1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,700 So my talk is titled, Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security. 2 00:00:04,140 --> 00:00:05,460 How's the slides coming through? 3 00:00:05,840 --> 00:00:06,020 Good? 4 00:00:06,180 --> 00:00:06,340 Okay. 5 00:00:06,920 --> 00:00:16,420 So, if you saw the program, it had a typo saying this is also the solarpunk talk, talk, but it's not 6 00:00:16,420 --> 00:00:18,600 the solarpunk talk, although I do write science fiction. 7 00:00:19,400 --> 00:00:20,340 A little about me. 8 00:00:20,780 --> 00:00:23,300 I'm a freelance writer and investigative journalist. 9 00:00:23,900 --> 00:00:26,820 My day jobs are copywriting, content marketing. 10 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:28,300 You can hire me. 11 00:00:28,300 --> 00:00:34,020 I'm most known for reporting on hacktivism, transparency, legal cases, including that of 12 00:00:34,020 --> 00:00:39,280 Jeremy Hammond, who will be presenting here this weekend, as well as whistleblower Reality Winner. 13 00:00:39,860 --> 00:00:41,780 We will talk about her shortly. 14 00:00:42,020 --> 00:00:48,440 I'm also known for analyzing and corroborating the Stratfor private spy files that Jeremy Hammond 15 00:00:48,440 --> 00:00:51,380 gifted all of us and went to prison for 10 years for. [10 years per sentencing] 16 00:00:51,700 --> 00:00:56,700 I always say that I corroborated a lot of the information in them because the corporate media 17 00:00:56,700 --> 00:00:58,040 did not bother to do so. 18 00:00:58,040 --> 00:01:01,080 They just simply said Stratfor executive says, 'blah, blah, blah,' 19 00:01:01,380 --> 00:01:02,100 the end. 20 00:01:02,680 --> 00:01:07,000 But I had bothered to, you know, find additional sources, which editors are always mad at me about. 21 00:01:07,740 --> 00:01:08,480 Too much effort. 22 00:01:08,980 --> 00:01:09,220 All right. 23 00:01:09,320 --> 00:01:14,580 So, and now probably I'm most known for, get the most retweets for, election security matters, 24 00:01:15,060 --> 00:01:17,560 particularly Coffee County, Georgia, which we will get to. 25 00:01:18,080 --> 00:01:21,340 My day job, of course, one of them is substitute teacher. 26 00:01:22,620 --> 00:01:28,720 So, if, you know, no ins and outs in the first or last 10 minutes, and if you need a hall pass, 27 00:01:28,840 --> 00:01:31,080 raise your hand, and you can sign, all that good stuff. 28 00:01:31,240 --> 00:01:31,380 All right. 29 00:01:31,460 --> 00:01:35,200 So, Mr. Lucas will write you an infraction if you don't cooperate. 30 00:01:36,100 --> 00:01:42,600 Now, on a more serious note than substitute teaching, I want to just say very briefly that a 31 00:01:42,600 --> 00:01:50,340 decade ago, I spoke on a panel here about crowdsourcing research into the private spy 32 00:01:50,340 --> 00:01:50,960 industry. 33 00:01:51,580 --> 00:01:56,160 And I was on that panel thanks to the late Kevin Gallagher, who spearheaded it. 34 00:01:56,160 --> 00:02:02,720 And I would not be here today, if it were not for him doing that, and kind of encouraging me a 35 00:02:02,720 --> 00:02:03,440 decade ago. 36 00:02:04,800 --> 00:02:10,600 So, you know, there's a lot of, there should be more talks someday about mental health, and 37 00:02:10,600 --> 00:02:14,300 activism, and drug, recreational drug abuse, and things like that. 38 00:02:14,600 --> 00:02:16,740 I'm alluding to Kevin's story. 39 00:02:18,280 --> 00:02:21,400 So sometimes I wonder what he would say about stuff I'm doing now. 40 00:02:22,020 --> 00:02:22,360 All right. 41 00:02:22,460 --> 00:02:23,260 Moving on. 42 00:02:23,260 --> 00:02:28,300 I made a 14-page recommended resource list, a PDF bibliography. 43 00:02:28,740 --> 00:02:31,280 You can find it on various pages of my website. 44 00:02:31,880 --> 00:02:33,080 It accompanies this talk. 45 00:02:33,160 --> 00:02:35,280 It gives you lots of great information. 46 00:02:36,160 --> 00:02:38,280 And it looks like this. [Technical difficulties] 47 00:02:38,980 --> 00:02:43,620 So, this is what nerdy investigative journalists do in their spare time. 48 00:02:44,080 --> 00:02:49,300 So, you can find [in the PDF], you know, a bullet[point], you know, a particular book, and why it's a good book, or 49 00:02:49,300 --> 00:02:51,540 Reality Winner, election activism. 50 00:02:51,540 --> 00:02:53,060 Oh, well, you know. [More technical difficulties] 51 00:02:53,560 --> 00:02:54,020 Life is short. 52 00:02:54,100 --> 00:02:54,560 What can you do? 53 00:02:54,620 --> 00:02:55,380 It comes at you fast. 54 00:02:55,840 --> 00:02:57,160 A quick note on terminology. 55 00:02:57,460 --> 00:03:06,000 There's several things I'd like you to take away today, and one of them is this simple term. 56 00:03:06,400 --> 00:03:11,140 We say voting computer, or we should say voting computer, and not voting machine. 57 00:03:11,800 --> 00:03:14,180 Does any of you do your homework and know why? 58 00:03:14,660 --> 00:03:14,880 No? 59 00:03:15,100 --> 00:03:15,440 Okay. 60 00:03:15,780 --> 00:03:21,460 So, a machine, you remember from physics class, does one and only one thing, like a lever or a 61 00:03:21,460 --> 00:03:22,220 pulley, okay? 62 00:03:22,580 --> 00:03:27,660 It can't be reprogrammed to swap the votes around, okay? 63 00:03:28,200 --> 00:03:31,900 But a voting computer is a universal machine. 64 00:03:32,060 --> 00:03:36,940 That's Alan Turing, pictured there, who invented the concept of computer software in 1936. 65 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:41,280 Universal machine being a machine that can be programmed and reprogrammed. 66 00:03:41,320 --> 00:03:43,840 He called it 'instruction tables', right? 67 00:03:43,920 --> 00:03:44,400 Do this. 68 00:03:44,420 --> 00:03:45,900 If not, then do that. 69 00:03:45,900 --> 00:03:51,760 So, when we say voting machine, we give a wrong impression that this is like a lever you yank, and 70 00:03:51,760 --> 00:03:53,800 it's going to do the same thing every time. 71 00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:59,460 Not that the levers weren't messed with as well in the past, but voting computer emphasizes [made for reprogrammability, and], 72 00:03:59,460 --> 00:04:03,960 Oh my god, it's going to have all these pop-ups, and I can play Doom on it during the election and all 73 00:04:03,960 --> 00:04:04,540 that kind of stuff. 74 00:04:04,880 --> 00:04:08,960 Okay, so, framing election security for today. 75 00:04:09,540 --> 00:04:13,940 That slide is from one of my favorite movies, possibly my favorite movie, 1976 Network. 76 00:04:13,940 --> 00:04:16,360 If you have not seen it, you must see it immediately. 77 00:04:17,060 --> 00:04:19,140 Neither fake news. 78 00:04:19,660 --> 00:04:26,960 So, you know, the Trumpers have said things like, 'Well, there were these Italian artificial 79 00:04:26,960 --> 00:04:32,940 satellites that were lasering the elections and stuff', and they tried to go into court with some 80 00:04:32,940 --> 00:04:33,700 of this nonsense. 81 00:04:34,500 --> 00:04:41,380 And the judges, pretty much universally, in all cases except for one minor case [in Pennsylvania], smacked them 82 00:04:41,380 --> 00:04:48,680 down, fined them, made them take remedial education on education standards, legal education, 83 00:04:48,800 --> 00:04:56,480 things like that, because when it came time to pony up and show the notarized evidence of, you 84 00:04:56,480 --> 00:05:03,680 know, under penalty of perjury, of Italian satellites, and have the other side be able to 85 00:05:03,680 --> 00:05:07,400 critique it in the courtroom, the Trumpers said, blah, blah, blah [to try to distract from lack of evidence]. 86 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:14,240 So, what they were doing is they were leveraging the lawsuits for media attention to get their 87 00:05:14,240 --> 00:05:17,200 sound bites out there, and also donations, right? 88 00:05:17,280 --> 00:05:21,360 So, that was what Sidney Powell's 'Release the Kraken' lawsuits were all about. 89 00:05:21,740 --> 00:05:26,960 So, that's one extreme of this, how it's typically, the topic is typically framed today. 90 00:05:28,120 --> 00:05:34,000 So, it's not fake news nonsense about satellites and lasers, and the elderly poll worker is really 91 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:35,540 a lizard, you know, it's none of that. 92 00:05:36,040 --> 00:05:41,520 On the other hand, the opposite framing is that our voting computers are these perfect, wonderful 93 00:05:41,520 --> 00:05:45,400 things, as wonderful as your I Voted sticker and Mount Rushmore and apple pie. 94 00:05:46,200 --> 00:05:54,680 This is exemplified by, of course, Barack Obama, who said in 2016 when Trump was starting to say 95 00:05:54,680 --> 00:05:59,980 all his crazy Stop the Steal stuff, which was very far out for a [U.S.] presidential candidate to start 96 00:05:59,980 --> 00:06:06,260 saying, Obama said, anybody who brings up rigging is not a serious person. 97 00:06:06,920 --> 00:06:07,800 It doesn't happen. 98 00:06:08,080 --> 00:06:12,200 If you want the exact quote, you want to look at my Texas Observer article on Reality Winner. 99 00:06:13,300 --> 00:06:19,600 And so, you know, even one of the federal judges Obama appointed has said that gerrymandering is 100 00:06:19,600 --> 00:06:21,800 tantamount to rigging, a federal judge. 101 00:06:22,480 --> 00:06:31,080 And Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat in Oregon, said in the Senate, Kremlin, [Senate] intelligence [committee] reports 102 00:06:31,080 --> 00:06:40,060 about the Russian cyber attacks in 2016, Wyden said, well, you know, he can't rule out hacking by these 103 00:06:40,060 --> 00:06:45,160 distant Kremlin hackers, of the changing the votes and voter registration, all that kind of stuff. 104 00:06:45,280 --> 00:06:46,860 There's no way to rule it out. 105 00:06:47,140 --> 00:06:48,860 So, it's okay to bring it up. 106 00:06:49,140 --> 00:06:53,800 You know, this audience doesn't need this kind of, like, hand-holding against these, you know, duopoly 107 00:06:53,800 --> 00:06:54,520 extremes. 108 00:06:55,020 --> 00:06:56,500 But what can you do? 109 00:06:56,560 --> 00:06:59,020 I try to write for everybody sometimes. 110 00:06:59,260 --> 00:07:02,680 Okay, so now we have more of this framing. 111 00:07:03,120 --> 00:07:08,560 The global situation we have today, really fast, you know, we have the NATO countries, the so 112 00:07:08,560 --> 00:07:14,680 -called Western countries, with the Five Eyes countries in the lead, US, Canada, UK, Australia, 113 00:07:14,840 --> 00:07:16,340 and New Zealand, right? 114 00:07:16,420 --> 00:07:20,720 So, that's all the State Department diplomatic cables [leaked by C. Manning] about Five Eyes and all this kind of stuff. 115 00:07:20,720 --> 00:07:26,200 Then we have the BRICS countries [several autocratic], Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and many others have 116 00:07:26,200 --> 00:07:29,180 joined, such as India and Egypt, and United Arab Emirates. 117 00:07:30,120 --> 00:07:32,000 I think Argentina still wants to join. 118 00:07:33,620 --> 00:07:39,960 Versus the others, just various countries, you know, like, I don't know, I better not say one, 119 00:07:40,040 --> 00:07:43,840 but countries in Africa, right, that don't really have a stake [of their own] in this kind of thing. 120 00:07:44,280 --> 00:07:48,000 Versus the public, everybody, the global -- what are we now -- 8 billion? 121 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:52,380 And, you know, of course, the quadrennial [U.S.] presidential elections get the spotlight, but [besides int'l.], 122 00:07:52,380 --> 00:07:56,600 there's also all these down-ballot [U.S.] elections for your local dog catcher and your mayor and all this kind 123 00:07:56,600 --> 00:08:02,540 of stuff, where you can have a lot more impact than you might think, [even] if you live in a non- 124 00:08:02,540 --> 00:08:03,740 swing state, for example. 125 00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:14,500 Then we have, you know, our choice between two, you know, autocrats [candidates], Donald Trump, you know, these 126 00:08:14,500 --> 00:08:18,840 are the Epstein pictures, everybody has seen those, SpookyConnections.com is on the recommended 127 00:08:18,840 --> 00:08:19,720 resource list. 128 00:08:20,180 --> 00:08:21,760 That'll really dig into him. 129 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:26,500 He [almost certainly] owes a lot of money to China, despite what he says, you can see the blog post about that on my 130 00:08:26,500 --> 00:08:26,980 blog. 131 00:08:28,240 --> 00:08:32,120 So, you know, demagoguery is a word probably all of us know here. 132 00:08:33,800 --> 00:08:39,600 His Trumpers fans, MAGA people, they don't care about Trump's [likely] debt to China, they don't care about 133 00:08:39,600 --> 00:08:45,900 any of this stuff, because they see a big, tall, tough guy who is a celebrity TV person yelling and 134 00:08:45,900 --> 00:08:50,620 pounding his chest on TV and saying he's the chosen one, and they like that, because their 135 00:08:50,620 --> 00:08:53,780 brain is no longer on file, intellectual and emotional atrophy. 136 00:08:54,240 --> 00:08:56,400 Then we have Joe Biden. 137 00:08:57,020 --> 00:09:00,860 So, you know, a lot of this is sort of remedial, but I feel like you can't really talk about 138 00:09:00,860 --> 00:09:03,460 elections without this kind of context being set forth. 139 00:09:04,780 --> 00:09:08,640 You know, there's lots of stories of creepy Biden. 140 00:09:09,560 --> 00:09:11,060 Here's, like, a typical video. 141 00:09:11,340 --> 00:09:14,860 This Ramrants Twitter user is a right-wing source. 142 00:09:15,300 --> 00:09:21,680 He kisses her three times [HOPE's cuts removed one kiss & audience gasp], like it's not just once, you know, and then like the, you know, it's 143 00:09:21,680 --> 00:09:24,400 just he says something weird [and creepy], but the audio is off. 144 00:09:25,040 --> 00:09:31,520 So this Ramrants source, you know, it has a lot of videos that are C-SPAN that need to be collected. 145 00:09:31,920 --> 00:09:32,640 What's the date? 146 00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:34,040 Who are the people in these videos? 147 00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:35,880 Call them and interview them, that kind of thing. 148 00:09:35,880 --> 00:09:44,420 But the Ramrants source does have a few that are like, you know, he quoted some news article about 149 00:09:44,420 --> 00:09:48,940 a college graduate who was kissed by Biden, but she was actually glad she was kissed, and he made 150 00:09:48,940 --> 00:09:50,240 it look like it was, you know, bad. 151 00:09:50,300 --> 00:09:53,140 So take that source with a grain of salt [and] as a jumping-off point. 152 00:09:53,520 --> 00:09:59,960 But there's a lot of smoke there that indicates a serious fire, which means that, you know, this 153 00:09:59,960 --> 00:10:05,140 presidential voter's choice between the greater or lesser evil has now mutated into the choice 154 00:10:05,140 --> 00:10:09,940 between the greater and lesser pedo, or at least the greater and lesser creeper, because we could 155 00:10:09,940 --> 00:10:11,440 use more data on Biden, I believe. 156 00:10:12,860 --> 00:10:14,180 Meanwhile, so that's the world. 157 00:10:14,300 --> 00:10:15,820 That's where we're picking from for presidents. 158 00:10:16,040 --> 00:10:16,740 That's this country. 159 00:10:18,040 --> 00:10:22,160 And meanwhile, activist organizations such as the Center for Election Science are saying things 160 00:10:22,160 --> 00:10:26,340 like, the most important thing we do as a society is to elect leaders. 161 00:10:26,920 --> 00:10:31,120 It's not bearing or raising children or composing a groundbreaking sonata or curing cancer or 162 00:10:31,120 --> 00:10:31,520 anything like that 163 00:10:31,660 --> 00:10:33,560 [all those, interactive, are "as a society"]. It's I Voted stickers every four years. 164 00:10:35,140 --> 00:10:38,900 It's really hard to work with election security topics because you're constantly reading stuff 165 00:10:38,900 --> 00:10:39,960 like that, the advertising. 166 00:10:40,620 --> 00:10:41,000 It's gross. 167 00:10:41,980 --> 00:10:44,220 All right, overview of mass collaboration. 168 00:10:44,500 --> 00:10:45,440 Is the talk over yet? 169 00:10:45,480 --> 00:10:46,260 How much time do I have? 170 00:10:46,620 --> 00:10:47,460 I better talk faster. 171 00:10:48,600 --> 00:10:50,220 Nobody's going to the bathroom or recess. 172 00:10:50,400 --> 00:10:50,880 You gotta listen. 173 00:10:51,480 --> 00:10:53,940 Okay, so mass collaboration, all right? 174 00:10:54,020 --> 00:10:58,380 So we have humans collaborating in numbers [of] more than one. 175 00:10:58,440 --> 00:11:03,640 I guess you can collaborate on your own with yourself and any sort of imagination [connecting nonlocally across spacetime] 176 00:11:03,640 --> 00:11:07,600 But with consensus, we usually start there, right? 177 00:11:07,800 --> 00:11:10,440 Consensus is voting and it has pros and cons. 178 00:11:10,880 --> 00:11:16,240 Probably the biggest pro is that it's one of the most comfortable ways for us to work. 179 00:11:16,240 --> 00:11:18,880 If you're hanging out with friends and you're like, 'Hey, what do you want to do for dinner 180 00:11:18,880 --> 00:11:19,180 tonight?' 181 00:11:19,820 --> 00:11:22,460 I mean, if you have a good relationship, that's a good conversation. 182 00:11:22,640 --> 00:11:23,540 If not, not. 183 00:11:24,080 --> 00:11:26,420 But you know, it's a comfortable thing. 184 00:11:26,460 --> 00:11:27,380 We're going to go for dinner. 185 00:11:27,500 --> 00:11:28,960 I vote for, you know, vegan. 186 00:11:29,040 --> 00:11:30,060 I also vote for vegan. 187 00:11:30,180 --> 00:11:31,260 Okay, kick out all the carnists. 188 00:11:31,320 --> 00:11:31,640 We're good. 189 00:11:32,220 --> 00:11:32,580 All right. 190 00:11:34,160 --> 00:11:36,200 Consensus also has a lot of cons. 191 00:11:36,480 --> 00:11:40,240 I think we're going to have something like a hundred and seventy million voters this November. 192 00:11:41,160 --> 00:11:44,160 And for example, I will be voting from Seattle. 193 00:11:44,300 --> 00:11:46,000 Let's say that Washington state is a swing state. 194 00:11:46,060 --> 00:11:52,700 It's not, but I'm going to go vote for Biden, who's going to appoint an appointee, who's going 195 00:11:52,700 --> 00:11:56,240 at the National Weather Service, who's going to appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to appoint 196 00:11:56,240 --> 00:12:00,020 [or hire] somebody else, who's going to make some decisions about meteorology that's going to affect people in 197 00:12:00,020 --> 00:12:00,300 Florida. 198 00:12:01,340 --> 00:12:02,080 I'm not in Florida. 199 00:12:02,080 --> 00:12:03,700 I don't know anything about meteorology. 200 00:12:03,880 --> 00:12:05,240 Why am I part of the input here? 201 00:12:05,340 --> 00:12:09,600 Why am I part of the garbage in that's creating the garbage out, right? 202 00:12:10,280 --> 00:12:11,620 So that's one of the cons of it. 203 00:12:12,460 --> 00:12:16,540 And usually advocates of, 'Hey, we got to do everything, but voting is the most important thing 204 00:12:16,540 --> 00:12:17,360 you ever do in your life.' 205 00:12:17,460 --> 00:12:22,400 Those kind of people say, 'Well, sure, you're right about these counterarguments, but the only other 206 00:12:22,400 --> 00:12:25,040 option is hierarchy, and that's gross. 207 00:12:25,180 --> 00:12:27,080 So we have to have this horrible [admittedly problematic mass consensus].' 208 00:12:27,260 --> 00:12:34,060 It's the 'Democracy is crappy except for all the others', whatever that quote is, 'is the crappiest 209 00:12:34,060 --> 00:12:34,660 except for all the others.' 210 00:12:34,780 --> 00:12:34,880 Okay. 211 00:12:34,960 --> 00:12:36,420 So hierarchy, pros and cons. 212 00:12:36,500 --> 00:12:37,980 It's really good in an emergency. 213 00:12:38,420 --> 00:12:40,180 Oh my God, the building is burning down. 214 00:12:40,380 --> 00:12:43,260 Like, I'm going to push you out the window onto the lifeboat -- 215 00:12:43,360 --> 00:12:46,840 I mixed my metaphors -- right now! Because, you know, hurry, hurry, hurry! 216 00:12:47,420 --> 00:12:49,380 It's also good for things like sports, right? 217 00:12:49,520 --> 00:12:52,740 [Which is] simulated war. Or, you know, BDSM or something like that. 218 00:12:52,760 --> 00:12:57,060 Like, it's, you know, so sometimes people have their claws out and the boxers, right? 219 00:12:57,060 --> 00:13:02,200 You can see boxers compliment each other before and after the fight, but during the fight there, 220 00:13:02,460 --> 00:13:05,180 you know, there's a definite hierarchy when you knock him to the ground, right? 221 00:13:05,260 --> 00:13:06,220 You give him a concussion. 222 00:13:06,540 --> 00:13:07,180 All right. 223 00:13:07,280 --> 00:13:13,220 So the hierarchy cons, you know, I think there's like a statement that everybody is depressed. 224 00:13:13,680 --> 00:13:17,240 Everybody who's a paid worker is depressed because they lose autonomy. 225 00:13:18,340 --> 00:13:22,680 There's like two others, [creative] control [or purpose] and mastery over their own life work or something. 226 00:13:22,780 --> 00:13:24,060 We all go to paid jobs here. 227 00:13:24,120 --> 00:13:25,800 We know the cons of hierarchy. 228 00:13:26,880 --> 00:13:31,240 So people say, well, I guess it's back to consensus then because there's no door number 229 00:13:31,240 --> 00:13:33,340 three, but thankfully there is a door number three. 230 00:13:33,820 --> 00:13:35,140 That is stigmergy. 231 00:13:35,540 --> 00:13:39,980 This is a concept not invented but developed by Heather Marsh in her Binding Chaos philosophy 232 00:13:39,980 --> 00:13:42,940 books, which everybody should read and they're in my recommended resource list. 233 00:13:43,400 --> 00:13:47,160 I'll keep it really short with just like two [three] examples. 234 00:13:47,420 --> 00:13:49,240 One is you go to a doctor's office. 235 00:13:49,340 --> 00:13:51,080 You're the only person in the waiting room. 236 00:13:51,200 --> 00:13:52,820 A puzzle is partially put together. 237 00:13:52,920 --> 00:13:53,740 The goal is clear: 238 00:13:53,880 --> 00:13:54,680 Put together the puzzle. 239 00:13:54,860 --> 00:13:57,680 Anybody in the waiting room can participate and put together the puzzle pieces. 240 00:13:57,760 --> 00:13:58,340 It's transparent: 241 00:13:58,480 --> 00:13:59,560 You can see all the puzzle pieces. 242 00:13:59,940 --> 00:14:02,700 And everybody gets to enjoy the end product, the beautiful puzzle. 243 00:14:03,060 --> 00:14:04,100 So you're sitting there puzzling. 244 00:14:04,760 --> 00:14:08,460 You're not voting with another puzzler because you're the only person in the room and you're not 245 00:14:08,460 --> 00:14:09,660 giving or taking orders 246 00:14:09,760 --> 00:14:11,020 so it's not hierarchy either. [Yet it's [collaboration with future/past puzzlers] 247 00:14:11,140 --> 00:14:17,080 Okay, we have things like this socially, finger- tapping on guitar, for example, or any sort of 248 00:14:17,080 --> 00:14:20,740 cultural thing when you know, when Eddie Van Halen was first finger-tapping on guitar, he turned 249 00:14:20,740 --> 00:14:22,580 around so that people wouldn't see his trick. 250 00:14:22,660 --> 00:14:27,700 He was trying to have a unique sales point and keep it kind of a proprietary secret, but over 251 00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:32,180 time, you know, it melted out and other guitarists started finger-tapping and they start influencing 252 00:14:32,180 --> 00:14:32,660 each other [i.e. indirectly collaborating]. 253 00:14:32,760 --> 00:14:34,360 But nobody's like voting, do you, 254 00:14:34,480 --> 00:14:39,340 Do you finger-tap with your index or your middle or giving [hierarchical] commands or orders, right? 255 00:14:39,420 --> 00:14:40,940 So we do this [stigmergy, indirect collaboration] with like slang too. 256 00:14:41,080 --> 00:14:45,540 Like the goal might be make English language better, like, say cool stuff. 257 00:14:45,600 --> 00:14:49,480 And so you hear something like, you know, 'Bet' or all this Gen Z slang, right? 258 00:14:49,500 --> 00:14:50,600 And you adopt some of it. 259 00:14:50,900 --> 00:14:52,080 So that's, like, stigmergy. 260 00:14:52,140 --> 00:14:52,860 It's [indirect] collaboration. 261 00:14:53,040 --> 00:14:56,680 You're collaborating to make the language cooler, the guitar playing cooler, the puzzle better, and 262 00:14:56,680 --> 00:14:58,240 you're not doing hierarchy or consensus. 263 00:14:58,240 --> 00:15:04,400 So boom, just smash this framework of all these [seemingly] millions of well-funded election security 264 00:15:04,400 --> 00:15:08,200 nonprofits that won't ever say this stuff with their corporate mask. 265 00:15:08,760 --> 00:15:08,880 Okay. 266 00:15:09,060 --> 00:15:13,520 So next is, I don't know why I'm looking at that when I have that here, Survey of Typical County 267 00:15:13,520 --> 00:15:16,940 Elections System. How we're doing on time? [Tech problems had eaten more time than I thought.] 268 00:15:17,320 --> 00:15:17,920 Ah, not bad. [Wrong.] 269 00:15:18,360 --> 00:15:18,560 Okay. 270 00:15:18,640 --> 00:15:29,240 So when we are looking at the election system today, what we're doing is we're studying how, you 271 00:15:29,240 --> 00:15:36,420 know, mass-scale multi-million people consensus is working in this country, right? 272 00:15:37,640 --> 00:15:39,240 And what are the pros and cons of that? 273 00:15:39,300 --> 00:15:40,340 How is it going down? 274 00:15:41,260 --> 00:15:44,060 There are 3,000-something [usually considered] voting jurisdictions in the United States. 275 00:15:44,160 --> 00:15:45,060 [But 6,000 or more if fully comprehensive] Most of them are counties. 276 00:15:45,240 --> 00:15:48,900 So people just kind of loosely call them all counties, even though some of them are townships 277 00:15:48,900 --> 00:15:50,080 or municipalities or whatever. 278 00:15:50,860 --> 00:15:52,680 So now we're going to go into this flowchart. 279 00:15:52,780 --> 00:15:54,720 This is what I was doing in my hotel room this afternoon. 280 00:15:55,080 --> 00:15:56,180 It's a work in progress. 281 00:15:56,340 --> 00:15:59,380 I aim to improve it over time and eventually put it on my website. 282 00:15:59,520 --> 00:16:01,460 All right, time to rock and roll. 283 00:16:02,040 --> 00:16:03,700 This is the voter knowledge right here. 284 00:16:03,800 --> 00:16:05,180 This is where it all starts, right? 285 00:16:05,260 --> 00:16:07,440 Knowledge is power, all that kind of stuff. 286 00:16:07,540 --> 00:16:11,780 So you have education, media, propaganda, and a big part people overlook is trust. 287 00:16:11,880 --> 00:16:16,920 They talk about, like, oh, do people like Biden's policies or do people like Trump's, I don't know, 288 00:16:17,020 --> 00:16:19,660 [his] money, you know, but it's, like, trust. 289 00:16:19,700 --> 00:16:20,820 Who do you trust, right? [Any politican? Any institution? Any data source?] 290 00:16:20,880 --> 00:16:24,860 And you want to trust but verify, but trust is a big part of this knowledge. 291 00:16:25,880 --> 00:16:30,580 We're not the best word, but in, you know, relationship, social-emotional picture is the 292 00:16:30,580 --> 00:16:30,980 trust. 293 00:16:31,740 --> 00:16:35,220 Okay, so you get pre-election tracking polls happening at this point. 294 00:16:35,340 --> 00:16:36,720 This is all pre-election stuff. 295 00:16:37,280 --> 00:16:39,180 Voter eligibility and registration. 296 00:16:39,440 --> 00:16:43,740 Here are multiple issues with that that you can find resources on in the recommended resource 297 00:16:43,740 --> 00:16:44,160 list. 298 00:16:44,540 --> 00:16:45,660 I don't need to read that aloud. 299 00:16:47,580 --> 00:16:50,020 So here we have vote capture. 300 00:16:50,280 --> 00:16:55,860 Okay, so here's a big concept that's going to help you whenever you talk about this subject from now 301 00:16:55,860 --> 00:16:56,140 on. 302 00:16:56,680 --> 00:17:01,020 Divide, you know, Gaul was all, all of Gaul was divided into three parts, but this is divided into 303 00:17:01,020 --> 00:17:01,320 two. 304 00:17:01,920 --> 00:17:03,800 On one hand is vote capture. 305 00:17:04,340 --> 00:17:06,620 On the other hand is a vote tallying. 306 00:17:07,180 --> 00:17:14,840 Okay, so vote capture is, we see the vote capture can happen at home with vote by snailmail. 307 00:17:15,580 --> 00:17:20,360 Vote capture can happen at the precinct on touchscreens or paper ballots or ballot marking. 308 00:17:20,860 --> 00:17:24,240 Vote capture can be the astronauts voting from outer space, right? 309 00:17:24,280 --> 00:17:29,300 There's a lot of registering, recording your, well, not the right word, capturing your vote. 310 00:17:29,380 --> 00:17:30,320 What did you, what did you vote? 311 00:17:30,440 --> 00:17:31,220 Who did you vote for? 312 00:17:31,740 --> 00:17:36,960 And then the other half of it down here is this vote tallying, totaling, or tabulating. 313 00:17:37,080 --> 00:17:38,700 Those words all mean the same thing. 314 00:17:38,700 --> 00:17:41,700 So you say, well, are elections secure or paper ballots good? 315 00:17:42,140 --> 00:17:45,880 Well, are you talking about the vote capture or the vote tallying? 316 00:17:45,920 --> 00:17:52,260 Because feeding paper ballots into, hand-marked paper ballots into an optical scanner is one 317 00:17:52,260 --> 00:17:57,400 thing, but the actual bubbling in with a pencil or what[not] is something quite different, right? 318 00:17:57,480 --> 00:18:00,460 And so the, maybe one is good and the other isn't or something like that. 319 00:18:00,700 --> 00:18:04,460 So vote capture on one hand, vote tallying or counting or whatever on the other. 320 00:18:05,360 --> 00:18:07,940 There's no French Academy mandating a single word. 321 00:18:08,800 --> 00:18:09,200 All right. 322 00:18:09,480 --> 00:18:10,200 [unclear]... 323 00:18:10,520 --> 00:18:14,780 Here, before the vote capture, we have election professionals readying. 324 00:18:14,960 --> 00:18:20,300 They do things like ballot design or logic and accuracy testing. 325 00:18:21,000 --> 00:18:24,120 This is the voting vendors and the election workers and the counties working together. 326 00:18:24,260 --> 00:18:28,800 Like, each county [of] these 3,000 counties is one unit or one cell of the country's system. 327 00:18:30,520 --> 00:18:33,440 Ballot design is more complicated than it sounds, right? 328 00:18:33,500 --> 00:18:38,440 Because you might have which little pixels on the touchscreen go with this candidate or something. 329 00:18:38,500 --> 00:18:42,860 And if you look at the story of whistleblower Clint Curtis, you can see how that was important. 330 00:18:42,920 --> 00:18:43,640 He was murdered. [Correction follows.] 331 00:18:43,640 --> 00:18:48,660 It's in the recommended, I'm sorry, he was not, the civil investigator Raymond Lemme, who was 332 00:18:48,660 --> 00:18:50,540 investigating [Clint Curtis's] claims was [murdered]. 333 00:18:51,040 --> 00:18:54,900 You can see that in the recommended resource list if you want that kind of stuff, including a 334 00:18:54,900 --> 00:18:55,220 documentary. 335 00:18:55,640 --> 00:19:01,380 But this stuff is all really important and not really covered widely at all. 336 00:19:03,100 --> 00:19:08,120 Vote capture, UOCAVA, Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. 337 00:19:08,460 --> 00:19:10,840 So a lot of that happens by the internet, right? 338 00:19:10,880 --> 00:19:19,800 If you're a soldier on a base on the other side of the planet, or if you're a migrant, something like 339 00:19:19,800 --> 00:19:20,080 that. 340 00:19:20,900 --> 00:19:24,740 Even candidates themselves voting, you know, there's always kind of like a big publicity thing 341 00:19:24,740 --> 00:19:27,460 where the president goes in, or the presidential candidate goes in to vote. 342 00:19:27,740 --> 00:19:31,040 So there are these unusual kind of circumstances that are fun because they're part of the system 343 00:19:31,040 --> 00:19:31,280 too. 344 00:19:31,440 --> 00:19:33,800 You can't, you know, they're more attack surface, right? 345 00:19:33,860 --> 00:19:35,960 There's more ways things can go wrong. 346 00:19:37,260 --> 00:19:45,360 I should say that UOCAVA is not the only internet voting happening right now in the United States. 347 00:19:45,800 --> 00:19:47,920 King County, where I live, which is Seattle. 348 00:19:48,900 --> 00:19:55,620 They have a, I can't remember, it's some sort of strange environmental board or something that 349 00:19:55,620 --> 00:19:59,540 votes, it's set aside from everybody else and does internet voting. [King Conservation District] 350 00:19:59,640 --> 00:20:04,840 And I've done it a few times and tweeted at the vendor who runs it and tried to provoke them into 351 00:20:04,840 --> 00:20:06,360 responding and I didn't win that one. 352 00:20:07,360 --> 00:20:08,600 I mean they didn't respond. 353 00:20:09,960 --> 00:20:12,980 So then we have, let's see. 354 00:20:13,400 --> 00:20:16,840 So you can vote from home, which is basically absentee ballot, right? 355 00:20:16,900 --> 00:20:23,160 Instead of living in another country, you are voting by snailmail from home, like your absentee 356 00:20:23,160 --> 00:20:24,800 headquarters or country is your house. 357 00:20:25,020 --> 00:20:26,900 So that's what happens in Washington state or Oregon. [Technical difficulties] 358 00:20:27,280 --> 00:20:34,120 Okay, let's see if it's the, so, you know, once we have this vote recording, this vote capture, you 359 00:20:34,120 --> 00:20:35,780 know, you capture the vote and you record it. 360 00:20:35,840 --> 00:20:37,140 I guess it happens at the same time [more or less]. 361 00:20:37,260 --> 00:20:38,740 Ask Jacques Derrida about that. 362 00:20:39,100 --> 00:20:42,880 But you have post-vote capture exit polls. 363 00:20:42,880 --> 00:20:44,000 These are the exit samples. 364 00:20:44,180 --> 00:20:47,360 You can see a lot in the recommended resource list from Jonathan Simon about that. 365 00:20:47,460 --> 00:20:49,100 I'll talk about that in the activism section. 366 00:20:50,100 --> 00:20:53,420 The vote might be recorded, you get the idea, right? 367 00:20:53,540 --> 00:20:58,840 But this is, you can, I'll make sure to upload this to my website afterwards so that people can 368 00:20:58,840 --> 00:20:59,280 find it. 369 00:20:59,980 --> 00:21:08,700 Here we have, once the vote is recorded at a county precinct, a bipartisan transport team, you 370 00:21:08,700 --> 00:21:12,040 know, drives it to the central counting facility of a county. 371 00:21:12,600 --> 00:21:14,160 Okay, so it's like central headquarters. 372 00:21:14,420 --> 00:21:15,240 That's always kind of crazy. 373 00:21:15,360 --> 00:21:16,240 It's like, who's in that car? 374 00:21:16,320 --> 00:21:17,160 Is the car videotaped? 375 00:21:17,200 --> 00:21:20,300 They have a chain of custody documents and they have a lot of measures. 376 00:21:20,520 --> 00:21:25,200 But, you know, it's just an interesting kind of thing that you don't hear about that you don't see 377 00:21:25,200 --> 00:21:25,640 in the news. 378 00:21:26,640 --> 00:21:30,740 Once it gets to that central counting facility is where you have processing, right? 379 00:21:30,780 --> 00:21:33,240 So you remove the memory drive from the storage bag. 380 00:21:33,340 --> 00:21:38,320 So in the transport team car, there's a storage bag with the memory sticks into the central county 381 00:21:38,320 --> 00:21:38,540 thing. 382 00:21:38,600 --> 00:21:42,900 You take it out, or maybe if it's vote by mail, you check signatures on the ballot envelopes to 383 00:21:42,900 --> 00:21:43,820 see, you know, that kind of thing. 384 00:21:43,860 --> 00:21:46,460 In Seattle, Washington state, you have to sign the ballot envelope. 385 00:21:46,880 --> 00:21:53,280 During processing and beyond, review teams of election workers adjudicate the gray areas of the 386 00:21:53,280 --> 00:21:56,120 edge cases where they're not really sure, like, what happened [with voter intent]. 387 00:21:56,640 --> 00:21:58,740 This can be a vector for a lot of problems. 388 00:21:58,920 --> 00:22:02,960 It can also be blown out of proportion as a lot of problems I'll talk about. 389 00:22:03,220 --> 00:22:03,880 Let's see what I'm doing on time. [Tech difficulties meant much less time.] 390 00:22:04,260 --> 00:22:05,040 Yeah, I think we're okay. [Wrong.] 391 00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:06,020 All right. 392 00:22:06,040 --> 00:22:10,040 So in Georgia, they changed their voting vendor. 393 00:22:10,120 --> 00:22:14,220 So in Georgia, every single county uses the same voting vendor. 394 00:22:14,460 --> 00:22:17,480 159 counties all use Dominion Voting Systems right now. 395 00:22:17,940 --> 00:22:23,200 Whereas in Texas, where it's 254 counties where I'm originally from, each county [picks their own] 396 00:22:23,200 --> 00:22:23,900 voting vendor. 397 00:22:26,100 --> 00:22:34,000 But the, oh yeah, so in Georgia, they changed from their previous voting vendor, I think it was 398 00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:39,100 Diebold or somebody who bought out Diebold, to Dominion voting computers. 399 00:22:39,640 --> 00:22:47,260 And one of the Coffee County election workers' complaints about these Dominion computers was that 400 00:22:47,260 --> 00:22:52,940 the adjudication fields in the software, if they're going to say, you know what, we got to 401 00:22:52,940 --> 00:22:56,300 throw out this ballot because they voted for everybody, they bubbled in everything. 402 00:22:57,200 --> 00:22:59,300 Well, with their own -- that's called over-voting. 403 00:22:59,820 --> 00:23:06,200 So you could, in their old voting computers, you could go and say, well, the adjudication panel, 404 00:23:06,320 --> 00:23:12,620 the vote review panel, was Joe Smith and Susie, you know, but once they updated to, I mean, 405 00:23:12,780 --> 00:23:18,700 changed to Dominion, Dominion no longer gave them an option to write down who the adjudicators were 406 00:23:18,700 --> 00:23:23,120 and what date and time and all that stuff that helps investigative journalists or auditors or 407 00:23:23,120 --> 00:23:25,560 whatever figure out what really happened. 408 00:23:25,700 --> 00:23:27,640 So that was a legitimate complaint. 409 00:23:27,640 --> 00:23:33,680 But then when they made some, Misty Hampton, then the election supervisor shortly after Jan. 6, with 410 00:23:33,680 --> 00:23:38,360 the Coffee County elections office breach, now one of Trump's co-defendants in the RICO case in 411 00:23:38,360 --> 00:23:43,980 Fulton County, Misty Hampton made some videos about this adjudication problem, but she didn't 412 00:23:43,980 --> 00:23:45,700 explain it just like I explained it. [She portrayed all adjudication as inherently sketchy.] 413 00:23:45,900 --> 00:23:49,540 She was one step from lizards and Italian space satellites again. 414 00:23:50,300 --> 00:23:56,220 So, you know, it's a real kind of legitimate vector for problems and a solution for it, a big 415 00:23:56,220 --> 00:23:59,700 solution, is to have more election monitors, election observers. 416 00:23:59,880 --> 00:24:01,660 And I'll talk about that later on. 417 00:24:01,720 --> 00:24:04,660 That's where you have eyes on these adjudication teams 418 00:24:04,680 --> 00:24:06,580 and so you can look for sketchy stuff. 419 00:24:06,980 --> 00:24:12,120 Okay, once we process the votes, we have to count them, vote tallying, totaling, tabulating. 420 00:24:12,620 --> 00:24:14,120 We might scan the paper ballots. 421 00:24:14,420 --> 00:24:17,040 We might read the memory device, could be a CD -ROM. 422 00:24:17,200 --> 00:24:19,240 We might insert into a computer, read the data off. 423 00:24:19,920 --> 00:24:25,560 And when it's a ballot marking device [BMD], like Georgia is using currently, it is a touchscreen 424 00:24:25,560 --> 00:24:27,620 essentially that's yoked to a printer. 425 00:24:27,940 --> 00:24:36,140 And the printer prints out what is claimed to be a voter verified paper audit trail, but is instead a 426 00:24:36,140 --> 00:24:38,100 QR code that humans can't read. 427 00:24:38,520 --> 00:24:42,740 So it's like, you know, if you got a receipt and it was written in, you know, Farsi or something, 428 00:24:42,800 --> 00:24:44,740 unless you're Reality Winner, you can't read it, right? 429 00:24:44,840 --> 00:24:46,020 That's one of the languages she knows. 430 00:24:47,800 --> 00:24:48,880 So it's a QR code. 431 00:24:48,940 --> 00:24:50,860 You can't read it, you know, that causes a problem. 432 00:24:51,100 --> 00:24:52,460 So there's lots of issues here. 433 00:24:52,500 --> 00:24:54,320 And that's a swing state, right, that's having that. [Georgia] 434 00:24:54,400 --> 00:24:55,040 And the Curling v. 435 00:24:55,200 --> 00:25:05,100 Raffensperger case in federal court in Georgia is now trying to abandon mandatory BMDs and use hand 436 00:25:05,100 --> 00:25:06,640 -marked paper ballots in most circumstances. 437 00:25:07,560 --> 00:25:13,640 We have our voting computer vendors here in this part and elsewhere, like with voter registration, 438 00:25:13,780 --> 00:25:14,220 for example. 439 00:25:14,780 --> 00:25:20,620 The current triopoly of opaque proprietary vendors is ES&S, headquartered in Omaha on John Galt 440 00:25:20,620 --> 00:25:21,140 Boulevard. 441 00:25:22,040 --> 00:25:24,720 They're the biggest voting vendor in the United States, if that tells you anything. 442 00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:32,200 Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in both Toronto, Canada, and I believe Denver, somewhere 443 00:25:32,200 --> 00:25:32,720 in Colorado. [Denver] 444 00:25:33,440 --> 00:25:38,300 So you often hear the far right saying, oh my god, Dominion's based in Canada. 445 00:25:38,480 --> 00:25:40,720 Well, yeah, but it has two offices because it serves multiple [countries]. 446 00:25:40,880 --> 00:25:46,020 Okay, this is like chasing the tail around, you know, that's like what the media does with people. 447 00:25:46,580 --> 00:25:50,880 Okay, so then we have Hart InterCivic based in Austin. 448 00:25:51,540 --> 00:25:55,260 There's an example of a voting vendor that's aiming for less opacity. 449 00:25:55,580 --> 00:25:59,460 I'm not optimistic enough to say more transparency, but that's Clear Ballot based in 450 00:25:59,460 --> 00:26:03,720 Boston and they're used in King County in Washington state. 451 00:26:04,600 --> 00:26:07,840 But they're definitely, you know, I don't want to, like, neg them. 452 00:26:07,960 --> 00:26:11,880 They're definitely like interesting and good and worth checking out, but they're not also not 453 00:26:11,880 --> 00:26:14,740 putting Libreboot on the firmware or anything like that, right? 454 00:26:14,880 --> 00:26:22,820 So, politics is the art of the incremental little bits till the global warming kills us all, right? 455 00:26:23,320 --> 00:26:27,600 Okay, so we go into vote totals here. 456 00:26:27,740 --> 00:26:29,460 This is, like, post-election time. 457 00:26:30,100 --> 00:26:30,500 Canvassing. 458 00:26:30,800 --> 00:26:32,900 What the heck is canvassing versus tabulating? 459 00:26:33,060 --> 00:26:34,800 Well, I finally figured this out the other day. 460 00:26:35,340 --> 00:26:39,640 There's actually an Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that has a glossary 461 00:26:39,640 --> 00:26:40,900 of election terms, very useful. 462 00:26:41,240 --> 00:26:44,020 But canvassing is where you organize the vote totals. 463 00:26:44,180 --> 00:26:51,740 You might say we had this many overseas soldier votes and overseas citizens votes [i.e. UOCAVA], or we had this 464 00:26:51,740 --> 00:26:53,760 many votes that were challenged or something. 465 00:26:53,820 --> 00:26:56,180 We're going to put them all in a little spreadsheet and have a lot of fun with it. 466 00:26:56,580 --> 00:27:02,120 That's what canvassing is, and it helps with the certification processes of, you know, various 467 00:27:02,120 --> 00:27:02,980 states have. 468 00:27:04,940 --> 00:27:11,920 When you figure out the vote total at a precinct rather than a central facility or maybe both, they 469 00:27:11,920 --> 00:27:14,560 sometimes tape poll tapes, a.k.a. 470 00:27:14,560 --> 00:27:19,200 result tapes, on the window, sometimes required by law, sometimes not. 471 00:27:19,300 --> 00:27:23,500 You can sometimes persuade them to do it or show it to you, and you can take a picture or a video 472 00:27:23,500 --> 00:27:25,880 and crowdsource it to Scrutineers.org. 473 00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:29,160 They look like cash register receipts. 474 00:27:29,720 --> 00:27:35,100 So then we go down to here, retention of ballots, 22 months if there's a federal race, otherwise 475 00:27:35,100 --> 00:27:36,340 state law determines it. 476 00:27:37,200 --> 00:27:39,760 Then we have a thing here about audits versus recounts. 477 00:27:39,800 --> 00:27:42,800 I should explain this really quickly because this is, again, you're reading the news or you're 478 00:27:42,800 --> 00:27:45,840 watching TV and audit this and recount that, and you're like, 'What does that even mean? 479 00:27:45,840 --> 00:27:46,280 I don't know. 480 00:27:46,360 --> 00:27:47,040 Why don't they tell me?' 481 00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:49,140 Well, they don't tell you because they're not talking to you. 482 00:27:49,340 --> 00:27:53,060 The corporate media is talking to the intelligentsia, the commentariat, the civil 483 00:27:53,060 --> 00:27:58,520 bureaucracy, journalists, you know, the commentariat, the intelligentsia, whatever, it's 484 00:27:58,520 --> 00:27:59,840 the three-letter agencies. 485 00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:02,920 They're not talking to Joe Schmoe, who doesn't know the difference between a recount and audit. 486 00:28:03,380 --> 00:28:05,640 We're not the audience for this stuff. 487 00:28:06,360 --> 00:28:14,600 So audits with like, Philip Stark, his risk -limiting audits, his, not the fake imitations [accepting QR codes] 488 00:28:14,780 --> 00:28:22,500 -- and there are some -- are statistical spot-checks where you take little samples of the [ballot] vote totals 489 00:28:22,500 --> 00:28:26,980 and then all that kind of stuff in the trail, the evidence trail, to determine if a recount is 490 00:28:26,980 --> 00:28:27,360 needed. 491 00:28:27,840 --> 00:28:33,980 And if the margins are really, really, really, really close and the Stark risk-limiting audit is 492 00:28:33,980 --> 00:28:38,580 saying, 'Hey, something might be sketchy here,' that's when you do a recount that's exhaustive. 493 00:28:38,700 --> 00:28:39,800 You recount every ballot. 494 00:28:41,680 --> 00:28:46,760 There's a kind of a dispute within election activism where some people say we need hand- 495 00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:48,040 marked paper ballots. 496 00:28:48,220 --> 00:28:53,000 Both sides of this dispute agree that for vote capture, we need hand-marked paper ballots. 497 00:28:53,320 --> 00:28:58,860 But then they say for the vote tallying portion of the program, do we need to hand-count all of those 498 00:28:58,860 --> 00:28:59,860 publicly [as in Australia and elsewhere]? 499 00:29:00,040 --> 00:29:03,000 Like, make it a federal holiday and take a month to like do it? 500 00:29:03,260 --> 00:29:07,480 Or, you know, right now people expect overnight results, right? 501 00:29:07,560 --> 00:29:11,600 But get them accustomed to the 18th century, like let's take a month to everybody count it. 502 00:29:11,900 --> 00:29:16,820 Or is it okay to feed them into the voting computer optical scanners, digital scanners? 503 00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:18,000 Might that be faster? 504 00:29:18,140 --> 00:29:21,820 Might that be more accurate than tired humans being pressured to do it overnight? 505 00:29:22,200 --> 00:29:26,960 As long as, with the caveat, the proviso that we do these risk-limiting audits with statistical 506 00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:36,380 perfection and make sure that the software on the voting computers is not, you know, compromised in 507 00:29:36,380 --> 00:29:36,780 some way. 508 00:29:37,320 --> 00:29:38,760 All right, last slide of this. 509 00:29:38,780 --> 00:29:40,060 So now we've totaled our votes. 510 00:29:40,780 --> 00:29:44,500 Hopefully the county will upload it to the website for public use [and post poll tapes]. 511 00:29:44,760 --> 00:29:47,720 They'll probably upload it to the state entity for certification. 512 00:29:48,180 --> 00:29:51,800 They might get it there another way by, you know, by courier or something like that. 513 00:29:52,480 --> 00:29:55,680 Then you have the state election board or maybe the state Secretary of State. 514 00:29:56,180 --> 00:29:59,760 They're going to certify it, sign the certification documents, all this kind of stuff. 515 00:30:00,200 --> 00:30:04,340 At that point, it's going to go to the federal level if and only if there are federal races on 516 00:30:04,340 --> 00:30:04,720 the ballot. 517 00:30:05,700 --> 00:30:09,640 And the Election Assistance Commission sometimes gets these [other] reports. 518 00:30:09,900 --> 00:30:11,580 They get reports from each state [about election processes there]. 519 00:30:13,320 --> 00:30:14,240 The U.S. 520 00:30:14,300 --> 00:30:16,220 president of the, I'm sorry, the President of the U.S. 521 00:30:16,300 --> 00:30:17,040 Senate gets it [for the Senate, i.e. the vice-president] 522 00:30:17,120 --> 00:30:17,480 The U.S. 523 00:30:17,540 --> 00:30:18,280 House gets it. 524 00:30:18,660 --> 00:30:22,560 National Archives and Records Administration gets the presidential for the Electoral College. 525 00:30:24,480 --> 00:30:30,120 I was wondering how do these votes get from the state to the feds? 526 00:30:30,760 --> 00:30:36,960 Because you hear about ballots, you hear about paper trails sometimes, right? 527 00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:38,380 But that's only on the county level. 528 00:30:38,520 --> 00:30:43,640 That's level you as a human, you know, 180 million voter is interacting with. 529 00:30:44,180 --> 00:30:47,680 But what about, how does it get from the state level to the federal level or something like that? 530 00:30:48,000 --> 00:30:49,060 So I asked people. 531 00:30:49,560 --> 00:30:53,600 They didn't want to be attributed, but they were in a position to know. 532 00:30:54,080 --> 00:30:59,340 And they told me that it's sent by private carrier like [DHL] or FedEx. 533 00:30:59,480 --> 00:31:04,420 Now, if you know these companies, you know they have special divisions, like, for shipping organs or 534 00:31:04,420 --> 00:31:06,780 something that have to be kept refrigerated, things like that. 535 00:31:06,940 --> 00:31:12,780 So they assuredly have a division for government records, like shipping them around. 536 00:31:13,320 --> 00:31:17,740 But I think it's pretty funny because you could make a great stoner movie where you have like this 537 00:31:17,740 --> 00:31:22,460 stoner who's, like, an election worker and he's got like this thumb drive. 538 00:31:22,700 --> 00:31:26,600 It's got, like, the dispositive thing about the who's going to win the presidential. 539 00:31:26,720 --> 00:31:28,860 He's got to drive all the way to D.C. 540 00:31:28,940 --> 00:31:34,780 and stop for like marijuana and getting [into] all these crazy complications, you know. 541 00:31:35,580 --> 00:31:37,800 But okay, so that was the survey. 542 00:31:38,040 --> 00:31:42,820 We surveyed the election system and now we're going to scrutinize it. 543 00:31:43,940 --> 00:31:46,080 This is whistleblower Reality Winner. 544 00:31:46,300 --> 00:31:52,600 By show of hands, how many people know, vaguely acquainted with who this person is? 545 00:31:52,740 --> 00:31:53,260 Cognoscer. 546 00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:54,720 Okay, maybe half. 547 00:31:55,120 --> 00:31:56,680 Okay, maybe a little bit more than half. 548 00:31:57,200 --> 00:31:57,540 All right. 549 00:31:57,680 --> 00:32:04,220 And then raise your hands if and only if you know what she revealed, even vaguely. 550 00:32:04,520 --> 00:32:05,840 Now we have about three people. 551 00:32:05,940 --> 00:32:08,380 So that's the great job of the media right there. 552 00:32:09,540 --> 00:32:18,040 You know, as she said, the scandal of who Reality Winner is and how weird her name is became the 553 00:32:18,040 --> 00:32:21,340 focus and not what she leaked. 554 00:32:21,480 --> 00:32:25,840 The Intercept printed five pages of a top-secret National Security Agency report. 555 00:32:26,640 --> 00:32:32,840 She leaked it in 2017, but it basically showed the Kremlin issuing cyber attacks against the U.S. 556 00:32:32,880 --> 00:32:34,480 election system in two stages. 557 00:32:34,780 --> 00:32:46,600 Stage one was, you had the Kremlin breach VR Systems, a voting registration vendor in Florida and 558 00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:48,140 they denied that they were ever breached. 559 00:32:48,220 --> 00:32:50,760 That's a huge story I could go into, but I won't. 560 00:32:51,160 --> 00:32:57,260 And so they go into VR Systems, these Kremlin military intelligence hackers and they, with 561 00:32:57,260 --> 00:33:01,720 actual names, there's actual, like, names of these people [hackers in] indictments that came out later, thanks 562 00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:02,640 to Reality Winner. 563 00:33:03,340 --> 00:33:06,240 Assuredly, I mean, I'll tell you, Obama wasn't going to talk about it. 564 00:33:06,580 --> 00:33:10,600 You know, if you look at the Senate Intelligence Committee report about the Russian interference in 565 00:33:10,600 --> 00:33:16,480 the 2016 elections, [then-U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry said, 'Hey, let's have this big public thing and let's all 566 00:33:16,480 --> 00:33:20,360 like talk about this, like an inquiry and talk about this Russian, Kremlin cyber attacks.' 567 00:33:20,620 --> 00:33:24,740 And Obama said, 'No, we're going to get, we're going to kind of like, keep it quiet because we 568 00:33:24,740 --> 00:33:28,120 don't want people to lose faith in the system and da-da-da-da-da.' 569 00:33:28,140 --> 00:33:32,580 Oh, everybody's like, oh Barack, but I think, you know, it inspired me to come up with the Doggerel 570 00:33:32,580 --> 00:33:33,660 for Democrats. 571 00:33:34,260 --> 00:33:34,940 Let's see if I can remember it. 572 00:33:35,260 --> 00:33:38,700 What raises doubt might lower turnout. 573 00:33:39,560 --> 00:33:42,560 So only open your mouth to fellate the state. 574 00:33:42,840 --> 00:33:45,580 That's Obama's response to Kerry essentially in a nutshell. 575 00:33:46,320 --> 00:33:46,580 Okay. [abridging for time] 576 00:33:46,860 --> 00:33:56,200 Now, so the first stage was they breached the voting systems vendor, VR Systems (everything's 577 00:33:56,200 --> 00:33:58,400 system and system and cyber and system!). 578 00:33:59,140 --> 00:34:05,720 And they essentially did that so they could use VR Systems internal documents to imitate their logos 579 00:34:05,720 --> 00:34:08,340 and stuff and put together better spearphishing emails. 580 00:34:08,820 --> 00:34:15,040 Then they sent these spearphishing emails to Florida county election supervisors and according 581 00:34:15,040 --> 00:34:22,220 to Florida governor and [both U.S.] Florida senators [at the time], some of the county election workers fell 582 00:34:22,220 --> 00:34:27,000 for this spearphishing trickery and according to Bob Woodward, some of them got malware installed 583 00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:27,860 on their systems. 584 00:34:28,260 --> 00:34:33,460 And meanwhile, you have, you know, people dancing around on the Dem side saying that it's, it's this 585 00:34:33,460 --> 00:34:34,120 is all made up, 586 00:34:34,160 --> 00:34:35,720 it's not real. But it's very real. 587 00:34:35,840 --> 00:34:37,520 So that was the two stages, right? 588 00:34:38,160 --> 00:34:41,200 The next one is this Coffee County elections office breach [insider threat]. 589 00:34:41,320 --> 00:34:43,500 That's Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO. 590 00:34:45,420 --> 00:34:52,040 He flew into Coffee County, Georgia shortly before that Misty Hampton election supervisor resigned 591 00:34:52,040 --> 00:34:58,160 supposedly for, or was forced out, terminated supposedly for her timesheets, but in actuality 592 00:34:58,160 --> 00:35:02,260 for her role in the breach, she was [just one of the breachers], Coffee County basically made her the scapegoat. 593 00:35:02,340 --> 00:35:08,240 There's a lot more people [breachers] in Coffee County, this rural southern Georgia county in the swing state 594 00:35:08,240 --> 00:35:09,540 of Georgia, 16 [Electoral College] electors. 595 00:35:09,680 --> 00:35:12,040 This will come up, I'm sure, in the news November and December. 596 00:35:14,360 --> 00:35:21,580 The Coffee County, Sidney Powell hired, you know, the big MAGA lawyer, Trumper lawyer, hired 597 00:35:21,580 --> 00:35:26,760 SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta-based forensics firm to go in there as operatives and make off 598 00:35:26,760 --> 00:35:28,760 with exact copies of the voting software. 599 00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:32,640 And remember, every county in Georgia uses the same [vendor], so it's a whole statewide voting software 600 00:35:32,640 --> 00:35:33,080 compromise. 601 00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:38,540 Now, of the swing state, one of the biggest swing states, 16 electors, and the media's like, well, 602 00:35:38,740 --> 00:35:42,220 you know, they're like sleeping and when they're talking about, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever. 603 00:35:43,180 --> 00:35:45,340 There's a lot I've written on both of these. 604 00:35:45,440 --> 00:35:54,320 They're all in the recommended resources list. And the, there's CVEs as well from the Curling v. 605 00:35:54,480 --> 00:35:58,700 Raffensperger trial, which is what the Coalition for Good Governance is a nonprofit that's a 606 00:35:58,700 --> 00:35:59,940 plaintiff in the Curling v. 607 00:35:59,960 --> 00:36:06,340 Raffensperger trial to change the mandatory BMDs to handmarked paper ballots and with RLA Stark [audits]. 608 00:36:06,760 --> 00:36:13,460 And they discovered the Coffee County breach and that Curling case has CVEs, lots of them. 609 00:36:13,580 --> 00:36:14,760 You know what CVEs are, right? 610 00:36:14,800 --> 00:36:20,120 The official [computer security] bug classifications. On the BMDs, Dominion systems used in Georgia. 611 00:36:20,120 --> 00:36:21,480 So it's not a kooky thing. 612 00:36:21,580 --> 00:36:23,080 It's about as legit as you can get. 613 00:36:24,700 --> 00:36:27,360 Finally, let's see election activism is the last thing. 614 00:36:27,800 --> 00:36:32,240 These you can all look up in my recommended resource list. 615 00:36:32,920 --> 00:36:37,380 I want to especially point out some of the nerdier stuff like the statistical forensics and better 616 00:36:37,380 --> 00:36:40,780 data access, maybe trying to make a free software voting company. 617 00:36:40,920 --> 00:36:45,840 If you're in a state where each county gets to make its own choices and you get to go become 618 00:36:45,840 --> 00:36:50,100 friends with the election supervisor [and board], maybe you can hack together something and put Libreboot on 619 00:36:50,100 --> 00:36:50,520 the firmware. 620 00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:57,120 Or you can just have another big picture where, you know, maybe the most important thing in life 621 00:36:57,120 --> 00:37:01,100 isn't coming to consensus on whether we want to be ruled by Creep Number One or Creep Number Two, 622 00:37:01,600 --> 00:37:04,160 but instead, you know, picking ourselves and each other. 623 00:37:04,780 --> 00:37:05,660 We can do that. 624 00:37:05,780 --> 00:37:06,860 We can vote with our wallet. 625 00:37:07,260 --> 00:37:08,660 We can vote with our words. 626 00:37:08,840 --> 00:37:09,880 We can vote with our actions. 627 00:37:10,340 --> 00:37:11,380 We can vote with our choices. 628 00:37:12,020 --> 00:37:19,060 So all this voting software stuff is great and important, but you know, in the 19th century, the 629 00:37:19,060 --> 00:37:24,800 New York Times reported that there was a poll worker who simply took ballots he disfavored and 630 00:37:24,800 --> 00:37:25,400 ate them. 631 00:37:26,060 --> 00:37:26,500 Right? 632 00:37:26,620 --> 00:37:32,380 So you don't have to have superduper computer hacks to rig an election, but you do need 633 00:37:33,160 --> 00:37:36,820 dishonest people that aren't being observed, aren't being scrutinized, aren't being observed. 634 00:37:36,920 --> 00:37:37,960 You know, you get the idea. 635 00:37:38,680 --> 00:37:39,560 So now Q&A. 636 00:37:39,880 --> 00:37:40,220 Thanks. 637 00:37:40,520 --> 00:37:44,640 I'm not sure if you covered it because I did miss the beginning of your talk, but the recent 638 00:37:44,640 --> 00:37:50,240 lawsuits that were going on, my understanding of them was that, you know, I was all excited because 639 00:37:50,240 --> 00:37:54,560 I was thinking that there was finally going to be discovery and we get to really find out what was 640 00:37:54,560 --> 00:37:55,640 going on in these machines. 641 00:37:56,040 --> 00:38:02,000 But my understanding is really what was going on is some people made the mistake of saying that 642 00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:09,660 they knew the person who was an employee who made the actual tampering, and that was the misstep. 643 00:38:10,140 --> 00:38:12,120 Is that sort of your understanding? 644 00:38:12,520 --> 00:38:15,180 That's really the only thing that really came out. 645 00:38:15,420 --> 00:38:20,280 So a civil lawsuit is like a souped-up Freedom of Information Act request because you can do 646 00:38:20,280 --> 00:38:21,360 discovery and all that. 647 00:38:22,120 --> 00:38:26,280 In Georgia, there are three major lawsuits that are discussed in my recommended resource list. 648 00:38:26,420 --> 00:38:26,940 They're all civil. 649 00:38:27,260 --> 00:38:27,720 No, they're not. 650 00:38:27,820 --> 00:38:29,540 Two civil, one criminal. 651 00:38:30,080 --> 00:38:33,020 Then the Stop-the-Steal Kraken ones, if those are the ones you mean. 652 00:38:33,440 --> 00:38:34,660 Yeah, I mean, it would be like, oh, great. 653 00:38:34,720 --> 00:38:38,160 We're going to get interesting discovery and transcripts and quotes, but essentially the judges 654 00:38:38,160 --> 00:38:41,400 very early on in the hearing said, you guys don't have squat. 655 00:38:41,580 --> 00:38:42,520 Quit wasting my time. 656 00:38:42,580 --> 00:38:43,240 Get out of my courtroom. 657 00:38:43,980 --> 00:38:43,980 Okay. 658 00:38:44,220 --> 00:38:44,480 Thanks. 659 00:38:44,700 --> 00:38:45,740 I have a couple questions. 660 00:38:45,920 --> 00:38:52,180 If you went back to the 1950s, where all the machines from mechanical and you used the handle, 661 00:38:52,720 --> 00:38:59,340 would you say that was more secure or less prone to playing games? 662 00:38:59,920 --> 00:39:00,520 Douglas W. 663 00:39:00,880 --> 00:39:06,680 Jones is a computer science professor who has a website that gives a brief illustrated history of 664 00:39:06,680 --> 00:39:07,820 voting in the United States. 665 00:39:07,960 --> 00:39:09,620 That's in the recommended resource list. 666 00:39:09,760 --> 00:39:14,380 And he talks about the dials and the levers and the pros and cons of each. 667 00:39:14,940 --> 00:39:16,760 They've all been messed with at some point. 668 00:39:17,060 --> 00:39:22,500 I think the difference with computers is you can do things at vast scale that much faster than you 669 00:39:22,500 --> 00:39:23,840 can eat ballots. 670 00:39:24,540 --> 00:39:26,520 Would you be better off with paper ballots? 671 00:39:26,940 --> 00:39:29,800 Because, you know, look at what you got. 672 00:39:29,900 --> 00:39:35,560 You look at some of the stuff in the news with things like AT&T being hacked, or let's say you go 673 00:39:35,560 --> 00:39:42,460 to where people have changed code in a and they couldn't even see it in a gaming machine in Vegas. 674 00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:45,560 So there's so much you can do so much with those ROMs. 675 00:39:45,960 --> 00:39:47,400 You could, you could. 676 00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:47,740 Yeah. 677 00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:52,640 So have a program that says, OK, if you press A, I'm going to make it C. 678 00:39:52,740 --> 00:39:54,400 And you would even know that if you're not in on it. 679 00:39:54,480 --> 00:39:54,920 Yeah. 680 00:39:55,080 --> 00:40:00,480 The story of whistleblower Clint Curtis and the detective Raymond Lemme is an old school kind of 681 00:40:00,480 --> 00:40:03,560 version of that in [Florida and in] Georgia, same state where Lemme was killed. 682 00:40:04,660 --> 00:40:08,400 Before the BMDs, there were touchscreens that were paperless. 683 00:40:08,440 --> 00:40:09,280 So there was no trail [not even QR nonsense]. 684 00:40:09,360 --> 00:40:12,160 You just touch the touchscreen and then you hoped that it was OK. 685 00:40:12,660 --> 00:40:13,540 Then they hooked it up, 686 00:40:13,700 --> 00:40:16,640 the judge said, 'Hey, you need to make a paper trail.' 687 00:40:16,960 --> 00:40:20,840 So they hooked it up to the touchscreens (or different ones), up to printers and printed out 688 00:40:20,840 --> 00:40:22,400 with a QR code that nobody can read. 689 00:40:22,460 --> 00:40:23,200 So same difference. 690 00:40:23,700 --> 00:40:25,320 So would you, OK, one more question. 691 00:40:25,700 --> 00:40:32,400 Would you say the elections in the last six, twelve years have been accurate or do you think 692 00:40:32,400 --> 00:40:37,260 it's more hype if people say it's phony or the numbers don't jive? 693 00:40:38,160 --> 00:40:38,400 Yeah. 694 00:40:38,500 --> 00:40:39,360 Two answers to that. 695 00:40:39,460 --> 00:40:43,100 Number one, I think the most honest answer is we don't know, not enough data. 696 00:40:43,600 --> 00:40:47,800 And I think the second answer is if you look at Code Red by [former pollster] Jonathan Simon, the 697 00:40:47,800 --> 00:40:54,180 statistical forensics of exit polls, which are used by the United States to monitor elections, free and fair 698 00:40:54,180 --> 00:40:58,460 elections in other countries, he's using that same method to monitor elections here. 699 00:40:58,740 --> 00:41:05,380 And they're often good enough, but there's often disparities here and there as well, enough that 700 00:41:05,380 --> 00:41:13,480 there's people need to fix it or evolve our democracy past this mass consensus thing, not 701 00:41:13,480 --> 00:41:14,460 mutually exclusive goals. 702 00:41:14,940 --> 00:41:15,060 Hi. 703 00:41:15,520 --> 00:41:19,560 So some states are moving to a ranked choice voting system. 704 00:41:20,160 --> 00:41:24,240 How do you think that affects us in the fact that it's going to need more computational power to 705 00:41:24,240 --> 00:41:26,860 actually tally a winner in some runoffs? 706 00:41:27,060 --> 00:41:29,580 You can't really do that by hand in a timely manner. 707 00:41:29,980 --> 00:41:32,060 And do you think that's a better system overall? 708 00:41:33,020 --> 00:41:38,420 OK, so ranked choice voting [RCV] called instant runoff voting in Canada and elsewhere is in my 709 00:41:38,420 --> 00:41:39,420 recommended resource list. 710 00:41:39,460 --> 00:41:43,540 There's an answer there, but I will say briefly that it's a good idea with difficult 711 00:41:43,540 --> 00:41:44,180 implementation. 712 00:41:44,620 --> 00:41:48,060 There's different ways, like, what we know is the voters first preference. 713 00:41:49,320 --> 00:41:52,760 But after he fills out the [RCV] ballot, what if the election changes dramatically? 714 00:41:53,080 --> 00:41:59,160 Ayn Rand enters the race and somebody dies and you know, you can try to predict that with [RCV] algorithms, 715 00:41:59,400 --> 00:42:03,320 but the public and election workers and the candidates in the United States and the voting 716 00:42:03,320 --> 00:42:06,720 machine computers are still struggling with how to implement etc. 717 00:42:06,820 --> 00:42:11,440 I do think overall it's a good idea to get away from the spoiler effect and let people vote their 718 00:42:11,440 --> 00:42:12,680 heart, their principles. 719 00:42:13,260 --> 00:42:16,460 But implementing it correctly is another question. 720 00:42:16,920 --> 00:42:18,160 I think this is the last question. 721 00:42:18,560 --> 00:42:19,180 Oh, shoot. 722 00:42:19,820 --> 00:42:19,960 Hi. 723 00:42:20,820 --> 00:42:22,300 You said you're from Seattle. 724 00:42:23,060 --> 00:42:25,740 From Texas originally, but live in Seattle last [eight] years. 725 00:42:25,880 --> 00:42:28,040 Well, you're voting King County in Seattle. 726 00:42:28,140 --> 00:42:28,340 Yes. 727 00:42:28,580 --> 00:42:35,100 So I wanted to ask you, what is the role of the PCOs from King County into the whole voting 728 00:42:35,100 --> 00:42:40,440 system that you have there, like choosing the commissioner voting or presenting the candidate 729 00:42:40,440 --> 00:42:45,760 that will become the commissioner that will become the guy who will decide what the little[?] dot is. 730 00:42:46,200 --> 00:42:54,460 The role of those people, of those local PCOs, how they're called over there, the Precinct Committee 731 00:42:54,460 --> 00:42:59,100 Officer of the parties of the Republican and Democrat. 732 00:42:59,360 --> 00:43:03,400 We have another name here in New York and every county has a different name. 733 00:43:04,140 --> 00:43:07,460 And so what's their role in your presentation? 734 00:43:08,340 --> 00:43:16,260 And in a segue, there is a documentary called County on PBS that you can stream and maybe add on 735 00:43:16,260 --> 00:43:16,720 your resource. 736 00:43:17,400 --> 00:43:25,080 So if if you want to have, you have election poll workers, I'm sorry, you have election workers and 737 00:43:25,080 --> 00:43:31,820 you have voters, but then you have people watching to make sure that things go smoothly and fairly. 738 00:43:32,080 --> 00:43:38,160 These people are usually partisans registered with the political party because they're the only ones 739 00:43:38,160 --> 00:43:39,860 who care enough in many cases. 740 00:43:40,320 --> 00:43:45,540 If you're a nonpartisan observer, like in King County, you have to get a training from the 741 00:43:45,540 --> 00:43:49,020 through the League of Women Voters with King County Elections, which I'm actually doing later 742 00:43:49,020 --> 00:43:49,600 this month. 743 00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:54,720 And then you can go in and you can observe as a nonpartisan observer and you can see about these 744 00:43:54,720 --> 00:44:00,800 bipartisan transport teams or these multi-partisan or bipartisan adjudication vote review, all this 745 00:44:00,800 --> 00:44:01,320 kind of stuff. 746 00:44:01,720 --> 00:44:06,300 And I think what's important is, yeah, those things do have a role, right? 747 00:44:06,400 --> 00:44:12,880 They're like the employees of the party, of the candidate, like advocating for that candidate's 748 00:44:12,880 --> 00:44:16,740 interests at the election office, at the precinct, or the central counting facility. 749 00:44:17,660 --> 00:44:23,840 But they're still attack dogs for their party. 750 00:44:23,960 --> 00:44:29,120 They're not nonpartisan observers or scrutineers or public interest minded people. 751 00:44:29,840 --> 00:44:31,380 I'm not sure if that answers. 752 00:44:31,820 --> 00:44:33,540 It's interesting because you're right. 753 00:44:33,680 --> 00:44:38,240 There are parties and people, but like, for example, in New York, Democrat and the Republican, 754 00:44:39,080 --> 00:44:44,380 in the county where there is most Republican, the Democrat position is filled by a Republican. 755 00:44:44,980 --> 00:44:46,920 It's still having a Democrat and a New Yorker. 756 00:44:47,180 --> 00:44:48,180 Thank you, everybody.