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giving your front row seat to mock -- a front row seat to democracy. >> this is nick penniman with issue one. he is the founder and sierra. when it comes to funding and sourcing, where does it come from? guest: mostly foundations. the packard foundation. large american foundations. some individual donors, republicans and democrats. a variety of people are interested in improving democracy. host: election security. what got you interested in that as a group? guest: we were deeply concerned about five years ago about the incredible doubt that people started having in the outcomes of our elections. it is something i had never seen before. i am 53 years old. like you, for most of my life, we would have elections, they would go well enough and people would accept the results.

a lot of attention started getting focused on the nitty-gritty aspects of elections and conspiracy theories starting emerging that created doubt in elections and tension too. we feel that in a democracy the most basic thing we do is elections. we have to continue to not just get that right, but also instill confidence in people that it is done right. host: when you talk about election security integrity, what does that mean? guest: safe and secure elections that are administered well and have clear and definitive results for people. host: do you think as far as this coming election, what do you think is the ability to achieve that goal? guest: 100%. we have this remarkable election infrastructure in america.

we have 8000 jurisdictions in america, highly decentralized. every state has its own rules and even each precinct has its own processes. the system runs well. it runs securely. here's the problem. the problem is, number one, it is held together by duct tape. it is underfunded. we have underfunded our election infrastructure and we need to do a better job of creating first-class election infrastructure. number two, the people who do the work are under incredible stress and pressure. it is not a five day, nine to five job. it is a seven job for most of them. because of the conspiracies that have emerged, they are also under death threats. they have had threats to their families, the kind of stuff that your average election demonstrator should not have.

we have to get more funding into elections in this country. we need to create first-class election infrastructure in america. we have to respect and take care of the people who do the work. host: the recent spending package that was approved by congress, $55 million for election security, what do you think of the figure and what does that money do? guest: that's not enough at all. we worked with a lot of secretaries of state to come up with a number that they felt with the -- that they felt would be reasonable and it was $400 million. half $1 billion was what was needed for this year to improve election security. $55 million is not adequate. at some point, congress has to wake up and realize that this is their elections too. they are elected on these same ballots. what we need them to do is realize that they can play a critical role in improving this

critical infrastructure in this country. half $1 billion sounds like a lot. in the context of a $4.7 trillion annual budget, it is not a lot of money. the national budget this year is $25 million. even if it were to happen for elections, that is 1/150. it is not a lot of money in the context of our federal budget but it would mean the learn to minister our elections. host: our guest on election security, (202) 748-8001 republicans. (202) 748-8000, democrats. (202) 748-8002, independents. election workers, (202) 748-8003 is the number to call. as you see it right now, when it

comes to security, where are the deficiencies? guest: cyber is our number one control -- number one concern. we have entities who want to disrupt it. a single failure of machinery in a single precinct can create a national panic. even one successful breach could disrupt the entire process. we have election administrators around the country who have said that we need to improve our cyber but we don't have the money to do it. cyber is number one for me. number two, i will love a paper trail for every vote in america. 80% have paper trail that we should have paper trails for every vote in america. number three, especially for

those who are inclined to conspiracies, what we hear from our administrators in every precinct is that they would love to install security cameras not just in voting places but also in the warehouses where the voting equipment is kept. it is a great piece of transparency that would calm a lot of nerves. host: go back to the election from five years ago that we talked about. would you say now that it was administered fairly? where there issues about how some states administered? a lot of states were trailing because of covid at the time. guest: which is part of what germinated a lot of the conspiracy. all of a sudden, they are allowing mail-in votes to come in longer. that created paranoia which bread conspiracy theories. there were 60 law foods -- 60

lawsuits filed by the trump campaign against the outcomes of the 2020 election. all of those 60 lawsuits never even made his trial -- never even made it to trial for lack of credible evidence. a bunch of those were heard by judges who were appointed by trump himself. the only one thing that occurred in the 2020 election is that at one point the state of pennsylvania put aside some of the mail-in vote that had came late with the notion that if the vote was close enough that those votes that had been put aside would make a difference, then we would figure out a way to adjudicate them. by such a march in pennsylvania, those votes were not necessary -- by such a margin in pennsylvania among those votes were not necessary.

of the institutions that figure out how to sort through, the courts is one of our best. everything pivots on the court of law. the fact that 50 lawsuits were filed and there was enough credible lawsuits says a lot to me. host: do you think the system in terms of mail-in voting and early voting has improved? guest: absolutely. there is more voter id. 36 states now do voter id. i'd love to see more voter id. there is better cyber but there are a lot of states lagging behind. a lot of states are improving or implementing additional audits. after the voting occurs, they take a random sampling of votes. they make sure that those are comports with what the machine said they were. the additional things that haven't heard -- that have occurred have further improved our election infrastructure. host: our first call for you is

from ian from florida on the independent line. caller: good morning. i want to thank c-span for their hard work and for having me on the air. i just had one quick question. i remember when conspiracy theories used to be a fun thing to talk about with friends like sasquatch or bigfoot. not when it was a central selling point of one of our largest political parties. i am wondering why it got to this point and how it happened. guest: listen, i don't agree with your last point. i don't think it the central selling point. there are groups in this country on the right and the left who are inclined to believe in conspiracies about the government. when it comes to elections in this country, listen, the

environment in america, the information environment has been deeply radicalized by social media. we have handed everyone in the world who can own a cell phone the ability to become their own broadcaster, their own publisher. when you do that, you create a chaos of noise and also you enable people who want to believe those things the ability to find each other and connect and bolster each other and grab little pieces of information that they believe supports their conspiracy, their idea and they get fired up about it. in the world i grew up in where we had a handful of newspapers and our job was to sort fact from fiction and take opinions and print responsible opinions that were fact-checked, that

worked -- that were not defamatory -- we have radicalized the conversation in this country and we have to bring it back and center it around facts. host: new jersey, republican line. caller: hi pedro. hi mr. penniman. i would like to ask him what he thinks about what happened with georgia's presidential election and when the lights suddenly went out and all the ladies came in with suitcases. i imagine they were filled with votes for biden. i want to know what his comment on that is. guest: again, this is a piece of information that has not been verified by the election officials themselves. the little pieces of information get picked up on social media and they get spun into larger

stores and then people get it into their heads. you have an georgia brad raffensperger who is the head of elections in georgia. the next person down is also a conservative republican. both of them voted for trump. they oversee the elections in that state. there were plenty of audits done in georgia because it was such a contentious state in 2020 and none of those audits came up negative, meaning none of them came up with the notion that there was any kind of fraud. host: richard in georgia, democrats line. caller: good morning. i am a poll worker. i can tell you, i have seen how the machines work, i process them in and out and all of the votes are counted with a paper ballot as backup.

my thought is that the story of voter fraud, they need to look at places like what happened in north carolina where there was voter fraud. also the state of colorado has one of the best absentee ballot rates of counting votes legally and securely in the all of their votes were counted, 70 something million for trump. 81 million for biden. people have to realize that the machines and that other company, those machines are secure and they are not tied to a modem. host: i have no idea -- guest: i have no idea what he was talking about. i can tell you this, mail-in

ballots, there could be voter fraud. the washington post and an independent institute did a huge study of 14 million mail-in ballots in the 2020 election and concluded that maybe 372 of them could have been compromised, out of 14 million. do some people try to vote fraudulently? yes. do some people try to mail in a ballad of a family member who passed away -- the ballot of a family member who passed away? yes. out of 14 million votes, if 370 of them are fraudulent, that is not enough to swing an election and not enough to justify the conspiracy theories. by the way, thank you for being an election worker. you guys do god's work, the

everyday work of american democracy. host: when you hear artificial intelligence, what is your largest concern when it comes to elections? guest: your voters need to be really aware of this, your viewers. there is going to be a significant attempt by our adversaries to suppress and disrupt the voting in this country this year using artificial intelligence. what we expect to see, the main form in terms of a suppression, -- in terms of others suppression, will be robo calls. it will be much more sophisticated. here is what will happen. if you are a member of a methodist church in phoenix, the artificial intelligence will see that you are a member of that church and will even grab audio from the pastor of your church. it will artificially generate

the pastor's voice and you will get either a robo call or some kind of message on your facebook saying, it's pastor john. i want you to know that the state of arizona has extended voting so if you are too busy on tuesday to vote, don't bother. you can do that on wednesday and thursday. it can be that sophisticated. it is terrifying. we will see a lot of attempts to mislead people about time, place and manner of voting, through robo calls, robo text messaging, tiktok, you name it. it will be highly host: what do you base that on because what if someone at home says that is a conspiracy. ? -- a conspiracy three? guest: is a conspiracy by the russians and iranians to do

this. the agency inside the department of homeland security has heard about this. it is a conspiracy to disrupt this election and try to impute it and make it look quickly live in a thick democracy -- fake democracy. host: the chief cyber guy talked about concerns that have and how they are watching for ai use. i want to please description and get your response to it. [video clip] >> we have tried to educate the poll workers that ai is here and give them a framework of how we think these threats are going to potentially affect them and provide mitigating guidance. a lot of those end up being a mixture of educational and cybersecurity. making sure you're cyber and digital doors are locked, not

making yourself vulnerable. making sure you cannot be targeted through artificial intelligence. we don't think it is a new one, but it is going to be a little faster so we will take it from there. it is an agency part of the election landscape coming into november. host: it is a threat but none sisterly anyone, he talks about. guest: it is not a new threat, it is a threat that has been put on turbo boost by generative ai. have they been doing this on any past? of course. are they doing this better and smarter because of ai? definitely. what he mentioned is right but he did not mention the massive disinformation campaigns wants to get people to vote or to convince them that voting is compromised. host: a group this year said

developments in use of ai, officials are mitigated -- are prepared to te these effects. they are already mother with fishing -- many of the best mitigation measures for generative ai enhanced threats are cybersecurity, best practices recommended for use. -- for years. what do you think of that? guest: true, but that does not deal with the voter side of it. if you are saying deepfake videos sake you don't have to vote on tuesday because it has been extended, it doesn't deal with that. we are crating a communications hub of 20 to 30 organizations that are helping communicate to voters where, wind, and how to vote and pushing them to official sources of information.

we are deeply concerned about people misleading people how to vote. host: how do you think -- guest: i don't think we are very good at it. especially if it is audio or video. people are inclined to believe the stuff that is before them. we get it. you are flipping through facebook or whatever, you are going to be 60 messages in three minutes. one of them is don't bother voting tomorrow because you can vote wednesday and thursday. that person looks official or looks like my secretary of state or my pastor. people need to slow down, especially when it comes to where, when, and how to vote and they need to go to those sources. host: nick penniman joining us.

let's hear from melissa in iowa. caller: thank you for taking my call. please don't hang up on me. i have a couple of things to say and a question. when the lady was talking about the video, that is a video everyone has seen. that was not made up, those individuals bringing boxes out from under the table, that is something that everyone has seen. please don't disregard what she has seen and don't say she needs to ignore her eyes because her eyes told her the truth. you talk about ballot integrity, how about in connecticut in the last election? they had to redo it because there was ballot stuffing. we never had issues with voting or anything until all of this stuff gets nailed to everyone --

everybody. everybody knows election day is on one day. you vote on that day. your vote counts, you vote that day. if you have all of these votes coming in on papers from three weeks out or a month out for a week behind, nobody knows what is going on. that is too much fraud. for you to say there is no such fraud when that gentleman was a poll worker and explained their issues and you tell him he doesn't know what he is talking about, you are the issue. when you want to say we have other governments in our elections, that is because we do the same thing to them. we want to dictate who is president or prime minister of another country. host: you put a lot out for the guest. guest: what the georgia poll worker called in and said there was fraud in north carolina, all

i said was i didn't know anything about that. i was not discrediting what he does and he talked about how he believes the systems in place in georgia. number two, in terms of mail in ballots, this was a process that was pioneered by republicans at the state level years ago because they thought it would improve voter turnout, especially among older americans who have a problem getting to the polls. it has also been used by our military. there have been secured he measures put in place with mail in ballots including barcodes that track them, including signature verification, and other things that make a voting by mail is secure from voting -- form of voting. the washington post and an institute that studies the stuff

look at mail in votes and said that 370 of them were problematic. that is a very small percentage. that is what i know. >> -- host: the national council of state legislature -- it is nothing new as far as this past election was concerned. >> it has been around since the 1700s. it has been in states pioneered by republicans. host: let's hear from bob in atlanta. good morning. republican line. caller: elections are very important in this country and you need to understand that. all of this mail in stuff come here in georgia, there are plenty of shenanigans that go on. it is so ported to keep this

country from getting more and more polarized. however you try and get that soap up -- so that you have to show up to vote. i was in the military and it may be okay for military people overseas. i agree with previous callers that we need to have people to show up to vote. if you are so old or invalid that you cannot do that, that is okay with me if you don't vote. that means you may not know the issues. the election is so important that we have to find a way to make it so you don't get ballot harvesting. nobody is enforcing those laws anymore. we have a lot to society when it comes to stuff like that -- lawless satiety -- lawless society when it comes to the point that.

the only way to know the election is honest and fair is to stop this mail in >> on wednesday, homeland security secretary alejandro mayorkas is on capitol hill to testify on the president's 2025 budget request for his depament and take questions on immigration policy o the u.s. southern border. he is appearing bore both chambers of congress starting with the house at 10:00 a.m. and in the afternoon, a senate appropriations committee will hearestimony. watch coverage of both hearings on c-span3, on our free mobile ap c-span now, or online at c-span.org. an update now on the impchment of homeland security secretary alejandro mayorkas. reuters is reporting on the decision by housrepublicans to delay the transfer of impeachment articles against secretary mayorkas to