Yeah. So, weirdly enough, my background is in neuroscience. So I was doing my neuroscience PhD, which I finished in in 2017. And then right after that, I decided to make the leap into policy, which is where, where my passions really are. So, you know, I've I've spent a year in the senate working on technology and privacy issues. I've also worked on election issues like redistricting, public access to elections data, and election security. So I'm really interested in the technology side of voting rights. So that's questions like, how can technology be used to make it easier to vote and to protect elections? But on the flip side of that, it's also how is technology weaponized to suppress the vote by misinforming people or by making it harder to cast a ballot. And, I'm really glad to be at CVT because I think CVT is just the perfect place, to be doing that kind of work right now. Jumping into the issues at hand, how is this election season different from other ones in the past? Yeah. I think everybody does know the answer to that because, obviously, there's one thing that's made this year different than all years in the recent past, which is COVID. COVID has made everything different, and, you know, elections are are are no exception to that. The big change with, elections this year has been the rise in mail in or absentee voting. And by the way, there's the I'm gonna use those two terms interchangeably because, there's really a semantic distinction. It's just a semantic distinction between mail in and absentee. So absentee voting, you know, it's nothing new, but many states are having to scale up their their absentee systems in a huge way. And this is a a brand new way to vote for so many people, and so there's a lot of uncertainty that voters have about how to cast their vote, how to sign up for their vote, when when voting absentee. And, unfortunately, this kind of kind of situation with a lot of uncertainty, there's a a fertile environment for misinformation and disinformation. So we're seeing a lot of, disinformation campaigns. You You know, we're seeing disinformation campaigns about COVID, and we're also seeing about voting. And, unfortunately, much of both of that originates with the president, which poses some unique challenges. So, yeah, another thing that makes this election different is that we have an incumbent president who's actively spreading disinformation about how to vote and how secure the election is. And that's a very strange dynamic when you look at other recent presidential elections. There's a lot of talk about mail and voting. Can Can you explain how vote by mail works? Yeah. Sure. So, you know, it's it's nothing too fancy. Every state has had some form of absentee voting for years. It's been around since 1864, which was the year of Abraham Lincoln's reelection. And at the time, it was intended for, to make it easier for soldiers in the Civil War to vote or make it possible for soldiers in the Civil War to vote. It's remained an important option for military voters, overseas voters, disabled voters, and elderly voters. So, you know, it's really nothing new. But what's new is that, before this year and there are still some restrictions about this. There there have been restrictions about, who could vote for who who could vote absentee. In many states, you have to have some sort of excuse to vote absentee. You have to be above 65 or you have to be sick. But COVID, has has changed things, and a lot of states have made a lot more people eligible. And that's something that that some advocates have been pushing for for a long time. Right? If people wanna vote by mail, why shouldn't that be an option? But, you know, mail in voting, it it's fairly simple. It uses some of the same systems as in person voting such as voter registration databases. You have to be registered to vote. You request your you know, and and broadly speaking, registered voters request their ballot. A blank ballot is mailed to them with unique identifying information tying that ballot to a specific voter, and the voter fills it out and sends it back. And it's tallied

a lot of the security measures for in person voting apply to mail in as well. So, you know, think about the security checks that, that an in person voter, experiences. So, you know, the voter goes up to the table. They announce themselves. Maybe they provide some identifying information. A poll worker finds their spot in the poll book. The voter signs that. The voter receives a ballot, and then the poll worker marks that that person has voted. So, you know, that does a few things. It ensures that you are who you say you are, and it prevents you from voting more than once. And mail in voting has analogous mechanisms for each of those. So, you know, just like an in person voter has to has to go to the polling place and identify themselves, an absentee voter also has to send an application and which you know, with some identifying information about who they are and says, you know, I'd like to I'd like to have a ballot. So, so you have blank ballots are mailed to, individual voters with unique barcodes that, tie a ballot to a voter so that elected officials know if someone has has, voted in election and not allow them to vote multiple times. At various points in the process, voters also have to make sworn statements to say, that I am who I say I am. And in some states, you also have signature verification. So, when the voter signs a statement saying that they are who they say they are, sometimes that signature is actually checked against the signature that the, that might be on file for that voter. And if the signature doesn't match, then that ballot might might be thrown out. Or, in some states, a voter might be notified that there's a problem with their ballot, and they'll have a chance to to correct or cure the deficiency. And all these security measures mean that it's basically impossible to commit voter fraud at the scale you would need to to swing an election. And even voter fraud at the individual lever level is incredibly rare. Five states have been conducting elections almost entirely by mail for years without widespread problems. Oregon has been doing vote by mail the longest. They've been mailing ballots to voters for twenty years, and there have only been two fraud cases out of 50,000,000 cast. So so yeah. It's it's basically nothing. So, you know, these frequencies of fraud are about five times less likely than the odds of getting struck by lightning in your lifetime, if that gives you a sense. How will different state election laws generally impact the electoral process? Yeah. So, you know, we have a federalist election system in this country, which means that, it it's left up to each individual state to determine the rules for their election, except from for some some basic minimum standards that that congress has set, set out. So, you know, that means that there's a lot of variance across the states for, the rules about absentee voting, and it means that in some states, it's much harder to vote by mail than in others. It it also means that even for people who are allowed to vote by mail in their state, then in some states, it's much likelier that their votes won't count because of a minor error they made, such as, you know, I mentioned the the signature matching process earlier before. In some, you know, in some cases, they might be comparing the signature on a ballot to a signature that a voter made on an electronic pad at the DMV fifteen years ago. So, you know, you can imagine that that creates, you know, a a reasonably high likelihood that a signature will be judged not to match even though the voter did nothing wrong. So, you know, there's and and there's also ongoing litigation about all these rules in in lots of different states. In in lots of these states, the rules about when ballots can be counted or which ballots can be counted, whether voters will have the opportunity to fix a problem in their ballot if there are problems with it. So, you know, all all this variance across states, it it's just a it's a pretty uncertain environment. One one good thing is that I think election officials have been doing a really good job of informing the voters in their jurisdiction about what the rules are. I think they've been saying for months to people, you know, if you're gonna vote absentee, make sure that you, you know, request your ballot early. Make sure you return it early. And if enough people do that, then, you know, hopefully, that will kind of mitigate some of the, the effects of these, like, say, uncertain deadlines. If you just have, you know, more people who know that they should just get their ballots in now and not wait till the last minute. So what role is social media playing in the election process? Yeah. So, you know, obviously, social media is how how people connect and communicate with each other, especially now in the pandemic with, in person social interaction being, you know, such a rare a rare thing. And, you know, just speaking personally on on my social media, I see a lot of really great election related content. I see people who are enthusiastic about the candidates, about the voting process, pictures of people mailing in their ballots, people reminding each other of some of the pitfalls to voting, by mail, like, you know, make sure that you you sign everything. And, you know, platforms are are also facilitating the spread of of accurate, good information across these platforms. So for instance, Facebook and Instagram have this voting information center for helping people register to vote and get accurate information on how to vote, reminding people to return their ballot and allowing elected election officials to send out alerts to their voters. But, you know, unfortunately, misinformation and disinformation also, proliferate on these platforms. And, you know, like I said before, misinformation and disinformation, they love an uncertain environment. And, you know, right now, we have, people who are uncertain about what are the absentee voting rules in their state, and that that creates environment where misinformation about absentee voting can spread. So, you know, about a quarter of Americans think that voter fraud has been a major problem with vote by mail, which it's just not true. And so when people repeat that on social media, it might make people, less likely to vote or more likely to distrust the vote. And that's a big problem for, democracy, which depends on trust. And misinformation is also really hard to stop. So each day, there are billions of posts on Facebook. There, there are over 3,000,000 posts each day that are reported by AI systems and by users as potentially warranting removal. And even with, Facebook's thousands of content moderators, that's just an insane amount of content to review, and it's it's very hard to do and and very time consuming. Now let's switch gears a bit and talk about mis- and disinformation. Give our listeners who might not know a quick idea of what these are and why they're such a big topic these days. Yeah. So this has been this has been a big focus of, of our work at CDT and and especially of, Emma Alonso at CDT. Yeah. So there there's a few different kinds of misinformation and disinformation, and, I mean, there's few different kinds of false information. Misinformation is false information that is created or shared without an intent to mislead or to cause harm. And so that can include just genuine mistakes, that people make, on on social media. You know, someone posting a status update that ballots need to be sent in right now or something like that, if that's something that they heard. That that's a piece of misinformation. Disinformation is inaccurate information that, is shared with the intent to mislead and cause harm. So that can be individual posts, coordinated disinformation campaigns. And, you know, since we've been talking about mail in voting, I would also include, the president's campaign to say that mail in voting corrupts the election, is a disinformation campaign that is intended to sow doubt about the electoral process. And, you know, they're a really big problem because these things, dominate the media. The the press is constantly put in a spot of of having to debunk these things. They polarize the population over things that are straightforward and and shouldn't even really be matters of debate. And, yeah, it it's it's a big issue for for democracy.

this summer, we we collaborated with the Center for Tech and Civic Life to put together a course specifically, aimed at helping election officials, fight misinformation and disinformation. And, you know, this is stuff like make sure that they, that election officials have social media accounts. Make sure they get those social media accounts verified. Make sure that they, you know, are just are just flooding the zone with good information, and, you know, providing updates as needed to their, constituents to make sure that there's there's no question about what what the rules and, procedures are for elections in a particular jurisdiction. A second thing that we just did is we released a a a short document on voter suppression content. So voter suppression content is a a kind of misinformation and disinformation, that suppresses the vote. So there's all kinds of misinformation and disinformation. Right? Like, we're seeing, you know, stuff about how masks cause COVID, you know, that kind of thing. But voter suppression content is specifically misinformation and disinformation that suppresses the vote. So, we released a short document on how to identify voter suppression content and how to counter it. And, we hope that that is also useful for election officials who are trying to make sure that their elections run as smoothly as possible.

Yeah. So, you know, one really important election cybersecurity issue is, the integrity of voter registration databases. So, you know, these were really put in the spotlight in 2016 when we know that, the the Russian state hacking, agencies were able to they they attempted to get into every single state voter registration database. And in some cases, they were able to actually breach the database. Now we don't think that there's, there's there's no evidence that they were able to actually alter the voter registration databases, But that, the those facts really brought the importance of securing voter registration databases to the forefront. So every election official in the country has been put on alert since 2016 that they need to secure these databases. And the integrity of these databases has been even more important, now that so many more people are voting by mail. It's it's it's that much more important that people's addresses be correct because if a ballot is, say, sent to the wrong address, there might not be enough time before the election for a voter to realize it and, request that another ballot be sent to their real address. So, you know, I think there have been a lot of improvements since 2016 to voter registration database security. But, I'm that's one thing I'm keeping an eye on is whether the changes that people have made have really made those databases secure. And I'm I'm pretty confident that, there there won't be any issues this year related to that. And then, you know, another concern I have is just that the disinformation about voting fraud in general is is going to lead to in person voter intimidation. So the president and his campaign have called for people to watch the polls, in some cases, in in a kind of, somewhat threatening manner. Now poll watching is one way for the public to have oversight over how elections are conducted, and, I think most states have laws about how to do proper poll watching. But I'm just concerned that the rhetoric about the election and about fraud has gotten, so overheated and so hostile that, it can be taken to the point where, you know, there are these sort of vigilante poll watching operations where people, go to the polls to try to, intimidate people from casting their vote, and and that would be just terrible. But, you know, despite all these concerns, I'm really amazed to see how many people are turning out to vote early. There's just we're seeing just crazy high turnout numbers. You know, I think in Texas you know, we're two weeks before the election right now. And in Texas, I think the number of people who have turned out to vote early, are already at about 40% of the total number of people who voted in 2016 overall. Yeah. It's it's amazing. And they're we're seeing, like, really high numbers like that across the country. So, you know, that just shows that people are really enthusiastic about voting. And if, and if people do that, you know, like, if if so many people are turning out to vote early and so many people are voting by mail, I think that's a that's a really great thing for our democracy.