everyone, come on in and grab a seat. thank you, forgetting back in so quickly after that brief break. [inaudible]. >> that the state and county level and at the federal level and really 55 excellent very bipartisan groups in the democrats. [inaudible]. and come to respect ath great dl now briefly introduce them all and they may be about anything that i have said that to my immediate left secretary of michigan, jocelyn and i have known each other for years and she one reaction to the secretary of state's office and election and reportedly, she literally wrote thebr book on secretaries of state. reporter: she ever took and i highly encourage you to read this book and the next person, i don't reallyno know what to say. [laughter] and on the one hand, i can tell you what it really think of his work is not used to me saying that so i will just say matt has served a very high level in elected office and he has servec as in the infrastructure security now he works at microsoft. and by two people in all of these especially. [inaudible]. [laughter] >> is a map, and then al schmidt, former commissioner the philadelphia and currently he's nonprofit in philadelphia in many might recognize him as he is done many appearances on tv and as a witness of the january 6th incident as well and to his left, is wayne darby former director - and nevada and he was transitioning in 2020, the legislature and foolishly still stated help run the november 2020, elections in nevada, as we all know - the fact that his family. [inaudible]. secretary of state for office and they county election officials and we can talk more about that later. and at the far end, the secretary common law, chapman, commonwealth secretary. and, secretary chapman, for a few years i'm sorry few months, ande then he's been in the elections for quite some time and now as secretary of commonwealth overseeing that so with that, i want to talk a little more about each of your experiences and seeing the 2020 and today as we sit here since the 2020 elections had i will start with you. there were so many new things happening in michigan and although tools sentiment hacked in the state of michigan in 19 and i will just say. [inaudible]. i was literallyly in michigan wn we start to get worried and word and some of you remember the next day which i'm not even in the mba and as you might - you have a lot of issues and things that were going on and can you talk a little bit about those experiences. --and then will go on to talk about what is going on today. >> first, my colleagues and also. [inaudible]. and, the expert of elections and is you all know, i'm fortunate to have the election directors in the statete of michigan for a long time nationwide, and so frankly, from 2020, that but it was long before 2020, as director then director thomas and subsequent experts to the state to help us implement changes that were enacted by voters in 2018, and i will talk briefly about that but i also really laid out both the realities of what we lived through and got through and why our elections in 2020, all four of them that we had, throughout the yeard every election since has many truly smooth and highly successful in extraordinary high turnout levels and every one of usbr of the course of the safe n the spark has stepped up at every turn to ensure that we did and could meet the scrutinies that was placed on us the story of our elections like it is many states, is one of great success and despite being in the eye of the storm and then the other reality is this kind of the misinformation there that it uncovers everything about confusion that i believe was intentional for various reasons but we go to the statement about what we really experience and the other thing that i will emphasized, a lot of you know that i worked on this secretaries of guardians in 2008, telling the story about how does rebellion secretaries of state, my gun secretary grayson who i introduce new look at theg time and in the others equates things that were going on i noticed in the state and when i was elected in 2018, as an academic as welcome as former dean of a law school and i got the experts for many - and here on this panel bipartisan group of people becoming to get to advise us on how to implement automatic voter registration and election date registration no absentee voting and as well as online voter registration and by bringing those by following the data by implementing best practices and learning from california and oregon and other states that it already a lot of these things, we actually found is that the superteam after the 2020, election, that if you follow the data, and if you look at the best practices and if you learn from others experiences and just do the right thing every step of the way, regarding the people and following all of the details and to make sure that every clerk has the resources and the needs to succeed, is a really great thing to say that you know what, is a very a professional operation tt we run in michigan that are clips run as all of the local level it turns out that if you lead with a bipartisan standpoint of all of the data enablement best practices into a with professionalism along the way making sure every vendor no matter who they are convoked, you can succeed even we have there's a storm clouds efforts. as of the bottom line is you can we get and we continue to succeed in managing affairs for democracy and if the people leaving theve systems, follow te data and remain nonpartisan and professional and implement best practices and trying to meet the needs of every voter. >> that is great and i'm going to skip over the map which i will do a lot during this panel and i want to go to belpre second because just as michigan was implement a lot of plan changes and a lot of things that were challenging for elected officials and voters to understand this opinion philadelphia particular was doing that as well, all pre- covid-19 you are introducing paper ballots that the polling places andal technologies for te first time and you are allowing for absentee voting for more voters than had been previously allowed and can you talk a little bit about lang ground work for what you were saying in philadelphia in particular to lead up to the 2020, and how that played out in november. >> sure and even though a lot of counties including our 2020, kicking and screaming about a lot of those - the partner state was having implement including voting systems with the voter verifiable paper ballot we were soot fortunate that the departmt of state me that a priority for every single county because he cannot imagine the sort of additional misinformation going on had wen not have this is important that we do not have voter verifiable paper ballots with candidates into on paper readable results of use not one but two audits after the fact, and that lead up to not only henry rolled out a new voting system for in person voting but in pennsylvania we had a nuisance on voting with voting by mail other than in the past it had been absentee ballots, had have an excuse, obviously you were absent or incapacitated smi we went from having almost no voters are very few brother, to half of our voters right out of the gate embracing mail ballots, and about half in the general election that was three inner-city 5000 voters who voted by mail and that election and that on top of covid-19 environment and one thing that i also sometimes forget as we also had significant unrest in philadelphia which was a real concern, polling places were closed and voters being able to make it to the polls to vote on time and so is a whole constellation of challenges we faced and bipartisan, but is a always the right amount of tension between emma republic could to the democrats and designed that way to have the checks and balances at the end of the day and help to resolve the most safe and secure election history in philadelphia and thus not an exaggeration i t even think it subjective because we had paper fellows now that we never have before. >> is a great point and is not just pennsylvania, the make a change, georgia also made that change all verifiable paper ballots in north carolina other elected official statewide, paper ballots in 2020, that is one of the reasons that we saw a much greater ability of transparently to verify the outcome of the correctly determined in 2020, impaired any other election american history and in nevada, what you saw was little different because nevada had a history, there was paper ballots in nevada and many of the rules around elections, there was a changes to a lot of them but a lot of them with the as previous elections but they still used kind of pre-election and post- election scrutiny in the processor try to be an delegitimizing we talked a little bit about this. >> sure, a long history of absentee voting although particular did not take much advantage of that but it really was an issue of scale nevada rather than the new processes. but there were other changes in nevada that added to the complexity and prior to 2018, election administration in nevada had been consistent, unwanted changes for the legislative level through a date for in our county electe' officials. i would like to give a shout out to a couple here, where las vegas is, that county, and where reno is and another did a great job in the elections and where to make changes because of what the legislature enacted in 19 and also in 2018 and also our election officials were working on implementing voter registration and implement election day registration at polling places and then the covid-19 pandemic hits. ... -- we had to make changes because of what the legislature enacted in 2019 and voters in 2018. our election officials were working on implementing medical registration at the dmv. and implementing registration and calling laces. and then the covid 19 pandemic hit. we also put a lot of money in at the state level of purchasing new voting machines prior to the 2018 election. we were still using the machines that we purchase with the influx of -- dollars. so there's a lot going on and all of a sudden 20/20 we had under 50 percent of the voters voting by mail in the general election so it really became an issue of scale, not ernecessarily implementing new processes. it was a real task trying to educate voters most of whom i think voted by mail in the 2022 election had never voted dby mail the course of educating those a voters about the process and that this isn't a new process that we just put together a f last-minute. it's a process that had been in place formany years . it's just a matter of scaling it up. i don't know how successful we were at the educating part . certainly there are things nywe could have done better and i think that's something election officials across the country can look at how we can educate voters so a lot of the misinformation comes from alack of understanding about the process . so even though we were implementing new processes we were immune from a lot of the criticism that all the other election officials in this room received. and it was a difficult time. i'll be very honest. even the secretary of state's level where we are really at the administration level, county election officials are doing 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 for my family. but you know, i think there's others on this panel and the prior panel. it was an extremely successful election despite all the challenges and that is a great testament to the workof the election officials particularly at the local level . to implement either new processes or scale up the existing processes. and to do that in the middle of a global pandemic, it was just amazing to see how successful it was. >> i'm going to go to leave but as you were at dhs in cyber security infrastructure as we call it and you kind of saw elthe things wayne was talking about across the nation. the if we all think back for a moment especially those of usin this room . the knights, we didn't hear a lot of problems on november 3. i'm trying to think back to were there news reports of along lines western mark not really. where their reports of machines not working? not really, everything e went pretty smoothly and it wasn't until the outcome started to be known that misinformation start started occurring on a massive scale. what were you see up to election day and dhs in particular, individuals in dhs in particular really tried to set the record straight on these things. i don't know if we can talk about the political pressures that were applied but i think everyone who worked with dhs thought that was in an incredibly professional group and the role you playedwas important . >> thank you david and thank you for letting me be on this panel but it's pretty humbling as the folks that administer the election across this country that as wayne said in the midst of a global pandemic wrist their own lives and the health of themselves and their staff and their families to ensure democracy administered is overwhelming so i'm thankful to be here and incredibly humbled to serve on this panel with these folks sitting in this room. at cisa we work since the critical infrastructure designation to build relationships and engage with state and local election li officials and by the time we got to 2020, not just november 2020 but as all we had relationships with all 50 states , the territories and literal thousands of local election officials e through the information sharing and analysis center. the work we were doing with our field reps, cyber security reviews and really our focus heading into 2020 was to improve the overall cyber security systems after what happened in 2016 where russia targeted election infrastructure and attempts to undermine shconfidence in the election. we spent so much time and energy working. ... [audio lost] >> the vast majority of states having postelection audits. the fact that states had implemented everything from multi factor authentication to network segmentation to instant response planning. we had literally done tabletop exercises with thousands of local election officials throughout the country and so all that is to say as we headed into election day 2020 we were testing the resilience of the process. we knew something was going to happen and we were confident that the same local election systems prepared so fully and had adjusted those procedures in the face of covid and had prepared for that. for those who work you know election officials spend time asking themselves what can go wrong and once they've taken the steps they asked what else could go wrong? have i introduced leother risk ? there are a election officials, the best our total control freaks in the bestway to ensure the administration of the process . though we head into election day, we're in our operations center in arlington virginia and literally connected rothrough a chat room with thousands of state and local election officials . and its client. there are things there, things there and there always are in elections, as there always are when you involve millions of people participating in the process it was nothing major. it was nothing alarming and in fact at times the chat room was jokey, just sharing information because it was so quiet and i've been in elections since 2006. it was the quietest ouelection day i've everexperienced at every level . it was quiet. so to know where we are now is stunning in part because of how quiet it was on election day and the level of coordination and communication we had , there was if there was something larger going on, one election officials would have known and i'm confident they would have communicated with us about it. >> that's right. one of the things i think people don't realize about the elections, we have hundred 60 million people vote in 2020, 120 million more ballots cast that ever before but the people that voted on election day were lower in 2016. there were about 100 million people in 2020 and i know i've talked a lot about this especially those that were running elections. it was so quiet in the afternoon. i took a walk around the tmall thlike i would never do on election day. normally we be talking about things happening around the country and they were tapping . i want to come to you. you've been on the job a few months but your now the third secretary in 2020. in pennsylvania and you have seen firsthand the effects of fraudulent claims about the election in pennsylvania. you're seeing it in kansas your current state. can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in your office and also throughout the county as i know and i talked to outabout this and others. there is turnover in the counties .you talked can you talk about what you're seeing today? >> i've been on the floor since january and it's been right along six oumonths with everything happening from the recount to redistricting to all the court cases we are defending right now and at federal and state courts it's been quite busy . one concern i continue to have is the rampant misinformation and disinformation. that continues to happen throughout the state of pennsylvania. really looking back at 2020 outlet election was administered and also mail in voting in pennsylvania. the 2020 election was secure. it was safe. 2022, same thing. we continue to see this narrative that there was voter fraud which we all know has been debunked multiple times but the concern with this misinformation and disinformation is that it remains a threat to election officials and election officials have been feeling this and i know al definitely experienced this before today. and really it's un-american and has no place in a democracy but we are concerned that there has been turnover t. you've been seeing it around 30 election officials at the county level wehave to part of their positions since 2020 and some of it has been been because of threats. some has been because of retirement or going to other counties but there's a lot of turnover so at the department of state we're doing everything we can to support election officials who may be new in the role. we have counties and election directors who have monthly meetings with county commissioners so everybodyhas been aligned with this message as well as the administration of the elections . we obtained resources. one concern that were continuing to see is public records request. counties are being inundated right now because of misinformation about the 2020 election counties are doing more with fewer resources and they don't have time to respond to all of these right to know requests. we're trying to support the counties as long as we can but other issues in pennsylvania, also which we are trying to manage expectations and we have been since 2020 on the lack of the ability to pre-canvas, preprocess which also leads to disinformation because after elections, national media say why is pennsylvania still counting votes days after theelection ? no, it's election officials doing their job and making sure they are counting every vote and so the legislature of opennsylvania passes a bill or law to allow for reprocessing balance we are going to be assigned with the task about how the process is working that we have to make sure we are continuing the message ofmaking sure that this is the process . elections are secure and pennsylvania can feel confident in the integrity of the election process. >> that point about disinformation and how long it's taken to counterbalance. i mean, many people don't realize california was countingballots to . most of the states where were still counting ballots. it takes a long time to 50 million ballots and on them effectively. but the criticism only applied in states that didn't like the outcomes