Technologygy and the center for justice to welcome you to what i consider to be a very timely and very important symposium. At these outset, i want to thank all the participants who got an incredible array of speakers participating in the form. I want to thank the guests that have taken the time to join us this morning, and i also want to reach out and say thank you to cspan for covering something that i think all of us, regardless of th whether republ, democrat, independent think it is critically important. Its an disputed people have been hacking into the elections for a long time. The evidence is indisputable. We can start with 2016, but i think that we will look back before that we might havese seed there were some people playing around inpe that arena even befe that time. So, when we decided to get together for these organizations to pull together a symposium to deal with how to make the 2020 election more secure so we are grateful they can join us this morning. Some of you in the audience might remember i talked to colleagues from the school and asked them how old they were 2001 on 9 11 most of them were in grade school and a couple of high school at the time i reminded them that it was called to the white housthe white housn the opportunity to set up the department of Homeland Security and as i look back and reflect on the time. They would attack us and attack our citizens and within a couple of months or a year or so we decided it better start paying attention to the digital attacks but this is now 2003. With Digital Tools and minimal sophistication was what we are dealing with today and clearly the frequency has been expanded exponentially. So thinking back about those days, and i think about trying to deal with physical and Cyber Attacks, and i think to myself, and this is my opinion and i share it with you i hope that you agree it is one of thes reasons behind the forum its potential to as harmful and painful to deal with the attacks of those days and is potentially harmful to the citizens and economy as terrorists, physical or Cyber Attacks would be in my judgment nothing has a greater potential to undermine for we are as a free people in Cyber Threats to democracy in a free and Fair Elections by creating doubt and uncertainty to the legitimacy of the political process and create chaos which we see today even that divides the political leaders. Is to destabilize the governmental institutions and im afraid we have to admit they are succeeding. Truth and civility in the very foundation of the Constitutional Government are the primary victims of the abuse and misuse of social media. Lets be very clear we focus a lot on the foreign influence and there certainly is a there will be some discussion about that but lets not underestimate the rule of the domestic cyber activity as well perhaps not to destabilize the process is to promote the political candidacy no matter the goal. The digital son is never going to set. Its justte going to get hottern the hyper connected world the challenges associated with Cyber Threats to the institutions of governmentf continue to grow ad expand so its forgot reason they said lets look at vulnerabilities in the electoral process endquotes to give look at the impact of social media on the process itself. Without further ado i want to introduce my friend and colleague. [applause] it is a pleasure to bee here today. I want to thank you all and welcome you to the audience. One thing thats important to remember because we are going to be talking about Election Security and about the media and money and data as a part of the undercurrent. No one here is a paid speaker or was charged emissions. No sponsor is doing this and pursuant to the grand. This is because the group of entities and individuals like you all here recognize the importance of securing the elections and the threat that come from these aspects we are going to talk about today. When we talk about politics its very easy to get personal. It is incredibly interdisciplinary and mixed in terms of the backgrounds from the speakers that have come here today. We are looking forward to working towards problem solving with youou all. I dont want to take very much time but i want to remind everybody as we frame the questions and responses and we have a great opportunity for audience participation and we want to hear from you. This is an Incredible Group of people so again remember this isnt about my politics or your politics. Its about saving democracy so lets work tmuch work to do thar and without further ado i want to turn over to my colleague whos one of the leading data scientists in the country. [applause] a personal thanks to you and the governors for your investments in bringing us here today. We are here to wrestle with a critical challenge. As i mentioned im the director of the institute for computational basis i was. We support him. If data and Computational Research at penn state and we alsopo support the rmhighperformance computing system and events such as this. The mission of the institute is to bring Interdisciplinary Research of scientific importance and advance the goal. We do that with departments all across the university. We are jointly hiring with departments such as astrophysics and engineering and such as political science, psychology, and more. And one of these intellectually intelligent and interdisciplinary scholars. The institutes culture is to bring together a diversity of experts through many disciplines professional perspectives and backgrounds in that group today. Its our tendency to limit ourselves to consideration of the facts in front of us and consider the image. This was purported to be the fire in a single day in australia. This was terrifying to me until i found out that this wasnt, it is still horrendous but thats a different story. No single expert can take on securing elections today. Its not simply a Technology Issue or a policy issue. Its an interdisciplinary problem requiring collaboration from experts in all of the specialties and more. Because elections are at the heart of the functional democracy, it is imperative that we investigate this from a multitude of perspectives bringing the best minds to bear. The Election Security is an interdisciplinary challenge but its also a data science challenge. Doubt is at the core before the vote is cast. The readily available personal and Demographic Data creates opportunitieste to provide tailored messages, micro targeting select groups through social media. While this can be a boon to business, the data mining has been readily used to spread disinformation across the electorate. Once elections take place, each vote is a crucial data point in determining the leadership of the country. How they are tabulated, how they are analyzed and communicated without bias these are important aspects of the process that must be secure. That will lead to action thank you for bringing us together. [applause] and the Brennan Center the direction of the mess the director of the program. Welcome. Thank you and thank you to all the groups partnering at the Brennan Center it is an interesting and informative conversation. I have been asked to present an overview of some of the Biggest Challenges facing American Election infrastructure. I will discuss whether or not insurmountable challenges and what we can do in the long term after 2020 to start making differenton changes to secure election infrastructure. It isnt fair but ill use iowa and the caucuses as an introduction. [laughter] i was a little bit worried about nevada but i did have to overhaul my slides there wasnt too many big disasters. But the reason why i think its not fair to use iowa before i do itiran there was no cyberattack on the infrastructure they were using as far as wes know. Of course the caucuses were run by the democrats they are not run by professional Election Officials by the states or counties as the primary czar as the general election. But there were some importanter questions going into 2020. The first is that vendors are a point of vulnerability in elections. Up on capitol hill with election infrastructure and security they talk about election official officials, states, counties, but much is supported by private vendors. They touched nearly aspect of our elections. So there are three big manufacturers of Voting Machines and they control 90 percent of the market but there are certainly hundreds of Additional Companies that maintain and program these machines and vote maintain the database for those were eligible to vote and other essential functions for our elections but yet unlike other vendors and other sectors that have been deemed critical like dams or energy or defense there are no federallas regulations in fact there has been very little federal oversight of thesend vendors so what this means we dont even have a full picture that are looking on the manufacturer we dont know what kind of screening they do we dont know who owns the maryland learned the past couple of years that vendor for the Voter Registration systems was owned by rush oligarch we dont know the supply chain practices or what kind of internal cybersecurity practices they enforce. So Election Officials can know what type of security practices they put in place in their offices but they really dont know when they are dealing with vendors to purchase product for services what they are doing. They can ask in a can trust but they really cant know. We wont get that problem fixed before 2020 but i do think there is bipartisan interest in tackling this problem. It to say this is something they want to address. Lv and we dont need to be despondent with the department of Homeland Security they have all done a lot to secure elections. And for the first time in more than a Decade Congress has provided money to the states to help secure their systems to spot vulnerabilities. And it is a weakness going into 2020 and the solution is to hope for the best. So this is the second question from iowa that a great danger of cyberattacks there are always technical problems but the reporting app in iowa had glitches only some precincts that i wouldnt be talking about iowa today but the failure was systemwide it is the danger of cyberattacks that they could be targeted for systemwide failure. It could be particularly damaging if mike can iowa those in large numbers like Voter Registration databases those that determine eligibility and of course Voting Machines. The answer is to build and redundancies with the electronic pool books if it rs attacked or failed so that you get long lines they cant use a regular ballot and then they are sent away. But to see examples of this then it would be a bigger mess than we saw the iowa caucuses. But of those states that require a paper backup for these electronic pool books that seems like an obvious solution in that its not corrupted in some way and then we have a solution for that of the database to be infiltrated inin some way the other solution is the original ballot we can people go back and check if there is problem with the data that we had unfortunately most dont have the provisional ballots we have had instances in the past where people ran out of provisional p ballots so they have recommended every polling place have three hours worth provisional materials to get through if there is a systemwide attack on the database. Of course voting machine failures themselves can be a problem there are pbl 20 states using electronic Voting Machines and again those emergency paper ballots but many states dont have minimums for emergency paper ballots for that kind of a failure or. Finally the paper backups the voters in iowa voted on the bill if there were reporting apps we really wouldve hadd problems they didnt have a record to go back to people could have trusted you may have lost those votes entirely. Unfortunately we still have states that are using paperless Voting Machines in the United States and this is despite the fact we are near universal agreement we need to get rid of these systems as soon as possible but the good news to drastically reduce the number of paperless machines have gone through 30 million in 2016 to less than 16 million coming up in this election and there is nothing in the battleground states to uset those paperless machines and the 2020 election. One challenge in addition to looking at it to check the software is reporting only half of all states require that before certification and if it is statistically significant so i will wrap up by saying the good news for 2020 is all the things that i talk about are things that could be done in 2020 to get those back up books is very accomplishable with the emergency paper ballots and provisional ballots and as we can get done in time of the november election. [applause] the states are on the front lines of the National Association of state election directors we are fortunate to be joined by the executive director association. [applause] good morning i want to emphasizeth very sad for the kids at home that caucuses are not run by Election Officials not political apart not Political Parties i just want to emphasize that so thank you very much for having me. I thought it would be helpful before we spend all day talking about election and Election Security of how elections work to help you have a more informed discussion. E ofational Association Election directors is a professional association and our members are part of the territories so we have america as samoa and guam and california and texas with everything in between and they are very different the chief election official is secretary of state represented by the National Association of secretary of th state and those 40 stays the election director works for the secretary of state the other 16 are the Election Officials so if you wonder what the director does there are Administrative Professionals implement technologies and run trainings work with local officials and so much more. There are a handful of federal laws that govern elections but when we talkli about security just remember the american with disabilities act because they have the very difficult job to make sure they are secure and accessible for all voters. Of courseti there are other laws but in general elections are run by the state so they are very highly decentralized in administrative structure most administer at the county level but there ar 12 that administer at the township level like new england and michigan and wisconsin that is somewhere between eight and 10000 local jurisdictions in the country depending on how you count every single one is responsible for elections in their jurisdiction. I use wisconsin as an example because 1853 local jurisdictions or 1900 if youre a math person you recognize that is about 20 percent of the local elections in the country many of those are parttime and one third turn over annual leave. Talk about implementing cybersecurity at the global level that so we are working with with trending with the officials who may have other responsibilities who care aldeeply about democracy and we dont want to scare them off cannot do democracy without them they are not here but i will pick on them anyway. They have trainings at the local level with hundreds of ritrainings per year for cybersecurity and election administratio administration, tabletop exercises and have implemented multi factor authentication but it is really hard because eaagain you need to make sure they are not scaringn, people off and running them out of the process. With this designatione in 2017 to take advantage of a lot of different resources working with the department of Homeland Security in very different ways they are also taking advantage of state resources to do a fishing test or a Vulnerability Assessment like those in washington working closely with the National Guard to take advantage of that expertise like amazon and microsoft but other states are doing the same thing and we have states working with colleges and universities taking advantage of the expertise they are seeing that at the local level as well that they have coeges or universities in their jurisdictions relying on that expertise something that we touched on were resources that most of you in this room they are tremendously under resourcedd certainly people appreciate that i like to remind people in 2018 its really hard to procurer state and local government especially dedicated technologies like Voting Machines you just cant go to office depot or staples to buy them off the shelf its dedicated technology and can be difficult to do. Also keep in mind with k procurement Voting Technology procured at the state level you have the buying power of the entire state and other states is done at the local level. And that can be very difficult and t again then you get into theve timeline which you get to that procurement then you have the implementation nobody wants to implement a new Technology Two weeks before an election. You need to have time to educate your voters and poll workers because an election requires all of these different people to workeq together. The thing that i will say to keep in mind going through today the best way to know what is go