Tell us little bit about your own personal background and how you found your way into the role as city clerk in Montpelier?
John Odum: My own background is in electoral politics primarily, but also IT work. I’ve been a DVA and a network admin for a couple of nonprofits including the state Democratic party. I was recruited by someone to run for city clerk and thought it was a good opportunity to retire from politics. Although, of course, that was naïve. It turns out to be quite a local political position. But you know, I told myself it was retirement at the time. So, I’ve been clerk now for eight years. I’m in my third term; it’s an elected position. In that capacity, I do everything from being the election administrator to being in charge of dog licensing. It’s quite a portfolio!
What goes into the preparation process for leading up to election day? And is there anything that your municipality does that is unique?
Odum: Well, what’s coming up is of course not just the Super Tuesday Presidential Primary, but our municipal elections, which always happen the first Tuesday of March, it’s our town meeting day and the smaller communities still have traditional New England town meetings. We do not. We’re a bit larger and it’s little bit too bulky for the larger communities. So, we just run a traditional ballot. Our actual procedures have come more in line with the state lately. The secretary of state takes on a lot of ownership with the presidential primary. We print the ballots, facilitate and promote early voting and voter registration, run the actual election day, do the counts, make the reports, and make sure everything adds up at the end. We do try hard to focus on election security to the extent we can add extra safeguards, and that’s part of what’s exciting about testing this new project with SICPA.
Tell us about how the SICPA pilot came to be and what you hope to achieve?
Odum: One of the areas of election security where there is still a lot of work to do is in making sure that our voter registries are as secure as all of the other points of possible intrusion by a potential hacker. This is really important, because as you can imagine, disruptions in voter registries could cause a lot of challenges to the voting process. We saw SICPA as an organization that could help us harden those defenses. SICPA initially was an idea partner, and they have a solid reputation and an expertise in blockchain technology. There are a lot of different projects across different industries being worked on in blockchain, and in Vermont, we are trying to become a hub for blockchain technology. One of the things I really like about SICPA is the experience and the quality of professionalism and expertise, they have a little bit of a more mature approach to a technology that everyone seems to want a piece of, including how and when to apply it. And I think this is a perfect application for it.
If you were to describe for a regular voter what the pilot with SICPA will do, how would you describe it to them?
Odum: I would say the pilot is allowing us to be extra vigilant about the integrity of the voter registry and the registrations of Montpelier voters. Voter registration data is identified, finger-printed and monitored in a way that enables us in real time to look for problems, intrusions, and anything else that shouldn’t be there or that isn’t behaving the way it should. It can alert me to possible mischief which then enables me, of course, to alert the secretary of state. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s basically a 24-hour a day surveillance system of our voter registry, which is really exciting.
As you look at the 2020 election landscape, do you think our elections have become safer or less safe since 2016?
Odum: Well, that’s a really tough question. If we’re actually talking about technological security, I feel like we’re better off just because there’s more focus on it, there’s more taking it seriously top to bottom across the country. The Mueller report indicated a lot of vulnerabilities in some of the state websites that have access to voter rolls, and a lot of those vulnerabilities to intrusions have been addressed. It’s an arm’s race with this stuff. It’s an arm’s race with this stuff, so we can only get so far ahead of it. But the fact that more people are taking it seriously, the fact there is more networking and information-sharing is definitely an improvement.
What do you think is the most exciting development or innovation you’ve seen in the election security space over the last couple years as you’ve been in this role?
Odum: I think there has been a real sea change in the attitudes among local election officials and secretaries of state to self-examine our own protections and safeguards without being defensive. The responsibility for secure elections starts at the local level and that’s not a responsibility you can push off onto somebody else. That’s our responsibility. Here. Local. If something goes wrong it’s not Homeland Security’s fault. I think what you see in the last couple years, through the gradual acceptance of projects like the independent voting village at DEFCON is that attitude has changed. There’s much more of an open, collaborative, and I think honest and collaborative approach among the greater election community and they’re taking this work seriously. I think it enables a lot more technological security simply by virtue of people getting on the same page and knowing you’ve got allies out there in this important fight.