WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:03.700 So my talk is titled, Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security. 00:04.140 --> 00:05.460 How's the slides coming through? 00:05.840 --> 00:06.020 Good? 00:06.180 --> 00:06.340 Okay. 00:06.920 --> 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 00:16.420 --> 00:18.600 the solarpunk talk, although I do write science fiction. 00:19.400 --> 00:20.340 A little about me. 00:20.780 --> 00:23.300 I'm a freelance writer and investigative journalist. 00:23.900 --> 00:26.820 My day jobs are copywriting, content marketing. 00:27.560 --> 00:28.300 You can hire me. 00:28.300 --> 00:34.020 I'm most known for reporting on hacktivism, transparency, legal cases, including that of 00:34.020 --> 00:39.280 Jeremy Hammond, who will be presenting here this weekend, as well as whistleblower Reality Winner. 00:39.860 --> 00:41.780 We will talk about her shortly. 00:42.020 --> 00:48.440 I'm also known for analyzing and corroborating the Stratfor private spy files that Jeremy Hammond 00:48.440 --> 00:51.380 gifted all of us and went to prison for 10 years for. [10 years per sentencing] 00:51.700 --> 00:56.700 I always say that I corroborated a lot of the information in them because the corporate media 00:56.700 --> 00:58.040 did not bother to do so. 00:58.040 --> 01:01.080 They just simply said Stratfor executive says, 'blah, blah, blah,' 01:01.380 --> 01:02.100 the end. 01:02.680 --> 01:07.000 But I had bothered to, you know, find additional sources, which editors are always mad at me about. 01:07.740 --> 01:08.480 Too much effort. 01:08.980 --> 01:09.220 All right. 01:09.320 --> 01:14.580 So, and now probably I'm most known for, get the most retweets for, election security matters, 01:15.060 --> 01:17.560 particularly Coffee County, Georgia, which we will get to. 01:18.080 --> 01:21.340 My day job, of course, one of them is substitute teacher. 01:22.620 --> 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, 01:28.840 --> 01:31.080 raise your hand, and you can sign, all that good stuff. 01:31.240 --> 01:31.380 All right. 01:31.460 --> 01:35.200 So, Mr. Lucas will write you an infraction if you don't cooperate. 01:36.100 --> 01:42.600 Now, on a more serious note than substitute teaching, I want to just say very briefly that a 01:42.600 --> 01:50.340 decade ago, I spoke on a panel here about crowdsourcing research into the private spy 01:50.340 --> 01:50.960 industry. 01:51.580 --> 01:56.160 And I was on that panel thanks to the late Kevin Gallagher, who spearheaded it. 01:56.160 --> 02:02.720 And I would not be here today, if it were not for him doing that, and kind of encouraging me a 02:02.720 --> 02:03.440 decade ago. 02:04.800 --> 02:10.600 So, you know, there's a lot of, there should be more talks someday about mental health, and 02:10.600 --> 02:14.300 activism, and drug, recreational drug abuse, and things like that. 02:14.600 --> 02:16.740 I'm alluding to Kevin's story. 02:18.280 --> 02:21.400 So sometimes I wonder what he would say about stuff I'm doing now. 02:22.020 --> 02:22.360 All right. 02:22.460 --> 02:23.260 Moving on. 02:23.260 --> 02:28.300 I made a 14-page recommended resource list, a PDF bibliography. 02:28.740 --> 02:31.280 You can find it on various pages of my website. 02:31.880 --> 02:33.080 It accompanies this talk. 02:33.160 --> 02:35.280 It gives you lots of great information. 02:36.160 --> 02:38.280 And it looks like this. [Technical difficulties] 02:38.980 --> 02:43.620 So, this is what nerdy investigative journalists do in their spare time. 02:44.080 --> 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 02:49.300 --> 02:51.540 Reality Winner, election activism. 02:51.540 --> 02:53.060 Oh, well, you know. [More technical difficulties] 02:53.560 --> 02:54.020 Life is short. 02:54.100 --> 02:54.560 What can you do? 02:54.620 --> 02:55.380 It comes at you fast. 02:55.840 --> 02:57.160 A quick note on terminology. 02:57.460 --> 03:06.000 There's several things I'd like you to take away today, and one of them is this simple term. 03:06.400 --> 03:11.140 We say voting computer, or we should say voting computer, and not voting machine. 03:11.800 --> 03:14.180 Does any of you do your homework and know why? 03:14.660 --> 03:14.880 No? 03:15.100 --> 03:15.440 Okay. 03:15.780 --> 03:21.460 So, a machine, you remember from physics class, does one and only one thing, like a lever or a 03:21.460 --> 03:22.220 pulley, okay? 03:22.580 --> 03:27.660 It can't be reprogrammed to swap the votes around, okay? 03:28.200 --> 03:31.900 But a voting computer is a universal machine. 03:32.060 --> 03:36.940 That's Alan Turing, pictured there, who invented the concept of computer software in 1936. 03:37.680 --> 03:41.280 Universal machine being a machine that can be programmed and reprogrammed. 03:41.320 --> 03:43.840 He called it 'instruction tables', right? 03:43.920 --> 03:44.400 Do this. 03:44.420 --> 03:45.900 If not, then do that. 03:45.900 --> 03:51.760 So, when we say voting machine, we give a wrong impression that this is like a lever you yank, and 03:51.760 --> 03:53.800 it's going to do the same thing every time. 03:54.000 --> 03:59.460 Not that the levers weren't messed with as well in the past, but voting computer emphasizes [made for reprogrammability, and], 03:59.460 --> 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 04:03.960 --> 04:04.540 that kind of stuff. 04:04.880 --> 04:08.960 Okay, so, framing election security for today. 04:09.540 --> 04:13.940 That slide is from one of my favorite movies, possibly my favorite movie, 1976 Network. 04:13.940 --> 04:16.360 If you have not seen it, you must see it immediately. 04:17.060 --> 04:19.140 Neither fake news. 04:19.660 --> 04:26.960 So, you know, the Trumpers have said things like, 'Well, there were these Italian artificial 04:26.960 --> 04:32.940 satellites that were lasering the elections and stuff', and they tried to go into court with some 04:32.940 --> 04:33.700 of this nonsense. 04:34.500 --> 04:41.380 And the judges, pretty much universally, in all cases except for one minor case [in Pennsylvania], smacked them 04:41.380 --> 04:48.680 down, fined them, made them take remedial education on education standards, legal education, 04:48.800 --> 04:56.480 things like that, because when it came time to pony up and show the notarized evidence of, you 04:56.480 --> 05:03.680 know, under penalty of perjury, of Italian satellites, and have the other side be able to 05:03.680 --> 05:07.400 critique it in the courtroom, the Trumpers said, blah, blah, blah [to try to distract from lack of evidence]. 05:08.000 --> 05:14.240 So, what they were doing is they were leveraging the lawsuits for media attention to get their 05:14.240 --> 05:17.200 sound bites out there, and also donations, right? 05:17.280 --> 05:21.360 So, that was what Sidney Powell's 'Release the Kraken' lawsuits were all about. 05:21.740 --> 05:26.960 So, that's one extreme of this, how it's typically, the topic is typically framed today. 05:28.120 --> 05:34.000 So, it's not fake news nonsense about satellites and lasers, and the elderly poll worker is really 05:34.000 --> 05:35.540 a lizard, you know, it's none of that. 05:36.040 --> 05:41.520 On the other hand, the opposite framing is that our voting computers are these perfect, wonderful 05:41.520 --> 05:45.400 things, as wonderful as your I Voted sticker and Mount Rushmore and apple pie. 05:46.200 --> 05:54.680 This is exemplified by, of course, Barack Obama, who said in 2016 when Trump was starting to say 05:54.680 --> 05:59.980 all his crazy Stop the Steal stuff, which was very far out for a [U.S.] presidential candidate to start 05:59.980 --> 06:06.260 saying, Obama said, anybody who brings up rigging is not a serious person. 06:06.920 --> 06:07.800 It doesn't happen. 06:08.080 --> 06:12.200 If you want the exact quote, you want to look at my Texas Observer article on Reality Winner. 06:13.300 --> 06:19.600 And so, you know, even one of the federal judges Obama appointed has said that gerrymandering is 06:19.600 --> 06:21.800 tantamount to rigging, a federal judge. 06:22.480 --> 06:31.080 And Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat in Oregon, said in the Senate, Kremlin, [Senate] intelligence [committee] reports 06:31.080 --> 06:40.060 about the Russian cyber attacks in 2016, Wyden said, well, you know, he can't rule out hacking by these 06:40.060 --> 06:45.160 distant Kremlin hackers, of the changing the votes and voter registration, all that kind of stuff. 06:45.280 --> 06:46.860 There's no way to rule it out. 06:47.140 --> 06:48.860 So, it's okay to bring it up. 06:49.140 --> 06:53.800 You know, this audience doesn't need this kind of, like, hand-holding against these, you know, duopoly 06:53.800 --> 06:54.520 extremes. 06:55.020 --> 06:56.500 But what can you do? 06:56.560 --> 06:59.020 I try to write for everybody sometimes. 06:59.260 --> 07:02.680 Okay, so now we have more of this framing. 07:03.120 --> 07:08.560 The global situation we have today, really fast, you know, we have the NATO countries, the so 07:08.560 --> 07:14.680 -called Western countries, with the Five Eyes countries in the lead, US, Canada, UK, Australia, 07:14.840 --> 07:16.340 and New Zealand, right? 07:16.420 --> 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. 07:20.720 --> 07:26.200 Then we have the BRICS countries [several autocratic], Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and many others have 07:26.200 --> 07:29.180 joined, such as India and Egypt, and United Arab Emirates. 07:30.120 --> 07:32.000 I think Argentina still wants to join. 07:33.620 --> 07:39.960 Versus the others, just various countries, you know, like, I don't know, I better not say one, 07:40.040 --> 07:43.840 but countries in Africa, right, that don't really have a stake [of their own] in this kind of thing. 07:44.280 --> 07:48.000 Versus the public, everybody, the global -- what are we now -- 8 billion? 07:48.000 --> 07:52.380 And, you know, of course, the quadrennial [U.S.] presidential elections get the spotlight, but [besides int'l.], 07:52.380 --> 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 07:56.600 --> 08:02.540 of stuff, where you can have a lot more impact than you might think, [even] if you live in a non- 08:02.540 --> 08:03.740 swing state, for example. 08:05.000 --> 08:14.500 Then we have, you know, our choice between two, you know, autocrats [candidates], Donald Trump, you know, these 08:14.500 --> 08:18.840 are the Epstein pictures, everybody has seen those, SpookyConnections.com is on the recommended 08:18.840 --> 08:19.720 resource list. 08:20.180 --> 08:21.760 That'll really dig into him. 08:22.000 --> 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 08:26.500 --> 08:26.980 blog. 08:28.240 --> 08:32.120 So, you know, demagoguery is a word probably all of us know here. 08:33.800 --> 08:39.600 His Trumpers fans, MAGA people, they don't care about Trump's [likely] debt to China, they don't care about 08:39.600 --> 08:45.900 any of this stuff, because they see a big, tall, tough guy who is a celebrity TV person yelling and 08:45.900 --> 08:50.620 pounding his chest on TV and saying he's the chosen one, and they like that, because their 08:50.620 --> 08:53.780 brain is no longer on file, intellectual and emotional atrophy. 08:54.240 --> 08:56.400 Then we have Joe Biden. 08:57.020 --> 09:00.860 So, you know, a lot of this is sort of remedial, but I feel like you can't really talk about 09:00.860 --> 09:03.460 elections without this kind of context being set forth. 09:04.780 --> 09:08.640 You know, there's lots of stories of creepy Biden. 09:09.560 --> 09:11.060 Here's, like, a typical video. 09:11.340 --> 09:14.860 This Ramrants Twitter user is a right-wing source. 09:15.300 --> 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 09:21.680 --> 09:24.400 just he says something weird [and creepy], but the audio is off. 09:25.040 --> 09:31.520 So this Ramrants source, you know, it has a lot of videos that are C-SPAN that need to be collected. 09:31.920 --> 09:32.640 What's the date? 09:32.760 --> 09:34.040 Who are the people in these videos? 09:34.160 --> 09:35.880 Call them and interview them, that kind of thing. 09:35.880 --> 09:44.420 But the Ramrants source does have a few that are like, you know, he quoted some news article about 09:44.420 --> 09:48.940 a college graduate who was kissed by Biden, but she was actually glad she was kissed, and he made 09:48.940 --> 09:50.240 it look like it was, you know, bad. 09:50.300 --> 09:53.140 So take that source with a grain of salt [and] as a jumping-off point. 09:53.520 --> 09:59.960 But there's a lot of smoke there that indicates a serious fire, which means that, you know, this 09:59.960 --> 10:05.140 presidential voter's choice between the greater or lesser evil has now mutated into the choice 10:05.140 --> 10:09.940 between the greater and lesser pedo, or at least the greater and lesser creeper, because we could 10:09.940 --> 10:11.440 use more data on Biden, I believe. 10:12.860 --> 10:14.180 Meanwhile, so that's the world. 10:14.300 --> 10:15.820 That's where we're picking from for presidents. 10:16.040 --> 10:16.740 That's this country. 10:18.040 --> 10:22.160 And meanwhile, activist organizations such as the Center for Election Science are saying things 10:22.160 --> 10:26.340 like, the most important thing we do as a society is to elect leaders. 10:26.920 --> 10:31.120 It's not bearing or raising children or composing a groundbreaking sonata or curing cancer or 10:31.120 --> 10:31.520 anything like that 10:31.660 --> 10:33.560 [all those, interactive, are "as a society"]. It's I Voted stickers every four years. 10:35.140 --> 10:38.900 It's really hard to work with election security topics because you're constantly reading stuff 10:38.900 --> 10:39.960 like that, the advertising. 10:40.620 --> 10:41.000 It's gross. 10:41.980 --> 10:44.220 All right, overview of mass collaboration. 10:44.500 --> 10:45.440 Is the talk over yet? 10:45.480 --> 10:46.260 How much time do I have? 10:46.620 --> 10:47.460 I better talk faster. 10:48.600 --> 10:50.220 Nobody's going to the bathroom or recess. 10:50.400 --> 10:50.880 You gotta listen. 10:51.480 --> 10:53.940 Okay, so mass collaboration, all right? 10:54.020 --> 10:58.380 So we have humans collaborating in numbers [of] more than one. 10:58.440 --> 11:03.640 I guess you can collaborate on your own with yourself and any sort of imagination [connecting nonlocally across spacetime] 11:03.640 --> 11:07.600 But with consensus, we usually start there, right? 11:07.800 --> 11:10.440 Consensus is voting and it has pros and cons. 11:10.880 --> 11:16.240 Probably the biggest pro is that it's one of the most comfortable ways for us to work. 11:16.240 --> 11:18.880 If you're hanging out with friends and you're like, 'Hey, what do you want to do for dinner 11:18.880 --> 11:19.180 tonight?' 11:19.820 --> 11:22.460 I mean, if you have a good relationship, that's a good conversation. 11:22.640 --> 11:23.540 If not, not. 11:24.080 --> 11:26.420 But you know, it's a comfortable thing. 11:26.460 --> 11:27.380 We're going to go for dinner. 11:27.500 --> 11:28.960 I vote for, you know, vegan. 11:29.040 --> 11:30.060 I also vote for vegan. 11:30.180 --> 11:31.260 Okay, kick out all the carnists. 11:31.320 --> 11:31.640 We're good. 11:32.220 --> 11:32.580 All right. 11:34.160 --> 11:36.200 Consensus also has a lot of cons. 11:36.480 --> 11:40.240 I think we're going to have something like a hundred and seventy million voters this November. 11:41.160 --> 11:44.160 And for example, I will be voting from Seattle. 11:44.300 --> 11:46.000 Let's say that Washington state is a swing state. 11:46.060 --> 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 11:52.700 --> 11:56.240 at the National Weather Service, who's going to appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to appoint 11:56.240 --> 12:00.020 [or hire] somebody else, who's going to make some decisions about meteorology that's going to affect people in 12:00.020 --> 12:00.300 Florida. 12:01.340 --> 12:02.080 I'm not in Florida. 12:02.080 --> 12:03.700 I don't know anything about meteorology. 12:03.880 --> 12:05.240 Why am I part of the input here? 12:05.340 --> 12:09.600 Why am I part of the garbage in that's creating the garbage out, right? 12:10.280 --> 12:11.620 So that's one of the cons of it. 12:12.460 --> 12:16.540 And usually advocates of, 'Hey, we got to do everything, but voting is the most important thing 12:16.540 --> 12:17.360 you ever do in your life.' 12:17.460 --> 12:22.400 Those kind of people say, 'Well, sure, you're right about these counterarguments, but the only other 12:22.400 --> 12:25.040 option is hierarchy, and that's gross. 12:25.180 --> 12:27.080 So we have to have this horrible [admittedly problematic mass consensus].' 12:27.260 --> 12:34.060 It's the 'Democracy is crappy except for all the others', whatever that quote is, 'is the crappiest 12:34.060 --> 12:34.660 except for all the others.' 12:34.780 --> 12:34.880 Okay. 12:34.960 --> 12:36.420 So hierarchy, pros and cons. 12:36.500 --> 12:37.980 It's really good in an emergency. 12:38.420 --> 12:40.180 Oh my God, the building is burning down. 12:40.380 --> 12:43.260 Like, I'm going to push you out the window onto the lifeboat -- 12:43.360 --> 12:46.840 I mixed my metaphors -- right now! Because, you know, hurry, hurry, hurry! 12:47.420 --> 12:49.380 It's also good for things like sports, right? 12:49.520 --> 12:52.740 [Which is] simulated war. Or, you know, BDSM or something like that. 12:52.760 --> 12:57.060 Like, it's, you know, so sometimes people have their claws out and the boxers, right? 12:57.060 --> 13:02.200 You can see boxers compliment each other before and after the fight, but during the fight there, 13:02.460 --> 13:05.180 you know, there's a definite hierarchy when you knock him to the ground, right? 13:05.260 --> 13:06.220 You give him a concussion. 13:06.540 --> 13:07.180 All right. 13:07.280 --> 13:13.220 So the hierarchy cons, you know, I think there's like a statement that everybody is depressed. 13:13.680 --> 13:17.240 Everybody who's a paid worker is depressed because they lose autonomy. 13:18.340 --> 13:22.680 There's like two others, [creative] control [or purpose] and mastery over their own life work or something. 13:22.780 --> 13:24.060 We all go to paid jobs here. 13:24.120 --> 13:25.800 We know the cons of hierarchy. 13:26.880 --> 13:31.240 So people say, well, I guess it's back to consensus then because there's no door number 13:31.240 --> 13:33.340 three, but thankfully there is a door number three. 13:33.820 --> 13:35.140 That is stigmergy. 13:35.540 --> 13:39.980 This is a concept not invented but developed by Heather Marsh in her Binding Chaos philosophy 13:39.980 --> 13:42.940 books, which everybody should read and they're in my recommended resource list. 13:43.400 --> 13:47.160 I'll keep it really short with just like two [three] examples. 13:47.420 --> 13:49.240 One is you go to a doctor's office. 13:49.340 --> 13:51.080 You're the only person in the waiting room. 13:51.200 --> 13:52.820 A puzzle is partially put together. 13:52.920 --> 13:53.740 The goal is clear: 13:53.880 --> 13:54.680 Put together the puzzle. 13:54.860 --> 13:57.680 Anybody in the waiting room can participate and put together the puzzle pieces. 13:57.760 --> 13:58.340 It's transparent: 13:58.480 --> 13:59.560 You can see all the puzzle pieces. 13:59.940 --> 14:02.700 And everybody gets to enjoy the end product, the beautiful puzzle. 14:03.060 --> 14:04.100 So you're sitting there puzzling. 14:04.760 --> 14:08.460 You're not voting with another puzzler because you're the only person in the room and you're not 14:08.460 --> 14:09.660 giving or taking orders 14:09.760 --> 14:11.020 so it's not hierarchy either. [Yet it's [collaboration with future/past puzzlers] 14:11.140 --> 14:17.080 Okay, we have things like this socially, finger- tapping on guitar, for example, or any sort of 14:17.080 --> 14:20.740 cultural thing when you know, when Eddie Van Halen was first finger-tapping on guitar, he turned 14:20.740 --> 14:22.580 around so that people wouldn't see his trick. 14:22.660 --> 14:27.700 He was trying to have a unique sales point and keep it kind of a proprietary secret, but over 14:27.700 --> 14:32.180 time, you know, it melted out and other guitarists started finger-tapping and they start influencing 14:32.180 --> 14:32.660 each other [i.e. indirectly collaborating]. 14:32.760 --> 14:34.360 But nobody's like voting, do you, 14:34.480 --> 14:39.340 Do you finger-tap with your index or your middle or giving [hierarchical] commands or orders, right? 14:39.420 --> 14:40.940 So we do this [stigmergy, indirect collaboration] with like slang too. 14:41.080 --> 14:45.540 Like the goal might be make English language better, like, say cool stuff. 14:45.600 --> 14:49.480 And so you hear something like, you know, 'Bet' or all this Gen Z slang, right? 14:49.500 --> 14:50.600 And you adopt some of it. 14:50.900 --> 14:52.080 So that's, like, stigmergy. 14:52.140 --> 14:52.860 It's [indirect] collaboration. 14:53.040 --> 14:56.680 You're collaborating to make the language cooler, the guitar playing cooler, the puzzle better, and 14:56.680 --> 14:58.240 you're not doing hierarchy or consensus. 14:58.240 --> 15:04.400 So boom, just smash this framework of all these [seemingly] millions of well-funded election security 15:04.400 --> 15:08.200 nonprofits that won't ever say this stuff with their corporate mask. 15:08.760 --> 15:08.880 Okay. 15:09.060 --> 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 15:13.520 --> 15:16.940 Elections System. How we're doing on time? [Tech problems had eaten more time than I thought.] 15:17.320 --> 15:17.920 Ah, not bad. [Wrong.] 15:18.360 --> 15:18.560 Okay. 15:18.640 --> 15:29.240 So when we are looking at the election system today, what we're doing is we're studying how, you 15:29.240 --> 15:36.420 know, mass-scale multi-million people consensus is working in this country, right? 15:37.640 --> 15:39.240 And what are the pros and cons of that? 15:39.300 --> 15:40.340 How is it going down? 15:41.260 --> 15:44.060 There are 3,000-something [usually considered] voting jurisdictions in the United States. 15:44.160 --> 15:45.060 [But 6,000 or more if fully comprehensive] Most of them are counties. 15:45.240 --> 15:48.900 So people just kind of loosely call them all counties, even though some of them are townships 15:48.900 --> 15:50.080 or municipalities or whatever. 15:50.860 --> 15:52.680 So now we're going to go into this flowchart. 15:52.780 --> 15:54.720 This is what I was doing in my hotel room this afternoon. 15:55.080 --> 15:56.180 It's a work in progress. 15:56.340 --> 15:59.380 I aim to improve it over time and eventually put it on my website. 15:59.520 --> 16:01.460 All right, time to rock and roll. 16:02.040 --> 16:03.700 This is the voter knowledge right here. 16:03.800 --> 16:05.180 This is where it all starts, right? 16:05.260 --> 16:07.440 Knowledge is power, all that kind of stuff. 16:07.540 --> 16:11.780 So you have education, media, propaganda, and a big part people overlook is trust. 16:11.880 --> 16:16.920 They talk about, like, oh, do people like Biden's policies or do people like Trump's, I don't know, 16:17.020 --> 16:19.660 [his] money, you know, but it's, like, trust. 16:19.700 --> 16:20.820 Who do you trust, right? [Any politican? Any institution? Any data source?] 16:20.880 --> 16:24.860 And you want to trust but verify, but trust is a big part of this knowledge. 16:25.880 --> 16:30.580 We're not the best word, but in, you know, relationship, social-emotional picture is the 16:30.580 --> 16:30.980 trust. 16:31.740 --> 16:35.220 Okay, so you get pre-election tracking polls happening at this point. 16:35.340 --> 16:36.720 This is all pre-election stuff. 16:37.280 --> 16:39.180 Voter eligibility and registration. 16:39.440 --> 16:43.740 Here are multiple issues with that that you can find resources on in the recommended resource 16:43.740 --> 16:44.160 list. 16:44.540 --> 16:45.660 I don't need to read that aloud. 16:47.580 --> 16:50.020 So here we have vote capture. 16:50.280 --> 16:55.860 Okay, so here's a big concept that's going to help you whenever you talk about this subject from now 16:55.860 --> 16:56.140 on. 16:56.680 --> 17:01.020 Divide, you know, Gaul was all, all of Gaul was divided into three parts, but this is divided into 17:01.020 --> 17:01.320 two. 17:01.920 --> 17:03.800 On one hand is vote capture. 17:04.340 --> 17:06.620 On the other hand is a vote tallying. 17:07.180 --> 17:14.840 Okay, so vote capture is, we see the vote capture can happen at home with vote by snailmail. 17:15.580 --> 17:20.360 Vote capture can happen at the precinct on touchscreens or paper ballots or ballot marking. 17:20.860 --> 17:24.240 Vote capture can be the astronauts voting from outer space, right? 17:24.280 --> 17:29.300 There's a lot of registering, recording your, well, not the right word, capturing your vote. 17:29.380 --> 17:30.320 What did you, what did you vote? 17:30.440 --> 17:31.220 Who did you vote for? 17:31.740 --> 17:36.960 And then the other half of it down here is this vote tallying, totaling, or tabulating. 17:37.080 --> 17:38.700 Those words all mean the same thing. 17:38.700 --> 17:41.700 So you say, well, are elections secure or paper ballots good? 17:42.140 --> 17:45.880 Well, are you talking about the vote capture or the vote tallying? 17:45.920 --> 17:52.260 Because feeding paper ballots into, hand-marked paper ballots into an optical scanner is one 17:52.260 --> 17:57.400 thing, but the actual bubbling in with a pencil or what[not] is something quite different, right? 17:57.480 --> 18:00.460 And so the, maybe one is good and the other isn't or something like that. 18:00.700 --> 18:04.460 So vote capture on one hand, vote tallying or counting or whatever on the other. 18:05.360 --> 18:07.940 There's no French Academy mandating a single word. 18:08.800 --> 18:09.200 All right. 18:09.480 --> 18:10.200 [unclear]... 18:10.520 --> 18:14.780 Here, before the vote capture, we have election professionals readying. 18:14.960 --> 18:20.300 They do things like ballot design or logic and accuracy testing. 18:21.000 --> 18:24.120 This is the voting vendors and the election workers and the counties working together. 18:24.260 --> 18:28.800 Like, each county [of] these 3,000 counties is one unit or one cell of the country's system. 18:30.520 --> 18:33.440 Ballot design is more complicated than it sounds, right? 18:33.500 --> 18:38.440 Because you might have which little pixels on the touchscreen go with this candidate or something. 18:38.500 --> 18:42.860 And if you look at the story of whistleblower Clint Curtis, you can see how that was important. 18:42.920 --> 18:43.640 He was murdered. [Correction follows.] 18:43.640 --> 18:48.660 It's in the recommended, I'm sorry, he was not, the civil investigator Raymond Lemme, who was 18:48.660 --> 18:50.540 investigating [Clint Curtis's] claims was [murdered]. 18:51.040 --> 18:54.900 You can see that in the recommended resource list if you want that kind of stuff, including a 18:54.900 --> 18:55.220 documentary. 18:55.640 --> 19:01.380 But this stuff is all really important and not really covered widely at all. 19:03.100 --> 19:08.120 Vote capture, UOCAVA, Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. 19:08.460 --> 19:10.840 So a lot of that happens by the internet, right? 19:10.880 --> 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 19:19.800 --> 19:20.080 that. 19:20.900 --> 19:24.740 Even candidates themselves voting, you know, there's always kind of like a big publicity thing 19:24.740 --> 19:27.460 where the president goes in, or the presidential candidate goes in to vote. 19:27.740 --> 19:31.040 So there are these unusual kind of circumstances that are fun because they're part of the system 19:31.040 --> 19:31.280 too. 19:31.440 --> 19:33.800 You can't, you know, they're more attack surface, right? 19:33.860 --> 19:35.960 There's more ways things can go wrong. 19:37.260 --> 19:45.360 I should say that UOCAVA is not the only internet voting happening right now in the United States. 19:45.800 --> 19:47.920 King County, where I live, which is Seattle. 19:48.900 --> 19:55.620 They have a, I can't remember, it's some sort of strange environmental board or something that 19:55.620 --> 19:59.540 votes, it's set aside from everybody else and does internet voting. [King Conservation District] 19:59.640 --> 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 20:04.840 --> 20:06.360 responding and I didn't win that one. 20:07.360 --> 20:08.600 I mean they didn't respond. 20:09.960 --> 20:12.980 So then we have, let's see. 20:13.400 --> 20:16.840 So you can vote from home, which is basically absentee ballot, right? 20:16.900 --> 20:23.160 Instead of living in another country, you are voting by snailmail from home, like your absentee 20:23.160 --> 20:24.800 headquarters or country is your house. 20:25.020 --> 20:26.900 So that's what happens in Washington state or Oregon. [Technical difficulties] 20:27.280 --> 20:34.120 Okay, let's see if it's the, so, you know, once we have this vote recording, this vote capture, you 20:34.120 --> 20:35.780 know, you capture the vote and you record it. 20:35.840 --> 20:37.140 I guess it happens at the same time [more or less]. 20:37.260 --> 20:38.740 Ask Jacques Derrida about that. 20:39.100 --> 20:42.880 But you have post-vote capture exit polls. 20:42.880 --> 20:44.000 These are the exit samples. 20:44.180 --> 20:47.360 You can see a lot in the recommended resource list from Jonathan Simon about that. 20:47.460 --> 20:49.100 I'll talk about that in the activism section. 20:50.100 --> 20:53.420 The vote might be recorded, you get the idea, right? 20:53.540 --> 20:58.840 But this is, you can, I'll make sure to upload this to my website afterwards so that people can 20:58.840 --> 20:59.280 find it. 20:59.980 --> 21:08.700 Here we have, once the vote is recorded at a county precinct, a bipartisan transport team, you 21:08.700 --> 21:12.040 know, drives it to the central counting facility of a county. 21:12.600 --> 21:14.160 Okay, so it's like central headquarters. 21:14.420 --> 21:15.240 That's always kind of crazy. 21:15.360 --> 21:16.240 It's like, who's in that car? 21:16.320 --> 21:17.160 Is the car videotaped? 21:17.200 --> 21:20.300 They have a chain of custody documents and they have a lot of measures. 21:20.520 --> 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 21:25.200 --> 21:25.640 in the news. 21:26.640 --> 21:30.740 Once it gets to that central counting facility is where you have processing, right? 21:30.780 --> 21:33.240 So you remove the memory drive from the storage bag. 21:33.340 --> 21:38.320 So in the transport team car, there's a storage bag with the memory sticks into the central county 21:38.320 --> 21:38.540 thing. 21:38.600 --> 21:42.900 You take it out, or maybe if it's vote by mail, you check signatures on the ballot envelopes to 21:42.900 --> 21:43.820 see, you know, that kind of thing. 21:43.860 --> 21:46.460 In Seattle, Washington state, you have to sign the ballot envelope. 21:46.880 --> 21:53.280 During processing and beyond, review teams of election workers adjudicate the gray areas of the 21:53.280 --> 21:56.120 edge cases where they're not really sure, like, what happened [with voter intent]. 21:56.640 --> 21:58.740 This can be a vector for a lot of problems. 21:58.920 --> 22:02.960 It can also be blown out of proportion as a lot of problems I'll talk about. 22:03.220 --> 22:03.880 Let's see what I'm doing on time. [Tech difficulties meant much less time.] 22:04.260 --> 22:05.040 Yeah, I think we're okay. [Wrong.] 22:05.760 --> 22:06.020 All right. 22:06.040 --> 22:10.040 So in Georgia, they changed their voting vendor. 22:10.120 --> 22:14.220 So in Georgia, every single county uses the same voting vendor. 22:14.460 --> 22:17.480 159 counties all use Dominion Voting Systems right now. 22:17.940 --> 22:23.200 Whereas in Texas, where it's 254 counties where I'm originally from, each county [picks their own] 22:23.200 --> 22:23.900 voting vendor. 22:26.100 --> 22:34.000 But the, oh yeah, so in Georgia, they changed from their previous voting vendor, I think it was 22:34.000 --> 22:39.100 Diebold or somebody who bought out Diebold, to Dominion voting computers. 22:39.640 --> 22:47.260 And one of the Coffee County election workers' complaints about these Dominion computers was that 22:47.260 --> 22:52.940 the adjudication fields in the software, if they're going to say, you know what, we got to 22:52.940 --> 22:56.300 throw out this ballot because they voted for everybody, they bubbled in everything. 22:57.200 --> 22:59.300 Well, with their own -- that's called over-voting. 22:59.820 --> 23:06.200 So you could, in their old voting computers, you could go and say, well, the adjudication panel, 23:06.320 --> 23:12.620 the vote review panel, was Joe Smith and Susie, you know, but once they updated to, I mean, 23:12.780 --> 23:18.700 changed to Dominion, Dominion no longer gave them an option to write down who the adjudicators were 23:18.700 --> 23:23.120 and what date and time and all that stuff that helps investigative journalists or auditors or 23:23.120 --> 23:25.560 whatever figure out what really happened. 23:25.700 --> 23:27.640 So that was a legitimate complaint. 23:27.640 --> 23:33.680 But then when they made some, Misty Hampton, then the election supervisor shortly after Jan. 6, with 23:33.680 --> 23:38.360 the Coffee County elections office breach, now one of Trump's co-defendants in the RICO case in 23:38.360 --> 23:43.980 Fulton County, Misty Hampton made some videos about this adjudication problem, but she didn't 23:43.980 --> 23:45.700 explain it just like I explained it. [She portrayed all adjudication as inherently sketchy.] 23:45.900 --> 23:49.540 She was one step from lizards and Italian space satellites again. 23:50.300 --> 23:56.220 So, you know, it's a real kind of legitimate vector for problems and a solution for it, a big 23:56.220 --> 23:59.700 solution, is to have more election monitors, election observers. 23:59.880 --> 24:01.660 And I'll talk about that later on. 24:01.720 --> 24:04.660 That's where you have eyes on these adjudication teams 24:04.680 --> 24:06.580 and so you can look for sketchy stuff. 24:06.980 --> 24:12.120 Okay, once we process the votes, we have to count them, vote tallying, totaling, tabulating. 24:12.620 --> 24:14.120 We might scan the paper ballots. 24:14.420 --> 24:17.040 We might read the memory device, could be a CD -ROM. 24:17.200 --> 24:19.240 We might insert into a computer, read the data off. 24:19.920 --> 24:25.560 And when it's a ballot marking device [BMD], like Georgia is using currently, it is a touchscreen 24:25.560 --> 24:27.620 essentially that's yoked to a printer. 24:27.940 --> 24:36.140 And the printer prints out what is claimed to be a voter verified paper audit trail, but is instead a 24:36.140 --> 24:38.100 QR code that humans can't read. 24:38.520 --> 24:42.740 So it's like, you know, if you got a receipt and it was written in, you know, Farsi or something, 24:42.800 --> 24:44.740 unless you're Reality Winner, you can't read it, right? 24:44.840 --> 24:46.020 That's one of the languages she knows. 24:47.800 --> 24:48.880 So it's a QR code. 24:48.940 --> 24:50.860 You can't read it, you know, that causes a problem. 24:51.100 --> 24:52.460 So there's lots of issues here. 24:52.500 --> 24:54.320 And that's a swing state, right, that's having that. [Georgia] 24:54.400 --> 24:55.040 And the Curling v. 24:55.200 --> 25:05.100 Raffensperger case in federal court in Georgia is now trying to abandon mandatory BMDs and use hand 25:05.100 --> 25:06.640 -marked paper ballots in most circumstances. 25:07.560 --> 25:13.640 We have our voting computer vendors here in this part and elsewhere, like with voter registration, 25:13.780 --> 25:14.220 for example. 25:14.780 --> 25:20.620 The current triopoly of opaque proprietary vendors is ES&S, headquartered in Omaha on John Galt 25:20.620 --> 25:21.140 Boulevard. 25:22.040 --> 25:24.720 They're the biggest voting vendor in the United States, if that tells you anything. 25:25.480 --> 25:32.200 Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in both Toronto, Canada, and I believe Denver, somewhere 25:32.200 --> 25:32.720 in Colorado. [Denver] 25:33.440 --> 25:38.300 So you often hear the far right saying, oh my god, Dominion's based in Canada. 25:38.480 --> 25:40.720 Well, yeah, but it has two offices because it serves multiple [countries]. 25:40.880 --> 25:46.020 Okay, this is like chasing the tail around, you know, that's like what the media does with people. 25:46.580 --> 25:50.880 Okay, so then we have Hart InterCivic based in Austin. 25:51.540 --> 25:55.260 There's an example of a voting vendor that's aiming for less opacity. 25:55.580 --> 25:59.460 I'm not optimistic enough to say more transparency, but that's Clear Ballot based in 25:59.460 --> 26:03.720 Boston and they're used in King County in Washington state. 26:04.600 --> 26:07.840 But they're definitely, you know, I don't want to, like, neg them. 26:07.960 --> 26:11.880 They're definitely like interesting and good and worth checking out, but they're not also not 26:11.880 --> 26:14.740 putting Libreboot on the firmware or anything like that, right? 26:14.880 --> 26:22.820 So, politics is the art of the incremental little bits till the global warming kills us all, right? 26:23.320 --> 26:27.600 Okay, so we go into vote totals here. 26:27.740 --> 26:29.460 This is, like, post-election time. 26:30.100 --> 26:30.500 Canvassing. 26:30.800 --> 26:32.900 What the heck is canvassing versus tabulating? 26:33.060 --> 26:34.800 Well, I finally figured this out the other day. 26:35.340 --> 26:39.640 There's actually an Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that has a glossary 26:39.640 --> 26:40.900 of election terms, very useful. 26:41.240 --> 26:44.020 But canvassing is where you organize the vote totals. 26:44.180 --> 26:51.740 You might say we had this many overseas soldier votes and overseas citizens votes [i.e. UOCAVA], or we had this 26:51.740 --> 26:53.760 many votes that were challenged or something. 26:53.820 --> 26:56.180 We're going to put them all in a little spreadsheet and have a lot of fun with it. 26:56.580 --> 27:02.120 That's what canvassing is, and it helps with the certification processes of, you know, various 27:02.120 --> 27:02.980 states have. 27:04.940 --> 27:11.920 When you figure out the vote total at a precinct rather than a central facility or maybe both, they 27:11.920 --> 27:14.560 sometimes tape poll tapes, a.k.a. 27:14.560 --> 27:19.200 result tapes, on the window, sometimes required by law, sometimes not. 27:19.300 --> 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 27:23.500 --> 27:25.880 and crowdsource it to Scrutineers.org. 27:27.440 --> 27:29.160 They look like cash register receipts. 27:29.720 --> 27:35.100 So then we go down to here, retention of ballots, 22 months if there's a federal race, otherwise 27:35.100 --> 27:36.340 state law determines it. 27:37.200 --> 27:39.760 Then we have a thing here about audits versus recounts. 27:39.800 --> 27:42.800 I should explain this really quickly because this is, again, you're reading the news or you're 27:42.800 --> 27:45.840 watching TV and audit this and recount that, and you're like, 'What does that even mean? 27:45.840 --> 27:46.280 I don't know. 27:46.360 --> 27:47.040 Why don't they tell me?' 27:47.280 --> 27:49.140 Well, they don't tell you because they're not talking to you. 27:49.340 --> 27:53.060 The corporate media is talking to the intelligentsia, the commentariat, the civil 27:53.060 --> 27:58.520 bureaucracy, journalists, you know, the commentariat, the intelligentsia, whatever, it's 27:58.520 --> 27:59.840 the three-letter agencies. 27:59.840 --> 28:02.920 They're not talking to Joe Schmoe, who doesn't know the difference between a recount and audit. 28:03.380 --> 28:05.640 We're not the audience for this stuff. 28:06.360 --> 28:14.600 So audits with like, Philip Stark, his risk -limiting audits, his, not the fake imitations [accepting QR codes] 28:14.780 --> 28:22.500 -- and there are some -- are statistical spot-checks where you take little samples of the [ballot] vote totals 28:22.500 --> 28:26.980 and then all that kind of stuff in the trail, the evidence trail, to determine if a recount is 28:26.980 --> 28:27.360 needed. 28:27.840 --> 28:33.980 And if the margins are really, really, really, really close and the Stark risk-limiting audit is 28:33.980 --> 28:38.580 saying, 'Hey, something might be sketchy here,' that's when you do a recount that's exhaustive. 28:38.700 --> 28:39.800 You recount every ballot. 28:41.680 --> 28:46.760 There's a kind of a dispute within election activism where some people say we need hand- 28:46.760 --> 28:48.040 marked paper ballots. 28:48.220 --> 28:53.000 Both sides of this dispute agree that for vote capture, we need hand-marked paper ballots. 28:53.320 --> 28:58.860 But then they say for the vote tallying portion of the program, do we need to hand-count all of those 28:58.860 --> 28:59.860 publicly [as in Australia and elsewhere]? 29:00.040 --> 29:03.000 Like, make it a federal holiday and take a month to like do it? 29:03.260 --> 29:07.480 Or, you know, right now people expect overnight results, right? 29:07.560 --> 29:11.600 But get them accustomed to the 18th century, like let's take a month to everybody count it. 29:11.900 --> 29:16.820 Or is it okay to feed them into the voting computer optical scanners, digital scanners? 29:16.960 --> 29:18.000 Might that be faster? 29:18.140 --> 29:21.820 Might that be more accurate than tired humans being pressured to do it overnight? 29:22.200 --> 29:26.960 As long as, with the caveat, the proviso that we do these risk-limiting audits with statistical 29:26.960 --> 29:36.380 perfection and make sure that the software on the voting computers is not, you know, compromised in 29:36.380 --> 29:36.780 some way. 29:37.320 --> 29:38.760 All right, last slide of this. 29:38.780 --> 29:40.060 So now we've totaled our votes. 29:40.780 --> 29:44.500 Hopefully the county will upload it to the website for public use [and post poll tapes]. 29:44.760 --> 29:47.720 They'll probably upload it to the state entity for certification. 29:48.180 --> 29:51.800 They might get it there another way by, you know, by courier or something like that. 29:52.480 --> 29:55.680 Then you have the state election board or maybe the state Secretary of State. 29:56.180 --> 29:59.760 They're going to certify it, sign the certification documents, all this kind of stuff. 30:00.200 --> 30:04.340 At that point, it's going to go to the federal level if and only if there are federal races on 30:04.340 --> 30:04.720 the ballot. 30:05.700 --> 30:09.640 And the Election Assistance Commission sometimes gets these [other] reports. 30:09.900 --> 30:11.580 They get reports from each state [about election processes there]. 30:13.320 --> 30:14.240 The U.S. 30:14.300 --> 30:16.220 president of the, I'm sorry, the President of the U.S. 30:16.300 --> 30:17.040 Senate gets it [for the Senate, i.e. the vice-president] 30:17.120 --> 30:17.480 The U.S. 30:17.540 --> 30:18.280 House gets it. 30:18.660 --> 30:22.560 National Archives and Records Administration gets the presidential for the Electoral College. 30:24.480 --> 30:30.120 I was wondering how do these votes get from the state to the feds? 30:30.760 --> 30:36.960 Because you hear about ballots, you hear about paper trails sometimes, right? 30:37.000 --> 30:38.380 But that's only on the county level. 30:38.520 --> 30:43.640 That's level you as a human, you know, 180 million voter is interacting with. 30:44.180 --> 30:47.680 But what about, how does it get from the state level to the federal level or something like that? 30:48.000 --> 30:49.060 So I asked people. 30:49.560 --> 30:53.600 They didn't want to be attributed, but they were in a position to know. 30:54.080 --> 30:59.340 And they told me that it's sent by private carrier like [DHL] or FedEx. 30:59.480 --> 31:04.420 Now, if you know these companies, you know they have special divisions, like, for shipping organs or 31:04.420 --> 31:06.780 something that have to be kept refrigerated, things like that. 31:06.940 --> 31:12.780 So they assuredly have a division for government records, like shipping them around. 31:13.320 --> 31:17.740 But I think it's pretty funny because you could make a great stoner movie where you have like this 31:17.740 --> 31:22.460 stoner who's, like, an election worker and he's got like this thumb drive. 31:22.700 --> 31:26.600 It's got, like, the dispositive thing about the who's going to win the presidential. 31:26.720 --> 31:28.860 He's got to drive all the way to D.C. 31:28.940 --> 31:34.780 and stop for like marijuana and getting [into] all these crazy complications, you know. 31:35.580 --> 31:37.800 But okay, so that was the survey. 31:38.040 --> 31:42.820 We surveyed the election system and now we're going to scrutinize it. 31:43.940 --> 31:46.080 This is whistleblower Reality Winner. 31:46.300 --> 31:52.600 By show of hands, how many people know, vaguely acquainted with who this person is? 31:52.740 --> 31:53.260 Cognoscer. 31:53.720 --> 31:54.720 Okay, maybe half. 31:55.120 --> 31:56.680 Okay, maybe a little bit more than half. 31:57.200 --> 31:57.540 All right. 31:57.680 --> 32:04.220 And then raise your hands if and only if you know what she revealed, even vaguely. 32:04.520 --> 32:05.840 Now we have about three people. 32:05.940 --> 32:08.380 So that's the great job of the media right there. 32:09.540 --> 32:18.040 You know, as she said, the scandal of who Reality Winner is and how weird her name is became the 32:18.040 --> 32:21.340 focus and not what she leaked. 32:21.480 --> 32:25.840 The Intercept printed five pages of a top-secret National Security Agency report. 32:26.640 --> 32:32.840 She leaked it in 2017, but it basically showed the Kremlin issuing cyber attacks against the U.S. 32:32.880 --> 32:34.480 election system in two stages. 32:34.780 --> 32:46.600 Stage one was, you had the Kremlin breach VR Systems, a voting registration vendor in Florida and 32:46.600 --> 32:48.140 they denied that they were ever breached. 32:48.220 --> 32:50.760 That's a huge story I could go into, but I won't. 32:51.160 --> 32:57.260 And so they go into VR Systems, these Kremlin military intelligence hackers and they, with 32:57.260 --> 33:01.720 actual names, there's actual, like, names of these people [hackers in] indictments that came out later, thanks 33:01.720 --> 33:02.640 to Reality Winner. 33:03.340 --> 33:06.240 Assuredly, I mean, I'll tell you, Obama wasn't going to talk about it. 33:06.580 --> 33:10.600 You know, if you look at the Senate Intelligence Committee report about the Russian interference in 33:10.600 --> 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 33:16.480 --> 33:20.360 like talk about this, like an inquiry and talk about this Russian, Kremlin cyber attacks.' 33:20.620 --> 33:24.740 And Obama said, 'No, we're going to get, we're going to kind of like, keep it quiet because we 33:24.740 --> 33:28.120 don't want people to lose faith in the system and da-da-da-da-da.' 33:28.140 --> 33:32.580 Oh, everybody's like, oh Barack, but I think, you know, it inspired me to come up with the Doggerel 33:32.580 --> 33:33.660 for Democrats. 33:34.260 --> 33:34.940 Let's see if I can remember it. 33:35.260 --> 33:38.700 What raises doubt might lower turnout. 33:39.560 --> 33:42.560 So only open your mouth to fellate the state. 33:42.840 --> 33:45.580 That's Obama's response to Kerry essentially in a nutshell. 33:46.320 --> 33:46.580 Okay. [abridging for time] 33:46.860 --> 33:56.200 Now, so the first stage was they breached the voting systems vendor, VR Systems (everything's 33:56.200 --> 33:58.400 system and system and cyber and system!). 33:59.140 --> 34:05.720 And they essentially did that so they could use VR Systems internal documents to imitate their logos 34:05.720 --> 34:08.340 and stuff and put together better spearphishing emails. 34:08.820 --> 34:15.040 Then they sent these spearphishing emails to Florida county election supervisors and according 34:15.040 --> 34:22.220 to Florida governor and [both U.S.] Florida senators [at the time], some of the county election workers fell 34:22.220 --> 34:27.000 for this spearphishing trickery and according to Bob Woodward, some of them got malware installed 34:27.000 --> 34:27.860 on their systems. 34:28.260 --> 34:33.460 And meanwhile, you have, you know, people dancing around on the Dem side saying that it's, it's this 34:33.460 --> 34:34.120 is all made up, 34:34.160 --> 34:35.720 it's not real. But it's very real. 34:35.840 --> 34:37.520 So that was the two stages, right? 34:38.160 --> 34:41.200 The next one is this Coffee County elections office breach [insider threat]. 34:41.320 --> 34:43.500 That's Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO. 34:45.420 --> 34:52.040 He flew into Coffee County, Georgia shortly before that Misty Hampton election supervisor resigned 34:52.040 --> 34:58.160 supposedly for, or was forced out, terminated supposedly for her timesheets, but in actuality 34:58.160 --> 35:02.260 for her role in the breach, she was [just one of the breachers], Coffee County basically made her the scapegoat. 35:02.340 --> 35:08.240 There's a lot more people [breachers] in Coffee County, this rural southern Georgia county in the swing state 35:08.240 --> 35:09.540 of Georgia, 16 [Electoral College] electors. 35:09.680 --> 35:12.040 This will come up, I'm sure, in the news November and December. 35:14.360 --> 35:21.580 The Coffee County, Sidney Powell hired, you know, the big MAGA lawyer, Trumper lawyer, hired 35:21.580 --> 35:26.760 SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta-based forensics firm to go in there as operatives and make off 35:26.760 --> 35:28.760 with exact copies of the voting software. 35:28.920 --> 35:32.640 And remember, every county in Georgia uses the same [vendor], so it's a whole statewide voting software 35:32.640 --> 35:33.080 compromise. 35:33.320 --> 35:38.540 Now, of the swing state, one of the biggest swing states, 16 electors, and the media's like, well, 35:38.740 --> 35:42.220 you know, they're like sleeping and when they're talking about, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever. 35:43.180 --> 35:45.340 There's a lot I've written on both of these. 35:45.440 --> 35:54.320 They're all in the recommended resources list. And the, there's CVEs as well from the Curling v. 35:54.480 --> 35:58.700 Raffensperger trial, which is what the Coalition for Good Governance is a nonprofit that's a 35:58.700 --> 35:59.940 plaintiff in the Curling v. 35:59.960 --> 36:06.340 Raffensperger trial to change the mandatory BMDs to handmarked paper ballots and with RLA Stark [audits]. 36:06.760 --> 36:13.460 And they discovered the Coffee County breach and that Curling case has CVEs, lots of them. 36:13.580 --> 36:14.760 You know what CVEs are, right? 36:14.800 --> 36:20.120 The official [computer security] bug classifications. On the BMDs, Dominion systems used in Georgia. 36:20.120 --> 36:21.480 So it's not a kooky thing. 36:21.580 --> 36:23.080 It's about as legit as you can get. 36:24.700 --> 36:27.360 Finally, let's see election activism is the last thing. 36:27.800 --> 36:32.240 These you can all look up in my recommended resource list. 36:32.920 --> 36:37.380 I want to especially point out some of the nerdier stuff like the statistical forensics and better 36:37.380 --> 36:40.780 data access, maybe trying to make a free software voting company. 36:40.920 --> 36:45.840 If you're in a state where each county gets to make its own choices and you get to go become 36:45.840 --> 36:50.100 friends with the election supervisor [and board], maybe you can hack together something and put Libreboot on 36:50.100 --> 36:50.520 the firmware. 36:51.680 --> 36:57.120 Or you can just have another big picture where, you know, maybe the most important thing in life 36:57.120 --> 37:01.100 isn't coming to consensus on whether we want to be ruled by Creep Number One or Creep Number Two, 37:01.600 --> 37:04.160 but instead, you know, picking ourselves and each other. 37:04.780 --> 37:05.660 We can do that. 37:05.780 --> 37:06.860 We can vote with our wallet. 37:07.260 --> 37:08.660 We can vote with our words. 37:08.840 --> 37:09.880 We can vote with our actions. 37:10.340 --> 37:11.380 We can vote with our choices. 37:12.020 --> 37:19.060 So all this voting software stuff is great and important, but you know, in the 19th century, the 37:19.060 --> 37:24.800 New York Times reported that there was a poll worker who simply took ballots he disfavored and 37:24.800 --> 37:25.400 ate them. 37:26.060 --> 37:26.500 Right? 37:26.620 --> 37:32.380 So you don't have to have superduper computer hacks to rig an election, but you do need 37:33.160 --> 37:36.820 dishonest people that aren't being observed, aren't being scrutinized, aren't being observed. 37:36.920 --> 37:37.960 You know, you get the idea. 37:38.680 --> 37:39.560 So now Q&A. 37:39.880 --> 37:40.220 Thanks. 37:40.520 --> 37:44.640 I'm not sure if you covered it because I did miss the beginning of your talk, but the recent 37:44.640 --> 37:50.240 lawsuits that were going on, my understanding of them was that, you know, I was all excited because 37:50.240 --> 37:54.560 I was thinking that there was finally going to be discovery and we get to really find out what was 37:54.560 --> 37:55.640 going on in these machines. 37:56.040 --> 38:02.000 But my understanding is really what was going on is some people made the mistake of saying that 38:02.000 --> 38:09.660 they knew the person who was an employee who made the actual tampering, and that was the misstep. 38:10.140 --> 38:12.120 Is that sort of your understanding? 38:12.520 --> 38:15.180 That's really the only thing that really came out. 38:15.420 --> 38:20.280 So a civil lawsuit is like a souped-up Freedom of Information Act request because you can do 38:20.280 --> 38:21.360 discovery and all that. 38:22.120 --> 38:26.280 In Georgia, there are three major lawsuits that are discussed in my recommended resource list. 38:26.420 --> 38:26.940 They're all civil. 38:27.260 --> 38:27.720 No, they're not. 38:27.820 --> 38:29.540 Two civil, one criminal. 38:30.080 --> 38:33.020 Then the Stop-the-Steal Kraken ones, if those are the ones you mean. 38:33.440 --> 38:34.660 Yeah, I mean, it would be like, oh, great. 38:34.720 --> 38:38.160 We're going to get interesting discovery and transcripts and quotes, but essentially the judges 38:38.160 --> 38:41.400 very early on in the hearing said, you guys don't have squat. 38:41.580 --> 38:42.520 Quit wasting my time. 38:42.580 --> 38:43.240 Get out of my courtroom. 38:43.980 --> 38:43.980 Okay. 38:44.220 --> 38:44.480 Thanks. 38:44.700 --> 38:45.740 I have a couple questions. 38:45.920 --> 38:52.180 If you went back to the 1950s, where all the machines from mechanical and you used the handle, 38:52.720 --> 38:59.340 would you say that was more secure or less prone to playing games? 38:59.920 --> 39:00.520 Douglas W. 39:00.880 --> 39:06.680 Jones is a computer science professor who has a website that gives a brief illustrated history of 39:06.680 --> 39:07.820 voting in the United States. 39:07.960 --> 39:09.620 That's in the recommended resource list. 39:09.760 --> 39:14.380 And he talks about the dials and the levers and the pros and cons of each. 39:14.940 --> 39:16.760 They've all been messed with at some point. 39:17.060 --> 39:22.500 I think the difference with computers is you can do things at vast scale that much faster than you 39:22.500 --> 39:23.840 can eat ballots. 39:24.540 --> 39:26.520 Would you be better off with paper ballots? 39:26.940 --> 39:29.800 Because, you know, look at what you got. 39:29.900 --> 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 39:35.560 --> 39:42.460 to where people have changed code in a and they couldn't even see it in a gaming machine in Vegas. 39:42.560 --> 39:45.560 So there's so much you can do so much with those ROMs. 39:45.960 --> 39:47.400 You could, you could. 39:47.400 --> 39:47.740 Yeah. 39:48.000 --> 39:52.640 So have a program that says, OK, if you press A, I'm going to make it C. 39:52.740 --> 39:54.400 And you would even know that if you're not in on it. 39:54.480 --> 39:54.920 Yeah. 39:55.080 --> 40:00.480 The story of whistleblower Clint Curtis and the detective Raymond Lemme is an old school kind of 40:00.480 --> 40:03.560 version of that in [Florida and in] Georgia, same state where Lemme was killed. 40:04.660 --> 40:08.400 Before the BMDs, there were touchscreens that were paperless. 40:08.440 --> 40:09.280 So there was no trail [not even QR nonsense]. 40:09.360 --> 40:12.160 You just touch the touchscreen and then you hoped that it was OK. 40:12.660 --> 40:13.540 Then they hooked it up, 40:13.700 --> 40:16.640 the judge said, 'Hey, you need to make a paper trail.' 40:16.960 --> 40:20.840 So they hooked it up to the touchscreens (or different ones), up to printers and printed out 40:20.840 --> 40:22.400 with a QR code that nobody can read. 40:22.460 --> 40:23.200 So same difference. 40:23.700 --> 40:25.320 So would you, OK, one more question. 40:25.700 --> 40:32.400 Would you say the elections in the last six, twelve years have been accurate or do you think 40:32.400 --> 40:37.260 it's more hype if people say it's phony or the numbers don't jive? 40:38.160 --> 40:38.400 Yeah. 40:38.500 --> 40:39.360 Two answers to that. 40:39.460 --> 40:43.100 Number one, I think the most honest answer is we don't know, not enough data. 40:43.600 --> 40:47.800 And I think the second answer is if you look at Code Red by [former pollster] Jonathan Simon, the 40:47.800 --> 40:54.180 statistical forensics of exit polls, which are used by the United States to monitor elections, free and fair 40:54.180 --> 40:58.460 elections in other countries, he's using that same method to monitor elections here. 40:58.740 --> 41:05.380 And they're often good enough, but there's often disparities here and there as well, enough that 41:05.380 --> 41:13.480 there's people need to fix it or evolve our democracy past this mass consensus thing, not 41:13.480 --> 41:14.460 mutually exclusive goals. 41:14.940 --> 41:15.060 Hi. 41:15.520 --> 41:19.560 So some states are moving to a ranked choice voting system. 41:20.160 --> 41:24.240 How do you think that affects us in the fact that it's going to need more computational power to 41:24.240 --> 41:26.860 actually tally a winner in some runoffs? 41:27.060 --> 41:29.580 You can't really do that by hand in a timely manner. 41:29.980 --> 41:32.060 And do you think that's a better system overall? 41:33.020 --> 41:38.420 OK, so ranked choice voting [RCV] called instant runoff voting in Canada and elsewhere is in my 41:38.420 --> 41:39.420 recommended resource list. 41:39.460 --> 41:43.540 There's an answer there, but I will say briefly that it's a good idea with difficult 41:43.540 --> 41:44.180 implementation. 41:44.620 --> 41:48.060 There's different ways, like, what we know is the voters first preference. 41:49.320 --> 41:52.760 But after he fills out the [RCV] ballot, what if the election changes dramatically? 41:53.080 --> 41:59.160 Ayn Rand enters the race and somebody dies and you know, you can try to predict that with [RCV] algorithms, 41:59.400 --> 42:03.320 but the public and election workers and the candidates in the United States and the voting 42:03.320 --> 42:06.720 machine computers are still struggling with how to implement etc. 42:06.820 --> 42:11.440 I do think overall it's a good idea to get away from the spoiler effect and let people vote their 42:11.440 --> 42:12.680 heart, their principles. 42:13.260 --> 42:16.460 But implementing it correctly is another question. 42:16.920 --> 42:18.160 I think this is the last question. 42:18.560 --> 42:19.180 Oh, shoot. 42:19.820 --> 42:19.960 Hi. 42:20.820 --> 42:22.300 You said you're from Seattle. 42:23.060 --> 42:25.740 From Texas originally, but live in Seattle last [eight] years. 42:25.880 --> 42:28.040 Well, you're voting King County in Seattle. 42:28.140 --> 42:28.340 Yes. 42:28.580 --> 42:35.100 So I wanted to ask you, what is the role of the PCOs from King County into the whole voting 42:35.100 --> 42:40.440 system that you have there, like choosing the commissioner voting or presenting the candidate 42:40.440 --> 42:45.760 that will become the commissioner that will become the guy who will decide what the little[?] dot is. 42:46.200 --> 42:54.460 The role of those people, of those local PCOs, how they're called over there, the Precinct Committee 42:54.460 --> 42:59.100 Officer of the parties of the Republican and Democrat. 42:59.360 --> 43:03.400 We have another name here in New York and every county has a different name. 43:04.140 --> 43:07.460 And so what's their role in your presentation? 43:08.340 --> 43:16.260 And in a segue, there is a documentary called County on PBS that you can stream and maybe add on 43:16.260 --> 43:16.720 your resource. 43:17.400 --> 43:25.080 So if if you want to have, you have election poll workers, I'm sorry, you have election workers and 43:25.080 --> 43:31.820 you have voters, but then you have people watching to make sure that things go smoothly and fairly. 43:32.080 --> 43:38.160 These people are usually partisans registered with the political party because they're the only ones 43:38.160 --> 43:39.860 who care enough in many cases. 43:40.320 --> 43:45.540 If you're a nonpartisan observer, like in King County, you have to get a training from the 43:45.540 --> 43:49.020 through the League of Women Voters with King County Elections, which I'm actually doing later 43:49.020 --> 43:49.600 this month. 43:50.000 --> 43:54.720 And then you can go in and you can observe as a nonpartisan observer and you can see about these 43:54.720 --> 44:00.800 bipartisan transport teams or these multi-partisan or bipartisan adjudication vote review, all this 44:00.800 --> 44:01.320 kind of stuff. 44:01.720 --> 44:06.300 And I think what's important is, yeah, those things do have a role, right? 44:06.400 --> 44:12.880 They're like the employees of the party, of the candidate, like advocating for that candidate's 44:12.880 --> 44:16.740 interests at the election office, at the precinct, or the central counting facility. 44:17.660 --> 44:23.840 But they're still attack dogs for their party. 44:23.960 --> 44:29.120 They're not nonpartisan observers or scrutineers or public interest minded people. 44:29.840 --> 44:31.380 I'm not sure if that answers. 44:31.820 --> 44:33.540 It's interesting because you're right. 44:33.680 --> 44:38.240 There are parties and people, but like, for example, in New York, Democrat and the Republican, 44:39.080 --> 44:44.380 in the county where there is most Republican, the Democrat position is filled by a Republican. 44:44.980 --> 44:46.920 It's still having a Democrat and a New Yorker. 44:47.180 --> 44:48.180 Thank you, everybody.