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Rep. Paul Fielder of Thompson Falls attended a cyber symposium last week that focused on the 2020 presidential election. Fielder returned from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Sunday evening. He was one of six legislators from Montana who attended the symposium.

Fielder said there was a lot of information and evidence presented at the symposium, which was sponsored by Mike Lindell, founder of the My Pillow company. Speakers included mathematicians and experts in cyber security. "They looked into the forensic auditing of the voting machines and issues they found in the last election and presented it to legislators from around the country," Fielder stated. From there, the legislative group met to come up with a plan. Fielder said he spoke directly with some of the speakers and said the group wanted tools and specific information they could take back and use in their respective states.

"I was trying to learn as much as I could," Fielder said after he returned from South Dakota. "Electronic voting machines are a big problem because they can be hacked into. Election results can be changed through computer programming. Anybody can hack into that software." He noted that they watched a demonstration at the symposium in which two people hacked into computer systems within five minutes.

Fielder said that they heard experts speak on how computer software companies periodically say they are going to update the software. "That's when they can erase the bad stuff they put on the computer," he noted.

The symposium, Fielder said, focused mostly on the 2020 presidential election, "but I'm always concerned about the down ticket races."

He said there are safeguards that need to be put in place. "A lot of people have been concerned about the election." Fielder is in his fourth term as an election judge in Sanders County. He said legislators will be contacting their respective county commissioners and asking them to not update the software they have on their voting machines. Fielder noted it's federal law that voting records have to be kept for 22 months after an election, including ballots and software. "What I stress is that preferably we have a forensic audit immediately before and after the ballot counting to make sure that nothing has changed during the ballot counting process." He added that a number of states during the 2020 election stopped ballot counting during the evening.

"We've talked with the secretary of state so that we can start putting some safeguards on our electronic voting systems," said Fielder, who said there are questions in the state, but he did not know of any specific issues in Sanders County. "There are things we want to look at."

Sanders County Election Administrator Nichol Scribner said that she is confident in how things are going in the county office and the security in place. "I feel that voter records are as safe as they can be," she noted. "At the state level, we have Montana National Guard and Homeland Security in charge of security." She said that voting machines are never hooked up to the internett and that in Sanders County, the machines are tested more than is required by law.

Scribner added that the process in the county is transparent. "Everything we do is open to the public." The county elections staff test software once it has been updated and uploaded prior to the election. Then, within 14 days of each election, another audit is completed in which an independent audit team hand counts selected precincts and races to verify it matches the report that is printed at the end of election ballot counting. Scribner said the allowable margin of error is 5%, but the county's margin of error has always been zero since she has been in the position.

Fielder added that the symposium and travel was not a reimbursed event and that every legislator paid for his or her trip themself.