Welcome to bdcs last event before election day. I direct the elections podcast of the bipartisan policy center. We knew 20 20 would be exciting but for election nerds like me and those in idthis panel president ial election years are always eventful that we did not expect all this. According to the us elections project , as of this morning co more than 79 million ballots have been classed including 27 million early ballots and 82 million absentee ballots and 39 million absentee ballots outstanding and in some counties and states we are nearing the point when more ballots were cast before election day 2020 and during the entire 2016 Voting Period land it means this will be the First National election when more than half of the balance were cast prior to election day t. This shift occurred during a once in a century pandemic forcing officials to adapt. Election administrators atthe state and local levels deserve all our admiration. Since voting is happening right now and processing is happening right now weve decided to assemble a group of voting experts who have been Election Officials or studying it for their entire careers to discuss what to expect as this unprecedented election season nears its end hopefully read it before i introduce them i ask you please submit question throughout this event either to facebook and youtube in the e Comment Section or on twitter using the hashtag ttc life. Also i invite you to register for an event we will be holding virtually december 15. Ng2020 voting experience and goals for reform cosponsored by the Democracy Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of new york. Youll find more information on bbcs website and with that let me introduce todays panelists. Doctor Lana Atkinson is professor at this Political Science and director of the and y for Democracy Institute of social research at university of new mexico. He internationally recognized expert in the area of election science, methodology, voting rights, Public Opinion and Political Behavior area 80 is a Senior Advisor of elections and in 2013 she was selected by president obama to serve as a nation are on the commission at the bipartisan policy center. Prior to that she was federal Compliance Officer for arizona elections for 11 years. Edgardo cortes is a former virginia commissioner of elections and current security advisor at the Brennan Center for justice. He has served as a general registrar for Fairfax County virginia and finally, chris thomas is a bbc fellow and Current Special advisor to the detroit city clerks area chris also served as commissioner on the president ial commission on administration and was a longtime director for the state of michigan. Thank you to all the panelists weregoing. With that let me jump into my first question and im going to ask edgardo, talking about the titles held by the National Intelligence director and fbi director about interference, what are the biggest risks remaining on election day and in the days that follow . Thanks so much for having me with you today. I think the announcement last week was big news but i think for me one of the biggest part of the news was that the federal government identified an issue and made the public aware of it, maybe election official aware of it quickly which is a big change from where we were four years ago in this process. So i think heading into the election, some risks to the system still. A lot of the issues that we anticipate heading into next week revolve around the technologies as used in polling places, not necessarily that theres foreign threats which there are but i think just keeping those systems running, theres kind unprecedented use area that weve seen slowdowns during early voting and so i think the appropriate backups in place for Election Officials, one area of concern that weve been looking at is postelection and the Election Results. And the need for everybody to kind of be patient as Election Officials work through counting all ofthose bats that have come in already. And not being kind of taken aback that the vote totals change as the night progresses and as the days progress and ballots continue to be counted from this election. Doctor atkinson same question. Early in 2016 we had concerns about interference, and our Voter Registrationdatabases, what are your concerns for this cycle . Im not immensely concerned about that versus just general things going on. I think theres certainly things going on out there, but i think the thing is the difference between being concerned about them and having information is of something really happening and mucking up the system and one thing we can say about our system is the fact that is so fragmented is a wonderful thing for security and our system of electionsis really quite secure. Cant even focus for along time on absentee voting. Is the fact that were going to be doing more absentee voting this year another area of more risk western mark. I think thats a great question and i havent had anyone frame it in quite that way before. I think the question that has come up quite repeatedly is that theres this narrative around voter fraud and that we should trust both by mail or absentee voting and i think that is ill placed and illfounded. So when we talk about the security of the system, for me its a question of does it mean that voters who have collected that way of voting, do they have the opportunity to effectivelytheir voices heard through that channel . We do know that vote by mail has some opportunity for voters to misstep. They can fail to sign the signature blocks. They can return to late which is the two largest reasons for rejection. So there are opportunities for missteps on the part of the voter, not having the ballots be counted but i know in this moment many states have taken on policies either through governors executive orders and directives from secretaries of state and others to make sure that voters have the opportunity to get their ballots in and postmarked by election day. We know many places are in fact allowing for drop boxes and things of that nature though we wont have hopefully as many late ballots but you mentioned theres still outstanding tens of millions of voters have their ballots on their kitchen tables, on their desks who need to make sure that voters read those instructions thoroughly and get the ballots back in. Because for me, that is the real challenge is making sure enthat voters who have mentioned or shown that they want to participate either by registering to vote or buy in g fact requesting about, that they have every opportunity in a Global Pandemic in the midst of a third wave, a third site that were seeing here of getting those ballots back and making sure they are effectively counted. The last part of that is that we also know there are challenges when voters vote to vote in person and are given provisional ballots so we you know theres going to be a confluence there. Weve seen it already in early voting voters that have ballots at home and have decided to go vote in person and are having to vote a g provisional ballot of those will become the ballots that also we will be looking at after election day as we do every election and have for a very longtime. Weve had those procedures and policies in place. Of course candy in just two minutes was able to sum up very successfully all my concerns about the election ctand we will get to all of them in detail and i want to ask thomas you work at the federal level, statelevel and now the local level on elections so what are your biggest concerns about security for the next 7 to 14 days . Really going into the election, security is making short everybody gets help and thats what voters are concerned about right now. Weve got drop boxes across the city of detroit. We have monitors and also reported so the security from that standpoint is to assure voters that the balance that they drop in the dropbox are collected and processed and any tempering will be viewed from these agents. We have this at the voter county board is over 700 workers and thats where ereverything is going to the processed in election day so were, we have that locked down. We have our precincts locked down. We are working with the state and were assured of security in terms of ourstatewide organization system. Its really the issue of security in a broad sense of a kind of intimidation which has is concerned right now. Weve had a ban on guns overturned by the courts. Thats on appeal right now. And there is concern with michigan and capital early in thespring. We hope not to see that. Chris, im going to get with you for one second and i mentioned earlier were seeing historic levels of turnout election day. It may be that up to two thirds of the ballots come in before election day but that still means that upwards of 50 or 60 Million People are likely to turn out on election day and so certainly throughout the early voting process, especially in the first date was on voting across the country be seen long lines. Is that what we shouldexpect to see on tuesday . And we expect to see long lines through this and just the limitationsthat come with voting in person . Im not expecting long lines like were seeing on tv from other states. The question is with the increase in mail ballots, how far would states allow their local Election Officials to increase but if they validated too far then perhaps as her studies have shown over the past several election cycles the lines have generally gotten short. In michigan, there is no allowance for increase but we whave every single precinct open. We have an abundance of workers, where not short in that regard. But i do not anticipate at least in michigan theres going to be any. Obviously with sanitation of the polling booth, and social distancing things will be slow down. But as long as your constituents are not overly invalidated precincts they should be okay and they should not have lines. Doctoratkinson same question. You study lines before so what are you expecting to see in new mexico and around the country . Im expecting to see some lines on election day. Just today iowa as consolidated and closed a lot of precincts for election day and thats going to affect voters though covid will affect voters in some places. Theres always lines on election day and obviously the social distancing is going to impact that as well. But weve seen lines happening in early voting and you know, people hang in those lines and they get processed and they vote. I think for the most part for the vast majority, over 90 percent of voters or more, they are going to go into a voting location and not have any weight or hardly any weight at all but certainly there will be some lines. We have had a huge number of voters vote early in mexico either in person or by mail but theres also a large number of people as tenney mentioned who havent voted yet. Havent got their absentee ballots and that did request it so i dont know if they will be turning it in late or walking in late or not late but by election day. So theres still a lot of outstanding people to vote, either through the mail and theres still going to be a substantial number, much less , a majority of people that have perhaps as much as60 percent of the people voting or more are going to vote, probably more, 70 percent or more voting before election day. Thats a great segue into my next question which is just for tammy and tammy is our expert on absentee voting. Absentee ballots will be the ecstory ofthis election and its not only because of their amount of usage. Its also going to be i think because theres going to be a lot of litigation and theres been a lot of litigation around but can you speak of some of the issues weve been seeing and this is with receiving more than one ballot or getting the wrong ballot or the naked ballotissue , i had to bring it up on a panel like this. What are the things that are likely to be issues this past week and thenpotentially litigated in the week after election day . I think that your spot on, theres going to be quite a bit of litigation around absentee vote by mail ballots as well as provisional ballots, anything that is not determinative or already counted is going to come into question potentially in some places if the y race is close and the races are close. We have a lot of other of course down ticket contests on the ballot or ballots. So part of the challenge we have here is thinking about in this moment around the increased use of vote by mail. Ilmany jurisdictions were caught a little off guard because you have states where traditionally they had singledigit participation in vote by mail whether this is because the voter needed to use an excuse in order to get their ballot mailed to them or whether it was because in that space the culture was just basically to go vote in otperson anyway. And what we saw in the primary season is that many voters were taking the primaries, im sorry, the pandemic very seriously and decided to request their ballots by mail area and local Election Officials were inundated with applications, they were having a hard time getting the ballots out in time. People were using their preexisting policies and materials to satisfy a much larger volume of voters and thats where that practices were adopted, but they had been spent so over the course of the summer weve seen more states and jurisdictions revising the design of their envelopes so its more intuitive as to where a voter needs to find, adopting policies and best practices from center for civic design and some of these other things that when you think about it, it sounds like its really in the weeds and theres a how can i make a difference that we know through studies k that when voters know where and when to sign, when the instructions are easy to understand , they know when they need to have it returned by and when in fact there provided with options in that return we have fewer voters having ballots that are called into question as being potentially rejected. So i think that we will see a lot of that in the days following election day. Just depending again upon how many of these ballots get back early and to alana , we had thousands of voters got their ballots off at the polls election day. They are actually seeing voters bringing them in earlier and so on Election Night for the majority of states, were going to have a lot of the returns on those absentee ballots so i think its important for voters that still have that ballot in hand to know if you get in early you will be part of the first ballots counted. Im going to turn to chris. Michigan had been marking towards more absentee voting over the past couple of years but currently everything there seeing this year due to the pandemic has been much greater and they could ever haveanticipated so what are our localities doing to prepare for this onslaught . So the localities were allowed, that was the big learning curve for everybody. We typically have been handling 25 percent of the vote by mail so we have come experience but we dont have so experience with 60 to 65. Detroit had their largest number of ballots, 81,000 in a primary election with almost no serious contest on. So it was great time to learn and get all the kinks out if you will. So one thing weve learned in this state and a lot of the states ahead of us is the use of these highspeed calculators. We have a very long ballot but weve never been able to use it in the past. They would not work consistently with about but the voting vendors have fixed that so in detroit, we had 18 highspeed and the primaries we increasethat to five. As many cities in our state that have larger populations and that will move things along. Regarding the application process , we are secretary of state issued absentee ballot applications to everybody in the state and those applications were dual applications. Which means you fill that out, get about in the primary and the general election. So we were basically frontloaded in november so when our ballots became available late september, we were pushing now statewide over 2 million ballots that we didnt have to wait for another request to come in. So that has really saved us. Thats the steps towards dropbox as never before in michigan so thats a first. Satellite offices, thats a first. We had those in detroit but not in any other community so we worked ways to make it easier for voters to get on track through the system and also with ballot tracks and voter Information Centers to keep track of whether their ballots came back and thats what we see as an issue for november. Is when voters look to see if their ballot has not been returned and they show up, we put our procedures in place to handle that. To allow them to vote and they will have a call back to the city clerks office, and allowing them to go ahead and vote. Im going to ask order one more question on voting and im going to warn all the other panelists im going to move into in person on election day in a omoment so get ready. I want you to put on your Brennan Center hat. There have been a lot of changes to the voting process this year. Some of them have been done by legislatures, some have been done by courts, undone by other courts andsome undone by other higher courts. My question for you is there is now been several big cases out of the Supreme Court in the Circuit Court around absentee voting and windows ballots received after election day. What is your recommendation to voters who may be concerned therules may be changing now five days before election day, what would you say to somebody holding onto that one of their absentee ballots . Thats a great question and i think at this point the safest thing for voters is to return that ballot in person and to return it prior to the close of polls on election. Ay whatever method your state allows for, chris mentioned the use ofdrop boxes and a lot of states have provided drop boxes for voters. States at minimum allow you to drop off your ballot at the local Election Office in person. So some states are now a