about it. Jared two things to the census part. One, it shows you how interconnected elections are with so many varying things and theyre so granular and its hard to actually tell that story. When there is some sort of issue, whether it is an equipment failure, or a website at the county level has been taken over, when it is reported, it is always reported as hey, election system is hacked. With the general public years here is that, i think that is what is skewing some of the numbers when people worry about their vote being cast. When they hear its a website that is just a countywide website, they equate that with voting systems, the thing you cast your ballot on. Because of the inability to anularize stories when it comes to election systems, i think thats pushing some of that narrative. But when it comes to the census i think, i took my political hat off a number of years ago. You cant win elections of still you cannot run elections and still have a party hat on. When it comes to redrawing lines, i do have a comment on that. What i will say is that we often talk about elections being the foundation of democracy. I think it is maps, maps are the foundation of democracy. Updating Gis Technology in states is highly, highly important because we live in a representative democracy. If i can guarantee you are getting the correct ballot face to make sure you were voting for for your actual representatives, then you are being disenfranchised. We have to begin to do more with these ancillary technologies that really play a large role. This is ai think holistic issue. Questions here . Hello. I am with propublica. When maurice, you were talking about the different primaries and how the reliability of those results matters in terms of how candidates the money they receive, i think back to an knoxent a few years ago in county, tennessee, in which the county website that reported these results had gone down. Im just curious your thoughts if results are tallied and kept securely by the state, local and county officials will they still put up results on the website . Especially a 15yearold windows operating system and or create fraudulent results that have dueling winners for a county or federal election, im just wondering, first, do you see this as a potential problem, an area that has not been addressed, beyond talking about Voting Machines . And what can be done about it . It needs more upgrades, or moving to the cloud as a Green Infrastructure that way . Just curious your thoughts. Maurice i am worried about that. It seems like an unfortunately easy way to undermine voter confidence. Abroad, we have seen attacks on things like reporting sites. I think having redundant sites ready to go if there is a andlem with your site, again, i think there is a possibility for those that can onit, to report accurately what those totals are, on the fact that they are unofficial. That where the official sites are, i think all those are of potentially addressing problems that might occur on Election Night with reporting results. I think we even saw this a little bit with iowa. What happened was a mess. It looked really bad. But at the end of the day, it was about reporting the results. They did have paper backup for the votes that they were able to go back to. So some of it is just i think on the media and the reporting, but you sure that we get out Accurate Information. As i said, i do think that it is valuable to have for election offices to have redundant sites if something goes wrong with the sites that they have that go down. Maurice i will address that from a Technology Point of view. I think it would be important to keep in mind how people are actually looking for results on Election Night. Are they just typing in an Election Results insert my state into google . Are they going to social media . Are they going to the election official websites . View, i think that if we can make it easier for machines to find what the Election Results are, it would be easier. So if someone types in what is their election result on google, you know, what are some ways that we can make it easier for google to find those trusted Information Sources with Accurate Information on them . Things like a dot gov domain , as a trusted source of information that is easily identifiable, something that is different from other domains. Webpageschinereadable so that information can be easily parsed and updated. Because i can definitely see a situation where, on Election Night, people are just asking with their voices, who is winning, or who did win, and they have no idea where the information is coming from. Whens the last time you asks alexa, what is the weather . What is the data source for the information . You go okay, its going to be about 32 degrees, i should get a jacket and you move on from the day. We can take a look at what are some ways we can make those trusted sources more readily identifiable and accessible by the tools people are using, assuming that they may not go directly to that source of information. I think that there is more of a push this year to try and get the word out, not only just from the media but also from election dont expect to get the results on Election Nights. That seems to be the message. If there was any good advantage to the, it was to say, this is initial information, you might have to wait days. I think you can talk until you are blue in the face, people are still going to want the results immediately. One problem that i see is that the candidates will, one candidate came out ahead in the gotnning, then when they more official results and somebody else is ahead, if it is a really close election, they are going to use that to try and sow doubt in the results. I am thinking of florida and in 2018, there were huge numbers of absentee ballots that were not counted. It was days, and there were all these President Trump raised this question, why do the results keep changing . What is going on . As though it were a fraud. I think we all just have to be very careful in trying to get the message out, this is the process. I think there will be tons and tons of absentee ballots this year. You know better than i do on that. But [laughter] jared, you have the last comment. Jared it is absolutely a problem. Night returns, as a society, we need to get away from this idea have to have them immediately. Part of that process is that with the controls in place to mitigate risk. In kentucky, we posted Election Results on every single precinct before those results actually go back to the county. So to me that the several it adds a layer of security into the system that says that votes are not being chained at the county level and that we can always go back. Its also giving access to ap and admins to have runners that go around. They actually pulled the results on the doors of the precincts in kentucky and have those up and ready to go. Quite frankly before i have those results. So for me even though on my Election Night deterrence system, it says in big flashing red letters unofficial , results, it is a how many times i say that or its on there are big and bold it is, people still take that as verbatim and the run with it. And they run with that. We know is definitely from election administrator processes, is a human process. There is Human Interaction with this data. Because of that, sometimes a clerk might fail to put absentee numbers of the end of the night. Guess what, when they go back to certify the election, those numbers were grown because of absentee numbers are coming in, and it becomes a breeding ground for disinformation and for that sort of thing. In my last gubernatorial election, i had a governor that did not can immediately based on concede did not immediately based on the fact that our Election Night returns system was showing different things. And he appropriately asked for a recanvas and he improperly allowed that process to play through. Properly conceded the race after those results came back. Thats appropriate. But what happens when the numbers are so skewed that the general public doesnt trust those numbers . Thats a big problem. Pam can i just add one thing . Danielle it will be the last one. [laughter] pam sorry. Larry brought this up a bit in the beginning when he gave his talk, why it is so important to have these audits after the as a matter ofat routine, you do a risklimiting audit, so that people have confidence that those official results, if different from the initial results, are accurate. Danielle i would like to thank pam fessler, lawrence norden, Jared Dearing and Maurice Turner for this conversation about Cyber Security and election system infrastructure. Thank you. [applause] you all. We are having a coffee break now. Stay tuned for the social l engineering discussion. Is coming up. I am going to go ahead and start introducing