Transcripts For CSPAN2 Election Officials Discuss Election A

From. [inaudible] at the state and county level. And im really excited to be joined here by excellent Election Officials. A very Bipartisan Group of two democrats, three republicans who ive known for years and ive come to respect a great deal. Im going to briefly introduce them all and feel asleep to elaborate or rebut anything i said when your turn comes but to my immediate left any of you might know secretary Jocelyn Benson of michigan. Jocelyn and i have known each other for years. And she won election to secretary of state in michigan and oversaw the 2020 election and also importantly she literally wrote the book on secretary of state before she took office so i encourage you to read it. I dont know what to say about that. On the one hand i can tell you what i really think of his work but hes not used to mesaying i think that. Ill just say mass has served at very high levels s of the state of ohio office and served as Election Assistance Commission are. Its served as Cyber Security Infrastructure Security Agency and now he works at microsoft. He educates people on all these things especially. [inaudible] to matts left is al schmidt, former commissioner for the city of philadelphia and currently leads the Nonprofit Committee in philadelphia and many of you might recognize him from his hearings on tv is before the january 6 committee as well. To his left is wayne sorely, former election directorfor the state of nevada. He was transitioned to his job in 2020 with the legislature but foolishly still stayed in to help run the november 2020 election in the state of nevada which we all know there were no perceived issues at all. It was a textbook way to run an election thanks to the secretary of state as well as county Election Officials and we will be talking more about that later. Acting secretary of the commonwealth, lee chapman. [inaudible] and secretary chapman has been filling that role for a few years and hes been in elections for a few months, for quite some time and now serves as secretary of the commonwealth overseeing his program so with that i want to talk a little more about each of your interests. That you seen both in 2020 and today. Its been days since the 2021 election and there were so many new things happening in michigan and have nothing to do with coded threat all kinds of new election rules by the state of michigan and then it hit, ill just say march 10 was the primary 2020. I was literally in michigan visiting polling places when we started getting worried about how bad it could be, those of you that remember next day they started shutting down the nda which was what brought it home to me. And so you might not have seen too much of the primaries but we had a lot of issues going. Things that were true things going on inmichigan. [inaudible] you set it up right. My colleague secretary raffensperger and also the mayor and expert of elections in michigan chris thomas you all know. Were fortunate enough to have the demon of all election directors in the state of michigan for a long time nationwide so a lot of our preparation frankly april 20, 2020 started long before 2020 and it was with people like election director thomas and jonathan bringing experts to the state to help us implement new changes that were connected by voters in 2018 and ill talk briefly about that but also wanted to say david deftly laid out both realities of what we lived through and continue to live othrough one our elections in 2020 all four of them that we had h throughout the year in every election since i spend extremely smooth. Highly secure with extraordinary turnout was. And every one of our 1600 clerks at the state for the most part stepped up at every turn to ensure we did and could meet the scrutiny that was placed on us but the story of our elections in michigan like in many states is one of Great Success in spite of being at the eye of the storm and the other reality is this kind of misinformation available that covers everything. A cloud of confusion. I believe was intentional for various reasons but very is very clear misstatements about what we really experienced. And the other thing ill just emphasize is as a lot of you know as david mentioned , i will this book on guardians and the democratic process in 2008 trying to tell a story of how democrat and republican secretaries of state like then secretary greyson blanchard is my time and many others were doing great things that were going unnoticed in the state and i took those best practices and when i was ouelected in 2018 as an academic as well, former dean of the law school i just brought experts including many in this room and some here in this battle, Bipartisan Group of people to come to michigan to advise us on how to implement automatic Voter Registration, election day registration. Postelection audits as well as online Voter Registration. And so by bringing those experts and by following the data and by implementing best practices and learning from california and oregon and other states that have implemented a lot of these things we found and i send this to my team after the 2020election. If you follow the data, if you look at the best practices, you learn from others experiences and do the right thing every step of the way recruiting good people, following all the details, making sure every clerk has the resources and machines they need, you succeed and its a great thing to experience. To say you know what, it is a very professional operation that we run in michigan and our clerks run as well as the local level. Turns out if you lead from a bipartisan standpoint, follow the data do it with an air of professionalism over all along the way to ensure every voter can vote, you can succeed even if theres storm cloud of efforts at misinformation which is what we reendured and continue to endure so the bottom line is we did and we will continue to succeed in managing a fair and secure democracy and if the people leading the systems follow the data, remain nonpartisan and professional and implement best practices and try to meet the needs ofevery voter. Thats great. Im going to get over you which im going to do a lot. Cai want to go to our second because just as michigan was implementing a lot of o plan changes but a lot of things that were challenging for Election Officials and voters to understand. Pennsylvania and philadelphia in particularwas doing as well. This was all pre coded. New technology polling place for the first time. Youre allowing for absentee voting. For more voters that had previously been allowed to do that. Can you talk about laying the groundwork for what you were seeing in philadelphia in particular in the lead up to 2020 and how that played out in november . Sure even though a lot of counties including ours into 2020 kicking and screaming about a lot of the requirements that are state was having us implement including new voting systems with a voter verifiable paper ballot , we were so fortunate that the department of state made that a priority for every single county and commonwealth because i cant imagine the sort of additional misinformation would be going on had we not have that system prior tothat we do not have voter verifiable paper ballots. There were candidates main human readable incorporated bond paper results that we use fornot one but two audits after the fact. In the lead up not only have we just rolled out a new voting system, for inperson voting in pennsylvania we had a whole new system of voting with voting by mail other than in the past it had been absentee ballots. You had to have an excuse obviously you are absent or incapacitated in some way, unable to cast your ballot at the polls on election day and we went from having almost no voters or very few rather voting by mail to half of our voters out of the gate in an ballot voting. Half of our voters voted by mail in the primary and half in the general election that was375,000 voters voted by mail in that election. That on top of the trans am environment and one thing i sometimes forget is we had civil unrest in philadelphia which was a real concern for us about having polling places that were close about our voters being able to make it to the polls to vote on time so it was all constellation of challenges that we face and we had a bipartisan board that was always the right amount of tension between im a republican and i was there with two democrats and its designed that way to have sort of checks and balances but i think at the end of the day it helps to resolve it in the most safe and secure electionin the history of philadelphia. Thats not an exaggeration. I dont even think its subjective because we had me paper ballots that we never had before. A great point and it was not just pennsylvania that made that change. Georgia seems to have made the change to all verifiable paper ballots in 2020 and North Carolina Election Officials went verifiable paper ballots in 2020 and one of the reasons we saw much greater ability to transparently verify that the outcome was correctly determined. In 2020 as compared to any election weve ever had in history. In nevada what you saw was a little different because nevada had already had a history of mail in voting. There was paper ballots throughout the state of nevada. Many of the rules hearound elections, there were slight changes but a lot of them were the same they had been in previous elections but you saw kind of predilection and postelection scrutiny on the process totry to delegitimize it. Can you talk about what you are saying . Nevada has a long excuse of no excuse voting although voters didnt take much advantage so it really was an issue of scale in nevada rather than new processes but there are other changes going on innevada that added to the complexity. Prior to 2018 Election Administration in nevada had been consistent. There hadnt been a lot of changes at the legislative level to the processes and our countyElection Officials a couple of which are here. Id like to give a shout out to janice, former registrar in washington county. Deputy secretary of elections. We had to make changes because of what the legislature acted in 2000 and 19 and also because the voters in 2018. So are Election Officials were working on implementing Voter Registration at the dmv. Implementing election day registration at polling places and then the pandemic hit. We had also put a lot of money in the state level to purchasing new Voting Machines prior to the election. We were still using the Voting Machines we purchased with the influx of e dollars and so theres a lot going on and all of a sudden our Legislature Said every voter is going to be mail the ballot for the 2020 general election and in the prior president ial election we only had about 6 and a half percent of the voters in nevada to devote via mail outs. They all have the opportunity to so i dont know if its excuse absentee, just hasnt been used because we put a lot of emphasis into our early dovoting program which is a twoweek period in person voting but the voters have graduated towards. All of a sudden in 2020 we had under 50 percent of the voters voting by mail and the general election so it became an issue of scale. Not necessarily implementing new processes so it was a real path to try to educate voters most of whom i think. Voted by mail and the 20 20 electionhad never voted by mail before. So educating those voters about the process and that this isnt a new process that v we just kind of put together at the last minute. Is the process that have been in place for many years as a matter of scaling it up. And so i dont know how successful we were at the educating part. Prearly are things we could have done better i think thats something i think Election Officials across the country can look at how we can educate voters and the public better about our processes. Theres been a lot of misinformation comes from a lack of understanding about the process. So even though it was, we werent implementing new process we were immune from the criticism that came from all the other Election Officialsin the state or in this room receive. And it was a difficult time. Ill be very honest. The secretary of state level where we are really at the kind of administration level, county Election Officials are doing the heavy lifting in the trenches doing most of the work. And getting most of the fire. Even at the state level it was a difficult time. Personally professionally from my family, but i think theres judges on this panel , it was an extremelysuccessful election. Despite all the challenges and that is a great testament to the work of the Election Officials particularly at the local level. To implement either new processes or scale up preexisting processes. And to do that in the middle of a global was just amazing. To see how successful it was. Im going to come to you matt. Matt, you were at dhs in Cyber Security infrastructure. And you kind of saw the things that we was talking about across the nation. The if we all think that for amoment especially those of us in this room , the knife, we didnt hear a lot of problems on november 3. Im trying to think back to where they are news reports of long lines at the polls . News reports of problems and machines not working, not really. Everything was moving smoothly and it wasnt until the outcome started to be known that the disinformation started d occurring on a massive scale. What are you seeing up to election day and talk a little bit because dhs in particular individuals within dhs in particular. Really tried to set the record straight on these things. I dont know if we can talk about political pressure that was applied but i think everyone who worked with dhs that that was an incredibly professional group and it was important at the postelection period. To be in this room honestly its humbling that the Election Administration in this country that wayne said wrist their own lives and health of themselves and their staff and their country to ensure democracy got administered is overwhelming im thankful to be here, incredibly humbled to be able to serve on this panel with these folks sitting inthis room. At six up we had worked since the Critical Infrastructure designation in january 2017 to build relationships and engage with state and local Election Officials across the country by the time we 20 20 not just november 20, 2020 20 as a whole we had relationshipswith all 50 states, territories and thousands , literally thousands of local Election Officials through the information sharing and Analysis Center through work we were doing with our field reps with Cyber Security and really our focus heading into 2020 was to improve the overall Cyber Security of the systems after what happened in 2016 where russia targeted are election infrastructure and attempts to undermine confidence in our elections. We have spent so much timeand energy working to build those relationships, to support those electionofficials. To implement those best practices secretary benson referenced as we sat there , we had done everything we could think of to support those Election Officials to assess risk rent we had published Risk Assessment around how we can better security elections and work with the Election Officials across the country to implement many of and has been said now several times between 95 percent of ballots cast being auditable records in 2020 and the vast majority of states having postelection audits of those ballots, the fact that states have implemented everything from multifactor authentication to Network Segmentation Incident Response plan. We had literally done tabletop exercises with thousands of local Election Officials and state Election Officials across the country so all that to say as we headed intoelection day 2020 we were confident in the resilience of the process. You even if something was going to happen we were confident that the state and local Election Officials had prepared soulfully and have adjusted those procedures in the face teof coded and prepared for that. For those that have worked in and around Election Officials you know Election Officials and their time asking themselves what could go wrong, how do i prepare for that and one state in those steps ask what else could go wrong. Introduced other risks. There is a personalities. Best Election Officials are total control freaks in the best way to ensurethat the administration process. We had in july today, were in our operations enter in Arlington Virginia and can connected through a chat room with thousands of state and local Election Officials and its quite quiet things here, things there as there always are elections. As you always are when you a involve literally millions of t people participating in the process but it was nothing major. Nothing alarming. In fact at times the chat room was people just joking just sharing information and joking because it was soquiet. Ive been in elections since 2006. It was the quietest election day ive ever experienced and at every level. It was quiet. To see what weve seen is stunning in part b