[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] i appreciate everyone quieting down so fast. All right. Were about to embark on our second panel of the summit, and the second panel is on the topic that for those of you who know me and know my work over the last 25 years in the election space is near and dear to my heart. Its probably the most important thing is were talking about the nuts and bolts of elections for running smooth elections in the United States, and something where we have made fast strike in the last couple of decades, and that is maintaining accurate and complete voter list. Those two aspects are really important. Whereas women talk about Voter Registration come so much of the time when we talk so much of the oxygen is taken up by those who would seek to make it a choice between affording the franchise to all eligible voters and keeping clean lists and keeping those who are ineligible maybe because they moved or died off of the list. And what we know is that thats a false choice, that you can do both and that both are necessary to fully enfranchise voters. We put together a great panel for this conversation. Im really pleased of everyone here. First, its going to be moderated by pam fessler, formerly of npr for many of you know. Are so many reporters never, election and Election Administration issues and really did a great job of understanding the challenges. Just for most in the room, pam was at the forefront of that. She summit ive been working with and talking with for more years than i will say for her benefit and mine. Next to her is secretary mattis Toulouse Oliver of the mexico was also a former county election official in new mexico who ive also known for longer than i will say. Next to maggie is sector gregg amore from rhode island, just elected in 2022. Next to break his sector steve simon of minnesota who what term are you are now . This is your third term. Affective state of minnesota. Next to steve is jeramy grey goose achieve a deputy at the Los Angeles County registrar and Recorders Office in california, an office that oversees more voters that almost all of the states. And next to jeramy is ryan germany whos a former counsel for the georgia secretary of state office. So i will leave it to you, and, to take it from here. Thank you. Thank you very much, david david said earlier, election comfort is used to be very boring and among the most boring topics was list maintenance, but that is no longer the case. So under excited that we have this wonderful panel here to talk about very, very important topic. Groups trying to undermine confidence in our elections as proof the system is filled with fraud want to talk with each of you, why is it so important to have clean election rules for the work you do and where the biggest obstacles we are facing right now to achieve that . Thank you all for being here, pretty awesome panel. I started my career as the county clerk and process Voter Registrations myself because there are many times as anyone have worked in these elections, the job has to be done even if it means boss lady herself has the Voter Registrations process, thats what it means. Having been voting is important for Election Integrity because everybody wants to know political voters and only eligible voters are asking about so making sure it is critical to that effort. When i first came into office, clear about it, i remember ongoing dialogue with groups watching, its called Different Things in different places, referred to as the purge but the process we have to undertake every state every two years by federal law to have that was being done and what it was done properly and quickly realized the political side of things being electric minister but this is a crucial process because more duplicates, more issues and registered voters and more likely you are to have problems and questions about whether or not they are accurate. Their tools in our tool quit, a requirement for centralized statewide Voter Registration database. Across the country that have their own thats all we have. They been able to use Social Security numbers. We were grandfathered in the Social Security act would only have that tool in our toolkit tristate is going great. The Social Security file in our state the gold standard, the challenges moving forward ill be brief, weve talked quite a bit and we have plenty of panelists hello there and is an expectation perfect and its literally never going to happen and Voter Registration is voluntary. A high level of accuracy and confidence, thats our challenge moving forward. No only been in office for months, how do you see the challenge seeing accurate rules in rhode island. My list of students significantly. I sponsored what is known as the vote act expanded voter access in many ways, drop boxes and Community One drop box the opportunity to not have a witness or notary to expand the access but a key element of that bill was the requirement for the Department State to do voter maintenance prior state law prior. My primary opponent accused me of wanting to purchase a list member a relatively progressive guy. There is confusion so we talk about left and right where the nihilism come from and pressure points, both ends of the spectrum so we make sure explain what that means and the prior panel did a good job talking how important it is to take the time to respectfully explain the system and if i can speak to a small group of people and a republic based on that conversation we talked about the fact that we are receiving information from our department of correction twice a month where they indicate whos incarcerating and we receive permission in every other week from the department of health. Combs people and makes them feel better about the process. It is a process. Its not a soundbite situation, you have to make your case in small groups and large groups when you can and explain the system. When you do, you will gain confidence. Why is it so hard to have clean for rules . For the challenges . I agree with everything with my colleagues, obviously foundational. Its information, its only going to be as good as your information. Its really important to know the rules and only the people who should be are. I agree that risk maintenance is not the same as purging, it just isnt. You want clean photo goals and people who have moved, people who are deceased and otherwise do not belong those roles to be off. We are a sameday Voter Registration. It welcome, almost 50 years ago from this date 1973, minnesota was one of the first and sameday registration in the Previous Panel is a discussion about election misinformation and is so often the case in that realm, theres a kernel of truth that grows into something far uglier and more toxic. Naturally people register on the same day which is ride to conspiracy theories about one 104 voter turnout 109 voter turnout and very often the spiking turnout or registration is due to sameday Voter Registration. Its not a conspiracy, its not fraud. Its a function of the laws we have so that is a challenge in this, explaining the nature of our system. I know you have a different perspective because youre a deputy of the county Election Office so much more on the front lines. Do you get a lot of pushback from people who say voter rolls are a mess. Evidently. Larger than 40 of the 50 states in the country so we have a perspective and that we manage at the grassroots but size, scale and complexity gives us a birds eye view of National Challenges and issues we deal with throughout the country. It is important in this subject not to delineate voter rolls from any other entity based we have and any other factor. My background primary is information technology. The last ten years have been in and out of elections but ultimately important to understand financial institutions, healthcare institutions and Public Safety institutions are dealing with the same challenges as it relates to managing accurate data related to our constituents. Most individuals dont associate challenges we are having not just in california and l. A. County but throughout the nation in housing. Thirty years ago we moved into a home, stayed 30 or 40 years and hand the property down to your family and it stays in the family 50, 60, maybe even 100 years. That was tremendously easy to track at various Registrars Office and assessors and property tax organizations and etc. It is no longer like that. One of the earlier panelists stated we manage a fluid community now. Theres a lot of associated with that. We are a vote by mail state and the minute someone receives about the previous resident of that individual may have moved out a week prior. You have a perception we are not managing appropriate levels of Quality Control so a lot of complexity involved. Managing a large identity based management process. Maybe you can answer this. The average american looks of these and says why are the roles still inaccurate . Dont quite understand the challenges and companies are able to track down my list of people who are customers and there are others in our society and economy of today very accurate. How do you explain that in a state like georgia to the voters that there are all these issues . To have an education process or how do you deal with this . Thanks. My name is ryan, general counsel at general States Office in georgia. Generally 24th in january this year i told my wife for two to three year job and i missed that one but when it came out i had a lot of litigation experience which ended up serving pretty well in the office but i didnt know a lot about elections other than voting and turn on the tv and see if you want but i learned quickly running an election is a complicated logistical exercise that requires teamwork topdown from the state of the top of the county all the way down people at the polls and across the whole state whether the state like georgia or california, a conjugated logistic exercise and thats why this is so crucial because its two things. I want to say voter centric thing to do because it helped make sure when voter shows up to vote, everything is right. You want to show up at the polls and theres wrong information or something because it takes longer for the poll workers, people around it see it and think its not smooth so the voter centric exercise and a wise man told me this but less maintenance is in franchising because a lot of what youre doing is telling voters hey, heres what we have, it looks like it might be out of date, can you update this . That being said, the difficulties listening, you are the recipient of a lot of those tweets with filing fees. [laughter] particularly in the runup to the 2018 election in georgia and even 2016 election week were sued by groups on the left basically claiming any regular maintenance we were doing, use or lose it, all kinds of twitter friendly type of phrases and these were old, they were not new laws, they were existing laws passed by democrat journalists signed by democrat governor but because they had a narrative they wanted to forward about particularly my boss at the time is running for governor so these things had been very well accepted Election Administration practices all of a sudden became very controversial and wasnt really something we were prepared for and then on the other side of it, on the right 2020 election we saw lawsuits from people affiliated with trump theres this inaccuracy in these people voted here didnt live here and its a difficult process to run perfectly because of data in time and people notice so to answer your question, one thing we do is a lot of notices in the law given to voters and i would say a lot of times they are more accurate with listed companies have because it is a matter if they send a piece of mail to the wrong address and the political groups will send out mailings, they send it to the wrong person and causes all sorts of calls to Election Officials and they say what is this . Had them i think one group uses magazine subscriptions and absentee ballot or wrote Voter Registration and every time they send them out and its a great way to start a Conspiracy Theory so Election Officials have to be careful and i think they are more so than other groups. Im curious how much you think the problem is education, educating the public, this is how the system works, why we take people off the road, this is why there are sometimes inaccuracy in the roles or why he might be getting mail from a third party group, often think its from the Election Office but how much is actually educating voters how the system works versus the logistics of having an accurate system . One sub topic that comes to mind is a matter of common sense and ask a lot of folks in minnesota, how many people do you know, regular people, not people attuned to these issues like people at the conference here today but have any you know they move out of the state and after all the check listing do, change my magazine subscriptions in this and the christmas cards, how many know on the way out the door i better call my local Elections Office and let them know im leaving so they can take me out the list . I dont know anybody who does that. [laughter] i havent done that. [laughter] long time ago. When i was a College Student for example. I dont remember ever doing that when i went to college. Most people dont do that. With the reality that means their people on the boating rolls in more than one state. Its not a Conspiracy Theory and i dont mean to make this political but trump children and biden children it turns out when people look at luke records, it doesnt mean they were bad or perfect, it doesnt mean they were up to no good, it means they were normal National Americans who are busy and going a lot through clear lives. Its one example why this matters, not that people are doing anything that. We got to keep track of the stuff look at into the tools we can use. 40 million americans every year changing the address so to talk to your education points, we removed 61000 voters from our list in january and population of 1 million, thats a significant number. Its part of regular maintenance the reflective of the 2020 election mail ballot applications that were voters to the ones returned to us as undeliverable, they were made in active, placed in the inactive list to elections, they did not vote and we needed to issue a press release so we can talk about this. Wanted Rhode Islanders in the media to ask questions so we could explain the process. I read senator one afternoon and republican senator who said great job, he is very happy a joke. [laughter] but we want that conversation topic. The points are correct, the education is incredibly important. One big problem i see when i talk to people worried about these, people understand the difference as active or inactive so it comes back to education or trying to get the public to understand. I would add using early examples of Human Behavior in general, how many of us receive correspondence from previous residents are home or unfortunately received information from someone in our household since been deceased . My mother passed away in 2016 and i dont receive voting material for her but what i do receive in marketing material, material from previous initial institution and etc. So its important when we educate the public, we asked them to look through a rubber lens. It does not absolve us of any level of responsibility manage quality voter goals but take a step back and look at other variables all around us and they will see voter roles are probably one of the tighter processes in our communities. One thing that helps in georgia is sometimes in the media especially surrounding the political process, a lot of coverage can be coverage of and when to use that. [laughter] one thing we did in georgia and he cant remember those 2019 or 2021 work with a local reporter who went out and found people about to be went to the addresses and a lot of the coverage about to purge these people, he went and found they are not here and they didnt want to be registered so when you go and you on the ground reporting they found this is nothing to see here, everything is checking out and the other thing is, is asking a lot of Election Officials to educate voters on why somebody, 99 sure moved to a different state and remains on the board for years, thats a process in federal law and work in the federal government to . As i say, i know its a lot but they can look at the loss essay in the 90s, maybe that made sense when things were by mail and telephone things, its not the world we live in anymore. That federal election cycle, it one time once youve notified identified someone, they are no longer in this state. Especially when you have so many people moving every year. Lets talk about main tools out there, how you maintain voter roles and one of the biggest ones a couple of you refer to is eric, electronic Registration Information and this is a state run, state Member Organization or network where states can share Voter Registration information and compare their list against each other and compare their list against other National Databases like Social Security death tracker, change of address forms in an effort to identify anomalies, people who have died, people registered in tw