AAPD – American Association of People with Disabilities
Voter Registration advocacyblackboard DATE \@ "M/d/yyyy" 6/19/2018captioned by total recall captioning>>TED JACKSON: So thank you very much for joining us today, with the Do Network. On this slide we have two images The first one is the Do Network logo and the second one is the logo of California Foundation for Independent Living Centers. The Do Network, which is short for the Disability Organizing Network, is a network of advocates from the- Systems Change advocates from the independent living centers across the state of California and about 1,500 volunteers in our network that organize in communities for greater access wherever people with disabilities live, work, learn, shop, play, and vote. We are a program of the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers, which is a membership organization and open to all of California's independent living centers. Currently 21 centers are members of CFILC. CFILC is a disability rights organization and it also hosts other programs like Ability Tools and YO! Disabled and Proud. You can check us out on the web at or . So today's webinar is called Advocating for Increased Accessibility with Additional HAVA Funds. I'm very excited that we have some guests with us today who are coming from three different organizations. My name is Ted Jackson. I'm from CFILC and I'll be your moderator. But our presenters today are Zach Baldwin from the American Association of People with Disabilities and Rev Up, Michelle Bishop with the National Disability Rights Network, and Mark Abbot with the United States Election Assistance Commission. And with that, I'm going to hand things off to Zach to talk about the Rev Up campaign. >> Zach Baldwin: Great. Thank you so much, Ted. Can you hear me? >> Ted Jackson: We can hear you loud and clear. >> Zach Baldwin: Excellent. Well, thank you everybody for joining today's webinar. I will be brief to tell you all briefly about our Rev Up campaign and what we've been working on before we turn it over to Mark with the EAC and to Michelle. So the Rev Up campaign launched in early 2016. It is a national nonpartisan initiative that aims to increase the political power of people with disabilities while also engaging candidates and the media on disability rights issues. Rev Up is an acronym, it stands for Register! Educate! Vote! Use your Power! And our whole campaign focuses on voter registration, voter education and voter engagement. And we do this by partnering with a lot of local and state and even national disability organizations as well as other civically minded organizations. The voter registration piece is pretty straight forward, making sure people are registered to vote. The education piece addresses educating voters on the election process in their states since it varies by each state as well as where candidates stand on certain disability rights issues. And then we otherwise support our partners to be able to go and help their community to be active and participate in the upcoming election. Next slide, please. I did want to highlight National Disability Voter Registration Week which is coming up next month, July 1620. If any of you are familiar with National Voter Registration Day that happens annually in September. This is pretty similar to that. We borrowed a lot of the similar ideas and goals of that event to create our own week that was focused on the disability community. We of course encourage voter registration year round, but we wanted to have this week as a time when all of our partners around the country could really focus on doing events or activities at the same time so we can show the collective organizing power of the disability community. If you haven't already, I would encourage you to go to NDVRW, it's the link at the bottom of the screen. That's our landing page for National Disability Voter Registration Week. There you can access our 2018 toolkit which includes a guide of how to host a voter registration event as well as other ideas on events or activities that you could do in conjunction with voter registration to draw more people to come out and attend your events. The toolkit also includes a number of different samples, social media posts and graphics so that you can participate digitally if you're not able to do your own in-person event or if you wanted to do both. Next slide, please. And lastly, a few of the other Rev Up resources that we’ve released this year. I mentioned our National Disability Voter Registration Week Toolkit, we also pulled out just the social media aspect of that toolkit if you are only organizing online. We've also developed a candidate questionnaire template and this guide explains how 501C3 nonprofit organizations can engage in candidate questionnaires while still remaining nonpartisan. Essentially you just need to, if you send a questionnaire to one candidate, you have to send it to all candidates within that election. And have equal communication to everyone and then any responses that you receive would need to be published as is without any commentary. So we explained some of those rules and then include a whole long list of sample questions that you can use to create your own candidate questionnaire, whether it's for a federal level election, state level election or even locally. Our goal there is to try to help all of you have a little bit of an easier time to create your own candidate questionnaire. We also have a candidate forum guide and this draws on a lot of existing materials about how to organize a candidate forum. But we also included some commentary on some unique aspects that come in to organizing an event for people with disabilities, mainly how to make sure an event is fully accessible for everyone who participates and the guide really goes hand-in-hand with our candidate questionnaire for having some sample questions that you could ask candidates. Our newest resource just came out this Tuesday, that's our election accessibility toolkit. This document is a guide for individual advocates and organizational advocates on how they can work with election officials. It includes things like poll worker training guides, talks about polling place accessibility surveys and some other ways that you can get involved to make sure that elections are fully accessible. A part of that was a report regarding the accessibility of the 2016 election and this examined several different reports that other folks created. SelfAdvocates Becoming Empowered, the Government Accountability Office and Rutgers University to give a more holistic look at accessibility in the previous election. And our last Rev Up resource that we have planned to release is our Rev Up Issues Guide. This is a comprehensive yet concise view of looking at different issue areas, like healthcare, education, transportation, civil rights, community integration, et cetera, and identifying some of the major pieces of legislation or regulation or programs and services that need to be funded. Identifying some of those main and really important topics and trying to really explain them briefly, identify things that we are in support of or in opposition to just to provide a good primer for individuals and advocates to have with them if they're out talking to voters or talking to elected officials or even talking to the media. We're putting the final touches on that and hope to release that sometime next week. So you can find all of this information and more on our website, it's the link at the bottom of the screen, this one is REVUP and I’ll, we'll leave it there and I'll be on the line for any questions that come towards the end. >> Ted Jackson: Thank you, Zach. And just really quickly, folks, there are a couple of images on these Rev Up slides. The first one is the international accessibility logo, which is a circle with an opening towards the top and a line through it, and then on the other side is the Rev Up logo, which is a white circle and it says REV in blue and the V is a big check mark like you're checking off on a ballot. And then below it is UP with an exclamation point in red. And with that I want to thank Zach and move on to our next speaker, who is Mark Abbot with the United States Election Assistance Commission. Welcome, Mark. >> Mark Abbott: Hi, thank you, it’s good to be here. Can everyone hear me okay? >> Ted Jackson: Yeah, we can hear you, Mark.>> Michelle Bishop: Yes! >> Mark Abbot: Hello? >> Ted Jackson: Mark, we can hear you. >> Mark Abbott: Okay, great. So I’ll go from here. So the Election Assistance Commission is a bipartisan commission, federal commission. With four commissioners, two Democrat and two Republican, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. We get often grant money that's dispersed to the state election offices, it’s then often re-dispersed to the local election officials. It's called HAVA money, the first money came after the Florida election back when we had the hanging chads issue, which seems very quaint now, doesn't it? Given everything that's going on. So I just want to spend a few minutes with you today talking about the new resources that are available. I'll give just a very quick history on some of our prior funding since it's relevant to this conversation. We will talk about the new election security committee and how that relates to accessibility. And then a couple of slides on how the funds can be used specifically to support accessibility and security around elections. And of course, I'll stay at the end for any questions you may have. So, that's our topic. So just the quick history. First, there's three kinds of money under HAVA that the Election Assistance Commission is responsible for and then there was some money given to the department of HHS to do voting accessibility, which was like ramps and other kind of physical things you can do to make the polling places accessible. We didn't have anything to do directly with those funds. What we were able to do was improve the administration of elections with grant money, the first money came in 2003 and it was $325 million. And then along with that came some money to replace voting equipment. If you remember the punch cards, the lever voting machines, they replaced those. With this whole series of different equipment which now needs to be replaced again. And so, and with those, that was another $325 million back also in the early 2000s. And then we had something called Requirements Payments. These were payments that states received to help them meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act, which was passed after the Florida election, HAVA as it were. In particular there were sections 301 dealing with accessibility and section 251, which is all the requirements found in Title III of HAVA that put in new responsibilities on the states to make elections be administered differently or behave differently. So that was $2.8 billion, it was a lot of money. Most of that money is now spent. So Congress has, is interested because of the security issues because of the ageing equipment issues because of the challenges we saw in the last election with getting more money out there. So in fact, they did that. So, in 2018 in the Omnibus Appropriation, the Election Assistance Commission was given $380 million to help out with license security, and in particular was to make improvements to the Administration on Elections, including to enhance technology and make elections security improvements as authorized under section 101 of HAVA. So Congress clearly had in mind and they told us in the bill notes that they want to see improvements to security for elections but they also gave us this money under section 101 of HAVA, which is the most flexible section in the statute. That section allows for all manner of improvements to election administration and processes from equipment to training to fiscal accessibility. All are allowable under this grant. So they gave $380 million which has, a fair lot of discretion as to how the money is spent. I’ll tell you where the status is of that money right now. So, let me just, in March 22 is when the President signed the bill authorizing the appropriation, on April 17 we issued awards for that money to every state election office. Those awards, called the NGA, Notice of Grant Awards, had a couple of conditions on it. They were allowed to ask for their money right away in a letter, the letter had to tell us what their process was going to be, putting together a budget and narrative on how they proposed to spend this money. That budget and narrative is due to the EAC in July, July 16th. So states are busy sending their letters to us right now since they've actually put together the plans already, and mostly they're telling us what their process is going to be for figuring out how to spend that money. And I think that those processes are different in all 55 states and territories that received a grant from us. And that's where you all can plug in. Our website has these letters posted. And from there you can get a sense of what the states are thinking about what to do with the money, but also more importantly who they're going to talk to and what steps they're going to take to make sure they have good input on the formation of their budget. And narrative for what they want to do with the funds. So that deadline is July 16th, it's a big deadline. But it's also important to remember that it’s just the first deadline. They have five years to spend this money, much of this money is going to be sub-granted down to the county and local level. So you have the chance to interact at that level with officials to figure out the best use of that money for purposes that you think are important. And the plans can be changed. This is flexible money and the EAC is being incredibly flexible in how we administer it. They can give us the budget categories now, but in three months or six months or in a year after this election in November, they can change those categories and priorities depending on what they see the needs are. So it's important to understand that while this is a very rushed process because we're trying to get the money in their hands and have some of it spent on security issues prior to the 2018 election, there is quite a bit of flexibility and what they can do with the money over the next five years. So I'm going to the next slide. And this is so their planning and narrative, and we've asked for information kind of in seven categories: voting equipment replacement and upgrades, election auditing, voting registration systems and management, cyber vulnerabilities, training, communications, and additional categories. And additional, that would include accessibility, but I would also argue and what we've said is that the accessibility issues span all seven categories. And all of those activities, somebody could be going out in any one of those activities related to making the election process more accessible and we would expect and would fund anything in those categories. Next slide is kind of examples of allowable costs and there’s more of this on our website. Basically, anything they spend the money on has to meet section 301 of HAVA which is the uniform non-discriminatory election technology administration requirements. So whether it's physical access to polling places, the new voting equipment, the registration process, education and communication initiatives to support a more accessible voting environment, even given the new security parameters that are being installed or training of poll workers and others for the same purposes, all of that is allowable. And those are good examples. But there are many others out there as well. So, for the next steps, and this is I think almost my last slide. When I think about next steps for this audience that’s attending this webinar, I would say learn the state's planned process for the next 60 days or next 30 days now. Really, you can plug in to this process in different points of the way but you have to learn it first and the best place to start is with that letter that they sent to the EAC. We now have 35 of those letters on our website. We have 63% of the $380 million has already been requested from those 35 entities. And it's what, $240 million, and all of them have listed to varying degrees of specificity, what they plan to in the run up to their requests which are due in July. So, I would ask the second step would be to participate in the early planning meetings. So many states are holding stakeholder engagement meetings or convening with local officials, they're having public meetings. Find out what's going on, and then obviously see if you can plug in to that, even at the state level or the local level. There will be another bite at this because a good portion of the money is not just going to be administered by the state, it's going to be given to counties often times on a formula basis. For example in Florida it's going to be the voting age population formula used to determine how much each county gets of their allotment which was $19 million. So this process will happen again at the county level over the next year and that's actually very, a much more friendly place and easier to access place in terms of getting to the decision makers at the state level. And then continue to find ways to link needs for increased voting accessibility to ongoing security issues. So, you know, your voice in the security and safety and openness of the voting process is important and I think this is a great time to plug in. And then finally like I mentioned earlier, remember that all of these plans can be amended at any time to include a greater focus on accessibility or other things that you see are missing in the plans for each of the states, that each of the states put together. So, and then my contact information is up here on the next slide and I have my office number which is 3015633956 and my mobile number is 2023271883. I'm very available to take calls and questions on this topic, it's important to me personally but I also think it's really important that HAVA is and the EAC is mindful of, you know, all of our different stakeholders and what they would like to see come out of this grant money. And also, the grant money is renewable, right? Congress could give us more money. So if we see the money being put to use and we see there's additional needs, it can't hurt to talk about that with your, you know, your representatives. So those are my quick slides and thoughts on the 2018 HAVA security grants and I'll stick around for questions at the end. Thank you. >> Ted Jackson: All right, thank you so much, Mark. That was really informative. And I think that just for myself and watching it, I saw a lot of pinpoints in places where we could be doing some advocacy with our county election officials and state election officials to make sure that some of that money gets spent on accessibility or that if it gets spent on something like a new website that we have already, and we already advocated for accessibility on the old website to make sure that the new one is going to be accessible too. So this is really great information. I do want to stop here just in case anyone has any questions before we go on to Michelle. We’ll do questions later on as well. But are there any questions right now? There's a question in the chat box about the slides being emailed out after the webinar, yes. Of course we would email them out along with the rich text outline. Any other questions? Okay, great. So we're going to go ahead and>> Can you hear me now? >> Ted Jackson: Oh, go ahead. >> Out of curiosity, if a state doesn't make the July 16 deadline, is there another deadline or can they just file it whenever they want to?>> Mark Abbott: Well, they have to make that deadline for all requested expenses. So the Notice of Grant Award is a legal contract that every state will absolutely want to think and plan with, and so you can get an extension which would keep you in compliance in and extended as long as is needed. You have five years to spend this money. Obviously we would like to see plans come together sooner rather than later but it does not have to be by the 16th if you have some reason that you needed an extension. >> Are you saying that the money can be spent within five years, but that it must be requested by the 16th? >> Mark Abbott: Or an extension requested. So we’re asking for it now, but what we need by the 16th is how you plan to spend it initially. And I can just say one, I don't want to get too far in the weeds on this, but the federal government has to obligate this money to the states by the end of our fiscal year which is September 30th. In order for me to do that, I have to have a valid grant agreement in place which means they have to meet the conditions of the award. If they can't meet that deadline, we have to extend it so that they're still in compliance with the award so I can obligate the money. They can then request the money, and draw it down from their treasury account at any time in the next five years, but you would have to spend it within five years. I hope that wasn’t too confusing.>>Jim Dixon: Thank you, Mark, this is Jim Dixon, I have a question. If the state wants to conduct beta tests of new accessible voting equipment, in other words they want to run, they want to test it in a small turnout election, they could put that in their plan and use this money to conduct the tests? >> Mark Abbott: Absolutely, yes. The what I've been coaching states to do is, you know, take care of the more simple and very important security things that they have to do to vote, you know, assure the public and do the concrete things needed, you know, secure the election. But beyond that there are some really good uses for the funds and I would say that's probably one of them, especially as we're looking at, you know, significant equipment purchases in the coming years and it would be always good to beta test before you buy. >> Jim Dixon: Thank you. >> Ted Jackson: Great questions. All right. So we're going to move on to Michelle Bishop from NVRN and we'll have time for more questions at the end. Welcome, Michelle. >> Michelle Bishop: Thanks, Ted. Can you hear me okay? >> Ted Jackson: I can hear you loud and clear. Yes>> Michelle Bishop: Great. Thank you. So my name is Michelle Bishop, and I'm the voting specialist at NDRN, the National Disability Rights Network, and we’d got some awesome P&A’s on the call, hi guys. For those of you who don't know NDRN, we're the national membership association for the P&A's, the Protection and Advocacy Network. So we do a lot of work around voting, actually under the Help America Vote Act. I was just going to talk briefly today on our call or our webinar. About this HAVA funding and the interaction between security and access and what the role might be for disability rights advocates in this process. Just some quick pointers that we thought would be helpful because Mark already gave you all some great information and next steps to go forward. So just some things to think about in doing this work. The first thing we always say around this, and I just want to reiterate it because we get this question a lot, is that these are HAVA 101 funds. So yes. The money can be used to improve accessibility. That was the main question when these funds became available. Can it be used on access, does it have to be used on security? Yes, the money can be used to improve accessibility. As Mark said, the HAVA 101 funds are very broad and that was done for a reason. Should the money be spent on security? That answer is also yes. The money should be spent on security. I want to say very clearly that that is Congress's expectation and it's necessary. We're doing a decent job of securing our elections, a lot of those, you know, those hacks that we know happened to state voter registration databases they were detected which means that systems are doing their job when someone tries to hack it's detected. But we could be doing even better. This money is necessary for security, states that aren't going out and spending it at least on fortifying their online voter registration databases should be doing that, every single state has an online, or has a digital voter registration database that’s statewide, it’s required by HAVA. The money should be spent on security. So the question when we're talking about disability rights advocates really becomes “is there room for access improvements in the budget?” Taking a look at what states want to do with those funds, how can they use just even a small percentage of those funds to help support making elections more accessible? And we're going to talk about that in a little more detail over the next couple slides. And I'll tell you exactly what we think that means. So the other thing, if you remember one other thing, I think about my comments today, it would be that we have to be very mindful of the public narrative around how these HAVA funds are going to be used. One of the first reasons why I told you why the money should be spent on security is because it is necessary. There is a need to improve our security spending when it comes to elections. The other reason is because congressional funding for elections is very hard to come by. We've been waiting years for states to get a new allocation of HAVA funds to spend on elections and funding is tight. If the public narrative around the spending of the money become that it was not spent to secure elections, that is very dangerous. If we go out and we do some really great advocacy about how elections could be more accessible and then the story in the news in the public discussion around the funding becomes that states were given money for security and they went out and spent it on disability access, they will be hardpressed to get another dime out of Congress for a very long time. And that's something that just none of us can afford. So when we're going out and we’re talking about how these dollars can and should be spent, we want to be really careful that we're being supportive of security because it's necessary but also because if we flip the story on what's happening with these dollars it could actually have some very serious consequences down the road. Another thing to think about, we want to make sure that we're really speaking the language here of the elections world. As soon as these dollars became available there was just a buzz in the disability rights community can this be used for accessibility? We've been waiting for this money for a long time too, we still need it to solve accessibility concerns, we still have inaccessible polling places. We have ageing voting technology. Some of which is, you know, was not our favorite voting technology when it was first on the scene 15 years ago anyway, right? There's still such a great need. Very quickly that conversation, so many of them that I personally sat in became about spending all the money on access versus spending the money on security. And I just want to caution that that's a bit of a false narrative. Disability rights advocates seem to be the only people who are running around calling it spending on access. Or spending on security. That's not really how security folks are talking about it, that's not how elections folks are talking about it. We want to be careful that we're listening to how our partners in the elections administration community are talking and that we're mirroring that language back so that we're having an effective conversation. I think there's a reason that nobody else is really talking about it that way. And it's because very few activities really fall in to one bucket or the other. There's not that many things that are just clear cut spending the money on access. Now if they say we're going to use it to make our least accessible polling places more accessible and we're going to put up, you know, portable ramps and temporary parking signs, okay. That's pretty clear cut access. There also aren't a ton of activities that are clear cut security. There are a few if they say we're going to contract with a cyber security firm to make our digital voter registration database more secure, that's pretty clear cut security. But a lot of the things that they're doing don't necessarily fall into one bucket or the other. Don't necessarily speak directly to one interest group or the other. A lot of what our elections administrators are saying is that I'm going to purchase new voting technology. Or I'm going to update our websites, our public facing websites, the ones that voters interact with. Those that's the world that our elections administrators are living in and what they're thinking about. And we have to be able to talk to them in that way. Because something like let's just focus on purchasing new voting machines, that's not an access thing. That's not a security thing. It's a running elections thing. How accessible it is, how secure it is depends on the decision they make about what technology they're going to purchase and how they're going to implement it. So we have to be a part of those conversations. It's not necessarily a matter of saying spend the money on access. Spend this percentage of money on access. It's a matter of saying talk to me about what you see the need for in our state around elections and let's talk about how we can leverage that to also make voting more accessible. One last thing I wanted to mention around this is monitoring security improvements as well. It's not that clearcut whether or not we're talking about access or security in terms of a lot of what our election administrators want to do. So when we are talking about security improvements, even those improvements that are really focused on security can have an impact on the accessibility. One of the really important things that Mark said today, if you caught it was that accessibility should span all seven of those categories. To which they can allocate the funds. Access is not its own category. It spans all the other activities that you can do with the dollars. Because anything that they're looking at doing could affect access. If they're looking at making changes to their website, even to make it more secure, we know once you go in and you start messing around with the code for a website, you could make it inaccessible, that still has to be checked, we have to be mindful of that. If you're going in to make changes to the website for other reasons, can you be doing work on making it accessible for voters with disabilities at the same time? Everything they're doing has to meet those, the 301 of HAVA as Mark mentioned it has to meet those accessibility standards. So disability rights advocates, we have a role to play in monitoring all the changes that could have impact on accessibility, no matter what it is that they're looking at doing. So it’s - I encourage everyone to think about this in a much more expansive context then just are we just spending the money on access? What accessibility improvements can we make? And let's think about the broad range of activities that our elections administrators may be thinking about and how access is a part of that and can be integrated in to that and how we can improve the security without hindering or possibly while enhancing the accessibility for all voters as well. We want to make sure we're speaking the same language as those that we're trying to influence. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions for the Q and A at the end. You have my information here, my name, my email address Michelle.Bishop@ and I would love to talk about it further. Ted take it away. >> Ted Jackson: Thank you Michelle. That's a really really good viewpoint following Mark's talks. So, are there folks that have questions out there? You can raise your hand by pressing a hand button, and we can call on you. If you want to speak, just put a * 6 to unmute your phone to speak or you can put your questions in the chat box. Look’s like there’s a…>> Uh hello, I have a question. >> Ted Jackson: Okay, go ahead.>> Yes, under section 101 for those states who currently have a paper vote by mail system, would these plans also cover the state switching to a secure online voting system? >> Mark Abbott: Uh, theoretically, they could do that if the secure online voting system met the standards of Title III of HAVA. >> Oh okay, thank you so much. >> Mark Abbott: So, it has to, you know, without knowing anything about the system, all voting systems must meet Title III standards. And so if it does that, then it would theoretically be eligible for funds. >> Okay. Thank you so much. >> Mark Abbott: Does that help? >> Yes. >> Ted Jackson: Great question. Are there any more questions? >> Mark Abbott: Yeah, I had my hand up, just a quick and a quick commentary. So, I do know because I've heard today from appropriators that the Senate is actually very interested in this topic of accessibility and security, and so and you know, they're addressing this for '19 in the near future, so as you have an opportunity to talk to people you know, it's not a bad time to be talking about these issues. [?Keyboard Sounds?]. >> Ted Jackson: That's great. I'm curious to know for folks who are either on the webinar system or on the phone, are there folks out there that are members of their local, or their county or their statewide voter accessibility advisory committee? And they might be already in a position to advise on some of the spending of this money? I think Russell Rawlings from Sacramento was on, and I know he is. In his local county>> Russell Rawlings: Hi, Ted, this is Russell. Yeah, Ted are you able to hear me? >> Ted Jackson: Yep, yes. >> Russell Rawlings: Okay, yeah. This is Russell in Sacramento, California. And yes, I sit on our county Voter Accessibility Advisory Commission, and this election cycle we changed to modify a vote by mail format where we had Vote Centers, and we did have an issue with accessibility at one of our Vote Centers. And ultimately the county decided to pull the Center, and our hope is that they will get it up and running before November. Would the HAVA funds be applicable to get physical access to a location that would've been a viable polling place?>> Ted Jackson: I think that question's for you, Mark. >> Mark Abbott: I get that that’s heading to me. Could you, could you kind of recap the question for me? >> Russell Rawlings: Sorry, yes. Here in Sacramento county, we moved to a modified vote-by-mail Vote Center format, and one of our Vote Centers, proposed Vote Centers had severe accessibility problems, and at the Voter Accessibility Advisory Commission we, and well externally, we put pressure on the county. And ultimately they pulled the Center which was, you know, good for access that they would be relocated to a different spot. But unfortunately, there were people in that community that lost out. >> Mark Abbott: Right.>> Russell Rawlings: We did kind of an informal commitment that the county would work toward making sure that the city that it was going to be located in would have some ability to make the access changes. So I was wondering if the HAVA funds would be available. >> Mark Abbott: Yeah, so the answer is yes with a caveat. I think we don't like if it's a ramp or if it's minor alterations to an entrance or to restrooms or to things that can be done for what I would consider like a small capital cost, then it's fine. But when we get in to massive building renovation, it's not really allowable under these grants. And so we general, working under a threshold of like funding under $10,000 is probably going to be okay. If you can get them to give you the funds. But, it's not large capital expenditures. >> Russell Rawlings: Okay. Do you know if they can be used in combination with other funds, perhaps? Like…>> Mark Abbott: Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Russell Rawlings: If there were minor changes and major changes that needed to be, uh…>> Mark Abbott: Yeah, yes. That's not an issue. That would be great. >> Russell Rawlings: Okay. Additionally, one other issue that we were having, and I know Ted that this probably is going to be of interest to you as well, the county also purchased new equipment. So we had so many changes this year. And the accessible polling device had some physical use issues where it was, you know, needed something to help anchor it. And I'm guessing that the HAVA funds would apply to help some sort of funding to help.>> Mark Abbott: Yes, absolutely. Retro-fit or modify or otherwise make more accessible current equipment is in fact an allowable cost. >> Russell Rawlings: Okay. All right. Oh, and kind of, sorry, one more question too. This is a different type of question because I participated in a coalition that was doing from GOTV and education work and it was being done in a nonpartisan way. Can the funds be used for smaller non-governmental agencies to help with making material more accessible, for example a website? >> Mark Abbott: We can make material more accessible, but it can't be around focusing on getting out the vote or doing registration drives, even if they're nonpartisan. >> Russell Rawlings: Right. But it wasn't, really. It wasn't about registration, it was just about the changes to the system.>> Mark Abbott: Yeah. So the kind of, who, what, when where, how to vote kind of informational stuff, that's encouraged and we'd like to see how the fund's going to that, it's a valid expense. >> Russell Rawlings: Great. Okay, thank you. >> Ted Jackson: Great. So, we have a question here in the, from Annie in the chat box. What security measures are states taking that could affect accessibility? So maybe some examples that you could give of where they’re doing security upgrades and there's a tie in to accessibility. >> Mark Abbott: So I can, anyone can jump in, I can do a couple off that kind of quickly that I think of. Um, well, this question is, the voter registration accessibility. So major changes to the websites to going to double authentication that might require an access to a smartphone to get in to, to authenticate your account, for example. So there's some, just some security parameters that as you fill those out, you need to be mindful of accessibility. Same goes for redoing public facing kind of websites. I think that this point that was made earlier that you would want to test them and this equipment itself. If you're changing, if your equipment, you know, most of the vendors are mindful of the fact they have to have accessible equipment available. But what is it? Has it been tested? Is it the right equipment to get? You know, being able to weigh in on those decisions before those contracts are made, that's a good thing and I think Jim mentioned the beta testing is, would be something along those lines. So that would certainly have something to do with it. Much of, and then of course, the awareness and education components of voting securely or managing your voter registration securely. It’s clearly training that could be done it, would be helpful. Mostly geared at, this would be geared towards, you know, election workers, whether the volunteers are paid or folks that worked in county government for example, you know. We know there are thousands of counties that actually don't have I.T. support and so, you know, what their systems are and who's using them and how secure they are, it's an open question. So that could have some implications there for that population. Those are off the top of my head I can think of those things. >> Ted Jackson: Thank you very much. I think we'll go ahead and wrap up, did we have one more question? >> Christine Fitzgerald: Yeah, Ted, I had a quick question, this is Christine Fitzgerald. >> Ted Jackson: Go ahead. >> Kristine Fitzgerald: Okay. So, um, I noticed other sites when they do either captchas in the image format or in the audio formats it makes it very difficult for somebody with a visual impairment to use captchas. What is the current thinking or what can be the current thinking to change that and make it more user friendly? >> Mark Abbott: That is a great question. You know, I can't answer that in the context of the elections, I'm not sure what election directors and the vendors are thinking about there. You know, of course there's audio versions of that technology that are available. The newer versions of the captcha don't require you to enter anything. They require you to unlock your secure phone. And so, you know, the system actually can tell whether or not your smartphone is locked. If your smartphone is locked and you unlock it, that validates your email and allows you to enter in to the system. So that's, that is something that typically most people can do, and that might be a way around this issue. But it's a great question and I will, if I can find out anything more about it I'd be glad to share. >> Christine Fitzgerald: And I'm sorry. Also the audio captions as well I've found that they don't always have a clear distinction between background noise versus the proper key entry that you're supposed to make. >> Mark Abbott: Mmhmm. Yeah. I think it's a fault in the actual service that's offered. Because a piece of technology that just bolts on to your website and there are more than one supplier of that technology out there. You know, so I think this is part an awareness building, in and around. If it's not working right, the I.T. people running the system really need to know that and to make that change. That’s a very low cost change. To get something that works better. >> Jim: This could be an opportunity to go back to the point that was made, very important, about talking to your senators and representatives about the importance of continually funding for voting and accessibility and specifically the needs for research and development. The technology of voting, the way we vote is constantly changing and there's a need for Congress in the next appropriation to recognize that the EAC needs funding to support the improvements of the accessibility. They've done that before and many of the improvements in the voting machines that people are seeing they're on the market now were developed with public money. There's a system developed out of the University of Florida that is very accessible, that the state of New Hampshire is using. And the state is saving $300,000 in non-presidential years by using a very accessible system. And we need research and development money so that accessibility can keep pace with all of these changes. So talk to your congressman and your senators about that. Thank you. >> Ted Jackson: Mhmm. Thanks, Jim. Thank you, all. And I love the fact that Jim came in at the end with some advocacy to talk to our decision makers and policy makers. So that's really wonderful. So, folks, we'll get the slides out to everyone as well as the rich text file outline in the next day or so. I want to thank you all for joining us today. And in a couple of weeks this webinar will be up online on the Do Network website which is . You just click on the training page. It will go directly to the training library unless we have other webinar trainings that we've announced and then you just, really go to that training page, you can see the other webinars at the top there will be a button that says training library, and you click on that. My name is Ted Jackson with the Do Network at California Foundation for Independent Living Centers. I'm the Community Organizing Consultant. And if you want to get more involved with CFILC or the Do Network, you can reach me at Ted@ or 2028541626. Thank you very much for your participation today. And we look forward to seeing all the advocates out there, advocating for security and access hand-in-hand together with your election officials. Have a good day. ................
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