I want to thank you for coming back, personnel from the break i went to welcome my panelists took thank you for being willing to participate. Obviously is the topic du jour i would say for Election Administrators as well as folks like jeremy in the Computer Science community dealing with election Cyber Security and securing the elections process. Just as a way of the background this topic is obviously the top of jews your coming out of the 2016 election where we saw a nation state state level election systems through registration as well as vendors and spear phishing attempt in 2016 as well as the declaration of election with Critical Infrastructure by the department of Homeland Security, so on this panel today i hope we delve into some of those issues and talk about the operating environment Election Officials are in today sharing expertise see all have experiences and most important what steps we are taking to secure the process when you board in 2018 and how you are moving forward prepping for primary season and november, so i want to note jeremy gray who is also to be a palace from la county came down with the flu and so we thank him for not coming and sharing, but his expertise will be missed and i know hes greatly disappointed and you all will have to carry that extra load of not having jeremy there. I will start out with introductions. Im fortunate enough to know all of you so i will do quick introductions and teed up with you, jeremy to do a quick three to fiveminute opening remark if thats okay. First on my farm might right is jeremy epstein. Jeremys been a long time computer scientists engaged in Election Research and look at the Cyber Security challenge and election he was a member of the ac technical Guideline DevelopmentCommunity Oven is to write the next version of standards coming early may 2018. Jeremy is also a poll worker in his home county of Fairfax County virginia and he takes a great deal of pride in that and has learned about the process in that way and is affectionately known as east coast jeremy because jeremy gray is west coast jimmy so i will try not to refer you to refer to you in that way. Immediately to my right is secretary of state Nellie Gorbea from the great state of rhode island. Secretary Nellie Gorbea, i got to know well through the process of your Voting System process. Secretary Nellie Gorbea does not take no for an answer for she knew she wanted to innovate in the state of rhode island then pushed to get innovation in place in the state of rhode island prior to the last president ial election 2016 including replacing the voting equipment in bringing about a number of reforms, so the secretary and her staff were incredible to work with as they look to innovate and improve the election process in rhode island. Thank you for being here up your my immediate lace left is secretary of state kim wyman. Undoubtedly she will talk about vote by mail. Secretary kim wyman is unique amongst her peers in that prior to being the secretary of state she was a local election official and is intimately familiar with how elections are run and the challenges that exist on the state level and for many new innovative reforms and securing the process and what happens when decisions are made in legislatures that impact you down all the way to the local level. Secretary kim wyman, thank you for being here. Last but not least, David Stafford is the supervisor of elections for a scam be, the pensacola area for those not familiar with florida. I suggest you visit data david. He has a wonderful office in pensacola. David has been a part of the National Level conversation regarding the Government Coordinating Council and establishment of level of critical answers if the structure. David, i thank you for being here and participating in the discussion. Thank you. I will start intentionally with cheap you jeremy to open the conversation and part of what i want you to discuss by the way he knows am going to ask this. Discuss what it means for us to be in an environment in which nationstate actors are targeting election assist systems and share your thoughts in the environment we are in and where we are headed. Thank you. I need to start by saying although i am the precinct chief for virginia and work with the National Science foundation, nothing i say reflects those organizations and they are my opinion only. Usual disclaimer. Clearly we have seen in 2016 that many of us in Cyber Security community have expected at some level for decades we have talked about many of these things and in a sense there was no surprise, but in another sense it was surprising how brazen some of these attacks were. Perhaps most critical thing to learn as if you have a computer that is internet connected you make its a internet connected, but its internet connected and when i hear people saying it secure because its not on the internet, it is. Remember in the not so distant past we would spread viruses through floppy disks to those are still introducing the same risks. Talk to the iranians if youre not familiar with that it was the case where a non connected system was infected with malware to put out of Commission Nuclear central fusion. Im not saying new color central fusion and Voting Machines are the same think, but it demonstrates that you cant really be offline. If you think you are secure you have not looked hard enough. I spent some time as a hacker, one of the good guys to help companies and its pretty much a given that any system can be broken into. Im glad dhs is doing the sorts of things they are doing as part of their status, critical resource, but anyone who thinks thats enough hasnt looked far enough. You dont do it once and then you are done. I have looked at some reports made public from dhs and they are good, but they are maybe i should say they are fair, but they dont really demonstrate the level of sophistication in that nationals that it adversaries have. They are uniformly vulnerable and i think any Cyber Security expert who looked at any of these system would come to that conclusion. We need to be focused on detection and recovery and we also need to keep in mind the average lag time according to the fbi from a compromise until detection is in the range of three to six months, so coming out on the day after election day saying there was no compromise, thats not really surprising that you have not seen a compromise. It may not show up for three to six month on average. So, i went to also focus on what we can do now, which is the move to paper ballots and limiting audits is important. I want to give a shout out in particular is he her somewhere from virginia who has made major pushes in virginia, my state, two cats paper ballots. Its been a huge change. If you not read the report that caused virginia to get rid of the remaining dres, is compelling reading and i dont mean compelling in a sense of putting you to sleep i mean compelling in the sense of if anyone out there thinks they can use dres safely, you need to read that report. Whats they found was its basically too sensitive to tell you how bad it is and that should be a message for all of us. We need to make sure we go to the hand marked paper ballots and we also should recognize that its a good thing because it results in shorter lines. We were just talking about that and it does result in shorter lines. I know im supposed to keep this short so we mention to brief points, internet voting. See what i said previously. If anyone thinks internet voting is a good idea, what planet are you coming from . This is just not a good idea with any technology we have today. We do not know how we do this. When banks and the pentagon and so on can keep hackers out, what makes you think a nation state isnt going to get into your system, which is good as your people are, you have the resources of citibank or the pentagon or, you know, boeing or whatever to protect your systems its not that youre not smart hardworking people, you dont have the resources and by umno Election Officials, state alice, whatever is just about idea. The final state, to throw out there is off chain. There are at least a dozen startup scene walk chain is the answer to voting. Well, lock chain is one of those things that if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. It doesnt okay job of solving one of the easiest parts of the voting problem and does nothing at all to solve the hard parts, so block chain is not an answer. We need to go back to basics, the things we know work, paper, chain of custody, accurate record retention, monitoring and not assume that it was secure yesterday so therefore its secure today. Thank you. Thank you for those uplifting comments. [laughter] i know, thats what you do, but i will come back to you and talk about not just some of the basics you talked about, but ways to engage her community proactively and things like that secretary Nellie Gorbea . Thank you very much for putting this together. In rhode island we have had multiyear relationship with your office and your agency and its been invaluable in very much the kind of expertise that you have that you provided is essential to the state of rhode island, so i thank you very much and your staff. In rhode island, tickets important to note in the panel you put together is great because we have different styles represented on the panel. Rhode island is the original state to declare independence unlike what you may have heard in your history books and as of one of the original we have a fairly old Voting System that dates back to the beginning of this country and over the last few years weve done a lot to change the way and modernize and secure the way we do it and i serve as the state chief election official, but we have a system thats basically threepart system where the department of state is this chief state election official. I handle putting together the ballot for the entire state. We dont have counties which simplifies things incredibly and once we prepare that ballot we send it to the printer and that ballot that is to distribute it to local canvassers who run the day of election with the state board of elections, which is an independent agency, nonpartisan, so that they really brief sort of them are. We also the department of state run the central Voter Registration system and so that whole system is what my office takes care. It goes to the whole issue of education. If you move from rhode island to massachusetts or connecticut, you change the way your system works and i think thats a key point that was discussed earlier that we need to understand as americans sort of what is the system that i am currently operating in so we can then talk about the solution and securing and at the same time increasing access. We have had wonderful collaboration with the Election Assistance Commission and part of Homeland Security over the last two years and when i took office in 2015 and this is actually my first election term both as secretary of state and elected office and i had the advantage of being eight deputy secretary of state for four years and i know a number of people are here from the early years, but so we came in and realized that our Voting Systems were really outdated and the concerns of security were an issue with 20year old paper ballot scanning machines that were on the verge of breaking down because who has parts for a 20year old scanner quarks so i made it a point of speaking with the governor and leadership and we were able to purchase for the entire state and time of the 2016 election ballot scanning machines that really increase the Comfort Level we had with regards to securing the election , but i will say at this point that securing an election there is no Silver Bullet and it is not a point. Its a path and so its layers and layers of different actions that take you to better Risk Management you just said if you think you are solving it did have other problems, so we went ahead and bought the voting machine and went ahead and got on my Voter Registration packs, automatic Voter Registration packs and implemented automatic Voter Registration has been passed and is in the process of being implemented. We also have really done a lot of work and this goes to the Civic Education piece in simplifying how we discuss elections with voters and basically looking at the center for civic design for help and how do we use design things in a way that people understand them. So, improving access to the ballot box by even thinking about how you communicate, how do you present your information to your citizens so they can more easily access the ballot box and so i come with a firm belief that actually you can improve the integrity of elections without sacrificing access. You can actually do both and i think it rhode island we are in the process of showing this can be does. It does require an incredible amount of collaboration. I dont have all the resources. Im happy to go to the department of Homeland Security to organizations like the National Association of secretary of state for back best practices or the conversations about how to do this better and i think those forms are important to us being able to provide better elections , so thank you very much for your time and i went to make sure we get to the other subjects. Unfortunately for all of you now, there are additional questions and you raise a critical issue we will come back to which is the conversation around the balance between access and security in the rally for Election Officials that there is no such thing as that balance that the process has to be assessable. Thats not a balance requirement so we will talk about that. Secretary, the site that the four drawers. Thank you for convening this and i would agree with west secretary Nellie Gorbea mention acrosstheboard and even though our states are very different and show that diversity across the country in this decentralized with electing our leaders my state of washington has about 4 million registered voters, 39 county auditors who are responsible for conducting the election, not only during the input of the Voter Registration data, but also sending ballots to the voters and things and we are faux by mail, the second straight in the country to vote by mail following oregon and then a number of western states are on our heels and joining us and you in the east is coming. I know you dont believe us. It is coming. Our world is 18 day Voting Period and you have heard comments today about that. The dynamic of how people float is changing in the way they vote is changing. So, my office just like secretary Nellie Gorbea and the chief election officer for the state and our state does reviews of the election operation in the 39 counties and training and certification and many of you will remember our state was front and center a few years ago with the closest governors race in history of the country. That was so much fun, by the way i think a lot of good came out of that race and being under the microscope and it really does drive you to make sure every single voter in your state and i think is the goal of all Election Administrators across the country has the same experience that same access, same security level. All of those things. Administrators across the country as well as secretary of state are always working to that end to make sure we are as uniform as possible to make sure its fair across the country. In our state we have four election vendors who provide the ballot tabulation system that are counties use in the vast majority of our voters use paper ballots that are digitally scanned, that we still have optical scanning. We have voter verified paper if that makes sense and on the Voter Registration side our model is kind of a bottom up. Counties to all of the input of the Voter Registration that feeds in from one of three vendors to our centralized Voter Registration base and we also have a number of things we put into place over the last probably 10 years from an application where voters can get information about themselves, specific information called my votes and i will talk later about the challenges we have of having some of these applications, but voters can check the registration status, register online, update registration, find out their ballot layout and what offices are on their ballot and i also just talk a bit about to touch on our state implemented online Voter Registration 2006 and we have an id check as part of that and its one of those things and i think one of the Common Threads you will hear today is how you implement things matter and voter idea in some cases is a splash point hot issue and in our state it happened because we have the front end working with stakeholders and groups to make sure we would be able to be successful in that rollout, so all of the Cyber Security discussion we will have in the next hour, i think dovetails nicely into ho