Transcripts For CSPAN3 House Judiciary Hearing On Securing Elections 20240714

Yesterday, the director of National Intelligence testified that, quote, the greatest challenge we have as a nation is making sure to maintain the integrity of our election system. Closed quote. Excuse me. I agree. Our democracy was founded on a government elected by the people, for the people and free and fair elections. Today our elections, the very core of our democracy, are under attack. Special counsel muellers report in no Uncertain Terms details our Foreign Government attacked our 2016 election is, the russians objections were clear, secure the election of one candidate of president over another and undermining confidence in the sbrintegritief our elections. Theres no evidence that russia affected the actual vote count of our elections but russia did steal thousands of documents from american citizens that it used to influence public opinion. It also accessed voter data and gained other valuable intelligence which it may seek to exploit in the future. In short, as special counsel mueller emphasized, russias attack deserves the attention of every america. Russias attack was not its only incident. As fbi director Christopher Wray warned, make no mistake, the threat keeps escalating and were going to have to up our game to stay ahead of it. Despite concrete evidence confirmed by the heads of our intelligence agencies, President Trump has refused to acknowledge russias attack or outline how he intends to deter future interference. More troubling, there have been reports from multiple senior white house officials, the organization tasked with leading our Election Security efforts, that the white house failed to adequately inform americans about continuing influence efforts and has directly stymied attempts to investigate or discuss the attacks on our elections. We now have evidence that the president of the United States asked a foreign leader to interfere in our next election. The president is not only refusing to defend our elections against foreign attacks but is actively soliciting such interference. That is unacceptable. That puts our nation at great risk. You must not let foreign attacks go unpunished and undeterred and we must make the investments necessary to withstand any future attacks. The Judiciary Committee is tasked with the duty of protecting the right to vote for every american. That includes not just equal Voting Rights and access to the polls, but confidence in the accuracy and security in our elections. We will protect that sacred right. We will not let anyone attempt to undermine our democracy. Todays hearing will help carry out that duty, to ensure that we understand the extent and the scope to our threat to our 2020 elections and to identify appropriate steps for defending against those threats. I am pleased that last week the Senate Approved a bipartisan spending bill to safeguard Voting Systems, but much more needs to be done. U. S. Elections are not built of isolated parts. Existing infrastructure is a vast ecosystem that includes Voter Registration, vote casting, Election Night reporting. Each of those areas are vulnerable to attack. If theres a flaw in one piece of the technology, it can jeopardize the entire process. As jay johnson explained, the integrity of our Election Outcomes on a National Level dances on the head of a pin. Securing our election system requires securing each of its component parts. This begins with ensuring that we can verify all votes through audits to certify that each vote is counted. We must also secure our Voter Registration databases. A report found that in at least 40 states, databases and machines were instituted more than a decade ago. Outdated systems are difficult to maintain, are subject to serious flaws and vulnerables and are vulnerable to attacks from the outside. Our adversaries are agile and advanced. We are too. We must you want the Critical Infrastructure. In addition, nearly all states in territories rely on outside vendors in some capacity. 92 rely on just three vendors. These vendors must be regulated to ensure that all of their products meet minimum Election Security requirements. Finally, state and local officials responsible for administering elections, they must have the resources and training necessary to protect our Voting Systems. We must also develop better tools to share Cyber Security and threat information. In 2016, according to the Intelligence Community, state Election Officials were not sufficiently warned or prepared to handle an attack from a hostile nation state actor. We must ensure that each component piece of our election system is integrated, equipped and ready to handle any attack from any actor. In short, the challenges facing our elections are serious, evolving, and multipronged. There are no easy answers. I know that Ranking Member collins agrees with me that the threat to our elections is a threat to the american republic. I thank mr. Collins for his attention to this issue and i am pleased to say that we selected the witnesses here today. These witnesses will help us understand further the extent and scope of the threats we face and the vulnerables in our systems that must be patched. Their testimony will help guide this committees efforts to ensure the testing of our elections and i thank them for appearing today. Working together, we can protect our Voting Systems going forward. Our democracy depends on it. The Ranking Member has been detained and i will recognize him for his Opening Statement after he arrives. Without objection, all other Opening Statements will be included in the record. I will now introduce todays witnesses. Debra plunkett is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy school for science and international affairs. She previously served as Deputy Director and then director of the National Security agencys information director. She served under both president clinton and president george w. Bush. She received an mba from john hopkins university. Kathy bookvar. As the associations representation on the coordinating council. Previously, she served as Senior Adviser to the government of pennsylvania on election modernization and as chief council for president. She worked for many years as a poll worker and Voting Rights attorney. She received her jd from Washington College of law. Will the gentleman yield . I yield to the gentleman. She was my student. I yield back. I will assume she learned well. Tom burt is the Corporate Vice president of the customer trustee at the microsoft corporation. She works to formulate microsofts security globally including advancing the tech accord and the defending democracy project. Mr. Burt joined microsoft in 1995 and has since held several leadership roles in the Company Including leading the Litigation Group from 1996 to 2007 and more recently leading the Digital Trust team. Prior to joining microsoft, he was a litigation partner at a law firm in seattle. Mr. Burt received a bachelors degree from stanford university. We welcome all of our witnesses and we thank them for participating in todays hearing. If you would please rise, i will begin by swearing you in. And raise your right hands, please. Do you swear or affirm that the testimony youre about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and belief, so help you god. Thank you. Let the show the witnesses answered in the affirmative. Thank you and please be seated. Please note that each of your written statements will be written into the record. To help you stay within the fiveminute time, theres a timing light on your table. You have one minute to conclude your testimony. When the light turns red, it signals your five minutes as expired. Chairman nadler, Ranking Member collins, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. My testimony focuses on potential security vulnerables of our election systems and recommendations to better protect our democratic processes and systems from cyber attacks. We must take bold, divisive and expeditious steps to protect our elections. All known threats must be addressed in order to better ensure secure and trusted elections. Bad actors, whether nation states or lone criminals focus on gaining access to systems that provide the best opportunity to achieve their goals, including influence, destruction, profit, espionage, coercion or just fun and fame. Attackers with make their attempts from across an ocean or from down the street. We must treat Election Security as imperative for safeguarding our democracy. In the United States elections are complex and decentralized. The United States hasover 10,000 election jurisdictions. These jurisdictions vary by technology and processes. Recognizing the variety of election jurisdictions is central to developing and implements strategies to improve election infrastructure and security. While operations can vary significantly, there are fundamental similarities in some infrastructures. Many election systems are built using general Purpose Technology and commercial off the shelf software. This means they are often subject to attacks, it means experts have identified some best practices to mitigate many of the risks. The key is to make sure these solutions are kept up to date. At harvard, a project produced a state and local Election Security playbook which identifies 10 best practices that apply to all elections jurisdictions which ill briefly summarize today. The first is to create a proactive security culture. Most compromises start with human error. A Strong Security culture makes a big difference as to the success of a malicious actor. The second is to treat elections as an interconnected system. Any digital device that touches election processes must be safeguarded. Device Security Management should be centralized and streamlined. The third is to require a paper vote record. It is essential to have a voterverified record to allow votes to be cross checked against electronic results and the record must have a rigorous chain of custody. The fourth is to use audits to show transparency. Auditing should be embedded at points in the process where data, integrity and accuracy are critical. The fifth is to implement Strong Passwords and two factor authentication. Twofactor authentication is one of the best defenses against account compromise. Next is to require controlled access. Isolate and prioritize Sensitive Data and systems so you know which systems should be properly protected. Number eight is to back up data which allows attack detection after an incident. Number nine is to require vendors to make security a priority. Detailed security specifications should be written into documents and venders must be required to notify officials immediately after becoming aware of a breach. And build public trust and prepare for Information Operations. Transparency and open communications will counter Information Operations that seek to cast doubt over the integrity of the election system. In conclusion, election systems are Critical Infrastructure. To protect them, the federal government must provide the guidance and support by allocating resources to upgrade election systems to the highest Security Standards, ensuring Information Exchange between entities is seamless, instituting standards that elections must follow and encouraging a culture of security by keeping the American Public fully informed on malicious actors, behaviors and intentions and the governments efforts to stop them. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important dialogue today. Thank you. Chairman nadler and esteemed members of the committee, thank you so much for your leadership on Election Security. As chief election official of pennsylvania, i have the privilege of working with dedicated Election Officials across the commonwealth in all 67 counties to make sure all of our elections are fair, accessible and secure for all voters. As has been discussed, the issues surrounding Election Administration have become more complex because of security issues. As we know, foreign adversaries are trying to influence our elections. The key to thwarting this effort is to make sure that we are building our cyber walls faster than those that are trying to tear them down. Election security is a race without a finish line and our adversaries are not slowing down. We need to make sure that we are meeting and exceeding those technologies and making sure that we invest at all levels substantial and sustained resources. Alongside the great majority of states, we urged the federal government to provide additional Election Security funding but also infrastructure. And we need to look at this like we look at other ongoing initiatives. We dont do once and done appropriations for other types of security, for health care, for education, we look at these as ongoing investments and thats how we have to look at our elections. Nothing is more important than the security of our democracy. There will be great advances over the last many years as discussed the eisgcc has been helped secure elections and its working to formalize information sharing, communication protocols to make sure that your local and state Election Officials can respond timely to threats. The great thing about eisgcc is it has a wide range of members. We have 29 members, 24 of them are local and state Election Officials but it includes critical federal partners like dhs, nasa and other officials. Other partners are dhs, national guard, center for Internet Security who have been incredibly strong partners making sure that we have risk and vulnerability assessments, shared intelligence, table top exercise and extensive communications. But theres more that we could do. So one of the things that i would love to see the federal government being more involved in is venter oversight, tracking foreign ownership, making sure that were getting background checks, making sure theres a good chain of custody across all voting and election components. We also need to strengthen lines of communication in both directions from federal, state and local. For example, when there are local incidents reported to our federal partners, they need to make sure that they know so we can respond to those incidents. On the pennsylvania landscape, weve had some great successes over the last year and a half that ive been very proud to be a part of. Weve had a very we broke down silos. We knew it was important to have an integrated approach to Election Security and its been incredibly effective. We have an Interagency Work Group that involves it professionals, security, Law Enforcement, Homeland Security, elections and emergency preparedness. We meet regularly and Work Together to make sure that we are working together as a front to make sure we have the most secure and accessible elections in pennsylvania. Weve provided table top exercises and we were the first state in the country to accept dhss offer of free vulnerability assessments to states. One of our big successes has been our transition in pennsylvania to voter verified paper ballot systems. A year ago, we had 50 counties across pennsylvania that had no paper trails. As of this november, there will be 52 counties that will have paper trails. A huge flip. A credit to the county Election Officials for all their work. Im also happy to say that we have a post election Audit Work Group as discussed by the chairman. This is a critical piece of our elections to make sure were auditing and confirming the results of the elections. The right to vote is a fundamental right and every voter must be provided equal access to the polls. Our democracy and bolstering confidence in that democracy is worth every dollar. Thank you very much. Chairman nadler, Ranking Member collins and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the important topic of how emerging technology can contribute to the security of our elections. Im the Corporate Vice president at microsoft. My Team Includes our defending Democracy Program which works to protect democratic elections from cyber attack around the world. We know that skilled and wellfinanced adversaries have and certainly will continue to attack elections in the u. S. And in other countries. All in the per suit of their goal of undermining citizen confidence in democracy. Defending democracy and our elections are important to microsoft. We spent the last year working on what we has a Technology Provider can contribute to this effort and im pleased to inform the committee that this week, we released free, open Source Software Development Kit called election guard. Simply put, election Guard Technology can enable the most secure and trustworthy elections in the history of the United States. How does it do this . When a vote is cast, it is immediately encrypted so it cant be seen or changed. The voter receives a tracking number and when the election is complete, the voter can go on line and check to see, for the first time in history, that their vote was in fact counted and unchanged. Election guard, more than that, also enables anyone voting officials, the media, third party watchdog organizations, to build a verifier application that will let them confirm that the tally is correct and unchanged. All of this can be done without ever decrypting individual votes. Through the use of encryption, a well established technology that can count votes without ever decrypting the underlying data. Election guard is designed to work with many of the Voting Systems in use today, including electronic ballot marking devices or hand marked paper ballots and we have on our road map, making it work with other forms of elections. Weve made this Technology Free and open to everyone. Microsoft is not making my revenue from election guard. Weve been working closely with all the major u. S. Election vendors, encouraging them to build systems with election guard and were excited to report that their response has been enthusiastic. But theres a significant impediment to the adoption of this and other new voting technologies. The complex and outdated federal election machine certification process. This process is more than a decade old and its too slow and too burdensome to allow officials to respond as quickly as needed to our adversaries. Unfortunately this means that new machines using election guard likely will not be certified in time for use in the 2020 national election. This certification process also hinders basic security hygiene. Today if a voting machine is updated with a minor Security Patch from a trusted vendor, it will have to go through a full recertification process. This creates a significant disincentive for Election Officials and vendors to deploy Security Patches leaving our elections vulnerable. Were pleased that the commission is in the process right now of revising these certification rules and we would ask all of you to encourage the commission to adopt soon new rules that enable Rapid Deployment of new Security Technology and basic security hygiene. While we and others in the private sector can contribute advances to secure the vote, theres of course an Important Role for congress. We would agree with the written testimony regarding the urgent need for longterm sustainable funding. This is needed to enable Election Officials to plan ahead, to purchase new equipment rather than letting outdated systems remain inactive and to update staff. We live in a world with agile enemies who are persistent in their efforts to interfere in your democratic process. Our citizens deserve to believe to cast their vote. We believe election guard is Breakthrough Technology that can achieve this goal, but we remain committed to working with government, Civil Society to take even more steps to ensure that every vote is counted and every voter has confidence in our free and fair elections. The stewardship of our democracy requires nothing less. Thank you and i look forward to your questions. Thank you. I thank all the witnesses for their testimony. Well now proceed under the 5minute rule with questions. Ill begin by recognizing myself for five minutes. Id like to focus on one component of our election systems that i find particularly concerning, Voter Registration databases. The Mueller Report concluded that on approximately june 2016, the gru compromised the Computer Network of the Illinois State board of elections and gain access to a database. In this case, the Russian Hackers successfully breached the databases but they failed to alter or to delete voting records. My question to you is, if Russian Hackers had changed voting records including deleting voters from the databases, can you describe the impacts it could have had on the election . If they had altered the databases. It would have been devastating had they altered the databases and altering in this case could have been changing records, it could have been deleting records which would have made it in some cases impossible for voters to vote, to register to vote, voters could have been turned away. It could have inserted voters into the database that could have provided an opportunity for those who shouldnt be voting to vote. It would have been devastating had that happened. So thousands or tens of thousands of voters might have turned up at the polls and turned away because there was no record of their registration. Thats correct. Thousands of nonexistent voters might have voted. Thats correct. Thank you. The bill includes Accountability Measures and requires that funding cannot be used to purchase nonqualified Voting Machines. The senates version is only 250 million. Your written testimony emphasizes the need to replace paperless machines and implement robust post election audits using paper ballots. We saw in 2000 how one countys failure to properly maintain its chads or nonchads held up the entire country. And this could again conceivably hold up the entire countrys election. Now, i understand why some states or counties might not want to spend the money necessary to update their election machinery so they cant be hacked, but i was a stoustou that states are still buying Voting Machines that are electronic that do not have paper trails and vulnerable to hacking. So my question is, aside from the obvious necessity of appropriating money to update our election machinery so that we have hackproof machines that cannot be tampered with from the outside and leave auditable trails, which means paper trails, do you think the federal government should mandate this because after all, the federal elections are premised on accurate counts in every state and county, should we mandate as well as providing the funds for modern Election Technology so that we can be sure that no foreign actor is in fact hacking in fact phonying up our vote and perhaps doing so and leaving no trail that you knew it later. What was me to make a comment about federal and state roles and responsibilities. But heres what i would say, sir, it is incumbent upon every state to institute the appropriate security measures and make sure their technology is their most robust available in order to protect the democracy and their election in votes and i believe theres a role for the federal government in this space that starts with requiring that vendors follow certain Security Standards in the production and delivery and maintenance of the equipment that these states are using. That would standardize, at least, the security of those systems. Everything from, you know, auditing and Database Management to on the back end should something happen to the systems, being able to report on that. Obviously, if the federal government mandated that only proper machines could be made, then new purchases would only be of proper machines. In the five seconds i have left, do any of the witnesses want to comment on whether they think it necessary for the federal government to mandate that existing machines be replaced in time for the election election so we can guarantee an election undictated from moscow or someplace else . We think as the Election Assistance Commission is revising its standards for certification, theres an opportunity there to inject standards for the security of the devices to be certified. And i would caution, though, that we must be careful not to specify specific Technological Solutions because our enemies move very quickly. We need to be quick in response. But it would be an advance in our current state and help us secure our elections. Thank you. I just want to stay that i think youve mentioned a lot of the areas that we need to invest, you talked about Voter Registration systems, you talked about i think you talked about sensors and all kinds of other things, so what i would like to see is that we define a continuum that are critical priorities but allow the states to know best whats the most critical need in their state to decide what the best use of funds are. Thank you very much. My time has expired. The gentleman from colorado. Im interested in the election Guard Technology that you were talking about earlier. And one of the interests i have is that the United States wasnt the only country that russia targeted in the last decade. Its clear that russia tried to impugn the integrity of the brexit vote, the scottish independent vote, theyve been involved in spain with the catalonia independence movement. Will microsoft make election guard available to our allies, foreign countries, or something similar so that we can try to make sure that democracies across the world have elections that are considered by their people to have integrity . Yes, thats absolutely our plan, congressman. As you may note, our account Guard Service which we offer for free to help protect campaigns against being hacked, weve extended that to 26 countries around the world and we tend to do the same with election Guard Technology as well. Its a free, opensource project so any vendor in any country is free to take that technology and build it into election systems. We work to extend our protections to all democracies committed to free and fair elections. Okay. And one of the things im interested in is exactly youve used the word agile a number of times. And im assuming that there is a distinction between hardware and software. Can you explain that . When the chairman talks about updating systems, i think were in large part talking about hardware. I want to make sure that we have hardware thats compatible with whatever the software is that we need to be agile with. Its important that both hardware and software be the most secure, current engineering and theres work to do frankly on both sides of that. But most importantly, for most of these systems. Its the ability to update software. As i mentioned in my written testimony, we Just Announced recently that we are going to provide Free Security updates to windows 7 election voting devices because we discovered that there are many of those devices still in operation around the country even though thats decades Old Technology and its and it reaches its end of life this january for most customers. But because of the importance of securing our vote, we are providing for free those security updates through the end of 2020. The challenge, though, as i mentioned earlier, with current regulations, its actually very difficult for local officials to apply Security Patches to their devices. So we need to work on both the software and hardware side of the equation to ensure that we can bea agile in adopting the best technology. For old folks like me, we believe if its not on paper, its not secure. If you have an opinion on how we convince the American Public that were doing everything we can to make elections credible. How do we convince the American Public that something that we cant see, that exists out there somewhere is just as good as a paper ballot and being able to see something on paper . If i could start off, at least ill claim to be young at heart, congressman, there are two important things we can do to help establish that trust and one, which youve heard about from others which we absolutely endorse at microsoft is the existence of a paper backup at least that can be used in audits. Our Technology Supports an advanced form of risklimiting audits which allows the outcome to be audited and show it wasnt tampered with. And the maintenance of a paper back up so you have that as a resource to go to. If we can get to a world where the election Guard Technology is adopted, that brings in new trust. Voters will now be able to for the very first time see that their vote got counted and wasnt changed. Today im from Washington State. We cant i have no idea whether the ballot i mark was ever actually counted or not. With this technology, voters will know, which should help establish voter trust. And mr. Chairman, i dont even do this, but i wanted to thank you for holding this hearing. I think its beneficial. I think its important for everybody on both sides of the aisle to make sure we have this integrity. So thank you very much. Thank you. The gentle lady from texas. Thank you. Led me had my appreciation for this hearing as well. Let me ask one question from each of you with a yes or no answer. Do you think it is important for there to be governmental involvement and a regulatory structure in review of the technologies as we move toward the Upcoming Elections as quickly as possible . Yes. Yes. And mr. Burt . Yes, i do. Let me ask you with respect to the 2016 election and the russian gru officers compromise, Computer Network of the Illinois State board of elections and gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered voters. The officers were able to steal data of thousands of u. S. Voters before illinois was aware of the hack. If russia had succeeded in all of these efforts, can you explain how attacking voter software can impact an election . Certainly, since the foundation of the voter system begins with the registration databases which validates that a voter is eligible to cast a vote, should that database be altered in any way, whether it be destroyed or deleted or additions made to it, it could jeopardize the ability of a citizen who has the right to vote from voting and would certainly alter the outcome of the election because it would prevent those who should be able to vote from casting their votes. It would undermine the very basis of our democracy. Thats correct. Mr. Burt, youve mentioned the election guard. Were all fascinated by that. Its outstanding technology. But in your marketing to the entire world, im not sure what kind of litmus test youre going to use to determine whether or not it is a democratic government and what is the potential of innocent democratic governments now giving technology of that level of sophistication to be utilized and to hack into the system . What are the protections and the fire walls on your system if by chance you sell it to an enemy . Were actually being quite deliberate and careful about the countries to which we expand our services. But let me be clear about election guard. Its an opensource project that anyone can access and that leads to the security. As people find any flaws or security flaws in the software, it can be updated. Whats important to understand is that this technology is not capable of being used as an offensive weapon. What it does is secure the vote. What it does is ensure that votes are encrypted and cant be changed or altered and it ensures that the vote can be verified and that the count can be properly verified by individual voters and by any third party. To the extent that this technology is deployed even in countries that we would not consider an ally, it means their votes are it doesnt give them the ability to breach or hack into the votes of another country . Thats correct. Let me ask the secretary, what is the importance of having a variety of technologies that states can have access too than the limited number of vendors that we already have in terms of protecting the election process. One of the benefits that we have decentralized systems have their advantages and disadvantages, but having the variety of technology is definitely an advantage because the likelihood of the ability to breach all the different technologies is harder than if you had one uniform across the board. Its key to keep the diversity of our systems. And someone mentioned three. Having us be able to certify or legislation that deals with expanding that opportunity would also enhance the security and safety of elections. Let me youre all lawyers and in the past, election 2016 weve determined that there are a lot of foreign operatives. Do you think its important to have legislation that indicates that if you, an elected official, are approached by a foreign adversary that you need to report that to the fbi . Im asking where across the board. Yes, i do. Yes, i do as well. Certainly. I asked unanimous consent to place into the record hr 253. Can an effective Deceptive Campaign spoofing attacks be deployed through user Search Engine requests. Can you just answer the question, mr. Burt . The time of the gentle lady has expired t. Witnesses may answer the question. Yes, thats possible. The time i agree. All right. Thank you. I yield back. Gentleman from florida. I would like to associate myself with the comments security must be viewed as a bipartisan endeavor for us to make progress and that all voters deserve to have confidence in that process. I must say it was disheartening that the chairman began the hearing by taking a bunch of partisan shots at the president. I dont understand how that is helpful to the work that were doing here. Really, thinking in terms of the value of elections most broadly, i fear that the greatest risk to our democracy may not be hacks or interference with the vote. It may be the efforts by radical democrats to try to impeach a president who was duly election. That seems to undo elections more than hacking. Alass, back alas, back to the work of this committee. Thank you for coauthoring this legislation that requires the head of the department of home l Homeland Security to notify some instruction or hack. My question is really to any of the members of the panel to speak to the utility and importance of real time coordination in the event of an intrusion and how you might see state and local officials working cooperatively and proactively with the federal government in such an endeavor. I would love to take a crack at that. Thank you, congressman. Its critically important that collaboration at the state, local and federal level. And we saw it in pennsylvania last year, in november of 2018s election. We were connecting across the country to other states and to the federal government getting real time information about things that were being seen in other states. We could not only take for example, there were attempts to hack into interruptions in other states. Ip addresses were identified, passed to other states. We then were connected across the state to the 67 counties, could pass along those ip addresses so they could block it proactively before having to it was literally in action collaboration that protected our election. That kind of thing, both before, during and after, is critical in order to make sure that we have the most secure elections possible. If i may, in 2018, under the direction of the director, there was a war room established at the federal level to which Technology Providers, state and local officials were all invited. We participated in that. That was a good step fort. What you suggest is absolutely critical. I agree that the more efficient we can have communication between all federal agencies who are aware of attacks in real time with state and local officials and also leading Technology Providers who stand ready to assist with this effort of protecting our elections, the better it can be. We need to improve and expand on that rapid real time sharing of threat information at the time of the election. And before then. I agree with both. I just also add, its critically important and i think a good role for the government to create the environment where information sharing can happen without restrictions and a smooth and precise and expeditious manner such that everyone who needs the information can get it and its presented in a usable fashion. I would not limit that to state and local and federal as has been stated. Vendors, they are good Threat Intelligence organizations that are doing a great job in uncovering good information that needs to be a part of this dialogue. That is helpful advice, especially when i think about the experiences in florida where hackers masquerade at vendors. They would seem to be an important part of the community. Thats very helpful. I would observe that there seems to be some confusion in florida as to the extent to which any hack could lead to voter manipulation in future elections, not based on changing the tallies of the votes but by potentially manipulating someones name. If someone changed my name on the voter roll, i would have a hard time having my vote counted. This may be a broader question than you are able to answer. Im interested and the think the committee could partner with others on the utility of Block Chain Technology to enhance the security of elections, because in a decentralized ledger, i would think such a manipulation would be less likely. I would seek any comment anyone would have. I appreciate the chairs indulgence. I think theres great theres certainly the opportunity for block chain to be relevant in this space. If we think now about the American Public and their understanding of voting and Voting Systems, we are talking about paper ballots as a backup. Generally, people understand that. Block Chain Technology is very complicated and is untested. I know its being tested in West Virginia, as i understand it. I think theres a possibility. Its not something i think is ready for use for a general or primary election. Thank you, madam chair. I thank the witnesses for your appearance today and for your testimony. The center for American Progress recently reported that, quote, voting on paper is the most hackproof way of conducting elections. You agree with that, do you not . Today, yes, i do. What about you . Absolutely. At least with a paper record, i should say. Mr. Burt . I would say that we actually believe that election guard provides an even more hack proof way of voting. But paper as at least a backup or as primary, because the technology would support either is important to maintaining the security of our elections. Whethn we talk about a paper ballot, were talking about a hand marked paper ballot, is that right . It doesnt necessarily have to be hand marked. But it should be there should be a piece of paper involved. If the paper involved is produced by a touch screen voting machine and that piece of paper also has a barcode along with the races that the voter voted on and this paper that the machine produces with the barcode is given to the voter who can then check it, make sure that it reflects accurately what choices were made by that voter and then that piece of paper is then scanned into a counting machine, which counts not the actual choices made by the voter but the barcode on top, thats the kind of paper ballot that you are talking about . I dont know about the barcode piece. I think i can answer that. For example thats where audits come in. For example, were developing a process in pennsylvania i guess the question that im asking, if its the barcode that is counted and not the box that is identified as the one that was checked by the voter, how does the voter know that the barcode which is counted actually reflects the choices that the voter made . Or does the voter just simply have to depend on the barcode to accurately reflect how can we get around that if were counting the barcode and not counting the hand marked paper ballot . Most systems, whether they are paper or ballot marking device, use some form of mark for the tabulation process, whether its a barcode or timing marks which some of the paper ballots use. Theres basically triggeris into you are able to count the hand marked ballot by hand. Thats what the audit would do, would look at the plain text language it can compare to the tabulation numbers yes, with the hand. The hand marked ballot is the way that produces an auditable trail, but the ballot that is counted by the barcode and is not hand filled out is just simply a further extension of the mechanics of the computerized voting . If i may, congressman, in the context we are talking about the barcode, that paper still shows the specific individual votes, which the voter in a wellrun system, has had an opportunity to verify the check marks in the boxes. Now youve those check marks are not the ones that are counted. Even if its not hand marked but the voter verified those boxes, now you have a paper ballot thats verified that can be used for counting. How does the voter verify the barcode or counting mechanism reflects the choices that the voter made . That is part of the audit process that can be performed by looking at the tally against the audited subset of ballots thats selected for the audit, looking not at the barcode in this case but looking at the boxes that are checked. The audit system provides let me just say this then. Isnt it clear that a hand marked paper ballot that is then fo fed into a counting machine which counts s that tally alon with the other voters and then at the end of the voting process if there is a recount then you can actually count the paper ballot, the hand marked paper ballot by hand and compare that to the tally that was produced by the counting machine, doesnt that provide the most effective way of auditing the results of an election . I would say that its not important whether the ballot was hand marked or marked by a machine as long as the voter gets the opportunity to verify that what they see on the ballot is what they intended before they deposit it in the ballot box. Whether its my hand marking or the machine that checks the box, you have a clear representation of the voter intent. In fact, in a machine checked box, sometimes thats clearer. As you know, with hand marked ballots, there are disputes about what a voter intended with the marking depending on the system. The gentlemans time expired. Theres no way of doing that with an electric i yield back. The time has expired. The gentleman from being north dakota, mr. Armstrong, is recognized. Thank you. If i have time, im going to come back to this. Mr. Burt, in your written testimony you mentioned you talked about future threats. One of those was deep fakes and synthetic media being a future threat. Im an old state party chairman. I understand how in the last ten days of a close election things escalate extremely quickly. Why is this such a threat . What can we do to deal with it on the front end . I have seen some our colleagues, they did one yesterday. I dont know another word to say other than creepy. They look absolutely legitimate. Congressman, thats exactly why its such a threat. We know our adversaries among other things engage in disinformation campaigns in which they attempt to take the extreme positions on social issues relevant to the campaign and he they try to insight conflict among the american electorate. They seek to discredit candidates through their campaign. We should anticipate they are going to become more sophisticated in their efforts. Synthetic media or deep fakes as its called regularly, the technology that enables that, both in terms of audio and video, is advancing rapidly. Usa poi as you point out, its possible with the most advanced technology to really create videos that appear to be entirely realistic. Theres a lot of research thats going into detection technology, how to detect these deep fake videos and show that they are artificial and not real. At the end of the day, the technology to create the videos, because of the way the Artificial Intelligence works, will always be ahead of any detection algorithm. The opportunity for our adversaries to use this technology to try to influence a campaign or an election is very real. Today, as it stands right now, we dont have a great answer to that other than to educate the American Public that its going to be even more important now than it has been in the past that they consume the information that they use to make election decisions from sources they believe are credible. There are a number of services out that try to rank and rate various sources to determine, is this a journalistically credible source or not. In todays world, thats going to become even more important. Thank you. I get criticized for a lot of things i say. I would prefer i not get criticized by people make up that i say. Moving into that, as far as a defense to that as were going forward, if the technology is advancing faster than the detection of it, it probably behooves us as a body and whoever else is doing some of these things to figure out a way, particularly with platforms and things, to have immediate removal and those types of efforts. Would that probably be just as were moving forward and going towards this, there has to be we have to have a way as a congress or as a government or just as an election to be able to deal with these things. Yes. The shortterm, i think using available detection technologies, working with the social media platforms and others to try to identify those that originate from adversaries, which is cyberSecurity Technology, we can deploy, those are going to be the best things we can do for this election cycle. We and others are investing in a number of efforts to try to come up with better ways, both to detect and to identify legitimate sources of video and audio so that over time we will have a better approach to solving this challenge. It is going to be a real challenge for us in the 2020 elections. Going back to the encryption stuff, how does the broader encryption debate potential affect affect encryption . That creates could create a builtin weakness in the balance. How do we balance Law Enforcement and the ability to do that with cybersecurity . This is a broader question that goes beyond the election context. The election context, the encryption we built into election guard would never have a back door. There would be no purpose to have the back door. It would reveal voter specific votes which you dont want to do for a variety of reasons. In the more broader context, this is a very nuanced discussion. There was a recent paper from the Carnegie Institute that i thought was very well done in talking about the broad range of issues relevant to encryption, Law Enforcement access, protection of dissidents, for example, the legitimate uses for encryption, why thats important. One of the things that paper said, which we absolutely endorse, its important to get very specific about the problem you are trying to address and look at that problem and how to properly balance all the competing interests as to that problem. There is no general approach to encryption that doesnt create way too many problems. We need to be very specific, look at those specific things and balance social issues to find the right result. Thats going to be some work we all have to do. The Technology Industry together with government. The time of the gentleman has expired. The gentleman from rhode island. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you to our witnesses for this very useful and important testimony. One of the things that im particularly concerned about is the regulation of vendors. As you are aware, a large percentage i think its 97 of states and territories use vendors in some capacity from the computers they use to access information to the servers that house information, the management of databases that contain information to cast and tally votes, websites and Software Usage displaying information results, to the software that creates ballot design and helps transfer information across systems. Three vendors in particular control over 90 of this process. Over 60 of the American Voters cast ballots owned and operated by a single vendor. Despite the impact of vendors on our system, there seems to be little regulation over vendors that really ensured Election Security. As a result of it, i think we have seen serious issues with vendor security. My first question really is for each of the witnesses, should we consider regulations at the federal level in creating some standards for vendors . If so, why . If not, why not . I absolutely agree that believe that we should. Election systems are a National Security threat. For a National Security threat, that has been the approach of the u. S. Government. It is to develop federal standards. In this case wouit would be fedl Security Standards that run the gamut from how the environment in which the software is developed and ensuring its developed in a secure manner and appropriately protected, straight through to the implementation and maintenance. Then the responsibility for reporting any vulnerabilities that are discovered even after that software and hardware is deployed. I think it is absolutely should be done. I believe its a role for the federal government. I agree. On every level. We have the Election Assistance Commission which does certification. As you probably know, not only has the ac been underfunded, but they also were unable to update their standards, the voluntarily standards for a long time and didnt have a quorum. In pennsylvania, we stepped in and last year when we knew we had to certify more Voting Systems, we created our own more stringent Security Standards, because we didnt want to rely on the outdated ones. It would be more effective if the federal government were having stronger oversight to standards and to oversight of, for example, we talked earlier about the foreign ownership, background checks and making sure theres chain of custody, controls over every component of the voting and election system. To make those standards requirements, not voluntary . Correct. Congressman, if i may add, i think were all in agreement on that. With the one caveat its important the standards not dictate any particular technology or technological solution, because that then sticks the states and local governments with a particular solution that that becomes vulnerable, it would take too much time to change. They need to be generalized so there can be innovation in terms of the Technology Approach that is used to meet those standards. In addition to the establishment of mandatory standards, are there other Things Congress should be thinking about with respect to the role vendors play in our electoral process and the ining at the rit it integrity of our elections . One thing thats one of the future threats that i think the vendors can be playing a more significant role is the risk of ransomware attack. We have seen attacks around the country. Ten in texas alone recently. The risk that our adversaries will use that same malware injected into the Voter Registration devices and basically will show up on the day of the election and the entire database will be locked up and you cant see it, thats a significant risk. Vendors need to work with their customers to help them understand how to establish defenses, how to have and build into the system backups that are offline and do exercises so state and local officials know how to restore those systems very rapidly so theres no interruption in the voting process in the event Everything Else that we do to try to maintain security is unsuccessful. Thank you. I want to thank you, mr. Chairman for holding this really important hearing. Theres nothing more fundamental than protecting the right of the American People to have their voices heard and their votes counted in our elections. This requires strong leadership from everyone at ever level of government. I thank you for conducting there hearing. The gentleman yield back. The gentleman from texas. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Appreciate you being here. I noted that the chairman said basically that he was astounded to fine counse to find count buying machines with no paper trail. Do you remember who mandated that every county or parish in america buy electronic Voting Machines and there was no require for paper trails because that was more expensive . Do you remember who mandated that . No, i do not. I was working for the state and county as a judge. Counties were outraged. Democrats intimidated republicans because of the vote in florida, even though there were fifth graders tested. None of them had trouble with butterfly ballots. People that were trying to vote democrat had a lot of trouble with them. There was outrage. There was demand for electronic voting. The federal government, congressman dated it. It was very, very difficult for counties, many counties to come out of the financial burden that this congress put on them. If some of them have had trouble recovering financially for the poor mandate from this congress, then hopefully they will be forgiven. Mr. Burt, its wonderful that election guard is being provided by microsoft to help secure elections. Does that work as well on apple or mac systems as it does on microsoft operating systems . Yes, congressman. It works on any platform. It doesnt matter what platform. I heard that about here in washington i could have whatever Computer System i wanted. I use microsoft operating system for years. I tell people, i thought microsoft vista was the best thing that ever happened to computers. It screwed up my software. I finally got mad and went and bought an apple. It was a mac. It was the best thing i ever did. Bought dozens since. When i was in congress, i wanted a mac. I got one. Microsoft system is what things are based on here. It screwed up any computer. They said, you just cant have a mac if you are going to communicate with other computers. I understand that your job is security and trust with microsoft. Maybe they havent told you. Is there any back door into election guard that Microsoft Might have in order to fix or deal with some problem in the system . Absolutely not, congressman. As far as you know . Not only as far as i know. But it was my team that did the Engineering Work on this election guard. Im confident there is no back door. The other thing i would say again is, we are making it an open source project. The source code is available today on get hub for anybody to look at. We encourage hackers to try to hack into it so that we can find any security flaws and fix them. One of the problems, since were all very concerned about Election Security, no matter how good your system is, it cant do anything about a county that hires a vendor, as my colleague just was bringing up, and the vendor at the end of our early voting on friday before the election on tuesday takes the 48 flash drives from the 48 precisiopr precincts home and plays with them until election day, your system cant help with that . The election Guard Technology, the way it works, actually provides security and trustworthiness even if you have a vendor or election official who has been compromised or has some malign attempt, because the vote gets encrypted the moment that the voter votes on it. Its protected against any of those kinds of attacks. If its protected against that kind of abuse, then a county may not want to use your system if they need a vendor to take them home and play with them. Im concerned that each of you think it is possible to rig an american election. If thats the case, i just warn you that in president obamas eyes, that would make you a nonserious person, because he said no serious person out there would suggest somehow you could even rig americas elections. I would encourage you, sense traditionally dead people vote nearly 100 democrat, you figure out a way to secure our graveyards so people dont keep turning out and voting in our elections. My time has expired. The gentlemans time expired. The ge gentle lady from washing. Thank you for being here. Its important the information you are giving to us. As i have come to learn more about this issue, i have been quite stunned that the United States is currently the only major democracy without a centralized agency governing cybersecurity. Although we have multiple federal agencies that have some role to play in protecting elections, theres no clear place that a local county thats concerned about lacki ihacking to. I read this report that explains there are single centralized cybersecurity agencies that coordinate National Security in australia, canada and new zealand. It reports in the United States, International Cybersecurity efforts must go through multiple u. S. Agencies, including nsa, dhs and fbi. Im really interested in this idea of centralized and cohesive coordination of our nations cybersecurity to better protect from foreign and domestic threats. Mr. Burt, i want to thank you for your work and say how proud i am that Washington State is microsofts home state and that i have the honor of representing many, many, many microsoft workers as my constituents. I think you have brought up some really you have done some really important work with the election Guard Technology. Im curious i know you just released it. Is it actually in use anywhere yet . Are we using it in washington, i guess is the most relevant question . No. Its not yet in use anywhere. As you say, it just released for public use just in the last few days. We are working with all the major election working with all the election vendors. Theyre all very enthusiastic. Theyre in the process now of evaluating the technology and thinking about how they could build it into new offerings, new devices. We need both the election vendors as well as state and local officials to understand the technology, think about how they can use it to secure their election. Were out actively helping explain and educate that. We do expect that either later this year or certainly in 2020, there will be were working with a number of partners on some at least pilot elections where it will be used for a certain precinct or certain location so we can test the technology, make sure its working as expected. Hopefully in the coming months and certainly by 2020. I was wondering if we were Pilot Testing it in washington. In your testimony, you talked about imposing a culture of cybersecurity, including training. I was struck by the fact that many of the existing Voting Systems were using windows 7. In your testimony in your written statement you talked about that. How do we maybe this say question for you but also for you, how do we make sure that we are providing the support and incentivizing in some way states and local counties to update their technology . We can have the best stuff and we can put it out there, but if people dont continue to update, were going to have this problem. Do either of you have comments on that . Well, i think you heard a number of comments that address that already today from the testimony. I would say, we basically endorse the comments from both of the other witnesses which is, among other things, a set of consistent federal standards on security for election would be useful guidance. You need to have a sustained, durable, longterm funding solution so that state and local agencies are not stuck because of financial considerations with outdated technology. This is just too important to our democracy. We need to make sure that we have the most secure systems possible in every state and local election. Is it just about money . Is it also about peoples fear of how to use technology, not perhaps having their Technology Officers in place . Theres a role really for lots of different pieces of the puzzle here. From everything from we were talking earlier about how it would have been great if the new systems, for example, in pennsylvania that we just certified over the last year, they should it would have been great if they were never made with windows 7 so that there was an earlier sort of prevention measure in place that just involves regulation at the front end. But then i think at the county level and at the state level, and the federal level, to have easier certifications. So when theres the transition and the upgrade of technology, we need to make sure those systems can be in use without being out of play for a while. Theres a lot of different leave e levels of it. You mean made with windows 7 . Things have an operating system within them. What do you mean by that . Thats their operating system base. Some were windows 10. Some werent. They were updated as they were being put out . Correct. There were negotiations in terms of the money piece, there were negotiations with the vendors to make sure they werent going to charge for the upgrade. It would have been better if there was never a need for upgrade because they had been made with windows 10 to begin with. Thank you. I yield back. The gentleman from virginia. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Im grateful to you for holding this hearing today. Its an issue that has been in need of examination for some time. Im hopeful that after todays hearing, we will be able to act on some of the excellent ideas that have been discussed this morning and many others that have been put forward. While the responsibility of carrying out elections is for local and state governments, the federal government does have a Critical Role to play. Its a fact that other countries are trying to interfere in u. S. Elections. Russia most notably. We must remain vigilant to remain foreigned aer ed advers not meddle. Our nation must stay on the cutting edge to ensure our elections stay secure. Its our duty to carry out the mandate and resist all forms of of tyranny that threaten our freedom. It seems like we are moving in two directions. Im curious about real time testing of block chain in West Virginia. West virginia had success in the m midterms in using block chain to allow overseas Service Members to vote. We have not explored directly i think across the country, were closely talking with West Virginia and watching how this goes. I think it did seem that the first run of it was successful. I think like we all know, theres a lot of risks with using untested technology. I think thats going to be something to watch over time. In the meantime, we are affefor an email system im sorry, i lost my voice. Thats going to be used, to allow instead of having to access a website encrypted emails for delivery for the voters. Thats our next Technology Way to protect the vote overseas. Mr. Burt, your technology seems to election guard seems to utilize both ends of the spectrum. You are having a paper ballot backup but exploring open source solutions. Do you still are you researching efforts to replace paper ballots, design and create Additional Software that could replace paper ballots . Are you of the mind you should always have that paper ballot backup . Our view whether its backup or primary, either way election Guard Technology can provide security and end to end verifying. It will work with paper ballots in either way. Our position is that today, its important to have a verified paper ballot backup as a minimum to use for audits and have it available in the worst case so you can do a hand count if necessary. Our Technology Supports that as well. We think its important. If i make comment quickly on block chain, our researchers who look carefully at electionbased technology do not think block chain is a great solution for a nationwide election. We are interested in the West Virginia experiment. We will look at that. It has a specific focus, which is may be useful for, for most part. There are two big problems. Its a distributed ledger. You need a leader, which we have with state and local Election Officials who establish what the rules are for voting and for who is on the ballot and who is not. Theres challenges with Block Chain Technology. Furth furthermore, it would not maintain the degree of security and privacy in each individuals vote that is critical to our national elections. You have been working globally on this effort. Have you seen in other countries any evidence of hackers and whether your work in other countries on those issues has led directly to denying hackers an option to penetrate election inf infrastructu infrastructure . The work we have done globally is with our account Guard Service where we monitor nation state actors attempting to hack into the accounts of candidates or others involved in election processes, including third parties, academics and ngos. What we have seen is that there are attacks in many other countries. We saw it in a number of the ones that chairman nadler referenced in his Opening Statement. We saw it as well in the french president ial election following ours in 2016. This pattern of conduct by the russians, but potentially by other nation states is continuing in multiple different countries. I thank the witnesses. Time of the gentleman has expired. The gentleman from maryland. Thank you. In 2016, Vladimir Putin assessed the russian posture visavis other countries. He realized he could not defeat liberal democracies militarily or economically. He convene d the equivalent of Manhattan Project for electronic subversion of the cyber elections and the social media of democratic countries. From prior hearings i have learned it was a threepronged attack. There was an effort to inject racial propaganda and other eye d delogical poison. There was a direct effort to hack into the dnc, Hillary Clintons emails. Were aware of that and had testimony about that. The third party was to go right to the state boards of elections to try to get into those systems. They got into the illinois Voter Registration base. They were not able to nullify the existence of voters on the database. What might have happened had they been able to do that . How secure are we against that in a similar attack in 2020 . The way it has been described to me is what they did was kind of like if you are a thief and you go around a neighbor and try to figure out which houses have unlocked doors or windows, the easiest to break into. When they are locked you move on to the next. They scanned states, found most of the doors, windows locked and moved on to the next. I think thats why we were successful at not having a worse situation. It could have been as has been discussed previously, it could have been devastating. How secure are the states . How ready are we . People ask me how ready are we. We dont have one system. We have at least 50 systems or 51 systems all over the country. I think we are absolutely in a better place than we were two years ago. I think the designation of elections is Critical Infrastructure was a big start to that. We have a ways to go. Thats why im really interested, congressman, on making sure that we dont focus entirely on Voting Systems. Voting systems are really important. But we need to be funding replacement of Voter Registration systems, intrusion detection systems, making sure counties have cyber protection, passwords, multifactor authentication. Those are just as important as the Voting Systems. We need to recognize that. Would we be safer in protecting our president ial elections, which are the biggest magnet and target for foreign actors, would we be better off if we had one National Popular vote for president or are we better off using the Current Electoral College system where we have a state by state voting and we have to protect all the different systems . Whats most important is that we have the right whatever whichever system we would choose to use, whats most important is that we have the right security protections in place. With the right security protections in place, either would work equally effectively, i believe. Mr. Burt, i was cheered to hear your testimony. Are you telling us that we have a technological fix to the problem of security of the actual Voting Systems themselves . Yes, congressman. We think the election Guard Technology, once its implemented in devices and those devices have been adopted will provide a high degree of security and more importantly will provide this end to end verifiability which will enable individual voters and voting officials to trust the outcome with the ability to have audits as a backup to add a layer of verifiability and trust in the system. It will promote more confidence in the reliability of the results . Yes. It would provide a greater degree of reliability. Voters will see their vote was counted. All of you have emphasized that our electoral integrity is a matter of National Security. If you think about it, why does Vladimir Putin and all the authoritarians and dictators want to destabilize our election . They want to destroy peoples faith and confidence if democracy. They would like everything to be about authoritarian despots who make deals around the world and go and corrupt each others elections and interfere in each others governments. I yield back. The gentleman from pennsylvania. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Burt, thanks for coming in today and thanks for all you are doing to make our elections safe and protecting democracy. I wanted to see if you would like to speak about why microsoft got into the election space and just generally speak if theres anything more you want to elaborate more on election guard . Absolutely. This goes to a number of the questions about how we got to where were at today. We need to keep in mind that our foreigned aer foreign adversaries is a new phenomenon and the process for certifying devices is older. This is something that the Election Community is reacting to in a relatively short period of time. For microsoft, this started in 2016. During the Democratic National convention when our Security Team saw that a group that we call strontium which we know is a Russian Organization operated by the gru, the same group, when we saw that organization registering a bunch of fake microsoft domains, domain names, websites that look like they were microsoft but really were not. Because of the timing, we immediately took action. Ult pat imately went to court. We have been in a battle with that organization over several years in court where every time they register fake domains, we get an order. We take those down and direct all of that traffic to our own sink hole. Were in a constant technological battle with that organization. It started then. As we fast forward over the next year, i had a conversation with our president , my boss, brad smith. We talked about the obligation we have as a company, a Company Based in a democracy, founded in a democracy to help protect however we can those Democratic Institutions and our voting process as a core democratic institution. Thats when we founded our defending Democracy Program, which were going to continue to invest in and advance in coming years. Thank you, mr. Burt. I appreciate all you are doing. With that, i would yield the remainder of my time to my friend and colleague from florida. Thank the gentleman. I have a unanimous consent that what i mentioned earlier be entered in. I know that we all likely have a lot to learn. Mr. Burt, do you view Block Chain Technology as being more applicable to the voter roles and ensuring no manipulation . Would you view the technology as applicable or inapplicable to those two silos of election data separately . I think you do need to ee g evaluate those separately. They are different problem sets. You need to look at the problem set and what you are trying to address. Theres two different problem sets. Offhand, im not sure that it is, because again, you dont really want in the context of a Voter Registration role, you dont want distributed why is that . You want to have someone who has the Decision Making authority about whats a legitimate registration and whats not. In a distributed environment, thats being determined by every other participant in that environment. There may be a way to make block chain applicable to the Voter Registration process to help with this security issue. I want to go back and talk to our experts. I think its probably not the right technological fit. Again, im not asserting it is. Its very interesting to me that it seems to be less susceptible to manipulation because in the event you had the circumstance you described where someone was attempting to manipulate data, instead of us relying on one supervisor of elections, a department of state or even some of these joint task forces that i think we have productively discussed today, you would have potentially thousands of different nodes and capabilities to be able to diagnose that manipulation. My concern now is, if you can essentially flummox a supervisor of elections, you can manipulate voter rolls. Im not certain that in my state there wasnt some manipulation of the voter roles. I dont expect anyone to be an expert on this. We have a lot to learn about it. I just reject the premise that only a piece of paper gives us a sense of a lack of manipulation. I dont disagree with that. If i may the gentlemans time expired. The witness may answer. Thank you. Let me go back and we come back to you and answer the question more specifically about block chain and Voter Registration roles, whether that or some other approach is the best means of securing those roles. The gentleman yields back. Thank you so much, mr. Chairman. Thank you to our witnesses for being here. I am from florida. I represent florida and i do agree with my colleagues statement that every voter, regardless of their party, where they live, deserves to have their vote counted. Thank you very much, mr. Chair, for this timely and important hearing. Mr. Burt, i would like to ask you, have you faced any obstacles at the federal level with implementing election guard . If so, what have they been . We have not faced any obstacles at the federal level to implement election guard. Now that the technology is actually out and available for inspection and deployment. We expect to have continued conversations with a number of representatives, federal government, where we will explain the technology and how it works. I dont anticipate actually any federal level resistance because i think we are aligned with the federal interests, especially those of sisa and others responsible for our Election Security. If you could state again, whats the time lane ine of implementation . The technology is available right now for implementation in devices. The time line is complex. That is a bit of a problem. Its complex for several reasons. The developede the vendors have to determine whether they want to put it in devices. There has to be demand from state and local vendors for the technology, which we think there will be based on our conversations. Once those are available, there has to be funding at state and local level to deploy the new devices that implement the tech nol a technology. Those rules are being updated by the election assistance program. You have all of those pieces that need to come into alignment. Were confident they will. Were confident we will have pilot elections utilizing this technology no later than 2020. The sooner that it can be deployed in order to see our elections, the better. My understanding is that certain of the breaches in the 2016 election, when they were going door to door looking to see which windows and doors are unlocked, were not immediately detected. My question is, what signs should Election Officials be trained to look for on election day to ensure that there are no undetected attacks . The first and most important is to have a baseline of what normal looks like. Every election jurisdiction needs to know what normal operations look like so they can have the appropriate monitoring in place should there be any abnormal activity, whether that be a flow of data that looks unusual, a disruption of data that looks unusual, a login from an unusual someone who should not have access, from an account that should not have access. Knowing what normal is and having that baseline and monitor for abnormal activity is the most important. I would say, every level needs to be trained in this. Starting from technology, the intrusion detection systems should be in every single county in the country and every municipality that runs elections. Thats one of the most critical components for protecting our elections from here forward. I would love to see resources from the federal government to make sure that that happens so we dont have voters in underresourced counties with this. Making sure we have support and training for poll workers to recognize not only signs that are problematic, but knowing about provisional ballots. We havent mentioned provisional ballots once in this hearing. We have a provision that allows when people are not in the voter roles to vote. Sometimes poll workers dont know what to do. If that person is eligible, they should never, ever be turned away. Thank you so much. I yield back, mr. Chair. There are four minutes and 20 seconds left on the vote on the floor. We have a number of votes on the floor. The committee will stand in recess but will reconvene immediately upon cessation of the votes on the floor. I ask the members of the committee, come back as soon as the last vote is cast. The committee stands in recess. As you heard, a break in the house hearing on 2020 Election Security. Members heading over to the House Chamber votes. They have been debating a bill. That bill would among other things stop construction of the border wall. The senate did pass the bill earlier this week. You can watch as those votes are tallies ied on cspan. Our coverage of this hearing will continue at the conclusion of those votes here on cspan3. Our cameras will be active. We will have live coverage when the hearing resumes here on cspan3. While members vote, a discussion about the houses impeachment inquiry efforts. He is a member of the House Oversight committee. Congressman, after Speaker Pelosi announced her impeachment inquiry, you called it a political stunt. Has anything thats come out over the past 48 hours changed your mind about that assessment . Not really. I think that Speaker Pelosi overreacted. An impeachment inquiry is unprecedented. To call for one without having the transcript of the call, hearing from the whistleblower, i think that is a rush to judgment. I think its a disgrace to the constitution. We have the white house memo about the call. We have the whistleblowers complaint. What was your starting on the call, what was your reading of the conversation . Did you think what was said in there was perfect and appropriate . This is donald trump were talking about. He is not mrpolitically correct. I think thats something every american has come to understand and somewhat appreciate. In his conversation with his counterpart in ukraine, i did not see anything wrong. The president asked about a potential act of corruption between the biden family and potentially corrupt ukrainian business. I think the president had every right to ask that question. The democrats say thats collusion with ukraine. We have heard this conversation before with collusion with russia. If the democrats hadnt already cried wolf so many times with respect to President Trump in the past, then i think this complaint might have more credibility with me. Until i see something that strikes me as impeachable, im going to consider this another political stunt. Especially the way it was handled. To call for an impeachment inquiry without having any testimony from anyone its not an impeachment inquiry on the Mueller Report or collusion with russia or anything pertaining to the campaign and Michael Cohen, nothing pertaining to his taxes. This is a new thing that just popped up. They decided, we will just have an impeachment inquiry. A question asked today by usa today. If the ukraine call was perfect, why try to bury it, in what reference to what the whistleblower said to what happened to the phone call memo after the phone call ended. Thats a good question. Thats something that the Oversight Committee or the Judiciary Committee should ask. I think thats fair game. Does it warrant a fullblown impeachment inquiry at this point . I dont think so. Lets take the fact that shes officially called for an impeachment inquiry. Nothing has changed for the past year and a half. Every committee has been trying to investigate President Trump foram a menu of potential crime. I dont think they found anything. Take us to the House Oversight committee, your committee. Whats on the menu in your committee . What are you looking into . What are into and what are your thoughts on that investigation . The menu changes every day. Its a daily special with democrats and with the chairman of the committee. You know, the committee is supposed to look at waste, fraud and abuse in government. Thats something im passionate about why i asked to be on the Oversight Committee when i came to congress three years ago. Its become i hate to quote the president on this but its become a witch hunt. When you bring people like Michael Cohen before the committee, right before they go to jail for lying to congress, i mean, that, in my mind, hurts your credibility a little bit. But i think there are things that the Oversight Committee can look into with respect to this call from ukraine. Such as what . I think, you know, my question is, what was what role was Rudy Giuliani playing . I think its a legitimate question. But also i think its a legitimate question as to what role was the biden family playing in this . Why was hunter biden getting paid from ukraine . Ethics rules are clear that family members are not supposed or anyone from that matter are supposed to lobby foreign agents and you have a severe conflict of interest. I know the democrats are quick to always point out potential conflicts of interest with members of the government staying at the trump hotel. What about the son of the Vice President getting paid by a ukrainian oligarch to do who knows what, at a time when relations with United States and ukraine are somewhat contentious. I think there are a lot of questions that can be asked in oversight. Certainly the democrats have a right to ask some questions about President Trump. But i think the republicans have a lot of questions, too. I know that jim jordan and mark meadows and myself are going to have a lot of questions pertaining to the biden thing. Im going to be open minded and listen. So far i havent seen anything. The president has a right to ask about corruption in his own country and i dont see anything wrong with that. To circle back to the first question. Are you concerned that Rudy Giuliani overstepped his role or he should have not had a role at all here . I dont know. I just my question is what role did Rudy Giuliani have . And, you know, i dont it may not be anything serious, but to me, of everything that ive read about the transcript, the two things that stand out in my mind are, what was Rudy Giulianis role and secondly, why was biden getting paid by ukraine . So i think at the end of the day, the potential for this to backfire on the democrats again is pretty high. And just like the Mueller Report, you know the democrats went all in on the Mueller Report, the Mueller Report came out and it was by all accounts a dud. Then they thought well give plu mueller an opportunity to come before congress and go into greater details about obstruction of justice and again it was a dud. The democrats want to impeach President Trump, this has been their goal since day one, but in my mind and the mind of most kentuckians there have been no impeachable offenses committed. It is just before 7 30 eastern. The house scheduled to be in at 9 00 a. M. Eastern. Our phone lines are open to call in and give us your questions and comments. Scott, seattle washington, independent, thanks for hanging around since our last segment. Go ahead with your question or comment. Where do i begin now . Been hanging on here for hours. You know, politics is one thing and life is another thing, apparently. Its clear that the only trouble you ever hear about in life comes from the politicians. I think its maybe what about this right that we have, cant we assemble as a militia, pick up arms and get rid of rogue governments like the entire 116th congress . How about that . Think about it, because were thinking about it. Are you saying youre thinking about taking up arms against the government . No. We have the right what are you saying . According to the constitution to abolish any branch of government we feel is being abusive or not operating with our consent. Do you understand that . Congressman, ill let you jump in. I think that americans will have a right and have the ability to judge whether this instance or any of the previous instances with respect to the Mueller Report or the president s personal life, the voters are going to have an opportunity to get rid of donald trump in one year. And in my mind to start an impeachment inquiry at this point in his first term, when were clearly in a reelection cycle, its somewhat confusing. Because if theyre confident that donald trump is a terrible president , if theyre confident that hes a corrupt president , then they have the right to make that case over the next 12 months with whomever their nominee is. I think personally its probably going to be elizabeth warren. But most people in washington that i talk to think the president is going to be reelected unless the democrats can impeach him. This is clearly political what theyre doing. I dont think theres a need to try to overthrow the government or anything, but i believe the people have the right to overthrow the president in one year, the right to overthrow congress. Were going to see what happens but i think with the president s legislative accomplishments, with the strong economy, and with the socialist nature that the democrat candidates for president have seemed to embrace, i think donald trump will be reelected unless they can find a Silver Bullet to impeach him, and i dont see anything that happened this week that would relate to that Silver Bullet. Dallas, texas, herman, democrat. Good morning. Good morning. My comment is when ever donald trump is in trouble, and i watched you, the morning show, whatever, his defenders defend him, you know they do the same thing. Its defend and attack. Defend, whether its the senators or the representatives or your callers, his supporters defend and attack. They never its unconditional love. It hurts him because he feels invincible so he keeps crossing lines. And thats the frustrating thing. Then they come back on and when hes in trouble again, they defend and attack. So whats the line youre most worried about . Where has he cross it hed the l and which worries you the most . He crossed the line as a candidate when he flooded his campaign with russians and making deals and stuff that he shouldnt have been making. And throughout his whole presidency hes crossed line after line. What deal do you think he shouldnt have made . He shouldnt have his p shouldnt have had the people in his sons office from russia, talking about making a deal, you know, and he shouldnt have made had the call, you know, that were talking about now, this recent thing that cost the you know, if we had the, you know, the russian thing had if he had not jammed up the congress and had like allowed his people to talk to congress, maybe he wouldnt be in this latest jam. Congressman . You know, i think thats kind of symbolic of some of the democrats mindset in washington, unfortunately. They dont like the president , and they really dont know anything that hes done criminally wrong. They dont have any evidence of any impeachable offenses but they want to get rid of him. I go back to when the republicans were in control of the house and barack obama was president. I wasnt in congress at that time, but our base really disliked obama as much as the democrat base dislikes President Trump. But never at one time did the republicans in congress try to call for an impeachment inquiry. You know, what the republicans tried to do was beat obama at the ballot box and obviously obama won reelection, the republicans continued to, in a constitutional way, challenge obamas policy and initiatives but never once did they abuse the power of the office by trying to call for an impeachment inquiry. So i think that its very unfortunate that were here talking about impeachment officially. I know weve talked about impeachment the last two years but now its been officially called and i think that, you know, the democrats really dont have anything to to impeach him for. About 15 minutes left with congressman james comer of kentucky. Phone lines split as usual. A reminder, the house coming in if at 9 00 a. M. Today. So well be ending our show then. Well take you there for gaveltogavel coverage. Frank in fort lauderdale, florida, republican. Youre next. Thank you. I listen to cspan replay last night of the hearing and i noticed the chairman of the committee, mr. Schiff, he kept mentioning a manufactured dirt to manufacture dirt that was the objective of President Trump. And i thought that was rather prejudicial. I thought the committee should be finding the truth and justice, not to have already made up their mind that its a manufactured thing, which is not true. Now, also, too, what biden did in ukraine was an obstruction of justice, where what trump the conversation with the president of ukraine about reopening the case and trying to find the truth and justice not about anything manufactured. This all went back to 2016, and they charged the Mueller Investigation exonerated President Trump of any collusion with the russians. But does what happen what biden did in 2016 has not been resolved. Thats frank this morning. Congressman . He mentioned adam schiff. I think adam schiff is the least credible member of congress. Adam schiff has had a bad run as chairman of the house intelligence committee. If you go back to tape, he had evidence, he had 100 proof that donald trump colluded with russia and he never produced it. It was made up. Thats a severe loss of credibility to his leadership as chairman of the intelligence committee. So, yeah, i take what adam schiff says with a grain of salt. How do you feel about your chairman, Elijah Cummings . Hes chairman of the Oversight Committee. I think Elijah Cummings is a good person. I think that he wants to do the right thing. I think nancy pelosi, deep down, wants to do the right thing. The problem is these new progressives that the democrats have elected are pulling them so far to the left that they cant stop them. And the new progressives are getting so much media coverage, theyre enjoying so much popularity from the base that they have caused pelosi and cummings to do irrational things that if you look at their career they would never have done before. I never agreed policy wise with anything that pelosi or cummings has done, but at the end of the day, they are way over bound in what they have a right, a constitutional right as a member of congress to say about President Trump and to call for. We can have hearings, im all about having hearings but until you get more evidence, until you know who the whistleblower was, what their motives were, is that whistleblower, in fact, credible, i cant imagine calling for an impeachment inquiry. Brenda, st. Stephens, south carolina, democrat. Good morning. Good morning, i have one question that i would like to ask the congressman. I feel like everyone has heard the tape, i saw the hearing yesterday, and every time something comes up that donald trump does wrong, its the democrats, its the democrats, its the democrats. And obama, obama, obama. Biden, biden. The situation with biden and his son was explained over and over, but they take sound bites of the money exchange, whatever, and dont tell the whole story. Now as far as the president , its not about democrats not liking donald trump, its the thing that donald trump, he shoots himself in the foot every time. One day after the Mueller Report and the hearing he goes and try and make a deal to get more dirt on another opponent . I mean, its wrong. Its not a matter of whether we like him or not, were sick and tired of him doing things that he thinks he can get away with because yall republicans dont hold him accountable. Congressman . The basis of the impeachment inquiry is President Trump was trying to get dirt on joe biden. The democrats have been obsessed with trying to get dirt on donald trump over the past year. I mean, their you know, thats a hypocritical things to say. What the democrats were saying yesterday was he was using the powers of the presidency to do that. The president asked his ukrainian counter part, you might ought to look in to see if theres anything corrupt that took place with former Vice President s son and this corrupt ukrainian oligarch and his company. The president has every right to ask that, i want the president to ask that, to a country we give foreign aid to. Im not crazy about giving foreign aid to any country but israel but we do. If the president is not the correct person to ask about that potential conflict of interest then who is . Is it the Intelligence Community . We have a real problem with the Intelligence Community right now. For whatever reason, i think that theres a bad disconnect between the president , his administration, and with the Intelligence Community. And i know that both sides have said a lot of bad things, not just james comey and clapper but a lot of former employees come on television, on fox, cnn, msnbc, constantly criticize the president , the president is constantly criticizing them. To me thats a serious problem whos responsible for that problem . I dont know whos responsible for that. But i can understand President Trumps distrust right now because in his eyes and my eyes there was no reason to launch the russia investigation to begin with. If were going to investigate more things on President Trump in the Oversight Committee, id like to investigate also what was the genesis of the russia investigation, was it the steele dossi dossier . That was a democrat Opposition Research firm trying to dig up dirt on donald trump, the same thing that the caller said from trump on biden. Not many people in washington, in the wrong party, ever thought biden would be the democrat nominee. We always thought it would be elizabeth warren, kamala harris, maybe even bernie sanders. So the the president had the right, in my mind, to ask his ukrainian counter part about potential corruption between United States and ukraine. Heres how frank in long island puts it, the democrats are putting our Intelligence Agency in danger in the democrats question to discredit the president , theyre weakening the office in their ability to discuss business and policy with foreign leaders. Frank in long island texting us this morning. You can send us a text or give us a call like mary, republican. The democrats hate donald trump because donald trump stands up and fight back. And for years the democrats is used to doing anything and saying anything and had branded the republicans as racists all down through the years and they rather retire they just lay down, roll over and take it because they know that most people that vote democrat is not gonna go and read and go through history and find out the truth about the democrats. Okay. And another thing, they cant tell us about his children thats working there in the white house getting paid. They are not getting paid. And donald trump do not take his pay. And the pay they say he has to take, he donates that to charity. What do you think about mary . I like her attitude. You know, the thing that i will say with respect to this investigation, i think she alieualie eluded to that, they called for so many investigations on the president , how many times can you cry wolf . It seems they built up so much hope among their base that the Mueller Report would be the Silver Bullet that would lead to impeachment, and when that came out and the testimony was such a dud, i think theyve just thrown another hail mary here with respect to this ukrainian phone call. The ukrainian phone call is public record. Everyone that ive consulted with, they dont see a problem with it. You can argue well, was it was it the perfect call between the United States and ukraine . Probably not. But the American People didnt want a perfect politically correct president , they wanted someone outside the box to disrupt washington d. C. , to drain the swamp and thats what we have, he asked the question about corruption. Lisa in south wick, massachusetts, independent, good morning. Good morning. I watched the hearings yesterday and i have to say weve all worked for people we dont like. And we still do our jobs. But, you know, watching that hearing yesterday, how they treated the acting dni yesterday was appalling. The fact is, as it relates to trump in this entire two and a half years, almost three years, this is nothing short of work place harassment. If this was us working in our normal course of life and business, any organization, this is blatant workforce harassment. The elected president , for no other reason, than to drain the swamp. He has done nothing but try to do that, and at every turn it seems like there is some sort of roadblock. Some sort of, you know, undermining of his, you know, vision, which we elected him for. Just like our private bosses, you dont like them, they have a vision, they have a mission, thats their course of action. Congressman, give you the final minute. I agree with what she said. You know, americas 50 50, and it was like that under obama. 50 of the american citizenry liked obama, 50 didnt. Its the same with trump. Half the people in america like him, half the people in america dont like him. But the republicans never tried to impeach obama we tried to defeat him at the ballot box. If people dont like donald trump, then theyll have a right very soon to get rid of him, and if they dont like how the republicans in congress react to the baseless claims of nancy pelosi and adam schiff, then theyre going to have a right to replace us very soon as well. Before you go, coming up on a twoweek congressional recess are you holding a town hall in the next two weeks . I am. Im going to have one in lebanon, kentucky, everywhere i speak we open it up for questions. How do you think this story plays in the first Congressional District of kentucky . I can tell you with confidence, 75 of people are going to have the same attitude that the last caller had. They ask me when i go home, why wont the democrats let donald trump lead . Why do they have to call for impeachment every day, why do they investigate him on everything . Why dont they just leave him alone and let him do what he said he was going to do when he said it was a candidate. The president enjoys high popularity in hi district. But there are a few that dont like. Its like that all across the United States. But im in a pretty protrump Congressional District in kentucky. Congressman james comber, republican of kentucky. Come back again sometime after recess to chat with us. Thank you for having me. We welcome back democratic congressman ted lue from california. You worked as a prosecutor the term quid pro quo has come up a lot this week. Can you explain what it is and how you prove that . Sure. As a former prosecutor we dont look at individual items of evidence in isolation. We look at everything in context. In this case donald trump has halted military aid to ukraine that congress had specifically approved because it was going to help our National Security interest, ukraine was pushing back against an adversary, and then a week later, donald trump calls the ukrainian leader and after he asks for aid, trump requests a favor, actually two favors, one is to investigate biden. So what a quid pro quo would mean, im offering military aid, im asking you to do me a favor, what is implied if you dont do me a favor, youre not getting the money. Which whistleblower complaint, where sit leading you next in terms of who you want to talk to about it . The whistleblower complaint was very detailed and what was stunning about it is the whistleblower complaint identified that call between donald trump and the ukrainian leader, all the elements and that was verified by the rough transcript the white house put out. So that lends a lot of credibility to the whistleblower complaint, in addition the inspector general, who trump appointed himself, deemed the complaint urgent and credible. And the whistleblower complaint lays out not just this call where trump tries to get the ukrainian leader to investigate his political opponent he also alleges a massive cover up where the white house knew what was said on the call was wrong, they put it into a different lockdown system for very Sensitive Information related to National Security. This call had nothing to do with National Security, it had to do with political considerations. And a lot of people were involved in that cover up, and we want to know who they were as well. Putting your prosecutor had back on, does it weaken your case that the whistleblower acknowledges they were not a direct witness to most of the events described . It would have weakened the case if the white house hadnt released its own rough transcript that verified exactly basically what the whistleblower said. The whistleblower provides a big road map for congress to investigate, the House Intel Committee is the lead on this. Theyll track down the different witnesses and the administration can either provide the information, if they have nothing to hide, if they dont, the American People can draw the inference theyre hiding a lot from the American People. What is the Judiciary Committees role now . You said the house intel will take the lead. The Judiciary Committee had the lead in the Mueller Investigation, what do you do now . House intel is going to take the lead on doing the investigation in the ukrainian scandal. At some point theyll conclude it and send the information to judiciary. Well look at it and if necessary we will hold a hearing and draft articles of impeachment and have a markup on it. Thats because articles of impeachment have to go through the Judiciary Committee or is that how its usually been done. If there were going to be articles of impeachment, it would first come out of the Judiciary Committee, that is correct. Do you think the articles will be narrowly focussed on ukraine or could you include some of what you were already looking into when it came to the Mueller Investigation and other topics . I dont know the answer to that. Well see all the evidence and then make a decision. I do want to say that impeachment, like the power to declare war are two of the gravest powers of congress it should never be our first option, it has to be our last option when we dont have any other choice. So we have to take this with the solemn responsibilities of what members of Congress Need to do. Do you have any sense of how long that process could take . Something that might happen before the end of the year . By the 2020 elections . I believe if there were going to be any articles of impeachment that would be passed it would be before the end of the year. Taking your phone calls for the next 22 minutes on the washington journal. Donna is in westerville, ohio, republican, youre up first. Donna, are you with us . Well go to anita in maryland, a democrat. Good morning. Hi. I would just like to say that everyone keeps talking about biden firing the you know, calling for the firing of the prosecutor and how his son was under investigation. As i understand it, it was an entire year since his son had been under any kind of investigation when biden started calling for the resignation of this prosecutor. And he wasnt alone in calling for the resignation of the prosecutor there were several in the European Union also calling for it. Also, last may, ukraine said that both bidens were cleared of wrong doing. So i dont understand why they keep picking on him, except its what they did with hillary on the the republicans just wont admit that the president was asking for interference in our election. Thank you for raising those points. People are certainly entitled to their opinions, but theyre not entitled to their own facts. Youre correct. In this case the ukrainians came out and said, look, hunter biden cant be held responsible for acts of this company that occurred two years before he went on the board of this company. The ukrainians also said they did an investigation found there was nothing improper for either hunter biden or joe biden and youre also right te at the time it wasnt just joe biden calling for the prosecutor to resign, it was the European Union, a lot of people looking at this saying this prosecutor needs to go because he was not doing the job he was supposed to be doing. Just based on the timeline, theres no evidence whatsoever there was any wrong doing by the bidens. This is a political hit job and you see the president was trying to get the ukrainians to launch another bogus investigation into his opponent. Remind folks who yury let san koe is. Hes a corrupt person that biden and the European Union wanted to get removed. The Washington Post reporting on some of his first comments since these revelations about the phone call and the conversations. This is from the story in the Washington Post yesterday, the former ukrainian prosecutor. He said from the perspective of ukrainian legislation, hunter biden did not violate anything. The Washington Post saying it was his first interview. And to followup on that, because biden was calling on him to be removed, it was going to put more light on this company that he was allegedly not investigating. So actually, it was going to be against bidens own selfinterest to do that. So theres no therethere in what republicans are making up right now. Brian in michigan, independent. Good morning. Hi. I want to stay on topic, but representative you said kashanko was a corrupt person, you dont know that. You have principals still involved in all of this, robert mueller, rod rosenstein, the legal group, this is all heading back to uranium one, this is all headed back that way. You cannot sell enriched uranium, i dont care to hear about the board or timothy or anything of that garbage. You cannot sell enriched uranium, turn around a few years later and turn around and act like russia is the worst people in the world. You cant do it. Sir, youre entitled to your opinions, i have no idea what youre talking about, actually. Tim in florida, a republican. Good morning. Hi. I got a couple questions im going to try to stay on topic. You claim that youre a prosecutor, okay, and as a prosecutor, you should know that the information that the whistleblower put in his complaint is all hearsay, which is inadmissible. So how can you base that trump did something wrong in the conversation when you got somebody thats making claim that he never heard the conversation. Thank you for your question, youre entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. As a former prosecutor i know that when a suspect makes admissions against his own selfinterests, thats totally admissible. Thats a classic hearsay exception, absolutely admissible in court. All their stunning admissions that donald trump made either on national tv or in this phone call. Second, yes, the whistleblower said he didnt have firsthand knowledge of the phone call, but guess what, the white house released the rough transcript of the phone call that verified exactly what the whistleblower said. So at this point its irrelevant what the whistleblower said about the phone call because we have the summarized notes of the phone call. Get it . The Washington Post today im sorry New York Times has a column by david brooks. And hes the headline of that column, hes guilty but impeachment is a mistake. So focussing on the politics of this for a second. One thing that david brooks writes is that democrats are playing trumps game here, he said trump has no policy agenda, hes incompetent at improving the lives of the american citizens or his voters but hes good at one thing, waging reality tv personality wars. So now he gets a war with nancy pelosi or jerry nadler. This is what democracy is supposed to look like. Why they would want to distract from that is beyond reason. Trump verse nadler is the contrast that trump wants to draw. I have no idea whether if we do formal impeachment, if it would help trump, hurt trump, be neutral. My belief is we shouldnt do impeachment for political reasons. We also should not not do impeachment for political reasons. Its just got to be based on the facts and the law. Well assess what the evidence is, it needs to be our last option. If we conclude that the president of the United States halted military aid to a critical ally at a critical time and then in the context of that stopping of military aid had a conversation with the military leader to investigate an american citizen for political purposes thats a high crime. Anthony, louisiana, independent. Good morning, its not working. Its not working. What yall saying to us, what you trying to tell us, i used to vote democrat, its not working sir. You telling us that what mr. Trump has said that all the stuff he was saying, it was used to get the ukrainian people, no, sir, we not believing that. What do you believe, anthony . I dont believe mr. Trump was trying to get trying to do the thing that they are trying to say mr. Trump is doing. So again youre entitled to your opinion, im going to tell you what the actual rough transcript of the phone call said. It shows that after the ukrainian leader raised the issue of military aid from United States, specifically javelin missiles that was going to help the country push back against its adversary, also our adversary, trump immediately asked him for a favor. One of the favors trump asked for is to investigate trumps political opponent, biden. And this is done in the context of donald trump having halted military aid that Congress Approved to ukraine a week before this phone call. None of those facts are disputed. You can draw whatever conclusions you want, but the facts are staring you in the face. Brenda, houston, texas, democrat. Good morning. Oh, my goodness, i cannot begin to tell you, how it is my absolute i mean, my absolute pleasure to speak with you this morning. John, ill let you know when im done. Mr. Lieu, i want you to know, and you tell all of your other congress men and women that the American People support you. We stand with you. Hes going to fight dirty, you stand tall because god is with you. Because you have the truth on your side. Let us know what we need to do. Get to the different organizations to get out to the different communities, what you want us to do to support you because im behind you, im retired, ill do whatever you need. And also to the republican the ones that trump supporters, theres a Silver Lining, theres a Silver Lining and the Silver Lining is, donald trump has finally beat president obama, hes going to be impeached. And president obama was never impeached. Thank you so much for taking my call. Have a great day. So thank you for your call. I do want to note that this is not a partisan issue. What we have here is the american president soly solicit interference of our election. He did it in the context of halting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that the Congress Approved. This is an american issue. Thats why you see two republican governors come out and say they support this impeachment inquiry. You had rempresentative turner,a republican from ohio, coming out and saying what the president did was not okay. Ive been a democrat for 36 years and i have never been more disgusted with my own party. Its been hijacked by communists, socialists, its no longer the Democratic Party of my parents. When does hearsay become the new standard in which we destroy people . You attempted to do this with kavanaugh in the hearing, with christina ford, i got cultassau but i dont remember when or where or have. You have no integrity sir because you turn a blind eye and deaf ear to what biden did to ukraine, he withheld 1 billion until the prosecutor investigating his son was fired. Thats quid pro quo. Thank you for your call. Hearsay is absolutely add miserable if its an admission against selfinterest. So when donald trump is saying hes asking for a favor of a political leader, thats admissible. Its an exception to the hearsay rule. Because its basically an admission against trumps own selfinterest. Lets take the hearsay thing away because guess what, we have the actual summarized transcript of their phone call that says trump did exactly what the whistleblower said trump did. Thank you. Angela, oklahoma city, oklahoma, independent. Good morning. Good morning. I am still for trump. Theyve been after trump ever since he got in office. Angela, you got to listen through your phone and talk through your phone. Turn down your television. Well let you figure that out while we go to theresa in wyoming, a republican. Good morning. All i have to say is thank you, you hold your head up, and you be proud. Thank you, thank you for your call. I appreciate that. Less than ten minutes before the house comes in for the day. After today, the house is headed to two weeks of congressional recess. I wonder, what your plans are over recess when it comes to this issue, are you Holding Town Halls . Do you expect this to be the focus . The House Intel Committee is the lead on this issue, theyll continue investigating but there is other work the house is doing. We have introduced a major bill to lower Prescription Drug prices this is something well talk about in the next two weeks. We also have introduced legislation on background checks for guns that weve already passed, bipartisan, its before the u. S. Senate. Were going to be putting pressure on the u. S. Senate to take that up for a vote. And we also have laws im sorry bills that i hope become laws on Election Security and to root out corruption well talk about those issues as well. On the Gun Legislation weave been waiting for a while from the promised legislation from the white house. I wonder what your thoughts are about cooperation on some sort of strengthening of background checks in the wake of this story and how the president has responded to congressional inquiries about it. So for a long time, the nra would say, you know, background checks would never have stopped any of these gun crimes and it turns out the last mass shooting, background checks had it been universal would, in fact, have stopped it. Which are you referring to . The last one where the person tried to get a gun, was denied by a background check and got it through a sale not covered by the current background checks because theres a loophole. So now we have not only bipartisan support we have a case of background checks if it was universal would have worked. It was before the u. S. Senate were calling for Mitch Mcconnell to take it up for a vote. The other thing is government funding, the Senate Passing the resolution to keep the government funded for another six weeks. I wonder your thoughts on being able to come up with a bill that can pass the senate, get signed by the president to continue to fund the government for fiscal 2020. So i do support the shortterm cr, continuing resolution, to have the government funded. I believe when we come back, we have to focus on making sure we have a longerterm funding strategy because it makes it very hard for agencies, for military and for other stake holders to plan when we have these shortterm c. R. S. Can congress focus on that at the same time theres a focus on an impeachment inquiry . We have multiple committees going on, an appropriations committee, budget committee, rights now house intel will take the lead on the ukrainian issue but this other work in terms of making sure that we reduce Health Care Costs for the American People, increase the wages, put them in good jobs, thats going to continue. About five minutes before the house comes in. Well take you there live. When they do your phone calls with congressman ted liu of virginia. Ted in texas. Good morning. I appreciate you guys for doing this. Its nice to talk to someone with the range of our congress. Its good to see you. I just think youre playing into trumps hands. Everybody is playing into trumps hand because attention is attention, and when he gets attention he thrives on it whether its good or bad. So all that needs to stop and we need to do something about the infrastructure of our country. All our roads have potholes, our bridges are crumbling. Im in new mexico well get the last dollar, thats how it is. We need to concentrate on what we can do. Im sad to say this, trump is going to win if they keep fighting each other the way they are. The democrats raising their hands saying theyre going to give Illegal Immigrants free healthcare when we have to pay for ours. Thats playing into trumps hand. You need to come together, stop the bickering and fighting and talking about donald trump. I appreciate your call. In terms of infrastructure last year i introduced legislation to help our needs it was tagged at 2 trillion, some within my own caucus were saying it was too much. But then the president of the United States later floated the number of 1. 5 trillion, i said i wasnt that much off. It turns out we have a 4 trillion infrastructure deficit in the next ten years we have to work on infrastructure, i agree with you. So our congressional committees are, in fact, working on infrastructure. And unfortunately the white house, earlier this year, walked away, took all their marbles went home, were getting news they may want to come back and talk about infrastructure so well see. In the meantime our committees are going to work on these infrastructure bills and well work on those this year. Madeline from West Virginia, republican, good morning. Good morning, thanks for taking my call. I just want to say, i am 89 years old. I have never, in my lifetime, seen our country in the shape its in. And if people doesnt turn back and pray and ask god to straighten it out, the democrats are gonna bring our country to disaster. Thank you for your comment. Narj marge gee in fi philadelphia a democrat. Im all for impeachment. Hes being impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. As far as the republicans keep calling in on the democrat line, they call in on all three lines and cspan does nothing about it, i was a democrat but im a republican. And then they go on and talk about how you know, its just ridiculous. Trump said he could shoot somebody on fifth avenue and get away with it, these are the people on fifth avenue saying its okay. Go on and shoot me. This show only works if people do call in on the correct lines and we try to rotate through the lines to get a lot of different views we trust our callers to play by the rules here to have this conversation. Congressman ted lou on the high crimes that the caller was talking about. So thank you for this the question you raised. Again i want to note that this is not a partisan issue, it should not be a partisan issue. The president here cut off Critical Military aid to ukraine, which was helping push back against one of our adversaries, helping protect our National Security. No one disputes donald trump halted that military aid, thats a fact. A week later theres the phone call where donald trump, right after the leader requests the military aid, trump requests a favor, an investigation of joe bid biden. Thats a fact. These are facts you cant dispute. Thats why you have republicans supporting this impeachment inquiry, including two republican governors. You see when you ask the person people this question now a majority do support the impeachment inquiry because they were reading these documents themselves. They can read the whistleblower complaint, its online. You can read the raw transcript of the phone call. Its online and you can make your decision. But these are grave facts. Congressman, thank you. Appreciate your time. Come back again. Any time. Thank you. This meeting will come to order. The gentle lady from texas is recognized. Thank you, mr. Chairman and the patience of our witnesses as they waited while we registered our votes. Thats what were focussed on, arent we, voting. So thank you for being here. Election security is all about voter confidence and participation, the more confident voters are, the more confident theyll feel that their vote has been counted and their voice has been heard and, of course, this directly impacts your future participation. I listened with great interest to some of your testimony and ive looked at your written testimony and i wanted to start with you, mr. Burk, and quickly i dont need a i heard you explain the system that you have, and i just want to make sure that anyone watching is clear. Is yours a Software System or is Software System and machines and an auditing system, too, or all of the above, one of the above . Ours is a Software System that needs to be incorporated into the Voting System that is utilized by the state or local voting officials. And it supports multiple different forms of Voting Systems. So you can have an electronic ballot marking device, start with hand marked ballots that are then scanned. We support those and working to support others not as widely used. But its basically software that needs to be incorporated by venders into the system itself. And the verification that the voter can go to online, that will simply verify that they voted or can they print something at home through your Software System . So the system when they vote, they go to the polling place and vote, they have a piece of paper that has the coat, and they can enter the code in later and they can get verification that their vote counted. They cant see who they voted for, but what the system tells us them was your vote was not changed and your vote was counted. Its important they not be able to see their vote because they could be coerced and anyone doing an audit would not see how they voted. Correct. So there is really is no paper trail. There is a paper trail in the sense that our system supports the creation of a verified paper ballot. You vote, thats encrypted but you also get a paper ballot the voter can look at, yes, this is correct. You can put it in the ballot box, that can be used for risk audits. Im thinking of people in my system that dont have a computer at home, dont have a laptop, a way of doing any of that. So what are we to do with, quite frankly, the usually targeted populations when there is some of this, you know, misinformation, you know, hacking, its usually a lot many times minority voter precincts that get attacked. So what would we do then for the person who doesnt have access to a computer or internet to be able to go through that process . So our system is based on polling place voting. Whether its hand marked ballots or using an electronic voting machine. The election guard supports going to the polling place to vote. You dont need to have any technology to vote no to verify. Yes. Im talk about verifying you voted. Its happened to me once. I voted and i thought i had done everything and then they came to the car to get me and said, you know, i was a senator at the time, they said, senator, it didnt go through. I said, what do you mean it didnt go through . I had to go back in and essentially vote again. It made no sense to me that i had to do that. I think that happens probably more often than not. So im just concerned about the populations who dont have access to that computer to verify that, in fact, their vote was counted. Understandable. The good news is you can do the verification in our system with a smart phone. And in most populations smart phones have penetrated further than loptops. Many in my district dont have smart phones. They have the one that you go to the flea market or a store what are they called, the click it phones or flip phones. They dont have the smart phone. Those are more costly. They go and get one month at a time. Were talking about people that are paycheck to paycheck. They cant afford one like mine. Yes. And i understand congresswoman, the verification does require some access to a system, whether its your neighbors phone, your phone, go to the library and access a computer, to get that personal verification. Now keep in mind, thats a new advance of the technology, but to do that verification and see your vote was counted with our system you will need access to something, whether its a smart phone, a public computer, some of device that lets you see, yes, my vote got counted. Thank you. Ive run out of time and i yield back. The gentle lady from pennsylvania. Thank you very much. I wanted to thank you for your work in removing barriers to voting in pennsylvania for everyone whos eligible to vote. In particular, i wanted to thank you for your attention to modernization of pennsylvanias Voting System and things such as just two weeks ago rolling out the ability to request absentee ballots online. I know my three children who do not live in the district anymore, when theyre at school, appreciate that ability. Youve also paid a lot of attention to our young voters. I know particularly high school registration. Can you tell us a little bit about what youve done there. Governor wolf started a couple years ago the governors Civic Engagement award and its been a tremendous success in pennsylvania encouraging students in schools to register eligible voters to vote. And its been terrific, both the competition from schooltoschool and studenttostudent but also their engagement in voting. Which as we all know, probably a lot of us started our Civic Engagement early and it really Research Shows when you are engaged early you become lifelong voters and thats critical to our democracy. Turning more to whats at hand here. Theres discussion about needing to improve lines of communication between federal, state and local agencies. Can you explain a little bit about that . Absolutely. So, you know, one of the things that weve been talking about a lot as we develop these conversations around Election Security is the importance of continuity of operations or coup planning. Its a thing that a lot of areas like Emergency Management and Law Enforcement have been doing for a long time. But the elections fear is relatively new. One of the critical components of effective coop planning is knowing who to call at the moment you need to call them, the last thing you want to do when an incident happens is figure out who the right person is to call. So the more clarity we have about who at the federal government is the is the call to make at incident x, y or z, the better it would be for the counties not have to have to figure it out at the moment. Were doing a lot of work with the counties to do that plan and we have a lot coming from the federal government to make sure we have centralized lines of contact. Okay. If you have one piece of advice for congress as we debate the appropriate vehicles to legislate and to fund this, what would that be . I think id have to go back to our conversation about diversifying the types of Election Security thats implemented across the country so theres been a lot of attention to Voting Systems, which is a very important thing to transition to paper records. But as we discussed earlier, so many other components of this process are at least at critical. We need to allow funding to go to voter reg rags databases, intrusion detection systems, making sure we have layer, phishing and Security Training and multifactor authentication and c. O. O. Planning. All of those things are equally important. And im most worried about thinking one solution is going to fix everything. We need to give the states the ability to decide what theyre most critical components are. And as i understand it, that involves both work and helping establish best practices that the federal government can help push out and then providing funding to achieve those best practices . Exactly. Thank you. I yield back. Thank you. The gentlemlady yields back. The gentleman from arizona. Thank you for hosting this hearing. Its one of the most pressing issues facing our nation. Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today and sharing your expertise and taking the lead role in protecting the integrity of our elections at every level. Much appreciated. Our nation came under attack in 2016. The special counsel described russias efforts to interfere in our elections as sweeping and systematic. They deceived americans, hacked into Campaign Email accounts, hacked into the very systems and databases that conduct our elections at the state level. We know that the same kind of attacks continue to this very day. The federal bureau of investigation director Christopher Wray stated, this is not just an election cycle threat, its pretty much a 365 day a year threat, unquote. Despite that, the white house has done nothing. It joins the senate in sitting on its hands in the fight to defend our democracy. Its a real travesty and i hope this hearing and legislative efforts we can begin to turn the tide. Unfortunately, my home state of arizona, its Voter Registration database one was one of russias targets. Their attack wasnt successful but it shows the heightened importance local officials must place on Election Security. You mentioned in your written testimony the importance of the integrity of Voter Registration databases and epoll books. When it comes to the use of epoll books for Voter Registration rosters and ballot ondemand printers, do you believe it is a best practice to use encrypted communications in all circumstances when data is transmitted or received . Yes, i do. Is there ever a circumstance where Election Officials should transmit or receive data on these devices in a nonencrypted manner . I cannot envision a circumstance such as that. Thank you. You also mentioned that the steps the federal government and state governments must take will cost more than 2 billion. Not all states are adequately investing in Election Security. Some, including arizona, are cutting Election Security funds. What type of outcomes and risks are states that dont take this issue seriously exposing themselves to . Theyre exposing themselves to the potential for their Election Outcomes to be corrupted, invalid, not accepted, not trusted by the populous they represent and ultimately the impact of the perception could be much worse than the reality, which would mean people would not come out to vote. Thank you for that answer. This is a question for all of the witnesses. Some elected officials use usb devices to tran minute data from one to another. Is it best practice to use those devices only a single time to minimize the possibility of malware or use those devices repeatedly . I would go with, yes, it is certainly a best practice. There are some circumstances where theres effective reformatting that might be effective but i think using new ones is always the best, best practice. Mr. Burt . I would caution that usb devices are a known vector for the transmission of malware which can be installed at the time of their manufacture. Even using new usb devices or anything other than a very highly trusted source and increasingly that would mean of american manufacture if youre using it in an election of the United States is a challenging thing to do. You can try to scan that device, you can try to make sure it doesnt have malware on it before its used but that could be a costly and timeconsuming practice. So the use of usb devices is something we would say you should be very cautious about doing it even once because the malware may be present on that device when you first use it. Thank you. Miss plunkett, do you have any thoughts . I would say unless there are no other alternatives, the use of thumb drives should be prohibited. Thank you very much. I yield back. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this important hearing. I want to associate myself so as not to be repetitious with representative stantons remarks of the gravity of the situation as well as the chairman. Secretary boockvar, and youre not alone in saying this, nothing is more important than the security of our elections. Nothing in this democracy is more important than that. And so im glad were talking about these issues. And secretary, im delighted to see you here from pennsylvania, i thank you and governor wolff, particularly in the area of Election Security. Im thinking back to mueller coming in and telling us and telling the world that certainly our elections were interfered with in 2016. And if i recall him correctly, he said and its going on 24 7. That interference continues. Can you describe some of our vulnerabilities as of 2016 and maybe lay out some vulnerabilities that you still see . So, i think the good news in going back to what we talked about earlier is the good that arose from what happened in the past is that we are with the declaration of the Critical Infrastructure has provided us with a lot more resources. And so, you know, one of the things that i really think is critically important across the country as well as in the state are these collaborations weve been talking about. So, i think the lack of collaboration and intersection of resources could be a vulnerability if its ignored. So, for example, we found in pennsylvania, as we started to have like tabletop exercises and really improve our collaborations. A lot of times in the counties the Election Officials didnt even know the Emergency Management personnel. And thats crazy, right . So, in 2018 the primary was almost like a reallife tabletop exercise. I dont know if you recall but there was a tornado that crossed the state literally on primary day. And so we had to have trees were down, polling places were blocked, electricity went out. The intersection of the Emergency Management Law Enforcement and elections is critical. So, i think one of the vulnerabilities is not feeding that well. And, again, it goes back to the c. O. O. P. Planning as well. And i also want to make sure that our counties have the resources they need to have really advanced intrusion detection systems, effective training of phishing and security and all of that. And every advanced sensor and, you know, protection layer defenses of their network. Those are the areas i would really focus on supporting the local counties and municipalities would be one of the areas id want to direct most attention. The issue of certification of the equipment itself, what is the delay there. How could we streamline that, you or any of the witnesses . The issue there is that the standards that are the guidelines that are promulgated by the Election Assistance Commission on more than ten years old. The most recent modification of those guidelines, theres not a single election system thats been certified under those most recent guidelines and theyre ten years old. What the election System Commission is doing right now, revising those guidelines s critically important. But they need to move quickly. They need to move with expeditious activity because this threat, as you pointed out, is 24 7. Its happening now. Its going to happen through the 2020 election cycle. We need the eac to adopt new guidelines quickly. The current ones are dont adequately address security. Theyre too long and too bur n burdensome. One of the critical things for all state and local Election Officials is we need to make it very easy to apply security updates. Thats a key defense to these adversaries from every vendor. So, we need to be able to apply security updates requesticly, expeditiously without so much bureaucracy on we can respond. Thank you. This is by way of a rhetorical statement. I was struck by something you wrote in your testimony. You wrote Election Security is a race without a finish line. That our adversaries are continuously advancing their technologies and we must do more all the time, so we know we cant see a finish line for this. We have to identify the threats. I have to wonder what conversations all of you have had to have with your own organizations based on foreign threats but now the news of this past week, domestic threat to our election . It couldnt be a more grievous, grave time. None of us is pleased with the news of the ukraine conversation by the president of the United States in an attempt to interfere in a future election. So, i praise you all for your work. Help us do better at our work to protection our elections. I yield back. The gentlelady yields back. This concludes todays hearing. We thank all of our witnesses for participating. Without objection, all members will have five legislative days to submit additional written questions for the witnesses or additional materials for the record. With that, without objection, the hearing is adjourned. If you missed any of our live coverage, it will be available to view online shortly at our website, cspan. Org. Just type Election Security request the in the video search box, which youll find at the top of the home page. Also coming up live today on the cspan when politico interviews lawmakers and politic strategists. Scheduled speakers include congressman mark meadows and 2020 democratic president ial montana governor steve. Live coverage starts tomorrow at 10 30 a. M. On cspan. This weekend on American History tv, saturday at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, historians talk about the lefbs learned from the reconstruction period after the civil war. The concept of whiteness before the civil war was a barrier of exclusion when states said only white men can vote. Whiteness was, therefore, used to exclude others. In the civil war whiteness becomes a baseline. If white people enjoy legal rights, everybody else has to enjoy those rights also. At 8 00 on lectures in history, the destralization of the United States in the 1970s and 80s. And sunday at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, the psychological impact of flying on world war i pilots. And women in the apalo program and the challenges. There were cameras all over the place. This camera was just on me. I had no idea how long it had been just on me. I didnt say anything about it. We didnt even know the term Sexual Harassment or im, you know, hostile workplace. There are two ways to think about that. One, its a little voi youristic on the dudes watching you and it is harassing and uncomfortable. The other way to think is let them look and all know, let everyone who is not in this damn room know, theres a woman here, im here, get used to it. Explore our nations past on American History tv every weekend on cspan3. Ry lonnie bunch outlines to lawmakers. He testified before the House Administration committee. Mr. Bunch become secretary in june of 2019. The smithsonians first ri