Drop them in the chat room. Voting is on everyones mind at the moment in with the coronavirus especially more voters than ever are trying mailin ballots are voting early and as we are talking about our usual voting methods so many things have moved to on line and people are asking will voting become digital as well . I want to start the conversation by asking why would you even want to on line voting and i will say im coming from Seattle Washington where we have a robust mailin ballots system and its quite easy. I think the appeal is enormous. In theory its largely been attempted in this country for military servicemembers and it could be used for people with disabilities who f dont have a lot of access to the polls. I think if we somehow had a robust on line Voting System that would drastically increase participation and the bigger question than how we would get there. This country doesnt have great numbers of people who show up on election day and many people are so engaged. They are more interested in then devote in an election. I would second what kevin just said. I think we need to keep in mind that there is a nontrivial number of voters who cant hand mark a paper ballot and are not able to effectively use the postal ballot and the mailin system as well with various constraints. We do need to keep in mind also there is an element of anonymity and we are going through a pandemic right now. We need to have backup plans not just one but several and a Digital Solution to provide that element of protection against different scenarios and provide access to people who have been disenfranchised and use the traditional method of voting. Its allus about access and as much choice as a weekend given to people in a responsible measured way and thats the big reason why we need to keep exploring. To keep things interesting i will push back a little bit. First of all i should say i work on access issues and its always my resumption that we want to increase options for voters so if we could find a way to allow for internet voting that is secure i think that would be great to offer that option to voters. Its not totally clear to me that would increase turnout. Again i think its critical to find ways to increase options for voters and to increase access but if you look at states that have more early voting in states you dont necessarily see huge increases in turnout and i think their issues why people dont have the turnout in the u. S. That many of us would like to see as other countries. At the same time theres no questionme that for some voters particularly those with disabilities this might be away in particular for the challenges that they we have easierto to vote. For the time being and im sure we will get into this discussion there is pretty much a universal opinion by Security Experts that we are not ready to do this and we need to be looking for alternatives right now thato cn help voters with disabilities and voters living abroad to ensure that they can vote in their votes will be counted. We will deftly come back to the issue of security but before we get into that i want to catch folks of that they havent been following closely how close are we to having on line voting and whereto is this happening alreay and who is at the leading edge of this . I can address that. As kevin previously mentioned currently several jurisdictions around the country have this optionro available. Primarily u. S. Citizens living overseas and a small number of jurisdictions voters who have some form off disability. I believe more than 30 states do allow some form of electronic for a subset or group of voters. Some are handled by facts or email some of which are not secure by any standard so thats something that needs to be kept in mind when you talk about security. What is the actual process of voting on the phone or on line look like . What does it look like from a user perspective . I would be happy to take that. There are a couple of different approaches. The traditional approach has been to use some form of web site and our approach has been the use of the smart phone application. From a Voter Perspective the process is the same as you would do for any absentee voting process when you register in your jurisdiction as an absentee voter. There is a federal form and theres also a state form so you can do either. Your county or local clerk will do a little bit of vetting when you send out information at once that is applied theres an option on the phone for which method you want to choose who you can choose the postal mail or you can choose facts in some jurisdiction and you can choose electronics in some jurisdictions where electronic options would be email or mobile. You get an invitation and depending on the channel if its mobile youd be asked to download a nap and you show authentication using your mobile number and email to match and then you are prompted into i. D. Verification. You take a picture of your government established photo i. D. Or passport and you are asked to move your face so if knows its real and you are not taking a picture of another picture. They make sure your i. D. Is valid and of everything is matching with the Voter Registration file then you are at abbott and stored in a secure location and with the help of credentials you can use a fingerprint of face i. D. Or a wearable and at that point you are ready to receive your ballot using your ballot on the phone and you can mark your ballot and acts as the interface or if you need to blow up the forms you can do that and once you are ready you choose in many states will ask you to sign an affidavit and you sign on the phone and thats automatically transcribed on the affidavit and that is compared by the elections state Voter Registration system. You get a receipt so u. S. A voter can he pass protected and you can quickly chat and it has an identifier which you can use to audit your work and in parallel the jurisdiction gets a copy of your receipt which then is used to do an audit and on election day a paper ballot showing that you are voting on the phone is generating a paper ballot and the computer hand mark its into the system. In the background there is a ledger system as well on a network which set a postelection audit to give assurance of confidence and ensuring everything went through without any tampering. That is one of the ways the works right now. We will go over the verification process as well but i know that there has been a lot of mistrust over the last three years especially phone security. Im curious what the conversation has been like from voters. How do you make sure that voters feel secure in the system and i like to hear from kevin who has reported on this. I have talked to a number of people who have cast their ballots do this Voting System and pretty much to a t. They all had some difficulty in setting it up and overall with the experience. I think thats a distinct discussion of security concerns but purely in terms of figuring out they had a little trouble making sense to it. Voting is not easy anyway but they did enjoy it. I dont know if you want to get into the security issue as well but i do think there is enough ofof a consensus among security that its a much toughert nut to crack. I their Security Issues . A couple ofd things. If you look at polling on this in general if you ask voters if theyd like to be a look but on their phones they will say yes mention russia or security attacks essentially attacking our elections those numbers plummet. Th i think most people when they are thinking about voting are necessarily thinking about security but of course thats a great concern and when you raised with voters is a great concern as well. I think its worth noting the vect that we have moved dramatically away from voting over the internet away from a paperless Voting System and how much movementt there was mostly because of National Security warnings but also because there is a public desire to have the paper record that voter has seen before was cast in the machine. Record before was cast in and how important it was to people. R ive gone from something even the past two years 2016 i think, one in five voters have the verified voter paper record and that this election would beec 4 rate theres a dramatic move away from this and thats in part because of the security concerns that i have raised. If i could add a couple of things to that. We have also seen a lot of what was referred to in a lot of the feedback in the jurisdictions yes you asked the first question what people want to vote on their phone and not on line and the majority are in favor and if you asked them a question about eight people to get skeptical and if you follow up with a mechanism to vote the number shoots up again. That is an indicator that people are looking for a measure of trust and i think thats something that shouldnt be overlooked. Lets back up a little bit. Theres a possibility of interference with our election. What are the major security risks especially compared to traditional voting . I think the most alarming thing that i have heard talking with Security Experts is the idea that an on line Voting System can. Essentially a Central Place where ballots are cast. A worse Case Scenario of a particular voting machine being hacked on election day means that votes could be spoiled. If we are talking about a centralized hub and im just speaking in broad terms here every vote that was cast on election day which is essentially orders of magnitude more and third if there is not a paper record at the end of the day a separate independent recount the discrepancy might not ever be found which states have a couple y of weeks maybe four election results. It varies by law but every state has for instance several between november and january before we swear in the next president so thats a greater nightmare scenario i think than any i can think of with traditional paper voting. I think thats a good example and id have to agree with that. Thats a big concern and there are concerns about we hear from personal devices and how secure those devices are and im now aware attack it reaches everybody voting on their iphone to potentially have their vote impacted and i do think the point that kevin just brought up the deante about the paper record that voter has filled out by now and 2021 of the things that i think everybody has an election but one of the things that makes me feel a lot better is not all the ballots are in 96 of the country. If there is some kind of problem or some kind of doubt theyll be able to go back to that paper record that the voter herself has filled out and is viewed and confirmed and how she intended to vote and that should go a long way to resolving doubts about vote totals. The actual security and as you know all too well that perception is incredibly important in ensuring that her democracy works. So a couple of things to add to that as kevin mentioned. The whole idea of having you look at the designs of the mobile Voting Systems out there that something which has been addressed through the use of technology and generally every jurisdiction in the u. S. Has its own elections so even if you are using the system across multiple jurisdictions that data would be logically separated so theres no single place where somebody can come in and audit the vote. Thats one. The second one is there is a paper ballot being generated here so the key difference here is as a voting person i have to have trust in the paper ballot and the machine is not going to be thrown away or something bad will happen to it. Something small and inconsequential when people say here with some of the new technology you literally get 100 assurance that not only did your absentee ballots make it but it was counted and tabulated and that should not be overlooked. That technology has a way to give us more trust than what we have an existing system. There is a perception i agree. There are a lot of conflicting thoughts out there so that is something which over period of time and thats why its very importantt to make sure technology is a rolled up overnight by the slow and gradual process where you can expand access beyond the small group of people. I do think, if i can note here thereve been a couple of studies of Security Papers on foes in the m. I. T. One found that the server would be able to control the total results if i understand that correctly. There at least is security researchers disagree on that point. That is essentially a misunderstanding of the nature of the system. If you could correlate that kind of track as well i have to trust as a citizen whats happening in the election and whats happening behind the scenes and if the militia factor decides to throw away all the paper ballots or we t recently saw and california people who voted dont even know so the reality is it exists in the voting as well and ultimately there is a perception that is created that is foolproof and that system has so we shouldnt ignore those and i think if you have adequate control and take action at every the riskcan minimize to a level that the system becomes usable. Thats what we need to focus on in a digital system just like the same approach with the in person voting s system. I just wanted to mention the california example that instance where for to drop docs they empty drop boxes regularly in california and they generally have video cameras. If their bar codes on the paper ballots so they are able to Contact People and the bar code keeps track of the ballots and they are able to Contact People whose ballots may have been lost and obviously thats an exceptional circumstance. So you are talking about limited impact on the kind of attack and inability to recover. I think we still have a lot of questions and in the examples that kevin and i gave. We have a lot of experience with voting on paper and with security measures around paper ballots and a builtin a lot of resiliency and the systems to ensure if there are problems where able to recover and that would minimize problems. I have this concern generally, because there arent enough standards and regulation and oversight in our election systems, but we dont have any standard nationally. I shouldnt say we dont have any National Standards for internet voting. So we have private vendors who are selling methods of voting to Election Officials. I dont know ifia Election Officials really have any thing to judge them on. There are no standards that these are being stood against parade theres no notification system. So at the end of the day what youre left with is, Election Officials basically having to rely on the representations of the vendor for which there is really no check. With the vendor is telling you is true. Are there standards that they have satisfied . I think its ada real problem. I think most people agree they think were ready for internet voting or not, that we really need to have clear standards before we come anywhere close to having any significant number of people voting on these issues. Host i would guess the average its pretty low in academician every Election Officials would independently verified, security either. So what might those regulations look like . How is a bridge that gap to see what is adopted is actually secure . There are some standards that were putut out by the overseas Voting Foundation and connection, working with Security Experts. They say this independent standards out there. Frankly i think if were going to do this in the United States, it should be Something Like the National Standards of technolog technology. Which helped design the standards abuse for Voting Machines that are in place. Put Something Like this togethe together. But at the end of the day, it seems to me that there are at least three things set the standards need to satisfyo part one is to ensure the privacy of the voter, right . Close of the steps that might be taken to authenticate the voter. How do we ensure with their privacy is protected . With the secret valve United States. Thats one of the reasons this is such a big security challenge it is not like banking. We need tono make sure that people cannot buy or see how other people arere voting. When you to ensure 22 authenticate. Have a system or anybody can go in and but for anybody. Theres a bit of attention there. Then of course, probably most importantly, we need to ensure the integrity of that vote. We need to ensure that every step of the process when a person is trying to vote on their phone to when it arrives , the election offices that it actually represents the vote that the voter intended to cast. And somehow do that without the voter or anybody else, certainly anybody else being of the sea and confirm with the voter how they intended to vote. These are complicated things to do. Sue back if i could add to that. I agree about the problem of the standards that is something we have been advocating for for a while. Earlier this year almost like in the appeal for all the agencies to welcome that. And at the same time, the process of piloting and trying the solution is that standards process. Because in the past there has been an attempt unfortunately to prevent or delay needs to be actuated. And secondly, people look at the piloting, the idea of remotely ratifying the order, which is one of the challenges outline. From a few years ago. Thats actually been addressed based on standards which have beenen created. That is been successful in other industries. We brought it to the election space. So that is whats happening, bit by bit, stepbystep. Minor was a formal standardization process for just like the one that exists for hardware in person Voting Machines. That would definitely benefit the space. And also helping, controlling some of the contradicting that is out there. So back sorry to judah jump in . No you goo ahead, you go ahead. With the pilot i wonder if we can go over some of the path and how its gone. I feel it kevin is not reported on th