Good morning, welcome everyone to the first of three special panels for the Center for Security and Politics at the Goldman School of Public Policy in conjunction with SIGA. Today we're hosting three panels on three different aspects of elections and election security. I'm Janet Napolitano. I'm a professor of public policy at the Goldman School and the head of the Center for Security and Politics. The first panel will be moderated by Professor Susan Hyde, and it will discuss some comparative examples from other countries. The second, which I will moderate, will be a panel with state elected officials who were on the front lines during last November's election. And finally, the third panel to be moderated by Dean Henry Brady of the Goldman School will focus on some of the more technical aspects that can improve election integrity. Each panel will have a Q&A session and you're invited to participate in one, two, or three of these important discussions. So now, without further ado, let me introduce Professor Susan Hyde, who is a professor of political science, SIGA affiliate, and the interim co-director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Take it away, Susan. Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure to moderate this panel on election security with a very ambitious goal of covering in a mere 90 minutes what the U.S. can learn about elections from the rest of the world. First, thank you to SIGA and to Berkeley's New Center for Security and Politics for setting this up and to Professor Napolitano for kicking things off today. Congratulations to you on the new center. We're all just absolutely thrilled with everything you're bringing to campus. So thanks again for bringing us together today. Before I introduce the panelists, I wanted to say a few words about the topic of election security, as I think it's one that invites a diversity of interpretations. Today, at least on this panel, we'll be talking about election security using a relatively expansive definition. Election security, broadly conceived, is something that includes procedures for running free and fair elections, protecting elections from efforts to undermine their democratic character, which would include but not be limited to over forms of election fraud, politically motivated election violence which can occur before, during or after elections, foreign interference in elections, which would include international efforts to undermine voter support for democracy. As well as efforts to falsely undermine voter confidence in the electoral process. I'm here in part because I've been studying most of these issues for a long time, in part by looking at efforts by international actors to support democracy and elections around the world. As part of that research, I've served as an international election observer on formal delegations for elections in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, with several organizations including the Carter Center, Democracy International and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. I've also done some related work in Bangladesh and in Cambodia, and part of my research focuses on global trends in elections across democracies and autocracies. In all this work, election security is a topic that I've spent quite a bit of time on and that I'm passionate about. One of the things that's very striking about my very recent experiences covering this topic is that although for the most part focused on efforts by outside actors to influence elections around the world. For the first time in my career I spent in 2020, the US presidential election cycle, talking to journalists about how my research on election violence, election fraud, democratic backsliding and the potential resilience of democratic institutions. Might be more applicable to US politics. So, while in some ways this was disappointing as an American citizen, it's also something that for those of us who do focus on elections around the world and international standards for democratic elections has probably been a long time coming. It is the case and where it's the case that some Americans, perhaps even some in the audience or many in the audience have bought in deeply to this idea that American elections and American democracy are exceptional and perhaps beyond reproach. One thing I wanted to begin by emphasizing is that it has been clear since well before I started working in this area roughly 20 years ago that US elections and election administration have long fallen short of what are now international standards for democratic elections. The US is, for example, the only country in the world that explicitly allows for partisan administration of elections. It is strange for other people in other countries to hear that we allow elected secretaries of state to both run elections and be candidates in those same elections. That's something that's relatively unique to the United States. Voter identification has become a very partisan issue in the US, whereas in most countries around the world it's pretty normal for the burden to be on an independent election commission to make voter identification and voter registration accessible to all eligible voters. Of course this issue has become heavily polarized and partisan in the United States. As many in the audience will remember there were calls for reform after the 2000 US elections, including for example by the National Commission on federal election reform, led by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Much of this was reflected in the help of America vote act passed shortly after they released their conclusions. And this did I think lead to some limited areas of progress. It was followed by another commission, the Carter Baker Commission, which made further recommendations. But it is clear to me from reading about and having heard speak individuals like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, in part because of their prior experiences in both US politics and in promoting international standards for democratic elections that there's a long list of changes that they have advocated for and that have been reasonably clear would help with US election security. When when I talk about these issues, many people are surprised to learn that the US has invited international election observers since 2002 invited and had international election observers since 2002, most prominently from the organization for security and cooperation in Europe. For the 2020 US elections, their preliminary post election statement congratulated election administration in in the US elections and congratulated their successes in running an election during such a severe part of the global pandemic, but also highlighted some of the problems and I wanted to mention those problems that they highlight because it does set up some of the conversation that we're having today, including political polar polarization that eclipsed substantive debate, unequal access to voter registration. There are some finance laws that are easy to circumvent, as well as the stunning amount of money in US politics. And partisan efforts aimed at voter suppression, including what they document as 10 million voters who received automated disinformation phone calls aimed, I think at suppressing their vote, or just waiting them from turning out. This criticism, however, in this preliminary report, at least in my reading of this report was the effort by the incumbent president to falsely undermine the integrity of an election. These are all very hot topics. One of the challenges in approaching this topic is that the consequences of problematic elections can endure beyond that election. The problems with election security were not severe enough to change who won an election. For example, if the election outcome is not that close, a voter who is turned away from the polls in one election may never try to vote again. On the other hand, they could also be mobilized into activism. The experience with fraud has been shown in other contexts. For example, in Mexican elections to make some voters less likely to turn out for several subsequent election cycles. And we know, as I mentioned in other cases, experience with problematic elections can also mobilize voters and make people more likely to participate. So judging the some effect of violations of election security over the long term can be very difficult. Without politically motivated efforts to undermine elections, which is something that does happen in lots of countries around the world, one of the things that is clear is that some actors attempt to undermine elections without getting caught. And one can try to undermine voter confidence falsely without necessarily changing the real quality of the election or the real conditions on the ground. They may seek to maintain plausible deniability about the legitimacy of their actions. And except under some very specific circumstances, they don't usually admit to what they're up to, even when in some cases they're recorded taking actions that look very suspicious. This can make the academic study of election security very challenging at times, right? This is an illicit behavior in many cases. And so sometimes, or another thing that I wanted to bring into this conversation is that a lot of the terminology surrounding election security also becomes politicized, which is yet another challenge for those of us who are working in this space. For example, the term election integrity, which until this year was relatively benign. Most people up until this point wanted elections with integrity has recently become pretty politicized as something that's now being used to justify widespread efforts to pass new legislation that's aimed at suppressing voter turnout in the future. With a fairly obvious objective of suppressing votes that are not for one of the political parties. There are also a number of other violations of election security that may affect the outcome of the election, but may come about through administrative incompetence or other issues that are not necessarily partisan efforts to deliberately undermine democratic elections. And again, those things can also undermine voter confidence, as we'll talk about in this session. So as we talk about lessons from around the world that may be relevant to understanding the potential for democratic backsliding in the United States, as well as improvements to and violations of election security. It is important to keep in mind that there are a number of different relevant actors at play, the government in power, the bureaucracy, including election administrators, voters, political parties, all of which may have different preferences and different ways in which they may go about either working to protect the vote, or working to subvert it sometimes at the same time. It's now my pleasure to introduce our panelists, each of whom are exceptional in their fields, and bring with them not just wide ranging substantive knowledge about elections in many countries around the world. I've also been at the cutting edge of bringing rigorous research methods to policy relevant questions that are connected to elections and the potential for electoral reform and election security. You'll note, and I'll just flag this, that some of their expertise is relevant to efforts to engaging in reforms that are aimed at improving efforts within relatively democratic contexts right so making democratic elections better in some form. The panel also includes individuals with expertise in areas that I would classify as efforts to undermine election security but also potentially democracy. Right, so we're both talking about how to improve elections within a democratic context, and ways in which some of these violations of election security might not just be problematic for the election, but might be problematic for democracy more generally depending on the context. I'll now go through and introduce our panelists very, very, very briefly. There's more extensive bios in no way summarizing all of their impressive qualifications. First, Catherine Casey is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research explores the role of information in enhancing political accountability. She brings extensive experience working on these issues in the particular context of Sierra Leone, and has worked elsewhere as well. Thomas Fujiora is an associate professor of economics at Princeton University. His research seeks to understand why elected officials fail to provide adequate services, and how the design of the electoral process can influence policymaking. He's worked on elections broadly in Benin, the Philippines and Brazil. John Siliota is an associate professor at the University of Pompo, Fabra. His research studies the determinants of voter participation, and the way public policy interventions affect different dimensions of voter and politicians behavior like turnout, vote buying, accountability and election. His work focuses on Peru, Paraguay, and Austria, among other countries. And last but not least, my colleague Isla Matanaka is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which political violence and elections intersect, and she has worked on these issues in, among other places, Columbia, Myanmar, and, and may touch also in her remarks on Sri Lanka. I've asked each of the panelists to open our conversation with a lesson or two from their own experiences that may be relevant to understanding US elections and the potential for reform. So as, as we open things up, I'd like to invite a Kate, Professor Casey to go first. Great. Wonderful. Thank you so much for the intro. It's fantastic to be here. Well, I'm coming from the perspective of work we've done in Sierra Leone. So this, in terms of Susan's categories, this is in how can we make democracies work better, so to really deliver for citizens. And I want to focus on, on two kind of common problems. So, you know, elections around the world face a number of challenges that are fairly universal. So what I want to focus on are how do we make sure that voters have the information they need to make good choices. And the second one is how do we get great people to run as candidates for elected office. So I think these are universal challenges and the solution is likely going to be very context specific. So things that work in Sierra Leone, very low income West African country are probably not the solutions that are going to work here in the United States. But the message from Sierra Leone is about how you get from the problem to the solution that works in your context. And the message I want to, I want to share is one of bold experimentation. Right. And so it's trying new innovative policy reforms, and then evaluating them very rigorously to see whether they're working better than what you're already doing. And so I want to share two examples of bold experiments I've been involved in with civil society and the political parties in Sierra Leone. And there's one each on each of these two, these two questions. So the first experiment I want to share is one about this question of how do you get voters the information they need to make, you know, great choices. There's a little bit of context just to start so so Sierra Leone is very low income country so a lot of voters are illiterate they haven't had access to public education. There's also in terms of media, there's just not a lot of great sources of reliable unbiased political information. And you can think about some pretty rural farming communities who are going into an election who may have very little idea about how the office works, you know what the qualifications are and who the candidates are that they're choosing between. So, so both this one and the next experiment I'm going to talk about are in the context of the Sierra Leone Parliament. And so the US analog you should have in your mind is the House of Representatives so the US House the elections are structured exactly the same way. So, this question about how you get information to voters so imagine you're in a rural village and people really have very little idea of what their options are. So the kind of bold solution that civil society partners want to test was what if we could expose voters to these very engaging debates right so you could go and see a debate between parliamentary candidates, and really get a sense for who they are what they stand for and what they're meant to be doing in office so this is exactly what we did so so picture like a drive in movie theater, except you're not going to drive there you're going to walk there right so big public gatherings and you're watching a video of the candidates running in your area. You know debating each other on merit right so how do we know whether this works, well where these drive in cinemas or these walk in cinemas are happening is kind of randomly allocated. So I can look at voters who got a chance to watch the debates versus those who didn't and I can follow their behavior right through the elections. So, what we found is these debates were incredibly successful at building voter knowledge right. They gave voters a sense of what elected parliamentarians were meant to do what the resources they had available to them, and what policies they had and all of this information actually changed people's voting behavior so voters start to shift to higher performing candidates and, and I want to say a couple things about these debates you know Susan raised some points about, you know, sort of party politics eclipsing substantive debate and voter misinformation. The candidates are moderated by a very trusted member of civil society, they're 11 level playing field so everybody running got equal airtime they're focused on substance and on merit right so they are really talking about the nuts and bolts of government and policy and what these candidates are doing. So that's, so that was one experiment on the voter side that was very successful. And the second experiment I want to share is on this question of you know, how do you get great candidates. For this one that the thing you need to know about your down is in the status quo the parties, they select their own candidates so think about a party you know, choosing all the candidates to run around the country. It's a very internal and from the outside pretty opaque process where you know party leaders are you know nominating and appointing candidates to run. The thing that is absent in the status quo is really any space for voters. And I was going to say Sierra Leone here is much more representative than democracies around the world in the US system. And so what the political parties themselves are saying and both major political parties participate in this experiment was, you know, how can we create more space for voters to have a direct voice and selecting who's going to run to be the candidate in this area. And what they did is pretty unusual is that they, they took huge, large representative surveys of all registered voters is not just who shows up for a primary, or who has the means to access of the polls to representative opinions of all voters and that's them. Of these four potential candidates who do you want the party to pick to be your candidate in this area. And so they aggregated that information and incorporated it with their own information on these candidates to select different types of candidates now how do I know the candidates are different, because again, this is a randomized experiment so these parties inside their own system are experimenting across different races with different ways of selecting candidates. So we can compare what the actual candidates look like. Once we get to the election. What they found is actually when they created more space for voters they were getting better candidates and particularly they're getting candidates who have been involved in providing a lot more local public goods in the past and this is something that voters in this context, really care about I think there's universal challenges. What exactly the solution to these challenges look like is going to vary a lot across countries but the message is bold experimentation and what does that take well it takes, you know, acknowledging that there's a problem, thinking about an innovative bold solution and then really be willing to test it rigorously and learn from this new experience. Thanks. Thank you. Next, I'm going to turn to you, Professor Leon Siliota. Thank you very much for the invitation and for the gentle introduction. So, as you mentioned, a large part of my research concentrates in studying the causes and consequences of electoral participation right and then so by reveal preference I think that electoral participation is a key element in the functioning of democracy and a key element also for boosting electoral integrity and trust in democratic outcomes. So my work has focused in several countries in Latin America with a particular focus in Peru and while as Kate mentioned, there are wide differences between the Latin American context and the US context there are still some universal lessons to be learned from comparative research. So just to put things into perspective, we have to notice that the electoral participation in the US is low, right? In the 1980s and 90s it was hovering around 50%. Since 2004 we've seen a relative increase and by the last presidential elections turned out reached a record high of 62%. This is still quite low in comparative terms. In most of Latin American or Western European countries you see turnout rates that are somewhere around 75%, 80%, similarly for some countries in Southern Africa. So a bunch of my research has been on trying to understand who do we bring out to the polls when we enact national and blanket policies to try to incentivize electoral participation and what are the consequences for representation. So there are two big messages that we get from this research. One is that you typically end up with these blanket policies, you typically end up drawing to the polls voters who are usually uninterested in politics and who are set. So therefore getting them into the polls do not have effects on what the policies that are get enacted are, but rather have implications for how they feel about the election and this is important for when we're talking about election. So what are the implications of these types of policies for electronic therapy? First there is habit formation in voting. So consistently having voters who are left out of the electoral process can generate pockets of these affected voters who first are completely left out of the political process and hence whose policies preferences are not represented in policymaking. Therefore they are not going to identify with elected offices. When they decide to participate, hence they may be more likely to be attracted by public claims rather than candidate valence or programmatic politics, which is the discussion that we really want to be having in any democratic process. In contrast, people who consistently participate are more likely to be part of the political discussion, acquire information, be much more engaged in serious conversation about programmatic politics. So in general, the findings from the literature leads us to think that participation in elections provides legitimacy to the process. The more people participate in elections, the more people I see around me participating in elections, the more we perceive them as being fair. So just as an example, last night I downloaded data on electoral participation around U.S. states and how much the absentee voting was happening in the last elections. And you see the facts just jump at U.S. So places with higher turnout have massively higher rates of usage of these absentee ballots. Unfortunately this is a correlation, but I think it goes in line with what we are finding in the literature. So what policies can help increase political participation? In the U.S., there is a lot of experience with get out of the vote campaigns, either led by political parties or other campaigns, and they do help in increasing turnout. So the objective of these different types of campaigns is to generate a gap in the participation between voters from different parties. So no, that doesn't contribute in increasing the legitimacy in elections. Similarly, enfranchisement is helpful for widening representation, but again, here we are focusing on a specific set of voters. In the U.S., clearly mandating to vote, like we've done in many Latin American countries and some European countries, is a no-go. But there are some hard and soft policies that can be relatively easy to implement. And here I would agree with Kate that we need to start experimenting in what works and what doesn't, and the decentralized organization of elections in the U.S. So some ideas just to trigger the discussion, automatic registration, which has been implemented in several U.S. states, voting on a Sunday, stuff that is really, really easy to implement. Alternatively, what we see in some countries is that even without the mandate vote turnout is around 80%, 85%. And this is mostly because people perceive voting as a citizen duty. So non-partisan campaigns in this direction can also be really helpful. So I'll just leave it there and we'll keep discussing later. Thank you. Great. So now let's turn to Professor Fujiwara. Thanks to everyone at Sega, the Goldman School, and Berkeley for the opportunity to talk here. So I'd like to start by sharing some lessons from Brazil, so the world's fifth largest democracy. And in particular, how Brazil has quite successfully administered its elections using electronic voting devices for over 20 years. And it has done so without any credible evidence of fraud and broad trust and support from the electorate. So the Brazilian electronic voting system is popular with no Brazilian voters since it's easier to use than the previously used paper ballots. And it also allows election results to arrive quickly. So usually polls on election day close at 5pm. And in the same evening, the same night, the full results from almost 120 million votes cast are made public, which is an important part of electoral integrity because it's in dispute between polls closing and actual election results not being clear to everyone that a lot of threats to electoral integrity or even democracy can occur. So the transition from paper ballots to electronic voting in Brazil happened in the 90s and it was successful in large part because Brazil actually already differed from the West in some dimensions. So Brazil had a centralized national electoral authority. They had a lot of power to oversee and even coordinate or even actually tell what to do to the state level electoral authorities. And the whole electoral authority system at the state and national level, it is part of the judiciary branch, which is by definition independent from the executive and the legislatures. And that has been historically trusted and perceived as independent by the population, more so than most state institutions, right? And so on top of that, the Brazilian electoral authority also made a clear effort to have transparency regarding the voting process. Election data is made publicly available in a way that's actually much easier for another average person to access data on elections than it is in the United States. And procedural documents are made public, all in a kind of centralized place. Well, the average Brazilian can actually go to the electoral authority website and collect all sorts of information that it's actually more difficult even as a researcher to find in the US, right? Another interesting lesson that while the electronic voting devices in Brazil they are what we call direct record, which means the vote telling process happens without anyone actually handling pieces of paper. The electronic voting devices, they do produce ballot level printout of results. So for each ballot, which you know the votes of say 200 to 500 people, it will print out what are the results of people that voted right out when the polling station closes. So that creates a paper trail that can be used to audit results and could address potential issues regarding say a cyber attack on a central vote telling system. There's also some downsides to the Brazilian system which are not inherent to the system but it is the way Brazil has implemented these downsides. The first thing that it does not allow absentee or male voting, a voter can only cast her vote in the polling station she's registered to vote, right? Currently the country is rolling out biometric vote information via fingerprint which also has some or can have some negative effects on voter registration and turn out since it requires you know every single voter to re-register to vote and provide a fingerprint to the authorities, right? These issues however they are counterbalanced by a system of mandatory voting much like Gianmarco talked about before me and by having elections on Sundays which are kind of clearly a day set out for everybody to go vote, right? And lastly, just to kind of put things in context in compared to the United States, I should give you some context that since Brazil really democratization in the 80s, right? The major parties are deleting presidential candidates, they have been committed to respecting electoral results. I think Brazil sort of leveraged a system where the main political actors were committed to respecting electoral results. There was a central independent electoral authority, right? And now these things are changing. The current president, Jorge Bolsonaro, has been making claims of electoral fraud without producing any evidence whatsoever to back it up. The claims had little consequence in last year municipal election, but you know Brazil is actually about to face probably its biggest threat when it comes to electoral integrity and when it comes to federal elections next year. So I think there's interest power to observe how it will be handled there and how the US can learn to handle things here. Thank you. Great. Thank you. There's so many interesting things we will touch on but basically from this point forward I'll be posing questions to the panelists. It'll be a little bit more conversational. We have some prepared questions and then we'll turn to some questions that we've received from audience members and from people who submitted questions prior to the panel. Yeah, this is, this is my greatest fear is that I would forget someone and I just about started to do it. Eila, please go ahead, Professor Matanak, sorry. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me and thanks so much for organizing on this topic. So while there are many different challenges to electoral security, I'm going to talk about violence around elections specifically starting with ties between politicians and armed groups. At times politicians and armed groups have become really closely linked. My cross case based cross country case based research with Paul Stanley and has shown that ties between politicians and armed groups are not unusual. Most armed groups actually do engage in some type of electoral participation, whether supporting particular candidates or coercing others. And many politicians are also open to this type of influence. So my cross national data tracking the most overt types of these links shows that these ties between politicians and armed groups often become endemic in really different context so different levels of democracy different levels of development, rather than focusing in on one case for this particular type of research we've really looked across a set of cases and I've collected data across a set of cases. So I think these links form between politicians and armed groups because simply put, they can benefit both of them. So armed groups can use ties to tilt outcomes towards positions that match their own political aims and agendas, as well as to recruit, organize and attack more openly with sympathetic politicians in office. Politicians though also can use this tool in much the same way that they use other types of violence, one sided repression communal communal violence. The illegal activity can mobilize some of their most enthusiastic supporters, but it can also deter legal activities so intimidating politicians to do less campaigning and legislating dissuade citizens from voting or supporting their preferred candidates and blocking civil servants from trying to do their jobs. So these ties between armed groups and politicians have the potential to undermine democracy. And we've been talking about them increasingly in the media recently. I think, you know, in terms of suggestions going forward once politicians become tied to armed groups, separation is not always so simple. Our work suggests that there are a few things to do beyond law enforcement that rely really on civil society and citizens. So first, monitoring and identifying these ties throughout the electoral cycle is really crucial government officials but also journalists analysts academics can help do this. The important thing here is that many of the links between politicians and armed actors are covert. And even when the ties are out in the open the specific language often allows politicians to deny them if pressure. This occurs across the cases that we look at calling them out and identifying patterns can help mobilize action. So once identified how do we hold politicians or armed actors accountable law enforcement of course has a crucial role in this the police and the judicial systems. Consistent response keeps armed groups framed in based on our work in the US and other contexts however we're a little bit concerned that politicians can at times push for uneven policing. And sometimes law enforcement bias and even open sympathies can actually be part of this violence. Beyond law enforcement, most of the ties to politicians also require a different approach, approach because they're often not verifiably illegal, even if patterns and other evidence exists. So holding politicians accountable for their ties to armed group can can involve things like political processes such as sanctions or impeachment, funding cuts by campaign donors, social media or other media companies enforcing policies about language, and ultimately disapproval expressed by voters by constituents. So recently Martha Crenshaw, drawing on her decades of research on homegrown tourism route that this break really happens when quote the community that they claim to represent rejects them that is rejects violence and that seems to be really crucial here too. So I would say that in terms of the spectrum this is more on the how do we avoid some of the really negative outcomes so we see in other places we have seen sort of broad based efforts to reject violence in different contexts. So even though our work shows that these that many elections feature violence and that because there are these benefits involved these cycles can be really hard to break. I am hopeful that we may find some solutions going forward. So I'll leave it there and look forward to the rest of the conversation. Wonderful that there are so many interesting things here. I think the questions you're raising are really fundamental right now, and do connect to these ways in which the US is experiencing things that hasn't experienced for a little while. And so therefore we have this need to draw on examples from other contexts highlighting the conversation we're having today. The next question I like to follow up with is just to ask our panelists to perhaps join some of our audience members and thinking about why it's a little bit difficult to compare the US to other countries and to think about both similarities and perhaps differences between the cases that you're familiar with so in what ways. Should we think about surprising similarities between the US and other places and in which ways should we think about differences that are maybe really important to emphasize ways in which the US just isn't like other countries and doesn't have good comparisons that we should should be making to other cases. Let's see I'll ask. Professor Casey to go first. Okay, well, since I'm, you know, talking about Sierra Leone, which is, you know, very low income West African country, I think you can think of a lot of differences that you know some are surprising some are not but I want to talk about the similarities. Sierra Leone has a fairly stable two party system like the US so the two parties that are the major parties now are the same parties that were formed around independence in the 1960s. And one thing I think is interesting is because they're there are affiliation sort of regional sorting. So there's affiliation there's kind of two major ethnic groups and two major political parties and they're wanted in the north and ones in the south so they're very stable, kind of they each have sort of equal sized support. But what this means this geographic sorting is that when you come down so present elections are super competitive right because each party has kind of equal shares. When you go to the sub national level like thinking about you know US House of Representatives, you get these very kind of homogenous local districts right and what does that mean that means like local elections are a landslide for one party, or the other. For example, I'm at Stanford. It's in Palo Alto. So if you think about our health districts, you go to the general election, the whoever the Democratic candidate is almost doesn't matter who that person is, they're going to the 75% of the vote versus 25% of the vote for the 50% of the vote spread and that just happens again and again and again. Right. The same thing in Sierra Leone so that's pretty much Palo Alto would be pretty much the median distribution in terms of how how uncompetitive a local election is. And so, you know, there's also there's two political scientists, Jim Snyder and Shigeo Horano wrote this beautiful book on US US primaries but this is one of the things they were pointing to is that it's not just Palo Alto like if you look at all US House elections over the last 70 years. A majority of them were decided by more than a 15 percentage point spread right that is a landslide. And so most of the US House elections anyway are also very, very lopsided. So this kind of ties back to like why I wanted to talk about that second experiment on how you select candidates because in a place like Palo Alto, the general election doesn't really matter right you know the Democratic candidates going to win so the question is, who is the Democratic candidate and how is that person selected and you know who had to say who turned out who participated. And I think that's where, you know, that's why it's really important to think about who's putting themselves forward and who's who's participating in that process of winnowing that group of potential candidates. And I just want to say so one surprising difference and this comes back to Gianmarco's point, and as a shout out to voters in Sierra Leone, turnout is not mandatory in the Sierra Leone the last two general elections, it was 84 87% turnout so that's, you know, not mandatory and it's just a phenomenal level of voter participation. That is truly impressive. Let's see. Professor Leon Siliota do you want to get in on this. So one thing that really got me thinking about the similarities between Latin America and the US is the use of political trials, right, so, so, I mean, after the last couple of engagements of former person Trump, and political trials are useful instruments for democracy to punish misconduct by elected officials outside election people. So we typically have very little tools are at our hands outside election periods to punish politicians, right. And however, this institutional safeguards at times can be a double edged sword. And this brings me back to a project I was working recently in Peru where there are recall elections for mayors around the country and they happen very often. The problem here is that there, there is a fine line when you are trying to punish an elected official for having misconduct, and when you're using these institutional tools for political purpose. Right, what I found in that in that project in Peru is that when potential candidates perceive that that a political trial is used in a with political motives that ends up deterring potentially very good candidates basically people who are thinking about entering politics, see that that they may be kicked out because of political motivations, and they say, Well, I may as well stay in my well paid private sector position right so so what was that was a parallel here. I mean, when you when you have such often happening in pitchments like what we've seen lately. And, and when you have voting in this case in the in the house and in the Senate, completely split against party lines. This underminds the objectives of this political trials in the in the sense that one of the benefits of having the discussions in public is airing some potential facts that that may document a wrong doing by elected officials. And when voting in the house and in the Senate is completely split along party lines. These these underminds the credibility of these these facts and completely raises the potential usefulness of these of these political trials right and this can have potential downward effects on the selection of people who decides to enter the political race at different stages. The quality of candidates is a really interesting theme that's coming out of some of these reforms. Professor Matt knock. Will you jump in on this question to. Yeah, I was also thinking about sort of the response to these different types of threats and especially thinking about electoral violence and so picking up on some of John Marcos comments just now you know thinking about. There's a wide range of what we think the government will do in response to this at times, the political violence is so deeply ingrained and linked to the judicial sector the policing sector that there's really no hope in some countries that there will be sort of any type of response from those bodies and in other cases there's much more hope and I think the US has shifted between those different opinions over the course of recent events and so you know there's there are cases that look a lot more like the US like there's an incident with para para politics in Colombia where there were links between paramilitaries and politicians in the legislature and there were investigations or court cases brought about the collusion between these politicians and the paramilitaries but there were also important roles played by politicians who tried to pass more legislation to sort of sanction this. It was sometimes blocked, but also through activists. So there were widespread protests, lots of different organizations wrote about this and then also there were journalists and others who actually uncovered some of these links Samana magazine was one of those that was sort of responsible for doing a lot of this work. So I think in these cases we can sort of see this like universe of responses it's not clear that all of those might exactly apply to the US, but it certainly fits somewhere between the spectrum of like places where the government is completely involved in this type of violence and places where it's like not at all involved. And so thinking about sort of the most effective response to it is likely going to fit somewhere in the middle and encompasses some of these reactions and responses that we've seen in other cases. Great. Thank you. And then, Professor, would you are will you jump in a little bit here. Yes. So I think what I'll say, echo the bit what John Marco also said is, I think in. So what are the things in any country expect a little bit is is that at some point there's some independent authority who make a call on what results are so right so there's like in in in the United States there's this that is independent or the in the United States this role would be the judiciary will be courts right and and if it gets there will be eventually the Supreme Court I was remembered from the 2000 election right and I think that's a good example because it was clearly in 2000 there was a ruling and then one candidate said okay that's the ruling right I'll go I said that's it right I'll concede right so. I think you were like two things that are perhaps a little different in the United States from other countries is is that the judiciary is not perceived by I think big part of the population with good reason as independent right because judge federal judges are appointed by the federal government and because you know state judges are appointed by state governments, because people look at the Supreme Court and they can clearly attach each judge to a particular party right. You create the system where it's sort of, you know, like the population expects and then the kind of independent referee to come and call things one way or the other, which is kind of difficult. So, going back to the example in Brazil, I think that's a country that can't handle this well because because the left authority is part of the judiciary and they're not appointed by particular parties, they can sort of play this role of being perceived at least by the population as a non political actor. And not only that I think they navigate this in ways that are complicated like going back to the political trials that your Michael say like say, they are responsible to say, make claims about does the sitting president broke electoral rule by say, taking off the book campaign donations right, and I think a lot of times they shy away from making rulings there because they know what the moment they step in they'll be perceived as political so it's a very difficult trade off people have to navigate but I think I think the United States has this particular idea that kind of permeates it is that once the judiciary is perceived as also as political and partisan it's hard to for the population to see, you know, their decisions as kind of being independent right but kind of as a kind of fair referee calling which way the election went. I think I'm going to circle back in a second to a question that's very much related to what you were just talking about but for now I do want to think about a question that's been on my mind as we've prepared for this panel which is that when we talk about the potential for reform in the US if you're just reading public commentary and whatnot. There's a lot of pessimism right there's a lot of a sense that it's hard to get multiple political parties on board. Kate one of the things that was struck by in your comments was just that all of the parties are willing to participate in these efforts to make the process more inclusive for voters. And that was true across apparently the entire political spectrum right. That just seems to be not the case right now in the United States and so I wanted to give our panelists a chance to say a word or two about whether anything from their experiences that suggest ways in which countries can move from intense polarization perhaps even in post civil war contexts to moments in which there's a willingness to adopt reforms and to move towards improvements in electoral processes. Ila or sorry for some of that. Let's go first. Sure. Thank you so I'm afraid I'm going to be relatively pessimistic on this front in terms of electoral violence I think there's really this possibility of getting very stuck in these cycles and so you know I mentioned some of the ways in which we might get out and I think in this country that is in this cycle might get out of it. But I think there is this big question about who politicians or who can who can hold politicians accountable in these contexts where they're really acting outside of the system, whether it's through something like electoral fraud or electoral violence which happens to be what I study. There are super interesting other you know political science works on this that suggests that the you know people who are closest to those who are using these social media channels so political allies or advisors might be most in the position to like call out or sanction this both because others will be most persuaded by their messaging because it's surprising right it's coming from the people who are closest and also because it sort of signals that they have the same interests, but they're willing to use a different mechanism. And I think that there are cases in which political violence is used especially by politicians because it's benefiting them right and so it's in some way that we need to break the cycle of benefits from these mechanisms whether it's fraud or violence or something else in these contexts. And I think that can be hard to do. I do study post conflict elections and I think there are ways in which that you can sort of shock the cycle in a way that resets the equilibrium. And then you have sort of a new playing field that eventually improves gradually, but I think these gradual institutional changes is something that we actually have less of an idea about how they occur in some of these contexts in a way that that's really positive so I would say I'm on the pessimistic end of the spectrum but I'm hoping my colleagues have other suggestions that are that are more optimistic. Yeah, well we can always hope. Thank you, Professor Leon. Sorry, I was trying to get to my next question. So let me put the more optimistic side here. So once again, when we've seen big packages of electoral reform trying to get passed in Latin America, they have been blocked by national forces. So in general, getting passed big reforms to electoral systems is hard. One advantage that the US has with a very, very decentralized organization of elections is that it allows for what Kate was saying earlier. Right, it allows for bold experimentation. And we know that once one thing works, it is much easier to push it higher ups in the political discussion. Right, so that's one thing that I would highlight that we should push local administrators to try to dig deep and come up with some creative solutions that can be scaled up to national policies. Great. Let's see, Thomas. Yes, I just want to follow up. I think, yes, there's the, I think I'm more optimistic because the United States has this decentralized administration, there's much more room for the bold experimentation. And one thing, one aspect I think in the pessimist view that I think is people are overestimating is that it, that you know how certain it is that each reform will kind of have the effect that the people pushing for the reform are taking. So there's a lot of unintended consequences in this reform, right. So, to give a current example, let's say there's a, in some state, the Republican Party is pushing to curb, say, mayor voting because they think that will help them in elections. But that's actually a very uncertain thing. They're probably basing on something that happened in this last election during a pandemic, right. It's not obvious it will happen. So, like, I wouldn't say take a bet that every time that you curb mayor voting that increases the Republican vote share, right. In a sense, I think it's as states will do the things, some reforms, even if they are kind of, say, being done with the intent of kind of tilting things down one party, it may kind of backfire by not happening. So then there'll be kind of this back and forth, right, so that there'll be it's there'll be room for improvement, right, especially like, you know, to returning things up for the way they were, maybe some changes will kind of stuck around because voters like it. It's actually, you know, I think there's a part of an optimistic. It's, it's not as easy to kind of, you know, tinker with electoral demonstration to get the things to go, you know, kind of tilt the scales in the direction of one party versus the other, right. I guess in the researcher from all of all the other panelists here you can see there's a lot of kind of unintended consequences things that kind of happen the way you don't quite expect it exactly to happen. There's something very interesting there which is one of my favorite article titles that has nothing to do with this is called driving with the rearview mirror. Because there's so many ways to undermine elections and so many ways to try to counter those methods of undermining elections reforms are aimed at the problems of the last cycle. Not attempting to try to guard against what are the most likely problems in the future cycle and if you're really intense much like a burglar or something like that if you're really intent on getting into the house. You might not go for the method of getting into the house that the that you know the person just set up security for right you might come up with a new method and so there are some very interesting aspects to this. Kate did you want to follow up on this too. Yeah, I will. So, I mean, I think, I think the kinds of things that the parties in civil society have been doing in Sierra Leone are kind of inherently an optimistic example but I wanted to like some pragmatic aspects of this kind of idea of experimentation is what you don't have to roll out a national reform that changes everything right I think John Marco talked about this you can start small start with a pilot this is really inherent to learning right you need to try some things and compare it to others. You can also, when you're thinking about a pilot you also you need to think about what are the strategic considerations of the people that need to participate.  So once you have one candidate signed up and a neutral party committed to broadcasting that candidates perspective. The other candidate, the cost of opting out now becomes really huge right so now if I don't participate my rival is going to get all this free campaign advertising. It's going to be particularly going to come in didn't want to show up right away, but then Jesus the challenger is going to be broadcast to thousands of voters, like you know basically no cost for that candidate I'm not going to miss this out. And then you have this coordination, or you can kind of corral everybody him right so that's kind of strategic considerations facing candidates on the campaign trail. And this idea of piloting. So that experiment where we're with the parties themselves are experimenting in how to select candidates. That did not roll out across all races at one go right so very first important steps so first of all we worked with political price registration commission which again is this is part of the government that is the regulator of party so again it's a non partisan platform. The first thing they said is you know we only have limited budget so which races would you be even willing to experiment with this new selection mechanism. Right, so then the party leaders themselves can hive off races that you know are too contentious to politically sensitive, where they are not ready to try something new, and they can pick a set of races where they are willing to experiment. And then you're the research team could come in and randomize which of those can be the new ones which are going to be the status quo right so it's kind of this idea of you know what are, what are people strategic incentives to try something new and when you're starting things from a pilot and stealing them up, you can make these strategic accommodations and compromises that is then sort of incentive compatible for everybody to participate in it. I really like that point I think that's very social scientists sort of contribution but I think it's important to think about in this context and in this conversation. I wanted to follow up on these issues associated with sort of trust and neutrality and polarization. These are issues that have come up in other countries I remember when I was election observer in Venezuela in 2004. We were basically being timed outside of polling stations and if we talk to one, one voter for 30 seconds longer than you know who's wearing a partisan color than another voter. You know, at one point we almost got arrested for for some slight difference in the time we were spent talking to different voters and these things get to a point where nobody trusts anybody. As international observers are put forward as a sort of neutral judge of the quality of elections. We've also brought up independent election commissions as a potentially important actor, several of you have mentioned this trusted organization from civil society or something like that and I wondered if you could just say a bit more about who these actors are in the context in which you've worked who is trusted who is legitimate. And when there are issues with voter confidence in the electoral process. It can that be addressed in any way that that would be useful for folks to hear about in relation to the US elections. Let's see I like going. Great, so I'll start with just a couple of comments about this I think you know I've mentioned that there is sort of this these interesting political science studies about how people can be most persuaded by by messengers with whom they share common values right so there is a reason why parties send their own observers to monitor elections and it's not just because if things go wrong they want to have been there but also because if things go right they want it to sort of be the people saying yes like this was a legitimate election right and so I think there is sort of this like, especially on violence there is this question about getting the people who are closest to the particular audience that you're targeting to reject violence to reject electoral violence right those are the most those seem to be the most trusted sources. Based on sort of like de radicalization literature and preventing the use of violence in electoral context in general I wanted to actually bring up the point that you just mentioned Susan but specifically with with relation to electoral violence which is that there have been some really interesting studies which you know well but perhaps others don't about electoral violence actually being displaced by having international monitors so that in some context international monitors can actually provide, you know, a check on these elections and so you actually are getting a displacement of violence as a strategy and I think it's important to think about like what violence is doing what a lot of these other disruption strategies are doing right. Fundamentally, they're about political exclusion, whether it's like in the initial phases where you're trying to get people not to participate in the electoral cycle, or whether it's in the later phases where you're trying to get a change in the outcome in terms of who actually comes into power and so having this, you know, observation, this third party observation can be really useful. Now that said, in some context, including in the US only certain parties really trust particular outside actors as being neutral and we've seen some cool ways that they work on this in recent years, both in the US and Tunisia by people like Sarah Bush and Lauren Prather and so I think there's really great evidence that this can at times work and it can displace violence. But who the trust for the sources are for this outside intervention or this outside of observation specifically, you know, I think might vary by context is something we would need to assess in each in each election. Yes. So on this issue of like building trust and our view of neutrality, I think we could talk a lot about like, you know, like specific steps and like authority can do to make it transparent to make it clear to make it like the you know, the ballots and the envelopes all make look trustworthy. But in, I think there's a natural limitation where at some point, you know, like, you know, the outside forces can outside the entities have to tell people these are these are valid results. I think then you really realize it say on the media on the media being perceived as independent and telling this is what the results that happened this is like this is or this was a free and fair election. And I think there's another entity we don't talk about it but it's the politicians themselves are like I think a lot of like what make a functioning democracy works is a system where the party is on their own will concede and always kind of say, this is what I lost like my my my challenger my opponent one in a free and fair place. So, you know, it's kind of easier said and done like I can say here, well, we should have an independent media that kind of makes this this work for us we should have politicians and parties that will behave. But I think it's as actors and all everybody's a political actor to some extent I think that it's important to always push on that you know let's say, of the disagreements when you see know when you see different candidates different parties taking some different positions you know that you know you can agree to agree. But I think everyone has voters as donors as civil society. We should understand like when somebody makes statements that kind of crosses the line into you know undermining election. They're really crossing a line that is very different from others right is something they know kind of undermined the democracy. So let's say, I think a lot of it makes the things work in other countries is that parties are kind of able to push out the candidates or its members that actually would be willing to make this claims I don't say when one candidate loses he can say, Oh, I didn't win for your family but maybe his other members of his party said no like you have to concede because you know next year will be next election will be someone else and we want this system to keep running the way it is. So I think there's a lot of that like it's just policing and punishing the people to try to deviate from making unfounded claims that the elections that are free and fair are not free and fair. Thomas yesterday in our planning meeting you mentioned one way in which the Brazilian government has increased trust in the electronic voting systems in Brazil. And you mentioned the hacker competition will you tell us a little bit more about that. So the Brazilian electorate. They also they try to make all the steps to make the electronic devices. So one kind of clever thing they did is they hold an early kind of hacker competition so they say like, we'll give an award to the person who come up with the most effective way to hack into the machines right. And, and I think, and then I think that's creates kind of trust in the thing a because you know they can they can show we're actually you know asking people to do their best job to undermine security so can defend it. And also because the winners of this hacking competition, they are so convoluted and so kind of they come up with things are so complex to do that it almost I say will be impossible to do right so usually it involves somebody. Say, oh I'm gonna hook up a cable to the device which obviously you know the election workers will say, oh I'm gonna kind of set up a big radio that has to be within, you know, half a yard from the polling device and then I'll interfere with the And the kind of it also shows like how hard it it would be to kind of actually engage in this right the system is very right it's not a design in a safe way right it doesn't right it's not like every device is linked to the internet and somebody can hack it is actually much more complex and it involves you know very complex ways of going about it I think that these ways of establishing confidence are really, really important and one of the things that several of you have highlighted in your comments it's just all of the ways in which creating doubt and sowing doubts about these more reliable actors can be very destructive to Democratic elections until election security so I think that's another theme that's coming out of this. Yeah, I just want to make a quick comment going back to the to the original point that that I made about turnout being one important determinant of trust in elections right and generating voting confidence so I was mentioning that there is some time persistence within individual right when you vote one time you're very likely to vote one time again the the second dimension of correlation is in the cross section right when you when you see more people around you doing something, you're also you think about it, much more carefully right and we see, we see this with vaccines right now, right, the numbers on of people who who were starting to receive a vaccine has gone in the complete opposite trend as a way vaccination has moved right and this is as some some people say that this is mostly due to the fact that once you know something who has taken up this vaccine I'm more likely to trust it. Similarly we with elections right when you see that more people are going to vote that implies that they trust the system when more people vote that that transmits much more trust. Let's see Kate you wanted to jump in on this too. I just wanted to just close out just by sharing a story about Sierra Leone so Sierra Leone was involved in a very brutal civil war that ended in 2002 and given what I some of the background I gave you about you know very intense two party rivalry and competition. So there's those first elections after the war was over work like extremely high stakes election. So the story on tell is just one about the power of individual leadership, and particularly the head of the newly formed National Electoral Commission again which is an independent government agency that oversees elections in Sierra Leone. The first director of that was a Dr. Christiana Thorpe so I'm she's just an amazing person, and a lot of ways she's worked in human rights advocating for girls education but she's also a former none and just her substance and her reputation and her leadership style, I think was just incredible for overseeing those first very contentious very high stakes elections and, and just a sense of like some of her accomplishments was there were, you know, different local elections that would be contested some with the ruling party some with the opposition party and she was seen as a fair arbiter and you know making calls and you know for the right outcome regardless of which party was contesting. And just as a sign of her accomplishment, like there's peaceful transitions of power, more actually even beyond her multiple transitions of power between the ruling party in the opposition even at the presidential level since, since the end of the war, which is actually very exceptional, just in the neighborhood of Sub-Saharan Africa. So, you know, it's a story it's not an experiment but it's, I think there's a lot of potential for people's trust in a particular leader and their reputation and the approach they bring to the office that they have that can, that can really do, can really do a lot in terms of building trust and legitimacy in the system. I think that's, that's very much interesting. And it's curious for me to think about just from what I know of US elections just who who might be able to play that role in the context of the US elections we did get a question from from the audience about whether this from Michael campus about whether international election monitoring should be used now more than ever when questioning election security and whether it should focus less on their assessment with an eye towards an international audience for that assessment and more towards the domestic population. That does seem to be like a question that is too cited. Sure, the international election observers can target their assessment towards domestic audiences, but that doesn't mean that they'll listen. And so this notion of sort of credible actors and thinking through, you know, who, who US audiences who audiences around the world when you're in a political context in which mistrust has grown distrust has grown very high. How can you reestablish trusted sources of information and I do think I want to throw out here at the risk of throwing our panelists off off guard a little bit. One of the other questions that we got from the audience which is from Ben Greenberg from vote shield. And the question is that disinformation around election fraud, even when no evidence exists is a relevant issue for the US and other countries. How can governments maintain public trust when their legitimacy is threatened by an unprecedented media ecosystem. And so just if I can just expand slightly on the question and say that I know that the current media environment is something that is also affecting elections in a lot of other countries around the world. There's, you know, micro targeting of disinformation from abroad, there is efforts to sort of splinter and discredit the media. A lot of the things that are happening in the US are happening in other countries as well. Including this issue raised by Ben Greenberg about about disinformation around election fraud, which can of course come from domestic sources or international sources and so it is a follow up question on this question of trust, but specifically related to the media ecosystem so I don't have any of you want to chime in on this or if I'm if I'm allowed to see if any of you want to want to jump in. I guess, I almost want to ask our distinguished host Janet Napolitano she has evidence on this but she's, I don't want to put her on the spot. There's a lot of, there's a lot of ways in which the media environment I think is changing in a lot of countries in the world in which scholars are still catching up with so Yeah, I think maybe I think yeah I think what I think was hard for us to kind of jump in and talk is is because it's unprecedented social sciences still kind of grappling with like, what is like how like how this is different and how to deal with that and I think how to kind of push back on this I say like so what is the best way to fight you know the spread of this information online right should be like use spread fact checking back to people online. Can we kind of rely entirely on on the traditional media to kind of say no these things that we know are circulating in your social media groups are false right, but I think because it's new it's we're still kind of grappling a lot with how to deal with this right. Well, I'll chime in and say, you know, one of the very earliest reports from an international observer group that I've that I've located is from the 60s, an observation mission by the organization for American states I believe it was in the Dominican Republic includes basically a complaint about a disinformation effort that there was a rampant rumor going around that these ballot envelopes that voters had to open to sort of access their ballot contained a flammable powder, so that they would like explode in their face and this is in the 60s right this is. And it was apparently disinformation and a rumor as far as the report could tell so in some ways some of these trends might be just more prevalent in terms of the damage that disinformation can do so this was, you know the thing I'm talking about in the Dominican Republic is just an isolated incident. But, but in some ways maybe the new thing is is how expansive it is and how many people it's influencing Isla. Yeah, I was just going to say that I do think there is a particularly important role for the media in a lot of these electoral processes and thinking about election violence in particular, you know these ties between politicians and armed groups. And others have written, you know, in the US context, for example, that these are often left. So, so Paul standalone and I were in our work we just find these as being either over or covert links and often both politicians and armed groups want to keep them covert. And then also in terms of like whether it's direct or indirect support so indirect support might be something like targeting a particular politicians opponent. Right, versus like actively supporting that politician by giving them funds or something so if you have indirect participation, and it's covert. The only way to find this is by producing more information right and so there are certainly government structures that sometimes investigate this but we've also seen a lot of these cases around the world be identified through the media. So there is now this like unprecedented media ecosystem as the questioner says but there is also this really important role for the media to play in many cases in sort of identifying some of these links. And, you know, and actually bringing them to light and so it's kind of a fine line and as Thomas says I think we're still sort of in the early days of figuring out exactly what the role is there and how to get sort of the best role in terms of strengthening democracy. There's so much that we could cover and I think that there's another question I kind of want to circle back to that touches on a lot of things that you all have brought up already. But I'm again just trying to push push along this comparison with with us and thinking about problems that, as I said in my introductory remarks, feel like things that people are paying attention to again in the US as problems that are that are new ish that the US had historically but is experiencing again. And these are problems associated with foreign interference in elections in the past few election cycles, false accusations of election fraud concerns that election violence would disrupt the pre election concerns before the election that election violence will be used to disrupt election day and violence in the post election period and so I'm wondering if our panels can turn to this question. Yes, so foreign intervention in elections can have effects, negative effects on two dimensions, one on on whether they are actually effective at affecting the election outcome through different ways, hacking or whatever. But second on on how it triggers public discourse right and here I think we have something to learn from the experience of Latin America in the past like 60 or 70 years, right so so in the in the past few few elections. And whenever there is a leftist candidate fielded, there are always claims about financing coming from from Venezuela in the in the past, going back to the 60s, 70s, 80s associations with Cuba. And, and the danger with that is is that it drives the focus away from from what we should actually be focusing on right so so it triggers a debate based on on basically what what could be considered as a rumor so and in here the hard question is again how can we go back from these discussions about rumors to to programmatic politics right and and there some experiences from from other countries I mean Thomas has done fantastic research in Benino on on on how like encouraging politicians to discuss a programmatic issues to generate much more trust among people increases turnout and so on I mean he can tell his business much better than I but we should not only focus on on on trying to to get at the point of the intervention right so we're talking about about Russian hackers. So we put together the correct safeguards, but also all the stuff that is coming up in the media later that they've heard us from from discussing substantive vision. You know, I do want to connect the answer this question to things, things that I was already talked about and we have a few other questions from from the audience I just want to introduce very briefly. I can address some of them and we'll see if the panelists have things to say. The first is from on COTO from the Zambia statistics agency who asks whether there are machine learning applications that could be used in advance to prevent election fraud. I'll start I guess by saying that. That's one other question to I'll just put you out. This is from Grace Gordon from UC Berkeley. How do countries around the world handle the harassment of election officials. I'll say that I have, I'm part of a group, thinking about how to push for nonpartisan election administration in the US and the reports back from election officials are that there are experiencing significant harassment in this cycle or that this is something that's a really major problem, and many going back to some of the comments that the panelists made earlier about good candidates running for office. Anecdotally what we're hearing in the US is that a lot of pretty good election administrators are quitting right that they're they're saying they've had enough of their families being harassed and targeted with threats of violence and really being accused of being partisan when in fact they're they're doing their job by most accounts. So I wanted to throw those two questions out there on the on the first question about machine learning I wanted to also mention that one of the more terrifying statistics I've heard about disinformation is that because it can be produced. Using AI and using various algorithms that you can have like just the amount of disinformation on YouTube about elections around the world. That's auto produced is is more than any of us could like then humans can even listen to write the volume far exceeds human capacity to monitor it. In that sense, it's not election fraud it's not directly addressing the question but I do think it's interesting to think about the problems associated with elections in which machine learning applications as well as some some other forms of more advanced technologies might be very helpful. And that's one area that the sort of combating disinformation where it just seems necessary because humans are not going to be able to deal with it. I do think that there's there's a lot of things that we could talk about here, but let's see Kate do you want to reference some of the election fraud. Sure. Yeah, I mean I think to our colleague from the the the statistics office. So this is not directly in response to the role of machine learning but just is kind of a slightly lower tech example like there have been a lot of studies where kind of the more classical election fraud like ballot stuffing and you know just, you know, a wholesale theft has been detected after the fact really by sort of statistical anomalies like, you know, there's too many people have ordered or the kind of patterns of numbers like there's too many numbers that actually had random numbers between one and nine maybe sort of uniform distribution but when people make up numbers like to report numbers they tend to like overstate certain numbers so you can kind of, there have been these studies that sort of these forensic statistical studies that sort of can detect fraud after it's happened I know your question is more about preventing fraud but I think one of the kind of promises of, you know, just sort of data you know big data and data analysis in general is it can be done very quickly right so if you can think of ways that it can be happening in real time. Maybe it doesn't prevent someone from trying but you could probably pick it up and coming back to like Thomas's points about electronic voting like there's a lot of analysis that can be done in real time. And if you know you had a monitoring team that could come in, you know, very quickly, it might have a preventative role as well as but in addition to sort of this complimentary exposed kind of forensic analysis. Yeah so I was going to say related to this not exactly addressing that question either but thinking about in general how we get like data on what's going wrong in elections I think electoral violence can be one of the things that's actually most difficult to get data on and so we actually have a large scale where we're looking at different mechanisms for doing this we're looking at household surveys, surveys of leaders, and then also like monitors sent to different places, plus what's widely available right now is like media reports on where there's electoral violence just even how do you actually measure and get a grasp of violence, let alone fraud or these other types of inherently hidden influence is I think really one of the trickiest questions and one of sort of the places that I hope the field is going to spend more time thinking about. And definitely something that now is newly relevant to the US I think you know as as you mentioned Susan I think we're all being asked to think about the US elections. For the first time, perhaps in our careers, because some of these issues really do pick up but I think actually detecting not only fraud but all of these other types of like influence the elections can be really difficult we see cool protest data now collected in a variety of ways and I think we'll be seeing more of this on electoral violence specifically committed by the state as well, going forward. Thank you, Ila Jean Marco did you want to add to this. Yeah, I mean, I don't have much to say about machine learning applications but I wanted to comment on on Kate's point about the analysis of electoral data and how can that help us detect early election fraud by bringing up the example of the last Bolivian election right so so they data can be very useful, but it has to be used well. It can be extremely dangerous if it's not right and the example of the Bolivian election I think is is very informative. What happened is that Evo Morales was running for for reelection. I think that by the evening of the election, he was losing by quite a bit. Suddenly there was an information shut down for a few hours when when information started flowing again. Evo Morales ended up winning by a relatively large part. No one stopped and did a very careful data analysis is the one Kate was suggesting, but but some electoral observers and not only the Organization of American States, if put out a statement saying this this change in the in the results in so few hours is is suspicious and that was used as a as a data point to to push Evo Morales as a as a Evo Morales selection as a fraud and to dismiss the whole process. Actually, there's been studies from researchers at the University of Houston showing that that it was not the case right the distribution was quite uniform. I've seen a lot of backing forth among academics on that election in particular. We're we're nearly to the end of our time here and I wanted to bring up one potential elephant in the room that we haven't addressed very explicitly but is definitely coming up in some of the questions we're receiving from the audience and it. It relates to the sort of utility of focusing on reforms in elections. When one of the political parties is refusing to abide by democratic rules and norms and is really going hard in the direction of authoritarianism. This and other trends that are really more related to democratic backsliding more than they are related to election security are of great interest to many of us to me to me. And it is perhaps a good closing thought to think about lessons that the US can learn from the rest of the world, not just about getting election procedures right, but also the ways in which at the same time there's a need to focus on what can be done to combat this problem associated with a major political party and or large swaths of voters just themselves no longer carrying that much about democratic elections or democracy. If you get the procedures right and that other phenomenon is going on. It's hard to think that the procedures and getting the procedural aspects right are going to save us so I wanted to close with that somewhat depressing but I think very important and please join me and in thanking our panelists and thank you and Jonathan for bringing us all together as well as the staff and see who ran all of this. Thank you. And Susan, I want to thank the panelists to this was great that fascinating discussion. I appreciate all of your participation and some of the questions raised and issues discussed. Good afternoon. Welcome everyone thanks for joining us today for the keynote panel of our free and fair elections symposium. I'm Janet Napolitano, former president of the University of California and Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona. I'm now proud to be a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley. And we are establishing there a new center on security in politics. And coming to the university this past year I founded the center in order to connect the security studies that are being done by the amazing faculty at Berkeley with policymakers and elected officials who can ensure real world change. Today symposium brings together those on the front line of the critical nexus between election issues and the conduct of our elections which really goes through the fundamentals of our democracy. Following the speakers we will take questions so submit those via Facebook or use the form on the website you use to register. This panel features election officials and some of the key battleground states from the 2020 election. Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan will also be hearing from a leading official from the Department of Homeland Security. Last November, all eyes were focused on today's panelists and how the elections in their states were being conducted. Officials not only faced intense scrutiny, but had to confront a series of unsuccessful lawsuits, among other things. Today we'll take a look back at this incredibly turbulent time and look ahead to see how we can confront pending legislation in the states and across the nation that seeks to change the way we conduct elections, and ultimately think forward to 2024. So it's my pleasure now to introduce our outstanding panel of experts. Jocelyn Benson is Michigan Secretary of State, where she works to ensure that Michigan elections are secure and accessible. Jocelyn is the author of State Secretaries of State Guardians of the Democratic Process, the first major book on the role of the Secretary of State in enforcing election and campaign finance laws. Katie Hobbs is the Secretary of State from my home state of Arizona. Previously, Katie served in the Arizona House and in the Senate as Minority Leader, and she now focuses on ensuring that Arizona elections are secure and fair and efficient. Josh Shapiro was elected as Pennsylvania's Attorney General in 2016. Josh previously served three terms in the Pennsylvania State House and was twice elected to County Commissioner in Montgomery County. And Matt Masterson is a non resident policy fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory. He recently served as Senior Cyber Security Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he focused on election security issues, and he also served on the US Election Assistance Commission. So thank you all for sharing some time with us this afternoon. So let's harken back to last fall when you were preparing for the 2020 elections. And I'd like to explore with you two things. One is, did you take any special actions in light of then President Trump's contention that the only way he could lose the election was if it were rigged. In order to make sure that you could prove the opposite if that were the case. And the second thing I'd like to explore with you is how you dealt with COVID and changes in your states on election procedures. So Secretary Benson, why don't we start with you and the great state of Michigan. You want me to take both those or just the first right now. Watch take the first one. Okay, so yeah, I mean we saw early on that there were going to be that misinformation was really going to be the biggest threat to election security and misinformation particularly perpetuated by those in our country with perhaps the largest platforms of anyone. This question of how you protect voters minds from being infiltrated by lies, in a way that would ensure that still be able to have confidence rightly place confidence in the security of the elections was one of the most significant things that we were planning to tackle throughout the year of course things changed a year ago today when we got our first cases of the coronavirus reported in Michigan about two hours after the polls closed and our presidential primary which was also a year ago and I'll talk about that later with regards to the misinformation coming from the president at the time and the threats and the challenges which we in Michigan really experienced multiple ways throughout the last the past two years. Our focus was really on three things number one building the infrastructure to ensure that our elections were successful. We made decisions to particularly post COVID make sure citizens knew their options to vote that they had confidence in exercising those options and that the infrastructure itself was secure, and the tabulation process as well was efficient and secure. The second pillar was to make sure that we educated voters about that infrastructure so that they knew proactively what their options were to vote and also that they could have faith and know everything we are doing to secure their vote. That enabled us to prepare for the third pillar which was countering misinformation and overall securing that the process and in many cases leading up to the election efforts to put robocalls and robocalls to our voters and things like that didn't land in Michigan because we had already effectively educated so many voters about how to vote absentee for example or vote through the mail that efforts to deter that were not really successful and that were quickly reported to us so that we could hold those bad actors accountable. But finally, the biggest challenge was really after the polls closed and we knew from the moment the polls closed to the moment we had our unofficial results announced in Michigan that there would be a space for bad actors, particularly the then president to sow seeds of doubt quite intensely about the results of the election or to question it or to declare victory. And so we planned for that by with transparency and with efficiency, we threw out every step of the way every moment from when the polls closed when we had our unofficial results which is actually only about 24 hours before work to increase the efficiencies of the tabulation process. We delivered content to the national and local media through social media to our voters about exactly what was happening exactly what we were doing to tabulate and protect the vote. And so that we were able to also announce the results the unofficial results two days sooner than we had predicted and then everyone was anticipating. So that at least in Michigan really stymied the efforts of bad actors to use that period to sow seeds of doubt of course we know after the fact that the full two months or three months remaining were used in very creative ways to through a PR campaign and other ways just to file lawsuits to without any evidence to try to undermine again the people's voices in the process. But the work throughout the year that we had done to really solidify the process and sure it was secure ensure people had faith in it and participated in it and then ensuring that's particular moment that we maintained control of the narrative and push the truth forward with to the security of the vote in the tabulation process that enabled us to do it successfully and really again though the the months that followed you know from the time when people showed up outside my home to you know protest and all the rest were quite challenging but we always had the truth on our side. We always had the voters and their voices to protect and also helped carry me and others through that very challenging stormy moment in November and December because of the work we had done the truth was on our side the votes had been counted securely and we knew that ultimately democracy would prevail. That's great Katie. Um, you know, as the elections are very different from state to state but I imagine a lot of our preparations look very similar and Secretary Benson touched on a lot of the preparations they were doing in Michigan and we were doing the same things here in Arizona. She also mentioned going into the election knowing that misinformation was our biggest threat to election security. We had the same focus in Arizona. And so it was really important that we were focused on what we were going to do to combat that we engaged very early with the National Association of Secretaries of States trusted info campaign to help make sure we were pointing voters and the public to those trusted sources of information and that they knew where to get the accurate information and we continued throughout the entire process from our presidential preference election all the way through beyond the election in November, continuing to put out information through social media and other avenues to to give voters information to explain the processes to show all the ways that we were transparent and that people could participate in the processes so that they part of how we keep them fair. And, and then we created a series of resources after the election, focused on what was happening to demystify the process and really just continue to combat all of that information and and quite frankly, we say misinformation but it's lies there were so many lies about the election and, and that is still happening here in the state of Arizona. And so, so really putting together a robust public education campaign was one of the most important pieces of election preparation, particularly when you put the COVID pandemic on top of that, which I think really serve to amplify the misinformation and the potential for voter confusion. Yeah, that's, that's, that's right. We'll circle back to COVID in a minute. Josh, you were the Attorney General. What were you doing before the election to prepare and were you working with your fellow state attorneys general? Was Daga involved or Raga or can you tell us what was going on? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, it really is just an honor to be here with everyone. I mean, we, we saw in this last election, just how fragile our democracy can be. And, but for a handful of secretaries of state judges and attorneys general and governors across this country, the results really could have been catastrophic. And it really is just an honor to be with these great defenders of democracy. And I watched them enough on TV. It's really wonderful to now be with them for this conversation today. And for us, you know, we were dealing with many challenges. Madam Secretary, you touched on these at the beginning, right? For us, the four big challenges were of course COVID, which everyone was dealing with. Trump and his enablers willing to just lie and Katie's right to call it what it is. These are lies, not just disagreements or misinformation. We had another challenge in Pennsylvania in that we were dealing for the first time with a new law that allowed for vote by mail. Other states were far more advanced than we were on that. And so for us, you know, we recognize coming out of our primary, which was pushed back. It was in June, very late primary due to COVID. And we needed to really get our house in order and get prepared for what I expected to be certainly an onslaught of lies, but also an onslaught of litigation leading up to the election before any vote would be cast. And so I took my team together, both the folks who do affirmative litigation are appellate folks are criminal folks, as well as our civil folks and we established three teams leading up to election day. We called them team A was the team that would take us until 659 a.m. on election day. Team B was our election day team to ensure that we had a safe and smooth elections, primarily our criminal folks. And then team C was going to be the folks who are going to have to likely litigate the results. So first we wanted to secure and protect every vote leading up to election day, ensure that people had a smooth day on election day, and then post election day make sure that all votes were counted. That that team worked diligently we communicated multiple times every single day, we're needed. I relied on my colleagues across the country, including the amazing Dana and Nestle from Michigan and many others who were dealing with some of the the same legal challenges that we expected to be dealing with in Pennsylvania and ultimately did we had to beat back 19 lawsuits from Donald Trump and his enablers before a single vote was counted. Pardon me cast, and then we had to deal with another 21 lawsuits, once those votes were cast, including some lawsuits that took us all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. At the end of the day, we had a safe and smooth election. At the end of the day, each and every legal vote was counted here in Pennsylvania. But I think it's also a truth that at the end of the day. There's some real damage that was done to our democracy. And we've got to do some truth telling here in Pennsylvania and across this country to repair the damage that was done by Donald Trump and his enablers who are still working to not just repair what happened in 2020, but make it harder for people to vote going forward. I'm sure we'll get into all that but you know that's, that's how we prepared going forward with those three teams. And ultimately, we proved to be successful in making sure every single legal vote was secured protected and counted here in the Commonwealth. You know, we've been talking about the pre election contentions by President Trump and his enablers, but I think before the election, the some thought what were the Russians going to be doing, had they just gone away since 2016. Matt, can you kind of bring us up to speed about what was going on in that in that score. Absolutely. And I want to echo what the Attorney General said this is such an honor for me to be on this panel with folks that I had the privilege to work so closely with like Secretary Hobbs and Secretary Benson. This election, in many ways is is a tribute to the incredible integrity of our election officials both the secretaries of state but the thousands of election officials at the state county township city levels that knew their job. They knew that it was up to them to uphold our democracy and did so with courage with bravery in the face of threats lies and everything else and so I hope as we reflect on 2020 there's obviously that the incredible negatives, but also the negatives of the professionalism integrity and bravery of our election officials, including the two secretaries of state here, including Secretary Sugasky in Nevada, or Megan Wolf in Wisconsin, or Tina Barton in Michigan I mean there's just so many that stood up and fought for the negative of the process to get to your question. It really is the perfect lead in. For three years, those of us at the Department of Homeland Security at SISA worked closely with the secretaries of state state election directors local election officials to prepare for what we thought and anticipated would be foreign interference in the election whether that's in the form of targeting election systems right trying to hack systems or dis info or a hybrid of the two right claiming that they had access to things and spreading misinformation, and it turned out all of the communications channels all the preparation, the amount of red teaming and tabletop exercising that we did with the state and local election officials proved to be invaluable. In our experience at SISA in combating the domestic disinformation that we ended up seeing around this election. The channels of communication we established where we had, for instance, an information sharing and analysis center that can reach 3000 plus election officials and virtually real time with information about threats risks. Narratives was coming about proved to be critical for us, not just to secure the infrastructure as Secretary Hobbs talked about, but to share information about what were the growing narratives and to push facts about the process. So, Russia had an ongoing continues to have an ongoing campaign to undermine our democracy. That's not going away in fact, you know, it's more brazen in many ways because of what's happened in 2020 and the narratives that they can build off of from this most recent election in the We saw Iran get involved in the lead up to the election sending messages directly to voters trying to discourage them from voting, purporting to be from the proud boys. And those are all things that we prepared for and talked about with state and local election officials and as both Secretary Benson and Secretary Hobbs talked about the establishment of election officials as that trusted source of information that trusted info 2020 campaign proved to be absolutely critical, not just in the lead up to the election but afterwards to rebuff that the lies, the misinformation that was being spread about the election and for those of us at the Department of Homeland Security. Really, our job was to raise up those voices to support those state and local election officials regardless of where the misinformation was coming from and to push the facts so for instance, in the aftermath of the election we established it's just something called a federal where we were really just publishing facts about the elections process based on emerging narratives that we saw and the best example came from Secretary Hobbs state with Sharpie gate. The claim that Sharpies that were handed out in Maricopa County were intentionally being used in validate. In this case Republican ballots, when in fact Sharpies were the preferred marking device to ensure that votes were counted had no impact on the result but we saw that narrative take off when blue check marks picked up on it and started pushing that narrative and so we put up on our electoral facts that your vote would be counted that Sharpies are an appropriate marking instrument and that in fact that the election officials across the country ensure that those votes would be counted and for us at CISA that was our role. That was our job to support those election officials that for three years we had been grinding away to build security to build resilience but more importantly not just do the work but talk to voters about it and election officials over and over and over again in the lead up to the election talked about how the process may be different but the integrity of the process remains that the votes will be counted as cast and that you could have confidence in the results of the election and I'm really proud of the work we did together. It wasn't necessarily the Russians or the Iranians in the end that we were pushing back against but all that preparation and work was critical in being able to push back against the lies in this election. That's really interesting so you were using the tactics that you had designed for foreign interference for domestic interference in a way. Go ahead.  And so being able to push and really pre bunk and the job that state local election officials did just messaging over and over again about how the process worked, what changes took place, what steps they've put in place to secure the election were really critically important in pushing back against the narratives we saw emerge, whether regardless of where they were coming from right and so, you know, it was that proactive work by the election officials that the constant appearances and messaging to voters that proved to be really critical in the end. If, if I can just jump is it okay to go ahead, Josh. Because I think it's a really important point that brought up and and that was really important work but I want to give you an example of what happened here in Pennsylvania. Notwithstanding the good work that many of the folks who worked in the federal government we're trying to do, we were facing just a tremendous amount of misinformation coming from the White House officially and from the present. This is a concrete example in Luzern County which is in the northeastern part of our state. Before we could figure out what was really going on. The president former presidents, I guess, I don't know whatever she was called the press secretary communications director. Acting in her official capacity in the White House complained about how a dozen or so ballots that were cast for Donald Trump were thrown away in Luzern County. And immediately we were facing this firestorm of, of, you know, what turned out to be misinformation but where we were trying to get a handle on what it was that they could possibly be talking about. We manipulated at the Department of Justice, the process of communicating with the public about what was going on there. Clearly his spokeswoman manipulated what was happening that the blue checks is Matt talked about, you know, we're working over time, when in fact, when my office was able to get involved talked to the local district attorney's office, talked to the local United States Attorney's office. And they thought that we had a, you know, basically an overzealous volunteer who accidentally tossed out a ballot when they thought they were tossing out the application, and they were immediately instructed by these good workers in the county to leave all of the information right there in the receptacle until law enforcement could come and determine what actually happened and make sure that no votes were ultimately thrown out, which is what occurred. So that's the kind of misinformation that we were dealing with day in and day out that we had to have units, not just of lawyers but of communications professionals, pushing back on that so that we could make sure people had faith in the process faith in our institutions in Luzern County or through the Secretary of State's office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and, you know, imagine going through that not dealing with foreign actors who wanted to try and undermine our system.  Yeah, I remember hearing about the 12 ballots in Pennsylvania. So, so in the midst of this kind of swirl of misinformation and preparation that you all were doing COVID hits. And I think it would be interesting to hear what impact that that had that change your dates for ballots, did it change your mail in procedure. How did, how did you handle COVID. Sorry, Secretary Benson, maybe. Yeah, as I noted, one year ago today, we had our presidential primary in Michigan. And one year ago at 10pm Eastern about two hours after the polls closed and we had a very successful election with high turnout and all the rest. Governor called and said she was about to announce the first two cases of COVID had come to Michigan. And from then on everything changed and notably we had three subsequent elections scheduled in Michigan local school board elections in May and about 10% of the state, a statewide primary in August and then of course November. And so we had to make two immediate decisions. One, really to adjust and adapt, but two, to not postpone me knowing that everything we did was going to set a precedent for how democracies reacted in times of in times like these in times of crises. And so importantly, we, I knew I felt that if we postponed an election or canceled it as many called on me to do for those May elections, we would be creating a precedent that that's what you do in times of crisis and I felt it was important at a time of great uncertainty when so many things were changing to be able to give voters the clarity and the certainty that their elections would proceed. And I did that not only with an intention of May and making sure we also used may as an opportunity to learn how the success to pilot things it was a local election. Let's, we made a decision to instead pilot multiple ways of cast of sending out ballots and returning ballots and tabulating ballots in a way that would adjust to this new life under the pandemic. But also to give voters the confidence it gets back to the misinformation we were thanks to the folks at CISA and the federal support. We were in a constant state of preparing for an influx of misinformation to come to our state. And we anticipated the pandemic would just make that even more of a fertile ground. And so I didn't want November to come and have people put out misinformation that the election was going to be canceled or postponed and for people to believe that because they had experienced it in previous months. So that was really important and then the second thing we did was just really double down on voter education also in line with giving voters the confidence and certainty that they could vote without risking their health providing PPE for all of our election workers in the and beginning to acquire the resources to do that early on for all three elections that we had educating voters about how to vote from home, which thanks to the voters actions in 2018 where they amended our state constitution to give themselves a right to vote absentee or vote from home. Without a reason we just doubled down on our efforts to educate citizens about how to access that right because it was new so I mailed every registered voter an application on to to vote on with information on how to request their ballot to be mailed to them. Was that controversial to raise. Well interestingly at the time where we said let's just mail everyone an application, because others were doing that in other states but also because the data showed that was the best way to educate someone about how to request to vote by mail, how to vote absentee, we thought well what if they get this mailing and they don't know they're not thinking about an election they're not thinking about November. And we don't really it has there's no context for it and it therefore just lands and doesn't really impact or educate. And thankfully, quote unquote, the president at the time decided to tweet at me getting you know lots of national fervor about sending out these applications and that actually worked to educate voters about their ability to vote. I think we've seen with a lot of more misinformation that we've encountered, but notably, more people voted absentee in our November election than ever before 3.3 million of the 5.5 million who voted, and we have those those who amplified that option through various means to make for making sure voters knew how to vote from home safely and also that if they chose to vote in person because they had that option that that be met with PPE clerks and election workers and with PPE to protect their health and safety if they voted in person so you know also in your constant conversation with other secretaries around the country we have weekly calls with the other secretary sharing best practices sharing what we were learning as we were managing the elections really put us all in a position to have a successful election in November because we had to engage every day every month every election as an opportunity to prepare and learn and really perfect for the lack if you can say even that it's like you know really put us in the best position possible to succeed in November with all that we learned and really focused along the way. So the former president gave you a hand. Well, yeah, I don't. All I can say is that it was not without its challenges I certainly didn't welcome that attention or that those threats that really just escalated throughout the year in a way that was, which was, you know, not enjoyable. But I tried always see the bright side and so notably it did amplify this right that citizens had in Michigan to vote by mail and vote absentee, and really, I think was part of what led so many people to ultimately decide to do so throughout the year. Yeah, yeah, Katie how about Arizona. As long as I'd vote by mail for many years but did did you make any changes in light of COVID. And well our top priority, the top priority of my administration has always been to increase voters ability to participate in democracy. And so that didn't change with COVID it became more pressing, because on top of of ensuring that we were expanding that process, and we wanted to make sure that voters didn't have to choose between that participation, and their health and safety. And so vote by mail was a was a key component of of what we did in terms of the, the election and the pandemic and health and safety. So, so we've had no excuse absentee voting in Arizona since the early 90s, and voters in Arizona can either request a one time early ballot for whichever election they prefer, or they can sign up for our permanent early voter lists about 75% of registered voters of both parties are on that permanent early voter list so they're sent a ballot by mail for every election that they're eligible to vote in. And so we asked the legislature early on while they were still in session to give us permission to, to basically implement universal vote by mail for the November for the August primary in November elections and the legislature wouldn't sign up for that conversation. But what we did was ensure that every single voter who wasn't already signed up for the permanent early voter list received communication either through our office or their county elections office, getting that application to either have the permanent early voter list, or request their early ballot for the August and November elections and so every voter was getting that information. So, as an option to to vote by mail and vote safely. But we also coupled that with looking at other ways that we could expand early voting opportunities in our state, along with voting by mail we also have early voting that starts seven days before the election. And there's a lot of areas of Arizona that are very underserved by the Postal Service and so we knew that making early voting more accessible in those areas was going to be really critical in order to not disenfranchise voters in those communities and so we expanded the early the secure early ballot drop off options. And I think we purchased about 84 new boxes for the state so that was on top of what counties already had in place. And, and, and then, as Secretary Benson mentioned of course we work to secure all of the necessary protective supplies for voters and poll workers. And, and Secretary Benson also talked about, you know, learning the lessons from the one election and applying it to the subsequent election so by the time we got to November. I think we were experts at election, conducting elections during a pandemic we also had our presidential preference election almost a year ago is the 17th so a week from from now a year ago and have three elections in in 2020 and I would say that the work that we did with all of those preparations and ensuring that voters could vote safely was successful evidence by the the record turnout in all three of those elections. And, and none of those preparations would have mattered if we weren't able to continue to educate the public about what we were doing and how they could participate safely and just continue to push back against the misinformation because, as I said earlier, the pandemic really served to amplify the amount of misinformation that we were having to deal with. Yeah, yeah. Josh what was going on in Pennsylvania and I have a particular question now, wearing your attorney general hat. There is a legal dispute as to whether anybody other than the legislature can make changes to election procedures and the conduct of elections and even in the circumstances that we had last year with with the pandemic. Did Pennsylvania have a lawsuit that raised that issue. Yeah, and I'll give you a little bit of background on that that's, that's a great question. So, so first I mean that the underlying issue of cove it is directly related to the question. You just raised actually just stepping a half a step back in 2019 prior to coven our state legislature with more Republican votes than Democratic votes past act 77 our vote by mail statute and so it allowed people to cast their ballots from home or wherever through through the mail. And a few months later, coven hits are primary, which would normally have been in April was pushed back until June, many people voted safely and securely by mail. Following that, we faced a couple more challenges. What happened was, we got notification from the United States Postal Service that they would not necessarily be able to deliver election mail on time. That was within the framework that was required upon hearing that there was a legal action taken by the governor, appealing to our United Pardon me to our state Supreme Court, asking to make sure that ballots that were post legal ballots that were post marked by election day could be counted so long as they were received by the Friday after election day. And the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, relying on state law and relying and dealing with the reality that the US Postal Service had laid out for us indicated that those ballots could be received and could be counted so long as they were post marked by election day. That's the subject of some litigation that went up to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices refused to step in and overturn the state Supreme Court on multiple occasions. But it turned into a talking point for Donald Trump and his enablers back to the point that was making before about, you know, the disinformation allies campaign. And so they were able to spin that as a tale suggesting that somehow this was going to be the reason why the election should be overturned from a pure mathematical perspective there were more than 7 million votes cast. And so Biden won the election here in Pennsylvania by over 80,000 votes, and that batch of ballots that was post marked by election day and received, you know, up to that Friday afternoon during that three day window during that three day window was less than 10,000 votes. So even if all of those votes happen to be for former President Trump, it would not have altered the outcome of the election. So that's what that, you know, that sort of manufactured controversy is all about. Now, the legislature is obviously now re looking at all of our election laws, I would argue they're looking at it to make it harder for people to vote but certainly if they want to look at this issue and address it legislatively they certainly can but our state Supreme Court ruled the United States Supreme Court refused to step in those ballots were legal but ultimately they were not material in terms of the overall vote total or vote difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Yeah, yeah. And we've been talking a bit about the amount of disinformation that was floating around, but I think it's fair to say that emotion emotions were running higher and higher as we got to the election and in the immediate aftermath of the election. What, what was that like were any of you ever the subject of potential violence or threat of violence. Jocelyn I think they, I think they came to your house didn't they. Yeah, I remember, you know, actually Secretary Hobbs I remember was the first that I recall making a statement about that about the threats and it was really something that we all experienced in varying ways but of course in Michigan, it really began in the spring when we had armed protesters to send on our state Capitol building with, you know, machine guns and the like and AK 47s, you know, in the chamber in the legislative chamber. So we'd been in this heightened state of intense threats and of course that you know in October, though there had been may there had been death threats made against the Attorney General myself the governor legislators. It really culminated in the kidnapping plot that was that emerged in October. So it was almost this, this, this odd normal in our state of, despite our all of our calls to the then president to really dampen down and really lead in trying to turn down the heat. So we were just getting turned up as we got closer and closer to November. And then, you know, two things happened after the polls closed one, it became very clear I was I was very, our estimates was that we'd have the election results by Friday. And what math told us with you 3.3 million absentee ballots and you have this many machines it'll take 80 hours to tabulate them we were able to increase machines and people so that we could cut that time in half and have our results in 24 hours after the polls closed on Wednesday. But notably I think there had been plans in place for violence people showed up at outside the place where the ballots were being tabulated in Detroit they showed up in Philly they showed up in Phoenix as well. And by that point, they just didn't realize that yet we had already we had created some shifts and other things to make sure that the tabulation was done earlier than planned and earlier than announced to essentially curtail any efforts to use Thursday or Friday to try to interfere with the process. Yeah, so that violence really was something that we had anticipated that we have the threats I should say a violence that occurred in Detroit, that we had really kind of tempered a little bit. But of course then it then manifested in various other ways including people showing up outside my home one Saturday night in December. And that was particularly challenging because it took state police 40 minutes to show up, even though they knew at 8pm. People were going to show up at my house at 9pm and they had intelligence warning us that they still didn't show up until closer to 10, despite our calls and it was really the attorney general who I was, who was most helpful in, in helping us get through that that was the mayor of Detroit and the chief of police in Detroit, but it was really unnerving until I realized that these folks outside my home these folks outside TCF center in Detroit. They weren't protesting me they weren't they were protesting democracy they were protesting the results of an election they disagreed with. And so immediately I, especially in that moment in December was was emboldened to stand proudly in guard of our democracy even if that meant increased attacks towards me as a person because again it was. There's the people the millions of people who voted in our state that I had to essentially protect against those angry individuals. And, and so that kind of gave me a sense of fortitude to get through it but of course that didn't stop the escalation of the threats all the way up until what we saw happen in our capital in January 6. The bottom line for me and all of that is that this can't become everything that happened after the election in particular all those shenanigans so I can sort of call them lots of things but that's a lot of what it was it can't become the norm and our democracy we have to on both sides of the aisle define what happened is wrong, hold those accountable, who led those bad actions to fruition and really ensure that, regardless of who wins an election that we can all come together and respect the will of the voters in the future. Yeah, yeah, I'm peaceful transfer of power, no doubt. You know, Katie what was going on in Arizona. Well, a lot of the same things that Secretary Benson mentioned we had armed protesters show up at the tabulation center in Maricopa County. And for a while, they were, you know, in the parking lot between the door and how staff members got to and from their vehicles and because it was right after an election and we were tabulating ballots, and they're pretty much staff working for 24 hours. So it was very disconcerting. We had national figures who were there, inciting the crowd, very potentially inciting violence, and then when the tabulation wrapped up they decided to, you know, show up at my house and do the same thing at my house. Again, very disconcerting, but I think Jocelyn really articulated something that's been, you know, a really difficult piece of all this is that these attacks on officials and it's not just those of us in high profile positions but it is all the way down to all the staff, the poll workers, the people that work in the offices. And it is, I think a sad state of affairs where we live in a world that we have to be concerned about all of their safety but what that is really about is the safety of our democracy. And I have always known that I stood on the right side of what everything that happened in the election, that we did everything by the book and I have no concerns about the conduct of the election. And that is also what emboldens me that we did everything right and that it is our job to stand up for the truth of what we did. So while it has been very disconcerting, I have not let it deter me from what I the job that the people of Arizona elected me to do. Yeah, for sure, for sure. You know, after the election. We learned all about how ballots are certified. And the count is certified and the electors are actually chosen. I was just wondering whether any of you think there's a better or more streamlined way to get to finality there, so that there aren't all of these opportunities to, you know, intervene, so to speak. I'll jump in on that, you know, I've, I've served as an elector now three times twice for Barack Obama and now once for Joe Biden. And I've even been in the US Capitol for the, what used to be sort of the somewhat quaint and an interesting process of certifying the electors in this case on January the 6th. And, you know, one of the reasons why the system has worked in the past is because people of both parties have respected the norms in our Constitution. And no longer is that the case. In this last cycle it was Donald Trump, and who knows who it could be in the future, and who knows whether these problems will only attach to one party I'd like to think that the party that I'm proud to be associated with the Democratic Party wouldn't engage with that but what we have seen is that those firms are violated and are willing to be violated and that the oath of office people take to the Constitution is clearly not something that they are willing to honor when their job is on the line or when their buddy's job is on the line. And so to the conclusion, notwithstanding that long history, I've had of being an elector and participating in this process that we can no longer trust those processes that I think people sort of thought were quaint in the past. First off, they're a relic of an age where at least, you know, three of us on this call vote wouldn't even count in the first place. It's a relic of an age where the system was set up and designed to work for certain people and not to really include the voices of others. And so I came out very forcefully, even after serving as an elector in this process, with abolishing the electoral college I recognize that is going to take time and it's not a realistic thing that would be in place in the short term but I think it speaks to the broader issues which gets to the heart of your question which is we have to have a direct, you know, pop