of a very close election and it may be that national process for the audit of federal elections would be worthwhile i would like to call on the ranking member mr mccarthy for his opening remarks and also invite the other specified in the rules to make sure that everything is shared as promptly as possible between the sides i would like now to call upon our panel and we have mr ion is election in florida audit for any election again as i've mentioned are not required the closest thing we have had in florida election law to an audit was our  resulted in an official margin of victory of less than one half of one one thousand and fifty five that general election was administered in franklin county using direct recording electronic voting machines with verified paper audit vote having long been determined in ohio for punch cards and optically paper ballots it seemed wrong to me at the time and wrong now that we would introduce a new voter intent question that could cause the voters probably cast and accurately recorded vote to bear county we don't have a paper trail so if you want to conduct an audit you're going to have to do it absent that test that you have already described so well and in franklin county we had paperless  that's the point to establish some measure of independence with regard to waiting time i would say that's the subject of other legislation that i've introduced and that others have introduced worthy of consideration director and had been appointed as a member of the three person election review panel doug lewis is executive director of the national association of election officials he has been the education program training program for elections and registration officials which awards the certified election registration administrator certificate upon completion of the program along with other honors an activity lawrence norden is the counsel for the brennan center for justice a think tank and public law in new york university school of law he works in the areas of voting technology voting rights and government accountability and is the lead author of several books relating to the machine and voting system he is a graduate the university of chicago and the n y u school of law ca patrick is a federal compliance officer of maricopa county arizona elections department and is responsible for the recent expansion of the maricopa county elections voters assistance and ward worker enhancement training program which won the national association of counties award in two thousand and five and two thousand and six and of ensuring compliance with the voting rights act the americans with disability act and to collaborate with community organizations and voter empowerment groups and finally pam was smith who is the president of verified voter and verified voting dot record has made legislative recommendations and reports on accessibility inaudibility issues for voting systems and other research and she has been a small business and marketing consultant for many a subject that probably would strike most people as rather boring but in fact critical if we are going to secure our elections improve them and restore full public confidence in electoral system my name is lawrence norden and for eighteen months i was chair of the brennan center taskforce on voting systems security task force included the nation's leading computer scientists and security professionals including scientists from the national institute of standards and technology and the former chief security officer of microsoft and former cybersecurity president george w bush what the task force found i think at this point is a consensus among security experts and computer scientists who have looked at electronic voting machines and that is that there are serious security and reliability vulnerabilities in these machines the good news is that there is also substantial consensus on how to address our abilities and one of the most important it is agreed that we can do is to use post election audit to compare of voter verified independent record to the electronic tally and fortunately this is already happening in many states as the chair mentioned in the last election twenty percent of shortly many recommendations in my written testimony i'm going to just briefly mention a few of them the first is that it's crucial that the selection process for audit be random and transparent hearing for for the legislation eight eleven i know there's been a lot of talk about security and accessibility of equipment and openness of software and any number of other things but the heart of the legislation is the audit there that are really undermining our our belief in our ability to govern ourselves and as i often say to middle school students and others  self government works only if you believe it does and i think there is a there is a lot that has shaken that that we need to address and at the heart of the day after the polls close would would satisfy your definition or a reasonable person's definition of an independent audit