COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
STATE GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE PUBLIC HEARING
STATE CAPITOL HARRISBURG, PA
IRVIS OFFICE BUILDING ROOM G-50
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10, 2 021 1:30 P.M.
PRESENTATION ON ELECTION OVERSIGHT: CERTIFICATION AND OPERATION OF VOTING MACHINES WITH DEMONSTRATIONS
BEFORE: HONORABLE SETH M. GROVE, MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HONORABLE RUSS DIAMOND HONORABLE DAWN W. KEEFER HONORABLE ANDREW LEWIS HONORABLE RYAN E. MACKENZIE HONORABLE BRETT R. MILLER HONORABLE ERIC R. NELSON HONORABLE JASON ORTITAY HONORABLE CLINT OWLETT HONORABLE FRANCIS X. RYAN HONORABLE PAUL SCHEMEL HONORABLE LOUIS C. SCHMITT HONORABLE CRAIG T. STAATS HONORABLE JEFF C. WHEELAND
Debra B. Miller dbmreporting@msn. com 2
BEFORE (continued): HONORABLE MALCOLM KENYATTA, DEMOCRATIC ACTING CHAIR HONORABLE ISABELLA V. FITZGERALD HONORABLE KRISTINE C. HOWARD HONORABLE MAUREEN E. MADDEN HONORABLE BENJAMIN V. SANCHEZ HONORABLE JARED G. SOLOMON HONORABLE JOE WEBSTER HONORABLE REGINA G. YOUNG
COMMITTEE STAFF PRESENT: MICHAELE TOTINO MAJORITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MICHAEL HECKMANN MAJORITY RESEARCH ANALYST MATTHEW RINDFUSS MAJORITY RESEARCH ANALYST SHERRY EBERLY MAJORITY LEGISLATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
NICHOLAS HIMEBAUGH DEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 3
I N D E X
TESTIFIERS
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NAME PAGE
JONATHAN M. MARKS DEPUTY SECRETARY FOR ELECTIONS AND COMMISSIONS, PA DEPARTMENT OF STATE...... 12
TIMOTHY A. BENYO CHIEF CLERK, REGISTRATION AND ELECTIONS, LEHIGH COUNTY...... 36
PAUL LUX, CERA SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS, OKALOOSA COUNTY, FLORIDA...... 63
SUBMITTED WRITTEN TESTIMONY
* * *
See submitted written testimony and handouts online under "Show:" at:
https://www.legis.State.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/TR/Public/t r finder public action.cfm?tr doc typ=T&billBody=&billTyp=& billNbr=&hearing month=&hearing day=&hearing year=&NewCommi ttee=State+Government&subcommittee=&subj ect=&bill=&new titl e=&new salutation=&new first name=&new middle name=&new las t name=&new suffix=&hearing loc= 4
1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 * * *
3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Good afternoon.
4 Welcome to another public hearing of the
5 Pennsylvania House State Government Committee on the
6 certification of election machines and election machine
7 operations with demonstrations.
8 Our Committee's extensive election oversight
9 hearing schedule will allow this Committee to complete a
10 deep dive into Pennsylvania's 1937 election law and how our
11 elections are administered in the Commonwealth in order to
12 inform the public and this Committee so we may facilitate
13 election changes which ensure our voting process is
14 designed so the voters select the winners and not the
15 process.
16 While the 2020 general election has been debated
17 and litigated ad nauseam, the General Assembly still has an
18 important constitutional job to execute legislative
19 oversight of laws we pass and agencies which administer
20 these laws. Specifically, House Rule 45 states, quote,
21 "...each standing committee or subcommittee of the House
22 shall exercise continuous watchfulness of the execution by
23 the administrative agencies concerned of any laws, the
24 subject matter of which is within the jurisdiction of such
25 committee or subcommittee; and, for that purpose, shall 5
1 study all pertinent reports and data submitted to the
2 House by the agencies in the executive branch of the
3 Government."
4 These hearings are focused on how voting machines
5 are certified and how they operate. Voting machines are a
6 tool which voters interact with to cast their votes. They
7 are incredibly important and very costly. These machines
8 also go through an extensive certification process, both by
9 the Federal Government and State Governments. Today will
10 be a tremendous opportunity for all of us to learn about
11 these certification processes and how these machines
12 operate.
13 In the Members' packets are numerous documents on
14 election machine certification. These have been emailed to
15 the Members attending virtually, and they will be placed on
16 my website at repgrove.com (http://www.repgrove.com).
17 We have four panels for today's hearing. Panel 1
18 is the Pennsylvania Department of State; panel 2 is a video
19 demonstration of all the voting machines which are in
20 operation in the Commonwealth; panel 3 is a county election
21 officer; and panel 4 is an election official from Florida.
22 These four panels will cover the gambit of voting machine
23 policy and practices while assisting the general public and
24 the Members of the State Government Committee to understand
25 the importance and impact of voter certification and 6
1 election machine policy.
2 I look forward to working with my colleagues,
3 stakeholders, and citizens to improve upon our
4 Commonwealth's election laws.
5 Acting Chairman, any opening comments, sir?
6 MINORITY ACTING CHAIRMAN KENYATTA: Thank you,
7 Mr. Chairman.
8 You know, I hope that as we continue these
9 hearings, and hopefully Pennsylvanians are tuning in, that
10 they get a greater sense of the truth and the reality that
11 the last election we had was free and fair, and I hope that
12 the testimony we hear today further allays any concerns
13 that were really, I think, manufactured in people's minds
14 because of the lies that were told.
15 And so I think these hearings are important in
16 terms of making the public have greater faith in their
17 democracy, greater faith in knowing that when they vote on
18 these machines, that their vote is accurately counted, that
19 it is tabulated and the way that we have always done it,
20 and that ultimately the majority and the will of the people
21 is respected.
22 And so I look forward to this hearing. I hope
23 that people are paying attention and they get a sense that
24 all the things that they may have heard, that they don't
25 have to be worried, because here in Pennsylvania, we have 7
1 safe, free, and fair elections, and we'll continue to do
2 that.
3 So thank you, Mr. Chairman.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: We have Members and
5 testifiers in attendance virtually, as well as the public
6 viewing via livestream. Due to Sunshine Law requirements,
7 if either of these platforms experience technical
8 difficulties, we will pause the meeting in order to correct
9 the issues.
10 For the Members participating virtually, please
11 mute your microphones. Please know when you speak or when
12 you are on camera, we all see and hear you. If you want to
13 be recognized for comments, please use the "Raise Hand"
14 function. After being recognized but prior to speaking,
15 please turn on your camera and unmute your microphone.
16 After you have completed your question, please mute your
17 microphone.
18 My goal is to allow as many Members as possible
19 to ask questions this afternoon, so please limit your
20 questions to one per person for a maximum of 5 minutes.
21 This should provide enough time for further rounds of
22 questions.
23 Also, this hearing is about election machine
24 certification operation. Please keep your inquiries on the
25 other topics until all Members' questions have been asked 8
1 concerning election machine certification operation. We
2 are holding more hearings on specific election topics. If
3 you have any questions that fall under one of those
4 hearings, please hold it for that hearing.
5 We will start Member introductions with Members
6 in the room. For Members attending virtually, I will call
7 on you one by one. Let's start.
8 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Thank you,
9 Mr. Chairman.
10 Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, 181st District.
11 REPRESENTATIVE YOUNG: Representative
12 Regina Young, Philadelphia and Delaware Counties,
13 185th District.
14 REPRESENTATIVE STAATS: Good afternoon.
15 Craig Staats, the 145th District, Bucks County.
16 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Good afternoon.
17 Representative Russ Diamond, 102nd District,
18 Lebanon County.
19 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Good afternoon.
20 Representative Dawn Keefer, 92nd District, York
21 and Cumberland Counties.
22 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Representative
23 Jeff Wheeland, Lycoming County, 83rd District.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
25 Seth Grove, York County, the 196th District. 9
1 And we'll go to the virtual Members.
2 Representative Andrew Lewis.
3 REPRESENTATIVE LEWIS: Andrew Lewis, representing
4 the 105th District in Dauphin County. Good to be here.
5 Thank you, Chairman.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
7 Brett Miller.
8 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Hi.
9 Brett Miller, 41st District, Lancaster County.
10 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
11 Clint Owlett.
12 REPRESENTATIVE OWLETT: Representative Owlett. I
13 serve Tioga and parts of Bradford and Potter Counties, the
14 60 th District.
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
17 REPRESENTATIVE FITZGERALD: Good afternoon.
18 Isabella Fitzgerald, representing the
19 203rd Legislative District, Philadelphia.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
21 Frank Ryan.
22 REPRESENTATIVE RYAN: Representative Frank Ryan,
23 the 101st District, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
25 Kristine Howard. 10
1 REPRESENTATIVE HOWARD: Hi.
2 Kristine Howard from the 167th in Chester County.
3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
4 Jason Ortitay.
5 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Jason Ortitay,
6 representing the 46th District, Allegheny and Washington
7 Counties.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
9 Lou Schmitt.
10 REPRESENTATIVE SCHMITT: Good afternoon,
11 everybody.
12 Lou Schmitt here, representing the city of
13 Altoona and parts of Blair County in the 79th Legislative
14 District.
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
16 Maureen Madden.
17 REPRESENTATIVE MADDEN: (Audio malfunction.)
18 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
19 Maureen Madden, you were just on. We saw you. We'll come
20 back.
21 Representative Paul Schemel.
22 REPRESENTATIVE SCHEMEL: Paul Schemel,
23 representing portions of Franklin County.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
25 Ryan Mackenzie. 11
1 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Good afternoon.
2 Representative Ryan Mackenzie, representing the
3 134th District in portions of Lehigh and Berks Counties.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative "Ben the
5 virtual war of Sanchez."
6 REPRESENTATIVE SANCHEZ: Good afternoon,
7 Mr. Chairman.
8 And I hope you weren't watching the introductions
9 yesterday, because I didn't want to lose my title when I
10 messed it up. But I'm Ben Sanchez, and I'm representing
11 Montgomery County.
12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
13 Jared Solomon.
14 REPRESENTATIVE SOLOMON: Good afternoon. Thanks,
15 Mr. Chairman.
16 Jared Solomon, 202nd, D, Philadelphia.
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
18 Maureen Madden.
19 REPRESENTATIVE MADDEN: Hi.
20 Representative Madden, the 115th Legislative
21 District, Monroe County. I made the mistake of moving my
22 computer and lost you guys. I'm back now. I'm happy to be
23 here.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: It happens. Glad to
25 get you. 12
1 Representative Joe Webster.
2 REPRESENTATIVE WEBSTER: Good afternoon,
3 everyone.
4 It's Joe Webster, Montgomery County, House
5 District 150.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you very much.
7
8 PANEL 1
9 ELECTION CERTIFICATION PROCESS
10
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: With that, we will turn
12 to our first testifier, Deputy Secretary Marks, who has
13 been with us numerous times, which we greatly appreciate
14 his insight.
15 Deputy Secretary, if you would turn on your
16 monitor. There you are.
17 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Can you see me okay?
18 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Yep. We can see you
19 and hear you.
20 Do you mind raising your right hand:
21 Do you swear or affirm the testimony you are
22 about to give is true to the best of your knowledge,
23 information, and belief? If so, indicate by saying
24 "I do."
25 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: I do. 13
1 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
2 Any opening remarks?
3 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: I do not. I just want
4 to say it's good to see you, Chairman Grove and
5 Chair Kenyatta. I trust Chair Davidson is safe and
6 healthy. But I'm ready to answer questions. I know I have
7 limited time, and I know you have a lot to get through as
8 well.
9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Will do. Thank you.
10 Mr. Marks, as you know, the topic of this hearing
11 is the certification of voting machines and machine
12 operation. We will obviously have a demonstration after
13 your testimony of every single election machine that has
14 been certified here in Pennsylvania and used.
15 I know you will not be here for the machine demo
16 part of the hearing, but I just want to let you know and
17 for the benefit of everyone watching, if we have any
18 questions from Members, we will send that over to the
19 Department at a later date.
20 So with that, Representative Nelson, are you on?
21 I don't think he is. I'll take his first
22 question.
23 As of the end of 2019, all of Pennsylvania's
24 67 counties' voting machines were decertified and counties
25 purchased new machines. With respect to voting machine 14
1 certification of these machines, according to the
2 Department of State's website, quote, "Any voting..."
3 machine "selected by a county must be certified by the
4 U.S. Election Assistance Commission...and the Pennsylvania
5 secretary of state. The EAC and the Pennsylvania
6 Department of State evaluate voting... " machines "under
7 current Federal and State standards. Pennsylvania has
8 developed new standards of security and accessibility that
9 manufacturers must meet to achieve State certification."
10 We all reviewed the PA Voting System Security
11 Standard document. That is also on your web page as well.
12 But for the benefit of Members and the public watching
13 today, can you please explain briefly the difference
14 between the Federal and State standards, because it's our
15 understanding that we cannot use a hybrid approach here in
16 Pennsylvania, and if you could kind of briefly go over how
17 that process works.
18 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yes. Absolutely.
19 So the reason we have a hybrid approach or we
20 have two levels of testing, it's actually a statutory
21 requirement. Before a voting system vendor can bring a
22 system in to be tested at the Pennsylvania Department of
23 State, pursuant to the Election Code, that system has to
24 first be tested by an independent testing authority at the
25 Federal level. And all of that Federal testing is now 15
1 under the auspices of the Election Assistance Commission.
2 The primary differences between the testing that
3 the EAC does and the testing that the Department of State
4 does, there are two that are related to security testing.
5 That is, we do an additional code review that supplements
6 the Federal testing, and we also do penetration testing.
7 The current Federal standards do not provide for
8 penetration testing, so we do penetration testing in
9 conjunction with a testing authority that has expertise in
10 IT security and specific expertise testing on electronic
11 voting equipment. And that penetration testing is designed
12 to test the voting system's security protocols and security
13 measures while the systems are in storage, while they are
14 being configured, while they are being transported, and
15 while they are in use at the polling place. And, you know,
16 it involves a lot of physical security testing, but it also
17 involves sort of testing to try to identify and exploit any
18 vulnerabilities, whether that's in the software, the
19 hardware, or any other component of the system.
20 So those are really the primary differences. We
21 augment the Federal testing with our additional security
22 testing.
23 And then, of course, we have to do functional
24 testing to make sure that the voting system meets the very
25 specific requirements of Pennsylvania's law, which have 16
1 gotten a little simpler now that straight-party voting is
2 no longer in place here in Pennsylvania. We had a very
3 unique way of straight-party voting with an individual
4 selection in an office. It was unique because we were the
5 only jurisdiction in the United States that had such a
6 specific rule related to making an individual selection in
7 an office after you had selected straight party. So that
8 has simplified our functional testing a little bit.
9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: And a combination of
10 those two, it has been said that Pennsylvania's overall
11 standards are more stringent because we have that hybrid
12 approach. Would that be an accurate assessment?
13 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: That's correct. Yeah.
14 The Federal testing is the baseline. It's required as a
15 prerequisite to State testing. And then we have
16 additional security testing that we make the voting systems
17 undergo before they can be certified for use here in
18 Pennsylvania.
19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: And if a voting machine
20 does not get cleared by the EAC, you don't even look at it,
21 correct?
22 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: No. We cannot look at
23 it if it doesn't pass Federal testing.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
25 Representative Kenyatta. 17
1 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Thank you,
2 Chairman.
3 And thank you, Deputy Secretary. I feel like you
4 are a member of the family at this point, you've been here
5 so much.
6 You know, a lot has been made -- I have two
7 different questions. A lot has been made of the safety of
8 voting systems, which, as I said in my opening, I'm happy
9 we're doing this to hopefully allay any of those concerns.
10 You have done this for a long time. Do you have any
11 concern as an elections expert about any of the systems
12 that are in use in counties across the Commonwealth?
13 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Thank you for that
14 question, Representative Kenyatta.
15 I do not have any concern, but I also want to be
16 clear that we're always vigilant. You know, our testing
17 process for voting systems has evolved quite a bit over the
18 course of my career.
19 I was here in the very early days of electronic
20 voting systems when they were used broadly across the
21 Commonwealth, and we have significantly improved and
22 evolved our process over time. And these additional
23 security standards that we put in place for testing just a
24 few years ago are just the latest, you know, part of that
25 evolution. 18
1 So we are always vigilant. You know, now that
2 voting systems are a part of critical infrastructure, it's
3 something that we're always mindful of and we're always
4 looking to improve so that we can assure ourselves and,
5 more importantly, assure the voters of the Commonwealth
6 that the systems that we're using are safe and accurate.
7 And I have a high degree of confidence, not only in the
8 Federal process but our own process here in Pennsylvania.
9 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: And so to just
10 quickly follow up to that before my second really short
11 question.
12 So voters in Pennsylvania should have confidence,
13 like you do, in our voting systems, that they are safe and
14 secure.
15 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: I believe they should,
16 but as I said, ever vigilant.
17 You know, we at the Department of State, and I
18 know the counties do a lot of testing. They are required
19 to do testing prior to each election. So, you know, I
20 think, you know, voters should familiarize themselves with
21 that so that they can feel as confident as I do in the
22 process.
23 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: And I asked this
24 question yesterday of a testifier; the same to you. Is
25 there anything from your vantage point that we ought to be 19
1 doing statutorily that would make the work you are doing,
2 specifically as it relates to the certification of
3 machines, to make it, you know, more streamlined, more
4 efficient for DOS?
5 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: I don't think so. I
6 think the process is pretty efficient now. I think it's a
7 good thing that our statute has always had that Federal
8 baseline testing. And, you know, this particular area of
9 the statute actually does give the Department of State a
10 fair amount of discretion as it relates to testing
11 protocols and directives and instructions to counties and
12 to vendors. So I think that we're pretty well covered.
13 I will reserve the right, though, at a later date
14 to maybe make a suggestion or two. There is always
15 opportunity for improvement. But I think the process works
16 very well right now.
17 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Okay. Thank
18 you.
19 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative Diamond.
21 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
22 Thank you, Deputy Secretary, for joining us once
23 again today.
24 I have a few questions with respect to just
25 machine testing and the reports concerning their 20
1 examination results.
2 What in fact does get tested, and if it passes,
3 what in fact gets certified? Are we talking just the
4 machines that people vote on themselves, or are we talking
5 more expanded, like the scanners, the tabulators, the
6 poll books? Are we talking about an integrated system that
7 gets tested or is it just the machines themselves?
8 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: No, that's a great
9 question. Thank you.
10 No, it's every component of the voting system.
11 So it is, each of these systems has an election management
12 system that is used by the county and the jurisdictions to
13 set up an election. You know, candidate, ballot
14 definition, everything that goes into that, that is tested,
15 as well as the hardware that voters use, if they are using
16 a ballot marking device to select their, to make their
17 selections, as well as the scanners that tabulate the
18 ballots after they have been cast. So our testing, as well
19 as the Federal testing, tests every component of the system
20 -- software, hardware, firmware, the whole nine yards.
21 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Okay.
22 I also noticed with just about every report I
23 have read, it contains petitions for certification and
24 recommendations. Is there a timeline for when those
25 conditions and recommendations need to be implemented by? 21
1 And, you know, hypothetically, what would happen if a
2 machine or a system didn't meet these conditions or
3 recommendations by the appropriate timeline?
4 And, you know, many of these lists of conditions
5 and recommendations, they are quite extensive. So what
6 happens, I guess, you know, if a system comes in and it's
7 like, well, it's meeting 88 percent of what you need, I
8 mean, do you go in and do you help that vendor kind of like
9 clean that up, or how does that work?
10 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: So, and I want to make a
11 clear distinction between conditions and recommendations.
12 Recommendations are best practices. They are not
13 absolutely required. Conditions, however, are. Those are
14 conditions of certification, and if a vendor or if a county
15 does not meet those conditions at the time the voting
16 system is deployed in the county, there may be penalties
17 for that, contractual all the way up to decertification.
18 So there is certainly no, there's no motivation for a
19 vendor or for a county to do anything other than field the
20 system as it has been certified under the conditions issued
21 in the report.
22 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Okay. And one last
23 question, Deputy Secretary.
24 The Voting System Security Standard document
25 states that the voting system test must confirm that the 22
1 voting system design, and I quote, "provides a mechanism to
2 detect problems and allows election officials to verify the
3 election outcome in a manner transparent to everyone, " and
4 I'll emphasize that last part, "a manner transparent to
5 everyone." Can you expand a little bit more on what this
6 realistically looks like within the certification and
7 testing process?
8 You know, we're getting a lot of calls about, you
9 know, voting machines, and I'm sure you understand the
10 nature of those calls. So, you know, that "transparent to
11 everyone" thing is very important to me, and probably
12 important to the people of Pennsylvania. So can you expand
13 a bit more on what that realistically looks like?
14 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Sure.
15 So, you know, the first thing, pre-election logic
16 and accuracy testing as well as post-election testing and
17 auditing done during the canvass, those are all done in an
18 open setting, meaning that candidates and their
19 representatives are allowed to be in attendance and watch
20 those things.
21 There is also a sort of auditing and reporting
22 that the system does that would be open to public
23 inspection as well. But it's really, it's really making,
24 you know, making those processes, and again, this is
25 pursuant to our statute that both the pre-election testing 23
1 and the testing that occurs during the canvass after the
2 election are open. They are done in open meetings, and
3 candidates and their representatives can be present to
4 watch that process unfold.
5 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: All right. Thank you,
6 sir, and thank you, Mr. Chairman.
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
8 Wheeland.
9 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Thank you,
10 Mr. Chairman.
11 And Deputy Secretary, welcome back again.
12 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Thank you.
13 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: We have heard from the
14 Department that at some point in the future, we're going to
15 have to replace our voting systems again. How long is the
16 recommended life cycle for our voting systems?
17 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: You know, it's typically
18 a range. You know, the Federal Government, I think, has
19 gone on record as, you know, anywhere from -- and it
20 somewhat depends on the individual system, but I think,
21 I think, you know, 8 to 12 years is sort of the lifespan
22 and depending on how much of the system can be upgraded as
23 necessary.
24 You know, I mentioned earlier when I was
25 answering Representative Kenyatta's question that we're 24
1 always vigilant, we're always evolving the process, and,
2 you know, the risks, you know, change over time.
3 You know, certainly over the course of my career,
4 you know, I never would have imagined, you know, sort of
5 the security considerations that we would have to take into
6 account in recent years as, you know, to be perfectly
7 frank, our foreign adversaries have become much more
8 sophisticated in, you know, cyber-attacks. So, you know,
9 it really depends on the system, but I think it's
10 reasonable to expect that you're going to get 8 years,
11 perhaps up to 12 years.
12 The previous systems, many of them, were in place
13 for 15 years or longer. And really the biggest issue with
14 them, you know, the hardware was still working well, and it
15 was really the software that could no longer be updated.
16 They were running on older versions of Windows that weren't
17 supported anymore and could no longer be updated. And
18 that's really the big risk, is, you know, when you get to a
19 point where you can no longer support the software and make
20 patches and other things to the system to protect the
21 integrity of the software, that's when it becomes a risk,
22 and the risks grow over time.
23 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Kind of like my cell
24 phone.
25 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: I'm sorry. I missed the 25
1 last part of that.
2 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: It's kind of like my
3 smartphone, my iPhone. You know, they only last so many
4 years--
5 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yeah.
6 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: -- and then the
7 software just doesn't function.
8 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Right.
9 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Except for our
10 Majority Leader, who I think still has a flip phone.
11 So would the machines ever get retested or
12 recertified, so to speak? And the reason I ask this is
13 because 2020 was, you know, the first election cycle where
14 counties used these new machines, and obviously there was a
15 record-breaking turnout which could have caused an abnormal
16 amount of wear and tear on these systems. So I'm just
17 wondering if there's a way to reevaluate them to ensure
18 that it's, you know, that it's only normal amounts of wear
19 and tear to account for them. Any recertification plans?
20 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yes. So there's
21 actually two mechanisms. The one mechanism is a petition
22 that can be filed by voters to request a reexamination of a
23 voting system, and there are specific requirements on what
24 that petition looks like and what kind of bond needs to be
25 posted with that petition. But the Secretary of the 26
1 Commonwealth also has the discretion to reexamine a voting
2 system if, you know, if any changes have been made or if
3 there's any reason to believe that the accuracy and/or
4 integrity of the system is at risk.
5 So there are mechanisms that the Department can
6 use on its own motion, and there is even a process by which
7 citizens can submit a petition for the reexamination of a
8 voting system.
9 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: So does your
10 Department, like, keep tabs? Do counties report to you on
11 the number of problems that may have occurred with system X
12 or system Y?
13 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yes.
14 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Is there a way to
15 report, that it would flag it that they would need to be
16 recertified or reinspected, or---
17 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yes. We do ask the
18 counties to report any issues that they have, you know, on
19 or before or even after election day. And we also require
20 that of the vendors, and if there is an issue, we will ask
21 the vendor for written information, essentially a
22 root-cause analysis and whatever the resolution is. And
23 we often ask counties for a written explanation if the
24 issue was, say, a user error in the county, just so that
25 we can make sure that we understand the nature of it and 27
1 what the county is doing to ensure that it doesn't happen
2 again.
3 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: So is there like a
4 tally sheet that the Department lists all 67 counties, and
5 is that something that could be shared with this Committee
6 so that we could see what issues occurred?
7 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yeah. I'll have to
8 check on that.
9 I don't, when you say "tally sheet," I don't -
10 you know, typically these are, like I said, like a root-
11 cause analysis document that we would get from a vendor or
12 a written response that we would get from a county. But we
13 would certainly summarize that information, and I'll talk
14 to our counsel. I'm certain that most, if not all of that,
15 could be shared.
16 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Thank you very much.
17 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Thank you.
18 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
19 Kenyatta, and then Representative Owlett.
20 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Thank you.
21 And, you know, I want to thank my colleagues for
22 the thoughtful questions today. Obviously, we represent
23 our constituents, but I'm sure your office has directly
24 gotten a lot of questions. Are there any, you know, is
25 there a frequently asked question about voting machines 28
1 specifically that you have seen come across your desk
2 repeatedly that you would want to use this moment to
3 address?
4 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: You know, I think the
5 questions we get the most, you know, this current
6 generation of systems is fairly new. You know, the
7 earliest, I think, I believe Warren County, and I hope I'm
8 right about that, I believe they were the first one to
9 adopt the new system before the November 2018 election.
10 But most counties implemented these in 2019, and there were
11 a few that implemented them just going into 2020.
12 So they are relatively new, and a lot of the
13 questions we get are about the ballots themselves and the
14 tabulators. It really was a sea change for voters in many
15 counties who were used to making selections on a
16 touchscreen, having, you know, and just pressing the
17 "Cast Vote." They didn't have to handle a ballot, an
18 optical-scan ballot. So that was really, you know, the
19 crux of the questions we got, was about sort of that
20 significant change in the way they voted.
21 And that's why we post a lot of information on
22 our website. I'm not sure which version, you know,
23 videos you're going to be viewing, but we do have a video
24 demonstration of each voting system. We provide
25 information on our website. On the votespa page 29
1 (https://www.votespa.com/Pages/default.aspx ), there's a
2 link there to information about each voting system so that
3 voters can educate themselves on how the voting system in
4 their specific county works and what it looks like and how
5 you go about casting your vote, you know, correctly on
6 those voting systems.
7 And we also have an Election Security page that
8 provides additional information about how we secure
9 voting systems and all election infrastructure, for that
10 matter.
11 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Can I just make
12 a quick comment?
13 As the millennial on this panel, you know, the
14 more that you can do to make that website user-friendly,
15 particularly on mobile devices, I think would be incredibly
16 helpful.
17 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Yes. Thank you for that
18 suggestion. And yes, we try to make as many of our pages
19 as mobile-friendly as possible.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative Owlett,
21 the last question for the Deputy Secretary.
22 REPRESENTATIVE OWLETT: Thank you, Deputy, for
23 joining us, and I will make this fairly quick here.
24 Just really quick, one of the big things that we
25 were talking about when we got these new machines was the 30
1 fact that we needed to have a paper record, and it's stated
2 that "...a paper record or ballot that can be checked and
3 verified by the voter and audited by election officials."
4 For the benefit of those that are watching, I
5 think there has been some confusion on this statement as to
6 maybe they would receive this paper when they leave, that
7 they could have verification that they voted. Talk a
8 little bit about what the benefits are of this and why you
9 believe that it was needed, and maybe clarify some of the
10 confusion around the paper record and what that means
11 specifically.
12 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Sure.
13 Yeah, it's not a receipt, and the voter cannot
14 walk out of the polling place with their ballot. If they
15 do, it's not going to be cast and it won't be counted.
16 In most jurisdictions, in fact, the overwhelming
17 majority are precinct tabulation, meaning the voter is
18 taking that ballot and then themselves feeding it through a
19 scanner, at which point the ballot is tabulated.
20 But the purpose for having those voter-verifiable
21 paper ballots is so that the voter can look at their
22 selections themselves and verify that, yes, this is who I
23 wanted to vote for before they insert it into that scanner
24 or insert it into a ballot box.
25 And the other important piece is the 31
1 post-election recount or auditing, that, you know, if it
2 really comes down to it, you can always go back and do a
3 hand count of those ballots. At the very least, you could
4 recount them with different machinery. But it gives you
5 the ability to go back to the official record of the vote
6 cast and review that if necessary in the event that there's
7 a controversy regarding the unofficial count.
8 REPRESENTATIVE OWLETT: So how long do we keep
9 these ballots? Are they stored forever, or, like, what
10 happens to them? Like the 2020 ballots, where are they at
11 now? Like, what happens there?
12 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: They' re in storage at
13 the counties. And if I misspoke, and maybe there is
14 something -- if I misspeak, I'll make sure we follow up
15 with the Committee. I believe their retention period on
16 official ballots is 11 months, according to the Election
17 Code. So they don't keep them forever, but they do have to
18 keep them for some period of time after an election and
19 before they can destroy them.
20 I believe it's 11 months. I'll check and verify
21 that.
22 REPRESENTATIVE OWLETT: That's fine.
23 Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Deputy.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you, Deputy
25 Secretary. I know you need to get going. We appreciate 32
1 your time this morning---
2 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Thank you.
3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: -- and we'll do some
4 follow-up questions. I know some Members had some
5 questions pertaining to stuff like the process for a
6 resident to challenge or question the certification, to do
7 recertification and stuff. So we'll make sure we get
8 those questions to you in writing. So thank you for your
9 time.
10 DEPUTY SECRETARY MARKS: Great.
11 Thank you again, Chairman Grove, and thank you,
12 Chair Kenyatta and Members of the Committee.
13 I guess I'll see you again next week.
14 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Sounds good. It's our
15 weekly time.
16
17 PANEL 2
18 HOW VOTING MACHINES WORK
19
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: As we transition to the
21 video demonstrations of all the election machines, which
22 are on, as the Deputy Secretary pointed out, they are on
23 the Department of State's website, I did want to highlight
24 some sections of statute and within the standards for
25 election machines. 33
1 If you want to look at Pennsylvania Election Code
2 25 P.S., Section 3031, it cites the specific standards
3 under the law, one of which I found very helpful -- testing
4 central automatic tabulating equipment as part of the
5 compliance. And it states that the essential tabulating
6 equipment must be tested publicly by the fourth day prior
7 to each election, and they have to, each county has to give
8 a 48-hour public notification of that.
9 Within the Department's document PA Voting System
10 Security Standard, which is also on the Department of
11 State's website, under "Assumptions," which is a
12 requirement for all election machines, quote, "No
13 components of the voting..." machine "shall be connected to
14 any modem or network interface, including the Internet, at
15 any time, except in a standalone wired local area network
16 configuration in which all connected devices are certified
17 voting...components. Transmission of unofficial results
18 can be accomplished by writing results to media, and moving
19 the media to a different computer that may be connected to
20 a network."
21 Further in this document it states network
22 requirements. It has to be for a closed network only, and
23 the voting system uses air-gapped computer networks.
24 "Air-gapped" refers to a completely closed network that is
25 not connected to anything else or any other electronic 34
1 computer.
2 "Penetration Testing," as the Deputy Secretary
3 signaled: "Penetration testing is an attempt to bypass or
4 break the security of a system or a device. Penetration
5 testing is conducted without the confines of a
6 pre-determined test suite. It instead relies heavily on
7 the experience and expertise of the team members, their
8 knowledge of the system, it's component devices, and
9 associated vulnerabilities, and their ability to exploit
10 those vulnerabilities." And it tests physical security and
11 voting system security in storage, being configured, being
12 transported, and being used.
13 So I would highly recommend residents of the
14 Commonwealth, look at these documents and review them,
15 because they are extensive. They are technical in nature,
16 but they do provide a good background about how our
17 election machines are certified moving forward.
18 With that, the Committee will move to viewing
19 videos of every single election machine that is used by a
20 county in this Commonwealth.
21
22 The following videos were shown:
23
24 https://www.votespa.com/About-
25 Elections/Pages/Dominion-Democracy-Suite-55A.aspx 35
1 https://www.votespa.com/About-
2 Elections/Pages/ESS-EVS-6 021.aspx
3
4 https://www.votespa.com/About-
5 Elections/Pages/Unisyn-QpenElect-20A2.aspx
6
7 https://www.votespa.com/About-
8 Elections/Pages/ClearBallot-ClearVote-15.aspx
9
10 https://www.votespa.com/About-
11 Elections/Pages/Hart-InterCivic-Verity-Voting-234.aspx
12
13 https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/hart-
14 intercivic-verity-touch-writer-duo/
15
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
17 As you can see, there is a multitude of election
18 machines that counties utilize. After they are certified
19 by the EAC, after they are certified by the Department of
20 State, after they have been through all the testing
21 requirements, each county decides which election machine
22 they do. They send a contract and purchase the necessary
23 equipment to facilitate their elections moving forward. So
24 you probably saw the equipment you use, but it's pretty
25 interesting to see how other people use equipment 36
1 throughout the Commonwealth.
2
3 PANEL 3
4 ELECTION MACHINE OPERATIONS,
5 ISSUES, AND TROUBLESHOOTING
6
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: With that, we're going
8 to turn to our next panel on county governments. Tim Benyo
9 is our next testifier, and if we can get him up on the
10 screen.
11 Tim is, again, a veteran elections director and,
12 again, quite battle tested. He's the Director of Elections
13 and Registration for Lehigh County. He has been with us
14 before. So Director Benyo, we appreciate you joining us
15 again.
16 And if you quickly could raise your right hand
17 and we'll swear you in:
18 Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are
19 about to give is true to the best of your knowledge,
20 information, and belief? If so, indicate by saying "I do."
21 MR. BENYO: I do.
22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Excellent.
23 Do you have any opening remarks?
24 MR. BENYO: Other than thanking you, Chairman
25 Grove, and Chairman Kenyatta and the other Representatives 37
1 of the Committee. I greatly appreciate you having me here
2 and all of these hearings and hearing what the county
3 election directors have to offer to your decisionmaking and
4 informing the public of what actually goes on in each
5 county. Thank you.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Will do. We appreciate
7 that.
8 And obviously, most voters have that interaction
9 at their precinct where they use election machines. With
10 the adoption of Act 77, absentee ballots and the no excuse
11 mail-in ballots are aggregated at the county level, and the
12 counties vote those ballots. So I think it's critically
13 important to kind of have that discussion. And I see you
14 are kind of in your equipment closet there, so maybe you'll
15 show us a couple of things that you do with that.
16 But I'll start off with a quick question.
17 There have been a couple State directives
18 concerning election machines. I got one dated June 9,
19 2011; one dated June 12, 2018; and my personal favorite
20 dated September 14, 2020, just because that was my
21 birthday. With those directives coming out, specifically a
22 directive on logic and testing coming out September 14th,
23 right before the election, from a county perspective in
24 terms of machine and system implementation, what's the
25 difference between the 2011 directive and the 2020 guidance 38
1 documents; and then, are they put into practice
2 interchangeably, in conjunction with one another, and how
3 difficult was it to implement them?
4 MR. BENYO: Thank you, Chairman.
5 I think they are in conjunction with each other.
6 As you can see and the thing when reviewing these documents
7 that stood out is the difference 10 years makes and how the
8 2011 document is based on the things that the Election Code
9 has us do on a regular basis, at every election. And then
10 the difference 10 years later in the guidance for
11 preparation, it's showing best practices on a computer, an
12 electronic system completely for all of the voting that we
13 do.
14 So yes, definitely in conjunction. The Election
15 Code guides us on what we need to do and what we need to
16 perform, and then the document from 2020 definitely shows
17 the best practices of computers where election directors
18 may not be, you know, completely up to speed on what the
19 best practices are currently.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Gotcha.
21 Do you think statute needs updated? You know,
22 again, 2011 is based on statute from the Election Code.
23 The 2020 is a guidance document, so it's kind of best
24 practices. Do you think we should go back and maybe adopt
25 some of those guidance documents within statute to make it 39
1 more of a directive in uniformity?
2 MR. BENYO: Well, I think there is always room
3 for improvement and maybe a little more clarity. But best
4 practices, I think the statutes as documented in the 2011
5 document kind of give us a little ability or leeway to
6 advance with the changing best standards and best practices
7 of the 2020 document.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Gotcha. Thank you.
9 Representative Miller.
10 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
11 Good to see you again, Mr. Benyo. I appreciate
12 you as a practitioner giving some testimony here.
13 I have a question. Most of us appear on election
14 day and just vote, but there's a lot of work that goes into
15 voting ahead of time, as you well know, in terms of
16 preparation. My question has to do with getting the
17 machines and all of that ready. Can you describe what sort
18 of examination goes on ahead of time related to like the
19 ballot sorter, the ballot marking device, the ballot
20 scanner, and the tabulator. What do you do ahead of time?
21 MR. BENYO: Sure.
22 As Deputy Secretary Marks had touched on, the
23 logic and accuracy testing is what is done at each county
24 prior to each election to weed out any problems of
25 differences in the coding of each machine, or making sure 40
1 that every precinct is attached to the race that it's
2 supposed to, cardstock is the right size. All these things
3 are tested of what will happen on election day.
4 It's like a pregame before the machines go out so
5 that we can see and have a better idea of what will happen
6 on election day when everything is deployed and the
7 machines are in use.
8 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Can you describe where
9 those machines are stored ahead of being brought out?
10 MR. BENYO: Sure.
11 In Lehigh County, we have, part of the system,
12 the voting machines that go out to the precincts, are
13 stored in a warehouse. As you can imagine, the larger
14 machines take up more space, so they are under constant
15 24/7 security, video surveillance, you know, passcodes to
16 get into the buildings, documentation on who goes in and
17 out of the building.
18 So they are stored in our county, and other
19 counties, I'm sure, have different procedures and different
20 places to keep all their stuff, but we have a warehouse
21 where the voting machines are, the precinct machines are,
22 and then our central scanners are always in our office
23 area.
24 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: And to the best of your
25 knowledge, there is not a uniform standard across the 41
1 67 counties. So in other words, you may have video
2 surveillance, but any other number of the counties may not.
3 MR. BENYO: I would assume that not all 67 do
4 have video surveillance, but there are locks and procedures
5 to keep everything safeguarded, I'm sure.
6 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Okay.
7 Another question. In the document Guidance on
8 Electronic Voting System Preparation and Security,
9 October 13, 2020, there's a quote here that says the
10 following: "Counties should maintain a robust chain of
11 custody protocol that documents access to all components of
12 the system including the county computers and the warehouse
13 storing the voting systems." Can you describe what "robust
14 chain of custody" means to you?
15 MR. BENYO: To me, it means that I know who has
16 access to each part of the election system.
17 So county computers, county computers are a
18 completely different system than the election side, the
19 election side including the SURE system, which was
20 discussed.
21 We have two, currently two different systems.
22 So all the other county workers have no access to the
23 SURE system. They also have no access to the different
24 components of the voting system, be it the election
25 software, the poll book software. Those servers are 42
1 stand-alone servers, and there's only a handful of people
2 that have access to those. And again, documenting who
3 enters buildings, that's another safeguard that we have to
4 make sure that we know who has access to those machines.
5 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: So again, across the
6 67 counties, "robust chain of custody" could mean different
7 things to different directors like yourselves.
8 MR. BENYO: Well, sure. I guess the
9 interpretation of "robust" can vary across 67 opinions.
10 Yes.
11 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Okay.
12 Just as the last question, a week or so ago we
13 had the Secretary of State for Ohio on, and he described a
14 system in Ohio whereby they had a room that was locked up.
15 They had a person with a key for the Democrat and a key for
16 the Republican. Everything was double signed off or double
17 keyed or what have you. What would you think of a system
18 like that in Pennsylvania?
19 MR. BENYO: I like the system idea. I don't know
20 how practical it would be to have both parties present
21 continuously when involved in different parts of the
22 process.
23 I don't know how Ohio decides who is on those
24 boards or who gets access, but in Pennsylvania is where the
25 counties are the people who code those machines, who are 43
1 caretakers for those machines, do repairs on those
2 machines. So having two people assigned to different
3 parties, there would have to be some type of guidance or
4 some type of legislation helping us get those people
5 appointed and be full-time employees.
6 REPRESENTATIVE MILLER: Okay. Well, thanks very
7 much for your testimony. I appreciate it.
8 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
9 MR. BENYO: Thank you, sir.
10 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Acting Chair Kenyatta.
11 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Thank you,
12 Mr. Chairman.
13 And thank you, Deputy Chief, for coming back and
14 for the work that you do.
15 I want to ask you those same questions that I
16 asked to the Deputy Secretary. As, you know, somebody who
17 works with these machines, who works at the county level,
18 do you as an elections professional have faith in the
19 machines, and do you think Pennsylvanians and folks in
20 Lehigh County should have faith in the safety of the
21 machines?
22 MR. BENYO: Absolutely, sir. I believe that
23 these are the most secure and accurate machines that have
24 ever been used in Pennsylvania. There is always room for
25 improvement, as the Deputy Secretary said, and I think 44
1 those are procedural at this point because of the newness
2 of the machines. But as was mentioned before, updates to
3 cell phones and computers are continuous, and these are
4 electronic machines and they do have a lifespan that needs
5 to be recognized and know they are not going to last
6 forever.
7 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: And then the
8 second question that I asked him. I am sure you are being
9 inundated with questions from folks in your community about
10 the safety of the machines. You know, is there a
11 frequently asked question that you get all the time that
12 hasn't been asked so far that you think would be important
13 for you to address for folks who might be watching?
14 MR. BENYO: Well, the Deputy Secretary also
15 touched on all of these procedures. Testing machines and
16 all the different parts are public events. They are open
17 to the public where the public should be able to see them.
18 And unfortunately, we don't have an audience very often.
19 Even last year with how under a microscope we were, there
20 was still nobody really attending any of these events. And
21 I think if people saw and when they do see, from
22 experience, when they do see what goes into putting on an
23 election, they are very impressed with the safeguards that
24 are available, that we do use and make sure that the
25 elections are secure and the machines are secure. 45
1 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Well, I just
2 want to thank you again. You have an incredibly tough job,
3 not just this election cycle, every election cycle, and so
4 thank you for your work.
5 MR. BENYO: Thank you, sir.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Director Benyo, just
7 real quick, what is the public -- how do you notify the
8 public, just a press release that it's testing time for the
9 equipment and stuff like that?
10 MR. BENYO: Yeah. Statutorily, Chairman, we have
11 to publish in multiple newspapers, but that has even gotten
12 expanded.
13 I post on my Facebook page, on my website, trying
14 to make sure that people know what is going on and have an
15 interest and encourage people to ask questions and to come
16 in to the office and see what goes on.
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Yeah. So coming up
18 with the primary election, there's going to be a point
19 where you're going to publicly disclose for people to come
20 in and watch the actual certification and kind of
21 pretesting of all this equipment where you run ballots and
22 make sure there is, you know, you run 20 ballots,
23 10 Republican and 10 Democrat, and it spits out within the
24 tabulators 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats, in simplistic
25 form; correct? 46
1 MR. BENYO: Correct, sir. Absolutely. And
2 again, encouraged to witness this, and it will be published
3 in newspapers and websites and social media. As much as we
4 can do with the resources that we do have, we try to get
5 people involved.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Will do.
7 Representative Nelson.
8 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and
9 thank you, Mr. Benyo.
10 You had mentioned earlier about the pregame
11 certification process. You know, on game day itself,
12 election day, can you touch on a little bit about, you
13 know, we did have machines that break or situations where
14 you may have to use those emergency backup paper ballots.
15 Can you kind of touch on the thought process of, you know,
16 when you take a machine offline and how you get it back
17 online again?
18 MR. BENYO: Sure. Absolutely.
19 I mean, they are mechanical machines, and things
20 do happen where ballots get jammed or ripped or the machine
21 just physically is not working properly. Being a
22 paper-based system, we have gone away pretty much from
23 emergency ballots. In Lehigh County, we are all paper.
24 Some other counties, of course, have different systems as
25 to -- you saw the videos. 47
1 We no longer have separate emergency paper
2 ballots due to the fact that we have paper ballots all the
3 time. But the machine would not be functioning.
4 So each machine has been created to have a system
5 that can accept emergency ballots, and the machines, the
6 ES&S machines that we use, it's simply a locked box
7 separate from the place where all the ballots would fall
8 into the ballot box. It's a box where ballots are stored
9 so voting can continue without interruption until the
10 malfunction can be fixed.
11 Of course, if that was a jam, the jam would be
12 addressed first, then determining if the machine itself was
13 malfunctioning. Then we could go to those emergency
14 ballots without interruption.
15 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: And you had mentioned the
16 jams. You know, we heard a lot from constituents with
17 problems of jamming. Was there a standardized process or,
18 you know, let's say you were opening a machine to clear a
19 jam, how was that consistently addressed or how would a
20 county -- part of those election day guidances, did they
21 come with specific checks and balances for how a machine
22 would be opened and how those jams would be cleared?
23 MR. BENYO: Sure. Every machine is different,
24 but the machine custodian or the machine operator on
25 election day was instructed to clear those jams in a 48
1 step-by-step process under the supervision of the voter
2 themselves.
3 Yeah, every county has a process to do that. In
4 Lehigh County, we have a backup. If the people working at
5 the polls can't fix the problem, we have what we call
6 rovers who have assigned precincts that they go and stop
7 at, you know, one after the other throughout the entire
8 election day. If a certain precinct has a problem, they
9 call the rover or the office and we'll dispatch the rover
10 to that location, so those rovers have more training on how
11 to fix a problem and get those machines back online.
12 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Yeah.
13 And then just to the ripped ballots that you
14 mentioned. So if a ballot gets ripped, does a voter get
15 assigned a new ballot? When you said they go into the box,
16 does that box return to the county then and get counted?
17 How do you address those ripped ballots?
18 MR. BENYO: Sure, two different things.
19 But if there's a ripped ballot, that would be
20 removed from the machine, unless, of course, it was
21 counted, and it would be spoiled, taken out of circulation,
22 placed elsewhere where it can't be accidentally put back
23 into circulation and get counted again. The voter would
24 then be issued a fresh ballot, revotes, re-marks it, and
25 places it in the machine. 49
1 That emergency box is then a different situation
2 where the machine isn't working. Not just a simple jam or
3 a ripped ballot and a replacement ballot; it's where the
4 machine itself isn't properly functioning, where it needs
5 to be taken offline. But, so that we don't stop the voting
6 process, they are still, people are still given ballots; it
7 just doesn't go into the scanner at that time. It then,
8 when the machine does come back online, that emergency box
9 underneath the machine of uncounted, uncast ballots would
10 then be cast in the supervision of both, both parties, a
11 minority and a majority inspector.
12 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Okay. Great. Thank you.
13 And thank you for those in-depth explanations. It was very
14 helpful.
15 Thank you, Mr. Chair.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Mr. Director, just a
17 follow-up.
18 So if a ripped ballot happens, obviously at a
19 precinct, the voter is right there and it can be
20 adjudicated right in front of them, correct?
21 MR. BENYO: Yes.
22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Can you walk us through
23 the absentee no excuse mail-in ballot counting process, how
24 you count those at the county level, and then if you have
25 issues of ripped ballots or issues with a ballot for the 50
1 absentee mail-in ballots where it's not like that day you
2 can go and pull, you know, voter Seth Grove and say, we had
3 an issue with your ballot. How do you adjudicate those at
4 the county level, because people don't get to, quote, "see
5 that firsthand" because they're not there at the precinct
6 watching it.
7 MR. BENYO: Sure.
8 Of course, we wouldn't know at that point . If
9 there was a ripped ballot, we wouldn't know who voted it if
10 they were taken out, taken out of the ballots. The secrecy
11 ballots are taken out of the return envelopes with your
12 name on it, and then the secrecy envelopes are opened and
13 the ballots are removed so that we have no idea who voted
14 and how they voted.
15 If that ballot is ripped, then in Lehigh County,
16 we remake those so that the one that is ripped is voided,
17 marked "voided, " and then we have a team of both parties,
18 Republican and Democratic parties, sitting there making
19 sure that the remake is accurate to the intent of the voter
20 prior to it being scanned into the system and then
21 tabulated.
22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Excellent.
23 And then you basically have a large, I will say
24 a large scanning machine at the county to process those
25 mail-in ballots, correct? 51
1 MR. BENYO: Yes, sir. We have multiple
2 high-speed scanners, central scanners, that are used to
3 count the mail ballots that are returned.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Will do. Thank you.
5 Representative Ortitay.
6 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
7 Thank you, Director, for being here.
8 I would like to ask a series of questions about
9 the voting machines and what happens to them after the
10 polls close.
11 So after the polls close, what happens to the
12 voting machines? Are they locked up? Are they sealed?
13 Are they picked up? Are they put in someone's car and
14 driven off? What happens to them?
15 MR. BENYO: All the machines are different and
16 have different procedures, but they all have some type of
17 memory in them that records the votes, how the votes are
18 cast.
19 The ES&S machines that we use, they have an
20 encrypted USB drive. They are specific to each machine and
21 each election. So those are removed and brought back by
22 the poll workers, brought back to the central location, and
23 that's where the votes are put into a tabulating machine.
24 The machines themselves at each precinct are
25 stored in the locations for later pickup, but there are no 52
1 votes or no memory in them. They are sealed with different
2 types of seals. There are tamper-proof seals and different
3 methods to record how they are closed, but with a specific
4 number which is recorded by the poll workers to make sure
5 that when they come back, we check them back and forth to
6 make sure that they are the same.
7 They are locked up for 20 days after the election
8 where they are not touched, so that in case there is a
9 recount or they have to be examined, that they can be
10 examined without anyone touching them prior to that. So
11 the 20-day coincides with the certification to the
12 Secretary of State from the counties.
13 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Okay. So with the
14 memory cards, the chain of custody is, everyone, you always
15 know where the memory cards are at all times. There is a
16 chain to be followed. There's--
17 MR. BENYO: Absolutely, sir.
18 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Okay. All right.
19 And when you say the 20 days, you're talking
20 about the 20 days is for the memory cards or is that just
21 for the machines?
22 MR. BENYO: Well, by law, we need to keep the
23 memory cards and can't get rid of them and reuse them.
24 There is statute that addresses that.
25 The machines themselves, just the physical 53
1 machines that are placed in the precincts, those are locked
2 tight so that they can be later examined if something were
3 to happen that they needed to be, by order of a court or by
4 whatever means, that we need to look at them.
5 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Okay. I think Deputy
6 Director Marks had said that they had to, the ballots had
7 to be kept for 11 months, and obviously the November
8 election is, or I'm sorry, the primary election is coming
9 up and it is not 11 months after the general election. So
10 do you reuse memory cards, or do you have to use new ones
11 for the next election?
12 MR. BENYO: Yeah. We are allowed to -- we can
13 reuse the ones that we have. They are then formatted after
14 a certain, whatever county specific time that they do it.
15 And again, it's usually right before, right before the next
16 election.
17 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Okay. And after the
18 polls close, the machines and everything are brought back.
19 Do counties perform any kind of post-election exam on the
20 machines to make sure that they haven't been broken,
21 there's nothing wrong with them, just to make sure they're
22 operational?
23 MR. BENYO: Not within that time that we are
24 restricted on not touching them. Afterwards, of course, we
25 go through them to make sure that they are working 54
1 properly, that nothing is broken on them. Parts get
2 replaced if they need to. But in that certain time space,
3 we can't touch them. They just sit in the warehouse under
4 lock and key.
5 REPRESENTATIVE ORTITAY: Okay. Thank you very
6 much.
7 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
8 MR. BENYO: Thank you, sir.
9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative Keefer.
10 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
11 Mr. Benyo, I have a question regarding the
12 development of, it's a directive that the State has, and it
13 says that -- the guidance document on Electronic Voting
14 System Preparation and Security, it's dated October 13th of
15 2020. It states that counties should do the following:
16 "Develop an inventory of all devices connected to or
17 running on your network, including devices that have been
18 or will be only temporarily connected." So can you explain
19 what the devices would be in this inventory and when and
20 why they might be connected to the Internet?
21 MR. BENYO: Sure. Thank you for your question.
22 Most of the devices are never connected to the
23 Internet. I mean, we do have to upload results, so those
24 computers are computers that are not connected to the
25 voting system itself. 55
1 I only have one server that is connected to the
2 Internet, and that's for the electronic poll books, which
3 is a completely separate system. So think of them all as
4 different working parts for a whole, a whole experience on
5 election day. So the electronic poll books are the only
6 one that uses a web-based connection to load the poll
7 books.
8 And now again, make sure we remember that they're
9 never touching the voting-process part, so it's a whole
10 different system. The other parts of the voting system are
11 the precinct scanners. They are your central tabulating
12 and scanning systems and your electionware, the software
13 that runs the whole system, the database for collecting all
14 the votes and tabulating them.
15 So these machines are never on the Internet.
16 They have no means to go on the Internet. They have no,
17 they have no need to go on the Internet. So it's a
18 completely stand-alone system, and the only way to transfer
19 data from the electionware system is to physically, and
20 quoting in very old terms, "sneakernet" your results from a
21 drive to a computer off of this centralized network to a
22 computer that has Internet access that can load stuff to
23 your website or to the Department of State.
24 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Right. So that's kind of
25 where I'm getting to, to try and understand that. 56
1 Now, I have gone into my county and sat down with
2 them and went through all this. So what they do, you know,
3 you take the scan, all the ballots, and you're scanning
4 them. I'm talking about maybe a process in-house of mail
5 ballots. And then there's our SIM cards. So they'll pull
6 out the SIM cards, and then they take those over to a
7 computer. They put them into a reader, and then they can
8 open the file and that tabulates them.
9 MR. BENYO: That's correct.
10 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: That's correct. Okay.
11 But that computer, you're saying that computer is not
12 connected to the Internet?
13 MR. BENYO: Correct. You are absolutely correct,
14 Representative.
15 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: And if it were, you would
16 have to show that on this inventory list.
17 MR. BENYO: Correct; yes. I don't know, in
18 Pennsylvania, the Internet access is not certified, so I
19 don't know why anyone, any county would want to put that
20 server into a compromising position where it could have
21 access, someone could have access to it and wanted to do it
22 harm.
23 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: And when you are
24 uploading it to the SURE system -- right? -- when you're
25 uploading all of that tabulated data up to the SURE system, 57
1 that would have to be some kind of an Internet connection,
2 correct?
3 MR. BENYO: Yes. The SURE system is the voter
4 registration system. So that does have some information,
5 but not necessarily the results. Somewhere in Harrisburg,
6 they do get combined into a central database, but that, the
7 Deputy Secretary would be able to answer that.
8 But yes, the results from the stand-alone
9 computer do need to be moved so that the public can see
10 them.
11 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Right. So the public can
12 see them, but you also are certifying your results as well,
13 because all the results are certified at the county level
14 and then the State takes those certifications.
15 And you submit those through a specific SURE,
16 like a portal report?
17 MR. BENYO: Correct, through the portal, the SURE
18 portal, which is a separate system than the SURE database
19 for voter registration. There is a disconnect between the
20 two, being two different systems.
21 There are multiple ways that you can upload those
22 results. A lot of counties do it by hand and do data entry
23 into the SURE portal, down to the precinct level adding
24 those numbers so that they can be then certified to the
25 State. 58
1 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Okay.
2 And then real quick on a follow-up then. Can you
3 tell me how often software updates, or how software updates
4 are handled and how often you are dealing with something
5 like that?
6 MR. BENYO: Absolutely. Absolutely,
7 Representative.
8 My quick answer is, almost never.
9 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: Okay.
10 MR. BENYO: The systems are certified, as the
11 Deputy Secretary said, through the EAC and through the
12 Department of State. There is a cost involved with those,
13 so the vendors are not -- it's not an encouraging process
14 to have a change to any of the software in any of the
15 systems because it has to be recertified and they have to
16 pay for that.
17 So the last system, the old system that just went
18 out, I don't think it was ever updated. This new system
19 hasn't had an update on it since 2019 when we purchased it.
20 So almost never is it updated.
21 REPRESENTATIVE KEEFER: All right. Thank you.
22 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
23 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you,
24 Representative Keefer.
25 Representative Lewis. 59
1 REPRESENTATIVE LEWIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
2 Good afternoon, Mr. Benyo. Thank you for being
3 with us today. It's good to have you here at the Committee
4 for this hearing.
5 When we think of every election year, obviously
6 there is a lot of preparation and a lot of time-consuming
7 effort involved in counties when it comes to machine
8 operation at every stage, whether it's pre-election,
9 election day, and even after the polls close. But in 2020,
10 you had the added challenge of doing all of these things
11 during a global pandemic, and we recognize that kind of
12 made an already difficult task into a Herculean effort.
13 And so my question for you is, can you just kind
14 of talk us through broadly how you faced this, how you
15 addressed it. It was major and I would say an unexpected
16 challenge to do all of this through COVID. So can you kind
17 of talk about that and give us kind of an overview of your
18 experiences with respect to dealing with all of this with
19 COVID going on.
20 MR. BENYO: Yeah. Thank you, sir.
21 I'm not sure if you're looking for specifics, but
22 I think the biggest takeaway was, I got good advice a long
23 time ago, to try not to take it personal, it's only
24 business, and I tried to not be offended by some of the
25 false accusations that came across to us. And it was 60
1 trying to take one day at a time and do everything with
2 patience and do our best to be courteous in the face of
3 some offending things that may have happened to us for last
4 year.
5 So yes, it was an undertaking that I hope doesn't
6 get repeated anytime soon. And as was testified in earlier
7 hearings, we did lose a lot of institutional knowledge from
8 directors who decided that it was better for them to move
9 on. And it's a shame that that happened, because
10 Pennsylvania has some catching up to do, and we need to
11 make sure that we regain that knowledge and move forward in
12 a good way.
13 REPRESENTATIVE LEWIS: Thank you. I appreciate
14 the answer. And I think it just bears kind of recognizing
15 here what you have done, and we applaud and commend you for
16 your efforts, especially in light of doing all this in a
17 pandemic. So thank you for your efforts and your actions.
18 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
19 MR. BENYO: Thank you.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
21 Just one quick follow-up on electronic poll
22 books. We don't have them in York County. We don't use
23 them. When you say they are connected to the Internet for
24 web-based connection, I assume that's to download the voter
25 registration file. So that doesn't come directly from the 61
1 SURE system, or is the SURE system data given to the
2 e-poll book vendor, they format it, and then download it?
3 Can you just walk me through that?
4 MR. BENYO: Absolutely.
5 Yes, whenever the cutoff date is, we send the
6 vendor the information for the voter registration. It's
7 not really any different than what committees and PACs
8 would be getting from us or the State on just the total
9 voter registration of the county, of the State.
10 So we give that to the vendor. The vendor parses
11 it out into the precincts that are required for the county.
12 That then is brought into the server that is connected to
13 the Internet. Then within a closed network in our county,
14 we then push that out from the server to each of the
15 electronic poll books.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Gotcha. Very
17 interesting.
18 And then, have you had any issues with the
19 e-poll books shutting down anything, and then, do you
20 request paper backup from the Department of State just in
21 case?
22 MR. BENYO: Well, everything is done in the
23 county. So yes, I print a backup, a paper backup that gets
24 sent out to each of the precincts just in case something
25 were to happen to -- there's at least two, at least two 62
1 poll books in each location, and they are redundant and
2 connect to each other via Bluetooth within those precincts,
3 so that if someone were to check in on one, they couldn't
4 check in on the second. It cross-communicates.
5 Yeah, but there's always, there's always a
6 backup. There's always at least two at every one, and then
7 we have the paper backup in case they do go down.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Gotcha. Okay.
9 Perfect.
10 That's all the questions we have, Mr. Benyo. We
11 really appreciate your time, again testifying in front of
12 the hearing. It's good to hear about the kind of back
13 operations that the average voter never gets to see or hear
14 about. So we greatly appreciate it. And again, thank you
15 for your service.
16 MR. BENYO: Thank you, sir. Thank you for having
17 me, Chairman.
18
19 PANEL 4
20 OTHER STATE VOTING MACHINE
21 CERTIFICATIONS AND OPERATIONS
22
23 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Our last testifier on
24 panel 4 is Paul Lux. He is the Director of Elections for
25 Okaloosa County in Florida. That is on the Panhandle and 63
1 is in the Central Time Zone.
2 He also served on the U.S. Election Assistance
3 Commission Voting Systems Standards Board, which I kind of
4 read today on some background.
5 Thank you so much for joining us, and we're
6 closing in on 70-degree weather here in Pennsylvania. I
7 don't know what it's like down there in Florida right now,
8 but we do have some Florida-esque weather right now. So
9 thank you, Mr. Lux, for joining us.
10 MR. LUX: Thank you, Chairman Grove and Chair
11 Kenyatta as well. I'm happy to be here.
12 I apologize for the kind of bifurcation here. I
13 do have a video feed for those who may want to see my
14 smiling face. But for reliability's sake, I have dialed in
15 for the audio, so.
16 So, yeah, I want to thank the Members of the
17 Committee for the opportunity to address you. Are you guys
18 getting the feedback I'm hearing?
19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: No, we're good to go.
20 But let me swear you in real quick.
21 MR. LUX: Oh; certainly.
22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: We aren't getting that
23 feedback, so just raise your right hand:
24 And do you swear or affirm that the testimony you
25 are about to give is true to the best of your knowledge, 64
1 information, and belief? If so, please indicate by saying
2 "I do."
3 MR. LUX: I do.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you very much.
5 Any opening statement or remarks?
6 MR. LUX: Certainly.
7 So briefly I just want to mention that I came to
8 the office here in Okaloosa County originally as the
9 Director of the IT, so my main job was not only our
10 internal computer systems but also all of the voting
11 systems. I did that in 1999, so those of you familiar with
12 the colorful history of Florida elections know that I was
13 there for the 2000 election then as the person running the
14 voting equipment.
15 I worked at various capacities until I was
16 elected in 2008, and I was frequently loaned out by my
17 predecessor to the Florida Bureau of Voting Systems
18 Certification, which gave me a really diverse and deep
19 background in how Florida goes through and gets everything
20 certified.
21 So I have worked over the years with the old
22 Global system, which then became Diebold, which then got
23 sold to ES&S and divested half of it to Dominion,
24 et cetera, for those of you who can follow all of those
25 family trees. I have worked with the ES&S stuff. I have 65
1 worked with the Sequoia stuff. So I have done all of those
2 things and have a pretty good background in a lot of those
3 different systems.
4 I mentioned I was part of the 2000 recount of
5 course, and I happened to be president of our State
6 Association during our 2018 triple statewide recount of a
7 U.S. Senate, the Governor, and one of the Cabinet
8 positions. We had a triple statewide recount in the State
9 of Florida, and I got to sort of be the person in charge of
10 our association through all of that.
11 As you mentioned, I'm a current member of the EAC
12 Standards Board. As a consequence of that, I was tapped by
13 the current chair of the EAC to serve as the Standards
14 Board representative to the Technical Guideline Development
15 Committee, which is a stand-alone body that recommends
16 changes to the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines at the
17 Federal level for the EAC. So I'm pretty well steeped in
18 all of that stuff, and I'm happy to answer what questions I
19 can.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you so much for
21 that background.
22 The first question goes to Representative
23 Mackenzie.
24 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Well, thank you,
25 Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Director Lux, for joining us 66
1 from Florida.
2 My first question is, can you please give us a
3 brief overview of the voting system certification process
4 in Florida that you mentioned, and what systems are used in
5 your State?
6 MR. LUX: Sure.
7 So Florida has its own voting system guidelines.
8 That is administered in Tallahassee at the State level by
9 the Bureau of Voting Systems Certification.
10 Right now, we have two main election system
11 vendors who are certified: Dominion, and we have four
12 different versions of the Dominion hardware and software
13 that are certified for use; and the ES&S system, and we
14 have five different versions of the ES&S system that are
15 currently certified for use.
16 We also have an approval process, if you will,
17 for things that are not voting systems that stand alone by
18 themselves, so consider it more like subcomponents, and
19 I'll explain what I mean here.
20 One of the approvals is for a group called
21 Clear Ballot, so I know from the videos you just watched,
22 you saw the Clear Ballot voting system. This is actually
23 their product called ClearAudit, which is not a voting
24 system in Florida. So they had to go through an approval
25 process in order to be approved for use in the State of 67
1 Florida, again, through that Bureau of Voting Systems
2 Certification.
3 And another company called Democracy Live has two
4 products, LiveBallot and OmniBallot, both of which are
5 online ballot delivery platforms that deliver blank ballots
6 to, in my case, I use LiveBallot, and we have been using it
7 since 2011 to provide immediate access to ballots for our
8 overseas military and our, well, absent military and
9 overseas voters, and the OmniBallot system that was just
10 stood up right before the 2020 elections, between the
11 August primary and the November election, and that was only
12 used by a handful of counties as the sort of demonstration,
13 mainly because of COVID concerns, to broaden the use of
14 that application to in-county voters with disabilities as
15 well.
16 So those are really the four platforms that we
17 use in the State of Florida that have been through the
18 Bureau of Voting Systems Certification.
19 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Okay. Thank you.
20 And so you described a process where some things
21 go to Tallahassee, and we seem to have a similar hybrid
22 system here of Federal and State standards. How does the
23 Florida Voting Systems Certification standards compare to
24 that of the EAC?
25 MR. LUX: So our standards, and I see from some 68
1 of the packet data that you guys received that you have a
2 copy, I think, of our voting system standards in there, and
3 anyone who looks at the front cover will note that the date
4 on it is January of 2005. And it's funny to look at it
5 15 years later and go, gosh, our standards are 15 years
6 old, but hey, guess what has been happening at the Federal
7 level -- almost the exact same thing.
8 I won't bore you with a long, detailed, tired
9 history of the VVSG and how we evolved from putting years
10 on it, which by the time the thing got certified at the
11 Federal level, you know, it was already, you know, 5, 6,
12 7, 8 years past the year that we hung on it, so we stopped
13 hanging years on it and now we have VVSG 1.0. We just
14 approved at the Standards Board VVSG 2.0 to the EAC.
15 But Florida's guidelines go further than the EAC
16 guidelines, and the real reason that it has to is because
17 we do certain things by statute in Florida, and we have to
18 make sure that the voting systems that we bring in to
19 Florida for use can actually handle that kind of stuff.
20 So one example that I can give you is the ability
21 to conduct what we -- we have a constitutional thing here
22 called the Universal Primary Contest. If only people from
23 one political party sign up to run for office, then that
24 race in the primary is available to all voters regardless
25 of party affiliation. So you have Democrat ballots with 69
1 Democrats and Republicans on it, Republican ballots with
2 Republicans and Democrats on it, and it really kind of
3 mixes things up. But that's just one example of one of the
4 quirky things we have in the Florida law that our voting
5 system standards have to be able to address a voting
6 system's ability to do.
7 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Okay.
8 And, Mr. Chairman, if I can, just two more quick
9 questions here? All right. Thank you.
10 So can you please explain to me what is meant in
11 Florida by "provisional certification," and how does that
12 work in your State?
13 MR. LUX: So provisional certification is
14 typically used when something is first brought in that is
15 not necessarily going to be part of the bigger voting
16 system, if you will. So a couple of examples I can give
17 you off the top of my head.
18 In 2000, Okaloosa County, my county, was one of
19 two counties in Florida that participated in the Federal
20 Voting Assistance Program's VOI, or Voting Over the
21 Internet Project. No small surprise that everything else
22 that happened in Florida in 2000 kind of swallowed up the
23 news that might have been generated by that project. But
24 that system that we used had to be certified by the
25 Bureau of Voting Systems Certification, but because it was 70
1 only going to be for a special one-time project, we don't
2 put it through the same, I don't want to say same testing,
3 because there were certain things it did not do that a
4 voting system has to do, but because it was not a proper
5 voting system itself. So they basically sat down with the
6 people and looked through the standards and found what
7 would apply and what wouldn't, and they provisionally
8 allowed us to use that system for that one project for the
9 2000 general election with the Federal Voting Assistance
10 Program.
11 We did it again in 2004 with the Serve Project.
12 We never got all the way to certification before that
13 project got canceled. We did our own kiosk-based Internet
14 voting project called the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting
15 Project. That system had to be provisionally certified as
16 well.
17 So usually the difference between provisional and
18 actual certification is, you know, there are certain
19 standards that may not apply to something that gets
20 provisionally certified that would apply to an actual
21 voting system. So to give you an example of what I mean,
22 the way to get the ballot information from, you know, one
23 of the ES&S or the Dominion systems into the Democracy Live
24 or the Clear Ballot system, you know, some of that applies
25 because it is interfacing with output files, be they PDFs 71
1 or actual, you know, direct database outputs, and then put
2 into another piece of software. And so wherever there is
3 at least a modicum of connectivity, not connected like wire
4 to wire but just, you know, exporting files and importing
5 them into the other system, the State requires that they go
6 through some sort of approval or certification process, and
7 that provisional process is how they manage that.
8 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Okay. Great. Thank
9 you.
10 The final question I have is, we were talking
11 earlier about what types of item devices, systems,
12 et cetera, get tested in Pennsylvania. So what types of
13 systems in Florida are tested? Is it just election day
14 equipment, or ballot sorters, e-poll books, et cetera. You
15 know, what is kind of the universe of things that are
16 tested?
17 MR. LUX: So I will be interested to see how it
18 evolves here actually, because right now, the main thing
19 that gets tested is the actual voting system itself. So
20 the election management system, which are the banks of
21 servers, or in some certain systems just an individual
22 server that manages the ballot layout and design that all
23 of the input from all of the precinct-based tabulators and
24 the central count tabulators and accumulating those
25 results, all of those types of things are part of the 72
1 election management system.
2 Then there's the actual physical hardware itself,
3 the high-speed scanners in the central count arena, the
4 precinct-based scanners like you saw in the video where the
5 voters are filling in their ovals and sticking the ballots
6 in the machines, that hardware and the firmware that goes
7 with that, all of that is part of what the Bureau of Voting
8 Systems Certification tests.
9 We do not currently test e-poll books or voter
10 registration systems themselves, and so that kind of falls.
11 But, you know, given where, you know, very publicly our
12 Governor's information that was public was used to move him
13 into a jurisdiction where he did not live, so when he went
14 to vote, he wasn't able to vote. It was in the news down
15 here right before the 2000 election.
16 So I anticipate that there will be some sort of
17 move, eventually, to maybe tighten that up a little bit to
18 bring e-poll books into the fold. But right now with our
19 government and the Sunshine Laws, our voter database is
20 basically available to anybody who would like it. Contact
21 the Division of Elections, and they will send you a disk
22 with everybody's information in it that isn't protected
23 otherwise by law.
24 So it makes it a little harder in Florida to say,
25 you know, we need to worry about the connectivity and the 73
1 safety of that, because that information is publicly
2 available to basically anybody who asks for it.
3 REPRESENTATIVE MACKENZIE: Okay. Great.
4 Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the time to
5 ask those questions, and thank you to Director Lux for
6 joining us. I really appreciate you being here and your
7 very detailed and thorough and informative answers to the
8 questions.
9 Thank you.
10 MR. LUX: Thank you, Representative.
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
12 Representative Kenyatta.
13 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Thank you,
14 Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Lux.
15 My good friend, Senator Jones down there in the
16 35th District, said you know what you're talking about on
17 these issues. And so my question, because it sounds like
18 you have heard at least part of the testimony here today,
19 is there anything that popped out to you as something that
20 you have learned over your many years doing this that you
21 think we ought to think about as it relates to certifying
22 the machines?
23 MR. LUX: Well, you know, one of the hallmarks of
24 the system we employ here in Florida is we, I say "we," the
25 Bureau of Voting Systems Certification employs people who 74
1 really know their stuff when it comes to software. And so
2 although I know that the VSTLs, the testing labs, that the
3 EAC standards are applied to for certifying things
4 nationally for EAC certification have a source code review
5 built in, Florida does its own source code review on top of
6 that.
7 A copy of that software that is reviewed goes
8 into escrow. They take hash algorithms of that software so
9 that -- I heard you questioning both Deputy Secretary Marks
10 and Mr. Benyo from Lehigh County about, you know, how often
11 does this software change or what happens when the software
12 changes, and one of the things Florida does that I think is
13 a very good protection of our system is we, the counties,
14 cannot receive software to update our firmware, our
15 hardware, our servers, without it going through that
16 Bureau of Voting Systems Certification first.
17 So even if it's just a patch that needs to be
18 applied, the vendor applies the patch to the system and
19 brings that stuff into the State. The State still does its
20 certification process on that software. It runs the hash
21 algorithm, and then they, the State, send the software to
22 me that they have approved.
23 So no vendor in Florida can ever show up
24 thumb drive in hand and say, hey, I'm here to fix your
25 voting systems, and plug it in and start up the software. 75
1 That's not going to happen in Florida. We have to get the
2 certified software from the Bureau directly, and then it
3 gets installed on our systems, and I think that is
4 tremendous.
5 There were a lot of anecdotal reports about, you
6 know, vendors in the field in various States of concern
7 that, you know, some guy was over there plugging thumb
8 drives in and doing whatever to the system. That can't
9 happen in Florida because we don't have the system
10 structured that way. And I think that's one of the very
11 positive things that having our own statewide Bureau of
12 Voting Systems Certification affords us.
13 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: Well, thank you
14 so much, and thank you for your work.
15 Thanks.
16 MR. LUX: Thank you.
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: That was an excellent
18 question, an excellent answer.
19 Representative Diamond.
20 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
21 Thank you, Mr. Lux, for joining us today.
22 You had already talked about precinct counting
23 systems and central count subsystems, and I did notice that
24 Florida standards indicate that precinct count systems
25 should have a useful life of 8 years and a central count 76
1 subsystem should have a useful life of 12 years. I was
2 just curious as to why that difference exists in the shelf
3 lives, and how was it determined that those were
4 appropriate shelf lives for those pieces of equipment?
5 MR. LUX: That is my favorite question of the
6 advanced questions I was provided. And I actually called
7 my friend in the Bureau of Voting Systems Certification and
8 said, hey, an interesting question here, just to get their
9 take on it, and they had forgotten that it was even still
10 in Florida standards. And so it predates both her and I,
11 I suppose, going into the standard.
12 Our best guess is that, number one, the cost
13 factor involved. The precinct tabulators tend to run
14 between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the system that
15 you're getting and the configurations that you want,
16 whereas the central scanners, certainly I'm an ES&S
17 customer here in Florida, and, you know, my central count
18 scanner, the DS850, which is a fabulous machine, but it
19 costs, you know, it's a six-figure cost for that one
20 machine, so much so that when we contracted for ours, we
21 cut our request back from two of those machines to a single
22 one just to keep it affordable for our county.
23 Add to that the fact that the precinct machines
24 themselves get a lot more wear and tear. So the central
25 count machines are sitting in, you know, a nice 77
1 air-conditioned room and they don't move around a lot.
2 Those precinct tabulators are getting rolled on and off
3 delivery trucks and bounced around, up and down roads, and
4 hauled off those delivery trucks and, you know, rolled into
5 precincts. And, you know, do they always stay on all four
6 wheels? No, they sometimes fall over or fall off things.
7 So they really do go through a lot more wear and tear and
8 get beat up a lot more. And so I would anticipate that
9 that is where there's probably some thought process along
10 those lines that led them to make those recommendations.
11 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: All right. Thank you,
12 Mr. Chairman.
13 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative
14 Wheeland.
15 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Thank you,
16 Mr. Chairman.
17 And keep sending that warm weather north. We're
18 enjoying it. It has been a rough winter here.
19 MR. LUX: Well, and if I could interrupt you
20 about the weather since you brought it up, I live in that
21 magic part of Florida that somehow in the winter always
22 records the lowest temperature and in the summer somehow
23 always records the highest temperature. And I still have
24 an ice scraper in my truck that I still use in the late
25 weeks of December and the early weeks of January. So for 78
1 at least 5 or 6 weeks out of the year, I still have to keep
2 an ice scraper handy.
3 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Well, that's fine. You
4 keep the cold, send the warm.
5 You know, you were talking about voting equipment
6 getting delivered, possibly falling over. How often does
7 Florida test its systems, its machines, to ensure proper
8 function, and are the examinations done pre- and
9 post-election? If you could explain, expound on that.
10 MR. LUX: Sure.
11 So we have, of course -- Mr. Benyo from Lehigh
12 County mentioned, you know, and went into very good detail
13 on what we would call our logic and accuracy testing. And
14 so our equipment goes through logic and accuracy testing
15 before each and every election. And that, of course, is
16 also a functionality check. So all of the functions that
17 the machine should perform should be part of that, should
18 be part of that logic and accuracy test.
19 So if you are going to modem transmit your
20 results when you are doing that public test, you should be
21 modeming those results to make sure that everything works
22 the way it's supposed to.
23 But, you know, there are also functionality
24 checks, and in my case, you know, I have a good warehouse
25 foreman who has been with me for years and years, and so we 79
1 do run a functionality check on the equipment.
2 Now, as to the Bureau's involvement with system
3 tests, so I mentioned that that software that they do the
4 code, the source code review on is put in escrow, so that
5 if there is ever an abnormality or a misbehavior of an
6 election system in Florida, we can actually, you know, lock
7 that up and the State can send their investigative team in
8 and they can run the hash algorithms and they can make sure
9 that the software hasn't been changed and, you know, try to
10 get to the root problem of why that happened.
11 And I have been, again, I mentioned I was loaned
12 frequently to the Bureau of Voting Systems Certification.
13 There's a very public issue with, I want to say it was some
14 Sequoia equipment in Pinellas County years and years ago,
15 and I was part of the team that got sent in there to try
16 and unscramble what had happened with them on election
17 night. Basically, their system just stopped allowing them
18 to upload results into the system. So I was part of the
19 team that went in and did some of that forensic testing to
20 try and make sure---
21 So the State, whenever there are abnormalities or
22 things that misbehave, we'll come in and do those tests
23 and, you know, actually verify software, firmware, all of
24 that stuff, to make sure that it all is up to scratch and
25 that it hasn't been altered in any way, shape, or form. 80
1 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: So that would be the
2 post-election inspection? It would only be done if there's
3 an issue?
4 MR. LUX: Exactly.
5 Now, like I said, you know, every county has its
6 own standard for, you know, what it does for post-election
7 testing, but we all follow a similar framework and
8 structure to make sure that everything, you know, is
9 working shipshape.
10 Now, in my case, again, you know, our law allows
11 you to only test a certain percentage of your voting
12 equipment. We never send anything to the field from back
13 in my days when I was the IT person. I'm a paranoid old
14 Army guy. You know, I want to make sure everything works a
15 hundred percent before it goes to the field, and we still
16 make sure that that happens today.
17 So even in jurisdictions that don't publicly test
18 a hundred percent of the equipment that's going to be used
19 and uses the percentages that the law allows, we'll still
20 be doing functionality testing both before and after the
21 election to make sure that everything is working properly.
22 And then most of us have, you know, also a
23 maintenance contract, and so, you know, the maintenance
24 teams will come in from the vendor under our direct
25 supervision. I don't allow vendors to work on equipment 81
1 without one of my people standing over them. And we make
2 sure that, you know, they are, you know, that all of the
3 preventive maintenance checks and services that they do on
4 the equipment is done under our direct supervision.
5 REPRESENTATIVE WHEELAND: Thank you very much for
6 that answer.
7 MR. LUX: Mm-hmm.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Representative Diamond.
9 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Thank you so much,
10 Mr. Chairman.
11 I want to, in a previous panel we talked about,
12 you know, polling locations here in Pennsylvania
13 experiencing mechanical problems -- machine jams,
14 malfunctions, that sort of thing. Does Florida have a
15 standardized process for troubleshooting and fixing those
16 problems when they occur? Is there a difference between,
17 you know, when you do it centrally, when you're counting
18 centrally, or when you're doing it at the precinct level?
19 You know, can you just summarize what that kind of process
20 is? You know, is there a policy, you know, that you
21 follow?
22 MR. LUX: Yeah.
23 So Florida does have a polling place procedure
24 manual that is applicable statewide. It is part of -- it
25 is created and edited through an administrative rule 82
1 process, and here in Florida, those administrative rules
2 have the same force of law. So whatever is in the poll
3 worker manual is, you know, what we are supposed to follow.
4 But because the poll worker manual has to be
5 generic at the 30,000-foot level, it's not going to drill
6 down into the "how do you unjam a ballot from machine X
7 versus machine Y." And so it basically just says that you
8 follow the guidance that is provided by your system vendor.
9 And so when you first implement a new system -
10 and the system I am currently using we implemented going
11 late in 2015 going into the 2016 election cycle, and, you
12 know, part of that is a class we affectionately refer to as
13 "care and feeding" of the voting system, where they teach
14 you how to go through all of that. And then you have to
15 apply those processes and procedures that the vendors give
16 you to then conform to your State laws as well.
17 So, you know, my policy, my poll workers' policy,
18 is we never, ever, ever touch a voter's ballot if we can
19 help it. Now, when your ballot gets jammed in the machine
20 and you have got to open the front of it with the keys that
21 only the clerk of the polling place has and pull the
22 machine forward and get that ballot out of the back of the
23 machine before it falls in because maybe it hasn't been
24 counted, certainly you can't let the voter do that, you
25 know, so you have got to have, you know, trained personnel. 83
1 So we actually train our clerks and assistant
2 clerks who are, some people call them poll judges, whoever
3 is in charge of the polling place and their assistant,
4 directly on how to clear those jams. We have training
5 videos that follow the guidance from the vendor as well as
6 our blend of, you know, what we have to do with the law so
7 that they can have ready access to those videos and watch
8 them as many times as they need to to refresh themselves.
9 And then as Mr. Benyo said earlier, we also have
10 roving teams of troubleshooters that are assigned to zones
11 throughout the election day, and that's their only job is
12 to drive around, you know, between 5 or 6 or 8 or
13 10 precincts, depending on the location, and just pop their
14 heads in and see if anything is going wrong. And, you
15 know, if there's a problem, they can usually respond within
16 about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the locations.
17 I have a very rural county in the north end and a
18 very compact county on the south end divided by a big swath
19 of Federal property called Eglin Air Force Base, so I
20 always have to have teams of troubleshooters in the south
21 end and teams of troubleshooters in the north end. The
22 ones in the north end are a little spread out and have a
23 little bit more distance to cover to get there.
24 But everybody employs a similar strategy. I know
25 in some of the large counties, like Broward, for example, 84
1 they even use their emergency operations center, and they
2 have all of their troubleshooters, all of their precinct
3 polling places, up on the big map in their emergency
4 operations center, keeping track of who is where so that
5 they know who is closest to send when they have problems.
6 So there's a lot of different layers to it here.
7 I can tell you, though, that one of the things we
8 do here following each election is we are all required to
9 file what they call a Conduct of Election Report, and that
10 Conduct of Election Report includes information and details
11 about any equipment failures that we experienced so that
12 the State can review those, and that's part of how the
13 State knows, you know, do we need to go look at these
14 people's machines and ask them, you know, to not, you know,
15 erase the programming and to hold on to it until we can get
16 there kind of stuff.
17 But that Conduct of Election Report, you know,
18 you have to report how many machines you put in the field,
19 how many machines had problems, how many problems couldn't
20 be resolved by troubleshooters, how many machines were
21 replaced with spare machines, et cetera. All of that stuff
22 is part of that Conduct of Election Report that we file at
23 the end of each and every statewide election.
24 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: All right. And then one
25 more question, Mr. Chairman, and we have been asking this 85
1 regularly of our testifiers.
2 You know, there's a ton of preparation and
3 time-consuming efforts involved for counties when it comes
4 to machine operation in every State, whether it's
5 pre-election, election day, or after the polls close. And
6 in 2020, you know, you, just like everyone else, faced the
7 added difficulty of every stage of handling this work
8 during a global pandemic.
9 So, I mean, besides just saying good job and
10 thanks for getting it done, you know, for the people of
11 Florida, I mean, how did you face this major and unexpected
12 challenge and crisis, and did that actually get recorded in
13 the report that you were just talking about in your answer
14 to the previous question? Was that part of like the
15 statewide -- do you consider that kind of a stress test or
16 anything like that?
17 MR. LUX: Well, you know, and it's funny you
18 would ask, because if you talk to anyone who lives in a
19 hurricane State, they'll probably tell you that we managed
20 it the way we always manage hurricanes. Now, of course the
21 difference between, you know, hurricanes and a pandemic is
22 you normally get several days' notice of the hurricane,
23 and, you know, you can plod ahead and look at what on your
24 election schedule it's going to impact.
25 And, of course, the hardest election for us, we 86
1 had a March Presidential Preference Primary, which the
2 lockdown occurred while we were in the middle of the final
3 preparations, just a couple of weeks before that
4 Presidential Preference Primary. And so we did, we quite
5 literally shifted into hurricane mode and, okay, these
6 polling places, our nursing homes, they are no longer
7 available; you know, what's our backup plan for polling
8 places or how do we get ballots to these people? All of
9 that was part -- I mean, it was literally just like, you
10 know, shifting gears and going, oh, we're just going to
11 treat this like a hurricane.
12 Of course, we had much more prep time and much
13 more availability of PPE and things like that going into
14 the August -- we have an August primary, which, of course,
15 falls right in the middle of hurricane season, which is a
16 fabulous time to have primary elections, by the way, and of
17 course our November election, which also is still inside of
18 hurricane season. And in fact we, in my part of the State,
19 got hit by two of them, close to August and close to
20 November. Of all the bad luck draws this time around, to
21 add a hurricane on top of the pandemic as one more concern.
22 But really, you know, any election person out
23 there is a crisis manager, because you never know what
24 piece of equipment is going to break, you never know where
25 the problems are going to occur, you never know where the 87
1 lines are going to show up, and you have to be prepared to
2 spring into action with, as we like to say, you know, we
3 all have very strong coup plans for continuity of
4 operations, but we also have, you know, plan B and plan C
5 and usually down to plans D, E, and F, because things never
6 go to plan.
7 REPRESENTATIVE DIAMOND: Well, thank you so much
8 for your time, Mr. Lux, and also for your very, very
9 interesting perspective on your challenges in Florida.
10 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
12 Representative Nelson.
13 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
14 And I very much appreciate your testimony and the
15 view from Florida. I got to live down in the Tallahassee
16 area after I first got out of the Marine Corps. It's a
17 great place to live down there.
18 Earlier in your testimony you had mentioned a
19 term I hadn't heard before, and that was the "immediate
20 online ballots for overseas Service members."
21 MR. LUX: Mm-hmm.
22 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Can you touch or expand
23 on that program, how it works?
24 MR. LUX: Sure.
25 So it is a pull system instead of a push system. 88
1 So the way most voting by mail or absentee ballot systems,
2 whichever you want to call it, the way most of them work is
3 the voter requests a ballot and then you send them a ballot
4 and then they send it back. And as I have been fond, the
5 euphemism I have been fond of using is that we have been
6 doing this the same way since the 1860s. Since the
7 United States Civil War, you the voter send me a notice
8 asking me for a ballot and hope I get it. I send you a
9 ballot and hope you get it. You vote your ballot and send
10 it back to me and hope that I get it in time to count it.
11 And we have been doing this the same way since the 1860s.
12 So our hardest to reach demographic, and I
13 mentioned that, you know, my county is divided by Eglin Air
14 Force Base, but it isn't just Eglin Air Force Base. We are
15 a big rectangle. My northern border is Alabama, my
16 southern border is the Gulf of Mexico, and in addition to
17 the largest Air Force Base in the world -- it actually
18 spans over into the neighboring counties -- I also have the
19 Army 7th Special Forces Group. The Air Force Special
20 Operations Command is here. The Navy has an explosive
21 ordnance disposal school here. We have an F-35 program
22 that has, you know, multinational and multi-Service
23 variants for both the Army, Navy -- or I'm sorry, for the
24 Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. We have a Coast Guard
25 Station here. So all five Service branches are here, and 89
1 nearly one-fifth of my voting population are military or
2 military families. So serving those voters has always been
3 a priority.
4 So what this system does is we upload from our
5 voter registration system into the Democracy Live
6 LiveBallot system a database of who should be eligible, and
7 what I encourage the users to upload is everybody that
8 could be eligible to use the system. Logging in to the
9 system there is a disclaimer that says that logging in to
10 the system constitutes a request for an absentee ballot;
11 therefore, we are getting the request by them logging in to
12 use the system. And they can log in and get access to
13 their ballot as soon as we have the files uploaded and
14 available, and they can print them out and send them back.
15 The problem in Florida is we still require that they come
16 back either by mail, or if you are overseas, you are still
17 allowed to fax it back. You know, show of hands from all
18 your Representatives who still has a fax machine or who can
19 still find a fax machine, and I suspect that answer is
20 probably virtually nobody.
21 So electronic return is still not part of that
22 process, but it is a pull system. Probably my favorite
23 success story was I had a voter who contacted me. I was at
24 a Friday night football game. My daughter is in the
25 marching band. And an Air Force, a young Airman contacted 90
1 me and said she was having trouble getting her ballot, and
2 I was able to direct her to the site. She was able to log
3 in, and by the time I got to my office Saturday morning,
4 her ballot was already sitting on my fax machine, and it
5 was just as simple as pointing her to the site that was all
6 ready for her to log in to. And so she was able to vote
7 from Kazakhstan without any hassle or additional contact
8 with my office other than the initial contact.
9 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: And that Democracy Live,
10 you know, with the continual evolution of Florida's
11 program, do you foresee e-return being considered? Would
12 that be able to maintain security and, you know, close that
13 loop faster for Service members?
14 MR. LUX: So I have been -- that is the drum I
15 have been beating for over a decade since I have been in
16 office, and I beat that drum alongside my predecessor for
17 the 10 years I worked for her before I became supervisor.
18 And if you know David Beirne at the Federal
19 Voting Assistance Program, who is the Director, just
20 mention my name and you will get a smile from him, because
21 he knows I hassle him about military ballot return more
22 than anybody else on the planet. Every conference we're
23 ever at together, whenever it's time for questions,
24 David Beirne always knows my hand is going to go up, he
25 always knows what my question is going to be, and he very 91
1 artfully always dodges answering.
2 But, you know, we are at that tipping point in
3 the technology where we can no longer -- you know, most of
4 us know that faxes are e-faxes, so once we all are aware
5 that most faxes are no longer coming from real fax
6 machines, it's time to start talking about the security
7 side and how we can best serve those voters, whether we use
8 a public key/private key system, whether we, you know, use
9 some sort of encrypted phone app, something that they can
10 use their CAC cards for. You know, there's a lot of
11 different ways to skin this. We have just got to, you
12 know, decide that it's a priority.
13 And as I mentioned to somebody earlier today, the
14 OmniBallot system, which was deployed mainly to try and
15 help solve this problem for in-county voters with
16 disabilities, I think -- and, you know, their follow-up to
17 them deploying the OmniBallot system in a number of
18 locations was, how are these people going to be able to
19 return their ballots, and the answer was, sorry, you got to
20 print it out and mail it in. So I think we are going to
21 get a little boost of help from the disability community
22 here in Florida with the OmniBallot system, which is also a
23 Dem Live product, and advance that conversation to be able
24 to better serve military in the near future.
25 REPRESENTATIVE NELSON: Thank you. 92
1 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
2 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
3 I want to go back to the Basic Education
4 Circular. You had mentioned your kind of guidance from
5 Tallahassee. Your State Department comes from an
6 administrative process. Can you just give us a brief how
7 that operates?
8 Here in this State, we get guidance directly from
9 the Secretary. Does that still occur, or is everything
10 kind of preset well in advance through that administrative
11 process?
12 MR. LUX: So the lion's share of it is done
13 through the administrative process, but where we have very
14 loud, very public conversations about certain aspects, we
15 will sometimes get extra guidance documents from the
16 Secretary that have not been through that rule process.
17 And we also, like a lot of folks, the Secretary
18 of State and the attorneys who work for her are the only
19 ones who are authorized to issue legal opinions to our
20 statutes, and those, of course, also have a binding effect
21 on the people who request those opinions. And so a lot of,
22 a lot of the noise in Florida, for example, this last year
23 around the drop boxes, it said the drop boxes had to be
24 monitored, and that's all the law said. That's pretty
25 vague. There was no administrative rule that covered the 93
1 operation of those drop boxes, and so you had counties
2 that said, well, I have got 24/7 surveillance cameras on my
3 drop boxes that's monitoring my drop box. You had other
4 counties that said, I don't put cameras on my drop boxes,
5 I put a human being beside my drop box, and when that
6 human being is not there, the drop box is, you know, pulled
7 inside and it's not available.
8 So the Secretary issued guidance and said in her
9 opinion, drop box monitoring meant you had to have a person
10 there, not a 24-hour camera. We will certainly see some
11 legislation to that effect this time around. But just as
12 an example, you know, the law gives her authority to make
13 rules in certain aspects in administration, so the law is a
14 high-level thought. A little further down, when you get
15 down to the nuts and bolts and into the weeds, that's where
16 the administrative rule process comes in.
17 So, for example, our voter registration form in
18 Florida is created by administrative rule, so the State
19 proposes changes to that rule. When we need to change the
20 form, all of the interested parties come in to the public
21 hearings for the administrative rule and we hash it out and
22 we talk about it and we argue back and forth about it, and
23 then the State rolls out its final version and says, here's
24 your new voter registration form, and that's the one that
25 you use now. 94
1 So a lot of the stuff that we do, a lot of the
2 forms that get created, a lot of the other guidance
3 documents like the Voting System Guidelines, the Polling
4 Place Procedures Manual, the security procedures that we
5 all file with the State, all of those things are maintained
6 and managed through the administrative rule process.
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Gotcha.
8 And one final giveaway. Kind of looking at where
9 Florida came from in 2000 to 2020, I think everybody thinks
10 or everybody has agreed that Florida has had a flawless
11 election in 2020. It took a long time to get there. It's
12 not like there was just all one hash of legislation. It's
13 a constant management of the system, correct?
14 The General Assembly in Tallahassee has done
15 multiple election reforms over 20 years, and my
16 understanding, part of that was engaging voter registration
17 directors or elections directors in the counties moving
18 forward, correct?
19 MR. LUX: So we have, you know, it really is an
20 evolution of a lot of things, and there was a lot of
21 growing pains for those of us who grew through all of it to
22 come out on the other end here.
23 But standardizing voting technology was one of
24 the earliest things, right? Everybody votes on a paper
25 ballot. We implemented touchscreens briefly, and then 95
1 quickly unimplemented touchscreens, except for voters with
2 disabilities. Now all of our disability equipment is able
3 to produce a paper, a voter-verified paper trail, or in the
4 case of some of ours, an actual ballot itself like you saw
5 in some of the videos. Requiring uniform ballot design,
6 which, again, is done by administrative rule. Requirements
7 for poll worker training that I mentioned.
8 You know, our poll workers go through required
9 amounts of training, 3 hours for an experienced poll worker
10 before each and every election, 5 hours for a brand-new
11 poll worker before they work their first election.
12 We standardized those polling place procedures,
13 again, by administrative rule.
14 We put into place -- and this was very important.
15 The difference between the success of 2000 and the success
16 of 2018 when I mentioned we had that triple statewide
17 recount was the implementation of mandatory deadlines for
18 recounts. So no one could drag their feet. You either
19 meet the deadline or you report your last-known good
20 results, and that, you know, we were able to get through
21 2018 with 66 to 67 counties meeting all of the deadlines in
22 the statute for that recount in 2018.
23 And then mandatory deadlines for certifying the
24 election. Nothing gets drug out. Although we don't always
25 get, you know, everything out right away on election night, 96
1 usually before we go home or the day after the election,
2 everything is accounted for, you know.
3 And then, you know, add all of the security stuff
4 to that, you know, the different MS and EII; our joint
5 election security initiative where they sent actual
6 security people to each of the 67 counties to make sure our
7 networks were secure before the election cycle started;
8 doing our own tabletop exercises. All of those things
9 contributed greatly to us running a very safe and secure
10 election, even in the midst of a pandemic.
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Great. Thank you.
12 If we don't have any questions--
13 We greatly appreciate your time. We appreciate,
14 obviously, your form of service and your insight, not only
15 as an IT professional but also as an elections director
16 from a State who had a seemingly flawless election this
17 last time around. So we greatly, greatly appreciate your
18 insight.
19 And again, to Representative Wheeland's point, we
20 appreciate all the warm weather. As much as you possibly
21 can send up, we would greatly appreciate it.
22 MR. LUX: Yeah.
23 I grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio, so
24 I know all about how miserable that nasty weather can be up
25 there, and I don't miss it at all. 97
1 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you again. Take
2 care, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
3 MR. LUX: Thank you for your time.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: That is all of our
5 panels for this hearing.
6 Any closing remarks?
7 MINORITY ACTING CHAIR KENYATTA: No. Listen,
8 thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the thoughtful
9 questions today.
10 And as I said in the beginning, if folks paid
11 attention to this, they should leave with a lot of
12 confidence that Pennsylvania is doing this the right way
13 and that their vote is safely recorded on these machines
14 and should feel confident about our elections moving
15 forward. So thank you.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN GROVE: Thank you.
17 I would like to thank all the testifiers for
18 their time today. I would like to thank the Members for
19 their patience and their questions as well.
20 While there has been much discussion about voting
21 machines in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, I
22 hope the general public has a better understanding of how
23 election machines are certified and operated in this
24 Commonwealth.
25 Some salient points I think we should all take 98
1 away:
2 Our voting machines are barred from being
3 connected to the Internet, thus they cannot be hacked.
4 Voting machines are required to be an air-gapped
5 system, which means they are not connected to the Internet
6 or any other devices. It's a closed network system.
7 Central automatic tabulation equipment must be
8 publicly tested to ensure they provide accurate counts.
9 Public machines, voting machines, are required to
10 provide audible logs or a date and time-stamped permanent
11 record for system events and audit data.
12 And voting machines are required to have
13 penetration tests to attempt to bypass or break the
14 security of a system or a device to ensure that they work
15 effectively moving forward.
16 These are just some of the standards election
17 machines are required to meet. I will be posting all the
18 documents that this Committee has reviewed going into this
19 Committee on my website so the general public can look at
20 all those security standards.
21 Of note, I have sent them to my best friend who
22 worked for the NSA, still works for the NSA, and he's not
23 the guy that goes and protects security, he's the guy that
24 goes and infiltrates security. He was very impressed with
25 the system standards that we have, particularly the 99
1 penetration tests within that data, so that gives me some
2 good confidence.
3 The certification of voting equipment and their
4 operation are a critical component in election integrity.
5 Getting this policy correct is critically important moving
6 forward. The testimony today will provide the backbone of
7 certification and operation of voting equipment policy for
8 this Committee moving forward.
9 I look forward to continuing the bipartisan
10 election oversight hearings and partnering with
11 stakeholders like our counties and the Department of State
12 and, of course, our county governments.
13 With that, this hearing is adjourned.
14
15 (At 4:03 p.m., the public hearing adjourned.) 100
1 I hereby certify that the foregoing proceedings
2 are a true and accurate transcription produced from audio
3 on the said proceedings and that this is a correct
4 transcript of the same.
5
6
7
8 Debra B. Miller
9 Transcriptionist