I want to thank you all for coming back to the exciting panel of accessibility. Im tom hicks, vice chair of the Business Commission and you will see two people on my panel today. The third is coming and the fourth is also coming. I will introduce the folks who are here. To my left virginia atkinson is the senior accessibility and inclusion specialist at the International Foundation for electoral systems. She is more than a decade of experience working on disability rights and government issues. She provides Technical Assistance and training to Civil Society organizations and election management bodies. She is also the lead author of the equal access how to include persons with disabilities and elections and political processes. On my right is stafford ward. Hes secretary of the board of the overseas Vote Foundation as well as the technology and Voting Systems advisor. The foundation provides us citizens with Voting Services and election data central to the mission. You are over here. [inaudible conversations] and elections we roll with it. Central to that mission is the foundations work to provide online tools to assist americans living anywhere in the world, including those living abroad and serving in the military. To register the vote and request their absentee ballot stafford plays a lead role in shaping the Foundation Strategies so Technology Initiatives and works to ensure voters have easy access to information they need to participate in democracy from all corners of the world. Michelle bishop is the voting right specialist with the National DisabilityRights Network. Of position she has held for nearly five years. She will provide training and Technical Assistance regarding Voting Rights and accessible for voters with disabilities. She also coordinates the burning work group and manages the surf but last but not least i will introduce him because hes on his way. Cameron [inaudible]. Director of the office of elections and general register for county the largest county in virginia. Its a state [inaudible]. He oversees the operations to coordinate voting registration, election initiatives for the counties and three quarters of a million voters and 243 election precincts. During his time as director cameron has expanded the countys election Language Access and successful story he shared with us last summer at our language summit here in dc. We look forward to his continued conversation today when he arrives. With that we will start with michelle to talk about disability access. Absolutely. Am i good . Okay. Hello, i Michelle Bishop and i like to make an entrance so i am always fashionably late but id also like to thank cameron for being later than i today. [laughter] something that i will basically never live down. Thank you for having me this afternoon first and foremost. Im happy to be here to talk about disability voter access and what we are looking in the 2018 election cycle and with National DisabilityRights Network or we are a National Network of disability rights organizations. There is an organization of ours at every state district wherever you are we are there and we are mandated by [inaudible] to access people with disabilities. Now that we got that out of the way of look at what we came to hear. What really sums up over looking at in terms of access to the vote with people with disabilities is the most recent report coming out of the us government, the office. They have surveyed polling place access in 2000, 2008 and 2016 and thats our best . As to where we are at. I think this most recent report from 2016 is telling because what we found is at the polling place itself, half travel from parking to the voting booth, has consistently improved in terms of accessibility. The first time this was studied in 2000 only 16 , less than 20 , of polling places were fully accessible. In 2008 when up to 27 . In 2016, 40 were fully accessible. That sounds bad and that sounds that less than half of the polling places are fully accessible and the sad thing is when i read that number i was excited so that tells you where our expectations are at right now because if less than half but i thought the number is still going in the right direction and i will take that wind right now. I will say, although progress has been slow, for many reasons, least of which is lack of funding, progress has been slow but we are moving in the right direction. The number that is more telling is that since 2008, weve looked at the accessibility of the voting booth itself and in 2008 they found that 46 of them were not fully accessible. 46 of voting stations himself had to some type of impediment for people with disabilities. In 2016 that number went up, 65 were in some way inaccessible and we are going in the wrong direction when it comes to our actually casting our ballots and the scenes that they were less likely to be wiltshire accessible, less likely to be set up to ensure the privacy, less likely to have readily. Audio cant read a page or screen and interestingly enough less likely to even be powered on. Setting out Voting Machines that were not even bothering to john. There are two in my mind main reasons for that. What changed between 2008 and 2016 . I will say the first thing that we talk about today is the funding issue. When it passed they were willing to put money into the state to get this equipment to make it happen and that money has not been replaced and in states and local jurisdictions desperately need funding to maintain or update that equipment and it solely needs to be updated because the machines were using were invented for ipads and iphones and so they themselves are severely out of date but the funding is not there to make those changes so we are working with a payment that is less than ideal. The other major thing that has been a focal point today is the security issue. I think its important and i think we need elections that are secure and accurate and i think that we all know that but the main solution to the security issue has been returning to the unmarked paper ballot. This is been the primary solution has been offered for all of our Cyber Security concerns. It means we went back to polling places mostly setting up folding tables with a stack of ballots and append. We have one piece of successful agreement for anyone who cant do that and were not even bothering to power it on because for some reason we talk about putting security we all get very, very quotable segregation. Anyone can hand marked this paper ballot will do that and anyone else can go use the special machine over here in the corner that the special people use and anytime we segregate out how to cast their ballots we see inequality. There is one lesson we learned in this country it should be that separate is not equal. We are seeing a decline in the accessibility of the voting booth itself and i think will continue to see that until we start proposing resolutions that are both secure and accessible and until were willing to fund them. And particularly some of the funds that we need to make as possible because that technology did not exist when we first went through this 15 years ago and were having the same argument that technology exist today we need to learn how to leverage it in a way that will be efficient and affordable. I think there are Real Solutions we are not really talking about them and were not working together to find them. The last thing i think is that what were looking at in 2018 is changing how we vote. All of a sudden people are registering to vote online or maybe your mail to ballot and you have options for how you want to turn it in that is amazing. I think voters expect those options and it makes it easier for Election Officials to manage and makes it easier for the voters to manage the process but those options only to be accessible. They are to varying degrees but with elections we all do it differently, every state, every locality does it differently and the extent to which were talking to people with disabilities throughout the process to make sure that it is accessible determines how accessible the systems really become. Are we talking to people with disabilities were thinking about this and how we develop it and how we roll it out or recruiting new voting permit and acting and asking people what they think about it after we never asked them will this work for you in the first place and i think the solution to all those things are rather simple. We have to be collaborating and working together. We talked a lot today about all the expectations of our election authorities and its not enough to be an expert in elections. Now you have to understand cueing theory and how to shorten the lie and to be an it expert in a Cyber Security expert to know park team came up because no one assigned it right and i bet half the people dont know what block chain is and you have to be an expert in all these things and thats unrealistic and unfair. The good news is a faulty logic logic. You dont have to be an expert but know how to talk to those. There are organizations in every state and district in territory that are federally mandated to work on this weather were talking to them or not we might as well Work Together and i think we can solve a lot of these issues but that is a lot of what we are working at in 2018. Thank you. We appreciate that. One of the questions i have later on is how can groups like yours work with Election Officials to move the ball forward so with that, cameron, we are going to go to you and the premise is that we are giving fiveminute presentations and then will be asking questions. Considering my tardiness i will try to limit that so i have to thank you for allowing me the opportunity to be the award winner for the fashionably late entry but being the moderator i thank you have that privilege but i can tell you its wonderful experience being literally trapped in an onramp on i 66 and for those of you out of town or you will be visiting dc in the future avoid 66 as much as possible. Thats the one place where as you are talking about lines for elections i think we could build pretty fantastic lines out there. In terms of the local administration for elections i couldnt agree more with a lot of what she said in regards to looking holistically at the approach for our voters. Here in virginia one of the things we had a fantastic opportunity and probably you all may have seen on the news around the country is that we had very close elections and those close elections goes to recount and recount revealed a lot of paper ballots in which you get to finally see how voters are actually interacting and not in a simulated environment, not in a test environment but in a real world, real election environment it comes down to did the person solve the problem right and for those of you done recount and those of you have done audits and looked at all your ballots you know that its not as simple as fill in the bubble and that direction they follow. I get to think what happens when someone who may not be able to hold a pen correctly and that person does not have an ability to understand fill in the bubble and what options do they have and are they that willing to go over to ask that one machine that might be there in a few years back i was really offended when i walked into a polling place and they had put up a handicap line on the device and i explained to them its not for someone who is physically disabled necessarily but someone who might have a visual disability or have a cognitive disability and allow them to interact and thats the approach that we try and take here in Fairfax County is that making our officers understand that is the way that it needs to be in it is not necessarily someone rolling up in a wheelchair or who might be using a cane. Getting that idea into 5000 election had is that they do need more than just pull it out but they need to turn it on. The need to understand that it needs to have all the accessories able and ready to go with it so that every voter who walks and has the ability to. One of the things that i want to look towards is leveling the voting experience for everybody. As new equipment comes out is more reminiscent of the dre style that prevents things like over vote to make sure that voters who have language barriers have that opportunity to matter what their language is and getting and using those devices as actual full pulling devices for everyone so that regardless of what the voters disabilities or limitations might be there voting the exact same way and the exact gets a valid and at the end of the day they wind up with the exact same type of ballot so that were not sitting here debating back and forth about having a threejudge panel decide if an extra line that someone through through a name constitutes i wanted that voter or i wanted that candidate or not. I think those are the past we can go down towards and those are decisions we have to make it i have to be drumming at the assembly saying we need more money otherwise we will end up seeing situations like this. If we dont have the resources for the voters we continue to have essentially what amounts to contested elections because we will have ink all over these paper ballots and so i think minimizing that in getting those resources is one of the things i look at locally especially as a little bit ago our General Assembly in virginia again. Stafford. Thank you, tom, for inviting me to this panel. Want to make a special announcement to my wife, happy anniversary. I have a different take on disability, different from what the other panelists here have today. Our goal is to change the narrative about those voting and what do i mean by that. Gone are the days that we had ballot issue that were prior to the uniform as of 1986 where the ballot was difficult to be reached for voters overseas and they werent received on time and students have the inability to vote overseas and the foundation sees itself in an election point in terms of regard to policy challenges that we see for overseas voters. One is being oversee voters who may have lived overseas for 20 plus years fill an absentee ballot every year and they have those living overseas depending on the state in which they live have that hurdle to overcome and states have american citizens born overseas may not have the ability to vote overseas and if you look at the overall overseas voting turnout rate is at 4 and i think my colleague here with a report to congress in 2016 is its a 4 rate and this morning they mentioned your Supreme Court where it was taking a ruling on how the National Voter registration act and in that case there is an example of a military voter who served 15 years in iraq in four years in afghanistan and he was thrown off the rolls in 2011 simply because he didnt elect consecutive election cycles and that was the reason why he was taken off the rolls. These are part of a narrative talking about that is changing and that we are focused on the foundation. I wanted to get to the point that i want to identify and might remark here. One is that i want to explain the foundation and i want to address accessibility and technology that we are utilizing and talk about the participation we have across the country. [inaudible] we are no longer known is that the uso foundation and in 2004 we were known as the overseas Vote Foundation that was established by our ceo and president at the time. She saw a need for the time for having greater access for those living overseas consistent with the [inaudible] act so we are not an Advocacy Group and we are a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization that serves us citizens living domestically and abroad to access the ballot and register the vote. In 2004 we were the First Federal right and the section we were these elements were in place so that us citizens the matter where they lived had access to the ballot. Part of our mission and vision is that everyone is a voter and what that means is ensuring that every citizen has access to voter information and as part of their democracy as voting essential actions so the uso foundation uses the Place Technology to make terms for the voting process and officers across the country. How do we go about doing that my next point leading to accessibility is some of the reforms we have seen with the 28 act and that helped us facilitate the voter rights overseas for your citizens and that enabled us to leverage that act and we can increase accessibility living overseas. Again this is part of the narrative that we are changing to discard the old notions of what it means overseas and what it is now and how we use specific technology to address accessibility issues overseas. We use standard industry standards in terms of technology with notation and python and some of the things that are out there to develop our backend databases so they are available to our state official, local officials and thirdparty organizations and some of the services we provide to harness accessibility and develop custom websites and host System Solutions for state. We have election official data reflect data from all electoral officials across the country we have specific data interface and that helps push the information we collect to our users and to our licensees so they can best use the information at their leisure. Because we are a specific technology we are serious about providing high quality data and data that is protected. Were very much and very serious about data privacy and noted in the Previous Panel about it of securing voter information. I think that was what doug mentioned in his remarks earlier. That leaves to our partnerships and relationships with Election Officials across the country. With state