>> President Donald Trump renews his claims about threats to election security and integrity as the midterm elections approach.

In a speech last week, Trump discussed foreign interference, non-citizen voting vulnerabilities in the American election system and reiterated some widely disproven charges.

His administration recently released a trove of heavily redacted documents which Trump says prove his allegations of voter fraud.

Joining us to discuss the issue are Jacob Ron executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago and former acting principal cyber director under the Biden administration and Steven Maynard Caliendo professor of political science and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at North Central College in Naperville.

Thank you both for being here.

We So let's start with this issue of of noncitizens voting.

The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

He sent letters to the secretaries of state in Pennsylvania and Nevada, New Jersey and California.

He claims that quote, through preliminary reviews of the 4 states records, DHS found there may be as many as 278,000 noncitizens illegally on their state voter rolls.

Stephen, what's your reaction to that claim?

That mean there's there's no foundation for them.

seems like that these were brought about by some.

>> Publicly available materials up to 250,000 voters could be one voter it's a federal crime to register to vote and to add or try to cast a vote.

If you're not a U.S.

citizen, if you're eligible to vote, it's it's very rare.

Doesn't happen very often.

The fact that President Trump took to a primetime address to do this problematic.

But it's also consistent with what he's done really for 10 years in terms of sowing doubt about the security of our election system.

Yeah, I mean that that leads me right to my next question.

You despite all these, you know, these years of claims.

>> They're, you know, is there evidence of widespread non-citizen down?

certainly not.

And it wasn't prior, you know, scholarly work has shown that it's very rare.

And then when the president was in his first term, he had a task force to look into this.

They spent a lot of money and never even issued a final report because he does off that before they had a chance to do so because I didn't find anything.

The president also warned of foreign interference in American elections.

Here's some of what he had to say.

>> Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle.

The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history resulting in China is elicit acquisition of 220 million us voter files.

What's your reaction to that?

>> Well, I think there's a couple different things going on here.

One is.

Traditional espionage.

The Chinese have conducted espionage on U.S.

elections for decades as many other countries have.

That's not good.

We try and prevent any way we can.

But also generally doesn't stick to.

Change the outcome of an election.

Secondly, by most Intel estimates to date the Chinese really don't favor one political party over the other.

They generally think that both parties are kind of against and they view that getting caught trying to change an election would have worst downside for them than any upside of of getting one party or the other into the White House or Congress.

>> So, you know, if China and other countries are trying to influence the outcome, why are they trying to obtain election information?

Well, I think they're trying to tend the election information for intelligence purposes, too, to find out information on U.S.

citizens.

They're interested and elected officials, intelligence officers, cetera, cetera.

But what the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, multiple actors are doing is trying to undermine our face in our electoral process in our institutions that really under pen the citizens franchise with the government.

You know, Stephen, in 2016, you know, you heard a lot from Democrats discussing Russian interference.

You know, today, certainly the you know, the president's and some other Republicans claiming elections are vulnerable.

>> To the politics about around this issue today.

Flip in some I do know that they flip so much.

I mean, what the what the Democrats are arguing about 2016 was that the Russians were involved in in in infiltrating social media to, as Jake mentioned, cause disruption to cause us to have sort of a failing belief in our system.

>> The Democrats claim that they were trying to help Donald Trump win because they thought they would be favorable to them.

That does not necessarily evidence of that.

But but I think it was dangerous about Thursday night was the conflation of foreign involvement in elections like that foreign interference, which is is Jake was sort of suggesting, you know, they're not taking our ballots and changing them.

And so the outcomes are changing.

And so I think just throwing all this together as one big, you know, it's kind of soup and then suggesting that the elections aren't mean, I think we have to be careful about what the implications are for sort of messaging from the White House.

you know, Jake, when you look at our voting infrastructure, what are the vulnerabilities there?

There's significant actually several reports that were released after the president's speech highlight.

>> Vulnerabilities that, by the way, we've known about for nearly a decade.

But nonetheless, still need to be fixed and and I do think both parties are at fault in the sense that Democrats often jump in and say just because Trump said it was wrong and then the administration wants to double down on election interference claims been debunked.

But it seems like nobody's really getting after solving the actual problem, which is better security around our elections.

And that's both of the machines and the government systems like the voter registration databases.

And so on elections rely on.

Yeah, I know this is something you work done quite a bit.

What are some of key remedies there?

Well, there's a few pretty simple ones.

And all of them, by the way, are the cheapest Number one is hand marked paper ballots because of the very least if everything goes wrong, a bunch of humans can go back and hand count every single ballot.

So that's number one.

Number 2, a little bit more technical, but still less expensive is open source voting equipment.

So this would be where anybody can see the code that's in the voting machine of the voting equipment.

Right now, the only people see the code of the bad guys and the vendors.

And we want everybody, including the good guys to be able to see if there's problems that need to be soft measure of transparent.

Exactly end that way.

When somebody says that there's a back door with Venezuela into the voting equipment that everybody can see the code and say is there one or not be able to have transparency on that.

And then finally, we really need to get rid of touch screen voting machines because they cause incredibly long lines, which dramatically affects minority populations.

Student populations, groups that have a higher density in their precincts which are largely are largely urban in certain areas.

Yeah, potential suppression of both.

Exactly.

I think Jake, Jake had a really nice point there about the messenger and in a sense to say it was somebody else making these claims or somebody ask asking these questions, we would receive it differently.

The issue is that the president started work the talking about election interference because he didn't understand how we might have lost an election in 2020 when he talked about Russia hoax first and in 2020.

>> And now he's talking about because he's worried about future elections.

And I think that undermines the real questions there there and the real opportunities we have to do things better.

So the messenger in this case does matter.

Yeah.

Well, you know, Trump also use the speech.

You know, she's advocating for the Save America Act.

This legislation would require proof of citizenship mandate photo ID at the polls impose criminal penalties to election officials if they >> register people who don't present the necessary documents that what what concerns do you have?

What I have so many concerns about one partly because their barriers to people being able to registered voters should be able to.

And I think we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.

This isn't the the the vulnerabilities in the system problem.

This is argument that non-citizens have been voting in ways that are disrupting elections problem, which isn't a problem.

So it's barriers to participation.

But also that last point you made about the election officials could be held criminally.

We have a hard time getting elected officials as it is right that we have a hard time getting people to do this work as it is that in the last thing that they're gonna want to do is put themselves in a position where if there's a mistake made, something happens, they're going to be personally responsible.

I think that would have enough time to talk about how the rhymes with the save act.

But those are Jake.

We've got just about 45 seconds left.

But you know what, what?

What is the barrier?

There was the message not breaking through in a bipartisan manner that there is work to be done to make, you know, to make these these changes that you've suggested for election system.

Sure.

you know, of course it's politics.

And once politics gets in the middle of things.

>> We generally tend to start fighting about politics and not about the problem and I think that if both parties were really kind of focus on actually getting after this, the way that they could, because cyber is often quite non-partisan.

We could solve the problem relatively quickly.

The solutions are not hard and as I said a minute ago that the cheapest solutions out there, those that does have a an added benefit getting folks on