But most of this panel i think will be focussed on data and the importants of data and how we use it in the elections community. We have a great panel here for you. My staff has provided some abbreviated biographies which ill read and then well start hearing from the panel. Ive asked each of them to speak for about five minutes or so from their perspective on this panel and then i have some questions for them. And then we will go to questions for you. So before i get started, i want to thank you all for being here. Really excited to kick off the 2018 elections. Itsard to believe its already 2018. Were kicking off the elections but officials have already started working on this. So i know those of you who are Election Officials, this is not a kick off for you. And you all have been working on this election since the last election and i appreciate all the hard work you put in to making our elections so good in this country. To my right is secretary barbara since 2015. She has more than three decades of combined Public Service and prior to becoming secretary of state she represented clark County District eight and before that she was elected to three consecutive terms representing clark County District five and the nevada assembly. To my left is dr. Christian, she is a Senior Researcher at the marsh group where she served as a lead researcher for the Voting Survey or eves and they did a fantastic job for us this year. Lets make that a Public Statement and thats not an easy task and hes worked a number of and our friends at the federal voting agency. So thank you for being here. To my far right is michael. Hes the register of voters for San Bernardino, california which is the largest geographic in the country. Hes worked for elections in three states and his expertise is in improving operations, reporting results quickly and accurately and while michael has made his mark at each post in San Bernardino county, he has made the Election Office into a more Efficient Organization and i know its quite an impressive operation. Including the launch of new applications and redesign of the countys ballot. Consolidation of underused polling places and much more. So were excited to hear about what youre doing in your office in San Bernardino. And to my far left, maybe politically, i dont know. Probably of me. Dr. Stewart iii who am i saying at the right . Distinguished professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, mit, where he has taught since 1985. And his Biggest Research includes close looks inside congressional politics, elections and important american political developments. Those of us in this room have come to rely on charles undeniable ability to help us understand voters and how Election Administrators and and and they all have notes in front of them instead of power point. Ive got to warn you. Im an elections geek. So im going to refer to my notes to keep you on track. The goal is to conduct elections in a fair, accurate, alaska sesable and transparent manner. So meeting that goal is difficult. Because our budgets are tight, our staff is small. We rely on temp workers and poll workers and the expectation is already going from the media and the public. So were constantly thinking of new ways to improve our processes and one of the ways we can do that is to use data. And so we typically collect raw data, analyze that data and use it to convert it to information to improve our processes. Traditionally the analysis to prepare that data has been simple. We look at the number of registered voters. We look at the historic turnout. We analyze how many ballots and we have put those computations into law. The issue though is that many times those computations are based on averages and averages across the county and thats helpful but it can be problem problematic and estimate how much supplies balance, etc. And stiemp said we waste money. In reality, many Elections Officials like myself have spent time to be more efficient. In my 18 year said in this business ive challenged my stafff to crunch their numbers and i always tell them they should have paid attention in math class. I remind them everything we do hads to be based on numbers. We have an elections analyst that does nothing but crunch numbers and develop processes all day for our different departments. So we currently analyze data in every area of our organization. In the process kind of goes like this. We collect data and im going to give you an example about how we look at polling places, for instance. So we collect data about the polling places. We find and inspect accessible polling places in quality places. I think were going to talk about that this afternoon in one of the panels. We measure the square footage, then we collect data about voter behavior. We know historically we look at voter turnout and we look at where people live and we look at where they vote and we measure when people vote by the hour. And this is something thats kind of unique and i dont think too many counties do that. Did they vote a regular ballot . A professional ballot or did they just drop off a vote by mail ballot at that location and then we also predict how the voter will behave on that election day. So we look at how long it takes a voter to drive to their location. We look at how long it takes to park their car how long it takes to process that voter and we gather that data. We also gather data about our poll worker to be there. How long does it take for a provisional supervisor to process a provisional voter and we take all this information and we crunch it. We calculate the capacity of each of our polling places. We inpresident trump and take that information and put it if had to soft ware and assign people to polling places. Because the goal is to keep every polling place busy but not have to any polling place get overwhelmed. We also project the number of vote rbz by the hour at each polling place. We use this information to determine how many supply said we put at every location. How many booths, how many other supplies we need and how many ballots of each type and keep in mind that people always think of how menopy ballots. Most Election Officials, its not just a ballot. In our country its over 400 different ballot types that we have to distribute through our county and we veto calculate the number of each of those types. We also assign the number of poll workers based on projections at each polling place and we do that for the peek hour. So the number of poll workers varies. Its not just three or five. Its anywhere from three to five or 18 different poll workers. We plan our lunch and dinner breaks so that we dont have people at break when we have a lot of voters coming. We found this Data Analysis is helpful and its helped keep things smooth at the polling places. We also know its not always dependable. So we also, in addition to prior to election day, on election day we actually survey each and every one of our polling places to find out what each one is like and then we make corrects as necessary and the result of our analysis has been that weve created a lot more convenience for our voters. We have very few lines and in their lines, the wait times are short. And weve used that money not just to give taxpayers back the money but inincrease our number of early voting sites. We conduct similar analysis for early voting for mail ballot drop offs and well use similar logic in the future and ill be tapping into amber to see what theyre doing in colorado to crunch their numbers. A couple other examples of data, we use it to speed up our ballot counting. We project time toads get ballots back and monitor progress. We analyze the time it takes to process ballots at each step of the way to process them, to count them, to duplicate ballots, store them and then we adjust as necessary. We also use numbers to train and assign our poll workers. But we have to contact over 10,000 people. We have to schedule over 7,000. We have to train over 5,000 and assign over 4,000 to get the 3500 to work on election day. We must also recruit and train people in six different languages. Because were a large area of 27,000 square miles, we train and assign by region. What we found is in each region so we use the information from our analysis to look at that behavior to have different projections in each different type of region so were not short in any particular region. So thats a quick look at how we use data. Its made the Voter Experience better. We also passed information to state and federal officials to and we compare our performance against other jurisdikdss. Great. Thank you so much and theres an unending number of data points that we connect and do other things with. We go to the state level. The secretary from nevada and interested in hearing what you have to say. In the state of nevada we have 17 counties and of those we have 15 that are elected clerks and then two voter registers and we have a very large county from clark. And the pain that youre going with. But one of the things i wanted to explain to and thats unusual to me is to hear acronyms. They can mean Something Different. So i want to make sure youre aware of the acronyms ill be using to talk about what were required to do. One of them is the Election Administration that we do get its a biannual survey administered by the eac. And that data thats collected includes and polling places, we also have what is the agency and its a Government Agency designated by the federal or a state law that is required to offer its customers or clients in most circs the opportunity to vote. Public assistance agencies like welfare or employment assistance agencies and Disability Service division and military recruitment offices. The next one is the cover transactions and every time a customer or a client with a vra is are equesting a service, filling outa form or application, the vra is require bide law to give the purseen the opportunity to register to vote. These are called covered transactions and two examples for us in nevada is when youre going to do anything with your drivers license at the dmv or a person submitting that application for welfare assistance. And then the National Voter registration act, the nrva, that is a 1993 federal law also known as the motor voter law that requires the dmv and public assistance agencies to register to vote. So with those i just wanted to make sure Everybody Knows our acronyms. In nevada we use data to improve the administration of elections and Voter Experience in several ways and among other things its county focusing on transactional data to monitor the effectiveness. So on a regular base were looking at what they give us to find out if its accurate and if theres any issues we might see. We coordinate routine reporting and nevada local Election Officials as well and the vote r registration agencies record and report the number of cover transactions whether the client chooses to register during the covered transaction and if theyre going to sentd it in later, those numbers are tracked. We know they have them and thats where they got that application. And the number each local vra office transmits to the county Election Office. They track and report the number. And instead of that information to the secretary of States Office. And the secretary of state receives monthly reports thrum department of Motor Vehicles. And these reports are made Available Online for the secretary of state nevada at www. Nvso www. Nvsos. Gov. As wellads identify best practices. And ill give you an example. If a significant decrease from previous reporting periods is in the number of voter applications being transported, the secretary of state Program Staff and the Voter Registration agency will investigate to determine the cause in whether any corrective action is taken and we do that on a regular basis between the two agencies. Then were evaluating the disposition among offices is another metric Program Staff uses to identify where review and corrective action might be necessary and an example is a local Voter Registration office that exhibits lower than average completed Voter Registration applications or rejected applications can indicate potential issues and the need for vra staff to review training materials. The secretary of States Office puts this Data Collection if to charts and graphs which allows for the review of large amounts of data at a glance as well as the identification of statistical variation sdwhz comparison of data over a period of time and other data sets and the example for this is the department of Human Services and reports multiple figures. And then collecting that this data on covered transactions from Voter Registration agencies allows the secretary of state to be proactive with any of the advocacy groups and innive nv uses turnout also to identify best practices at the local levels. So we feel very confident in the information were getting and being able to work with any of the agencies in nevada to see if we have any issues or where we might need to go in a different direction or look at how we might need to change what were doing. So look forward to the next part. Really the goal here is to make the process better for the voter and you know serve our taxpayers better as with el. Were serving public serve ntsz at least this time of the aisle and collecting that data ma makes so from the west side of the country im now turning to the other side of the country. And two panelists to my left are both researchers, academics and interested in hearing what you all have to say on what youve seen with the data and how to make things more efficient and bring integrity. Im a Senior Researcher at marsh group. We had had had a pleasure of working to administer the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey. And our Election Officials are exemplerry of how powerful data can be and really evaluate whether the policies that we have in place, the processed and the investments that were making in the election system are having the intentded effect. It big challenge that we dealt with as part of the Election Administration and Voting Survey is how can we learn from each other. They talked about elections create so much data and we have great examples of harnessing that data to do one ffs job better and make sure elections are run well but i think its important to remember and im lucky im on one of the early panels. And there are thousands of independent elections run at it state and local levels. And theyre at their own processes. And we talk about acronyms and defining those. Its really important. Because having we really struggled to talk to each other. So the Election Administration and Voting Survey for those of you who dont know, it is a large scale the only large scale Data Collection instrument for administrative data on elections in the u. S. Calling it a survey is a bit of a misnomer. Its a collection of administration in the United States. Registration turnout and military and overseas voting, technology and our processies. And whats remarkable is 2004 was the first eves survey was field and its remarkable to think fundamental questions about elections in the United States, so for example how many precincts and polling places in the United States. Its mind bog tooling think there was no one place that you could find that information. It seems so basic and fundamental. Thencer to that question for 2016 was theyre about 178,000 individual precincts. And about 116,000, almost 1 117,000 individual polling places. About 8500 early voting locations in the u. S. I will caveat and say those numbers are difficult to interpret. I think a couple of other highlights that we learned from 2016 and there were about local election and state Election Officials processed about 77. 5 million registration forms. By far the dmv, or department of Motor Vehicle offices about a third were coming from our dmvs. One change from previous elections was increasing use of online Voter Registration systems. So we had had 17. 4 coming from online systems and that rr up in 2012. Only about 5 . So big jump there. Similarly e poll books we saw an increase in e poll books since 2016 since 2012. 2. 5 million provisional ballots. About half of which came from california. Overall about 71 counted in part or full. So thats an important way, metric to consider how well that protection is working. Very active overseas voter population. We saw about 178 thousand ballots transmitted. Its about 100,000 more than 2012. Almost 80 were ultimately returned and counted. So these are important pieces of information of how ele