So my talk is titled, Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security. How's the slides coming through? Good? Okay. So, if you saw the program, it had a typo saying this is also the solarpunk talk, talk, but it's not the solarpunk talk, although I do write science fiction. A little about me. I'm a freelance writer and investigative journalist. My day jobs are copywriting, content marketing. You can hire me. I'm most known for reporting on hacktivism, transparency, legal cases, including that of Jeremy Hammond, who will be presenting here this weekend, as well as whistleblower Reality Winner. We will talk about her shortly. I'm also known for analyzing and corroborating the Stratfor private spy files that Jeremy Hammond gifted all of us and went to prison for 10 years for. [10 years per sentencing] I always say that I corroborated a lot of the information in them because the corporate media did not bother to do so. They just simply said, 'Stratfor executive says blah, blah, blah,' the end. But I had bothered to, you know, find additional sources, which editors are always mad at me about, too much effort. All right. So, and now probably I'm most known for, get the most retweets for, election security matters, particularly Coffee County, Georgia, which we will get to. My day job, of course, one of them is substitute teacher. So, if, you know, no ins and outs in the first or last 10 minutes, and if you need a hall pass, raise your hand, and you can sign, all that good stuff. All right. So, Mr. Lucas will write you an infraction if you don't cooperate. Now, on a more serious note than substitute teaching, I want to just say very briefly that a decade ago, I spoke on a panel here about crowdsourcing research into the private spy industry. And I was on that panel thanks to the late Kevin Gallagher, who spearheaded it. And I would not be here today, if it were not for him doing that, and kind of encouraging me a decade ago. So, you know, there's a lot of, there should be more talks someday about mental health, and activism, and drug, recreational drug abuse, and things like that. I'm alluding to Kevin's story. So sometimes I wonder what he would say about stuff I'm doing now. All right. Moving on. I made a 14-page recommended resource list, a PDF bibliography. You can find it on various pages of my website. It accompanies this talk. It gives you lots of great information. And it looks like this. [Technical difficulties] So, this is what nerdy investigative journalists do in their spare time. 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 Reality Winner, election activism. Oh, well, you know. [More technical difficulties] Life is short. What can you do? It comes at you fast. A quick note on terminology. There's several things I'd like you to take away today, and one of them is this simple term. We say voting computer, or we should say voting computer, and not voting machine. Does any of you do your homework and know why? No? Okay. So, a machine, you remember from physics class, does one and only one thing, like a lever or a pulley, okay? It can't be reprogrammed to swap the votes around, okay? But a voting computer is a universal machine. That's Alan Turing, pictured there, who invented the concept of computer software in 1936. Universal machine being a machine that can be programmed and reprogrammed. He called it 'instruction tables', right? Do this. If not, then do that. So, when we say voting machine, we give a wrong impression that this is like a lever you yank, and it's going to do the same thing every time. Not that the levers weren't messed with as well in the past, but voting computer emphasizes [made for reprogrammability, and], Oh my god, it's going to have all these pop-ups, and I can play Doom on it during the election and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so, framing election security for today. That slide is from one of my favorite movies, possibly my favorite movie, 1976 Network. If you have not seen it, you must see it immediately. Neither fake news. So, you know, the Trumpers have said things like, 'Well, there were these Italian artificial satellites that were lasering the elections and stuff', and they tried to go into court with some of this nonsense. And the judges, pretty much universally, in all cases except for one minor case [in Pennsylvania], smacked them down, fined them, made them take remedial education on education standards, legal education, things like that, because when it came time to pony up and show the notarized evidence of, you know, under penalty of perjury, of Italian satellites, and have the other side be able to critique it in the courtroom, the Trumpers said, blah, blah [to try to distract from lack of evidence]. So, what they were doing is they were leveraging the lawsuits for media attention to get their sound bites out there, and also donations, right? So, that was what Sidney Powell's 'Release the Kraken' lawsuits were all about. So, that's one extreme of this, how it's typically, the topic is typically framed today. So, it's not fake news nonsense about satellites and lasers, and the elderly poll worker is really a lizard, you know, it's none of that. On the other hand, the opposite framing is that our voting computers are these perfect, wonderful things, as wonderful as your I Voted sticker and Mount Rushmore and apple pie. This is exemplified by, of course, Barack Obama, who said in 2016 when Trump was starting to say all his crazy Stop the Steal stuff, which was very far out for a [U.S.] presidential candidate to start saying, Obama said, anybody who brings up rigging is not a serious person. It doesn't happen. If you want the exact quote, you want to look at my Texas Observer article on Reality Winner. And so, you know, even one of the federal judges Obama appointed has said that gerrymandering is tantamount to rigging, a federal judge. And Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat in Oregon, said in the Senate, Kremlin, [Senate] intelligence [committee] reports about the Russian cyber attacks in 2016, Wyden said, well, you know, he can't rule out hacking by these distant Kremlin hackers, of the changing the votes and voter registration, all that kind of stuff. There's no way to rule it out. So, it's okay to bring it up. You know, this audience doesn't need this kind of like hand-holding against these, you know, duopoly extremes. But what can you do? I try to write for everybody sometimes. Okay, so now we have more of this framing. The global situation we have today, really fast, you know, we have the NATO countries, the so-called Western countries [more democratic or less overtly fascistic], with the Five Eyes countries in the lead, US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, right? So, that's all the State Department diplomatic cables [leaked by C. Manning] about Five Eyes and all this kind of stuff. Then we have the BRICS countries [several autocratic], Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and many others have joined, such as India and Egypt, and United Arab Emirates. I think Argentina still wants to join. Versus the others, just various countries, you know, like, I don't know, I better not say one, but countries in Africa, right, that don't really have a stake [of their own] in this kind of thing. Versus the public, everybody, the global -- what are we now -- 8 billion? And, you know, of course, the quadrennial [U.S.] presidential elections get the spotlight, but [besides int'l.], there's [also] all these down-ballot [U.S.] elections for your local dog catcher and your mayor and all this kind of stuff, where you can have a lot more impact than you might think, [even] if you live in a non-swing state, for example. Then we have, you know, our choice between two, you know, autocrats [candidates], Donald Trump, you know, these are the Epstein pictures, everybody has seen those, SpookyConnections.com is on the recommended resource list. That'll really dig into him. He [almost certainly] owes a lot of money to China, despite what he says, you can see the blog post about that on my blog. So, you know, demagoguery is a word probably all of us know here. His Trumpers fans, MAGA people, they don't care about Trump's [likely] debt to China, they don't care about any of this stuff, because they see a big, tall, tough guy who is a celebrity TV person yelling and pounding his chest on TV and saying he's the chosen one, and they like that, because their brain is no longer on file, intellectual and emotional atrophy. Then we have Joe Biden. So, you know, a lot of this is sort of remedial, but I feel like you can't really talk about elections without this kind of context being set forth. You know, there's lots of stories of creepy Biden. Here's, like, a typical video. This Ramrants Twitter user is a right-wing source. 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 just he says something weird [and creepy], but the audio is off. So this Ramrants source, you know, it has a lot of videos that are C-SPAN that need to be collected. What's the date? Who are the people in these videos? Call them and interview them, that kind of thing. But the Ramrats source does have a few that are like, you know, he quoted some news article about a college graduate who was kissed by Biden, but she was actually glad she was kissed, and he made it look like it was, you know, bad. So take that source with a grain of salt [and] as a jumping-off point. But there's a lot of smoke there that indicates a serious fire, which means that, you know, this presidential voter's choice between the greater or lesser evil has now mutated into the choice between the greater and lesser pedo, or at least the greater and lesser creeper, because we could use more data on Biden, I believe. Meanwhile, so that's the world. That's where we're picking from for presidents. That's this country. And meanwhile, activist organizations such as the Center for Election Science are saying things like, the most important thing we do as a society is to elect leaders. It's not bearing or raising children or composing a groundbreaking sonata or curing cancer or anything like that [all those, interactive, are "as a society"] It's I Voted stickers every four years. It's really hard to work with election security topics because you're constantly reading stuff like that, the advertising. It's gross. All right, overview of mass collaboration. Is the talk over yet? How much time do I have? I better talk faster. Nobody's going to the bathroom or recess. You gotta listen. Okay, so mass collaboration, all right? So we have humans collaborating in numbers [of] more than one. I guess you can collaborate on your own with yourself and any sort of imagination [connecting nonlocally across spacetime]. But with consensus, we usually start there, right? Consensus is voting and it has pros and cons. Probably the biggest pro is that it's one of the most comfortable ways for us to work. If you're hanging out with friends and you're like, 'Hey, what do you want to do for dinner tonight?' I mean, if you have a good relationship, that's a good conversation. If not, not. But you know, it's a comfortable thing. We're going to go for dinner. I vote for, you know, vegan. I also vote for vegan. Okay, kick out all the carnists. We're good. All right. Consensus also has a lot of cons. I think we're going to have something like a hundred and seventy million voters this November. And for example, I will be voting from Seattle. Let's say that Washington state is a swing state. It's not, but I'm going to go vote for Biden, who's going to appoint an appointee, who's going at the National Weather Service [or whatever agency], who's going to appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to make some decisions about meteorology that's going to affect people in Florida. I'm not in Florida. I don't know anything about meteorology. Why am I part of the input here? Why am I part of the garbage in that's creating the garbage out, right? So that's one of the cons of it. And usually advocates of, 'Hey, we got to do everything, but voting is the most important thing you ever do in your life.' Those kind of people say, 'Well, sure, you're right about these counterarguments, but the only other option is hierarchy, and that's gross. So we have to have this horrible [admittedly problematic mass consensus].' It's the 'Democracy is crappy except for all the others,' whatever that quote is, 'is the crappiest except for all the others.' Okay. So hierarchy, pros and cons. It's really good in an emergency. Oh my God, the building is burning down. Like, I'm going to push you out the window onto the lifeboat -- I mixed my metaphors -- right now! Because, you know, hurry, hurry, hurry! It's also good for things like sports, right? [Which is] simulated war. Or, you know, BDSM or something like that. Like, it's, you know, so sometimes people have their claws out and the boxers, right? You can see boxers compliment each other before and after the fight, but during the fight there, you know, there's a definite hierarchy when you knock him to the ground, right? You give him a concussion. All right. So the hierarchy cons, you know, I think there's like a statement that everybody is depressed. Everybody who's a paid worker is depressed because they lose autonomy. There's like two others, [creative] control [or purpose] and mastery over their own life work or something. We all go to paid jobs here. We know the cons of hierarchy. So people say, well, I guess it's back to consensus then because there's no door number three, but thankfully there is a door number three. That is stigmergy. This is a concept not invented but developed by Heather Marsh in her Binding Chaos philosophy books, which everybody should read and they're in my recommended resource list. I'll keep it really short with just like two examples. One is you go to a doctor's office. You're the only person in the waiting room. A puzzle is partially put together. The goal is clear: Put together the puzzle. Anybody in the waiting room can participate and put together the puzzle pieces. It's transparent: You can see all the puzzle pieces. And everybody gets to enjoy the end product, the beautiful puzzle. So you're sitting there puzzling. You're not voting with another puzzler because you're the only person in the room and you're not giving or taking orders so it's not hierarchy either. [Yet it's collaboration with past/future puzzlers] Okay. We have things like this socially, finger-tapping on guitar, for example, or any sort of cultural thing when you know, when Eddie Van Halen was first finger-tapping on guitar, he turned around so that people wouldn't see his trick. He was trying to have a unique sales point and keep it kind of a proprietary secret, but over time, you know, it melted out and other guitarists started finger-tapping and they start influencing each other [i.e. indirectly collaborating]. But nobody's like voting, do you, Do you finger-tap with your index or your middle? Or giving [hierarchical] commands or orders, right? So we do this [stigmergy, indirect collaboration] with like slang too. Like the goal might be make English language better, like, say cool stuff. And so you hear something like, you know, 'Bet' or all this Gen Z slang, right? And you adopt some of it. So that's, like, stigmergy. It's [indirect] collaboration. You're collaborating to make the language cooler, the guitar playing cooler, the puzzle better, and you're not doing hierarchy or consensus. So boom, just smash this framework of all these [seemingly] millions of well-funded election security nonprofits that won't ever say this stuff with their corporate mask. Okay. So next is, I don't know why I'm looking at that when I have that here, Survey of Typical County Elections System how we're doing on time? [Tech problems had eaten more time than I thought.] Ah, not bad. [Wrong.] Okay. So when we are looking at the election system today, what we're doing is we're studying how, you know, mass-scale multi-million people consensus is working in this country, right? And what are the pros and cons of that? How is it going down? There are 3,000 something [usually considered] voting jurisdictions in the United States [But 6,000 or more if fully comprehensive]. Most of them are counties. So people just kind of loosely call them all counties, even though some of them are townships or municipalities or whatever. So now we're going to go into this flowchart. This is what I was doing in my hotel room this afternoon. It's a work in progress. I aim to improve it over time and eventually put it on my website. All right, time to rock and roll. This is the voter knowledge right here. This is where it all starts, right? Knowledge is power, all that kind of stuff. So you have education, media, propaganda, and a big part people overlook is trust. They talk about, like, oh, do people like Biden's policies or do people like Trump's -- I don't know -- [his] money, you know, but it's like, trust. Who do you trust, right? [Any politican? Any institution? Any data source?] And you want to trust but verify, but trust is a big part of this knowledge. We're not the best word, but in, you know, relationship, social emotional picture is the trust. Okay, so you get pre-election tracking polls happening at this point. This is all pre-election stuff. Voter eligibility and registration. Here are multiple issues with that that you can find resources on in the recommended resource list. I don't need to read that aloud. So here we have vote capture. Okay, so here's a big concept that's going to help you whenever you talk about this subject from now on. Divide, you know, Gaul was all, all of Gaul was divided into three parts, but this is divided into two. On one hand is vote capture. On the other hand is a vote tallying. Okay, so vote capture is, we see the vote capture can happen at home with vote by snailmail. Vote capture can happen at the precinct on touchscreens or paper ballots or ballot marking. Vote capture can be the astronauts voting from outer space, right? There's a lot of registering, recording your, well, not the right word, capturing your vote. What did you, what did you vote? Who did you vote for? And then the other half of it down here is this vote tallying, totaling, or tabulating. Those words all mean the same thing. So you say, well, are elections secure or paper ballots good? Well, are you talking about the vote capture or the vote tallying? Because feeding paper ballots into, hand-marked paper ballots into an optical scanner is one thing, but the actual bubbling in with a pencil or what[not] is something quite different, right? And so the, maybe one is good and the other isn't or something like that. So vote capture on one hand, vote tallying or counting or whatever on the other. There's no French Academy mandating a single word. All right. Or what planet... Here, before the vote capture, we have election professionals readying. They do things like ballot design or logic and accuracy testing. This is the voting vendors and the election workers and the counties working together. Like, each county [of] these 3,000 counties is one unit or one cell of the country's system. Ballot design is more complicated than it sounds, right? Because you might have which little pixels on the touchscreen go with this candidate or something. And if you look at the story of whistleblower Clint Curtis, you can see how that was important. He was murdered. It's in the recommended, I'm sorry, he was not, the civil investigator Raymond Lemme, who was investigating [Clint Curtis's] claims was. You can see that in the recommended resource list if you want that kind of stuff, including a documentary. But this stuff is all really important and not really covered widely at all. Vote capture, UOCAVA, Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. So a lot of that happens by the internet, right? If you're a soldier on a base on the other side of the planet, or if you're a migrant, something like that. Even candidates themselves voting, you know, there's always kind of like a big publicity thing where the president goes in, or the presidential candidate goes in to vote. So there are these unusual kind of circumstances that are fun because they're part of the system too. You can't, you know, they're more attack surface, right? There's more ways things can go wrong. I should say that UOCAVA is not the only internet voting happening right now in the United States. King County, where I live, which is Seattle. They have a, I can't remember, it's some sort of strange environmental board or something that votes, it's set aside from everybody else and does internet voting. [King Conservation District] And I've done it a few times and tweeted at the vendor who runs it and tried to provoke them into responding and I didn't win that one. I mean they didn't respond. So then we have, let's see. So you can vote from home, which is basically absentee ballot, right? Instead of living in another country, you are voting by snailmail from home, like your absentee headquarters or country is your house. So that's what happens in Washington state or Oregon. [Technical difficulties] Okay, let's see if it's the, so, you know, once we have this vote recording, this vote capture, you know, you capture the vote and you record it. I guess it happens at the same time [more or less]. Ask Jacques Derrida about that. But you have post-vote capture exit polls. These are the exit samples. You can see a lot in the recommended resource list from Jonathan Simon about that. I'll talk about that in the activism section. The vote might be recorded, you get the idea, right? But this is, you can, I'll make sure to upload this to my website afterwards so that people can find it. Here we have, once the vote is recorded at a county precinct, a bipartisan transport team, you know, drives it to the central counting facility of a county. Okay, so it's like central headquarters. That's always kind of crazy. It's like, who's in that car? Is the car videotaped? They have a chain of custody documents and they have a lot of measures. But, you know, it's just an interesting kind of thing that you don't hear about that you don't see in the news. Once it gets to that central counting facility is where you have processing, right? So you remove the memory drive from the storage bag. So in the transport team car, there's a storage bag with the memory sticks into the central county thing. You take it out, or maybe if it's vote by mail, you check signatures on the ballot envelopes to see, you know, that kind of thing. In Seattle, Washington state, you have to sign the ballot envelope. During processing and beyond, review teams of election workers adjudicate the gray areas of the edge cases where they're not really sure, like, what happened [with voter intent]. This can be a vector for a lot of problems. It can also be blown out of proportion as a lot of problems I'll talk about. Let's see what I'm doing on time. Yeah, I think we're okay. [In fact, tech difficulties meant less time than I thought] All right. So in Georgia, they changed their voting vendor. So in Georgia, every single county uses the same voting vendor. 159 counties all use Dominion Voting Systems right now. Whereas in Texas, where it's 254 counties where I'm originally from, each county has a different voting vendor. But the, oh yeah, so in Georgia, they changed from their previous voting vendor, I think it was Diebold or somebody who bought Diebold, to Dominion voting computers. And one of the Coffee County election workers' complaints about these Dominion computers was that the adjudication fields in the software, if they're going to say, you know what, we got to throw out this ballot because they voted for everybody, they bubbled in everything. Well, with their own -- that's called over-voting. So you could, in their old voting computers, you could go and say, well, the adjudication panel, the vote review panel, was Joe Smith and Susie, you know, but once they updated to, I mean, changed to Dominion, Dominion no longer gave them an option to write down who the adjudicators were and what date and time and all that stuff that helps investigative journalists or auditors or whatever figure out what really happened. So that was a legitimate complaint. But then when they made some, Misty Hampton, then the election supervisor shortly after Jan. 6, with the Coffee County elections office breach, now one of Trump's co-defendants in the RICO case in Fulton County, Misty Hampton made some videos about this adjudication problem, but she didn't explain it just like I explained it. [She portrayed all adjudication as inherently sketchy.] She was one step from lizards and Italian space satellites again. So, you know, it's a real kind of legitimate vector for problems and a solution for it, a big solution, is to have more election monitors, election observers. And I'll talk about that later on. That's where you have eyes-on these adjudication teams and so you can look for sketchy stuff. Okay, once we process the votes, we have to count them, vote tallying, totaling, tabulating. We might scan the paper ballots. We might read the memory device, could be a CD-ROM. We might insert into a computer, read the data off. And when it's a ballot marking device [BMD], like Georgia is using currently, it is a touchscreen essentially that's yoked to a printer. And the printer prints out what is claimed to be a voter verified paper audit trail, but is instead a QR code that humans can't read. So it's like, you know, if you got a receipt and it was written in, you know, Farsi or something, unless you're Reality Winner, you can't read it, right? That's one of the languages she knows. So it's a QR code. You can't read it, you know, that causes a problem [for oversight]. So there's lots of issues here. And that's a swing state, right, that's having that. [Georgia] And the Curling v. Raffensperger case in federal court in Georgia is now trying to abandon mandatory BMDs and use hand-marked paper ballots in most circumstances. We have our voting computer vendors here in this part and elsewhere, like with voter registration, for example. The current triopoly of opaque proprietary vendors is ES&S, headquartered in Omaha on John Galt Boulevard. They're the biggest voting vendor in the United States, if that tells you anything. Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in both Toronto, Canada, and I believe Denver, somewhere in Colorado. [Denver] So you often hear the far right saying, 'Oh my god, Dominion's based in Canada!' Well, yeah, but it has two offices because it serves multiple [countries]. Okay, this is like chasing the tail around, you know, that's like what the media does with people. Okay, so then we have Hart InterCivic based in Austin. There's an example of a voting vendor that's aiming for less opacity. I'm not optimistic enough to say more transparency, but that's Clear Ballot based in Boston and they're used in King County in Washington state. But they're definitely, you know, I don't want to, like, neg them. They're definitely like interesting and good and worth checking out, but they're not also not putting Libreboot on the firmware or anything like that, right? So, politics is the art of the incremental little bits till the global warming kills us all, right? Okay, so we go into vote totals here. This is, like, post-election time. Canvassing. What the heck is canvassing versus tabulating? Well, I finally figured this out the other day. There's actually an Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that has a glossary of election terms, very useful. But canvassing is where you organize the vote totals. You might say we had this many overseas soldier votes and overseas citizens votes [i.e. UOCAVA], or we had this many votes that were challenged or something. We're going to put them all in a little spreadsheet and have a lot of fun with it. That's what canvassing is, and it helps with the certification processes of, you know, various states have. When you figure out the vote total at a precinct rather than a central facility or maybe both, they sometimes tape poll tapes, a.k.a. result tapes, on the window, sometimes required by law, sometimes not. You can sometimes persuade them to do it or show it to you, and you can take a picture or a video and crowdsource it to scrutineers.org. They look like cash register receipts. So then we go down to here, retention of ballots, 22 months if there's a federal race, otherwise state law determines it. Then we have a thing here about audits versus recounts. I should explain this really quickly because this is, again, you're reading the news or you're watching TV and audit this and recount that, and you're like, 'What does that even mean? I don't know. Why don't they tell me?' Well, they don't tell you because they're not talking to you. The corporate media is talking to the intelligentsia, the commentariat, the civil bureaucracy, journalists, you know, the commentariat, the intelligentsia, whatever, the three-letter agencies. They're not talking to Joe Schmoe, who doesn't know the difference between a recount and audit. We're not the audience for this stuff. So audits with like, Philip Stark, his risk-limiting audits, his, not the fake imitations [accepting QR codes] -- and there are some -- are statistical spot-checks where you take little samples of the [ballot] vote totals and then all that kind of stuff in the trail, the evidence trail, to determine if a recount is needed. And if the margins are really, really, really, really close and the Stark risk- limiting audit is saying, 'Hey, something might be sketchy here, that's when you do a recount that's exhaustive.' You recount every ballot. There's a kind of a dispute within election activism where some people say we need hand- marked paper ballots. Both sides of this dispute agree that for vote capture, we need hand- marked paper ballots. But then they say for the vote tallying portion of the program, do we need to hand-count all of those publicly [as in Australia and elsewhere]? Like, make it a federal holiday and take a month to like do it? Or, you know, right now people expect overnight results, right? But get them accustomed to the 18th century, like let's take a month to everybody count it. Or is it okay to feed them into the voting computer optical scanners, digital scanners? Might that be faster? Might that be more accurate than tired humans being pressured to do it overnight? As long as, with the caveat, the proviso that we do these risk-limiting audits with statistical perfection and make sure that the software on the voting computers is not, you know, compromised in some way. All right, last slide of this. So now we've totaled our votes. Hopefully the county will upload it to the website for public use [and post poll tapes]. They'll probably upload it to the state entity for certification. They might get it there another way by, you know, by courier or something like that. Then you have the state election board or maybe the state Secretary of State. They're going to certify it, sign the certification documents, all this kind of stuff. At that point, it's going to go to the federal level if and only if there are federal races on the ballot. And the Election Assistance Commission sometimes gets these [other] reports. They get reports from each state [about election processes there]. The U.S. president of the, I'm sorry, the President of the U.S. Senate gets it [for the Senate, i.e. the vice-president]. The U.S. House gets it. National Archives and Records Administration gets the presidential for the Electoral College. I was wondering how do these votes get from the state to the feds? Because you hear about ballots, you hear about paper trails sometimes, right? But that's only on the county level. That's level you as a human, you know, 180 million voter[s] is interacting with. But what about, how does it get from the state level to the federal level or something like that? So I asked people. They didn't want to be attributed, but they were in a position to know. And they told me that it's sent by private carrier like [DHL] or FedEx. Now, if you know these companies, you know they have special divisions, like, for shipping organs or something that have to be kept refrigerated, things like that. So they assuredly have a division for government records, like shipping them around. But I think it's pretty funny because you could make a great stoner movie where you have like this stoner who's, like, an election worker and he's got like this thumb drive. It's got, like, the dispositive thing about the who's going to win the presidential. He's got to drive all the way to D.C. and stop for like marijuana and getting [into] all these crazy complications, you know. But okay, so that was the survey. We surveyed the election system and now we're going to scrutinize it. This is whistleblower Reality Winner. By show of hands, how many people know, vaguely acquainted with who this person is? Cognoscer. Okay, maybe half. Okay, maybe a little bit more than half. All right. And then raise your hands if and only if you know what she revealed, even vaguely. Now we have about three people. So that's the great job of the media right there. You know, as she said, the scandal of who Reality Winner is and how weird her name is became the focus and not what she leaked. The Intercept printed five pages of a top-secret National Security Agency report. She leaked it in 2017, but it basically showed the Kremlin issuing cyber attacks against the U.S. election system in two stages. Stage one was you had the Kremlin breach VR Systems, a voting registration vendor in Florida and they denied that they were ever breached. That's a huge story I could go into, but I won't. And so they go into VR Systems, these Kremlin military intelligence hackers and they, with actual names, there's actual, like, names of these people [hackers in] indictments that came out later, thanks to Reality Winner. Assuredly, I mean, I'll tell you, Obama wasn't going to talk about it. You know, if you look at the Senate Intelligence Committee report about the Russian interference in the 2016 elections, [then-U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry said, 'Hey, let's have this big public thing and let's all like talk about this, like an inquiry and talk about this Russian, Kremlin cyber attacks. And Obama said, No, we're going to get, we're going to kind of like keep it quiet because we don't want people to lose faith in the system and da-da-da-da-da.' Oh, everybody's like, oh Barack, but I think, you know, it inspired me to come up with the Doggerel for Democrats. Let's see if I can remember it. What raises doubt might lower turnout. So only open your mouth to fellate the state. That's Obama's response to Kerry essentially in a nutshell. Okay. [abridging for time] Now, so the first stage was they breached the voting systems vendor, VR Systems (everything's system and system and cyber and system!). And they essentially did that so they could use VR Systems internal documents to imitate their logos and stuff and put together better spearphishing emails. Then they sent these spearphishing emails to Florida county election supervisors and according to the Florida governor and [both U.S.] Florida senators [at the time], some of the county election workers fell for this spearphishing trickery and according to [journalist] Bob Woodward, some of them got malware installed on their systems. And meanwhile, you have, you know, people dancing around on the Dem side saying that it's, it's this is all made up, it's not real. But it's very real. So that was the two stages, right? The next one is this Coffee County elections office breach [insider threat]. That's Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO. He flew into Coffee County, Georgia shortly before that Misty Hampton election supervisor resigned supposedly for, or was forced out, terminated supposedly for her timesheets, but in actuality for her role in the breach, she was [just one of the breachers], Coffee County basically made her the scapegoat. There's a lot more people [breachers] in Coffee County, this rural southern Georgia county in the swing state of Georgia, 16 [Electoral College] electors. This will come up, I'm sure, in the news November and December. The Coffee County, Sidney Powell hired, you know, the big MAGA lawyer, Trumper lawyer, hired SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta-based forensics firm to go in there as operatives and make off with exact copies of the [Dominion] voting software [Democracy Suite v.5.5-A]. And remember, every county in Georgia uses the same [vendor], so it's a whole statewide voting software compromise. Now, of a swing state, one of the biggest swing states, 16 electors, and the media's like, well, you know, they're like sleeping and when they're talking about, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever. There's a lot I've written on both of these. They're all in the recommended resources list and the, there's CVEs as well from the Curling v. Raffensperger trial, which is what the Coalition for Good Governance is a nonprofit that's a plaintiff in the Curling v. Raffensperger trial to change the mandatory BMDs to handmarked paper ballots and with RLA Stark [audits]. And they discovered the Coffee County breach and that Curling case has CVEs, lots of them. You know what CVEs are, right? The official [computer security] bug classifications on the the BMDs, Dominion systems used in Georgia. So it's not a kooky thing. It's about as legit as you can get. Finally, let's see, election activism is the last thing. These you can all look up in my recommended resource list. I want to especially point out some of the nerdier stuff like the statistical forensics and better data access, maybe trying to make a free software voting company. If you're in a state where each county gets to make its own choices [of vendor] and you get to go become friends with the election supervisor [and board], maybe you can hack together something and put Libreboot on the firmware. Or you can just have another big picture where, you know, maybe the most important thing in life isn't coming to consensus on whether we want to be ruled by Creep Number One or Creep Number Two, but instead, you know, picking ourselves and each other. We can do that. We can vote with our wallet. We can vote with our words. We can vote with our actions. We can vote with our choices. So all this voting software stuff is great and important, but you know, in the 19th century, the New York Times reported that there was a poll worker who simply took ballots he disfavored and ate them. Right? So you don't have to have superduper computer hacks to rig an election, but you do need dishonest people that aren't being observed, aren't being scrutinized, aren't being observed. You know, you get the idea. So now Q&A. Thanks. I'm not sure if you covered it because I did miss the beginning of your talk, but the recent lawsuits that were going on, my understanding of them was that, you know, I was all excited because I was thinking that there was finally going to be discovery and we get to really find out what was going on in these machines. But my understanding is really what was going on is some people made the mistake of saying that they knew the person who was an employee who made the actual tampering, and that was the misstep. Is that sort of your understanding? That's really the only thing that really came out. So a civil lawsuit is like a souped-up Freedom of Information Act request because you can do discovery and all that. In Georgia, there are three major lawsuits that are discussed in my recommended resource list. They're all civil. No, they're not. Two civil, one criminal. Then the Stop-the-Steal Kraken ones, if those are the ones you mean. Yeah, I mean, it would be like, oh, great. We're going to get interesting discovery and transcripts and quotes, but essentially the judges very early on in the hearing said, you guys don't have squat. Quit wasting my time. Get out of my courtroom. Okay. Thanks. I have a couple questions. If you went back to the 1950s, where all the machines from mechanical and you used the handle, would you say that was more secure or less prone to playing games? Douglas W. Jones is a computer science professor who has a website that gives a brief illustrated history of voting in the United States. That's in the recommended resource list. And he talks about the dials and the levers and the pros and cons of each. They've all been messed with at some point. I think the difference with computers is you can do things at vast scale that much faster than you can eat ballots. Would you be better off with paper ballots? Because, you know, look at what you got. You look at some of the stuff in the news with things like AT&T being hacked, or let's say you go to where people have changed code in a and they couldn't even see it in a gaming machine in Vegas. So there's so much you can do so much with those ROMs. You could, you could. Yeah. So have a program that says, Okay, if you press A, I'm going to make it C. And you would even know that if you're not in on it. Yeah. The story of whistleblower Clint Curtis and the detective Raymond Lemme is an old school [touchscreen manipulation] version of that in [Florida and in] Georgia, same state where Lemme was killed. Before the BMDs, there were touchscreens that were paperless. So there was no trail [not even QR nonsense]. You just touch the touchscreen and then you hoped that it was OK. Then they hooked it up, the judge said, 'Hey, you need to make a paper trail.' So they hooked it up, the touchscreens (or different ones), up to printers and printed out with a QR code that nobody can read. So same difference. So would you, OK, one more question. Would you say the elections in the last six, twelve years have been accurate or do you think it's more hype if people say it's funny or the numbers don't jive? Yeah. Two answers to that. Number one, I think the most honest answer is we don't know, not enough data. And I think the second answer is if you look at Code Red by Jonathan Simon, the statistical forensics of exit polls, which are used by the United States to monitor elections, free and fair elections in other countries, he's using that same method to monitor elections here. And they're often good enough, but there's often disparities here and there as well, enough that there's people need to fix it or evolve our democracy past this mass consensus thing, not mutually exclusive goals. Hi. So some states are moving to a ranked choice voting system. How do you think that affects us in the fact that it's going to need more computational power to actually tally a winner in some runoffs? You can't really do that by hand in a timely manner. And do you think that's a better system overall? OK, so ranked choice voting [RCV] called instant runoff voting in Canada and elsewhere is in my recommended resource list. There's an answer there, but I will say briefly that it's a good idea with difficult implementation. There's different ways, like, what we know is the voters first preference. But after he fills out the [RCV] ballot, what if the election changes dramatically? Ayn Rand enters the race and somebody [another candidate] dies and you know, you [a voter] can try to predict that with [RCV] algorithms, but the public and election workers and the candidates in the United States and the voting computers are still struggling with how to implement etc. I do think overall it's a good idea to get away from the spoiler effect and let people vote their heart, their principles. But implementing it correctly is another question. I think this is the last question. Oh, shoot. Hi. You said you're from Seattle. From Texas originally, but live in Seattle last [eight] years. Well, you're voting King County in Seattle. Yes. So I wanted to ask you, what is the role of the PCOs from King County into the whole voting system that you have there, like choosing the commissioner voting or presenting the candidate that will become the commissioner that will become the guy who will decide what the little[?] dot is. The role of those people, of those local PCOs, how they're called over there, the Precinct Committee Officer of the parties of the Republican and Democrat. We have another name here in New York and every county has a different name. And so what's their role in your presentation? And in a segue, there is a documentary called County on PBS that you can stream and maybe add on your resource. So if if you want to have, you have election poll workers, I'm sorry, you have election workers and you have voters, but then you have people watching to make sure that things go smoothly and fairly. These people are usually partisans registered with the political party because they're the only ones who care enough in many cases. If you're a nonpartisan observer, like in King County, you have to get a training from the through the League of Women Voters with King County Elections, which I'm actually doing later this month. And then you can go in and you can observe as a nonpartisan observer and you can see about these bipartisan transport teams or these multi-partisan or bipartisan adjudication vote review, all this kind of stuff. And I think what's important is, yeah, those things do have a role, right? They're like the employees of the party, of the candidate, like advocating for that candidate's interests at the election office, at the precinct, or the central counting facility. But they're still attack dogs for their party. They're not nonpartisan observers or scrutineers or public interest minded people. I'm not sure if that answers. It's interesting because you're right. There are parties and people, but like, for example, in New York, Democrat and the Republican, in the county where there is most Republican, the Democrat position is filled by a Republican. It's still having a Democrat and a New Yorker. Thank you, everybody.