Madam secretary. Thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure. I love this annual tradition of talking to the secretaries. Well, we really appreciate you making time otherwise we would not be able to do it. So thank you for making it *** priority. Let's talk now about in the fight against election fraud. There's developed among the secretaries of state. This fight over election fraud detection. I'm talking about Eric this group, the electronic Registration Information Center. It's *** collaborative among states to try and spot double voting. Uh people registered in more than one state, et cetera, try to catch fraud. Some of your colleagues though are withdrawing from this multi state uh agreement. Your state is still in it. Why Eric is the number one fraud fighting tool that we have. It's the only way to exchange data about voter participation and voter registration from state to state. It's nonpartisan, it involves no outside entities. It's simply the states collaborating. It's really important to my colleagues who have left. I say there's nothing to be afraid of voter registration. So you're sort of um intimating one of the concerns that some of them have had that *** piece of Eric is not just that we share information to try to catch fraud, but it's that you need to reach out to people who are eligible but unregistered voters and some of them have explained that they believe perhaps that that is *** concern. They don't want told that they have to reach out to certain voters. The cornerstones of our democracy and elections are accessibility and security. Eric was *** perfect solution. increasing accessibility by identifying people who are eligible but unregistered to get them registered so they can participate and detecting potential dual voting or duplicate registration so we can clean up the voter lists. It's that perfect double solution, both protecting our voter lists and expanding participation. But what do you say to your colleagues who are leaving? I know you just did *** minute ago, but you're here at this conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Are you trying to do any arm twisting to get them to come back? More states are now considering leaving one of the benefits of Eric is it started small and it's grown over time. So the benefits of participation have only increased as we've moved forward to my colleagues. I remind them it's the only tool we have for exchanging information about who is registered or potentially voting in *** different state. And that is *** really vital tool in our election integrity. I also remind them that it's *** good thing to register more people. Maine was number one in the nation in voter participation last year and we did two things to be. Number one, first, we cleaned up our voter lists. We did *** state wide review of our list and increased maintenance. And two, we did voter outreach and education to include more voters. That's what made us. Number one, I'm encouraging my colleagues to follow suit. Let's talk about another issue that has come up here at this conference. Um You know, we've talked in prior conferences about disinformation and misinformation. I heard that in yesterday's secretary only meeting artificial intelligence *** I deep fakes have come up. How worried are you that artificial intelligence or deep fakes could be used to mislead voters in your state? Artificial intelligence is *** double edged sword. Of course, there is utility with things like chat bots that can help us respond to voter queries and increase voter information and education. But then we've already seen in the campaign world, these deep fakes which are very threatening. So we should be vigilant concerned. And also looking at artificial intelligence as both sides of artificial intelligence. Let me rephrase that um artificial intelligence in itself is not dangerous. It has both uses and negative. So we have to be prepared and vigilant against deep fakes and that role in disinformation. But also be thinking about the utility. How can we increase voter integrity through artificial intelligence functions? How can we increase public education? And protect our elections. At the same time, let's talk about another concern. The Center for Justice in April released survey results that found about one in five election workers, 20% say they plan to quit before next year's presidential election. That's the equivalent to 1 to 2 election officials quitting per day since the 2020 presidential election which saw unprecedented threats, disinformation COVID, et cetera. Are you seeing already that turnover of *** election workers in your state? We've seen turnover in Maine just as we've seen across the country. And so as we prepare for 2024 we are ramping up training for our clerks as well as threat assessment and reporting. We want to make sure that our new clerks feel as safe as possible and we want to increase their preparedness as we move into 2024. And is that one of the top priorities that you're looking at for the next statewide election? One of our top priorities is clerk training. We need to get prepared and election security is also at the very top of that list. Madam Secretary. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.