[Music] good afternoon today is constitution day hooray i'm jane brennan vice president of the league of women voters of central delaware county on behalf of the league i thank you for joining us today for our first hot topics program of the 2021-2022 year prior to the pandemic the hot topics programs were luncheons with guest speakers we hope to return to face-to-face programs as soon as we can do so safely but in the meantime we have been amazed and delighted by the very positive response to having these programs as zoom meetings as of the beginning of this meeting we had 72 people register so that's a a pretty good response the leak of women voters is a non-partisan civic organization committed to promoting political responsibility through informed and active participation in government citizenship and elections our motto is making democracy work and we do that through registering people to vote organizing and pre-presenting candidate forums providing candidate information through vote411.org and hosting educational programs such as today's hot topic program entitled election security in delaware county we believe in respect for individuals the value of diversity and the empowerment of the grassroots both within the league and in communities the lwdcdc is one of two local chapters in delaware county the other chapter is the radnor league we also have the delaware county league of women voters which is an inter-league organization whose function is to aid local leagues in addressing county-wide issues such as voter service the county health department and prison reform olivia thorne is president of that before we begin a few housekeeping details for the zoom meeting all of the participants except the guest speaker the moderators and our technological wizard kathy youngman will be muted the questions submitted prior to today have been shared with the speaker olivia thorne will act as moderator for these questions and any that are submitted via the chat during the presentation throughout the country the topic of election security is a very compelling and often contentious issue our speaker today is jim allen who was appointed in march of 2021 by the delaware county council and the board of elections to serve as director of elections in that role he coordinates programs between the three county election divisions the election bureau the voter registration and the equipment warehouse prior to joining delaware county jim reported to the chicago election board and its executive director to provide strategic planning continuity of operations planning website management communications and mass mailings his achievements include re-engineering the city of chicago's vote by mail system and preparing multiple language mailings and web services jim coordinated contingency and strategic plans with security partners at municipal county state and federal agencies from 2006 to 2020 he also served as the public face of chicago elections with local news media and civic organizations including the league of women voters in chicago his previous positions include seven years as an assistant cook county treasurer in 15 years as a newspaper reporter for the daily herald jim and his wife have three adult sons as you can tell from his biography jim is extremely well qualified about to speak to us today about election security in delaware county with no further ado please welcome jim allen well thank you everyone and i want to say thank you especially to olivia and jane and kathy the technological guru i i that's a it's an honor i hope to achieve some day but i don't i'm not counting on it um i i'm really honored to be here today uh especially on constitution today where we're just down the road from where uh that document uh was was put together uh through several steamy months of the of the summer and uh it's just uh it's just an extreme honor to come to delaware county i grew up in a county very much like delaware county in lake county illinois which was adjacent to cook county and it has some of the the very same uh not as long a history certainly but it has some of the same uh historical uh you know chapters in terms of its uh its politics so um as background i'm going to give you an overview on election security and i wanted to be able to screen share um see if we the dress rehearsal worked out all right can everybody see that and along the way i would like to ask i ask everyone watching to feel free to ask questions in 2019 i was invited by the the county clerks association in illinois to deliver a talk on preparing for the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment because we had done a lot of research in terms of uh the evolution of the 19th amendment illinois was one of the if not the first i believe it was the first to pass ratify the 19th amendment so we were really excited about going into 2020 and celebrating the 19th amendment and then coping um but anyway in 2019 i was giving this talk and i talked with the boards of elections in illinois which is a pretty diverse group but i've never spoken with the county clerks organization and the county clerks as it turns out is roughly 89 92 women so i re-titled my talk the day of to mansplaining the 19th amendment and i don't want to mansplain elections today so i want everyone to feel free to interject with any questions and keep this as um as much as a democracy if you will as possible so when we talk about election security there are actually several different areas or arenas where we have concerns um there there's the basics of the physical um you know making sure that there are security seals on every piece of equipment making sure that uh the warehouse is secure that your balance uh have a chain of custody starting from when you cut the files to the printer to the printer delivering them to the you know here in delaware county and or the vote by mail it's being delivered to the us postal service all the way through delivery to the precincts and then making sure that everything is secure on election day and transparent so that people can see if 100 people came in and voted there should be a hundred ballots for in this election we're going to talk about later this is going to be our first two ballot election so there should be 200 ballot pages um being submitted but we'll get to that later then ultimately uh secure physical security of the ballots at the close of the polls back to our facilities so that we can go through a recount or re-examination or through the routine processes of two percent body or uh the uh the work by the return board to examine how well the judges of election and poll workers uh did on election day in terms of preparing and gathering all the documentation um next there's uh an area that is really that has really come to the fore only since 2016 and that's the concerns regarding cyber security and infrastructure and the balloting systems and basically making sure things can't get hacked and by hacked i also include of our public dialogue and our discourse so for example in 2016 one of the concerns raised by the fbi uh and homeland security were that there were facebook groups that clearly were not based out of the united states but pretended to be and that were doing uh quite bizarre things to try to gin up attention on certain issues there was one that was based out of another country that called itself um the state of texas you know and affiliated itself with a political party and it had uh approximately 200 000 followers which was about 20 times the size of the actual political party in question and it turned out to be a foreign-based uh operation that was just putting out uh you know phony bulletins and stuff like that there was an event also in louisiana where they were where the the foreign agents as far as the cyber security experts can tell were trying to test the boundaries of what they might be able to induce in terms of a panic and they actually generated these images of a chemical plant exploding and it got to the point where it started leading to tweets going out and news service is actually picking it up and starting to call the local parish in louisiana and they're like there's no chemical explanation you know explosion here it just it was a weird situation and when this all started coming to the fore uh i can tell you that election officials everywhere were really leery of having any kind of involvement by homeland security uh our our watchwords were um you know advice but not access we we were really afraid of of letting the camel's nose under the tent of any administration back then it was the obama administration but we did not want to let the camel's nose under the tent where uh federal government agencies would start looking under the hood of our voting equipment and voting systems and our uh the closed networks that we had that were very secure ultimately it became clear how we could work together in 2017 and since then we've fostered a close relationship at the state federal and local level in fact as recently as july delaware county was among the participants in a tabletop exercise with csa with the department of state with the fbi and with homeland security talking about when we were going through different exercises how would we respond to hypothetical situations which by the way were no longer that hypothetical many of them were torn from the recent news pages of the last couple of years next in another area of security is making sure that we secure the rights of our citizens and with that we have fair and equal ballot access and by ballot access i mean not only being able to run for office but definitely the right to vote both running for office and the right to vote are extensions speaking of constitution date of the first amendment and our right to express ourselves and just as we have the right to vote as citizens we also have the right to not vote and we have to respect all of those diverse ways of participating so free and equal ballot access means making sure that regardless of age or gender or nationality or anything else that registration is accessible that we have polling places that are accessible to people of all physical abilities and that we have voting options and that are safe and secure of so that if people are immune compromised and they want to vote by mail they can do so so as well as have polling places that meet all the standards of the americans with disabilities act which i might note the us department of justice for the last 20 years has taken very seriously uh their their their watchdogs on the ada when it comes to elections and we've learned over the over the years as election administrators that even though a library might be grandfathered in as accessible based on when it was built the justice department comes in and says not for elections yes it's grandfathered in as a library or as a school or as a firehouse but not for elections so we actually have to follow stricter guidelines where for example um if we haven't come to this yet in delaware county but i've seen it in other jurisdictions where a water fountain it comes out of the wall as opposed to being recessed in the wall technically you should have a cone under that so that if a blind person is navigating that hallway with a cane that they're not confused by that water fountain and misdirected so they're all kinds of little nuances next covet 19 prevent presented a whole new election security challenge last year one that we responded to as a nation with expanded vote by mail now here in pennsylvania we expanded the vote by mail long before 2020 it was act 77 was a bipartisan effort which really set up pennsylvanians very well for 2020 and the pandemic because it presented a new option no one had to scramble to create this new law it was more of an effort than for at the election administration level to make sure that we had enough equipment and staff and and human power to be able to process these ballots our balloting system in delaware county one of the reasons i was attracted to this county not only does it involve paper ballots but it's the heart inner civic system specifically the verity voting system it's one of the more secure systems it allows for making sure that no individual ballot could be cast more than once and that sounds like a minor feature but sometimes an accident can happen where a poll worker doesn't understand what happened it may be a jam temporarily and they break the seals and say well you know what mrs jones go ahead you just scan it through again maybe it didn't go through so this is the only system that has that criteria that meets that criterion rather and that includes our vote by mail balance so our vote by mail ballots and our election day ballots and our provisional ballots have a a number on them to make sure that no individual ballot can go through the system more than once next you have paper is is an essential there's a professor at mit ron revest who i've had the good fortune to meet with um and ron uh is his last name is one of the initials in one in the very first cryptographic system uh for internet security and secure uh transmission of files and he still preaches to this day that no matter how great a system you might have as far as the internet internet security paper is the most secure way to cast a ballot because unlike every other transaction that we do on the web um we're talking about a secret ballot and so that means we have to know who participated but we can't know anything about what they fed into the uh the ballot box so if you go back in time our first century in the united states we were actually a public out call election so you had to go to a gathering place and then at that time you had to be a male for a period a landowner and then at the at least 21 years of age interestingly the first century they weren't uh worried about citizenship so even non-citizens were allowed to vote during that first century and the problem with that system is yes it was very transparent but it was almost it was arguably too transparent because your boss or the bully down the block or the union leader or whoever might want to intimidate or bribe you could see exactly how you voted because you would go to this public hall they would say okay now we're voting for u.s senate and then they would call on individuals and someone would write down on a big board at the front of the room so in the 1870s and 1880s america went to the system of the australian or secret ballot and in that system we have registration records so that we register voters and then those registered voters are allowed to vote only once and then uh once they've they cast their ballot it's cast secretly so ron rivest is saying that given every other election every other transaction on the internet rather if you buy tickets from american airlines or you buy buy a bicycle from ebay everything about the transaction the buyer and the seller is numb so the buyer and the seller know each other they know that they agreed to sell a blue schwinn for eighty dollars and it was going to get paid for with a visa account and so if any of those things goes wrong the buyer can go back to the seller or the seller can cancel the the transaction um here we can't know what burger you ordered or what um you know bicycle or pla what seat on the plane we have to allow for a secret ballot so that's why paper is a great durable record of what happened and even if the voter mismarked it and circled the name instead of filling in the box we can go back and tell the voters intent that was the problem of course with the punch cards with dimpled hanging swinging pregnant chads we couldn't necessarily tell the voters intent but with paper ballots that have marks on them we can tell the voters intent sometimes they double vote and they then they scratch out one and they write not this one this one we can tell the voter's intent next our system has scanned images so at the time the voter is feeding that ballot into the scanner or at the time that the ballot here when it comes from vote by mail goes from the secrecy envelope to the scanner and is fed into the scanner every one of those ballots has a scanned image so that even if someone were to tamper with the ballots after the voters left there would be an initial image to compare against the actual ballot so next you have transparency and that you can have poll watchers obviously not stand over the voting booth but they can see that a hundred people came in and the counter on the scanner says a hundred ballots were cast um barring of course the oddities of someone abandoning their ballot in the polling place or or something like that next it gives you a verifiable audit trail so that the recount is necessary you have the documents there so that the court can determine what actually went down so as background we have logic and accuracy testing which is a fancy way of saying we put every piece of voting equipment through the paces before we put it into the election supply carrier and take it out to the precinct we secure the cages with the equipment with you know a combination of seals and locks when the polls open they have to run a zero tape in the morning so the poll watchers can see that there was there were no ballots cast we have lists of all registered voters so that we know who is eligible to vote in that precinct we have a public counter on the scanner so that you can see through the day like i said that there were 50 later 100 later 150 ballots cast we have a results tape when the polls are closed so that even before that bag is sealed and then goes to ultimately the wharf facility um and even before that v drive gets taken away um there's a results tape that is put on public display as well as kept by the minority inspector in each precinct we have vote by mail security measures so that when an envelope comes back to us it's got a bar code to make sure that we issued that envelope and b that that voter was one who applied for the ballot and then when the ballot comes through we know that that excuse me was a ballot that we generated as opposed to someone else next we have physical security seals that we implement throughout our process such as tamper evidence seals that you put on different items such as everything from voting equipment itself to the ballot bags then there's physical security just meaning everything from the locks and the doors and the cameras so we have cameras on our drop boxes we have cameras here at the wharf so that uh when vote by mail processing begins we have a live stream so that anyone on the planet could watch that whole process we have limited access we use security badges to give limited access to secure security enhanced areas and then the network that we use for the boeing equipment is a closed network that you can only operate at the wharf it's not networked with any other computer system anywhere else in the county or definitely not with the internet so we take all of these issues very seriously next in terms of security the door swings both ways on security you have to be watchdogs on making sure that the vote was accurate and auditable and and and everything was on the up and up and fair but at the same time you also have to secure people's right to vote so in here in pretty much every other state we have motor voter at penndot facilities and we have for a number of years and and i'm pleased to advise you that even years ago we were impressed that pennsylvania was one of the first to go through additional training of department of transportation staff to make sure that they were properly administering that and to reduce the errors that could occur you have mail-in applications of course since the advent of motor voter and you have online applications and what's important to know is that each one of these involves a component of identification verification and then all of the election jurisdictions any time you get a change a new or revised uh registration has to do a verification mailing to guard against any kind of possible fraudulent registration um so we we have all of these measures in place and online applications interestingly were initially done as uh or initially introduced i should say in indiana and arizona as a cost saving and security measure because you instead of this paper mechanism uh this paper trail where then you have to count on the handwriting to be clear and then you have to count on the clerk to read it correctly and then you have to count on the clerk to enter that data correctly online voter registration applications take the data that typically is already in the department of transportation system off of a driver's license or state id um and then so there's no misspelling of names it's now just a data transfer from our department of state to the local jurisdictions next in terms of registration security one of the things that we have to do is constantly work on on updating the voter rolls so pennsylvania and several other states are participants in eric which is the electronic registration information center and this is a eric is a computer system a set of databases that constantly looks for duplicate registration so that when someone moves from one jurisdiction to a complete different state and they've got a common date of birth common last four digits of social security number and the same name then it looks for duplicates and it tries to determine which one is more recent and which one is older and therefore should be cancelled these happen for a variety of reasons commonly college students that's you know and younger people who are at the most transit part of their lives um they may end up registered in in more than one location um when those occur it typically uh almost never involves or results in someone voting in more than one location but for a time there might be two registrations a colleague of mine in a a republican led county and he's a former staff member for tom ridge governor of pennsylvania he offered a poignant observation he said i think there's the voter rolls are not as clean as one side says they are and the voter fraud is not as prevalent as the other side says it is um so we're constantly working on that in delaware county i'm hoping to be able to introduce a biennial canvas mailing to try to cleanse the voter rolls that much more i i'm a big believer in canvas mailings to try to double check that your roles are as up-to-date as possible um lately there's been a lot of talk so we may as well talk about this because this touches on election security uh voter id and i'm probably gonna make no friends with my next remarks i think voter id is one of those issues where nobody really has it right um you gotta you gotta understand that the world's biggest democracy one of my best days that i've ever had as an election administrator was meeting and talking with the commissioner for elections for all of india that's the world's largest democracy with now 800 million voters and ahead of every federal election they issue new photo ids to every single eligible voter it's a mammoth undertaking that involves deputizing and requiring every government worker whether they're a school teacher or an air traffic controller or a sanitation worker to canvas their neighborhoods and operate that and and make sure that new ideas and canvassing occurs uh in each neighborhood and we're talking about a variety of locations that some involve mountain climbers some involved the use of elephants to get there a lot of trains a lot of trucks in very tight congested urban areas bicycles you name it it's just it was a fascinating discussion but where voter id is probably most misunderstood on both sides on the one hand it's not as onerous as some people make it out to be um on the other hand it's not the security blanket that some people make it out to be to give you a case in point for the first six years that we ran early voting in illinois voter id photo voter id was required of anybody who needed who wanted to use early voting and during that time we grew the program from initially about thirty thousand people using it to more than three hundred thousand people using it and most in the most recent general election in 2020 more than 400 000 people use it and i can tell you handling all the communications for the board back there including media relations emails letters you name it we received zero complaints from people because you have to have if you're going to have a standard of photo id you have to have flexibility in there to make sure that you're accepting photo id which which shows the poll worker that at some point this person was at a government agency and proved they are who they are and that you know there's corresponding either social security number birth certificate whatever you know driver's licenses and state ids do not come out of anywhere at the same time you have to have safeguards and safety nets if you or i leave our wallet on the septa train the night before election day i think we should not lose our constitutional right to participate in an election we don't lose our citizenship just because we leave something so there have to be safeguards and safety nets to allow for people to either vote provisionally or in some states they even allow a neighbor to come in and testify that this is martha jones uh and i'll sign this you know this uh this uh verification this uh affidavit on her behalf and uh and and then there may be other forms of id that a person is able to use whether it's a pay stub or some other medicare card or what have you next there's got to be general understanding of the pros and cons the cons are that some people who don't have id might be might be reluctant to participate but the more suburban and urban area that you're in the chances are the the individuals are more likely to have ids uh the pros uh are that you are more likely to make a clerical error especially if we get to the point in pennsylvania where we have electronic poll books that scan the id and the errors occur when there's an eric jones senior and an eric jones jr and eric jones jr comes to vote and he's checked in as his dad wrongly and then dad comes to vote and he's told no you've already voted so there are some pros to introducing voter id however one of them isn't necessarily a you know an airtight security system and as a case in point the state where voter id was first introduced which was indiana years into it their highest election official their secretary of state was was indicted and convicted of voter fraud for using a purposely outdated id that listed the wrong address at his ex-wife's house and he was removed from office so he was convicted of voter fraud and removed from office and he used an id so it's it's not a fail safe to prevent someone from trying to skirt the law and vote somewhere where they shouldn't but it is something that can help clean up errors but you have to have like i said enough safety nets uh you don't want to go to a system you know there's one state for example that allows um certain forms of state issued ids uh including you know veterans cards and gun cards but not um you know issued by state universities so you know you got to have a fair and safe system if if that's ever going to be introduced uh probably the biggest factor facing all of us right now in election administration is just trust and faith in our electoral system and i've had a lot of time to think about all of the things that have been alleged and um about 2020 and all of the the records and the safeguards and and the uh the auditable you know paper trail that's available here uh and it what what strikes me is that universally it seems all of us as americans have accepted every contest that was elsewhere on the ballot other than one and i i have a hard time reconciling that and and and that's that's the challenge that we have as election administrators is trying to restore the trust and faith in our voting systems and try to educate we're actually if you think about it in the education and customer service business and so we need to try to educate our voters about all the safeguards i've spoken with members of the league who've pointed out that they had no idea about the various safeguards that go into place until they went to training at our warehouse and saw all the steps and procedures that go into place but we have registration systems that are based out of id and verification so that if someone does not present id there's at least a four digit social security number that can be used to verify that there is a person who was born on june 20th 1955 and uh with that name uh we have the secret ballot so but at the same time we have the ability to see there were this many applications from these voters we don't know which ones cast which ballots and then we have the verifiable uh you know paper trail and the records just on the internet of how many ballots were cast in every precinct you know the signs of fraud are where you have way more or way fewer ballots cast than you did ballot applications and there was none of that there there were no nothing there were no signs of that anywhere in the united states i cringe every time i i hear in a news media report there were no there was no evidence of widespread fraud well there was no evidence of even minuscule fraud when you're talking about 150 million ballots cast next i think there are opportunities for advancements right now there are bipartisan talks i'm pleased to say about introducing electronic poll books uh electronic poll books i want to warn everybody having been through a rollout you you want electronic poll books when you absolutely have to have them and once you get them it's gonna take a couple of elections to make sure everything goes smoothly but um once they're rolled out and once they're uh they're in place they make check-in goes more smoothly they allow for you know if there's even if there's not an id requirement i've seen in jurisdictions where the id allows the voter to check in that much faster because it just scans the id and then pulls up their voter record almost instantaneously so i don't want to come off as as i'm not advocating for or against voter id laws or anything like that but i'm telling you that electronic poll books where people do have id it uh can zip along the line because your two choke points in a polling place are the check-in station and do you have enough voting stations for people to vote so with that um just some information the next security measure is we have to educate our voters so for this election this will be the first time uh thanks to uh an odd little provision in the pennsylvania constitution that requires a separate judicial ballot um under article 5 section 15b we will have a two paper ballot election so we're preparing these graphics to be in the polling place we're also preparing a mailing that's going to make reference to it and we're going to definitely drive this home with our our poll workers as part of their training and we're taking precautions so we're going to require our our printing vendor to deliver the ballots for any precinct collated a b a b a b a b having been through enough two ballot elections i can tell you that if you don't do that there's a chance that the poll workers will only unload a package of ballot a and start handing those out then at about 9 a.m a voter calls and says you know i think i was supposed to get two pages and i only got one can i go back and there's no way you can say go back vote again or you know and and so we're gonna try to make it as easy and simple to understand at first for our poll workers but then for our voters too it's going to be important that they whether they're voting by mail we're going to have instructions on the secrecy envelope that say insert both ballot a and ballot b um and then at the polling place we're going to be instructing them to feed the ballots into the scanner one at a time so we're going to try to drive that home through training through materials uh last in terms of voter security this is a mock-up of the back side of the postcard that we plan on sending out to voters in as early in october might be the middle of october so that they know that they have the option to vote by mail and they can use any of the drop boxes um and secondly if they want to vote and first that we're going to have ppe there and that that they should check to see that the polling place didn't change we're very concerned that with this delta variant of the cova 19 virus that uh that there may be some polling place proprietors who pull out again just as they did we don't know how it's going to go uh it's just impossible to predict so we have to prepare for any contingency then as you can see we're including in that mailing a reference to how this is a two paper ballot election so with that i think i've gone over my allotted time so i'd like to just open it to uh questions i think you're muted i was muted yes i'm now unmuted um i'd i'd like to start with a few of the questions that um people had sent in in advance and probably the first one it should be what can the league do to help this year to ensure and to ensure a smooth election um spread the word about election that the judicial retention questions have to be listed on a separate page and uh if you can help us uh over the coming years more poll workers and especially more poll workers who are in their 30s and 40s who are going to stay with us and and not necessarily just do this for 5 or 10 or 15 years and who might be more comfortable with the coming technology if the state legislature requires electronic poll books i would i would love to explore a more comprehensive high school student judge program in chicago we had one for every precinct so we had two thousand we led the country and i'd like to see that as part of a civics program in delaware county jim can you elaborate just a little how that would work well uh the it might require some tweaks and state law so this isn't some magic wand i could i could wave so it's not something we could necessarily do right this minute we'd have to think about legislation dealing with it right and we have to deal with the politics of the situation uh to be honest so um the board has the authority to appoint for example clerks and machine operators or basically machine operators and i think that's one avenue that that that could be pursued uh if we were to go down that route we do advocate or i advocate rather for separate training for high school students because we want part of their training to be a little bit of role playing so that if they show up and they're told hey johnny we want you to go get coffee for everybody we don't need you here you know we want them to assert themselves and make sure that they're treated as an equal partner in the polling place speaking with working with others uh are you working at all with other counties especially counties that have the same polling voting machines that we do to try to um prepare for inevitable things that come up that we never think of in advance yes we're in uh almost unique position in that uh delco and lancaster are the two counties that have uh our inner civic equipment so we had a meeting with hart uh with lancaster county earlier this summer we're in regular contact with our counterparts in chesco matco philco um fox berks you know all the way up to you know lehigh and beyond um we attended the statewide conference at bear creek that was hosted by the department of state delaware county now serves as one of the few who advise the state on trying to come up with better simple plain english wording for their emails and their and their their letters so um so we're we're in regular contact as recently as this morning i sent out a blast to several of my colleagues on a campaign finance question uh to so that we could compare notes on how we're handling certain situations where it's a very small committee that may raise less than 250 dollars and whether a waiver is warranted in that situation so we definitely keep in touch with each other definitely well i think the other thing that there's always this feeling right now that we've got photo fraud allegations you know coming at us from different things and i didn't know if there was anything related also when you've talked with them about this have you talked with other counties about how they're planning to talk about and deal with this it's it's a it's a big topic and it's it's um you know i think it wasn't the factor but i think it's fair to say that that the combination of covid uh you know public acts 77 and then the questions that followed the election led to a big exodus of election officials who finally were ready to retire and uh throwing in the towel and i i and we're all aware of it and we've all been around elections those of us have been in the business for a while long enough that we we have this strong sense of camaraderie where none of us want a problem to go down on our watch all of us want it to be airtight and that if an election is decided by one vote that the that if it goes to the scrutiny of the court uh you know a recount a court supervisory count that those those results will withstand the test um so there is uh you know there are common talks among all of us as far as how we can do our best to restore faith but part of it is is simply recognizing certain facts like uh i was astounded earlier this week to hear a suggestion that that the voter rolls are filled with not real people that some of our registered voters don't really exist that that's and and that we that they need to re-prove up somehow that they exist uh let me preface this i i i don't see that as a as a monstrous threat to democracy but i do see it as because we've received some emails in response to that um about the the revelation of personal identifying information such as penndot numbers and social security numbers uh people are questioning whether they should remain engaged and they're very upset by it um i i just you know all of these voter registration systems were built on a bipartisan basis over the last 40 years and they were all built with a common theme of making sure that we get it right and and you know by elected officials who have been through the election election process themselves and again i go back to um that there's this amazing unanimous unanimous opinion among americans that we got everything else right just you know everything else that was on the ballots was right except for one thing is in question among only a certain portion of our population and we have to do our best to figure out how those individuals came to this conclusion and how we can prove uh that that the the results um are what they are one of the questions sorry can we address a a few of the questions that are in the chat is that possible i will i will do that too i will in just a second um but do you see and jim just really briefly any legislation right now that we should be aware of that's coming out of harrisburg that could change what happens in this election well we should we should definitely embrace any legislation that would allow us to begin to process not tabulate process um just as your scanner in the precinct is processing ballots from the second of the polls open at 7 am all the way through 8 pm and there's no there's no tabulation midday states across the united across the united states have long deployed a system of processing ballots before election day and processing them were if they use early voting sites for example and never tabulating and never opening any presence before christmas if you will and then merging and gathering those results and finally doing the tabulation on election night after the polls close uh election officials i've come into contact with in pennsylvania uh that we need this so that we can rebuild certainty when you have one group of ballots being counted by 10 pm and reported and then another group of ballots that are still out there that's what contributed to a lot of the the concerns last fall and um and it was avoidable but um hopefully that will be addressed i was thinking more of a legislation that's pending right now that we don't know about yet but i was going to say i do think we need to move on to the other things and there are a couple here that are just um uh i i know that a lot of people both prior to um today and also have put on the chat today uh about poll workers and you mentioned getting and we have quite a few poll workers on the call today as well and so um i just really wanted to um ask a couple of things um is um what is what is what is your plan for this fall trying to take a lot of questions and put it together one what is your plan for this fall for poll worker training how are we going to make it so that it is a um it's a system that works maybe better and people are more informed and i know that there have been some complaints about the fact that oh you've got to go read some video if you don't know the question and you don't have time to read the video because there are too many people there and this sort of thing so what is it what is your attempt this year to make this fall to make it better well prior to the delta variant our goal was to offer more and more classes all across the county and that has taken a hit um ironically we also have more competition for spaces because with the reopening of many of our areas and the ability to operate reasonably safely with face masks in many public settings so whereas we we didn't have competition in the past for just for example the media borough community center now we can't book all those days so uh that's the challenge that we have is is trying to set up more in-person uh training so that people have hands-on experience the next thing we want to get election results in faster so we're going to be working with partners in either in law enforcement or another specific organization so that we have the v drives being picked up in sealed and signed envelopes uh by designated deputized uh election authority employees uh who are designated to pick up the b drives and bring those down to chester so we would like to have election results if at all possible well before the 11 o'clock news uh so that's our goal is to speed that up because right now we had the judges taking them to a receiving station a receiving station waiting until they got x number of v drives and then transporting those um with the assistance of law enforcement down to the wharf we'd like to cut out that middle process and go straight to the polling places and the the goal also would be to make it easier for the poll workers to go through the drop-off site that much more quickly so they wouldn't have to go through that hole can you show me your v drive envelope can we cut it open can we check to see if you've got both v drives no we could eliminate a lot of that so we want to make it smoother for the the poll workers next we're working with the controller's office on streamlining the payroll system it's my personal belief that we should strive toward a couple of weeks or a few weeks at the most but at the same time we're paying our poll workers considerably more than we did in the past and now w-9s are being required so those are the issues that we're dealing with in terms of poll workers but we're still going to offer both online and in-person training and then the test online the only difference is we're going to scale back we had kind of an odd situation where people were working half days and they were getting 130 dollars in training pay and 70 dollars we're gonna cut the if if you only work a half day and that's a very rare group um you're going to get half the training pay as well so um the other thing i should mention uh the votesp has changed to gov for its domain name and on the in the paper on your uh slide you had it as um as calm still so oh no wait i i i bought the league editing always jim you know actually no that's a domain i bought okay the domain i bought so that it redirects it's really simple to uh and it takes it to the dot gov oh it does okay but i think as far as putting it on any mailings that we go out we should try to get people used to gov we we wanted to use the dot gov but it's so long you know people would be staring back and forth from the mail piece so we wanted to come up with something short and easy so that's why we were saying um vote by mail pa.com there is no vote by mail pa.gov that's something we just obtained to try to make it really easy for people to get to that pennsylvania website is this statewide or is this just being done in delaware county just in delaware county oh okay i didn't understand okay i mean i'll gladly hand it out to other people but you know if they want but okay uh nora burr results that she had to change her license to match her passport because her middle name and initial and do you uh do do you advise that you also do it on vote or registration if you change it on one um how does it do you have to have a consistency here i guess is what you know we're really talking about yeah i would recommend going online and using the the online registration system you can use the online registration system to update your registration and that includes name changes for people who uh have changed their you know they've gone from smith to smith jones or back to smith or whatever absolutely um and do you have any set date yet for when we'll receive mail-in ballots uh we're we just for certified uh i want to say wednesday the bell was just certified we had filings as recently as this week um so we're going through all the ballot styles now it's a very complicated process we have basically 428 ballot styles for this election this is one of the more complicated ones not as complicated as the primary but with the two pages and we're trying to make sure that the page breaks go right so that for example we have some precincts where if you just lay it out so that it so that all the offices on ballot a uh go on validate it'll leave just the inspector office on the back page of a so we're in those in those cases we're forcing the judge and the inspector or the mayor and the council to go both to the back page so we're going through that and we've got to finish proofing so it's going to be probably early uh october when those start to hit the mail right um okay then um you haven't really a date per se that we and and i'm assuming you're suggesting dropboxes not uh the post office boxes for mailing things in dropbox is especially for the voters who are waiting until the last week to either apply or return their ballot are the best way to get it directly to you're putting it basically in a ballot box that's run you're you're reducing risk of it being lost or delayed in the mail and the mail has done a great job in terms of local delivery however if you're waiting until the last couple of days to return the ballot you definitely want to use a dropbox and the county will be promoting on on anything they send out where the drop boxes are we will send out a complete list of 42 drop boxes plus the voter service centers so that people you know run into an issue they spoil their ballot what have you we'll have a voter service center at media again and then also in chester city and in upper darby uh it's a question here about how will um dalco respond to the subpoenas from the legislature wanting our personal information most of which is already available through sure database to begin with right we're going to follow the director the department of state delaware county does not release any personal identifying information we release what's required under the law absolutely everything that's required uh but you know there's there are laws to protect personal identifying information you know the last four digits penndot numbers what have you um and you know i i don't know that uh well suffice it to say we're gonna follow the department of state's lead on this and uh but if the law says we can't give it out i'm not sure that we'll we'll cross that bridge if if it ever if we ever come to it well here's another sort of saddest thing to go with that is uh since voter rolls were successfully hacked in florida how much attention is is delaware county or the state doing to anticipate this happening to us and um as they said admittedly defense always lags behind off behind offense but more to the i think the question is you know um have we anything in pla plan in place to one try to identify it happening before too much happens and also two what you would do to if something like that did happen well the situation that's uh that's being referenced if i recall correctly involves some electronic pull books and some data files um so i i would think that if we introduce electronic poll books we'll have a secure way of of managing those those uh data uploads to the individual poll books uh further you always have to have paper back up so uh you know when we introduce this new technology it's it's you always have to count on the power the batteries dying the power going out what have you so you always have to have a paper backup but i am not aware that any hacking of any voter rolls led to any fraudulent votes because that's they're two different buckets entirely right the the other thing um that um um is if if somebody is going to work at the would like to work at the polls how would you suggest now that um i know a lot of times people call us and then i call you or christina or something like that but you know um is there a plan or a way that you could just say i want to i know people have said they tried to work at the polls they thought they sent their name to the right place and it didn't work and so what is the proper way to do it well you can you can just google delco votes and it'll take you right to our website and then you can find your polling place you can find candidate lists and you can find contact information as far as uh how to sign up to vote or how to work in the polls so um i'm going there right now and delaware county elections because obviously there's more than one delaware communication that they should fill out or something like that that would make this smoother i need i mean i worked at the polls for years but i got invited to do it it was a personal you know another someone within the polls asked me but there there are people now who say i don't mind i don't have to work at my own poll i'd be willing to work in a neighboring poll or i know you're having trouble finding people at a certain area and uh but they they say they've called in and nothing happens they don't get contacted i guess that's what i'm saying well if that's if that's the case uh you know you can definitely send an email uh we've got a becoming a poll worker page it's and our web our email address is delco poll workers that's all one word delco poll workers at co dot delaware dot p a dot u s and i'll repeat that delco poll workers at co.delaware.pa.us and i guarantee our training staff are monitoring that email account thanks um the you know i i know we've sort of got run out of our time right kathy but um but i i um you know uh i i jim i don't know if you um would like to um share some way that we could get back in touch with you i know how to get in touch with you but i was supposed to share that with everybody well any of these email addresses uh if there's a question um you can definitely get in touch with with our staff and they'll definitely if you want to escalate it to me you can ask for uh ask for it to be brought to my attention i'd be more than happy to look into it is there a phone number for the um for the uh the wharf now so that we've i what i found is that since your moving things have moved around a lot of phone numbers just don't work anymore you just get a recording saying leave a message and nobody gets back to you the the one the one consistent one uh that is you know universal in terms for voters is 610 891 vote so that's you know eight eight nine one what vote oh vote oh yes i think i got eight six eight three so um again that's six ten eight nine one eight six eight three okay okay in the interest of time um thank you jim for a really informative and thought-provoking presentation would you all please join me in expressing the appreciation to jim by either clapping or using the clap symbol and uh i have a couple of announcements please save your save the date for our next program which is called post incarceration re-entry problems policies and programs and opportunities which will be presented thursday september 30th at noon via zoom and you can go to our website you're breaking up gene i'm sorry it appears that jane's internet connection may be dropping in and out if you go to our league webpage there's a calendar of events and you can see what's coming up uh from there it's lwvcdc.org so uh you can go there and get that are you back jane i think she's just dropped out entirely um i want to truly truly thank jim i learned so much amazing amazing amount of information thank you so much for spending time with us and running over oh okay jane's back but she's muted yeah jane you're muted so okay now i'm now i'm back okay uh did olivia um speak up about sending in your dues already my other hat is uh is chair of the membership committee uh guess what it's that time of year where you have to pay your dues even though it's for 2022 uh the the uh you have to pay them in 20 preferably before um january 31st 2022 and we try to do it before the holidays just because we all need a break by that point as well but um if you can se you can pay online if you want to uh through uh going into the join button uh or you can do it through um there's also a place there where you can also uh send in a form and mail in your dues and the mailing address is mailing addresses um p.o box 131 wallingford pennsylvania 19086 and dues are 60 households are 30 additional thank you very much could you plug our upcoming event you dropped out oh okay the two upcoming events on thursday september 30th uh at 12 noon we have um a program entitled post incarceration re-entry problems policies programs and opportunities and that will be at 12 noon via zoom you can go to our website to sign up for this program and again our website is lwvcdc.org and then our next hot topics program which will be by zoom is conspiratorial thinking and beliefs in voter fraud that's friday october 8th at 12 noon via zoom the speaker is adam anders assistant professor of political science at the university of louisville and again i'd like to thank jim for a really really informative presentation um and thank olivia for managing the questions and kathy as always for her technological expertise and i'd just like to add one thing to joe thank you to jim is that you know i don't know how many of you are aware that jim worked a lot with the league in chicago but it was just really wonderful to have somebody new coming in doing a totally different job in a different way and overseeing all three departments and then finding that the league had this person immediately who wanted to talk to us and help us understand things and it's been really great jim and we it's a joy to work with you and look forward to going working with you going forward well it goes both ways i'm a big admirer of the league my mom was a leader in the local league where i grew up so thank you so much for having me today known as a league brat to those who used to be thank you very much so i think that ends our program for today thank you everyone for joining us and um please check our website for future events thank you thank you jim thank you very much thank you