[Music] to start a voting session click the home button on the menu bar you can select your preferred language by clicking on the appropriate language on the menu bar you will be presented with a login page to activate the keyboard to enter your pin code tap on the top text entry box the keyboard will show at the bottom of the screen you can now type your pin code if you make a mistake while typing your pin code tap the backspace button located at the top right corner of the keyboard you will have to confirm your pin code by entering it a second time when you are done tap the blue login button you can now select the member states you wish to vote for by tapping the empty box to the left of each state name to unselect a member state tap the same box again to remove the selection to scroll down the list tap the screen and hold then drag up or down once you are satisfied with your choices tap the blue continue button you will be presented with a confirmation page with a list of your selection to modify your selection tap the great change button to go back to the previous page you can now modify your selection once you are satisfied with your choices tap the blue continue button you will be presented with a confirmation page with a list of your selection if you are satisfied with your selection tap the blue submit this will submit your ballot and will conclude the voting process please note that if you wish to submit a blank ballot tap the blue continue button without making any selection once you have completed the voting process you may click the home button on the menu bar to return to the vote selection screen here you may view the results of the ballot when the voting is closed and you may start the next vote when opened by clicking vote now

[and I'm afraid the elections gonna be rigged I have to be honest because I think my side was rigged sometimes folks in st. Louis they start complaining that they got cheated but I've never heard of somebody playing by being cheated before the game was over President Obama responding Thursday to Donald Trump's claim that the election could be rigged while dismissing frumps concerns the President did say the federal government is ready to help local election officials if it turns out their voting machines are vulnerable to hackers with recent hacks in the Democratic Party there are worries that a cyber attack could influence voting results in November those fears were heightened by a report from the Brennan Center for Justice it shows significant hacking vulnerabilities for computerized voting machines with little being done about it joining us with more on that is Dan Ackerman senior editor at CNET dan good morning it certainly feels like this is the year of the hack it does you could almost call this the year of the hack but it's part of a longer trend line that goes back a few years and what we've seen especially is that government data and political data whether it's the OPM data breach or the DNC emails it's a valuable target so obviously the next step is the big prize would be in an election especially when people start using words like Reagan throwing that around US elections are locally run thousands of different systems varying degrees of security is that a good thing or a bad thing that that split up like that yeah the way we run elections here it's very much on the local level so every state and even cities within the state they can have different types of electronic voting machines from different manufacturers running different software different operating systems updated and patched differently if you ask any IT guy about that they're gonna say it's a nightmare yeah some of the key battleground states Florida Ohio Pennsylvania seems like they have updated their software but what is the game plan I mean why are we not updating all of this software around the nation to ensure this doesn't happen because we don't have a uniform sort of national code of what election of what voting machines need to have what they need to look like it's really up to every state individually now some of the best-case scenarios are machines where they record the vote electronically but they also simultaneously create a paper record and you get to see that at the same time so then you could take any into jool machine or group of machines and audit the results and check the paper check the results but that's not every electronic voting machine and obviously not every voting machine is an electronic one you know right now how easy is it to hack an electronic voting machine theoretically yeah you could say that there's no system anywhere that's not hackable in you know in some form go back you know decades and people used to say there was no such thing as a bank vault that a criminal could not get into with enough time and enough resources you can say the same thing here but the fact that you have this sort of a quilt pattern of different machines and different software and some of them are updated some of them are old some of them are new you creates a lot of vulnerabilities there's such an interesting irony in thinking that the paper and the pencil might be the most effective way to do it but on the other hand if we are gonna go electronic is there ever gonna be a way to really say to people there's no way this could have been hacked yeah I think you can never tell anybody that something is totally 100% security can follow best practices a lot of what we're talking about with having the simultaneous paper record of anyone had the same types of machines have reminds me a lot of companies that make connected cars can it get home stuff they've all had data breaches and hacking because these are companies that do other things but they're not primarily security companies in 2016 every company has to be a security company and that includes the guys who make voting machines right we saw a graphic there's a second ago that that there are some countries like Belgium Brazil India and Venezuela that that that are all electronic but there's still most countries actually still use a paper-and-pencil sure and a lot of these are also much smaller you know countries and they probably have a uniform machine across you know the entire country whereas here again we have this patchwork system where kind of the lowest bidder in a lot of cases makes the voting machines it's interesting too because I think there's like a psychological component to say even if it hasn't happened it could happen oh and that especially when you start muddying the waters you don't have to do anything you just have to create the impression that you could get in there and leave a mark and that just makes people feel less secure about the technology they're using to cast their votes and the results dan thank you as always thank you

So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. We stand in elections; we vote in elections; we observe elections. Our democracies rely on elections. We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. Without that mandate, they would be corrupt. Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry -- a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here. To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted. Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. The ballot boxes go to counting places. They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. So we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust a lot of procedures. And sometimes we even have to trust computers. So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines, and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better. Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. And that's the tough part. How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret? Well, the way we've come up with uses computers but doesn't depend on them. And the secret is the ballot form. And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification. So this is how you vote. You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. And you shred the candidate list. And the bit that remains, the one with your marks -- this is your encrypted vote. So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if an election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. Votes can't go missing because then you won't find yours when you look for it. But the election magic doesn't stop there. Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one. And these are elections by the people, for the people. So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections. Thank you. (Applause)

Definitely! Robust electronic voting systems combine multiple layers of security and control mechanisms that guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of the information that is generated throughout the election process. And they also provide the necessary tools to audit results and validate their legitimacy. Let’s dig a little deeper. To understand the security of well-designed electronic voting systems, it’s important to always keep in mind one word: System. Voting machines, often a subject of much contention, do not work alone. Together with consolidation servers, configuration systems, and many other elements, they form a unified whole. Good systems are designed so that their different elements validate and protect each other. And this is precisely what Smartmatic engineers have managed to achieve. Encryption is a fundamental concept in election data protection. It protects the confidentiality of the data by making it unreadable to unauthorized users. Absolutely all the information stored in the system must be encrypted. Every component of the system must have a unique digital certificate. Thanks to these certificates, the different elements of the system can know whether or not they are interacting with a legitimate element of the same system. By combining digital signatures and asymmetrical keys, the system allows authorities to validate that the applications running the platform, and the data generated throughout the election, remained unaltered. In other words, they protect data integrity and legitimacy. Security Keys play a crucial role in safeguarding election data. Each device should have a unique set of security keys to safeguard the privileged information that it stores. And certain repositories may even have key splitting. This means that the keys are split into several parts; and only when all parties involved agree to unite their unique part of the key, can the data be accessed. For added protection, voting machines should be air gapped. This basically means that they are disconnected from the outer world. Only when voting is over, do they connect for a few seconds to transmit information. All the encrypted and digitally signed data must travel through secured channels. Multiple layers of protection can be added to reinforce the security of the transmission. Throughout the election, well-designed electronic voting systems normally produce multiple copies of every data point. Distributed data storage generate rich audit trails. Authorities can always go back to review the audit trail and validate the legitimacy and integrity of the information. Voting systems should always generate a paper trail. Physical copies of votes, tallying reports and other election milestones allow everyone, even those who are careless about technology, to verify that results are legitimate. So yes. Electronic voting systems can increase election security and transparency. Contact us and we will be glad to help you protect your elections.