Transcripts For CSPAN3 Georgetown Law Discussion On Voter Suppression Voter Turnout 20240713

Discussion on technology and how can increase or decrease better turnout, and look at the best way to educate local journalist covering issue, it is an hour and a half. Okay everybody it is time to take your seats please. So our next panel, this is the whole side you will see for the next panel so the theme of this panel is Voter Suppression and voter turnout and in particular the roles that Network Information technologies play in Voter Suppression and voter turnout from a variety of different perspectives so another way to think of it is maybe as peeling back the curtain a bit and getting into the technological underbelly of some of the things that the prior panel discussed. Once again we have a fantastic panel of experts from multiple perspectives backgrounds and disciplines and im not gonna repeat everything thats in the program but just briefly. To my immediate left is kara here is a senior policy analyst in the Economic Security initiative that georgetown law and our center of poverty and inequality she comes from a policy background, we have that jessica who who is a reporter with public a boost cover these extensively. Matt monaco is the Research Director who has studied bots and he is coming to us with computational linguistics background so correcting the other guy was real or the bought. And then finally at the opposite end of the table at least geographically is katie peters who is a cofounder of democracy works shes no longer with it but wall in her tenure there she was instrumental in their acquisition of the bar information project she was named to the forbes 30 under 30 for her works on democratizing access to new voting in voting information we are super delighted to have all of you here and as the Previous Panel did i asked henry one to make a ten to 12minute opening set of remarks and then i will ask some questions and then open the mics to you. So jessica is going to lead us off. Okay, i feel a little underprepared now that you had fancy sides before but i will try to do my best so what, i come at this from a different perspective than the rest of the panelists, i will be decidedly less tacky than the other three but hopefully thats welcome here, not you okay good then will be in good company so, i want to explain first what election land is, some context for the position that im coming at this information from, election land is something we have been doing since 2016 we did in 2016 in 2018 and prepping to do it again in 2020, the premise is that we try to hold data on election data in realtime and disseminate them to hundreds of media organizations so in 2016 in 2018 we had more than 100 local News Partners across the country who are feeding information to, prior to election land the way that the media covered problems especially on election day but even during early voting was they would drive around the polling places and be like is anything wrong and workers would be like no and the drive to the other polling place and now we have information Realtime Data from a couple of networks that do similar systems and they give us realtime information to those calls we can see where the problems are and we can send journalists their in realtime, so the idea if lightest shined at places where there is a problem maybe will be fixed, rather than the next day saying this polling place plead up and we can fix it in realtime, the way that we can do that is by training a lot of journalists on Election Administration i know that some of you in this room have been actively involved in elections so theres things that are problems benefactor not problems machines break it is normal and its not preventing a lot of people from voting theres no point im reporting on it, a poll worker will make a mistake thats normal, lines will be 30 minutes long, thats normal so a lot of what we see our job is cooling down the hysterics because we believe that if we show that there are problems where there are not actual problems and we make them into bigger problems and are people are less likely to come to polls, we are now responsible for over a fleeting confidence theres problems any want to make sure the real before we send local media to cover them thats the role we see far selves and the reason we see ourselves in those participants because we believe and i personally believe that the media is not just an observer of the elections are an active participant and them. So we have to accept that role and work within it and if you think about it the people who are looking for information on their polling place on the position of their candidates looking for information on Voter Registration deadlines are very frequently not looking at their counter registers website because they probably dont even know where it is but they are going to their local News Organization website so its in our interest to make sure that we have local media be reporting the most Accurate Information possible to that and we deeply encourage our partners to do things like go visit the county registrar play with the voting machine so they know how they work so if they meltdown they can authoritatively say what the problem is or maybe there is not a problem or maybe theyre old and machines or miss calibrated so we wanted to cool down the situation so not everyone is in hysterics and we can make sure that we are not unintentionally spreading misinformation through our own reporting so i think that knowing what to cover and what to give attention to has been focused really after now on the candidates complaining that this candidate got more coverage than i did whether you guys are the gay peepers of news and youre giving donald trump more advertising and in that way you participated in democracy thats true but its also true that if we overinflate one problem and dont give attention to another, where we overinflate one problem and dont give attention to all of the ways it can be improved we can be the gatekeepers to things that lead to turn out or dont. So i think you know the trust in the media here is a really important thing i know that the Previous Panel touched on this a little bit for example we are seeing this right now the ap has declined to call the caucus race purity voters not happy despite making a choice and being a pulitzer finalist for doing the exact same thing so when we make calls like this its up to the public to decide how do interpret those things and all we can do is make sure making the most responsible choice. From an administration standpoint we need to do a better job educating journalists on how elections actually work and how they function to make sure they are reporting Accurate Information that is what we try to do so i think just to wrap this all up i think that if the media can take a stronger stance and actively becoming part of the administration everyone will be better served they will have better information before and on election day, i think it will help turn out there are several studies that helped show the more coverage you gave these issues the better turnout it is or the more educated your local populace is i think we should take that very seriously and feel responsible for that information and thats what we are hoping election land will do. Thank you applause nick over to you. Well let me know if you cant hear me. Thank you for having me im really excited to be here. My name is rick manaco, i have been studying misinformation and bots and how theyve been spent spreading misinformation and particularly concentrating an election context so a lot of the work that ive done over the last five years has had a global lens and how bots this, so the topic on the Conference Today is really central to the research im doing and im really excited to do research with all the great people here, im director at the place called the Digital Intelligence lab with a think tank in paul Alto California and what we do is we try to produce public facing research that documents emerging ethical issues at the intersection of society and technology, and what we have done has been document tank state sponsored trolling harassment and disinformation, today and really excited to talk about some of the research that i havent actually been able to talk about before being in the disinformation world especially as a researcher right now i think some of us, there is a problem of disinformation abundant so i thought about so many pieces and studied so many pieces of this mind that i think some of the interesting things so this is a good place to synthesize my thoughts and think about some of the Key Takeaways from some interesting elections and ive studied in the past. Mind so with that mike my intention today is to cover to case studies, one of but increasing voter turnout and one of but decreasing voter porn their turnout. I should be circumspect and say attempting to increase or in attempting to decrease. Because that doesnt think is a big gap in the research right now is i think many of you know. And then i would like to talk about kind of a more passive use case of bots which i think doesnt get a lot of coverage. I think you all are familiar with the idea of a mega funding or amplifying message. They can be used in a more passive way to collect intelligence or collect data online without making noise. So i think thats something worth pointing out. Before we dive into these case studies i would like to just set some common definitions so that we know what we are talking about and were talking about bots i dont think this room probably needs this but just in case if anyone in the audience isnt too familiar. But our computer programs that poses humans online. They are automated programs. And political bots in particular which, we will be talking about today, a buts that are deployed to affect political goal. So social manipulation, opinion manipulation or social persuasion is really the goal in these cases. The builders and the deplores of these spots really want to convince the public or certain portion of the public to believe or act ideally in a certain way. So with that in mind i think the first case i would like to talk about is macedonia or i should say North Macedonia at this point. And basically in september 2018 there was a referendum in the country of what was then macedonia up on whether or not the country should change their name to the republic of North Macedonia. This was the first in a series of steps that composed something called pexa agreement which was an agreement between the macedonia government and the greek government to resolve a name issue. Essentially the greek government had bots. Macedonias acceding to nato or the eu saw for a long time because of the issues that greece has a region called macedonia within its own borders as well. So this is a kind of detente of those tensions. But the first step was to have a referendum locally in the country of macedonia, to consult the citizens and say, is this something we want to do . This was a consulted tory referendum it, was not binding. But it was something that ideally the government was hoping that there would be good turnout for so that they would be acting with the will of the citizens. They were hoping for at least 50 turnout if not a greater amount of turnout. This was a very interesting case study so i did research internally at a Company Called graphico where i used to work and Intelligence Company that specializes in dibss information. So i lead research is internally add graphica on the message on you lectures and collecting facebook and twitter data. There are others such as these transatlantic integrity conveyed condition in the digital corrective lab. Who also covered. What was interesting was we all saw the same thing which was to say they were about ten accounts that were hyperactive, that were producing hundreds if not thousands of tweets per day. That were promoting the idea of boycotting this referendum and were saying look, you shouldnt participate in this democratic process, this referendum isnt necessary, its not valid. You just shouldnt participate. So theres a hashtag, hash dog bikotera, which is macedonia for boy dog. So it is spread by these suspicious accounts about only ten accounts. They were highly automated. My internal analysis determined that as well as the Digital Forensics lab and a great report from the book and reporting network. A bunch of bots and anonymous accounts were producing tens of thousands of tweets in the months leading up to the referendum and encouraging this idea of boycotting. And in any way the referendum went off but the turnout was only 37 , far into the 50 the government was hoping for. Then another interesting thing to note in this case was that a lot of the traffic appeared to be driven by macedonia diaspora who were citizens but residing outside of the country. So boikotera, dot and k as well as some of the accounts that were producing about disinformation and may be true information and not were produced by a bright macedonia living in a way for example. And as a decision as the digital investigation revealed. A quick footnote, i also discovered a nigerian president ial election in the following february in 2019, and there was also a coordinated campaign in that case as well to emphasize again boycotting the election and not showing up. The motivations and the context there were quite difference. There was a but that was producing hundreds of tweets the days, saying dont turn out, dont participate in the president ial elections, nigerians on markers he is not valid. And they came from a place called. Biafra. Its a state that attempted to succeed in the 1970s causing the nigerian civil war but the context was very different. These campaigns showed coordinated behavior that was trying to encourage citizens to not show up for the elections. One case i am really excited to talk about is a case of but that were used to try to increase voters prefer not turn out in the united kingdom. It was actually covered quite heavily in a lot of Media Outlets but still i dont think it gets the attention that it deserves. So essentially how this work was there was a group of activists who were hoping to increase voter turnout, specifically among young people, to vote for the labour party in the 2017 snap parliamentary elections in the united kingdom. But what they decided to do was look, we want to increase voter turnout for a demographic that is all we did to find, 18 yards to 25 years old. This slice of people who we would like to get the turnout. What did these people usually do . Well a lot of them are on tinder, a lot of their minds like swapping out and trying to go and days. Why dont we just brother but thats on tinder and talks to people about their political views . And it seems like we can add to them to vote for the neighbor party, we will do that. If it seems like theyre going to vote for the conservative party, we will just tell them not to come up. This is what they did. What was interesting about this case is the whole time this was a fairly transparent process, the activists and the team of developers that built this bought, they were overt about it. They fund raised on indigo go publicly, and they said this thing was going on and how it worked was if you wanted to, if you agreed with a cause, you could volunteer for a takedown to be connected to this bought and to carry out these operations that i described already. What is it about this is that of course you dont know that you are talking with about when you are. And indeed, this is a case of cyber activity so part of the profile is automated but part of it is human. This means that you can talk with a user if ive volunteer my account and i could text everything i want to text them but one politics comes up the vote will take over and start spreading the messages to vote for the labour party. And then i can take over again. So its pretty insidious and its an interesting case. One thing i would like to note about this case is that it received positive press coverage of fairly unanimously so bbc in the garden and a lot of people wrote about these spots, saying this look at this great thing that these labor activists did and indeed, i should note as well that that demographic of people that they were targeting, 18 to 25 years olds, showed the high turnout that they had displayed in 25 years so since 1992, which is interesting. But something thats interesting to note here is that this is this could easily have been covered as the nefarious tactics say promoting the tories or another party. And thats something that i as a researcher want to highlight, basically something that we have advocated for the Digital Intelligence lap and the other laps i have worked for for the past five past five years that ive been thinking about these problems is the the idea that we should regulate uses of the tools but not the tools themselves. And we have to have a non partisan enforcement of how these tools are used. We can trace it in one case and say in one case targeting people with data score but when it happens with Cambridge Analytica, say its not okay. So i am running short on time and i might not talk about the type one case of collecting data and using Data Collected from bots to target voters, i will just mention that there is such a thing as travelers or spiders or scrapers, which are brought that can collect data on a certain individual or a number of individuals and that data in turn can be used to inform manual messaging or automated messaging which can be used to decrease voted for not. In conclusion, we have seen that there are cases of whats being used to increase and decrease voter turnout. And in all of these cases the bus were not transparent, crucially there were poisonous humans. And it is not evident to people interacting with them that they were interacting with an automated agent. We can expect this to increase i. Think we can expect this to be part of the fear took it off digital campaigning until we have regulation, kind of drawing a line between whats fair digital campaigning on the one hand, and what counts as digital social manipulation and behavior exploitation on the other. Its a lofty goal, its a tough red line to draw, but i think that is kind of central to all these problems, not only within politics but within the advertising or surveillance capital capitalism industrial at large. And i will close with, that thank you. Thank you. applause so katie. All right. How mild double . Okay. Cool. I got asked to come talk about the ways that Network Technologies can support voters and improved voter out and actually that tinder but is a really fun one to try and iron because in my work with some of the large social Media Companies and our work with nonprofit organizations in work with take and community partners, i think i have come to see three major roles that technologies can play in improving voter turnout that i would like to briefly talk about the day. One of them is an invitation. When we Research White people dont turn out there, is one segment of the population that by and large feels like politics is not really for them. We talk about it sometimes as apathy but when you are researching it often comes more to a sense that it is exclusion. It does not feeling like they know how to be engaging and they dont have a path in. So i have seen a number of ways that tech has really helped create on ramps and bring folks in and i will talk briefly about that. The second disinformation. This is what jessica already talked about in connection with election night. And i think its a great example of where you identify good Information Sources and broadcasting them is really possible. Professor body on the first panel talked about that map of where information is settled or emerging or controversial, and where in politics and policy, plenty of topics are either emerging or controversial. Election administration is one of those places where the information is quite settled. Where do i vote and how do i do so . Youve got really good limited trustworthy sources and tech has done an excellent job of amplifying those and really keeping some very clear signal amid the possibility of noise and we will talk about that. And then the third, for lack of a better term, and i dont have good deliberation here, im sorry, information and we will go with user experience. How people are actually able to use cast their ballots. Hotel can and has given us Better Options so that once people have decided to take part and know how, that they have a good experience of doing so, that it works smoothly and that it reinforces that and promote ongoing Voter Engagement and habit creation. So. Within that framework, her invitation is actually hugely a female. One of the things that i would say the idea of a bought and a set of automatic tweets either inaudible feels challenging. Im not really sure how to engage with the idea of the boycott. Meaning the fully catching hold from all of ten twitter account. Thats really a startling thing to think about. Where i think it succeeds morris intended the element is there is still an actual person behind it and there is the person at least kicking off that conversation. So some of the places ive seen that work really effectively our lets look around this room how many of you are uses or snapchat . Okay. Not too many. One of the things that is unique and special about snapchat is that more than many other social media entities, the interact directly with their own users through a user account of their own, simply called Team Snapchat. And it has faces. It has people who make these videos when they released new features or they commemorate holidays. Its an Consistent Group of folks who appear as Team Snapchat in their messages. The platform is not so much just a platform but appears as one of your friends in a meaningful way. So when snapchat started deciding what they wanted to do around the 2018 national Voter Registration day, theyve done some celebrity psas before and done some ads, and theyve seen some engagement. In 2018 they decided to have Team Snapchat themselves to a short mass snap that went out to all of their users that, said basically, registration is easy and we will hope you will do it. They signed up more than 400,000 to vote a resident registrations in the course of that promotion. It was made possible by networked technology but ultimately have that very human touch. It was a person asking you to come register. That person just happened to be an employee of snap ink. Similarly our college and University Partners for inaudible Voter Registration and registration platform that until recently i worked on, commonly used tabling. They go out and have the student volunteers with clipboards. Its a very person to person and his high touch. It has a really high tight success rate at getting students registered and ready to vote. Especially on larger campuses, its very difficult to reach every student. So starting with years ago we had a number of campuses, including those who use read just a class registration platform coral engage implement a step in the Voter Registration process that says okay, now that you are registered for classes, have you also make sure that your Voter Registration is up to date by implementing now we have seen College Campuses be able to touch all of their students and register significantly larger factions of the student body especially commuter campuses, especially nontraditional students, those and need invitation. And its still coming from a trusted source, its still coming from a Registrar Office but tech is making that possible. In the information bucket what we are working with is that trusted information is absolutely critical to helping people nowhere to go and know what to do, distributing that trusted information can be challenging because our elections systems are not centralized, all 50 states have different rules and different processes, some states have a much more centralized at the state level and there will be good Information Available to you there and others its much more county by county. So in 2008, in the early early days, the Pew Research Center published a report saying being online aside enough, it looked at the information on commonly asked questions, like an register to vote, where do i go to vote, and what is on my ballot . . And evaluated state election websites and found that many of them either did not have that Information Available, we were not able to answer those frequently asked questions, or ways that were accessible to many, people ways where it was behind along in screen where you provide information about your voter record in order to access. It so it started a collaboration that brings state election offices and google and since pew actually spent off in 2018 it has run out of democracy works and it provided a data standard and Technical Support on posting information on what do i vote and what do i publish on my ballot so they take whats on their system share that data and it can be built into a nationally built data set, and its published through an ap that we will put. Someplace if you ever searched online and where do we go to vote or what time does the vote pull open or who is on my ballot or you have a Search Engine give you that response or you have seen that on social media you likely interacted with voter information project and reaching more voters and making sure they turn out it makes it possible again for any number of partners to go make that request and you might not being to proactively go look for that but other people can share it and say i want you to go vote in this is ready to go. It makes it possible to have a backup source that is still official verified information if anything goes wrong with an election website on election day. It makes it possible to proactively distribute changes in situations where natural disasters forced places to move on the 11th hour which happened significantly after sandy in new jersey, in 2012. Finally and i think least seen or that tech has made it possible to give voters more options and to help change we vote in ways that reinforce making it friendly, this is a place where digitizing Voter Registration databases and makes it possible to have votes endurance and longer vote periods, it makes it more impossible to do automated Voter Registration with dmv database, is it makes it so that answering those calls, and my eligible and im not ready as much as you want the answer to be asked rather than know there are still steps you have to walk through. Maybe most importantly, it makes it much easier to run a hot line like our vote and have that information about where our, you what do you need and how do we resolve that on election day. So i think broadly those are the three major areas where we have seen significant success stories, these and anymore and will be really interesting to talk about how those play in alongside both other pro voter messaging and other Voter Suppression activities online. Thanks. Thank you. applause last deadly not least, kara. Thank you, folks can hear me, so it is a pleasure to be here i am delighted to be on the panel with these a mary amazing expiring experts and leaders and id also like to thank my colleague who is in the audience here for his help with preparing my remarks, so i will be providing some thoughts based on what i see from my perspective and from the perspective of the decennial census. So just in case anybody has been living under a walk, the 2020 census here, its, happening a got started in some rule areas in alaska and so in the time that i have i want to explore three questions with you. So what does this of this have to do their democracy . Second and what are the perilous of counting people in the digital aid and how is get out account groups leveraging technology in order to present a fair and more accurate account. So in a way its one of the most democratic of our institutions, its the only time that we attempt to count and collect some basic information about every Single Person who is living in the country and we use that so that we can fairly and appropriately allocate political power, so the constitutional basis is to allow for the appropriate proportion of seats to the house and the state in population and redistricting but although the data is essential to our political system, the extremely important that the process and data themselves remain a political and free from interference. So you can think of it this way, the census is meant to be the background in which our competitive democracy exists. And plays out, its not supposed to actually be part of that competitive democratic process and in order for the consensus to carry out its function in our political system needs to have integrity and both its process and its data and unfortunately this years census is experiencing some sort of unprecedented partisan interference and i will talk a little bit about what that means a little later on. Also important to know, the data is important to Racial Equity and they are important for Economic Justice so tense is data is used to allocate 1. 7 billion dollars of federal funds every year and that is for programs that help support the Economic Security of low income people, they support Health Programs and education programs, and the data also helps us monitor discrimination and enforceable and Voting Rights laws. So what does all this means . This means that when a communities undercounted in a sense, is there voted power is diluted, theyre less likely to get the fair share of federal funding, and we as a nation are less well equipped to understand the characteristics and needs of our communities and to enforce civil rights and Voting Rights protections, this is especially troubling when you think about who is most likely to be missed in the census. These are the groups that are also most likely to suffer from Voter Suppression so we are talking about people of color, we are talking about people with low incomes, some of the other group said the bureau finds difficult to count include recent and undocumented immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, people and rule and geographically isolated areas, people displaced by disasters, young children, people with disabilities and lgbtq people. So now i am going to pivot a little bit and talk about what it means that this is our First Digital census, so the bureau will offer for the first time the offer to respond to the census using an online portal and that online response option is going to make it a lot easier and more convenient to respond for a lot of people but of course there also people who dont have access to the internet, dont feel comfortable using the internet or just prefer not to use the internet so it is important to know that every household also has the option to get the call or get responses or respond by mail. And the bureau is also implementing new technologies and some other ways, they more fully integrated uses of federal and state administration records, commercial data sets, and there are a lot more examples of how the bureau is doing that in case there any sense discerns in the room i kind of doubt it but if you are when you can come talk to me about that leader. Many of these innovations promise to improve the efficiency of Data Collection while keeping costs low, but there are also challenges, for one thing without adequate testing the census might be vulnerable to both system failures and cyberattacks as highlighted in a recent gao report released last, year the Census Bureau and others have been wary of major website failure, on health care dock of that can interrupt census and reduce census and others are useful, here and conducted primarily online experienced a major failure when they used to collect responses after ddos attack and the new zealand 2018 census their First Digital sent this was off the widely criticized for its slow Response Rates. So, with all, that we also have to remember that this First Digital census is taking place within the context of unprecedented parties an interference that threatens to undermine the fairness and accuracy of the, count for those communities that are considered hard to count, the use of Digital Technologies can both you pretty improve participation but theyre also notable risks for those groups that are really caught in the cross fires of that, so for example the trump administrations failed attempt to add a Citizenship Question, even though this exchange was not added to the census we still know that the question being posed is increasing distrust in the government in ways that will suppress participation in the census and again when groups arent represented in the census they are disempowered politically. So this fear and trust is especially growing among immigrant populations, people of color, in particular latin next people, and it is in the broader context of the administrations anti immigrant rhetoric and anti immigrant policies. All of this is Fertile Ground for missing disinformation campaigns that might try to target certain communities, we are already seeing this happening, we are seeing misinformation, disinformation, but what has been done and what is being done, Civil Society groups are closely monitoring and developing and coordinating responses based on these threats, Society Organizations are really crucial to putting content out to counter, that right now its about developing inoculation messages, its about filling information gaps, conducting Public Education campaigns and really priming the public to understand the motivations for disinformation, the Census Bureau is also taking steps to address the concerns, they have a trust and safety team they have an email address on their website where people can report miss and disinformation they come across, they are working with tech companies, major social Media Companies, before the census no social media tech platforms had any terms and services that were related specifically to the census and the Census Bureau has made a lot of progress with these companies for the census which has been really important, they have worked with phase folk, pinterest, the list goes, on facebook is now agreeing to take down or misleading or inaccurate advertising, a huge step in the right direction. The Census Bureau is the first Government Agency to access youtube trusted flag or program, so its gonna flag militias content for you to do that decide whether or not that content violates their policies and so the Census Bureau also has access to the partners bureau and i wanted to say a bit more about how grassroots organizations are leveraging technology to help get out the count but im running low on time so quickly say they have launched social media campaign, some of the groups to be on the lookout for our advancing justice, ban campaigns like yell account me, and where the senses, Indian Country counts, and, more groups are also doing digital trainings leveraging data and analytics, putting together a map and he will be monitoring and reporting on self Response Rates in realtime i think on a weekly basis, local groups are setting up access to computers and kiosk so folks can go and fill out the census online if they so choose, folks are using estimates technology so there are tons of examples of this and i will end by saying this, the census, the Citizenship Question attempts, the broader political interference in the 2020 census perhaps heralds a future where the success or failure of the census is seen in partisan terms rather than in terms of its fairness or its accuracy, so each of us who cares about Racial Equity or who cares about civil rights or who cares about the integrity of our democracy should be paying very close attention as the census continues to unfold, thank you. So im going to start this phase of the proceedings by king up a couple of different questions for various over panelists to chime in on i do want to try to save substantial chunk of time for you all to ask your own questions at the end. But im hearing i guess i want to start by saying im hearing two different stories, a powerfully optimistic story about both crowd sourcing, get out the vote, get out the count, and sort of productive encouragement of state or the Census Bureau to kind of create platforms for digital inclusion. And then, a substantially less optimistic story about the potential for sort of sowing fear, doubt, and confusion, directed at unraveling or undermining some of those games. So i want to pose a hypothetical to you. And i dont even think its a hypothetical. We have a sneak preview coming up during lunch, we have a poster session where some of our fabulous Student Research projects will be presented, and this one has taken or is taken from one of the examples of chris comrades paper. But lets just say that as we are getting into voting in a primary, or the main event, that theyre start circulating reports that agent from i. C. E. Are at the polling place, looking at everybody. And if youre worried about illegal voting, go out and help them by monitoring, by looking to see who is coming to vote, and making sure that they really deserve to be there. Really happened. And lets say there are bots involved. Let say this starts to get traction. Lets say maybe even local media might pick it up. Is there a capacity, or how might we get to a capacity to flag that stuff in realtime, using any of the tools that any of you have talked about . And what could be done with that . I could kick this off. This is actually not a hypothetical dull. It happened in 2016. So and i can tell you exactly what we did i die i dont know if it there was affective honored but i hope it was so in 2016 there was a viral photo that circulated of a ice agent arresting a hispanic looking person at a polling place. It turned out that that was just a photoshopped image where they popped one out of an actual ice rate and then superimposed it onto the polling location. And you could tell that there was something wrong with the photo because no one in the line to vote was looking at the person who was being arrested. laughs like i dont know. If someone was being arrested in front of me i would be like i and no one was doing that. And i was like it this is probably not a real photo. And it took me about two minutes to reverse search that image and find both of the original photos. And so we wrote a post that we distributed to all of our local media partners, saying this is false and heres what it is. And so there are like very specific ways and there is misinformation researchers have done very conclusive research that shows how the media should report about miss and this information. And its sort of like we are about to tell you a lie, here is what the lie is, here is why it is wrong. So if you followed that pattern and people are much more likely to believe that what you are telling them is not true. Does that make sense . So but that is not often and how is the media comforted. They will say, like, this is going around, but i will not label it alive before they say it. And we know from other research that people generally only read the first three paragraphs of any given new story, which makes me feel right bad, but is the truth. So like we just have to do a better job of elevating the fact that things are incorrect and then proving conclusively that they are incorrect. And there are a couple of ways that you can do this effectively. One is to show this is the photo, here is the two other photos that this is clearly photoshopped from, right . You cant really dispute that. And then or to say, if you cant do that and often you cant you say this is the source that the information. And so there are information researchers that will for example tracing back to their origin and say, this started from a Misinformation Campaign in macedonia or this started from a Misinformation Campaign in iran. And so when you can do that, when you can either conclusively disprove the information or show that is from a distrusted origin, then people are much more likely to say, okay, thats not true. And i also the second thing im going to say and then i will stop is that there is a real difference between people saying that they are going to do something and then actually doing that thing. So in 2016, one of the things that election line was most concerned about is that all of these people who were devotees of roger stone were actually going to show up at the polls and the poll watchers. No one did. Because people like to talk a big game and then not actually do anything, right . So it does a lot easier to be like, im going to hunt down illegals at the polls than actually do that thing. And thats a good thing, i guess. But you know, it would take a lot of organization and we saw that a little bit you know, the rallies that were organized by russian disinformation campaigns in houston right . That took a lot of organization. It was an event. That was clearly organized. There was a time. There was a place. Without that people generally dont take it on themselves to create problems. Ill insert about a joke about you having to be in a line in new york you wouldnt stand on the line and just ignore something going down in front of you. I think you answered that beautifully. I think that where those sorts of expertise and those communications are already established, things like election land cocan go a really long way toward getting a correct response out at the speed of the misinformation or out ahead of it. And that where we have seen it inaudible is when those experts arent as immediately ready and collaborating and that you have given it more time and so that particular scenario is still one where i think theres a hopeful response. I hope you dont have any more really dark ones because i think that the community of people that you described coming together to distribute that are really prepared for many of these scenarios. But not necessarily all of them. Yeah. And i would just like to supplement. I like what you said about jessica about tracing things to their core sometimes sometimes being the most effective way of debunking or stymieing the flow of disinformation. I think as an investigator, open Source Intelligence enthusiastic, in cases like this there are tools to detect bots online of course. And there are, more importantly, techniques for detecting coordination online. So in the most ideal case, if you cant trace Something Back to a suspicious source, sometimes identifying suspicious coordinated behavior is enough in itself to say the, well this is something that is obviously coordinated it and theres an actor behind it coordinating this message. While i dont consider myself a facebook apologized i think there is a bit of logic to their line that they take down behavior and not content. This doesnt necessarily make a lot of sense when Chinese Government accounts are continuing to spread worked forward disinformation that was on twitter, which is something that we detected that the Digital Intelligence lap. But in the case of Something Like this, where you find a suspicious narrative and you dont know where its coming from . But but, you can see coordinated behavior, it certainly makes a lot of that. And the only thing i will add to briefly is the importance of a trusted messenger. So like you are saying, jessica, i think that is local news in particular, news that is in language and radio and things like that. Because its really important when we are talking about communities that are experiencing this fear and distrust and that are vulnerable to these false narratives, that the message the messages that counted that are best received when they come from sources that they do trust. And often thats sources that reflect their identity or that exist in their local communities. Do you want to add in . Because only. Once yes. Thank you for saying this. Yeah. So thank you. So that kind of leads into the next question i want to present i want to come back to the eye do maybe have a more dire hypothetical but first, lets just talk a little bit about digital modes off engagement and trust, right . So theres its interesting to juxtapose this super optimistic story of getting youth online, right . With the some more equivocal story that carrie has been telling kara, youve been telling about trust and its like in marginalized communities and it surfaced in this story about the census, right . And whether you can get out the count and how you can get out the kind and i think its services in this story about technologies for distributing voting information and as you put it, an invitation to turn out. How do you engage people who feel maybe not even that politics is in for then which i like to the turn of phrase but people feel like digital platforms arent for them or they are suspicious of what information may be collected or they wonder why the government wants this information about them. How do we sort of get a better grasp on that . It has to be a little more complicated and just we are claiming or reclaiming a new platform and rolling it out to everyone. Im hoping you will start. Me . No. Do you want to start . Oh. laughs if you dont want to of diving. Im really curious to hear from you. First thank you. Oh no. I do think that i will come back to your trusted actors. The second piece that i would layer in there, and i came across this at the center for civic design, i might have forgotten the name of the read your regional researcher who did it i apologize. But its called the berry picking theory of information gathering and search, and its less that you have a question and you go get a single answer and its a single correct source and that you either believe it or you dont and your done, but more that as you are watching a process or something as complex as the census or an election, you are getting many different inputs and wherever they continue to be consistent and each of them may add to your information matches what you want to stand before and layers on it, you build up a mental model of how it works, this is why what, this is how i fought, this is what being a voter looks like, this is my role in our democracy. And it can become a really sort of rich thing that you understand deeply, even if at the first moment all youve got is like, oh wait, theres this person on tv talking about this idea and im really intrigued by it. And you maybe start out and you look at this candidate and you are eventually get their. Or the census, theres a form in my mailbox and i dont know whats going on with it. And the more that different sources can reinforce each other and play into some more models, you dont have to say the same way, you definitely dont need the oh gosh, kara, you had all the wonderful hashtags about being in communities and there you dont need each of them to say the same thing in the city. Today those committees really need to look allies who they are speaking to. But they need to be coming out of the same song book and that needs to be harmony mom among them. You cant have one of them saying, like, this is going to happen with the information under another saying diametrically that it wont. And so, the more that there can be both fundamental truth these things surrounded show different lenses off and that there can be many different messages craning that sort of layered piece then, you build a more robust sense of understanding and treats that is somewhat more resilient against a single piece of disinformation or a single campaign. Yeah. I agree. And i think you, know, specifically when it comes to the census, its really important to help people understand why it matters so much. I think that you know, people dont talk about the sensors as much as they talk about morning. It happens once every ten years and, you know, i like to say that the census is about power. Its about political power. And its about money. And i think that that resonates with people. So part of encouraging participation and helping people to want to participate is helping them understand just what does it mean for mine community . It means dollars and cents for the community. It means political power for your committee. And also just letting people know that their responses are confidential and they are protected by law and that the Census Bureau takes that really seriously. And there is going to be a lot of messages saying the opposite. But you know, reinforcing that positive message that their confidentiality is protected and that the bureau is taking a lot of measures and taking that very seriously i, think its part of the message that we need to make sure to communicate. And then not just to be on the perpetual optimist side i would say that where there are those messages already out there about mistrust you have to do a lot more before the common positive messages really second. So there is just a higher barrier there and its a steeper uphill climb in a lot of ways if youre going to overcome existing mistrust. Is not is easiest that single engine invitation. So that leads to the more dire antithetical, so some pose it is not a matter of acute urgency like they are down theyre looking for people to arrest but more a matter of fostering voter apathy among sort of discreet identified groups you would much rather turn out and lower numbers so i will get back to maybe one of the teaches slides you know zika is the result of gmo mosquitoes being deployed by minority communities or Something Like that and its not for maybe this is the question is it a matter of simply tracing cause and effect if and a little bit of a different twist on this for each of you but an intention to produce a consequence of lower voter turnout can be real and yet hard to diagnose and respond to have you got any thoughts on that have you come up with any strategies each from your perspective is for responding to that sort of thing. Yes, so we think a lot about this and there are attempts, every election season to spread messages that would decrease turn out so the texas voter ideal always a really good example of this in 2016 where there was lots of, by the time the 2016 election roll around there was a declaration in, place the voter a. D. Law should not be able to disenfranchise anyone and yet the messages that were around it were sort of discreet enough to suggest that it would and those came from both sides of the aisle and i dont mean to bc taking sides here is just too so we had one group of people saying if you dont have your id you cant about because youre an illegal immigrant and we had the other saying go to the polls and confront your poll worker if they ask you for your ag when the reality was somewhere in the middle, which the poll were go could ask you for the year id even if he did have it that was okay, so i think that is a little bit different from what you are talking, about what the effect is the same, no one wanted to go confront their poll, worker thats not we want to do when you go vote and no one wanted to be a costed for an, anti vote it is something that can be into meeting it happens when every four years if than and so the landscape was quite difficult to navigate because the law was confusing everyone was confused people were using that to so initial mistrust in the system. The only way that we can combat that is by repeatedly putting out the truth in a coordinated way and so that is what election land is hoping to do, why its much more important for us to have k are a in dallas onboard rather than the New York Times National Desk because no one in the dallas suburbs is going to be reading this and everyones going to be leasing to carry a so being a part of election and thats fine but if theyre like we dont want to be in front of this can we send someone to dallas to convince you because i think its just about putting out the correct information repeatedly and unrelenting lane which is a very difficult thing to do and you can only do it if you choose to pour nate that is what we are trying to do, to make it be our together and so we are sort of succeeding, i think it will be easier in 2020 but you know its a coordinated communication and its key here. I think this also relates to the previous question kind of about Building Trust i think that was in the framework of government but its also an important question with media and social platforms as well. One initiative that ive taken a lot of hope from is the digital minister of taiwan has implemented a program that rolled out this year that is a Digital Media literacy program, so mission to literally see minus see the tools and techniques encourages and teaches students at a young age how to spot a fake dont name or look up when i dont name was created by not a lot of people know how to do it, things like that, no nonsense ways to spot something that suspicious or say im looking at this thing that came out of nowhere how can i progress to another, level how can i get a little deeper and find out if it is suspicious or reliable and i think that something we care about doing at the vigil intelligence lab, we are hoping to have convenience promoting basic Digital Literacy and bridging the gap between this open source digital Investigation Community and also investigative journalists on the other hand which i really see as flip sides of the same mcclain. Yeah to summarize what i am both hearing and trying to say is to tell the truth, to start the why take signal persuasive person and to combat it takes all of us into careful concert, its not an evenhanded process at all. So im gonna shortly open the mic but theres one last question from me were sitting in a law school, none of you, the law was sort of on the surface of maybe carry your presentation but if there was one thing that you good wavier magic wand and ask you want to do that what is this your project, what would be . I think its the one i kind of closed with, a lot of people really this idea of defining what constitutes exploitation, or manipulation that influences the social behavior on one hand and what constitutes fair advertising, i think and both battle it has implications for additional rights for brother in the world. This is a very specific answer but if i could wave my magic wand and changed everything, the fact that internal communications of lawmakers are not subject to this, so that should not be a thing anymore and this information and the way that laws deeply affect voting its very difficult to trace problems back to their source if you are putting it in a state lawmakers, it makes it easier for groups that have maybe a malicious interest in Voting Rights to have easy access to voters. So it makes things harder for the source, so i think if we can fix that lots of things like problematic pulled changing all those things and the truth will be easier to access. Not a lawyer but in a similar vein i think better insight and understanding is key to trust so weather that looks like establishing trends of transparency can help that in disinformation or whether thats having more in doing the counting and certification, Audit Committee is that i think will come up for exactly how that plays in, legally you are establishing good change of shelling that trust in that will go a long way. Its hard to think of a magic law, what really comes to mind for me is i would like to see a car trolls shift the way we think about our census and how it is important for everyone to be represented in it. I want to see our norm shift away from the severance of absurd level, i want to see this is unacceptable and as harmful to our democracy such that 2030 an administration, a lot we can do that we can maybe hopefully do that. Thank you. I have a few questions thank you for bringing all of these diverse perspectives to this, a lot of variety here and i was just wondering, so i feel like a lot of reporters, a lot of new people coming into elections especially the present election here, how do you think about bringing all these new people, oh you have to cover these elections this year and your work covering Election Administration but that cannot be the case for everyone who is tasked with it last minute and on the census i would love. Not to give you one more thing to do but once you get through april, it would be really helpful also i know the platforms have exceptions around sharing the information of misinformation and thats not allowed in elections had to think about policy elections you dont see in the census. So i think the way we are worried about, that i think a lot of the people that are covering on the polls are people who got for city hall or education and they are thrown in on the last minute to cover the administration, they have no idea really what a provisional ballot is and they are being asked to cover problems at the polls, the way we decide to do that is by trying to engage with reporters very early in the process, so we have training sessions that we hold at various journalism conferences and we also do webinars every week in the weeks leading up to the election, trying to get as many local reporters as possible on the horn to talk to Election Administrators, we send our reporting recipes for here is some data that you can get from your local administrator and here is what you should write about it, heres what you ask your local administrator if you can come and look at the machines before the election day, here is how you can go and watch if they are counting the ballots. So we try to give them as many tools as possible so that they dont have to search around for them and they can be more prepared because these voters, these election reporters are really strapped for time in and on election day injuring early voting we are disseminating information to voters, we vetted beforehand not necessarily for truthfulness, theres not much we can do to affect the truthfulness and tell the reporters on the ground to look at the thing but we simply dont pass on information that is not a problem, so if we get a bunch of reports that there is a really long line out one of the polling places but that line is only 30 minutes on we will tell local reporters about it. Or if we get a report that there is like ten Voting Machines in one place and one of them is broken it is not impacting line, theyre just worried about this one machine that is pretty normal, we will not pass that on, so we try to be a little bit of a gamekeeper in terms of what is an actual Election Administration problem and what isnt, so we have seen that helps reporters separate. Yeah i think the part about the census was more about a comment but i think you are right about your observation, social media platform seem to be more, seem to be further along in their efforts to you now keep missing information and disinformation on the sides, but i think there are getting it on the, census and surly more for 2020 but hopefully by 2030 we will see more parity in that. Hi my name is john, at my field is Data Analytics but i have also been a dedicated election worker since 2004 including being applause thank you. My father did for 40 5 50 years, so i picked it up and didnt want to work 16 hour days anymore, anyways i have been a site manager for early voting site i support a number of precincts, this is addressed to jessica, if you are doing election, land it is a terrific day diana and you said that you want to educate the media about Election Administration, here is my question, from Election Administrators themselves, the county level or the state, have you ever gotten any resistance or pushback . Yes. Its a hard yes and so at my job over the last year it has become probably of talking to three Election Administrators every day and we face last pushback now because i think people know what we do and what we are in 2016 when we first said we are going to have all the local media cover you people were like get out. And then drew in 2016 years was a can 2018 was better now we are in 2020 when i go to things like the National Associations of secretaries conference of the National Associations of state instructors conference. Oh jessica, election night, i want to talk to you about how i can get by local media involved. So i think its been about building a bit of a reputation with these local Election Administrators and sort of talking to them really far in advance. So the election is in november, obviously. We dont really do much with the primaries because they are often very different than the actual election. But we are already engaging with Election Administrators to make sure that they know what election ideas, who their local partners are going to be and what kind of question to ask. So next week we are sending out a survey to every election administrator in the country that is going to say what did the media get wrong last year and what you are worried about yes year hockey, the media get in touch with you on election day . What do you open to the media and what youre not open to the media . So we have all that information that we can give it to our partners said that they are immediately approaching the Election Administration is in a production way productive way rather than down a confrontational one. Thats a mistake that the media tends to make. The assume that Election Administrators are intentionally screwing things up. They generally are not. I have only met to a Election Administrators in my entire career as my election Election Administration journalist and saying you are not good. And but everyone else has been like really intentional, regardless of party, regardless of where they are, they want to have people come out to go vote and they wanted to go well. And so they try to help our journalists to approach them for that perspective and wave as we have been more protests successful in doing that there has been less and less resistance. Excellent. Thank you. Hi. My name is gaby. I work for an Organization Called new scott and we review new sites to give people context for what they see online. My question is also directed toward jessica and i want to give other people the opportunity to tremendous. Well you sound like you work with local journalists on the local elections and ensure people are coming out to vote and paying attention to what the real problems are. And im curious if you have thoughts on or work with national journalists. So for instance looking at what happened in iowa there were obviously a lot of problems there that journalist and look at first look and talk about them break detail. Its been covered on a National Level this is a crisis and then there is probably people who are going to see this and be less inclined to vote in their own primaries and they were in elections. And so im just curious how you and how cara on the senses also you need to get people to participate, how you work with people who when they see reports that are blown up by the National Media to make sure they still have trust in those institutions . Iowa is a really good example of this. So inaudible i got a call from my editor at 6 am on the morning of the iowa caucus saying you need to come in early and i was like ok so i ran into the newsroom and he was like, what you talked about . And i was like ive got to tell them what the hell happened and i wrote that. I dont know how many people read it. So you know, i think that the local media did a really good job of saying this is the party that Election Administrators. This is not going to happen again in 2020, they are just idiots. But the National Media has sort of betrayed this as a crisis and in the media interviews that i have done, in the last three days over this, its been really frustrating for me because National Radio and television reporters have been like, what does this mean for 2020 . And im like, nothing and they dont like that answer. But so there is not much that we can do to convince National Reporters who think that they know more than propublica fair enough that the coverage is incorrect. But what we do do is we staff an entire massive newsroom on election day. We take over the entire top floor of the puny graduate school of journalism and then staff it with people who are vetting these claims. And we invite National Media to come sit with us in that room. And so last through more in 2018 we had nbc and the New York Times and the Huffington Post and the abc all sitting around the table with us and so we feel like that tone down the coverage at least on that day. And one of the great things that we could do on that table because we are all sitting at the same table is we can write stories together. So in bc and i cobyline stories and Huffington Post and i copenhagen stories and we are all sitting around in an elaborate and put out feelers out in different ways i do that. And so i completely agree with the way you characterized the iowa election or the iowa caucus. And im hoping that we will sort of have a bigger role interNational Media this year because more people are hyper concerned about Election Administration on security. And so we are hopeful that more of them will join us not only on election day but during early voting and so we can tempt some of that down. I say we dodged a bullet in iowa. Because if that have had worked and gone on to other states, our adversaries could have exploited it because it clearly had a number of vulnerabilities that did not materialize in iowa. And i just want to say that the panel after lunch is probably going to talk about that, just in case anybody is on the edge of their seat. Thats not my question. Yeah. So. My question is how do we get the hsbc to prove remote the yourself the darker domain for voter election authorities . They are actually doing so. They are doing so as part of the Election Security . Yes. Okay. I think that needs to be publicized. Because they tend not to be good about publicizing things which sometimes can be a problem. And then also the election authorities need to understand the importance of having a vetted domain as opposed to something that the Internet Research agency can then copycat in a. Com manner to provide this in formation and other ways of attacking the electoral process. Yes. Fire way. Okay. Im down or not or from the National Democratic institute. We were globally on elections but obviously there is a lot of interconnections between what you are talking about. Cara, one thing i wanted to note, you are probably also aware that inaudible societies doing research on this census are just noting they may be a good group to collaborative with it. Yeah. They are friends. Okay, great. And certainly, on your comment on jessica on the locality of news and the importance of that in the ecosystem, i think its really critical there was a piece out in the atlantic month a yesterday on the day before saying essentially that brad pascale, Trumps Campaign coordinator, its going to be targeting local news specifically in the same way they did cnn espanol use in the last cycle. So i think my question reupholster on that local question and on the one hand im clears about whether you have thoughts about pressure points of the National Systems that you think is areas of concern. I would positive georgia as one, just in terms of the way that the election has been handled in the past and the way that it has been administered and problems in that system. But then also, what are some i think youve already a lot of good collaborative responses thats something we are thinking about internationally is developing better methods for into sharing from different groups such as yourselves that are taking different perspectives, to enable Data Collection analysis, sharing, recording in different ways. I want to see if you also might have other suggestions that would be useful in this case . So if you are not already collaborating with so i realize this name has different implications that the than the united states, but there is a group called cross check. Not of kansas. That does election land style things in other countries. Theyve done it in europe, theyve done it in south america, theyve done it in africa. So if you are not already collaborating with them im happy to put you in touch. But you know i think that the best thing that the thing about local news is that its very disparate and so we are trying to sort of create a platform for discussion so one of i think the most valuable things about it electionland is that we open up the inaudible channels so our partners can collaborate in it. That is when useful in the last couple of years because somebody will say that we will put something in the originals like general say what are you seeing this and what can we do to Work Together . And sort of combat the misinformation. And so i think now that there are targeted campaigns from people like the trump camp within the Trump Campaign that are targeting local media, putting, creating a platform to put those local media in touch with each other so that they can spot trends before covering them, is going to be really important. And so we are going to be stressing that even more this year. Yes. I have a couple responses. First, just to supplement the previous question, one of the more interesting less covered acts to aspect of the extended Government Shutdown last year was the expiration of h tps certificates on government dummies, which really opens up the floodgates for the main spoofing and potentially malicious attacks on citizens, which is really interesting so i think we should probably save some budget and man power for keeping those updated even in times of Government Shutdown. A second thought, more to the problem side of your question, and one thing im personally super concerned about is there was a jeff lake and the legislation to repeal the obama privately inaudible which prevented Service Providers from selling consumer data so. There is no law that prevent them from doing so and what we have to take them from their word, over isis, in contrast, 18 and bell have said they do not sell consumer data but they have been shown to do so with location data laughs there are reports from matchable and other places about them selling realtime location data from cellphones. So that is something id be concerned about particularly in the con text of inaudible gaiter phoenix that rose from the ashes of analytical. Another doctor are for him to add on to that. From that has said explicitly we are going to be in the business of microtargeting in election advertising and we intend to get all the data that we can procure. They explicitly mentioned Google Search history. This is definitely a way for them to do that in the united states. Yeah. So i think that i hope this isnt the case but there is our certainly conditions at play that would make Cambridge Analytica like the good old days. I am excited that you highlighted georgia because i agree that is a state to watch. There has been a lot of interesting disinformation on Election Security activity there in the past. Another thing that i think the next panel would know a lot more about than i do is im not going to talk about this very rigorously but there is a handful of counties that have a lot of power they night it states right . Four counties in swing states that have a lot of power for inaudible essentially. I would love to see more coverage of that stuff and kind of have more details about the demographics and voting dynamics in those countries and something i was thinking earlier, julie, when you are asking your question about trust in government, is Communications Programs in those counties in particular to say look, you are in a key county, you can expect for people to try to get you not to show up to vote. I havent had enough time to figure out whether thats a good idea or not was sitting on that panel and thinking about it, but in the interest of being transparent, thats what ive been thinking about. You want to speak to that . Okay. You have a question . Is that does anybody else want to ask you first question . If not the answer is quite yes, because we have fines. Okay. Question a statement . The hbo for movie recap inaudible in a florida Voter Registration process which suppressed voting by identifying a list of felons as ineligible and then under contract the provider was to expand the coverage to include anyone who had a similar name so that blew the list up from several hundred possible ineligible to somewhat i think they said 20,000 ineligible. Thats hard to detect. And what can be done to prevent that from happening because once its implemented is really hard to turn around . Are you asking what can be done to prevent people being unnecessarily removed from the roles . Right. Okay. So i think this is a really sticky area that people dont really understand. I think that the first thing to understand is its getting a lot easier to detect things like that because of movements like eric, which is the electronic registration election information. Thank. You does a good job repairing rolls together and identifying voters in more specific ways and you described. I also think its important for people to know that generally when you are removed from the role you are actually just meet in active. And you can still vote and you are immediately activated once you have any interaction with the system. So i think that there is a distinction in the media especially to be made between responsible miss and statements and they are and pushing out they are two different things. And responsible listing is important and it should be done. With the coverage i see coming out of kentucky is troubling to me because whats happening in kentucky is entirely legitimate and follows the. Orders of a federal judge. And it isnt violating anyones rights adult. But people are acting as if 100,000 people have been destroyed in franchise. Theres a very distinct difference. I think an order in addition to improving Voter Technology like eric, its also off to the media to understand very specifically how this maintenance works, how cleaning works, and to paint that accurately for the public so as to not cause panic. That the vast majority of people should absolutely expect to go to the polling locations and be on the rolls and if we set that expectation as a norm and not something crazy, then i think we see less chaos. Yeah. So we are about out of time anyways, i guess by way of parting edged want to offer this thought i had, i started feeling like we were talking about the beginnings of rapid media ras response, and we talk about rapid cybersecurity response, or rapid candidate response and that some aspects of that which just to cut you call to hold, down the intention, powerful attention with some of the ways iowa got covered so we are almost talking about a new set of arms around media response that would be super interesting to consider in more depth which we dont have because its about to be time for lunch, yay, so it is when i tell you all again there is box lunches in the back of the room which i believe is marked with what is in, them so if you have dietary issues you can check the list, the student poster presentations will be set up that will take a few minutes and there are four of them and there are separate lights on the table and take a look they cover the gamut of vetting machine and we will reconvene our, from the Podium Program at 1 45, please join me in thanking the panel. applause governor delivered a six state of the state address to in the state house in a lot this he spoke about infrastructure and eliminate barriers in education. My fellow marylanders. As we come together once again for th