Transcripts For CSPAN3 Discussion On Election Security Infr

The center for democracy, technology and the center for justice to welcome you to what i consider to be a very timely, obviously a very, very important forming symposium. At the outset i want to thank all the participants. An incredible array of speakers, guests who have taken the time to address this subject and cspan, regardless of republican, democrat or independent think is critically important. Its undisputed that there are people that have been hacking into our elections for a long, long time. The evidence is indisputable. We can start with 2016, but i think if we look back before that we might have seen there are people playing around in that arena even before that time. We decided to get together to pull together a symposium to deal with hacking in u. S. Elections and how to make the 2020 election more secure. So were grateful that they could join us this morning. Some of you in the audience probably remember, but i did happen to talk to some of my colleagues from Penn State Dickinson School of law and ask them how old they were 2001 on 9 11. Most were in grade school, a couple were in high school. At that time, i reminded them that i was called to the white house and then given the opportunity to set up the department of Homeland Security right after those horrific events. And as i look back and reflect on that time, im reminded that initially we were focused on a small group of terrorists from a small part of the world, who would attack us and use physically, and attack our citizens. Within a couple of months, a year or so, we decided in addition to dealing with physical attacks, we better start paying attention to digital attacks, but now think about this. This is 2002 and 2003. The tools available to those who would attack us with Digital Tools was minimal. The sophistication was probably primitive, compared to what were dealing with today. And clearly the frequency has been expanded chexponentially. I think back about those days and trying to deal with both physical and Cyber Attacks. By creating doubt and uncertainty to the legitimacy of our political process. And create chaos that divides our political leaders. If the goal of those who attacked our country was to destabilize our government and political institutions, im afraid we have to admit to date theyre succeeding. Truth and civility and the very foundation of our Constitutional Government are the primary victim victims of the abuse and misuse of social media. If the enemys goal was to destabilize, theyre succeeding. Lets be very clear. We focus a lot on foreign influence and there certainly is. There will be some discussion about that. Lets not underestimate the rule of domestic cyber activity as well. Perhaps not to destabilize our process, but to promote a political candidacy or point of view. No matter what the goal, its unamerican. No matter what the goal in the Digital World is one of the major challenges we have going forward. The other challenge is and i include all these remarks, the digital sun is never going to set. Its just going to get hotter. In a hyper connected world, the challenges associated with Cyber Threats to our institutions of government continue to grow, continue to expand. So its for that reason that these four organizations got together and said lets take a look at vulnerabilities in the electoral process and lets take a look at the impact of the abuse and misuse of social media on that process itself. I had a great opportunity to work with professor mckenna. Shes really the catalyst. I mean, shes really made a lot of this happen and a lot of the speakers are here because of their admiration and respect for her. Without further ado, i want to introduce my friend and colleague, professor. Ann . So really, im the chief button pusher. Its a pleasure to be here today. I want to thank you all and welcome to our audience on cspan. The governor has told you about the sponsors who are involved. I think one thing thats important to remember, because well be talking today about infrastructure and social media and were talking about money and data as well. The important thing to remember is that no one here is a paid speaker. No one was charged admission. No sponsor is doing this pursuant to a grant. This is because the group of entities and individuals, like you all here, recognize the importance of securing our elections and recognizing the actual threat to our elections that come from these two different aspects were going to talk about today. So when we talk about politics, its very easy to get personal. This group of speakers is incredibly interdisciplinary. Its incredibly mixed in terms of their backgrounds and affiliations, the speakers that have come here today. And so is this audience. This is really an impressive list of members of media, Intelligence Community, security, academia, researchers and so we are looking forward to working towards problem solving with you all. I dont want to take very much time, but i want to remind everybody, as we frame our questions, as we frame our responses and have a really great opportunity for audience participation with the luncheon. And we want to hear from you. This is an Incredible Group of people who have come together to work toward this important goal. So, again, remember, this is not about my politics or your politics. This is about saving democracy. So, lets work to do that together. Without further ado, i want to turn the mike over to my colleague, jenny evans, one of the leading data scientists in the country. Thanks, jenny. Thank you, anne. And my personal thanks to you and governor ridge for your investment in bringing us here together today. Were here to wrestle with a critical challenge to our democracy. As as anne mentioned im the director of the penn state institute of cyber sciences. We also support penn states High Performance computing system and events such as this. The mission of the institute is to bring Interdisciplinary Research of societal and scientific importance and advance these goals. We do that by cohiring faculty with departments all across the university. Were jointly hiring with numerous colleges and departments, departments such as astro physics and biomedical engineering, political science, psychology, gee dpraef and law and one of these intellectually adventurous, intelligent and interdisciplinary scholars. To bring together a diversity of experts in action. Through many disciplines, professional perspectives and backgrounds, you are that Interdisciplinary Group of scholars today. Its our tendency as humans to limit ourselves to consideration of just the facts in front of us, consider the image well, where do i find that image . There we go. Consider the image behind me. This was purported to be australia on fire. The fires in a single day in australia last year. As an australian, also as an american, this was terrifying to me until i found out that this is not a day. Its a month. Its still horrendous, but its a different story. No no single expert can take on securing elections today. It is not a technology issue. It is not a policy issue, it is not a law issue. It is a problem requiring collaboration from expert frs all of these specialties and more. Because elections are at the heart of our democracy, it is imperative that we investigate this issue from an multitude of perspective. Thats at the core of our election starting months before the votes to come. The Demographic Data creates opportunities to provide messages and selecting groups through social media. While this can be a boom to business, this data minding had been regular used to spread information across the election. Once elections take place each vote is a data point in determining the leadership. These are important as the elect traditional process that must be secure. While we dive on a new perspective on the electoral process today, the critical need to come together to share the diversity of the perspective and opening to discovery is unquestionably important. I am delighted that penn state institu institute, penn state of dickerson law are collaborating today and governor reed to host this event. I take you take advantage of this Exceptional Group to continue or initiate conferrings thatll lead to action in support of this grand challenge. Thank you all for joining us today and thank you again to the governor for bringing us today. [ applause ] i want to introduce larry, the director of the election reform program. Welcome, larry. All right, thank you, anne. Thank you to all the groups involved in partnering on the event today. I have been asked to, lets see if i can present an over view of some of the Biggest Challenges facing American Election infrastructure. I am going to discuss a little bit about why theyre not challenges in 2020 but also what we can do in the longer term after 2020 to start making bigger changes to secure our election and infrastructure. It is a fair but i am going to use iowa and the caucuses as an introduction to this topic. I was a little worried over the weekend. Fortunately i didnt have toover haul my slides last night. I dont think it is fair to use iowa. I should say of course there was new cyber attack on the infrastructure they were using there as far as we know. And of course as others have pointed out, the caucuses were run by a political party, the democrats, theyre not run by profit election professionals but the states or the counties as our primaries are and the general election as november will be. Nevertheless, i think there are important lessons going into 2020. Vendors are a point of vulnerability in our elections. We often on capitol hill when people talk about election infrastructure and security, they talk about states and counties. Much of our election infrastructure is created and supported by private vendors. They touch nearly every aspect of our elections. So folks may know that there are three big manufactures of Voting Machines in the United States and they control that 90 of the market for voting systems. There are certainly hundreds of Additional Companies that maintain these machines and electronic poll books determining whos eligible to vote and other functions for our elections. Unlike other vendors and other sectors that have been deemed part of Critical Infrastructure like dams or energy or defense. There are no federal regulations over these vendors. There is been little oversight of these vendors to date. What it means is we dont haves a full picture of how many vendors. They are working on our election infrastructure, we dont know where they are working. We dont know what kind of screening they do or employees, we dont know who owns them. Maryland learned in the past couple of years that a vendor for the Registration System was owned by a russian oligarch, they found that out because of the fbi informing them of that. We dont know what their supply chain practices are and their parts come from. We dont know what kind of internal Cyber Security practices they enforce. Election officials can no what kind of security practices they put in place in their offices. They really dont know when they are dealing with vendors and purchasing products or services from them of what they are doing. They can ask or trust about what they are doing but they cant know. We are not going to get that problem fixed for 2020. I do think there is a bipartisan interests in tackling this problem. There was a hearing at the House Administration committee in the past couple of months where both republicans and democrats expressed concerns about this issue. When i talk about Election Officials of both parties, they Say Something they want to address. I dont think that means we need to worry about 2020. The department of Homeland Security Election Officials and state and local government have all done a lot to secure our elections and our election infrastructure since 2016. Of course, for the first time in more than a decade, congress has provided money to the states to help secure their systems to vulnerabilities and those systems that they purchase from these vendors. Never the less, i think it is a real weakness in going into 2020 and the solution as always in an election is hoping for the best and to prepare for the worst. That brings me to the second lesson from iowa that i want to talk about which is a great danger of Cyber Attacks is system wide failure. If the reporting app in iowa were just a few glitches and some precincts have trouble reporting their results, we would not be here talking about iowa today. The problem of iowa was the failure system wide and system wide failure is different. It is a danger of Cyber Attacks that entire communities or jurisdictions can be targeted from the system failure. It prevents people from voting and having accurate numbers counted, electronic poll books checking in when voters check in at the polling places and Voting Machines. The answer to this vulnerability is redundancy. So here is an example of one of those pieces infrastructure that i was talking about, electronic poll books. What may happen if this system is attacked or failed . It may start up. We seen examples of this in nearly every federal election. But at a county or statewide level, it would be a real mess and i would argue a bigger mess than the problem we sign with the iowa caucus. What kind of thing can we do to ensure resiliency . Only 12 of them using the books required to have backups for electronic poll books. That seems to be an obvious solution, having something thats not on this tablet to go to if the system fails. Even if you have a paper backup it is possible that the paper backup itself could be corrupted in some way. And there you have a federal solution for that. The Voter Registration databases is infiltrated in some way. The federal solution is provisional ballot. We can have people vote and go back and check later with the data that we have. Thats a good federal safe. Every polling place has about two or three hours worth of provision materials. Voting machines failure could be a problem. They use machines to castor mark ballots. Emergency ballots that can be broken out and people can vote on them. Many states dont have minimum for emergency paper ballots in case of that kind of a failure. That brings me to the third and final lesson that i want to talk about in iowa which is that paper backups are essential. If voters in iowa had voted on that app that failed, instead of just being a recording app, we really would not have problems in iowa. There would not have been a record to go back to that people could have trusted, we may have lost those books entirely. We still unfortunately have states that have that are using paperless, Voting Machines in the United States. And, this is despite the fact that it is near universal agreement at least as 2016. We drastically reduce the number of paperless machines that we used in the United States. I would guess less than 16 million, coming up in this new electi election, you can see from the battleground states that would be using paperless machines in the 2020 election this november. One challenge is in addition to having paper we should be routinely looking at it to check the software thats reported, only half of the state required that kind of review of the paper before certification and fewer check statistically significant number of the paper ballots so i am going to wrap up by saying the good news for 2020 is that all the things i talked about as a resiliency measure are things that can be done for 2020. Getting bag up poll books in the polling places is something thats accomplishable and having minimum of emergency paper ballots and provision ballots is something that we can do this year and things like conducting post election audits are things that we can get done in time of the november election. [ applause ] thank you, larry. Our state are on the front line in infrastructure. One of the resources that our states have are National State electors. We are fortunate to be joined by annie cohen. [ applause ] good morning everyone. Real quick i want to emphasize what larry said, caucuses are not run by Election Officials. They are run by political parties. I want to emphasize it as we kickoff the rest of today. So thank you very much and for having me. I thought it would be helpful before we spend all day Start Talking about elections and Election Security to give you an over view of how elections work and to have an informed discussion. The National Association of state election director a professional association for state election directors. All 50 states in the u. S. Territories. We cover a lot of grounds because we have california, texas, guam and literally everything in between. Those are very different as you all know. If 40 states, the chief Election Officials are secretary of state. My colleagues from nasa in the bag there. In those 40 states the election director works for the secretary of state. The other 16 states the election director is the chief election official. If you are wondering what they do, they implement policies and technologies, run training and work with local Election Officials and so much more. There are a handful of federal laws that are governed e llectis elections. Election officials have difficult jobs making sure our elections are secure and assessable for all voters. There are of course other laws in the constitution. In general, elections are run by the states. Mo