They talked about how the states are preparing for a large increase and answered viewers questions about the voting process. Were thrilled to be presenting a timely panel entitled access to the vote, the ballot and the mailbox. Sponsored by the aba section of civil rights and social justice. This panel is one of many in a series of Rapid Response webinars. Were planning additional programs on a variety issues so please visit american bar. Org crsj for you be dates on these programs. Before we go to our program and how today will work, its my pleasure to turn it over to angela j. Scott, the 2020 2021 chair of the aba section of civil rights and social justice for a few remarks. Welcome, angela. Thank you, jamie. Many thanks to you and the entire civil rights and equal Opportunity Committee for planning this very timely panel. So its my pleasure to welcome everyone who is watching. Before i begin, and i say this before i say anything, i just want to make sure that you all know that im speaking in my personal capacity and that and not on behalf of my employer. Nothing that i or any of the panelists say today represents any views or of any component of the federal government. I just want to make that clear. In this day and age of a global pandemic, who would have thought that we would be living through Something Like this, but obviously over 210,000 americans have passed away from covid, so it is imperative that voters are aware of all of their options so that they can cast their ballots safely during this upcoming pandemic. And we know that certain voters had obstacles and barriers to voting even before the pandemic. So, for example, disabled and elderly individuals who were in longterm care facilities faced challenges that you and i may not and those barriers are obviously increased because of this pandemic. There are also Homeless Individuals and folks who for whatever reason list a p. O. Box as their resident address. Theyre not easily able to cast a vote. We know in various states and jurisdictions that there are new laws requiring purging from voter rolls or requiring identification that may not be easily available to some people. All of these constitute obstacles that can suppress the vote in many cases. And so to this end, the civil rights and social justice section is engaging in multiple efforts to stop some of these obstacles. We want to highlight the efforts through your programming and through some of the other efficients that we have planned. Were engaging in multiple efforts for our members to volunteer and serve the community in ways that will help ensure that people can vote this upcoming election. Our section along with other entities are helping people attorneys, to become poll workers through our aba poll Worker Initiative and those who cant do that, for those who cant be official poll workers or who cant commit to a long day of service like that, there are Election Protection opportunities. So the civil rights and social justice section is helping to facilitate, connecting our members and attorneys with nonpartisan organizations, some of whom weve partnered with in the past, Lawyers Committee for civil rights under the law, national bar association, we are helping to connect individuals who want to serve in shifts to help engage in nonpartisan Election Protection efforts. Our members are also working hard to create a tool kit that is designed for assisting individuals and Community Organizations in helping others. We all know there are many, many, Many Organizations that are well intentioned. We just want to make sure they have all of the facts and information and tools that will be helpful for them to be able to help other people. And finally in addition to this one, we have wonderful upcoming programming designed to take a deep dive into overcoming some of these obstacles. Obviously we have this Wonderful Program and coming up soon we have another program called obstacles at every turn, native vote in a world of coronavirus. We have our fifth annual state of Voting Rights program coming up. And we have another program on dignity, rights and democracy, a conversation. So we really encourage you all to join us for all of this, join the section, join us in all of these efforts. Im going to have to jump off, but, again, i want to thank you, jamie, all of the panelists, all of the Committee Members and the staff for putting this together. Elections are quintessential to our democracy through our nonpartisan programming and through our Community ServiceVoting Initiative this is year. Our members of the civil rights and social justice section with committed to being a part of solutions and a part of the nonpartisan effort to ensure that all eligible votes are counted. We look forward to you joining us. I think thats it. Im going to turn it back over to jamie. Thank you so very much for those comments, angela. Its wonderful to see you today. You too. During todays program, we encourage you to ask questions of our panelists through the q a, not the chat function. If you do not see the controls, please ensure your screen is not idle. We will address questions at the end of the day of the panel. We will be recording or sharing a recording of this program to everyone who is registered so you can share it widely with your networks. There will be captions available on the recording. And with that, were thrilled to bring you todays program entitled access to the Ballot Access to the vote, the ballot and the mailbox. There are four members of the panel. You will hear from them for several minutes each about their perceptions and expertise on the issues being discussed today. Then, we will open up for discussion and questions from the audience. I will provide a bio of each panelist before they speak. For purposes of initial introductions, im pleased to welcome our esteemed panel of elected officials, scholars and practitioners. The honorable kim wayman, secretary of state of washington, attorney general of oregon, law professor justin levit and attorney general jennifer holmes. Welcome and thank you all. More americans are expected to vote by mail in the upcoming president ial election than in any previous election in our country. Due to changes made by states in response to the pandemic. More voters are likely to cast their ballots by mail than go to the polls in person. But most voters have not voted by mail before. And that may lead to some uncertainty about whats ahead in the next few weeks. First, we will hear from secretary wayman. She is washingtons 15th secretary of state, first elected in 2012. She is serving her second term and is only the second female secretary of state in washingtons history. Prior to being elected to this office, kim served as the county elections director for nearly a decade and was elected county auditor. As washingtonians, we have had vote by mail for a number of years now. Can you please tell us about Washington States experience with vote by mail and how you address issues of safety and security. I would be happy to. Thank you so much for allowing me to be on this panel and thank you for the work that the committee and the bar has done. This is a really important topic and a very important year to do this work. Im going to take a minute to bring up hopefully if the tech agrees, a Powerpoint Presentation and just walk through what i would term the speed version of Washington State elections. And are you all seeing that . Okay. Im not. Thats kind of fun. I love technology. All right. There we go. Well, let me talk a little bit while im trying to get the tech to work. So there we go. Here in Washington State, and i think this is true of Election Officials across the country, we were election geeks by nature like many of you are law geeks and we were kind of like the offensive line in football. We dont really you guys dont Pay Attention to us until something usually goes wrong or we have a pandemic and now Everyone Needs to vote by mail. So let me real quick in the next five to ten minutes, share with you washingtons kind of path to this and what we do here to ensure that every eligible washingtonian has a right to register to vote and also have their ballot cast. Giving you scope and scale of washington elections. We have 4. 7 million registered voters and i anticipate by election day we will be knocking on the door of 5 million. Weve had a number of laws over the last 20 years that have really catapulted washington forward to be in a position that quite frankly like oregon was very good for a pandemic it turns out. It begins with voter i. D. In 2006, following the closest governors race in 2004, washington adopted voter i. D. Laws that have served our voters well. We have not had issues with suppression and we even withstood a challenge and im proud of the way we rolled it out. It wasnt politicized too much and it is really worked well with our system. Weve had online Voter Registration since 2008 and we have been a vote by mail state since 2011. Some of the in the last ten years, the activities and advancement that is weve made have expanded access. Starting, of course, with prepaid postage that we started doing in 2018 and in 2019 was really the huge expansion of access in Washington State. Same day registration, automatic Voter Registration and all of these really great advancement that is im proud to have been part of im not taking credit for it. Ive been an election administrator getting to enact these laws. We build out the controls that balance it out. And one of the big things we did in 2019 was rollout a near realtime statewide Voter Registration system. This is the backbone for a lot of the access that we have. Here in washington, our balloting will be available 20 days before election to any voter who wants to come in and get one. They have to be in the mail by our county auditors 18 days prior to election day. And we have over 500 ballot drop boxes that voters can drop their ballot in if they dont want to put it into the usps and were thankful for that right now. Certainly theres been a lot of interesting reporting about the usps. Here in Washington State and this is one area where oregon and washington differ. Im sure my colleague from oregon will talk about it in a moment. Washington is a postmark state. As long as we receive a ballot with a postmark on or before election day within the day following election day, that ballot can be counted and is counted as long as it meets all of the other eligibility requirements. And let me stop here for a minute and just talk a little bit about what we do to inspire that confidence. Certainly the president and the attorney general the u. S. Attorney general have made some pretty disparaging remarks about the security and the safety of vote by mail and ive been running votebymail elections for almost 20 years now. I can tell you the security controls that we have in place like checking and verifying every signature of every return ballot against the signature on the Voter Registration record is our linchpin for security. We make sure the signature matches and we dont want to disenfranchise a valid vote. We contact a voter if their signature doesnt match or is missing. Sometimes voters forget to sign their envelopes. We give that voter an opportunity for a second chance. Thats an empowering move that we started probably 15 years ago. But its also another security check. I quarantiguarantee you, if you a letter from your election official that says your ballot has been returned and you havent voted, youre going to be on the phone right away to make sure that ballot has been set aside and prosecuted if it is a crime. Another thing that were seeing a lot of here in washington that is a little bit newer in the last probably five to ten years is what we call the ballot chase. And that is where campaigns will get that list of voters after election day whose signatures do not match, theyll find their supporters, and follow up on this as well. This helps us reduce the rejection rate. Thats another reason why its good that our counties reach out to voters because it equalizes it for everyone. Its not the wellfinanced campaigns or wellorganized campaigns that have that advantage. Another thing that we have with our new vote wide system, the voters have the ability to i totally missed this, register to vote online and they can do that up eight days before election day. And then we do still have inperson same day registration up through 8 00 Election Night. Voters can track their ballot through our portal as well. Once they put it into the mail stream or put it into the ballot drop box and the county receives it, they can follow that path of signature checking to it being ready to count and can have an assurance that their ballot is received and if theres a problem, they can contact Election Officials to rectify that. As i said earlier, we have a 21day certification period in washington. So those latearriving ballots can still be counted. One of the things that i think is important to get on all of your radar if its not already is that i think were going to see a shift in november that most of the country has not seen before and i think oregon and washington voters are used to this. I think our counterparts across the country are going to be shocked to find out that theyre not going to know who won the election on Election Night and i think most voters think that is a final answer and i think all of the lawyers on this call know thats not the case because were working after election day to certify those results. But as you see in this bar graph, this is a typical return pattern that we see and this is from our 2020 august primary election. What i can tell you, though, this is off the chart in a way ive never seen before. Typically we do see about 50 o 60 of our ballots come in election week because of that postmark element. But you notice that we see a spike not only on wednesday after election day, but thursday. And what we saw in august is is that the volume was so crushing for our counties who are got at processing ballots, it took them an entire day to get a lot through their latearriving ballots that close at 8 00 on Election Night. I mention this because i think its a trend were going to see across the country. The latearriving ballots are going to happen. You potentially are going to be hundreds of thousands that get to their Election Offices with valid postmarks arriving the day after the election and will not be eligible to be counted in those states. I think we already are seeing litigation on that front across the country and i think we will see more of it following election day. But this is definitely going to delay the results in states across the country. This was a New York Times graphic that i just thought was great. The dark blue states are the states that have a history of votebymail elections. The gold states have how shall we say, very restrictive absentee laws. And all of the remaining states are ramping up their operations and we are going to have a wide array of absentee ballot processing and election activity that is vote by mail. I can assure you that my colleagues have been reaching out to our office and to our county partners and were all sharing a lot of information, probably the best thing that comes out of all of the preparations for cybersecurity, so we have been really working trying to get ready for 2020. One of the things the last thing ill leave you with is, we have a national hashtag called get out the vote excuse me. My brain is full. Trusted info 2020 and thats really trying to drive people to trusted sources of information like your county Election Officers, your state Election Officers, or the bar association, aclu, organizations that you can trust for information so that people know what they need to do. With that, i hope i hit my time right and thank you for letting me present. Thank you very much, secretary. We will next hear from attorney general rosenbloom. A former federal prosecutor, she was first elected as oregons 17th attorney general in november 2012 and was reelected to a second term november 8th, 2016. She is the first woman to serve as Oregon Attorney general. She has served as secretary of the American Bar Association as well as chair of the aba section of state and local government law. Attorney general rosenbloom you represent another one of the five states that exclusively votes by mail. I know youve been dealing with some recent litigation related to vote by mail. Can you tell us about this and any other relevant legal issues . Sure. Thank you so much, jamie. I want to go like this when you say were one of the vote by mail states. But, look, we understand its a lot more difficult for states that havent been to get up to speed and im so proud of those in so many states who are really making this effort because it is so important. Any state that allows for absentee voting, which we used to call it that, can easily, fairly easily, make this transition in a year where it is so important to do that. So let me start by saying thank you to you, jamie, for inviting me to the section of civil rights and social justice. I love working with you. Our sections do a lot together. And thank you to secretary wayman and my fellow panelists and for everyone who shown up virtually this morning. We have about 250 people on this panel webinar. Thank you so much for joining us. Obviously, elections are at the heart of our democracy and this year states are facing unprecedented c