Welcome to bdcs last event before election day. I direct the elections podcast of the bipartisan policy center. We knew 20 20 would be exciting but for election nerds like me and those in idthis panel president ial election years are always eventful that we did not expect all this. According to the us elections project , as of this morning co more than 79 million ballots have been classed including 27 million early ballots and 82 million absentee ballots and 39 million absentee ballots outstanding and in some counties and states we are nearing the point when more ballots were cast before election day 2020 and during the entire 2016 Voting Period land it means this will be the First National election when more than half of the balance were cast prior to election day t. This shift occurred during a once in a century pandemic forcing officials to adapt. Election administrators atthe state and local levels deserve all our admiration. Since voting is happening right now and processing is happening right now weve decided to assemble a group of voting experts who have been Election Officials or studying it for their entire careers to discuss what to expect as this unprecedented election season nears its end hopefully read it before i introduce them i ask you please submit question throughout this event either to facebook and youtube in the e Comment Section or on twitter using the hashtag ttc life. Also i invite you to register for an event we will be holding virtually december 15. Ng2020 voting experience and goals for reform cosponsored by the Democracy Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of new york. Youll find more information on bbcs website and with that let me introduce todays panelists. Doctor Lana Atkinson is professor at this Political Science and director of the and y for Democracy Institute of social research at university of new mexico. He internationally recognized expert in the area of election science, methodology, voting rights, Public Opinion and Political Behavior area 80 is a Senior Advisor of elections and in 2013 she was selected by president obama to serve as a nation are on the commission at the bipartisan policy center. Prior to that she was federal Compliance Officer for arizona elections for 11 years. Edgardo cortes is a former virginia commissioner of elections and current security advisor at the Brennan Center for justice. He has served as a general registrar for Fairfax County virginia and finally, chris thomas is a bbc fellow and Current Special advisor to the detroit city clerks area chris also served as commissioner on the president ial commission on administration and was a longtime director for the state of michigan. Thank you to all the panelists weregoing. With that let me jump into my first question and im going to ask edgardo, talking about the titles held by the National Intelligence director and fbi director about interference, what are the biggest risks remaining on election day and in the days that follow . Thanks so much for having me with you today. I think the announcement last week was big news but i think for me one of the biggest part of the news was that the federal government identified an issue and made the public aware of it, maybe election official aware of it quickly which is a big change from where we were four years ago in this process. So i think heading into the election, some risks to the system still. A lot of the issues that we anticipate heading into next week revolve around the technologies as used in polling places, not necessarily that theres foreign threats which there are but i think just keeping those systems running, theres kind unprecedented use area that weve seen slowdowns during early voting and so i think the appropriate backups in place for Election Officials, one area of concern that weve been looking at is postelection and the Election Results. And the need for everybody to kind of be patient as Election Officials work through counting all ofthose bats that have come in already. And not being kind of taken aback that the vote totals change as the night progresses and as the days progress and ballots continue to be counted from this election. Doctor atkinson same question. Early in 2016 we had concerns about interference, and our Voter Registrationdatabases, what are your concerns for this cycle . Im not immensely concerned about that versus just general things going on. I think theres certainly things going on out there, but i think the thing is the difference between being concerned about them and having information is of something really happening and mucking up the system and one thing we can say about our system is the fact that is so fragmented is a wonderful thing for security and our system of electionsis really quite secure. Cant even focus for along time on absentee voting. Is the fact that were going to be doing more absentee voting this year another area of more risk western mark. I think thats a great question and i havent had anyone frame it in quite that way before. I think the question that has come up quite repeatedly is that theres this narrative around voter fraud and that we should trust both by mail or absentee voting and i think that is ill placed and illfounded. So when we talk about the security of the system, for me its a question of does it mean that voters who have collected that way of voting, do they have the opportunity to effectivelytheir voices heard through that channel . We do know that vote by mail has some opportunity for voters to misstep. They can fail to sign the signature blocks. They can return to late which is the two largest reasons for rejection. So there are opportunities for missteps on the part of the voter, not having the ballots be counted but i know in this moment many states have taken on policies either through governors executive orders and directives from secretaries of state and others to make sure that voters have the opportunity to get their ballots in and postmarked by election day. We know many places are in fact allowing for drop boxes and things of that nature though we wont have hopefully as many late ballots but you mentioned theres still outstanding tens of millions of voters have their ballots on their kitchen tables, on their desks who need to make sure that voters read those instructions thoroughly and get the ballots back in. Because for me, that is the real challenge is making sure enthat voters who have mentioned or shown that they want to participate either by registering to vote or buy in g fact requesting about, that they have every opportunity in a Global Pandemic in the midst of a third wave, a third site that were seeing here of getting those ballots back and making sure they are effectively counted. The last part of that is that we also know there are challenges when voters vote to vote in person and are given provisional ballots so we you know theres going to be a confluence there. Weve seen it already in early voting voters that have ballots at home and have decided to go vote in person and are having to vote a g provisional ballot of those will become the ballots that also we will be looking at after election day as we do every election and have for a very longtime. Weve had those procedures and policies in place. Of course candy in just two minutes was able to sum up very successfully all my concerns about the election ctand we will get to all of them in detail and i want to ask thomas you work at the federal level, statelevel and now the local level on elections so what are your biggest concerns about security for the next 7 to 14 days . Really going into the election, security is making short everybody gets help and thats what voters are concerned about right now. Weve got drop boxes across the city of detroit. We have monitors and also reported so the security from that standpoint is to assure voters that the balance that they drop in the dropbox are collected and processed and any tempering will be viewed from these agents. We have this at the voter county board is over 700 workers and thats where ereverything is going to the processed in election day so were, we have that locked down. We have our precincts locked down. We are working with the state and were assured of security in terms of ourstatewide organization system. Its really the issue of security in a broad sense of a kind of intimidation which has is concerned right now. Weve had a ban on guns overturned by the courts. Thats on appeal right now. And there is concern with michigan and capital early in thespring. We hope not to see that. Chris, im going to get with you for one second and i mentioned earlier were seeing historic levels of turnout election day. It may be that up to two thirds of the ballots come in before election day but that still means that upwards of 50 or 60 Million People are likely to turn out on election day and so certainly throughout the early voting process, especially in the first date was on voting across the country be seen long lines. Is that what we shouldexpect to see on tuesday . And we expect to see long lines through this and just the limitationsthat come with voting in person . Im not expecting long lines like were seeing on tv from other states. The question is with the increase in mail ballots, how far would states allow their local Election Officials to increase but if they validated too far then perhaps as her studies have shown over the past several election cycles the lines have generally gotten short. In michigan, there is no allowance for increase but we whave every single precinct open. We have an abundance of workers, where not short in that regard. But i do not anticipate at least in michigan theres going to be any. Obviously with sanitation of the polling booth, and social distancing things will be slow down. But as long as your constituents are not overly invalidated precincts they should be okay and they should not have lines. Doctoratkinson same question. You study lines before so what are you expecting to see in new mexico and around the country . Im expecting to see some lines on election day. Just today iowa as consolidated and closed a lot of precincts for election day and thats going to affect voters though covid will affect voters in some places. Theres always lines on election day and obviously the social distancing is going to impact that as well. But weve seen lines happening in early voting and you know, people hang in those lines and they get processed and they vote. I think for the most part for the vast majority, over 90 percent of voters or more, they are going to go into a voting location and not have any weight or hardly any weight at all but certainly there will be some lines. We have had a huge number of voters vote early in mexico either in person or by mail but theres also a large number of people as tenney mentioned who havent voted yet. Havent got their absentee ballots and that did request it so i dont know if they will be turning it in late or walking in late or not late but by election day. So theres still a lot of outstanding people to vote, either through the mail and theres still going to be a substantial number, much less , a majority of people that have perhaps as much as60 percent of the people voting or more are going to vote, probably more, 70 percent or more voting before election day. Thats a great segue into my next question which is just for tammy and tammy is our expert on absentee voting. Absentee ballots will be the ecstory ofthis election and its not only because of their amount of usage. Its also going to be i think because theres going to be a lot of litigation and theres been a lot of litigation around but can you speak of some of the issues weve been seeing and this is with receiving more than one ballot or getting the wrong ballot or the naked ballotissue , i had to bring it up on a panel like this. What are the things that are likely to be issues this past week and thenpotentially litigated in the week after election day . I think that your spot on, theres going to be quite a bit of litigation around absentee vote by mail ballots as well as provisional ballots, anything that is not determinative or already counted is going to come into question potentially in some places if the y race is close and the races are close. We have a lot of other of course down ticket contests on the ballot or ballots. So part of the challenge we have here is thinking about in this moment around the increased use of vote by mail. Ilmany jurisdictions were caught a little off guard because you have states where traditionally they had singledigit participation in vote by mail whether this is because the voter needed to use an excuse in order to get their ballot mailed to them or whether it was because in that space the culture was just basically to go vote in otperson anyway. And what we saw in the primary season is that many voters were taking the primaries, im sorry, the pandemic very seriously and decided to request their ballots by mail area and local Election Officials were inundated with applications, they were having a hard time getting the ballots out in time. People were using their preexisting policies and materials to satisfy a much larger volume of voters and thats where that practices were adopted, but they had been spent so over the course of the summer weve seen more states and jurisdictions revising the design of their envelopes so its more intuitive as to where a voter needs to find, adopting policies and best practices from center for civic design and some of these other things that when you think about it, it sounds like its really in the weeds and theres a how can i make a difference that we know through studies k that when voters know where and when to sign, when the instructions are easy to understand , they know when they need to have it returned by and when in fact there provided with options in that return we have fewer voters having ballots that are called into question as being potentially rejected. So i think that we will see a lot of that in the days following election day. Just depending again upon how many of these ballots get back early and to alana , we had thousands of voters got their ballots off at the polls election day. They are actually seeing voters bringing them in earlier and so on Election Night for the majority of states, were going to have a lot of the returns on those absentee ballots so i think its important for voters that still have that ballot in hand to know if you get in early you will be part of the first ballots counted. Im going to turn to chris. Michigan had been marking towards more absentee voting over the past couple of years but currently everything there seeing this year due to the pandemic has been much greater and they could ever haveanticipated so what are our localities doing to prepare for this onslaught . So the localities were allowed, that was the big learning curve for everybody. We typically have been handling 25 percent of the vote by mail so we have come experience but we dont have so experience with 60 to 65. Detroit had their largest number of ballots, 81,000 in a primary election with almost no serious contest on. So it was great time to learn and get all the kinks out if you will. So one thing weve learned in this state and a lot of the states ahead of us is the use of these highspeed calculators. We have a very long ballot but weve never been able to use it in the past. They would not work consistently with about but the voting vendors have fixed that so in detroit, we had 18 highspeed and the primaries we increasethat to five. As many cities in our state that have larger populations and that will move things along. Regarding the application process , we are secretary of state issued absentee ballot applications to everybody in the state and those applications were dual applications. Which means you fill that out, get about in the primary and the general election. So we were basically frontloaded in november so when our ballots became available late september, we were pushing now statewide over 2 million ballots that we didnt have to wait for another request to come in. So that has really saved us. Thats the steps towards dropbox as never before in michigan so thats a first. Satellite offices, thats a first. We had those in detroit but not in any other community so we worked ways to make it easier for voters to get on track through the system and also with ballot tracks and voter Information Centers to keep track of whether their ballots came back and thats what we see as an issue for november. Is when voters look to see if their ballot has not been returned and they show up, we put our procedures in place to handle that. To allow them to vote and they will have a call back to the city clerks office, and allowing them to go ahead and vote. Im going to ask order one more question on voting and im going to warn all the other panelists im going to move into in person on election day in a omoment so get ready. I want you to put on your Brennan Center hat. There have been a lot of changes to the voting process this year. Some of them have been done by legislatures, some have been done by courts, undone by other courts andsome undone by other higher courts. My question for you is there is now been several big cases out of the Supreme Court in the Circuit Court around absentee voting and windows ballots received after election day. What is your recommendation to voters who may be concerned therules may be changing now five days before election day, what would you say to somebody holding onto that one of their absentee ballots . Thats a great question and i think at this point the safest thing for voters is to return that ballot in person and to return it prior to the close of polls on election. Ay whatever method your state allows for, chris mentioned the use ofdrop boxes and a lot of states have provided drop boxes for voters. States at minimum allow you to drop off your ballot at the local Election Office in person. So some states are now allowing you to drop off your voted absentee ballot at the polling place on election day so take a look at what your options are and drop it offin person. That way theres no question about whether it gets counted , doesnt get wrapped into these court cases around ballots that are postmarked by election day, whether or not they are counted so its the safest bet really for voters. Thank you for that. Im giving the panelists a couple more seconds and remind our viewers if you have a question and youre watching on her facebook or youtube feed you can ask your questions in the comments and we will try to get to as many as possible. Youre watching another feed, you can go to twitter and q that up with a hashtag dpc live and will get to asmany of these questions as possible. At the polling places it will be different, we knew that we had back in january when we thought everything was going crazy we didnt think the issue of facemasks was going to be a polarizing issue. Tammy, what are Election Officials doing about voting at the polling place . Are they mandating masks . What happens if voters, without merit wearingmasks, what should they be doing . Theres a variety of approaches depending on how the state or Health Department has laid out parameters within a given jurisdiction so we know that there are some states where the governor has issued a directive but left it up to the local counties to roll it out. So it really is a patchwork area i think part of the challenge Election Officials and poll workers are going to have is no matter what it the declared policy will be we will have some individuals who will show up to vote who forgot their facemasks so in that instance all workers are being supplied with extras that they can provide to individuals. Theyre also being advised ofthey can offer things like curbside voting if someone doesnt feel they can come into the polling place but we know there will be some who may want to test the system and who come without a facemask they willrefuse to wear it thats where were having training thats been provided. Some really good training materials that local Election Officials have been able to utilize from the healthy elections. Org which is a stanford an it project. They really talk about how to deescalate that sort of situation where if you have individuals ending in line and because of the social distancing, the lines are going to look long. We wantto focus more on the wait times there but if you have voters that are standing in line and the person 60 away is refusing to wear a mask , how does a poll worker escalate that situation . How do they offer the right Healthy Options to make sure everyone stays safe including the poll workers themselves . The answer in elections is always an asterisk, it depends and this is another one of those situations where we are trying to make sure that the general public and poll workers and Election Officials know that there are quite a few arrows in the quiver how wecan handle the situation to maintain the health and safety of everyone. Similar question, how are you hearing nationally about how Election Officials are planning on dealing with those kind ofsituations at the polls . Its a patchwork like tammy said and it varies a lot bystate. In texas its very clear that from the governor that you dont have to wear a mask, that they cant force people to wear a mask but it is our recommendation. And it varies a lot by state. Here in new mexico its also a recommendation that people wear masks of course for the poll workers its mandated with people in the polling place who are mandated. Was people are Wearing Masks. I have a survey in the field getting back information that most people are Wearing Masks while theyre waiting in line and in the polling place. I think theres good news on that. Im going to stay with you doctor atkinson right now. I think early in the pandemic there was a lot of energy towards trying to find the resources during the pandemic and congress did pass the carrots act which included 400 million for elections but nothing else. And since that time weve seen private philanthropy and really be shortening her foundation stepping up so could you whether or not Election Officials have the resources they need and really maybe just comment on whether or not private philanthropy is thebest way to Fund Elections in this country . Certainly in new mexico weve used a lot of those resources for ppe in the polling places and i think thats whats been going on across the country but we did not get enough red it was for the primary and the general and we could use more. Its helpful to have philanthropic individuals helping us out but i think the best way to fund our election system is through our taxes and through normal governmental needs. We want a level, we dont want to rely on that because its not a reliable way to run your elections. But were sad that its come forth to this particular electionwhich is a very unique election. Its very unusual, normally we dont have a pandemic going on. We should which should change the entire structure so maybe for this particular election those resources were appropriate and helpful and we are all thankful for them. Im going to ask you a similar question riyadh bipartisan policy center, we paid the need for early at 1. 5 billion. The Brennan Center pegged it at 2. 6 billion. So really we were a lot more needs than were met by this for hundred million from the congress and another 500 million or so from private philanthropy do you think Election Officials have everything they need to run this successfully . I think ultimately what next week the election will be successful and Election Officials will get the job done area i think that they certainly could have used more resources, particularly from the federal level. I think elections are run at the local level but those local Election Offices are running elections ctnot just for local offices but for state and federal offices as well riyadh so being a shared responsibility should mean that funding gets shared appropriately to ndarea so the Brennan Center has been pushing for congress to appropriate more funding and i think we will continue to have that pushed Going Forward and there should be, it shouldnt be dependent on there being a pandemic to provide the level of funding necessary to run elections appropriately. There should be a pretty consistent stream of funding at the federal state and local level to ensure that we can run elections the way that they should be run riyadh there are the cornerstone of our democratic process and its kind of a core function of government so we should be funding them appropriately so that people arent having to deal with the challenges we have to talk about today in terms of facing longer wait times or having equipment that doesnt work. All of those things could be greatly helped withthe use of appropriate funding. Tammy i want to turn toyou just to walk us through the polling place experience. Election officials have changed things and theyre not running the same voting so what are the biggest changes were seen on election day, in person voting options for this year . In some states we have legislators and others listen to local Election Officials and allow them to be flexible in serving their electorate. Other state student so in the same way we talk about resources, i think we need to take a moment after this election and reflect on what policies gave the voters the best in thismoment and some of these were things like allowing for the consolidation of polling places. Weve seen all across the country policy arenas, hockey ranks and other places being utilized so nontraditional polling locations being used as well as an expansion of early voting opportunities in places where they either didnt have earlyvoting or they expanded the number of days, number of hours , that sort of thing so voting in person its different this year. Wehave drivethrough voting in Johnson County iowa. We have locations where curbside has been fairly predominant in the south in some places like North Carolina that has become even more expanded. We have nontraditional locations are being used as i mentioned at the coliseum but other, a wide variety of these where Business Leaders have stepped up to offer their facilities so its important that voters are planning to go to the polls on november 3 know to look at what their polling place might be because it might be different. It could be that you dont have just a single place you have to go to or you have a variety of options you can collect some area so these are some of the things we need to kind ofcontemplate. A couple of the other changes that have taken place in this moment have to do with individuals who only working at the polls. We know that traditionally are poll workers have been on the vulnerable age who are very susceptible to this unfortunate pandemic. So we see an influx of younger people and other people whove never got to their community at for workers so in this moment i think its important that we can perhaps all of those have stepped in to assist and i think as voters we need to make sure that that means this might be the first time they work this particular position and to have a little bit of patience as well with your friends, family members and colleagues that happened back t taken and risen to the call but be sure to double check k where youre going to be voting on the third because its going to be really important that you know what youroptions are. Since they probably have changed. Thats a great point tammy obviously and i want to second your kudos for all the people who stood up. I do think that i was certainly among the people who early on was pretty concerned that in person voting was going to be an option because theyre just would not be enough workers and i am happythat i was absolutely wrong about that. People did step up and theres a lot of good groups out there that did a lot of recruiting. Candy mentioned arena voting and it reminds me you wrote an oped about this earlier in the year so just maybe focus on that fora little bit. What makes arenas a really good option especially this year . Arenas are set up with a lot of room, a lot of indoor space so if there are lines out of the elements in the northern tears here , november 3 would be a cold day. So its often the centrality and the policies all available and that you can spread out on every field or platform they have. But it really allows these locations to really process a lot of people. I remember watching kentucky, they did a really nice job and theres another one down by the university of kentucky ot and they had some challenges there just adding Additional Resources riyadh though they have a number of places in terms of processing alarge number of people. Out of the elements, and not relying on small cramped quarters. People particularly now want to be assured that theres plenty of room for them to spread out so i think that the beauty of this is out of necessity of course from innovation. I would hope to see this arena of voting move forward in the future even after the pandemic makes a lotof sense. This has been touched on by a few of our panelists so far and i want to focus a little bit more. Weve been calling this as the sleeper issue of 2020 three and there are a number of people who as we know have requested ballots, absentee ballots. Some days the requested without even realizing it because its a dual app for the primary and now theyre getting absentee ballots they dont want to vote and in many states this leads to a provisional ballot at the polling place so can you walk us through what a provisional ballot is first of all and how that gets counted or not after electionday . A provisional ballot is basically a bail based ballot area theres a question about whether youre able to vote on election day and that could be because of registration issues or the way you dock out in terms of having requesting an absentee ballot. The provisional ballot will let you cast your vote but the determination about whether or not theycount happens after the election so in terms of the process , usually theres some sort of envelope and information involved, a form you have to fill out. When it comes to absentee ballots that have been issued the way that those will be dealt with in the states is they will before counting your provisional ballots it will make sure that there was not an absentee ballot submitted and counted from you. And if there wasnt, then they will count that ballot read one of the things weve done at the Brennan Center this year heading into next week is really pushing states and local Election Offices to have sufficient provisional ballot materialson hand , to have sufficient ballots on hand, to issue provisional ballots and also the materials for issuing them because we are concerned that there will be and weve seen this during early voting in a number of states , because of delays in getting ballots out or delays in receiving them through the poll service where voters get antsy and they havent got in there about so they go in person to cast their votes instead. They have to go through that process so weve been plurging people to have sufficient ballots andmaterials on hand to account for that heading into tuesday. Doctor atkinson, what is usually the case, is this going to be kind ofan unusual situation in 2020 . There always a big deal because its important in the election system and to the voters. Some criticism of the fact that Election Night and when the ballots are counted. In michigan there has been a lot of concerns because michigan is a swing state and its going to be important in the president ial contest and yet only as of this year ken jurisdictions even processes absentee ballots a day before election day. Whats your idea on how counting will work and how longg it will go and something to be concerned about that we wont have the final results right away. To your last question on the results there have been many erelections staff [inaudible] i think that what we are looking at is this is just going to take a little more time but not to the extent that a lot of people think. Ive heard people talking about still counting on thursday. I dont see that unless there has been some type of problem that intervene. We have 10 whole hours to preprocess the monday before elections. It will be passed and signed into law november 5. Its a long process and we are very grateful for those 10 hours. We will open them check the men and we have ballot numbers and act the past that very few states have. We make sure the ballots are set in that we lock them up overnight and the next morning at 7 00 p. M. We begin tabulating them. This will give us a big jump on the day on election day itself. We expect to issue partial results by 8 00 on Election Night so we will have a very large number of ballots already tabulated by the time 8 00 comes around. As i noted earlier it makes all the difference. As you know michigan is run by a municipal 311 of those running the election but they are only seven that are above 25,000. They arent going to have any problems. It maygo not be 10 00 at night n november 4 but thats not the end of the world. The highspeed jurisdiction larger ones they are going to have the latest end up sometime on wednesday maybe some of them will go into wednesday afternoon but i dont think those are unacceptable times. We are not talking about days. A question we have received on twitter from nancy boswell. She talks about Voter Suppression and some of the lines. Are you seeing Voter Suppression nationwide or do we expected on tuesday . I think we certainly have some concerns about some of the scene things we seen in some of the rhetoric especially having people at polling places trying to either block access to or do things that are intimidating to voters. I think they are taking a look at Lessons Learned this election and i think on the front of voter intimidation in some of these other issues i think you have the need to revisit some of the federal legislation that provides protection in the election process given some of the practices we have seen this election will be helpful but i think i enlarge Election Officials are prepared to handle these situations. Theyve been working at the state local and federal level making sure theres appropriate coordination with Law Enforcement and to deal with any issues that come up. I want to stress if people see something they should report it absolutely but they should not be afraid to go to the polls and exercise their right to vote either now during early voting for those states they are still in early Voting Period or on tuesday election day. I want to ask you the same question in a different way. What we are seeing are some very long lines in our country during early voting but what do we know about the effect of long lines on the vote . Long lines always mean some people might get out of line and not dissipate in the process but we also know that people are willing to get in line. People than standing in line for hours and this is why early voting has been so important this year. We extended early voting and people have been taking advantage of all of the early voting because they are concerned about election day are waiting until election day. Iowa this morning closing many precincts with covid. No one knows a lot of people are very uncertain about whats going on and the president ial commission that president obama started was moving people to early voting and thats just been a real success this year. I think that success is going to play out on election day mostly positively and those are certainly instances of voter intimidation that is noter widespread and most people are going to experience, have a good election experience. A another question coming from one of our viewers f Larry Barnett and ill give this one to tammy. What is a safeguard in place to prevent people from voting in different states in the same election . There are a couple of safeguards. One of them is eric which is the electronic legislation Registration Center and eric is a proportion that compares the Voter Registration lists with the Motor Vehicle list with the Social Security death list and a wide variety of other state sets to compare one set of registrations from one place and that has been around for a numbereg of years. I dont know the exact number or the latest count that we have more than half the states are members so thats one way of identifying if people are registered intoif different states. Then they can follow up on it. There are a number of people who are registered in two states and your numbers may potentially its illegal to vote in two different states for an election in a president ial election so there are mechanisms in place where we continue to encourage states to join the eric consortium so we cannot only identify where voters are into places butpl its an import element and tool for states because it identifies eligible. Unregistered voters within your own state. People may be left moved in and got their drivers license but havent registered to vote. Its a tool thats used in that way and those types of tools and policies where the legislature have listened to Election Officials to be able to join consortiums like that put policies in place to service their voters best is important. N i think its a good segue and in this moment where we talk about having that balance between security and access eric is a perfect example. We identified voters as being registered in two places and it reaches out to voters who are eligible but not registered and in this moment we seen states all across the country implement Practical Solutions that they needed to do in order to serve the voters well so allowing voters to drop off the ballot at ara park in Madison Wisconsin to their Election Officials should not be controversial but we know unfortunately there has been more than 300 more cases to try to limit Election Officials ability to service their voters while this moment and its everything from how many drop boxes you can happen if you can have dropoffs and all of these are looked at afterthefact lame hoping voters are paying attention on which Election Officials at the state and local level as well as the federal level have their best interests at heart. We are going to really focus on the policies we have learned we needed for next year so thank you tammy. Another questionha for the viewers. Im sorry the recommendations of the policies and the recommendations those are things that these court cases that come into play and they have issued them as nonpartisan policies. I think we would be well served if more states develop them. Again tammy this is why we have the panel. We are titled logical election policy reporter in logical election policy came out and it seems during a pandemic a lot of it works well for states. We have 10 minutes left so if you want to submit a question theres still time. This is for edgardo talking about election databases and voterut registration databases being hacked. Could impact election day operations at polling places . It certainly could have an impact. We have seen not necessarily hacking but we have seen an increase of use of the system and the system not amiable to handle the use that is getting in the leadup to the election that is cause some failures. It does have the ability to impact operations. On election day itself its a little less impactful. The information at your polling place are electronic or paper pulse information has been downloaded their locally and this is where things like provisional ballots come into play making sure Election Officials are prepared for next week. If its malicious orai unintentional i am in virginia on the registration deadline. There was a Road Construction crew to cut off access to the statewide data center that brought down the on line registration system. Its not a malicious thing but something you have to kind of deal with and be prepared and all of the ones that officials have in place the backups having enough provisional ballot material so they can keep people voting even if their systems go down and for those places that are using ballot marking devices is a primary form of voting. If the machines are working they can still vote people and keep themem open. There is some potential for negative impact with the planning and mitigation strategies and the resiliency planning that Election Officials have been doing that will hopefully offset anything added. Im not going to let you off the hotseat. Iop was thinking about some isss on Election Night where Voting Results reporting systems are causing controversy. My question for you would be how should all americans be looking for information about Election Results on Election Night . I think on Election Night i think the first key for everybody is patience. Chris talked about how they are hoping to push out the results fairly early on in the evening. The process of counting ballots and reporting them out takes a while. Not just in a pandemic situation but it just takes time. I think in terms of sources of information you can go to the state and local web site putting out information about results and they are doing that fritolay throughout the night. As a result they are being updated and tallies are completed at the polling places and reported up. You also have backup. You have entities like the Associated Press where they have a program where they have people stationed at local Election Offices in polling places around the country where they are expecting close races so they can also collect results there where they are reported and publicly posted. They are a lot of different ways to receive the information. One thing i would talk to peoplt about again is Election Results get counted on Election Night are unofficial. The counting the ballots and confirming them keep going after the election and Election Officials have a lot of processes that they go through to make sure not only have they counted all the ballots that can be counted at those reports are accurate. They go back and doublecheck anything thats done in the polling places. We have a number of audits of the results of the election so there are a lot of steps in the process that would get to the final results of the election. We got a question from isaac about when you thought all of the ballots to be counted so i won to give matthew in tammy a chance to weigh in. Dr. Lonna atkeson . The first few days after the election unless the race is close to would be a good idea but even on Election Night i think things could be clearer. Of course we want to be ready to be patient but states like florida and North Carolina, those states have processes in place that should be able to provide all of their absentee ballots on Election Night. Michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania are littlet more iffy so i think depending on what the map looks like a mere zone is another state that is illpreparedhe and they are already counting their ballots. I think we might be surprised that we are going to see something reasonable on Election Night and have some idea of whats happening and a few states that are going to be closed and whether they are in thee ballots are not to make tht difference but even then a few days after the election certainly not more than a week should we have a clear winner. So far i like dr. Lonna atkesons prediction the best. My answer is allied with that in that i was more worried about this when we didnt know if soldiers would be returning their ballots as early as we have been so we will have a lot of t results then on the night f november 3 and we will have a lot that we can look to at that moment. I think its that ned foley discussion around the projection of the winner but i do think the other question of when do we know when all the ballots would be counted so the states with the longest canvas period is a state of california. On they allow 28 days after election date so Election Officials wont have more than likely the official results in california until the end of the month. Those are two very different questions. When do we feel comfortable projecting for the w winner will be and when will those final counts begun. The other piece is in many places if its close it might trigger a recount and we hate to use the r word but its quite possible there would be a recountec triggered. Thats where i think we will fall. Ha it all depends on what the final numbers arent how close they are whether or not we go into recount how much of it gets challenged in the court and all of that will tie into the timeline. We have a minute left. You are the only one of the panelists who is on the ground right now in many of the election jurisdictions so in 15 seconds what is your advice for voters today . At this point avoid the post office. Do not mail your ballot back. Take it to a drop talks, call a clerk and they will come and pick it up but do not use the post office. I want to thank all the panelists for being here today. Chris good luck in detroit and they we want to thank all of the people it joined us today on our various platforms on youtube and as well. Thank you for joining us and we will be back to rehash and relive the experience to 2020 election on december 15 and you can view is on the web site as well. Thank you very much and good luck voting. Florida may be a state that can be called by 10 or 11 00 on Election Night because they count so much of their early voting quickly that we have states like michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania that could be determinative in this election and they have policies that limit how fast or how early they can count their absentee ballots. I think cybersecurity experts are less concerned about the threat to vote counting that they have been in years past and thats a really good thing. Thats because of an increase of paper records that increased coordination among the state and federal government. Theres a lot of reasons to feel good that the security of this election will be better. Representative jim banks a republican from indiana and democratic congressman seth moulton talk about a congressional report on the future the defense task force. Hosted by the hudson institute, this is 45 minutes. Welcome to the hudson is today. Im brian clark a s
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