Next talk is non-visual access to Lenox from boot up to shutdown. Our speaker has been using Lenox since 1998. He's been involved with various accessibility working groups including the W3C from 2000 to 2004. He has recently submitted his PhD and is waiting for approval. Can you please welcome Jason White. Thank you very much. Now the idea from this talk derives from the quotation which I present in the abstract from Yenina Syker who is a specialist in the accessibility of Lenox free and open source software and open standards based in the United States. On her website she says that equal access is every blind computer user's right from boot up to shutdown. And Yenina argues quite correctly in my judgment that a boot up to shutdown review of the operating system and of its applications is the ultimate test of accessibility. My purpose in the presentation today is to attempt such a review. I start with the boot process. I discuss various types of user interfaces that are used by the operating system itself and by applications and I examine what the accessibility options are at each stage of the process. I don't plan to dwell extensively on the tools which are used for text-to-speech synthesis, for screen reading and for Braille access by means of refreshable Braille devices. The details of these I discussed much more fully in my LCA 2008 presentation, the video for which is still available online. However, given that many of you probably weren't present at the LCA 2008 presentation, I do wish to present an overview of the tools just to provide some context because they will necessarily be mentioned in the course of the central discussion. So, obviously I'm interested in output via synthetic speech and by refreshable Braille displays, which are electromechanical devices that can present a single line of text at a time in Braille. There is a variety of text-to-speech systems available, including hardware devices, many of which are no longer manufactured, and more recent software-based text-to-speech systems, including free and open source ones. The situation in regard to the software which is used to provide a user interface by means of these output methods can be understood by considering the various projects that they're currently on offer. Now, in the notes to accompany this talk, I summarise what I consider to be the central projects in this area. As far as Braille is concerned, there's one all-encompassing project, namely Braille TTY, which has been around for quite a long time. It has a highly active community of users and developers. It provides Braille reading functionality at the level of the Linux console, but also by way of the Braille API. It can interoperate with Orca, which I shall discuss shortly, to provide access to applications under graphical desktop environments. Next, we have SpeakUp, which is an interesting program. It's actually a kernel module that provides speech output by means of a hardware or software synthesiser, and it allows a user to review the screen interactively using speech and using the keyboard for input. Now, SpeakUp recently entered the staging tree of the Linux kernel as of 2.6.37. There are bugs which need to be resolved in order for it to migrate permanently into the mainline, so if you know any kernel developers who might be interested in accessibility and who have some spare time, then perhaps that's one project to which they might be interested in directing their attention. Emacs Speak is another project, a very different one from the preceding. I might actually mention it at the more detail later on, but basically it's a speaking extension to Emacs that was written by TV Rahman, and when we talk about Emacs applications later, I'll describe briefly how it works. What makes it different from the other project under discussion is that Emacs Speak is not a screen reader, it's not intended to provide a non-visual rendering of the user interface. Rather, it intercepts Emacs functions directly to provide a highly customized speech interface to Emacs itself and to its extensions. Finally, there's the most complex project of all, Orca, which is a screen reader for the graphical desktop environments under the X-Windows system. It's a GNOME project, so therefore it provides access to GNOME itself, but as we'll discuss later, it also offers access to various X applications. Orca is written in Python. It uses the GNOME accessibility API to interact with the desktop environment and with applications. Basically, what happens is that there are scripts in Orca that receive events from the accessibility API and it constructs its Braille and speech interface based on these events. Essentially, it operates by tracking the focus and by reading the current item, which is in focus, as the user navigates the graphical desktop. So those are the essential projects that we're concerned with and now we can move on to the substance of the talk, starting with the boot process itself. Now, obviously, this is somewhat important, but we're assuming here, of course, that we're dealing with a user who has a confident understanding of the operating system and who is administering their own system and wishes to have access to it. Now, in this situation, you don't want to be in a circumstance in which you apply power to the machine, wait for the amount of time that the boot process usually takes only to discover that nothing happens and there's no Braille or audio feedback. That kind of failure situation is highly undesirable. Unfortunately, it can happen and indeed, it can happen very early in the boot process itself. The CPU starts executing and the first thing that happens is that firmware is run. Now, this is not something which the Linux and Free and Open software community has yet been able to address, but there are issues at this level. Now, of course, if the firmware has support for a serial console and if the user has a second machine which can be connected over a serial port, which has Braille or speech access available to it, then, of course, the user is able to interact with the primary machine over a serial console and operate menus or command line interface in the firmware. Now, serial consoles are quite common in non-X86 systems and in servers, but unfortunately, the typical X86 case lacks them. Sorry to say. The second option that's worth mentioning is IPMI. IPMI 2.0, as I understand, it mandates support for serial over LAN. So essentially, you get a serial console over the network and that's obviously another option which user equipped with a second machine can employ. But in the absence of either of those, then we have a completely inaccessible user interface to the BIOS, which is obviously not helpful when problems occur or when parameters need to be changed. So what we really need is, first of all, core boot or a similar project to find its way into the firmware of everyday systems and secondly, for some accessibility project to overcome difficulties that are associated with providing Braille or speech access at this level. Once we get past the firmware and into territory where the Linux community has had an influence, we're in a little bit of a better situation. So we move on now to what happens in the boot loader and in particular, I'd like to talk about Grub. Of course, there are other boot loaders, but Grub is widely used and it has significant accessibility features, so why not talk about the boot loader which gives us the best support in this context. Now, first of all, it should be pointed out that a serial console is available in Grub and in the notes accompanying this talk I refer to the relevant section of the draft Grub 2.0 documentation at the FSF. Also, Samuel Teeble, who is a highly experienced researcher in kernel development who happens to have an interest in accessibility and who's been contributing to accessibility related projects very extensively, has added code to Grub 2. And I'm quite sure this is based on mailing list posts that this is his work, whereby you can configure Grub to play a tune when the Grub menu appears. Now, this is useful because not every system will beep at you when it begins booting from the hard drive. So to provide access, we really need to know if we can't get serial console access, at least we need to know when the Grub menu appears so that the user can start typing. For instance, they might just press the down arrow key and enter to select the single user mode menu option of their boot menu. Or they might want to type text into the Grub command line without any accessible feedback.  So this configuration option can be set and you'll get a sound with the right pitch and duration as specified in the option when the Grub menu is displayed. Let's just suppose that we get past the Grub stage and the kernel loads. The initial RAM disk is loaded, the init.rd in most distributions. And it should be noted at this point that we can in fact start, speak up fairly early and likewise we can also install Braille TTY into the initial RAM disk if we want to into the init.rd image. I haven't actually tried that, but of course if you were to do it, it would provide access at a very early phase of the boot process where occasionally matters can go wrong, especially if you're playing with interesting new file systems such as ButterFS for example. Also, I should mention that in relation to Grub and the entire boot process, if you're actually not booting a physical machine but a virtual one, then there are interesting accessibility options available. KVM and QEMU, which is of course the user space, element of that has the ability to display a text console on a terminal using end curses. There's a dash curses option to QEMU-KVM, which you can use and that will display everything from the virtualized BIOS through to the boot loader and everything that subsequently takes place. That was the first time I actually read a grub prompt, was when I installed KVM on a system. So, but if you're using a non-virtualized system, then of course you have to work through the accessibility techniques that I've talked about. The rest of the boot process is fairly straightforward. Speak up, as I said, can start quite early. So can Braille, TTY. If you get to the usual console login prompt, then of course everything is fine at that point. It's entirely accessible by means of those tools. GDM is also accessible and in fact the latest version of GDM, which in Debian is called GDM3, it's actually the version which is implemented with GNOME 3 technologies, has support for Orca associated with it. What that means in effect is that it creates a fairly minimal GNOME session and in that session it can invoke Orca to provide Braille or speech output from the boot, sorry, from the login menu of GDM. So you can in fact configure the relevant variables using gconf tool to make this happen. And that means that a graphical login is also accessible should that be desired. Now let's suppose that we go to the console and we log in. What's the state of accessibility here? We're at the console and if you'd like to know what my reasons are for choosing Linux over other operating systems then one of the central reasons has to be this user interface by which I mean the user interface that Linux inherits from the Unix tradition. The shell utilities, incurses applications, configuration files, text editors, all of the usual Unix tools. And it's the power and efficiency of this coupled with the accessibility software that I've mentioned earlier that really make Linux a pleasure to use for those of us who know how to use it. This is the real fundamental user interface advantage that Linux has over many other non-Unix type operating systems. So the console is highly accessible. Now there are some features that can be added to applications to make it even more accessible. And in the notes I've prepared a table that lists some of these. Essentially the idea is that the screen access software cannot itself handle certain features, for instance attribute curses whereby the real terminal cursor is parked at the bottom of the screen and highlighting is used as a substitute for the cursor. Now of course it would be possible to, as was done in the days of DOS many years ago, it would be possible to write code in your screen access software that would track these. But it's even easier just to write a patch to the relevant application to enable the cursor to be used properly so that you don't have to try to identify and track highlighting. And indeed many applications already have this built in and they indicate what the configuration options are for links, for instance, and Alpine. There's also a single column folder list option in Alpine that many speech users find to be valuable just so that they can read their folder list one line at a time and navigate through it effectively. Also another issue that arises quite frequently concerns automatically updated text. If you're using a speech system then you really don't want to have the line and column information in your text editor read out every time you type a character. So for VIM there's an option to turn off the ruler which just disallows that kind of status line in which the line and column information is presented and updated frequently. So there and a final option that's really worth mentioning here is the one in MUT. This is in fact very helpful to MUT users who are relying on either Braille or speech. It's a Braille friendly option so called. Essentially what it does is to place the cursor on the first line of the body text of an email message when the message text is displayed. That means you don't have to read through the headers and find the start of the message you can just begin reading the message immediately and that obviously saves time. So there isn't really much else to say at this level. Some people like to create aliases for single column LS output for example if they're using speech there are all kinds of ways in which one can personalize and customize a Linux environment and that that of course is very much part of what Linux is all about. So having discussed that I'd next like to talk about graphical desktop environments where the situation is rather interesting. As soon as our user ventures in here let's just begin by making it clear that their access options are highly variable. Now I have mentioned that Orca is part of the GNOME project and I've described how it interacts with the GNOME accessibility API. This is an API that enables that has to be implemented within user interface libraries and applications. Often it's very much within the user interface library GTK plus for example but sometimes there are function calls that have to be made within the applications themselves and this library provides information in the form of a tree of objects and events as those objects change through to your assistive technology and in this case to Orca which is the screen reader. So the idea is that if the applications are on the one hand keyboard accessible and on the other hand support the accessibility API correctly then it should be possible to navigate through and use the graphical user interface by means of speech or braille output or indeed both. Screen enlargement is also supported by Orca and there are difficulties there in the migration to GNOME 3 which I mentioned in the notes and I should in fact point out that even though the focus of the talk today is on the operating system itself and applications but this entire GNOME accessibility infrastructure is undergoing transformation. ATSPI 2 is a complete re-implementation of this which uses debuts rather than Corba and Bonobo as its inter-process communication mechanism. It's part of what they call the Bonobo deprecation project. I suppose that's what happens when you name your software after an endangered species. So anyway we now have this new debuts interface that's coming coming of age. There are performance issues that people are working on. Low latency is very important and by the way a lot of work associated with GNOME accessibility has been experiencing resource difficulties recently. Orca in particular lost its only full-time developer immediately after Sun were acquired by Oracle and unfortunately there isn't a lot of funding around for this work at the moment so it really would benefit from development effort from people who are interested in this kind of problem and who are experienced in writing this sort of infrastructure to or who are interested in becoming self-experienced to come in and help with it. So all of this is in flux. What that means from the perspective of our hypothetical user is that what works today might work better or worse tomorrow depending on what happens as they move toward GNOME 3. It's also interesting to note what's not included here but I'll mention that in a minute. I suppose we should start with the the applications that are accessible. Obviously there are core parts of the GNOME desktop itself. G-term, Nautilus, the desktop and the core desktop and so on. There are various GNOME applications such as Evolution and others. But also openoffice.org and Libra Office are accessible because they implement the GNOME accessibility API. Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird implemented. The Mozilla developers have been cooperative and responsive over time and in fact I think they're still funding some projects in this area. Eclipse, what else is there? There's an entire list here. I think I've mentioned the central projects or at least the ones that get the most attention on the mailing list. Pigeon is fairly popular among some users but what I should also say is that even though a project might appear on the list that I've given and I've given a fairly comprehensive list in the notes, even though a project appears there that shouldn't be taken as implying that the accessibility works. What it means is that there's a script that is a Python script in Orca which is supposed to support this application. It means somebody's written the script for it, somebody's tested it to some degree but that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to work reliably. And that gives rise to the question of how extensively and how well the accessibility support in the graphical desktop environment actually does work. There were interesting questions raised about it earlier this week on the GNOME accessibility mailing list. There are people intending to coordinate more extensive user testing and as well as more extensive automated testing so that they can try to catch regressions. Because of course there are regressions and I think one of the central reasons for this is that it's entirely possible for the accessibility API interface to break without any corresponding breakage in the graphical interface that most developers are testing with. So the result of that is that the accessibility support is somewhat fragile. You'll notice that QT applications and KDE are not included on the list. There's a very good reason for that. The support for the GNOME accessibility API and the whole accessibility infrastructure under Linux is not yet connected up in relation to QT. There've been efforts in this area. Occasionally there'll be posts on a mailing list about it. I'm not sure exactly what the status is other than that there isn't anything out there ready for testing at the moment. I know there are people who are intending to do it however which is obviously a good thing. Support for WebKit is well underway. It's still very much developmental. I understand that there are patches around and that changes have been integrated into WebKit GTK. So I suppose that means that at some point assuming that all goes as planned we'll get access to WebKit. So that's effectively the situation in graphical environments. They're not really in any way my preferred style of user interface. It's not so much the matter of there being graphical. It's really the way in which the user interfaces require you to interact with graphical user interface elements. They don't provide the same expressiveness that you get on a command line or in an editor such as Emax or VI where you have hundreds of key bindings that you can use to get work done efficiently. So I find that having to work in a graphical desktop environment which I do quite rarely. I do it for example to access Firefox so that I can work with JavaScript intensive web pages that require the document object model or XMLHTTP request or any of the other modern JavaScript APIs that console-based web browsers don't implement. But essentially my personal approach is to avoid that kind of environment as much as I can. Obviously for users who are coming from certain proprietary operating systems that graphical environment is somewhat attractive in the sense that it's similar to what they're used to but I'm not sure how much of an advantage that is over the long term as someone becomes a confident Linux user. At any event the next kind of user interface I'd like to discuss is Emax and this is for one very important reason that TV ramen has provided a superb program in Emax speak and it takes a very different approach to providing access. What's interesting here I think can be made clear by recognizing a contrast between the accessibility API and what has to be done in connection with Emax and that is that as I mentioned before the user interface tool kits and applications need to support the accessibility API. In Emax you have such flexibility that you can actually extend Emax itself and Emax applications to provide spoken feedback without having to modify any of their source code. I've actually worked with this. This is a really superb development environment. You can write advice functions for Emax speak, test them immediately, find the bugs. I always seem to introduce bugs and then fix them with a very short development and testing cycle and I find this to be extremely liberating. Basically what happens is that Emax provides an advice facility. The way it works is that you can write advice functions that are called before, after or around any given Emax function and those advice functions can perform useful work such as telling Emax to read a message for example or to play an auditory icon. The idea is that you write a fairly small amount of code that customizes the speech interface for any particular Emax package. It should be clear I think at this point that the extensibility is excellent and that the auditory and speech user interface is likewise excellent. The one class of applications and this is a class which is of growing importance that I haven't described in detail comprises web applications. We're getting more of these JavaScript, HTML, CSS combinations that provide application functionality. They've been around for a very long time. They've been growing in sophistication especially in recent years. One of the problems here is that the user interface components implemented in JavaScript don't use standard HTML form controls. It's not the only accessibility problem but it's one of the central difficulties and if they don't use standard form controls then how is your software which is providing the braille and speech access supposed to know what's going on when JavaScript is making modifications to the document? How is it supposed to know for example that that div element with a lot of JavaScript and CSS attached to it is in fact a checkbox? Now there's a well developed standard for solving this problem namely ARIA accessible rich internet applications. It's a W3C specification. It recently achieved candidate recommendation status within the W3C. Already it's been implemented by a number of web browsers and libraries including Mozilla Firefox and WebKit. So it's a very important specification and the idea is that you add and maintain in your JavaScript code various attributes which are included in the HTML document and these attributes tell the assistive technology what kind of element it is, what kind of update might be happening, whether the update should interrupt what the user is reading for example or whether it's just can be ignored for now. All of these details that you need in order to provide a non-visual interface that at least works are provided as long as the ARIA attributes are maintained and kept up to date and indeed of course present in the document. There are various free and open source libraries for constructing JavaScript applications that already provide support for ARIA attributes and the two that I highlight in the notes are Google's WebToolKit which is under an Apache license as I understand it and Dojo or Dojo however they pronounce it Dojo IBM developers if I remember correctly contributed the accessibility support for that. So the idea is that if you use one of these toolkits and you pay attention to the accessibility requirements then you can write an accessible web application and the way it works in practice if you're using Firefox and Orca is that the there's a mapping between the ARIA attributes and the accessibility API so that Firefox itself processes the ARIA attributes and updates to those attributes it makes the required accessibility API events available through the event registry which then goes to Orca and then it provides the Braille or speech feedback. So what we're doing essentially is we're taking the accessibility API and the GNOME accessibility infrastructure that I talked about before and we're adding another layer of accessibility API on top of that for our JavaScript application. Now if all of those layers work and everything is fine then we have an accessible web application. Obviously there are plenty of failure possibilities here but we don't need to talk about them right now do we? Let's be optimistic for a moment. So our users now had a tour of the console graphical desktop environments, GNOME in particular, Emacs, web applications, I think that essentially covers everything that they're likely to use. The shutdown process we hope is uneventful. After all it's very much a reverse of the boot process. Kernel paddocks are an interesting kind of situation. One technology that I haven't mentioned so far is Net Console.  Net Console essentially provides you with access to the kernel log messages from another machine using UDP packets and that can be useful for accessibility if you know that you have kernel problems. I've been lucky I mostly don't have kernel problems but there are situations in which people do. I mean for example they could in fact be hardware problems. There are cases in which failing memory can cause all sorts of panics and crashes. SpeakUp I understand because it's a kernel module that it can read the oops message that takes place on the console when there's a kernel panic. I haven't actually experienced that. I'm not a heavy SpeakUp user. I'm sure people who've been developing and using SpeakUp extensively have encountered their share of kernel crashes over the years but I understand that that should be possible as well. I think that essentially covers the boot up to shutdown review. I also believe it should be quite clear as to where the central problems and challenges are and that there are opportunities for the development community to step in and help to solve those challenges in cooperation with a very vibrant existing community of developers and users. I should perhaps preempt one fairly obvious question in connection with the GNOME Accessibility API and the accessibility infrastructure associated with it. Namely the question of what developers should do if you're writing a graphical application or if you're involved in one of the one of the graphical user interface toolkits what should you do in order to implement the API properly and make sure that everything works. There are test tools available. Documentation for the GNOME Accessibility API is somewhat lacking. Most of it is rather old and out of date. It should be possible to generate some reference documentation from the new debuss-based implementation based on the XML files that I looked at when I was examining the source tree. Also there are some people who are actively writing documentation which should be useful to developers. So I'm hoping that particular problem emphasizing the importance of documentation which of course has been mentioned on a number of occasions throughout this conference. I'm hoping that that will be of great help to developers interested in fulfilling their side of the accessibility scenario. So that essentially covers my talk. I hope that time is looking in our favor because it would be good to open it up for questions and I'll happily elaborate on any particular matters that you'd like to discuss. Any questions? Okay, I've got a couple. Has there been any work on like simple audio cues like beeping for panic or shut down to notify success through the PC speaker or something that's not likely to also have crashed like your audio driver? Sorry do you mean audio editing? For panic notification like the old sad Mac sound? I'm not aware of anything of that kind as yet. There are interesting issues around audio as well as to there's a project called speech dispatcher which is supposed to allow multiple speaking applications to share an audio device without interfering with each other. That's an interesting project that's had a difficult history including a fork that lasted for a while. That seems to have settled down but at the same time there are still issues that they're trying to work out especially in their interaction with distributions that load pulse audio servers by default. I'd like to say that you're not alone with kernel panics being absolutely annoying. The text of a kernel panic is not displayed when the graphical interface is loaded all the time so your system just locks up and plays dead with no message of what has happened to it. Yes that can hardly be a useful camp, right. I think we can understand that. I suppose there's KXEK and you're supposed to be able to get a core file. One of the other difficulties with all these solutions of course is that you really need to set them up ahead of time and you're only likely to do that if you believe there's a reasonably high probability you're going to experience one of these events. So if you're doing kernel development which i'm not but if you were then you're likely to do this if you're experiencing problems of this kind on a reasonably regular basis you're likely to do it but otherwise not and i'm sure that the interesting ones are those crashes that are completely unexpected that just take your system down. I've been getting one about once a week but you know i think that's my fault. Yeah Jason you were talking about the regressions happening in what was it in the the GNOME accessibility API is that and so is there a is there a test sort of test suite to kind of guard against those regressions that you're aware of i mean is is that an area where some work would benefit the the accessibility tool API? Well there are there are tools that will there's a tool that will show you what the API is providing as you interact with the application and Orca itself has a debugging facility that i've found useful in the past when i've been submitting bug reports and the way that works is that it logs every event that it receives from the accessibility API and then it logs what it did in response to that event so that you can try to work out whether the bug is in the Orca script that's trying to interact with the application or whether it's in what the application is providing via the accessibility API in the latter case then you really need to get the author of that application or somebody associated with the project or at least somebody who knows enough about the code to to fix it to go in and address the problem and there's a lot of testing and fixing involved it's a bit like having established a theorem we have a good general solution in principle to the graphical user interface accessibility problem and it's been around for a very long time the difficulty lies in the implementation of that solution and yes we do need more automated testing of these matters that's the reason for the discussion on the mailing list earlier this week we need automated regression testing and obviously better documentation better implementation but it's a very long way away from a situation in which somebody can run any x application of their choice and expect it to be accessible whereas of course at the console level they can run any console application of their choice and they can be reasonably confident that it will be entirely accessible unless it does something really odd. Okay our last question. Jason you've mentioned Google Web Toolkit and Dojo other JavaScript frameworks jQuery and the like can you briefly say what they would need to do to support ARIA you've mentioned that a div is not a checkbox is there anything else that you can highlight. So with all of their user interface components they need to include the ARIA attributes and then as the states change of in other words as the user interacts then they need to update the ARIA attributes that has to be done by manipulating the document object model so that's as I understand it that's essentially what they need to do I'm not sure whether they need to do something special in relation to keyboard access and focus I'm not completely sure of that but ARIA itself simply specifies what the attributes are how they're going to be interpreted by web browsers and assistive technologies and it's up to the JavaScript application to support that. ARIA is pretty simple to work with I have played with it a fair bit in the past and now could you please put your hands together for our speaker Jason. Now as a sign of appreciation from LCA to Jason I have this bowl which is made from Queensland Macadamia nuts. Thank you. Thank you very much.


My brother and I farm northwest of Mitchell, South Dakota. We've been partners since the early 80s. We raise soybeans and corn and some wheat. We were alarmed at the rate that organic matter has been decreasing since they broke the native sod. Once you realize that 50% of the organic matter has disappeared in literally 100 years and we know that organic matter without it you raise no crop. So really that kind of got us interested knowing that it was imperative to start increasing organic matter levels in the soil. We can't continue on the same path. We have to start focusing a lot more on soil health and soil health isn't just one thing, it's like a system's approach. I mean, for us it's combining no-till crop rotation, cover crops and then planting like native grass species in our sensitive areas, in our wetlands, in our salinity areas and along our watersheds to try to make our land not only profitable but sustainable for the future and to be able to tell the consumer we're out here producing a crop in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way. One of the big benefits that people don't think about is water management, in our part of the world let's say you have a corn crop and it quits using water pretty much about October 1st and then you plant soybeans in the middle of May and they really don't use very much moisture until almost the end of June and that's one of the downfalls of our crops is we have a lot of moisture in the spring and our crops don't use a lot so we have to find a way to store that moisture and cover crops are an excellent way to do them. We've made a real push to involve our landowners on the land that we rent at least to get involved and to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and show them that ultimately they probably benefit more than anyone does. One of the things that we've done in terms of educating our landowners is in the water quality area. We are upstream from Lake Mitchell and we have a one mile of fire steel creek running through our property and 10 years ago we worked in conjunction with the NRCS, the Game Fish and Parks, Jim River Development Corporation and actually the city of Mitchell to establish a mile long 350 acre riparian buffer to help keep runoff from going into the fire steel and ultimately ended up in the lake and it just kind of ties into the whole package that we put together in terms of soil health water quality even coming down to the bee pollinators we're in the bee program and so we just want to educate non-farmers on what we're doing to make the soil as well as the water and keep the bees alive and the things that we do that are kind of going the extra mile. Working with these guys is kind of the same process I do with all my other landowners. We spend a lot of time with the conservation planning process which has nine steps of planning. We're trying to identify resource concerns and identify different conservation practices that will benefit their land and operation and the resources on the land. It's eye-opening to see someone that committed for this long period of time to make no-till successful in this area and to try to better themselves with just not only no-till but to interject the various crop rotations and the cover crops into the cropping systems. You know the fun part of it is there's so many passionate people involved with the NRCS, with the SDSU extension, with Dakota Lakes Research Farm and the Soil Health Coalition there's all kinds of support and it's just nice, you know, talking with these other people who have the same passion at you that can help you.  You know, and this isn't all just about profitability, it's doing what's the right thing for the future. Hi, I'm Craig Staley from Mitchell. We've had some excellent speakers so far and I think Chris said something about, you know, by the time you go home at night you feel even dumber you did in the morning but I think I peaked. Like, I don't think I could feel any stupider on some stuff right now after you ponder all the things that we've heard about that kind of really make you think different about what we need to do in the future. I have a little history on my farm. I farm with my brother Gene around the Mitchell area. We first started trying to no-till back in 1986. We just started putting a little corn into old stubble and barley stubble and really just did that and we're working the rest of our ground and then back in 1989, which was a dry year, we just happened to decide to go up. We knew there was a research farm and that Dwayne Beck was operating up in the Redfield area and I just remember driving up there. I think it was maybe at the end of July and the whole way up there we just went by burned up after burned up poor looking crops and we get up to Dwayne's research farm and it's like a little oasis in the area and saw what he was doing and he really helped us get started where we wanted to go 100% no-till. So went back home, ordered a 750 drill and then ever since had been trying to no-till everything. So when we first started, we did a pretty decent job with diversity. We were planting winter wheat, spring wheat and corn and soybeans, but we didn't really do a very good job of intensifying our water use. So we were just planting the winter wheat and then doing nothing except spraying it till spring and we really struggled obviously getting crops planted in the spring because the wheat would stop using moisture in July and you try to put corn back in there next May and we probably get a lot of years, get 15 inches of precept and the soil holds eight, nine. So you got six inches of water that's either gonna run off or pond on your field. So in the late 1980s, I started trying to find some different cover crop mixes to work with and worked with Jason Miller. When we first started off, we were trying to use the different clovers thinking that we could fix them. Nitrogen, the red clovers, crimson and sweet clover. If we could get them in there, we could maybe fix them in and use some water, but they really didn't, they weren't aggressive enough. You just didn't get enough. Unless you wanted to wait till June 15th to plant your corn, they just really don't use enough fall moisture. So just kept trying different stuff and finally ended up just like everybody else kind of moving to some different mixtures. Obviously we've talked a lot about the benefits of cover crops. You know, they help increase diversity, but I think the one thing that, especially in Eastern South Dakota, we have talked about is increasing intensity.  So in the next spring, they were using a lot of moisture in the spring too and then the only mistake they made was they plowed it, but at least they had their water intensity a lot better than we do. I mean, we're going out, you plant corn and beans, they don't use enough moisture in the spring and pretty soon you have all these salinity areas in this runoff. So I mean, that's one of the main benefits of cover crops is trying to increase our water usage. You take the tillage out, you have to do something to increase your water usage and try to make it more like the native prairie. And so that's one of the things I've been doing with cover crops. And the other things, obviously you're building carbon organic matter, reduce nutrient leaching. As you can see by Anthony's slides, slides that, I mean a lot of these pHs have dropped from seven down to mid to low fives and that's just because it's a leach of nutrients because we're not using enough water. And so some of the other advantages obviously is to manage the soil moisture. Fix nitrogen, which that's when I first started out is what I'm trying to do, but really you just really don't, if you're putting in behind wheat or putting in behind corn or soybeans you just really don't, you have to almost have a full season cover crop if you're going to fix any end. So it mostly comes down to managing soil moisture, having to provide a living root system and improve your soil health, changing the plant residue to darker residue so you can get better warm up in the spring and build organic matter and carbon. And some of the things obviously I've looked for everywhere to does since you're not normally going to harvest the cover crop is you try to start with low seed costs, something that's easily to establish, easy to get planted and has aggressive growth. So you can, in our short, we just don't have a long enough season that we got to have something to have aggressive growth. This picture is like cereal rye that I broadcast into standing corn about the 10th of September. And this picture is like the middle of April. So you can see you can get some really intense growth. And the other thing you got to really be careful of with some of the cover crops is make sure you're thinking about what herbicides you're using before you plant the cover crop. Like in my wheat, I usually pretty much just use a herbicide with no residuals so you don't have to worry about affecting your cover crop mix. And, you know, I've used a lot of different equipment. I pretty much plant all my mixes behind wheat with my drill. And I have tried planting a few with a planter just to get a few, get over a few more acres. And then I also broadcast like my cereal rye into corn stalks. And these are some of the ones I've tried. I've tried to, and all this was broadcast. I tried broadcasting the winter wheat, annual rye grass and oil seed radish into standing corn. And also the cereal rye. I pretty much just gone to using the cereal rye because it has some, it's so aggressive that you can get so much growth off of it. I've done it like four years in a row. I just kind of, usually about the first or second week of September when corn is starting to let a little more light drop its leaves and it's starting to let more light in there. I'll just watch the weather forecast and if it looks like the temperatures are going down there's a chance for precept. I just have an aerial ply somewhere around, you know anywhere from 55 to 60 pounds depending on the seed count. And so I just take the rye up and I've done like four years in a row and I've always gotten a pretty good stand. I mean, I suppose if we have a real dry fall it might not, but so far it's worked every year. And the thing that's nice about broadcast is you can get it done so much earlier than you can if you got a count by it.  And I still do drill some, I just do some each so I'm not taking a chance too much on either one. And the one thing about the rye is so winter hardy that I mean, I drilled it this year in Thanksgiving day so it always seems like it never winter kills. And then in the spring, I just come back and I usually like to get quite a bit of growth on it. If I was gonna air on one side I'd let it get bigger than I wanted to because I'm just trying to help with soil moisture management and try to reduce, keep from getting more salinity spots. So I'll let it get up to boot high about three, four feet and then kill it and then plant soybeans into it. The one thing you gotta make sure, you wanna either kill it like six, seven days ahead or wait till after you plant it because you don't wanna kill it like two, three days before you plant because then it gets real rubbery and can really affect your seed to soil contact and cause you trouble. And like when I spray it out I make sure that I don't use any burners. You know, if you're gonna mix a pre in there I use like dual pursuit but really if you have a good stand you get such a matter residue it holds weeds down so good that you probably wouldn't have to use a pre on some fields I do some I don't but it really helps with weed control. And the other thing you gotta check on is like if you're gonna plant into green crops I mean, there's some rules on crop insurance so I mean, that's one issue too with planting green that nobody talks about but you probably wanna check with your crop insurance and see what they say about it. And I've done it like done even some dry years and I've never seen the soybeans yield less like this year where I had rye having all that rain and we had a tremendous amount of rain in the June and they were probably four or five bushel better than where I did have rye because they just took that moisture a lot better.  I mean, that's the thing about these cover crops you might not see a benefit next year. Like a lot of times in our area you know, where I put cover crops behind wheat if we have a fairly decent moisture next spring I mean, it doesn't necessarily out yield my corn on soybean grounds but usually the second year when I put beans back in there a lot of times there are four or five bushel better so sometimes it takes a couple of years and where you see the benefit and these are some different cover crops I've tried in wheat stubble and some successful, some not but I pretty much ended up where you see where most people are using a mix and obviously the first mix I think that everybody tried that actually worked was you know, the radish-canola lentil mix and this mix worked pretty good because it has a lot of aggressive growth but I mean, the one thing that's lacking is not enough carbon, it's just all broadleafs and what I noticed too is when you plant this you always get a huge flush of volunteer wheat so you have to deal with that and a lot of times spray it out so then I started going with more of a mix I have now which has like 15 pounds of oats or 15 pounds of oats and barley and that oats just comes flying out of the ground and seems like it really suppresses the volunteer winter wheat and then I also have rapeseed, radish, Ethiopian cabbage, flax and sunflower in that mix so each of them has different benefits you know, the flax and the Ethiopian cabbage they'll stand really good over winter if you want to catch some snow and but I definitely try it you don't want to put too much, you don't want to get too much oats or barley, too high a percentage of the grass crops in there I think I'm planting like maybe 10 or 15 pounds of oats and barley and this is one other thing I've tried behind the wheat this is like medium red clover I frost seeded in like March and into my wheat and then I let it grow all season and then put corn back in there and then I just had a little spot so I just left it in a food plot area to see how long it'd live and it was about two, three I got like three years out of that clover and then the frost killed it but the only downside to this is first it has to be dry enough in March you know, before you get it seeded and then you have to be awfully careful with what you use for herbicide because I think the only thing you could use is like buck drill that won't kill that clover either that or don't use one but probably the one good thing about it is it's growing all season so it should fix the man for you and the other thing I've tried where I didn't think I was going to get everything planted with my planter I went and put grain sorghum discs in my planter and I planted this is chickling vetch and field peas so if you don't have a drill that's one option the only problem is it really pretty low on carbon so it's certainly not near as good as the other mixes but it's something you could do if you have no access to a drill the other thing I tried this year I just keep trying different stuff to try to come up with more diversity and more water intense use is you've seen a lot of research on this skipperl corn so I'm in 22 inch rows so I planted two rows and then I'd leave a row blank and all I did was I just I kept my population total per acre I just usually plant around 28,000 so I just up the rate in those two other rows to mimic I think I was up to like 37,000 in those two rows and then at like V6 I side dressed urea and then I put a mixture of red clover, crimson clover, radish and annual ryegrass and I was lucky enough to get a rain and I had pretty good growth but even I even still had some trouble with shading because this year the corn grew so fast even though there's a 44 inch space I mean the cover crop didn't get real big but I still think it's gonna do me quite a bit you know you don't know the root growth underground means just as much as what's above ground so I'm hoping that did quite a bit good and the other thing I like about this is now I'll just go over where that 44 inch gap is I'm gonna plant corn there again and then this fall I'm gonna put shio rye in there and go back to soybeans so in three years I'll have two years of corn two years of cover crop and one year of soybean which will be a lot better for building carbon and using extra soil you know increasing intensity on soil moisture and corn soybeans I mean that's really the downside of doing that corn soybeans so I mean for parts of eastern South Dakota I think this could really work good but the only thing you gotta make sure of is you have to get a written agreement with crop insurance in order to do skip row planting so you have to get them to sign off on it before I do very much and as you can see I have some salinity areas too and this is just from over the years and you know not having an intense enough water usage so I mean instead of fighting it I mean I just put a lot of this area that had the low ground or had slinny issues into CRP and you could just see right the only problem I made here is I didn't go out far enough but you could see that's like three years of growth how much of that grew in that saline area and that's like that salt lander wheatgrass and alfalfa and it was really amazing how fast that turned that around and how fast that filled in I mean even first the wheatgrass comes and lowers that salt you know the salinity a little bit and then pretty soon you see alfalfa growing and so but if you just go back to farming and keep doing the same thing it's just gonna go back to the way it was so a lot of my fields I probably farm like 80% of it and have CRP spots in the lower areas just I mean there's a lot of them and they just drowned out and you know you're losing more money on them than even if you didn't you know you'd better off just not paying rent on them or have the land costs instead of keep farming them I think that's one thing you're gonna see people do in the future even if you can't get it to CRP you just will put it to permanent vegetation and bail it or instead of you know if your land costs are $150 but you know you still probably losing $250 by farming so you just better bite the bullet lose $150 and improve the soil health of the rest of the field and this is a picture this is like Canadian wild rye and this is another area that was had a lot of salinity and that's like two years after I planted it so I mean there's a lot of different things you can do with these areas besides just keep driving over them and putting seed and fertility on them so in conclusion I guess some of the things would be to plant aggressive mixtures plant the cover crop like it's a cash crop you know just don't take the time to plant it right and keep trying different mixtures, thank you. Good afternoon everybody, I'm Kurt Stiefaler I live over at Salem and farm over there get to go out and speak here once in a while just gonna talk a little bit about my farm history and some of the changes I've done over the years and kind of where it's progressed to here's from the previous owners of our homestead I guess or the where we didn't homestead but where we own now is a 1948 photo of our farm that they gave us from when their parents passed away and passed it on they thought it'd be kind of cool I didn't realize they'd take aerial shots back that long ago. Then fourth generation parents bought this farm in 1959 and it's got cow calf pairs and raised cattle and hogs over the years used a lot of barley previously and this is what it looks like now lots of changes the barn and where the new house is now is where the old house was that's about all that's left anymore May of 2011 I had a 120 mile an hour windstorm come through and that's why stuff got updated here a little sooner than my long-term plan but the grain bends mostly to the right and the big new shed there was other sheds and I had two silos there that were taken down in the wind so I got a instant farm upgrade. Just as we keep analyzing things as we go along in our lives back in 98 when the hogs got so cheap and stuff I decided to get out of that venture and concentrate more on the hogs and the crop part of our farming operation farmed with my mom and dad up till they decided to move to town in 1995 so I took over the farm more full-time I guess then but currently we're raising oats and corn and soybeans got some alfalfa for the first time last fall that I know of the farm has winter wheat on it gonna experiment with that a little bit got the cow calves to compliment some of the cover crops and stuff that I'm using doing a three-year rotation basically working in the corn and soybeans follow the oats with a cover crop right now and like to work in and get some crops in with the soybeans and the corn get that worked in there like staleas are using and I think that's a real good way to do that back in 1998 dad and I were talking we gotta do something a little different we gotta seem like our crops have plateaued a little bit the yields so we got a white planter and went to 19 inch rows on soybeans and we like that good enough went to 19 inch corn and about that same time we started no tilling there's a lot of ups and downs and it was early on for this area and the amount of rainfall we had and don't understand the soil I could do now but there's a lot of 10 years worth of failures I would say mudden the crop in not knowing how to manage that extra moisture that we had with the no till so we and working with the soil biology that I know now to break down that residue and use it better reason now I'm on 22 inch rows we went to that just to have some more common equipment as we upgraded equipment was a war out didn't see a lot of advantage at first to the yield but it's coming along now as we understand how to utilize it more about 25 years of no till just about all my ground I do put fertilizer in furrow just a low rate there to help get it going in the spring last couple years I've been people think it's always so much colder for no till I've been tempering my soils going from field to field between the corn stocks cover crops bear soybean fields I can test them all within an hour and they'll be all within a one degree soil temperature so I whatever reason I don't think that's an issue anymore I used to think it was a hold up but doesn't seem to be this is a you can see there's an awful lot of residue there and makes for tight quarters we call me the anti pheasant hunter guy around because of my narrow rows when I fertilize my oats I put about 35 40% of the fertilizer for the year down dry before I plant and then I'll put the rest on here later and I use the stream bar to stream the nitrogen on just about a boot stage here's some homemade wide drops I did for side dressing my corn got to realize and I was doing it too early so these little short ones are probably two and a half feet long so it wasn't quite accomplishing what I needed to I didn't think to get it on a little later now I've gone to these the mount on the bar they're not homemade but they're substantially cheaper than some name brand I guess after getting in the oats there about seven years ago I really started using the three way rotation and stuff that's changed the figure out a different way to utilize our feed also for the cows during the winter I just felt like I was taking too much time either used to chop silage and putting up hay extra equipment do most of this work myself except for some summer help high school kids I just didn't have a fall help either to get some of that put up so I started looking to get a cover crop in there and utilized that all winter long I figured I probably cut my hay usage down 40 or 50% or better during the winter last year was exceptional I had good growth of my cover crops I didn't feed any of my cows till the second week of March they didn't they put a hay in the hay feeder and they would take a bite and go spend the day in the cover crops so as you can see we get pretty good growth there these are planted like mid late August when I get the oats off I drill them in with just a 5400 international drill so it's nothing too special one thing I'll go back with my corn planter the last two years I have bought a wheat disc for my corn planter and I've been putting some oats in with my corn planter I'll make a pass and then I'll turn around and just offset 11 inches and come back so I'm on 11 inch spacing for my oats the yield seems there is good I just got to keep cutting the seed rate shooting for about a million and a quarter seeds originally an acre and I was down under a million and I still think that's too thick for the good stand I get with the corn planter using that the straw shortens up about probably 2 to 3 inches shorter straw but the yield is still the same I don't know I've got to keep playing with that if I'm going to keep doing that I was creating compaction I guess coming right back on top of those other rows when you're in the spring when it's a little wetter so that's the biggest part I don't like here's a little bit of some of the mixes I've tried probably 7 or 8 different varieties for a mixture I think you get too many one chokes the other out I think a little bit for me I think there are some varieties growing in there here you can see how much residue is there yet going in there I just really like that keep for the water retention protecting the soil from heavy rains and any rains as far as that goes and then wind erosion it says same I got cow calf operation put about on average a good 500 acres of oats in a year or some kind of small grain I also move my calving till the middle of May my cows don't start till the middle of May calving and I'll get them all calved out in the pasture start calving them out get 20, 30 pairs and then haul them out to pasture they pretty much take care of themselves calving I last 10 years I probably maybe helped 6 or 8 calves or pulled 6 or 8 calves I'm using a touch smaller bull but it's not that isn't a problem I think that green grass that the cow has it slicks her up inside to help her calve easier with that little bit of extra green grass one after they chewed it off in the fall I guess and I moved them on so you can still see there's an awful lot of residue and protection yet there for the soil and look how it stays green too right up till it's covered with snow deep and like I said if there's sunshine it'll keep going all winter long yet so this was a little oops that I found out but my cover crop from the previous year grew enough and it matured out in the fall the seed was good and came back to combine corn the next year in it and had volunteer oats coming up and made a nice inner seed cover crop so to speak so I guess this is a big reason why I switched to and I got tired of fighting the weather so much we just keep a lot more live calves around I guess doing that part of what they use in the cattle too is they'll additionally get on the cover crops but can utilize the pastures a little better so with the NRCS and getting some water lines put in tanks placed in the right place to get them some good water manage the pastures a whole lot better too this is just one of the setups one of my pastures that going out is just where the overflow drain pipe goes so it gets away from the tank area so don't mud it all up here's a pasture that I divided up the tank is in the middle there this is about a 30 meter pasture split it up in three just with electric fence we had extra rain this year but there's mostly kind of a brome grass in here I put them out about the 1st of June I put 18 pair in there and I pulled them off in the middle October and there's still a little bit of grass left on 30 acres for 18 pair so it shocks me how much a rotational grazing can help if we can get their timing down right to utilize that grass good here's a soil pit we did just that one's just showing how deep some of the roots went with the oats like some of those we measured were down a good three foot when we found them tried to get close to like a turn up and radish but it didn't quite work out to see how deep that tap root was actually going so there's quite a few even at two feet deep here's one we did for the soil health school that was in my place last fall we dug right into the corn field to see how deep the roots were going there they went down pretty deep but if you can kind of see the top layer of soil there's kind of a light brown and then the lower stuff the white is clay soil I sure think it's changing that clay over as I'm building organic matter and getting that down there's activity happening in the clay layer that's changing that over so that top layer is probably about ten or twelve inches next one was about six inches of change that's probably about a four foot pit the rest was heavy clay I guess I would call it you can change it over time to make the roots work like we've been talking today does make a difference we were doing some work with the ARS lab at Brookings and I just think we got to change how we're thinking here a little bit and we've been having a space program forever keep looking up at the stars looking for answers I think our answers are right below our feet to keep the next generations going here I think we can start looking under our feet a little bit we'll find our little pot of gold for us so thank you


Overall, just how have you felt since making the team coming out, getting a couple outings under your belt? Yeah, definitely felt more comfortable tonight. It was exciting to get out there and help Ty Owen out there in the fifth and big help from King there in the sixth too and it was fun. How tight-knit of a group is that bullpen? Yeah, everybody's really tight. The guys have been really nice to us newer guys and it's been good to get to learn stuff from them and come in every day and everybody's ready to work with a good attitude and it's fun. What's the biggest thing you've learned since being here, essentially? Just to have a routine and the guys really sit in the routine and I really see it every day whether it's in the training room or BP or catch play and just trying to learn from that and take as much as I can from that. What's it mean to get your first win? Yeah, it was exciting. Definitely kind of, you know, snaked in there in the fifth and Ty Owen pitched a great game and yeah, something I'll definitely remember for a long time. How did you find out you were the guy who got the W? Just knowing baseball, you know, that you come in the game in the fifth and so I was kind of aware of it if we kept the lead and so that's all I found out just from watching. You have a keepsake or something from the game? Yeah, I'm sure they'll give me the lineup card or something like that. So yeah, that would be a definitely good memory to have. It's not an easy spot to come into that you did, were you completely focused on the task at hand or were you a little nervous too? Clear for that, please? Sorry? How are you feeling when you came into that situation? It wasn't an easy spot to come into? Yeah, definitely haven't come into many situations like that, but I just attacked it the same way I do is trying to attack the strike zone and, you know, get guys out how I can and use three pitches for strikes and just trying to command the zone and yeah, that was my intent. A lot of veterans in this whole time, have you been picking guys mind to take some? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's a lot of guys with a lot of experience, a lot of saves, a lot of wins and obviously a lot of really good stuff. So yeah, it's been great to learn from them and hopefully continue.


Good evening. Welcome to Montpelier Civic Forum. Today we have a very special Civic Forum. We have John Odomar, a city clerk who's going to be discussing elections with us. He's going to be discussing when the election will be, how the election will be held, and election integrity, all of which are extremely important issues. John, thank you so very much for being here this evening. Thanks for having me. Was it the open Washington County Senate seat, do you think, that brought people out? That helped, the Democratic primary, that was a pretty active primary, but it's more than that, because we also had it a couple of years ago. So I think more than anything, it's just that the election is finally on everyone's radar, and they're coming out to it. So that's a difference, and it's a great difference, actually. The other difference I would cite would be, behind the scenes, the way the statewide database is structured, the way we clerks interact with it, the way it makes voting easier, and its level of security. The system we had when I started was, I was problematic. What was problematic about it? From the consumer's perspective, we still go, we still see our name in the list, we give them our name, and then we get the ballot, and we put the ballot inside, and we get the sticker. Well, there's functionality to it that enables us to do a lot of things a lot faster, especially early voting, so that's the big thing. There are fail safes in place, there are redundancies, so that we, it's a lot harder for a clerk to screw up now when they're entering data, when they're checking someone off the checklist. The biggest change, and it's also a much more robust system.  Oh, no, I just meant checking off as in you're coming in to vote. Oh, okay. Let's go to that one just for a second. How do you get tossed off the checklist?  I should mention, because that goes back to your other question, now that we're all feeding in, you know, really in a direct way all the different clerks into this database, when somebody registers in one, we immediately take them off the other. It happens at the same point. We capture that voter's record, it comes over. That was not the case before. So it really helps us, it really helps the integrity in terms of watching out for fraud. Because if someone gets checked off for that election, they're not going to be able to go, first of all, you're not going to be able to have as many duplicates. You're not going to get the double vote. And if they go to another town, they vote early in one, and then they go to another one and re-register and try to vote there, the election that they're trying to vote for will already indicate that they have voted that time. So it's a sweet new system. It really does a lot of good stuff. What if I came here from Massachusetts and still maintained the right to vote in Massachusetts as well as registering in Vermont? Would that be captured? Not necessarily. Well, it would be captured from our end if you tried to register there, because we are good about letting the other states know that someone has just registered here. They're supposed to let us know the reciprocal. And I can't say for sure how well that does or doesn't work. I know that we do our due diligence on our side, but it's theoretically possible. I have no sense of accountability for whether Massachusetts would let me know in the opposite. Now, having said that, it's very interesting in the elections world. There's a couple networks, one in particular that's called ERIC, which is a network of that different states feed into. I think it's up to around 15, 16 states where they do data share in a more direct way, sort of like we do here in the state. And they can track those interstate registrations a lot more carefully. Are they tracking by social security number? No, because none of them... There must be John Odoms all over the place. The standard way to verify and track voters, and this goes back to some federal legislation after the 2000 election debacle, is either through a DMV-issued ID, either a driver's license or a non-driver ID, or the last four of a social security number. This is what we do in Vermont, but it's the same system that other states use too. Now, you guys have training in Vermont and meet every so often the city clerks. What's the fraud that we're seeing in Vermont? I've heard a couple of anecdotes. What would those anecdotes be? That somebody came in and tried to vote in a jurisdiction next to the one that was appropriate. With the operative word being tried? Yeah, I think at one point somebody was given a provisional ballot that didn't go anywhere. What is a provisional ballot? A provisional ballot is something that's been all but eliminated in Vermont. Provisional ballots were also created after the 2000 debacle as a failsafe. If people should be on the ballot or aren't, there's some sort of question. So those are the people down in Georgia who have hyphens in their name and it doesn't match exactly. They can vote with a provisional ballot. They vote with a provisional ballot. And it was originally conceived as a way, again, to create failsafe and to protect people's right to vote. Now that the systems have gotten more sophisticated and the tracking is better, you more often see it used as a way potentially to marginalize someone's vote, to put it in a separate stack and push it to after the election and then maybe take it to a court to decide whether it should or shouldn't be counted. In Vermont, we basically eliminated those just from our own, our board registration system. And in fact, what was the, what did I hear from Will Senning, the elections director at the Secretary of State's office? He had a training one time and he said, you know, there's never really in Vermont any need to give anyone a provisional ballot unless maybe someone goes across the street, gets roaring drunk, comes in and demands they get a ballot where they should or not give them a provisional one and tell them to go away. And then that provisional ballot goes before a court and you could say, you know, I couldn't verify this person. Back a couple of years ago, you had, I was going to say some fun, but I'm sure it wasn't fun, Francis Brooks and Ashley Hill. How many votes separated those two? Well, when all was said and done, it was one when the dust settled. Did you have training on how to ascertain what the intent of a vote was? You know. And who was involved in ascertaining what the intent of that vote was? Well, since that's a county level vote, it was actually in the hands of the county clerk. And they got folks from all the different towns, didn't have to worry about different political parties because it was all within one political party. And yeah, people were just generally guided on, you know, we defer to the will of the voter. What does that mean? Or the intent of the voter. Excuse me, that's what I meant. But someone in a case where the intent, we're back to the hanging chat of 2000. But if somebody like put in a ballot and had written in or had voted for Ashley Hill and then crossed it out next to it, it said, no, I really mean, and then pointed here, then that's a case where the intent is clear. It's less clear if there's like maybe a little dot in one and the other one is all filled in. It's like, did they mean to vote for this one or did they think they were voting for two? Was it one person? Was it our county clerk who was the ultimate arbiter of that? The ultimate arbiter was the judge. So the county clerk oversaw a new recount, which was sort of a de novo recount, just counting everything from scratch. All of us clerks brought in our stuff. We were all there. Well, many of us were there. We actually used the Montpelier tabulators for that. That's why I was there really. And at the end of the day, they determined that there was a two-vote difference. But there were some ballots that had been challenged by one side or the other is questionable. So those individual ballots were reviewed by the judge. And there were four, I think, ballots that were ultimately in question. And so the judge ruled on all four. And based on his rulings, that gave Francis Brooks the one-vote win. Overseas votes that are coming in from people living overseas or people serving in the military, the Peace Corps, whatever. When did those come in? When do they have to be in? And when are they counted? What's the number? We have a hard and fast deadline. And the Secretary of State is on us for, you know, make sure these go in and make sure they're in there by the day. And I believe it's 60 days. I'm not sure. Right. But when do they have to be back? Oh, they have to be back the same time as everybody else has under Vermont law. We have to have them in hand by the time polls close on Election Day. So the military dozen who are serving in Afghanistan don't have an extra buffered window? No. And that's built backwards the other way. The idea is if we go back far enough, then that, you know, by all rights, should guarantee that they would get back in time. How far we go back 60. Do most states go back that far? You know, I'm not even sure about that. But my guess would be no, because a lot more states will have provisions for, say, post-mark ballots before the election. You can have ballots continue to come in under various provisions or other in a lot of other states. But here they have to physically be here. Here they have to actually be here. So given that there's a little more wiggle time on that end, I would imagine the front end time is a little less than ours. How do I get an absentee ballot right now? And when does it have to be back in? How do I get it back in? Oh, there's a number of ways you can get it back in. You can drop it off. Here in Montpelier we have a drop box by the back door of City Hall, which is where people will put payments and things if it's off hours. You can also put your ballot in there. You can mail it. That's not all kinds of waste. That's three. But there are three. And I can get that by how? Do I have to stop in the office to get that? You can call in. You can request it on the internet. You could also call it in. How do I request it on the internet? There is, what is it? I think it's O-L-V-R dot S-E-C dot state dot V-T dot U-S. So it's a state and not the city site that we request our absentee ballots. Right. If you want to do it online, there's a state portal. And it's the same portal which you can go and check your, you can actually go back and check on the status of that ballot. See if it's been issued or is still under review. How does the state know that it's actually me that's requesting it and not somebody pretending to be me? What do I say? Well, perjury attaches. Historically that's not something we've, you know, I think the small rural nature, it's not something we demand IDs. And currently under state law, yeah, you don't have to show an ID when you shop. I always tell people if another U comes and tries to vote, then one of you is going to jail. I don't care which one. Or at least a fine. Why don't we have jail? Why don't we have an ID? Why don't we require some sort of identification? I know we're a rural state and the people at the polls most likely will know most of the people who are coming through. Yeah, two reasons. One, because this is the system going way back historically. Two, because there hasn't been a compelling need yet to change it. If fraud increases, if there actually becomes an issue of fraud where right now there really isn't, then I think you'd see, you probably see a broad range of people saying we need to implement this. But right now it's, it would be a solution searching for a problem, basically. But other states are moving towards that solution searching for a problem? Yeah, and it's very controversial. I mean, I'm not going to characterize other states, particularize problems with or lack of problems with fraud. But certainly when these voter identification laws have been put into place, there have been a lot of arguments, many of which have stood up in court to say that the way they are structured is disproportionately affects one population or another demographically. If you're going to create a legitimate, genuine, if it ever comes to that, and Vermont, that we need to create such a system, it's going to mean to be done thoughtfully in a way that doesn't disadvantage one population over another, or you're doing a lot more harm than good. What happens after I put that piece of paper into the machine and the public has done? What happens at that point? All of those pieces of paper have gone through the machines, been collected. What happens? Well, then that we print out the results from the tabulator. We get an aggregate total. We report that to the Secretary of State's office. Is there any double checking on that before it goes in? No. I mean, we depend on those machines. We test them in advance to make sure we can depend on those machines. We actually will be testing this week all of our other machines. We usually will be running through ballots, running through every possible way, make sure the counts come up correct. If there is a question, if it comes down to one, two, 20, 25-oh difference, then that's why folks have a right to a recount. And we've got the physical backup. Physical backup is we were moving away from that in this country for a few years. Now the trend is going back, either paper ballots. We never moved away from it in Montpellier. We never moved away from it in Vermont. And now we're more of a model, right? But the trend is to go back to paper ballots or for ballots, paperless voting machines to then produce a paper product afterwards. So you have that. So once I have that, once you have that number in hand, what happens? How do you convey that number? Well, the first priority I have is getting it onto the Secretary of State's website. And they collect that information in one spot online so people can go and check. The second priority is not a priority, but I like to keep the press from driving me bananas. So I send them real quick the same thing. And then I get it out on the Facebook page, ASAP, because a lot of people look to that. And as you say, I need to try to see if I can get it onto the clerk's webpage proper a little more quickly than the next day. Right now it's on your Facebook page. It goes up on Facebook like that. And what is your Facebook page? It's Montpellier VT City Clerk. I mean, it's facebook.com. Approximately what time in the evening? Would we anticipate that those results would be up? Oh, it depends on the vote. It depends on how dynamic the vote is. It depends on whether there's a lot of write-ins. I would say this one closed at seven. I would say, you know, nine o'clock. I would think so. So you're putting this tally into a password protected area of the Secretary of State's website. That's correct. Is there any possibility that, you know, some malevolent person like organization like M13 would hack into that and change those tallies? Well, the more detailed his answer is that it's extremely unlikely, but the short one sentence answer is sure. There is no system that is 100% secure.  Okay, I have to ask, what is a credentialed penetration tester? I know, it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. Well, I'm a certified ethical hacker, which means penetration testing is testing security from the outside in rather than building walls. And I've got some certification in building the walls, but that's not as much fun. Penetration testers start from the outside and try to get in. They look for holes. Have you ever been successful in the Secretary of State's site? No, because of the rules of ethical hacking makes anything like that illegal. I would have to sign a contract with them that laid out very clear terms of engagement for me. So no, to the extent I get to play with this stuff, it's in sort of laboratory type environments. But, I mean, my point is that if there's one credo of people with this training, it's never tell anyone that any system is 100% guaranteed secure because it's not necessarily. And having said that, this is a very secure system. They, in fact, just implemented two-factor authentication, which is... What is that? Two-factor is, you know, a lot of folks who do online transactions have that, where you have your own password, but then you get a dynamically generated password, or else comes through text. You want to log in, you use your local password, you get a number of texts down that's unique, and you get that so that you get in that way. And that doesn't solve all your problems, but boy, it's probably the biggest single thing they could have done for help. Why are elections in Vermont so latent in terms of the total vote coming in if everybody's got computer access across the state? All of your county clerk, or your town clerks, have access to their website to put their tolls in? Well, I have to say, I'm not... You're not driving, you're not... I'm not aware that they are that late because we're required now. All of us are required to put that stuff in on election eve, even if it's a first pass. Because you're not driving it anymore. I could see when you were driving the tallies into the pailier or whatever. Right. No, no. We're supposed to, the law changed recently, we're supposed to get in those, at least not so much the detailed, with the overvotes and the undervotes and exactly... What are overvotes and undervotes? Undervotes is when somebody doesn't leave something blank. They don't use their full voting power and they don't vote on everything. An overvote would be if somebody votes for too many, like vote for one and you vote for two. We push that through. If we don't catch the person, because the machines will spit that out, they'll say, yep, no, overvote, overvote. So if the voter is right there, I'll say, you've got an overvote here, you want to try it again and I can rip up there and give them another one. But if they're not there, then we just have to push it through. And that ballot line that they overvoted on doesn't count, but it goes down on the list as an overvote so that we can track that. What happens if I get 10 votes as write-in? Do those go to the state as well? Do you give the write-ins that evening and the frequency of the write-ins? We put the write-ins in, although the way the law is now, if it's fewer than 30 write-ins, then it doesn't really count. 30 aggregate across the state or 30 locally? Well, it's going to be aggregate across the state if it's in across the state. That's what I'm saying, in the gubernatorial race. No, we put that stuff in. So every vote that's cast one way or the other is going to end up in the Secretary of State's office. For those kind of elections, yeah, they'll track them. If it's local, it's a local election, if it's less than 30, you just ignore it. How many people have registered this time? Are we seeing a spike in voter registration? Not really. And I think that's due to, first of all, Montpelier has pretty high registration already. But we've also... What percent are registered roughly already? I want to say, what is a six out of eight? So that's going to be around 75, 78 percent, something like that, maybe closer to 80. Yeah, I mean, that would be my guess. I don't have those numbers specifically down. So Vermont has been successful in terms of accessing voter registration with other kinds of... We've got automatic voter registration now at the DMV, which is fantastic. And that's part of why I think our in-house registration numbers have come down. Now when you go... And this has tripped a few people up, but for the most part, it works. When you go into renew your driver's license or get a driver's license, used to be you could opt in, check something, and then you get registered to vote. Now it's opt out. You're automatically registered to vote. So if you go in and check that little box, it means you're opting out. Now once the last time, can we do same-day registration in Vermont? What does same-day registration mean? Well, it means if you're not registered to vote and you want to come in and vote, then you can register that day and then you can vote. That's something... It does create some more work for a lot of clerks, which is a drag, but it's a terrific thing in that it encourages participation. But also to get back to your security question, it's a great bulwark against a lot of mischief that could be done. Also... Well, the lowest-hanging fruit for anybody, especially a foreign actor, who wants to cause mischief, is going to be those statewide databases that all the states have that we have. That's internet-facing. It's something that somebody might be able to get into. Now, what are they going to do if they get into it? You can't change vote totals in there, but you can change voter rolls. You could mass disenfranchise a whole bunch of people simply by taking them off the rolls. And that's one of the attacks that people are most concerned about. So if somebody did that, if somebody messed with somebody's voter registration, moved him around, deleted him completely, then that same-day registration creates a firewall between that because then we can put them back on. What happens if I moved after the election? I'm in District 2 right now. What if my wife and I moved to District 1 and we didn't inform you of our address? After the election? Last election, we voted in District 2. We have a different place in District 1. I go over to vote. They look at me in the book and it's my old address. What do I do then? Am I allowed to vote? Oh, sure. If you're in the same... Especially in an election like November, it's not District-based. So if my address is changed within Montpelier, I'm allowed to inform you of the new address and vote? Yeah, yeah. And we would like to know that. And you can certainly do that even if it's a District race. You can inform us of the address. We'll switch you over. We'll let the folks working in the different District checklists know and we'll get you a ballot for the appropriate District. We do that quite a bit. And that's another... That's actually where we capture a lot of our... The addresses that need to be updated are on these District elections because people will move and generally they won't let us know. So we get... That's where we get to do a lot of our list cleanup is on those annual city meetings. A lot of us are reading how absentee ballots are coming in strong in other states. How are they doing in Montpelier? Oh, boy. They're... Yeah, they are robust. We're getting quite a bit. We are going to have upwards of 40% of our ballots in Montpelier are going to be cast early, maybe not quite that high. But it's a lot. It's a big jump from the last couple elections. What do you ascribe that to? I think people are getting used to it. I think people... I mean really what we're creating with the early vote is less of an election day and more of an election season. And I think people are starting to think of it that way. You know, we certainly... We get regulars, certainly. The folks who have early voted before tend to early vote again. But then every year there's a few more and so then they get on that train and so we go. When all the votes are tallied, what do you think this will be like versus the last non-presidential mid-year election? Oh, it's going to be more, for sure. I think the last... I didn't check the numbers before I came in, but I'd be willing to bet the last non-presidential was in the 2600 range. And we're going to be more like 34, 3500. So it's going to be a... It's going to look a lot more like a presidential. People are really energized. There's been some discussion across the nation in terms of local elections. For Town Meeting Day, what percent of us actually do get out and vote? It varies. Actually, Town Meeting Day in particular varies quite a bit. But it usually varies between 30 and 60 percent. Well, that's quite a bit of variance. It is. When would 60 percent come out and vote on a Town Meeting Day? You know, that's a good question because I'm not always sure what drives that number. Certainly, if there's active controversy, which there isn't usually, but it has happened, that drives turnout. City Council races, where there's a challenge, where there's a race. Mayor, if there's a race, I think Mayor, the last time we didn't really have a race. But these contested, particularly open seats in the Council will bring out more. But on the other hand, you look at the numbers and sometimes they don't. So it's odd. It's a little hard to track. What are changes that are under discussion? I know the Secretary of State's office probably queries the city clerks as to how the system could be improved. Are there any changes that have been discussed but not implemented or stuff that other states are doing possibly that we would keep our eye on? Well, I know the Secretary of State would like to bring electronic poll books into the state. I have to ask, what is an electronic poll book? Electronic poll book would be something like some like a tablet or something. And these would be hard wire. They wouldn't be over wireless. Wireless is a big no-no. Why is wireless a big no-no? Too hackable. Way too hackable. So what is the poll book attached to? Poll book would go into some sort of depending on how they set it up. It could go straight into the Secretary of State's side or it could go into some point in between. And that would enable you to, right now we have to enter all the voter participation afterwards. And it's very time consuming. It's very boring. But this, with an electronic poll book, when people are checking in voters, boom, that participation is immediately noted. And that would, that makes our life simpler. Electronic voting. Internet voting. Yes or no? No. Why not? It's not secure. I mean, there's a... Aren't there states that are trying it? West Virginia is trying it. And I think most IT people you ask are going to say, don't do it. They're working in some sort of proprietary blockchain through a corporation. I'm not sure who they are. What is a blockchain? How much time have you got? A thumbnail. Oh my God. Is there even such a thing as a thumbnail of blockchain? Blockchain is a new technology that essentially works like a distributed database, cryptographic database that's used for, you know, the highest profile you hear about is Bitcoin. You have it used because it creates tremendous level of security, takes out the middleman in transaction. It's very trustworthy. It's very transparent. It's very stable. So it's a platform essentially. So they are using that platform, this very, very secure, this very robust platform as the means between the voter and the, you know, the centralized system. Instead of using U.S. postal, this is evolving from postal into a form of email. Right. But blockchain can give you a false sense of security because you're still susceptible at the user end to various types of hacking. You could have your, as they say, your session key hijacked. So somebody could take over your session on the computer and change something. You'd be susceptible to something called a man in the middle attack between you and your ISP. Is there anyone susceptible to intercepting a ballot sent through the mail and then sending it back to you? Well, theoretically, but it's a lot less likely. Taking it out of your mailbox or whatever? Yeah. I mean, that's what it would have to be. Somebody would have to lurk around, take it out of your mailbox and put it back in. That's not something you can do very large scale. That's something you can do by sending out a mass email with a phony link that you click on and your computer is infected. If I'm going to the polls on November 6th, what time am I going? Oh, 7 o'clock. 7 o'clock in the morning. 7 to 7, regardless of weather. Absolutely. I think that we've covered just about it. Is there anything that I didn't cover? No, probably, but it doesn't leap to mind. The topic is endless. What's the weather forecast for the 6th? I'm sure you've looked ahead. I have not looked ahead. I am day to day at this point. The work is so difficult. I'm just keeping my head down, processing those ballots and getting to the end. That's 40% come in early. It will, or close to it. It will. John, thank you so very much. And I'd remind you either to be part of the 40% and get your ballot in early or be part of the 60% and show up on November 6th. But do one thing. Urge your family and friends to vote either way because it's not only a civic duty, but it's civic responsibility. Thank you very much for watching this.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com with the filler for that basketball mixture that we have on jaspyscasebreaks.com We got to do this prism pack and we're gonna give away 10 spots and then we'll give away these teams So three different dice rolls here first dice roll. Who's gonna get those extra spots? So Brian you ended up with last spot mojo here. So there's 10 spots were given away So half there's only so we only sold 20 spots outright So half that list it's gonna get extra spots little buy one get one possibility here after eight two and a six eight times one two three four five six seven and eight After eight top half extra spots Chad, Brian, Nick, Nicholas, Anthony, Jay, Matthew, Brian, Alex and Nicholas Congrats to you. I'll put little rooftops next to your name so you know you won that Now for the rest of you, don't worry. I know you didn't get extra spots, but you're still in play for the teams All right, now let's do the break all teams are in let's roll it and randomize names and teams four or two six times one two three four five and six Brian four or two six times for the teams two three Four five and six. All right, there's the first half of the list right there There's the second half of this right over here And this is a hobby pack. So Could be some surprises in here. Let's find out. Let's do the break and then we'll re-randomize this list And we'll see who's in the next break Let's see who parlays their spot into that mixer John Morant red wave Harrison Barnes orange wave, that's the 60 and that's for the Kings. That's gonna be for Alex No autograph nothing too crazy here. Jared Butler and a nerlands Noel All right. Well Let's flip back over here. Let's see who's gonna get teams instead. I've got Nancy down to Anthony and everyone in between Third and final dice roll. Let's roll and randomize it four and a five top nine After nine good luck one two three four five six seven eight and Ninth and final time after nine now from ten on down Sorry Chad That extra spot not helping you this time, but I appreciate you and everyone else trying ten through thirty Sad times, but top nine You've got teams Nicholas Brian Alex David Nick Nicholas Nick Matthew and Dayton Congrats the top nine after nine you've got teams in the next break the basketball mixer So here's how it shakes out Dayton with my Lakers Matthew with Milwaukee Nick Smith with Brooklyn Nick S with the Knicks Nick Smith with the Sixers David with the Clippers Alex with the Spurs Brian with the Wizards and Nicholas S with the surprising jazz I'll see you the next video for the break. Jasper's case breaks.com


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