With me are Mary Ann Battle and Joe Henke, two of the reporters on the project. All together we had 24 students, they're both Walter Cronkite students. Currently they're here in Washington working in the Cronkite News Service Washington Bureau which is the only Washington Bureau for Arizona media. Covers what goes on in the federal government here that affects Arizona and the Southwest for newspaper and television clients throughout Arizona. One of the many professional projects at the Walter Cronkite School. So they were two of 24 students from 11 universities involved in the project this year, Arizona State, Maryland, Harvard, Syracuse, North Carolina, Elon, Florida, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Oregon, literally all across the country. So I actually had the pleasure during this project of having 11 national bureaus which many other newspapers including, I'm afraid the Washington Post no longer have. And during from January to May, we do a spring semester seminar to learn about our subject, to do the research involving experts in that subject and advocates on both sides. It's a video conference seminar so that all the students at the other universities are tuning in from their universities and our speakers appear in various places also through video technology. So we interviewed during the seminar representatives from the Heritage Foundation, the Republican National Lawyers Association, and others on that side of the argument, on the Republican side, and also Republican Secretary of State of Georgia and a number of other Republican officials. And then also on the other side, the Brennan Center in New York, of the Advancement Project here in Washington and other politicians and academics who've been studying this issue. We divided the students and the teams to do reporting, taking advantage of the fact that we had all these locations around the country. So they went out and did in-depth reporting and research in various aspects of voting rights to determine what stories we're actually we're gonna focus on for the project. And then from late May through July, we established a newsroom as we do each year at the Cronkite School in Phoenix where all the students and reporters come together with professional journalists, editors, multimedia people, web developers, et cetera, to produce the project. Now let's see if I can do this right. Sorry, trying to call up the website. Here we go. Oh, let's go back, I'll go back to the beginning. Okay, good. And did the final reporting, the writing of stories, the many of the students are also photographers, some are videographers and they all contributed to one thing that we decided, a very ambitious thing we decided to try to do which is the question of how much voting fraud is there in the United States anyway, which is what this whole argument is about. And so taking advantage of the fact that Steve Doiga, Pulitzer Prize winning database journalist is on the staff of the Walter Cronkite School and several of our student reporters were good at handling database issues. In addition to everything else they did, they divided up the country and put out research queries to all 50 states in the union. And when necessary filed FOI requests, when necessary went down to the county level if the state wasn't cooperating with us or said you had to go to the counties and developed this database of all election fraud cases in all 50 states going back to the year 2000. And out of that we discovered that there were more than 2000 actual election fraud cases during that time, not all of which resulted in convictions but there were more than 2000 election fraud cases which obviously is a very small number compared to the number of eligible voters and votes cast during that period, during that 12 year period. And that out of that, let me come back to that in a second. First of all, I want to just acquaint you with our website, which is votingrights.news21.com which has all the stories on it, more than 20 stories, the election fraud database, other databases and here, depending upon where you plug into the site since we're in Washington, Washington DC, comes up if you're in Montana, Montana will come up which gives you some cursory information about what you need to vote in that particular locality. You'll hear in the second part of this program a way in which to get deeper than that into your voting rights and voting requirements but this is a good way to start. And then you can see all the other different stories and things that I'll take you through. So let me go to see if I can do this, right? So here's the comprehensive database of U.S. voter fraud and covers no evidence that photo ID is needed. And then that second story there is a long, long detailed explanation of how we carried out this research so that anybody can come and use the database. I won't go to the database right now but it's there of all the 2000 plus cases. You look up every one of them where we have a name of a defendant, defendant's there, what happened to the case and what the case involved. And what we found is that out of these more than 2000 cases there were only 10 cases of voter impersonation in all the United States of America in the 12 years that we covered in all 50 states. That's in other words, in-person voter fraud where you go in and say that you're somebody whom you aren't which is of course the only kind of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter ID requirements. That's about one case for every 15 million registered voters in the United States. What we found that we're more of absentee ballot fraud, 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud usually organized not by voters but of course by politicians and campaigns or election officials. And 400 cases of registration fraud which that's individuals registering with somebody else whether or not they actually voted with that full phony registration is not known in these cases but there was registration fraud for which they were prosecuted. 74 cases of ineligible felons voting. Mary Ann will tell us later about the whole issue of whether felons are allowed to vote in various states around the country and most states most felons are not. 50 and sometimes the felons didn't realize that they were ineligible to vote. They simply voted, nobody stopped them. And of course that wasn't voter impersonation. They did show who they were and voted. 57 cases of non-citizens voting again a small number compared to the controversy over that. Mostly we found mistakes by voters and election workers. We have a very complicated voting system in the United States. It changes by county to county, state to state. You could have moved within the last two years and not done the proper thing to vote in the right place. Or in many cases more than one precinct votes in the same place like in a high school and you simply go to the wrong place in the wrong precinct place within that high school and wind up voting in the wrong place. Changes of address voting by absentee ballot and in person some older people forget that they've already voted by absentee ballot a couple months ago and get excited and go in and try to vote again in person. So it's mistakes account for more than fraud in what we found in the database. I can answer more questions about that during our question period if you wish. So we looked into what is the background then of what's been going on with all the controversy over voting rights. And one thing we looked at was the politics of it. For one thing, we also by the way conducted a Washington Post, the Washington Post was kind enough to conduct a poll for us. That stories appeared in the post and appeared other places including on our website which did show strong support for voter ID laws. However, voters did not understand very much about the impact of those laws and why they may or may not be necessary. And then we looked at why in 2011 and 2012 where there's so many voter ID laws enacted in the states across the country and we discovered that there was a kind of movement among Republican legislators around the country. Talking to each other, in the 2010 election, a number of legislators switched into Republican control. And the Republicans who gained control of those legislators talked to each other. Some of them through this organization called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, but we did not find that ALEC was driving this. But ALEC instead was a kind of convening place for these Republican legislators. And altogether they introduced 62 photo ID bills in 37 states in 2011 and 2012. And then we discovered that in some states, in the majority of the states in the country, not all but the majority of the states of the country, the Secretary of State is the official who's in charge of the elections in those states. You remember the Long Count in Florida in 2000 and the Secretary of State there. And what Joe Henke discovered was that a number of these Secretaries of State are not nonpartisan. They are avowedly partisan and have played a role in what's been going on around the country. Joe? Yeah, I worked with Emily Norr. She was a fellow with News 21 from Nebraska. We wrote this story together. And as Len alluded to, in the Florida election in 2000, Catherine Harris was at least in recent elections, one of the big names that we first saw of a Secretary of State being almost as big as the election itself. And this continued in the 2000s with Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Todd Rakita introduced one of the first voter ID bills that eventually went on to the Supreme Court in Indiana. But they weren't as big as Catherine Harris and neither of these Secretaries that I looked at have gotten to that level. But that doesn't mean that they're not being activists in their states for voter ID bills or other voter initiatives. Traditionally it's a position that we really don't hear about. The Secretary of State, we elect them in many states, but their position tends to be very quiet. But I found some that are getting more headlines that aren't being as quiet as we might have traditionally seen before. So two of the main ones that I focused on in the story or that I didn't focus on, but sort of rose to the top were Chris Kobach in Kansas. He's well known for supporting SB 1070 in Arizona, the immigration law there that was recently at the Supreme Court. He's also helped pass one of the strictest voter ID bills that we've seen passed in any of the states in Kansas. And then Scott Gessler in Colorado, he's been doing a lot similarly to Florida Secretary to get non-citizens off their voter rolls. And he's also supported other initiatives there as far as reforming campaign finance and other election related activities. But there's 36 of these Secretaries that are in charge of running the elections. And one thing that many of them would tell me as I interviewed them was, I don't hand out the ballots, I don't count the votes on election day. I'm not really doing much, which is true and valid. But leading up to the elections, they're, to me, I sort of see them as a football coach. They get all their election workers in line. They get them ready. They talk to the legislators and help give their best opinion if here's the legislation that we need to be introducing. Here's what we need to be passing because truly they know or should know the elections in their state better than anyone. They're in charge of them. But quite a few of them are falling in line with their party, whether it be the Democratic Party or the Republican Party and what their party's speaking points are for what we need or don't need as far as voter ID or what we do or don't need in another voting initiative. And quite a few of them that I found were Republican Secretaries. And not to say that the Republicans are more focused on this, but about two thirds of the Secretaries of States that are the chief election official in their given state just happen to be Republicans. So the article does focus a little bit more on Republicans but there are Democratic examples of this as well. In Minnesota, my home state, Mark Ritchie has been involved there and a couple of recounts have been highly contested and not to say that he did anything wrong in those but then recently he tried renaming some ballot measures and that's an example of where he's not doing anything on election day but he's tied or attempted to title amendments on Minnesota ballots in a way that some people have said are supporting of the Democratic Party. They're more supportive of how they would want that measure to appear on a ballot where in Minnesota all you get is a title, you don't get an explanation of what the actual ballot initiative is. So through that one single title, you're assuming the voter knows everything about that measure and all you're gonna give them is that title. And he changed a Republican controlled legislation, legislation's title to what he thought the best title would be and that I believe just recently was decided by the Minnesota Supreme Court what the title should be and they said that he does not have the power to title those amendments even though he sort of thought that he did. So that was one example of a Democratic secretary trying to influence maybe the election through his party. This was one of the most interesting findings for me in our research because I just assumed that most secretaries of state were not involved in politics, endorsing candidates and things like that and this was really a surprise to me. I think it's an important story and something that ought to be looked at by people who are concerned about governance in the country. The other movement we looked at was the movement to increase the number of poll watchers in voting precincts. On the one side is the true-the-vote movement which was born in Texas in Houston, Texas. Let's see if I can get back to where that story is. Which began a couple elections ago in Texas in by and large African-American precincts there. The people who organized true-the-vote who've had national conventions now involving representatives from 32 states around the country where they're trying to have this movement be active in a number of states around the country are concerned about voter fraud, they're concerned about ineligible people voting about non-citizens voting, et cetera. First they were challenging lots of voters in Texas and then people sued them for that and so by and large what they do now is they observe. They observe the poll workers themselves, they often are looking over their shoulders, they're taking notes and then they reserve the right to file objections about things that they don't like and they were active in Wisconsin during the recall election there and when these by and large white observers are in totally black precincts, the number of the voters told our reporters they feel intimidated by what are these people watching? What are they doing here? Are they trying to stop me from voting? So as a movement grew national on the other side the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and groups like the Advancement Project who are concerned about intimidating particularly minority voters are now gearing up their poll watchers. One of the meetings of the Democratic Convention was a rally of people from states around the country, Democrats from around the country to organize their poll watching. So you wanna watch on election night you may find out that there are abscirmishes breaking out around the country involving these poll watchers, lawyers who may be going to court to complain about activities about poll watchers on both sides in addition to the issue about how voter ID laws are going to be administered on election day. This could be quite a scruffy election night depending upon how people behave. Then we wanted to look at the question of how does this actually affect voters? On the opposition to voter ID says people are gonna lose their franchise. This is disenfranchising people who could not easily provide voter ID and we wanted to go out and see how that was working in various parts of the country. And indeed we did find for instance there's one state could be Tennessee, I'm sorry I can't remember right now it's in one of these stories where once you're 65, I'm 70 so I can talk about this, once you're 65 if you wish your driver's license does not have your picture on it. Which I guess it was passed by some legislator who didn't like the looks of their picture on their driver's license. And so as a result there are a lot of drivers who don't have pictures on their driver's license who would be ineligible to vote under the voter ID law there. In other states there are large numbers of people who don't have driver's license for a variety of reasons. They're elderly or they live in big cities where they just don't drive. They've never bothered to get a driver's license. My mother's 93 hasn't driven for years and it turns out that the substitute for a driver's license she had had her old address on it so she's now in the process at 93 trying to figure out how she can get proper voter ID in order to vote in Pennsylvania after voting all her life there. There are these kinds of issues around the country in Texas to get your voter ID. You've got to get to a motor vehicles bureau as is the case in many states. There are a number of counties in Texas. Remember how big Texas is. There are a number of counties in Texas where there's no voter ID office or they're not open for very long hours. We focused in the state of Georgia for a while because that was one of the early states for voter ID after Indiana. And they've worked very, very hard to try to make it non-discriminatory there. They make it very easy to get your free ID. They listen to complaints from citizens about problems. They're trying to address all the problems so that this is not disenfranchising. There's no way to put a number on this. There's no way we could do a database for this the way we did for voter fraud. But at least there's a lot of testimony from people that this could be disenfranchising, another thing to watch for on election day. But then we looked at the largest group of Americans who are in fact disenfranchised, which again I had just not thought about before this project. And these are people that have been convicted of a felony. They've served their time. They're back to what should be normal citizen life. And in many states of the union, they do not regain the right to vote. Or in order to regain the right to vote, they have to jump through incredible hoops, which Marianne will now tell us about. People with felony convictions who are not able to vote. It's an estimate. It's meant to show the scope, but there isn't a census-like head count. So it could be a larger number. It could be a little smaller. We're not sure. Across the country, every state handles this differently. They also have different lists of felonies. So you could be convicted of drug possession and be convicted of a felony in Florida and have to go through a very lengthy process that could take a couple of decades before you can vote again if you're lucky enough to get the vote back. Or you could be a person who committed the same crime in Maine and vote from prison. So the spectrum's pretty wide. And I was intrigued by it and I wanted to study every single state, but didn't get the chance to quite do that. But what we did find were that there were people out there who are struggling to get by, to make a living, to raise their family, and to recover from the consequences of maybe youthful indiscretions. And they really want to have a say in their community or they want to cast a ballot and are told that they can't. So it was interesting to get away from the system itself and talk to people who are directly affected by these laws and what this does to their self-esteem or their identity. It was very, it was touching, the group, the family that I used in our lead. They both had issues with drugs and they both had run-ins with the law except Josh Vanderkamp, the husband, he actually was convicted of a couple felonies. And so in Arizona, if you have more than one felony, you have to go through an application process in order to recover your rights. And Katie Vanderkamp, his wife, had met him in rehab, had been through similar situations, but she'd never been convicted of a felony. So she never lost her right to vote. They'd had very similar lives. They got together and tried to recreate their future together. They have two children, they have a house, Josh has a steady job, and yet they're so different in society because Josh can't vote and she can. We heard stories from all over the country about that. Folks who had in Rhode Island, for example, a grassroots movement there was successful and probationers and parolees who were disenfranchised before are now able to vote. They were excited about it. They were hopeful about participating in democracy. Some say that this might have an effect on recidivism. Folks who can vote may be less likely to go back to prison because they feel like they're more connected to the community, but studies there are slim to almost none. I think there's like one that we found that actually tried to look at that. The consequences are that there's some communities who have a high percentage of disenfranchised felons living within their borders. And some say that that minimizes the political clout of communities. If you have a lot of people who aren't voting, they may not have the ear of the congressman or the senators of that state. So it's something that it affects the individual, but it could also spill over to the communities where they live. There are many people that have moral objections to felons being able to regain the right to vote, but there's also a clear political angle involved here. Could you just talk a bit about Florida where it was gonna go in one direction and then it was reversed? This doesn't just break down into Democrat-Republican lines. In Florida, you had Governor Jeb Bush and Governor Chris. They looked at it from, well Jeb Bush looked at it from recidivism. It's a pricey thing in our community. Let's try to get folks to recidivate less. So he thought simplifying the voting, the restoration process there would be a way to do that. And so in Florida, you are disenfranchised and you have to go before a board that consists of the governor and three others. And they look at your application and the governor and those three other folks have the say. So you're either restored or you're not based on this board. So the Chris, for example, tried to streamline the process so that folks that had nonviolent offenses could kind of bypass some of these things and almost be automatically restored. And when Governor Rick Scott came into office, he made it so that now nonviolent offenders have to wait five years before they can apply. And violent offenders have to wait seven years before they can apply. Adding to that, there's also a backlog of applications that need to be processed. So some people are looking at 10, 15 years before they can actually have the chance to go before the board or have their application looked at. Florida is a battleground state. It's in 2000, it was won by a very small margin. Some people are saying this is a deliberative time to keep certain people off of the voter rolls. We didn't look into that particular issue in our article. We were more interested in speaking to the people who are affected by it directly, but it's food for thought. These rules can change through executive order. So one person can say, okay, I'm in office now. This rule is to lax, this needs to change. The procedure can change. Or it can go through constitutional amendments. Voters can weigh in through ballot initiatives and things like that, but it all depends on where you live. So Florida is an example of executive changing rules and making it a little bit harder for some folks to get restored. Just differs widely from state to state. And it seems to be something that prisoner advocates are finally cottoning on to and getting involved in. That was one of the ways in which we were able to do are some of our reporting was through them. Also on NPR, another one of our reporters has done an NPR story about this in Florida, which will be heard sometime soon. They've been working on the development of the story, but I would think it would probably be sometime this month. And we also have on the site itself, lots of voices of voters and prospective voters and felons who want to vote. We have them on video. We have voices that accompany photographs. I think you would be impressed by a lot of these people if you go to the website and follow through on seeing those. And then lastly, because of course, this remains a running story, an important story in the selection season. We have a breaking news button on the site where we are aggregating and posting pretty much daily coverage of all these issues around the country that we're curating. And so if you want to keep up with the subject, you can go to the website and to the breaking news button and follow along each day. We're also on Twitter. It's called who can vote on Twitter. I think that's right, at who can vote on Twitter. And it's something we're going to continue to report on through election night and the fallout from the election, because we think it's so important. And that's our presentation. Questions? Yeah. Make a break for the microphone. Peggy, I just get a congressional report for the Hispanic Outlook. And I'm writing a couple of stories, but on this issue, so I wondered if you'd done some work on the registration process, the application process. Would someone know that, I mean, if that was a felony, felony, or is there a check if someone's a citizen? Is, you know, where in the registration process is this? Identify. And then the other thing, I don't know if you did anything, I've been working on this for a while. I haven't had too many people who have worked on it. The effect of bilingual ballots in the area, does that encourage voters who don't speak English very well, especially in states that have initiatives? Mary Ann, you want to talk? Mary Ann, you want to talk about the felons? You, Joe, talk about bilingual ballots? Well, I think there's a lot of misinformation regarding felons voting rights. Like we mentioned earlier, some of the fraud may be a felon showing up to vote because he or she doesn't realize that, you know, he or she doesn't have the right to vote and the poll worker doesn't realize and then the ballot gets cast and then that's voter fraud and that's a felony.  You know, and it's as simple as that. And some of these poll watching groups are comparing registration rules with other data. So, I think it's a system that varies across the board. So, I don't really have like a succinct answer for it. Yeah, again, we have controversy right now over various states comparing their voter rolls or outside groups like True the Vote, comparing voter rolls. Want to compare voter rolls to the federal register of illegal immigrants to determine who's a citizen or not a citizen? I know there was been some work by the Kansas Secretary of State and some others of doing cross-state database checks to find either non-citizen voters or say I used to live in Kansas and now I live in Colorado and I registered in both places and can that database sort of take one of my registrations away so that I am voting accurately and legally. And then as far as the bilingual ballots, your question was if that encourages voters, if they have the opportunity to take a bilingual ballot. Yeah, it's not something specifically that I recall us looking at. I do know, I believe it was Proposition 200 in Arizona where Marianne and I were at. I think it was gonna be English only for election materials. And when I talked to election workers there, they did allude to the possibility that some people, if I don't speak English, I don't read English and the ballot's only in English, how am I gonna vote?  So there was some backlash at Proposition 200 in that specific line of the English only ballots and election materials. I'm not sure if other states have addressed that, but Arizona of course has been at the forefront of immigration issues and English only issues, so. Yeah, we should also say, another story covers this, that voting registration in the United States is a mess. Again, because of our federal system, there's no federal registration for voters as there is in many other countries. On a database you can search it and you can whatever and so on. Here it's again, it's state by state, county by county. And as a result there are lots of mistakes in voter registration. People who do move and remain registered where they were before and registered knew where they are. People who register in error in a lot of different ways. And this was studied by the Pew Center and it came out with a report much earlier this year showing how bad the registration roles were in many states. That doesn't mean that people are gonna be voting illegally but it does mean the registration rolls are a mess which makes it harder for poll workers to deal with you when you come to vote. And so they recommended, there is a, they worked with somebody who's developed a technology that would allow this sort of comparison state by state to clean up everybody's registration roles. And a few states have volunteered to be the guinea pigs to do this, but some states have refused. And one wonders why would you refuse to join a project that would clean up your registration rolls? I guess it because you may lose control over your registration rolls in that sense that you'd be joining with other states to have cleaner registration rolls. But that's another kind of movement going on in the country. Yes, in the green blouse and wait for the microphone. Hi, can you hear me? My name's Ashley Chase. I'm an associate at the Scowcroft Group and I recognize that your study didn't focus on this per se, but I'm wondering if you can speak to the actual impact some of these voter registration laws will have in the upcoming election, given that many of them are in the swing states. Right, and yes, the voter ID laws. That's what I talked about earlier, we don't know. And there's arguments going on on both sides. The advocates of voter ID said this shouldn't be a problem. People need voter ID to drive and to do lots of other things and you should get your ID and then you'll be able to vote. And others say, I talked earlier about the exceptions, the people that don't have the proper photo ID to vote and have been able to vote previously, giving other kinds of identification, your water bill, your property tax bill, whatever, without having to have a face of photo ID to do it. And so we just don't, some people say like, could have a big impact in swing states. Pennsylvania's one place where they actually have been to court about this. Several states have been to court about this. South Carolina's still up in the air, challenged by the Justice Department on the Loder Rights Act. And so there's a lot of litigation left before the election and probably after the election. And then we'll also see what happens on election day. That's a very big and important question. I should have mentioned, I've also about photo ID students. Again, many college students would like to vote where they've been going this college for several years, as opposed to voting by absentee ballot back home. So they registered to vote in the state where they're going to college. And in many states adopted voter ID, your college ID does not qualify as a state issued ID, unless you're going to a state school. And this means that people going to private schools, going to historically black colleges, do not automatically have the voter ID. The ID that would be necessary to vote. And in Wisconsin, which is, this has been vacated by the courts for this election, they wouldn't even allow the state university ID. You got to get a separate ID to vote. So the University of Wisconsin spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making other new voter ID available to Wisconsin students in case that law was in effect on election day. Yes, and then purple here, here's the front. Hi, I'm Jennifer Young. And I was just kind of wondering, so it sounds like the main problem is more messy voter registration system, like you said, county by county, state by state, and not necessarily voter fraud, because you don't have an ID. So why has the focus, where is this blossomed from, with the focus on voter photo ID instead of fixing our voter registration system? Right, the critics of photo ID, which tend to be Democrats and liberals, say the reason for this is to suppress the vote. That is to say that the people putting these laws into effect know that they will disproportionately affect students and minorities who would be more likely in their minds to vote Democratic. I don't know if they're right or not about that, but in their minds, they'd be more likely to vote Democratic. And therefore they want to suppress that vote. And that's the purpose of the voter photo ID laws from that point of view. And over there, a lady in the check, or whatever the print. My name is Nancy Carson, and I've worked a lot in information policy. And I'm curious as you work through this, I'm curious about who's interested in the data. Do you find an interest and a responsiveness by local governments, local papers? We know the usual suspects will use the parts they want. Do you sense that the information is beginning to make inroads out there someplace? Anybody reading it, caring, learning? Yeah, this has been widely reported. This is the only definitive study of election fraud in the United States, the only non-partisan one.  There are critics of it because they don't like the outcome, but by and large it's being cited. Just the other day I was listening to Diane Reem's show, there's a big debate going on about voter rights among people who are foreign against photo ID, for example, and they all cited the study as gospel, that this is the one study that they agree is accurate.  If I can add, as far as the actual getting the data, the work that the reporters that worked specifically on the database had to go to, and they called some states, and Alex Remington, one of our reporters of the few states, he had a call, attorney generals throughout the state, he had a call county by county and talked to election workers in some cases. And that at least said to me with the way the news industry is these days, a lot of news outlets can't do that. So seeing him call county by county and actually having the time to do that with the new 21 program says, people have their opinions out there, but a lot of this research had never been done before these election workers were confused when someone called and asked for how many cases of voter fraud have you had in your county. And they had to go find that information because they didn't have it readily available. This is a good background information about the voter 21 project because we have a couple dozen, up to a couple dozen reporters every year for this project. That is more reporters obviously than any news organization can put on a single project, even combinations of them. And that's why many, many news organizations use our work because we're able to do work they can't do. The supplements, I mean everybody's covering voter rights this year, but the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Arizona Republic, other newspapers around the country, NBCNews.com's many websites around the country, use many or all of our stories because they're stories that they can't do themselves even though they're covering this issue in other ways. And every year we try to pick a subject that where we can add value to what other news media are doing. Thank you very much. So thank you very much, Len, and the news 21 project. This event is now going to pivot away from voting rights to questions of voting and voter information. Now, my name is Tom Glazier. I've led our work here on media policy as part of a team housed in the Open Technology Initiative, or Open Technology Institute as it's now called, where we've been looking at the changing media and technological landscape as it affects citizens' participation in a democracy. And as the night report on sustaining democracy in a digital age, something we've used as a keystone for our work, says individuals need three things to participate in a democratic society. Relevant, incredible information, the education needed to engage with that information, and opportunities to participate. Now, critically, people, if we think about the act of voting and voting information, this is at the center of those questions. And if we are going to have informed voters in the 21st century, in 2012, the internet, mobile, and stationery, sort of regular broadband, is clearly a way they will become informed. Pew's latest data from Lee Rainey's inestimable Pew Internet and American Life Project released figures that 45% of adults in the US own smartphones, and that's before the iPhone 5. So we have come a long way from the plain text email that I received from the Goal campaign in 2000. It looked a little historic then, but we are in a different world. And to bring us up to speed on the state of the art, and I mean the state of the art, because some of this stuff is new yesterday, we have two experts, and I invite them to come to the stage now. In fact, I won't, correct me, I will invite Anthea to come and speak in a second, but come to the stage, please. We have two people, Anthea Watson Strong, who works with Google's Politics and Election team. Previously, she was with the new Organizing Institute, and subsequently the Obama campaign, and Roger McDonald of the Internet Archive, previously with Link2TV, of which he was a co-founder. These are experts as much as anyone can be in online information and data. Remember again that the Goal campaign was using plain text email. I would introduce Roger when he comes to the stage, but Anthea, I'll mention right now, is someone who has followed the arc, first as a field organizer, then realizing that this data thing could be quite interesting and useful, got hooked on it, and began work at the new Organizing Institute, and then the Obama campaign, she's now, as I said, with the Google's Election and Policy team. Anthea will come to the stage and explain exactly what Google is doing in providing information, and then I'll invite Roger to talk about a project that was launched yesterday, and then we'll have Q and A, so further ado, Anthea, please. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to come and talk with all of you today. It's such an interesting lead-in too, so thanks to those who came before me. So I'm gonna attempt what some say as the impossible is to get you really excited about civic data, and how you can visualize civic data in different ways to help voters get what they need in order to make it through the civic participation process. As Tal mentioned, I started back in 2006 as a field organizer, and I sort of experienced on the ground how confusing the civic process is to those folks who live in different communities throughout the United States, and sort of stumbled into the opportunity to help collect and standardize data and build really interesting, cool technology and offline products too that can help people get the information they need in order to be successful in casting their ballot. And so just to talk about that, I actually wanna talk first about an unsung hero in the space. The Voting Information Project. Somebody already mentioned Pew earlier today, and this is a Pew-funded project, but it actually started in 2008 at Google. So you guys have heard of 20% engineers, right? At Google, most engineers spend 80% of their time on their core product, but then 20% of the time they get to do something that they think is interesting and useful, but not necessarily something tied to their role at the company. And in 2008, a group of engineers were interested in building a polling place lookup tool. And in 2008, it wasn't dawn of the internet, it seemed like it should be pretty easy to create that polling place lookup tool. It's not hard technologically, but what they discovered was the data wasn't there. We've already mentioned that the American electoral system is highly decentralized, and a lot of the data that you would need to tell somebody where their polling location is capped at the county level. Sometimes on paper and occasionally in people's heads. So I've sort of talked to an election official in Tennessee where she has this mental map of how the precinct lines work. And when somebody new comes to register, she literally knows, oh, that's next to the red barn. That means that this is where the polling place is and she like enters into the database that way. That unfortunately is not easy to access like people's head. We haven't figured out how to get that into XML yet. So there's a real problem here. So Google set out to sort of collect this information and it was so successful in 2008 that they worked with Pew to launch the voting information project. And I can't say enough about the heroes at Pew and VIP for doing this. They work directly with local election officials to help them put election related data. So ballot information, local election official contact information, polling place information, early vote location information. They put that into an XML feed, which is just an easily updated format. And that information gets posted to repositories that allow us to build really cool technology. So we can look at some of the things that happened in 2010. If I can use the mouse, I am an expert in technology. So these are some of the things. The AT&T voter hub was really cool. So Google and their contribution to the voting information project creates an API that allows anyone basically to build on top of it. And one of the cool things about an API is it relieves from the local election officials the pressure to build the perfect tool, right? So I've organized a lot in Wisconsin. There's a big Hmong population, Hmong speaking population. It would take a lot of resources for the secretary of state in Wisconsin to build a Hmong polling place lookup tool. But by making this data available through an open API, then a developer can build that for their community. And you see lots of really interesting tools. So mobile was a big thing in 2010 and we saw AT&T build on top of it. But we also see there was a hackathon last weekend in Pennsylvania where a bunch of programmers got together who were really interested around the ID laws stuff and they built really interesting tools on top of that that served their community in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania. So it really unleashes the creativity of the internet to visualize this in whatever way is important to those folks. The other thing that we have which is probably one of the most highly visual, this is the 2010 gadget. And Google will be launching a new version of the gadget for the 2012 election. But the cool thing about it is it's embeddable. So anyone can grab this code and put it on their website. And we saw about 300 media organizations in 2010 put it on their websites to help inform their voters. The other note here is that 2012 is clearly, we get a lot of attention right now, but this is something that works for small elections too. So a local primary race, for example, the local paper with their website can throw it up there too. So she sort of show you how it works. I mean, a user enters in their address and it returns, so there's the address, it turns the polling stations, you can get directions. It's really a neat thing. You can also view candidates. So those are the folks who are on, this is sample data that it's working off of, not 2012 data. So it's open source tool too, so people grab it and scan it in different ways. And we've seen it embedded at Facebook, we've seen it embedded in lots of different high profile places. The API had about six million hits in 20 town, which means a good chunk of the population were finding out their polling place through this data in some way, shape, or form. So that's the voting information project. I also, since voter ID is something that we've been talking a lot about, the voting information project is collecting what they call rules of the road data, which is information about who needs to bring an ID to the poll, what user needs to do in order to register to vote, what user needs to do in order to apply for an absentee ballot. All of that data will be made available to in bulk format for people to build interesting tools on top of or for users, researchers to combine with different things. I think the creativity of the audience is what's gonna unlock the potential for all of this. The other really interesting data set that's available through an open API right now, the New Organizing Institute collects and standardizes election administration information. This is all available also in a database that you can download flat file or it's available through an open API. You can see there's a lot of really interesting information here. Answers to pretty much any question you might have if you're a voter. Again, hoping that folks will build on top of this and make it available and interesting and cool ways. In a lot of ways we're at the very beginning of what might happen in the future. The API, the Google API is gonna be relaunching very shortly probably this week and as such we'll start to see interesting tools built and launched on top of that. And so some of this is a to be stay tuned kind of situation. So thanks Tom. Thank you, that's great. So before we get a Q and A I asked Roger to come to the stage. So he, Roger McDonald works at the internet archive and they launched yesterday what was described in today in the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal which is quite impressive to get two hits like that in one day. As a tool that may let 10,000 John Stuart's bloom. Now that's maybe you don't want 10,000 John Stuart's. Maybe the world doesn't need 10,000 John Stuart's but when you hear a statement like that and it brings two to a report who reported in an outlet like the New York Times you have to think that the internet archive has done something interesting. So Roger will come to the stage and he gets pretty excited about this. I've seen him demo this to me before. So after about 10 minutes I will hook him off and we will go to Q and A both here and on Twitter if people use the MPI NAF hashtag we'll take those questions into the room during the last section of this event. So Roger, what that fellow did. Thank you. I will move. Okay. Hi, I'm Roger McDonald and I'm from the internet archive I really appreciate as does the rest of the internet archives Tom's invitation to show you a new tool we have. We've created the tool to offer citizens and journalists and documentarians and civic organizations and scholars a kind of unique access to a library of television news.  No archive that you can go to search for valuable information to hold accountable like newspapers the people and institutions who are reported therein as well as to hold accountable for how those that information was transmitted. So today we've launched a television news research archive backing up a little bit. The internet archive is a public digital library. We've been around for 16 years. We are mission ambitious as it is is to redundantly archive all human knowledge. We started off with the web because web pages come and go so quickly. We have crawlers that crawl about the web. So far we've archived 180 billion web pages. We are a big data concern for a nonprofit. You've just heard from, you know, the largest commercial big data concern. Through this tool, you can go back in time and take a look at what various websites look like over time. We have our scanning books and currently have an open library of more than two million books. We have millions of songs, hundreds of thousands of concerts, an enormous amount of information. Most of it available, open, free, to all, forever. Some of our archiving work is not that. And that has been television. We've been archiving television for about 11 years, starting off with 20 channels, foreign and domestic. And now we're up to about 90 channels, foreign and domestic. We record in two locations in the United States in the Washington DC metropolitan area and San Francisco Bay Area. So that means over the last 11 years we have all national news and all news from local stations in the Washington DC and San Francisco Bay Area. We use closed captioning for deep search, closed captioning this fantastic, amazing metadata that is rich and granular, but has been largely, almost entirely, ignored for that value. Broadcasters and others have begrudgingly put this on to make accommodations for those with hearing disabilities, but it turns out, and everybody in the ecosystem will discover this fairly soon, that this is amazing, rich, valuable information that allows you to do deep search, get right to the points that people are talking about in television. Oops, pardon me. So within the context of this year's elections we thought it'd be valuable to open up a beta project, demonstrate the value of an archive of television news. It is not a DVR in the clouds. It's not a lean back experience where you can just watch a program in its entirety. It's a research service. We are a research public library. So using this tool you can ask a question of it, dive in to the news, we'll present you with a variety of options. You can take a look at it. You can watch short 30 second segments of it. You can follow links back to the content creators, both the networks and the shows themselves. You can see the context in which that short clip occurred and you can quote television. You can quote and share now. You can share online, anybody in any fashion, a URL to a specific segment of time, 30 seconds or less, we allow you to trim the in and out points that will take people back to the internet archive, back to our digital public library, open up that page as it were, open up a video player, show you that segment that's been referenced by somebody else. You come there and you can see that, that's interesting, and you can then look and see the context from which that person drew that and draw your own conclusions. So we're doing this because television in general, this most pervasive and most persuasive medium of our civilization has no pause and rewind button on it. It sweeps over us and it affects our guts, affects our heads, but there's no model for going, hmm, how was that that I was, what was that? John Stuart has shown one iteration, one way of looking at it, particularly for those sort of gotcha moments. But in fact, like newspaper libraries, if you think about it, this is this rich, rich source of valuable, interesting information to allow you to discover all kinds of things. In this election context, we think it works really well for citizens to understand political issues, that which has been said, the migration of issues and statements over time to allow them to do their own research, to allow them to share with others. Hence, may a thousand John Stuart's bloom, but also for journalists of every kind, for scholars to look back and note all kinds of things. I'm gonna be a little brief now, and a variety of others. So I'd like to just show you, give you a brief little intro to what this is like. It's now open, free, you can use it today.  So don't worry that you go, wait a minute, what was that? I just wanna highlight a couple of things that'll give you a sense of what's now available. At archive.org slash TV. This is the public facing interface to a television news research service. Can you see, you can see my cursor. Here, we've opened up the last three years of TV news. Here it is day by day. This is the number, let's see if I can catch it. Anyway, these are, over the course of three years, this graph represents the number of individual programs recorded and available for search that day. This entire corpus that we present now is over 350,000 news programs. You can enter your search term right here. You could sort by network. You could sort by program. This is not so impressive this way. There's over a thousand programs. Most of them are short one-off series. We provide, we are doing some semantic intelligence. We're using some machine intelligence to extract what are called named entities. We are looking at the scaled value of using machine intelligence to help your search and as well as to help contextualize what you're interested in by drawing in outside data sets from open government sources, from new sources query the API of the New York Times or the Guardian to see what's the latest on what you're looking for or what was the archived information that you might be looking for. Without further ado, I'll just, so this is the first time I've ever demoed this and not asked somebody else to do it because I always think it's cheesy when somebody goes, let's demo this and we'll just choose, oh, this one, what did we discover? This is not necessary. So boom, up comes the coincidence of Romney and healthcare used in the closed captioning of television news. We've rank ordered, our search engine rank orders the relevance to what it thinks to your search. Your search can be very, very complex. The first up is a show from current TV, broadcast August 9th, 2012. You see a short little clip playing. You can hear it after the audio is pretty low because it becomes pretty distracting. And you can see some of the closed captioning context. You can sweep over the first 50 odd search returns and go, huh, that's good, that's interesting. Let me just go all the way to the right. This is the first 75 of approximately 2,293 mentions of the coincidence of those words Romney and healthcare. You could, pardon me, you could do some more search. So you've just done, looked at Romney and healthcare.  You say, I want this, but I don't want this. You could choose your network once again, your programs, your language, up an individual date range. And note here, here's a bunch of programs and they're listed and there's some interesting metadata next to them. These are rank ordered by the frequency of usage of that particular search term. So we see that over all the last three years, the program that used, that's somewhere in the program said Romney and healthcare was special report with Brett Baer 199 times. Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace 147 times. Sort of an interesting bit of metadata to allow you to say who uses what kinds of words over time. All these things are faceted. I click one of them and just restricts it to just that. Just that program, just that station, just that date, just that language and just that sort of semantic entity. Just randomly dropping into Fox report with Shepard Smith and like magic, it doesn't move. Well, I'll explain this is definitely somebody else's fault. It's not. Yeah, that's first white, white screen of death. So I've just limited that search now to that single program. You'll note up here, this graph, notes the numbers of programs of this single program per day that mention this. So that's an interesting bit of data that you can see peaks and valleys of mentions of those terms. Okay, let's dive in a little deeper. I've just clicked more info. There is another television news archive, a wonderful one at Vanderbilt University. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has been archiving the signature evening news programs of television news since 1968. They have expanded it to be the evening news programs of Fox and CNN. They do a magnificent job of adding human summaries of individual stories. I say human because we're interested in hugely scaled solutions, so that doesn't really work for this first data set of 350,000 programs. But the Vanderbilt Library also makes those available for viewing at the library, for loaning, for borrowing. You can request them to loan you via now DVD, used to be videotape, individual programs for your own personal research use.  We are also offering that service. In that search result, we found this particular clip. I may decide, yeah, this is that piece that I really want. Hit share clip. There's a unique URL to this point in time. This is shareable across the web. When somebody else clicks on it, they get this particular, they see this particular thing. Linkbacks to this particular Fox news site. You can borrow it in that fashion I suggested. And now you can drop in to the whole program. Somebody shares it, okay, that's interesting. But what did they say just before? What did they say just after? What was really this program about? Click on that. It was now dropped into the program. At 30 second intervals, we present thumbnails, these little pictures, and an index of words used during those 30 seconds to allow you to navigate throughout this program and go, oh no, you know, actually, actually this, this is what I was really interested in. And now you'll see that one segment that you chose. Or others. You can use this thumbnail index to look at, as a further means for navigation, you can also search within this broadcast to see how many, this is just this one show. How many times was Romney and healthcare in close conjunction? So we could use a variety of navigation tools to move around within this show, and that's one. That's the most online in a single day so far. Yesterday, a campaign spokeswoman said, quote, the American people don't want. That's it. This is the internet archives, TV news, research, and borrow service. Roger, thanks very much. It's clearly an exciting platform. I'm gonna move to questions here for both of, both Anthea and Roger, and then go to the audience in a couple of minutes. So, Anthea, you were, you're sitting in with the data. You're trying to make it useful on a bipartisan, non-partisan basis. If you were still an organizer, what would be the most interesting aspect of the new emergence of data in campaigns for you now? Is there something somewhere in the process that you're excited about a possibility in 2012 that wasn't a possibility prior? So I'm really excited about the way that data sets can be joined now. So there's a lot of really interesting, rich data. I'm very much focused on giving people information about who's on their ballot, where they vote, where they early vote, what they need to bring with them to the polls. But somebody who's interested in helping make sense of the campaign finance world, for example, could map our data to the sunlight data or the Center for Progressive and Responsible, what is it, the Center for Responsible Politics, C.R.B.? C.R.B. There's lots of really, what's it? Center for Responsible and Ethics. Thank you. So lots of really great sources of campaign finance data out there, and you could do a really interesting job of visualizing that to help inform voters about how money is affecting the candidates who are on their ballot. The way that you can organize these data sets is infinite, and quite frankly, I'm not gonna claim that I'm smart enough to know exactly what is needed in the space, but I am excited about unlocking the data so that other people who are super, super smart can build really interesting and cool things on top of it. So, Ante, you talked about linking this data with other data. So I've seen this, the beta version of the TV news service demoed a few weeks ago, and I was sort of excited about it, about what you can find. There's something really interesting that we could never really get hold of before, but for practically what it has to be useful, there are 10, maybe there are 10,000 John Sears out there, but they don't know how to use this platform yet and how it's going to flow into the body politic. How do you anticipate it emerging and being linked with the data that Ante had talked about? Well, frankly, having worked on this and sort of having this vision for almost a decade, I really can say that I've got some great ideas, my colleagues and I have some great ideas of over 100 experimental collaborators who are journalists and scholars and librarians. They've had some great ideas, but I think not unlike what you were saying that the greatest uses are going to be inherently something that we can't anticipate. So what we're doing is opening this up for creativity, but that said, librarians have noted the value for their patrons of being able to search for information that they are most interested in. Turns out public libraries are now being used more than ever. Why? Bandwidth. By whom? Those who don't have or much bandwidth are none at all. Not very big readers, big television watchers. They're looking for the two big things, jobs and health information. There may well be some jobs information in here that's of personal value to them. Not so sure of that, but clearly there's a ton of really interesting stories that have been done on health. As our lead developer, Tracy, who's a magnificent developer responsible for creating this in the underlying engine, noted right away, she looked at well let's look at deep vein thrombosis and thrombosis not so much because these are closed captioners who are not correcting their spelling, but deep vein picks it up and lo and behold there's a variety of really great programming that's done by news programs with wonderful graphics imparting valuable personal knowledge. Just think about making this relevant to people. There are 90 channels is a lot. Recording in two locations is a lot, but there's the rest of the country out there. What expectations or plans or hopes or aspirations you have for recording stations, local stations elsewhere around the country? I'm just intrigued about making this look more locally relevant. This is a start. We think that it's really important to take it beyond, record every news program in the United States and beyond we're doing recordings overseas as well. For the information for the local people in the selection context, it would have been really great to do that in the battleground states now that more money is being spent on television advertising by first and third party campaigns. That would be amazing in real time to be able to hold accountable the campaigns and the candidates and the stations for that which they are airing. Within the selection context we think that there's enormous value for journalists to ask those kinds of questions and get some answers and share the product of their research. Individuals, everybody. Farce John Stewart shows, yes, this is some of the production capacity. Yes, they do somewhat the same thing. They have some big DVRs and they're recording the closed captioning and they're doing deep search against it, but really the best of what John Stewart has is some fantastic talent, some great writers and huge production. Thank you. Now, this material is pretty useful. How immediately is it available? So say I see something on the television, now when would it appear on your... I neglected to address this question. We're recording 24-7. Our computers are taking the information and rendering it available for search and we wait 24 hours after first broadcast before it's available here as one of a number of accommodations of respect for those who've created the content. We're a research library. This is for research purposes and we don't want to... We really want to honor those who've created the content. Great, thanks for just now. Now I'll move to Q and A for the audience. Any hands in the air? Yes, lady in the front, please wait for the mic. In a sense, you do radio too because there's so much good stuff on radio that never gets archived. Oh, we agree, not yet. Yes, absolutely. That's interesting. The lady in the green. Hi, my name's Adrienne. I work with the election protection campaign under the Lawyers' Committee of Civil Rights and I had a question for you in particular. Because of the deals with technology, we recently launched a mobile app that's going to help voters look up their registration information as well as just access information on our website and you brought up an interesting point. I think it was you that brought up about smartphone users and how so many people... Oh, no, you did actually about how many people are on smartphones and I was curious because that's one challenge is making sure that people are using their smartphones in a certain way, especially disenfranchised, the most disenfranchised groups who are most affected by the recent laws who may not have had access to resources in order to do this, I guess. So my question is how are you getting the word out about this new technology and just getting the average cell phone user or internet user or whatnot to just know that it's there and start using it? Because we're working on that same thing. Yeah, totally. And your app is great. I've looked at it. It's fantastic. And I think that that's one of the really interesting and cool things about focusing on collecting standardizing data and making it available through this API is that we are hopeful that we can unlock the ability for an organization in the sense of yourself to concentrate on building a customized experience that makes sense for the community that you serve or the community that you're targeting and without having to worry about calling every election official in the country or without having to worry about the hard, tricky data problem of taking an address and matching it to electoral districts and then matching it to the data. That part, we're hoping to solve for you so that you can do a really great job of designing and marketing and building the apps that are really, really successful. The other thing is just, not every organization has the resources to build their own tools. Developers are expensive and quite frankly, not every organization is a technology company. So by creating the embeddable app that's easily, I mean, it's just like embedding a YouTube. You just grab the code and embed it. Hopefully anyone who has a website can really easily push information to their communities in the ways that it makes sense to do so. Thanks. Gentlemen, in the tie. Thank you, Benjamin Tua. Could each of you say a little something about your organizations, how you're funded, how many people you have working on your organizations in your organizations? Sure, I can go first. Actually, I'm really grateful for that question because I'm in a tricky place and I wanna be very clear about where I'm from. So I actually work for, I'm an independent consultant. I work with lots of different folks on building technology. Right now, one of my big clients is Google Politics and Elections, and Google Politics and Elections. And so I'm helping them with their efforts related to the 2012 election, but I don't work for Google. I work independently. So it's just me. Well, how do you get the funding to run this? So talking about the Voting Information Project, that's funded by Pew Charitable Trusts, and they're amazing folks and I can put you in contact with them if you'd like to talk with them more. Some of the other data sources that I highlighted have a diverse funding group. I could go into detail, but I think probably makes more sense to talk one-on-one on it. The Internet Archive is a 501c3 nonprofit, a public library, official library in California. We're a digital library. So though we have books, all the books that we have are scanned and then held in a physical archive and we keep all the scans of the books on spinning discs available through archive.org. We, our money comes from foundations, from fee for services for, we're really good at search and we're really good at archiving. So the Library of Congress engages us to do searches for them and much of that data is made public. National libraries throughout the world pay us a fee for services to archive their content. And, was there another part of the question? I don't know. And just for this project alone. Oh, the number of employees. Oh yes, so there's approximately 130 employees of the Internet Archive around the world. Most of those are in scanning centers around the world, scanning books. There's a scanning center in the Library of Congress right here. About 40 are based around in San Francisco where our headquarters are. Most of them are engineering oriented because this is a exquisite engineering project here. And there we, we've worked on sort of internal monies to demonstrate this. We look to put this back in time and carry it forward. There's a lot of ways that we can enrich other media and other kinds of search. But we've also gotten some wonderful support from individuals and foundations for this, including the Knight Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation and Craig Newmark of Craigslist, some individual supporters like Dave Glasgow. There's some wonderful people who've given us some support to help get this going in the last couple of years as we've been quietly tinkering on this and trying to solve a hard problem. There is no television news search. Nobody's used to going, oh, I know how to do this. So we've made our best first attempt to make it easy on you. And I hope you'll all take a little look at it. Thanks, Roger. I'll reserve, we've got four minutes left. I'll reserve a minute for a question and for quick responses from our panelists here. So in some ways, people are bombarded with ads. Candidates can reach voters directly. And there's more than 90 channels, as we all know, out there washing over a daily. So at one level, I see this and I wonder how data can have impact. At the other side of the equation, we've got other platforms pulling all this data together. Voters and turbo vote, which is trying to attack the voting registration aspect of this. MTV has a fantasy election game.  If you had your crystal ball, perhaps the crystal ball you want to see in the future, where do you, what do you see this, perhaps Roger, your platform developing and Anthea, where how do you see the voting information Nirvana? Nirvana? You know, I really love the Open Gov movement. And I think that we're, four or five, six years ago, we really, we thought that the government officials were gonna be building the tools that informed us and engaged us. And in order to get a Spanish language version of something, you know, we would need to petition the local election official. By making this data and election officials will continue to play a really important role in informing voters that that will never go away. But by unlocking the data, you engage a whole universe of people who are interested in doing really neat and innovative things with this data and with other data sets. And so Nirvana to me is real time accurate, highly interoperable data that will allow us to really understand the world and rank and sort in the way that is appropriate and make really well informed decisions effortlessly. So reducing the cost and increasing the benefit of voting through or in all of these other things to making the information transparent. Anthea, so real time perfect information. Great, so glad you work with Google. Wow, that's a great answer. There's no coincidence that we're here together. We think in the like minds, we're an open library. We're committed to openness. This is using all open source software behind it. We've opened up some media in a responsible fashion. We would like to, we can see great opportunities. We're kind of standing in the middle between those who create and author the content and those who can use it more creatively. And we think that our purpose like a library is to enhance access so that other people can work creatively. There is one thing that I see in the future that I'm hoping for it to come ever faster, which is for media sources, in this case, television news organizations to see value in their metadata in this closed captioning to open up their own archives for people to go deep search and view it in much larger quantities that we're doing here. Allow them to see whole programs, allow them to see adjacent programs. There's been a reluctance to jump into this domain and we're hoping that we've kind of opened up a friendly door for others to, including commercial operations, to experiment and discover the value of openness. Thank you, Roger. So a more perfect archive, I'll summarize. So first of all, I'd like to ask you to put your hands together and thank our panelists both from the first panel and the second. We will wind up the event now and I'd like to thank you all for attending. It's been, I think, a perfectly timely event that tackles an issue that is going to be in the news more even than it has. Thank you for coming. Bye-bye.


I'll go back to another one. If you're new to the channel, I am Golponi at the new car truck SUV reviews on YouTube. And today we're in the brand new 2024 Nissan Titan courtesy of younger Nissan in Frederick, Maryland. For more information on their inventory, please feel free to check out the link in the description box below. So we're in this one today because the Titan is an absolute beast. Not only that, you do get the very best truck warranty available here in the US, which is a five year 100,000 mile bumper to bumper warranty. Gotta love that. We happen to be in the SV trim level here today. So this is the most affordable trim level of the Titan. So ultimately in this video, we will be testing out and going over everything about this one from acceleration to braking, steering feel, ride quality, sound system, exhaust clip, all that fun stuff. So having said all that, what do you guys say? Let's just go ahead and jump right into it. And as always, let's start with pricing. And so there will be a few different configurations for the SV trim level. You got the crew cab four by two starting at $45,770. King cab four by four for $49,140. Crew cab four by two bronze edition for $51,340. And lastly, the crew cab four by two midnight edition starting at $52,830. And so any of those trim levels where I said four by two, that doesn't mean it only comes in four by two. You can get there set up with four by four. If you wanted to do that, simply add $3,190 to any of those prices. But regardless of configuration that you go with the power plant on the Titan is going to be the same. Powering this beast is a 5.6 liter direct injected V8 putting out 400 horsepower at 5,800 RPM, 413 pound feet of torque coming in at 4,000 RPM, power being sent to the rear wheels or all wheels through a nine speed automatic, zero to 60 time coming in at approximately 7.6 seconds with MPG numbers coming in at 15 in the city, 21 on the highway with premium unleaded fuel being recommended. So now that we have gotten all of that out of the way what do you guys say? Let's go ahead and find straight away. Let's put the Titan here to the test and let's see how quickly we can get our new 2024 Titan SV here up to speed. All right, here is our straight away in three, two, one, go. Stick revs high, it just chirped. Yeah, that's plenty of an acceleration for a truck. Absolutely. It's got a massive V8 under the hood. So that is certainly going to get the job done. It actually chirped a little bit there as well. Which is pretty darn cold. This thing is a beast still. Anyways, that was a heck of an acceleration. To go along with that acceleration as always breaking is equally important.  As far as that six easier stopping distance goes that comes in at 131 feet is where you're pulling up to a red light right here. So as far as breaking feel goes, it's actually not bad. I mean, it is a little bit on the softer side of things in terms of the breaking feel but it's really not that bad for the size of this truck. Typically with trucks amused to seeing the upper 130s if not even the 140s, I've seen that before as well. So 131 feet, that's perfectly fine. Absolutely no issues there. But so then touching on suspension and handling up front you're going to get an independent double wishbone type front suspension in the back multi-leaf rear suspension with solid axle. You're going to get front and rear stabilizer bars as well. As far as ride quality goes, that's actually been perfectly fine in my short little test drive here today. I'm kind of surprised on how smooth of a ride that the Titan actually is. So in my short test drive here at least I'm pretty punishing roots here in Frederick, Maryland. It hasn't been that bad. So absolutely no issues there. As far as steering feel goes, that's one of my favorite parts of the Titan. I think I probably said that my last review of this thing as well. It's so much on the heavier side of things. It's super heavy steering feel, which I personally love because it more instantly points you in the direction that you want to go. Gives you better driver feedback. So a lot of times with like large SUVs you're going to find super loosey-goosey steering feels and a lot of times with larger trucks you do have that same thing as well. But in the Titan it is 100% on the heavier side of things and I love it. But then touching on cabin noises we are going about 40 miles per hour right now. You do get a lot of that V8 engine noise coming into the cabin, which I personally love. There's nothing wrong with that. But as far as road noise and wind noise that's pretty much held at bay. You guys could probably tell. There isn't a whole lot of exterior noises coming into the cabin. Minus the V8 when I really get on it. So absolutely no issues there either. Touching on visibility, I would say the rear view mirror is kind of a little bit smaller than I'm used to seeing. I feel like it's just a smaller rear view mirror for whatever reason, but it looks like a truck. You can pretty much see perfectly fine out the back. As you would expect the visibility to look like but I do also mention though, if you were to go with that midnight edition trim level or configuration, you do get rain sensing windshield wipers as well. So if the Titan detected any kind of mist or rainfall it would automatically turn on this windshield wipers for you. So it's just one less thing you got to worry about. It's kind of like automatic headlights though. That's definitely convenient there as well. But that pretty much rounds out the performance segment of this review you guys. Let's go ahead and take a look at the exterior of our brand new 2024 Nissan Titan. All right, so here she is you guys, the new 2024 Nissan Titan finished in glacier white. In case you're curious of our exact exterior color name that we had on this particular Titan with us here today. But the one major change for the 2024 Titan is there is now a new bronze edition for 2024 with 20 inch bronze wheels, black front bumper and grill and a bed mounted sport bar which is pretty stinking cool as well. So I'll throw a quick photo on the screen there for you guys but that's what's new for 2024 essentially. But as always, let's go ahead and start with where the Titan is made. Taking a look at the VIN first character is the number one indicating that the new Titan is built and assembled here in the US in case you were curious. But now starting up front body colored front grill is coming standard on the SV trim level. However, for the bronze edition and midnight edition trim levels you will find gloss black front grills. And I will say we have about every single option on the board with us here today. So a lot of this stuff you're gonna be seeing on the Titan is for the most part pretty optional. And I'll throw a quick screenshot on the screen of all those options that we have with us here. But anyways, LED headlights do come standard on the bronze and midnight edition trim levels. It is optional otherwise like we have. Otherwise you are going to get halogen front lighting. Automatic feature is going to come standard across the board along with automatic high beams as well. So if you have your high beams on tonight and it senses a vehicle coming in the opposite direction it's gonna automatically dim them back to low beams and when their vehicle is gone it's gonna automatically bounce it back up to high beams for you there. So definitely very nice. Also front tow hooks coming standard on the bronze and midnight edition trim levels. You guys can see we do have that as an option. We got black tow hooks down there as well. Lower radiator skid plate coming standard on all trim levels across the board. But the bronze edition is going to add to that a transmission skid plate, an oil pan skid plate and a fuel tank skid plate as well. So if you haven't put it together yet essentially the bronze edition is kind of the off road trim level when it comes to the SV trim at least. So it's the off road package for the SV trim level more or less. And you will of course find some Titan lettering spelled out on the kind of front portion of the hood here, the upper portion of the front grill. I'll try to get up a little bit closer to you guys. It's kind of actually hard to see with the angles of the sun and everything. But just take my word for it. It's there on the upper portion of that gloss black front grill. You got the Titan lettering. So overall I actually think the front end looks dang good. I love the headlight design with the LED setup at least. So that pretty much rounds out the front end. Let's not go ahead and make our way to the side. I had some analysis around to the side of this one. Matte black windows arounds do come standard matte black door handles also coming standard power adjustable heated side mirrors coming standard as well. However, if you were to go with that midnight trim level you will get LED integrated turn signals and puddle lights then as well. Otherwise optional on the other trim levels. Running boards also going to be optional. I'm telling you guys though the running boards have definitely helped me out. I'm six feet tall. So a lot easier to get into this thing without the running boards. It's doable, but it's a lot more comfortable getting into it if you do have them. I will say that rear privacy glass does come standard on the Titan and then take a look down at the wheel setup. 18 inch machine finished alloys for the SV. 20 inch bronze alloys obviously with the bronze edition setup. Then 20 inch aluminum alloys for the midnight edition. But that pretty much rounds out the side profile. Let's now go ahead and make our way to the back. And so now since we are around to the back of this one you will find a matte black shark fin antenna all the way up top there. Just below that you do have some LED bed lighting. I'll get more into that in a little bit here but LED tail lights do come standard on the Titan for every single configuration. You gotta love that. And by the way, if I haven't mentioned it already we do have the midnight package for this particular configuration. So do you see that midnight badging found on the tailgate there as well. You do have the black badging to go along with that. I got the side step, tailgate step found on the bottom corner there. I'll give you guys some B roll of that but definitely makes getting into bed of this thing a heck of a lot easier. So love that that was there. You do have that tow hitch found just below that rear license plate as well. The SV tow package goes for $790 but as far as towing capacity goes that comes in at 9,290 pounds in case you're interested. And of course just below it all you will find a single exhaust out that kind of tucked away underneath on the passenger side. So having said that, I do believe you guys know what we have to do next is always here is that exhaust clip. All right and so now since you are around to the back of the Titan when it comes to opening that rear tailgate it is a easy lower tailgate. So it's gonna fold down slowly as opposed to just falling down abruptly like some other sharks do. But as far as payload capacity goes once opened up that comes in at 1,600 pounds in case you were curious. There is a factory applied spray on bed liner that does come standard, gotta love that. There's also though for the midnight edition at least you're gonna find a utility track channel system with two tie down cleats as well. So that's pretty cool. Also with the midnight you're gonna get some LED under rail bed lighting also LED tailgate area illumination as well but overhead LED cargo bed lighting is gonna come standard on all trim levels. Essentially just get a heck of a lot more of those LEDs with the midnight setup. So overall if you're gonna be doing a lot of work at night the midnight edition package might be the right fit for you but then make your way up to the rear leg room that comes in at 24.8 inches for the king cab at least and then 38.5 inches for the crew cab. Obviously we got the crew cab for reference. I mean even six feet tall. This is how much space I had back there. There of course are 60, 40 split fold up rear seats. So if you had a massive or a great Dane you wanted to put him back there that is definitely an option. There's a rear center armrest with cup holders coming standard across the board also rear ventilation coming standard as well. But also I did happen to find a 120 volt power outlet back there. 12 volt power outlet and two USB charging ports as well. So that was pretty cool finding all of that. And of course you do have a power sliding rear window that does come standard across the board as well in typical truck fashion there but then make your way up to the front seats eight way power driver seat with power lumbar for all trim levels. Heated front seats coming standard as well stain resistant claw seating coming standard as well. Overall as far seat comfort goes it was actually perfectly fine. Definitely didn't have any issues in my short test drive here today at least. So seating was perfectly on point. Then taking a look at the steering wheel it is tilt and telescoping. It did telescope out pretty far. So if you're a taller individual this is definitely going to work for you. It is leather wrapped as well. I just wish the 10 and two grips were a little bit thicker. This is such a beast of a truck. And then the steering wheel grips are just kind of on the smaller side of things. So wouldn't mind it if Nissan beefed them up but other than that it's perfectly fine. Then making our way to the startup let me start by showing you guys the key here. You got your Nissan logo all the way to the top lock unlock that circular button that is going to be a remote start which by the way from standard on every single configuration of this thing. But ultimately it is a keyless entry with a push button starts. All I'm going to do here is simply put my foot on the brake and press that engine start button located just by the driver's right knee. And so once started up tachometer is on your left speedometer is on your right. There is a fairly large digital screen front and center to control what is on that screen. There are steering wheel mounts controls found on the left side of the steering wheel.   I liked that. Also some driving statistics including fuel economy information, radio information, safety information, tire pressure. The list goes on pretty much everything you possibly want on the digital portion of the gauges at least. Then make your way to overall interior quality. Know there is no moonroof available for the SV unfortunately in case you were curious. Dual zoom climate control coming standard on all trim levels across the board. You will also find homelink controls from the midnight package. And that's for up to three different garage doors found just underneath of that rear view mirror there. Overhead sunglasses holder coming standard for all trim levels across the board. You're also gonna find some satin bronze interior accents for the bronze package at least. So that is pretty cool. I like the grab handles as always in typical truck fashion there. Just in front of the cup holders you got a little bit of rubberized storage more than likely to put yourself in there. Your heated seat buttons of course.  There's just so much storage space in there. Got a 12 volt power outlet as well. But overall as far as interior quality goes it's more to the point. Nothing fancy here. There is some soft touch material on the door. So I did like that. Some gloss black accents found just above the passenger side glove box there. But overall there is some matte black hard plastics throughout and pretty much designed to get the job done. I'll just put it that way. But now let's go ahead and take a look at the infotainment screen here. Eight inch colored touchscreen display does come standard. Bluetooth and audio streaming of course. Android Auto Apple CarPlay as well. And you can check out your radio information up there. And so when it comes to the sound system there is one of them for the SV and that is going to be a six speaker sound system. So having said that, what do you guys say? Let's go ahead and turn on the radio see what we got playing today. And let's test out the clarity of this one. Actually not bad. I've said this before I think in Nissan reviews the base they always do a really good job with. Regardless of whether or not it's an upgraded Bose sound system or standard sound system like this one. The base always sounds really, really good. Nissan usually does a pretty darn good job with that. Clarity was actually decent though as well. So one of the better six speaker sound systems that I've heard, I will say that. So no issues there actually. But last thing I wanted to mention to you guys on the infotainment screen is when you do put the Titan in reverse you will find a rear view camera coming standard across the board. Not the very highest quality as far as high definition goes but it'll get the job done and that is always is going to lead us into safety. And so front side, side curtain airbags do come standard. Driver and passenger knee airbags up front as well. In the back you're going to have latch AKA lower anchors and tethers for children for the rear car seats. Rear child door locks, tire pressure monitoring system but also coming standard. Lane departure warning, a driver attention monitoring system forward collision warning. Automatic emergency braking, a blind spot monitoring system with rear cross traffic alert and front and rear parking sensors as well. So a good bit. It's overall what caused my final thoughts of the Titan best in class truck warranty. You got to love the peace of mind of a five year 100,000 mile bumper to bumper not powertrain bumper to bumper warranty. So that is pretty darn good. Excellent steering feel as well. Pretty darn smooth ride as well for a truck. I will say that very powerful V8. Like I said, this thing chirped on the acceleration. So nothing wrong with that. Wouldn't have minded seeing a full digital gauge cluster. The gauges are kind of basic. Nothing crazy to them. So wouldn't have minded seeing a full digital gauge cluster that was customizable. I know Nissan can do it. They've done it in their other vehicles like the Rogue for example. So would love to have seen that. And also the braking feels definitely on the softer side. Wouldn't have minded if they firm that up. But having said that, this is a full size pickup truck. So I don't really think that's really a thing performance braking in a truck. But anyways, let me know what you guys think of the new Titan in the comments section below. That is about it for this one. You guys, thank you so much for watching. Feel free to follow me on social media at the bottom of the screen if you want to see what's coming next on the channel before it gets to YouTube. Be sure to hit the subscribe with the bell notification button. If you're into new car reviews, because that is what we do here in this channel after all. Do appreciate you guys watching more than you know and I will see you guys all in the next video. Stay Gold.


In the world of Rejects, anchors and boundaries are the most important concept to understand. They are simple but yet you cannot ignore it. Anchors are a way to assert where we expect boundaries in the string which we are examining. Though boundary assertions are not much important but when combined with other reject syntaxes they can be very powerful. Since meta-characters are a way to tell rejects that, hey, please start a match from here but do not cross this limit. Say here I have defined one statement, so over here boundaries can be the start of a string or the end of a string or it can be the start of a line or the end of a line or it can be a word boundary. But remember one thing, boundary assertions will not match characters, they just check for the boundary itself. So far we have been writing regular expressions that partially match pieces across all the text, sometimes this is not desirable. Did you remember this HL7 file name match demo from the previous video? This file name is consisting of more than 3 characters but still rejects matches with it. And to avoid this I would need to get more specific with my expression and say only match things that start with this particular set and that is exactly when you would want to use anchors and boundaries. Anchors have a special meaning in regular expressions, they don't match any characters. What they do is ensure that matches a position before, after or between characters. So there are two different types of anchors, a start of line anchor which is a carrot sign and an end of line anchor which is dollar sign. The carrot sign anchor matches the beginning of the string or a line, to find only the words that appears at the start of a line. You can include this anchor sign before the text to match in the regular expression. And using dollar sign anchor character, you can search for a text at the end of the string or at the end of a line and with this anchor the rest of the pattern must match immediately before a line fit character. Let us see one demo from our previous video where we match HL7 file name and how this anchor meta character help us to match a position before or after the characters. Alright, so if you remember this demo from the previous module where we wrote this regex to match the HL7 file which name start with the first three character followed by underscore and followed by six digit. Now notice here this last two file name it is still matches by this given regex even if it start with the six characters and ends with some other extension. So now if I add the carrot sign over here then did you see the difference? This file is removed now from the matching list and same way if I add the dollar sign over here then the last file name is also removed from the matching list. So this is how we tell the regex that please start matching input from here and ends the matching over here. Now what about word boundaries? Let us understand that meta character concept. As we saw in the previous video that by using the start of a line and end of a line anchors we were able to match an exit files which we are expecting. But if what I was matching was not at the start of the line or at the end of the line. So in that case these anchors would not have helped at all and that is where word boundaries comes in. Word boundaries are another meta character in regular expression that matches by position rather than by character. So there are again two meta characters backslash B and capital backslash B which matches word boundaries and non-word boundaries respectively. So word boundaries are the point in a string between a word character and a non-word character. It can be at the beginning of a string if the first character is a word character or it can be at the end of a string if the last character is a word character. Non-word characters can be period or a dot or a space or a column or any other punctuation mark. Non-word boundaries are exactly the opposite. It points in a string between two adjacent characters of the same type either word or a non-word. Now let's take a look at the example of word boundaries. Alright so here I have defined one statement in the input text and say we want to find a specific word from this text. Say for example here I want to find a word out so if I write that word in the regex then it started matching the three words instead of what I want. Now let us define the word boundaries by using the backslash B meta character in the start and in the end like this B and in the end backslash B. So did you see the result changes and now it started matching the exact word which we are looking for. So this is how we can define the boundaries by using the backslash B meta character. Alright now let us move on to the next and last concept in regex which is grouping and sub-pattern.