 And if we have a quorum then Patty can start the meeting at five o'clock. Okay. For those of you just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Join the Spanish channel we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Irina, can you please restate that in Spanish. Sure, para los members del público que desean escuchar esta reunión en español. Pueden acceder a la característica de interpretación, haciéndole click al globito que está en la parte de abajo de la pantalla y es cogiendo español. Una vez que escogen español les recomendamos que quiten el audio principal para escucharlo únicamente en español. Gracias. Thank you Marina. I'm going to go ahead and move you over into the Spanish channel along with Paloma. Paloma and Marina are our interpreters for this evening. Thank you. Thank you. And at this time Paloma if you can commence translation as the meeting starts at the top of the order when chair Cisco calls the meeting. Um, Stephanie looks to me like we have a quorum am I correct on that. You're correct. Okay so I'll go ahead and and begin the meeting then. So with that I'm going to go ahead and open tonight's meeting of the charter review committee and ask for roll call please. Thank you. Committee member weeks. Here. Member Walsh. Here. Member Villalobos. Here. Member Pitts. Here. Oh, thank you. Member Oliveris. Here. Member minor. Here. Member Miller. Member Masiya. Here. Member Martinez. Member lean. Member close. Here. Member good evening. Member Diaz. Here. Member Cunningham. Here. Member Contran. Here. Member Bern. Here. Member Bartley. Member Badenford. Member Barber. Here. Member Arizon and chair Cisco. I am here. Let me just circle back really quick member Miller. Have you joined us. Member Martinez have you joined us. Member Leung have you joined us. Member Goudinho have you joined us. Member Bartley have you joined us. Member Arizon have you joined us. I know she commuted herself. Can you hear us member Arizon. I see her present. So I'll mark her present and I think she's having some technical difficulties with her audio. So let the record show that all committee members are present with the exception of committee member Bartley. Committee member Goudinho. Committee member Goudinho. Committee member Leung. Committee member Martinez. And committee member Miller. Great. Thank you. And do you want to do some of the housekeeping. Matters. Stephanie. Thank you. So committee members, please keep your audio on mute unless you are speaking so we don't pick up any background noise. Also as members of the public during the meeting via zoom, they will be participating as an attendee. If you are calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during public comments portion of today's agenda. For privacy concerns, the host will be renaming your viewable phone number. To resident and the last four digits of your phone number. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment. Free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions. And our wealth staff to monitor that information. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions. And our wealth staff to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully. Or they will be removed. If necessary, we will also immediately end the meeting. Public comments will be heard after each agenda item is presented. And after each agenda item is presented. Chair Cisco will ask for committee member comments. And then open it up for public comment. If you are participating from zoom or by telephone and wish to make a live public comment on a specific item at the time public comment is opened by chair Cisco. Please use the raise hand feature. If you are calling in via telephone, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. Throughout today's agenda. When chair Cisco calls for public comment. An interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation services. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for public comment as required by the brown act. We asked those listening on the Spanish channel, but wishing to make a public comment. To please turn off interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called. So you can join the main channel to make your public comment heard and translated into English. This icon may now look like a circle with an ES in the middle. And the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening to the meeting in Spanish. Thank you chair Cisco. Thank you. Okay, so with that, we'll go ahead and move on to item number two, which is public comments on non agenda matters, which is a time for any member of the public to address the committee on matters of interest to the committee that are not on the agenda. And that was the tonight on our agenda items. So with that, I will go ahead and open that public comment period and check with our. Host to see if there's anyone waiting to speak. If you're participating by zoom. Use the raised hand feature. If you're calling in, you need to dial star nine and you'll be recognized by our host. Okay. So any hands be raised via zoom for public comment on this item. Okay, great. So with that, then I'll go ahead and close the public comment period and we'll move on to the approval of our minutes. We have two sets of minutes tonight. So we'll begin with our January 19th. Meeting minutes. Any comments, corrections on that set. Okay. Not seeing any of those will stand as printed. Next set is our February 2nd. Regular meeting and any comments or corrections on. Those. I have a correction. Okay. Who is that? This is that. I was. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think I know that you would. You joined the meeting later in the initial. Roll call that has you absent, but I noted when you joined the meeting. So my minutes reflect how I take the roll call at the beginning. Thanks to that. Okay. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and move on to our scheduled items. The first one is a standing item or point one, our equity principles. No presentation on that tonight. Any. Comments or additions or corrections to. Our principles document. Okay. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. No is. A matter that the public can comment on. So I will go ahead and open the opportunity for the public to comment on equity principles. Again, if you are participating by zoom. Use your raised hand feature. If you're dialing in. My telephone use the star nine feature. And I will check with the host to see if there's anyone waiting for the public comment. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. I'm not seeing any. So I will go ahead and open the opportunity for public comment on item 4.1. Okay. Thank you. So, okay. So we'll close that public comment. Period. And move on to. Our main item this evening, which is 4.2 on rate choice voting. Sue Gallagher and is. And Rob Jackson, our staff. And I believe we'll have a presentation by Eva. Proto. Okay. Thank you. So do you want to. Make any comments before we. Turn it over to miss Proto. No, I, we can go ahead and start with her presentation. She'll give us a general overview of rank choice voting. Okay. Prepare a second PowerPoint. With some just data from the San Francisco Bay area, which is where we're going to start. So we're going to start with that. And then we'll move on to the next item. We can address that separately, but this is where we start. So I will hand it over to miss Proto. Okay. I definitely want to welcome you miss Proto and appreciate your time tonight in making this presentation. So thank you. Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. So I am diva Marie Proto and I am the clerk recorder, assessor, register of voters. And then we'll move on to the next item. So we'll move on to the next item. And then we'll move on to the next item. So for the county of Sonoma and then the city of Santa Rosa contracts with us to conduct all of their elections. Next slide, please. So ranked choice voting is a system. That has become more popular of late. We've seen it in a number of jurisdictions. And it is where voters rank the candidates by preference. And then we've seen it in a number of different ranks. In California. It is only allowed to be used in charter cities or counties. So Sonoma County as an entity cannot use it at Santa Rosa and Petaluma are the only ones legally authorized to. There's two different types of ranked choice voting that we have available to us. There's a single transferrable vote. And then we'll move on to the next item. The district elections. This is what we would have had in Santa Rosa. Had it not gone to district elections. So when we had previous elections, it was a vote for three or a vote for four. Now with the districts, it's a vote for one. So it would be the instant runoff voting. Which is used for a single seat election. Next slide, please. And then we'll move on to the next item. The district elections. The voters are going to choose the candidate. They like the most. They're going to rank that person as number one. And then they have the option to make additional selections. In case the person that they selected as their first pick doesn't win. So they'd still get a voice in. The contest. Voters do not have to vote every rank. They're only going to be counted. The first round, the first choice vote is always going to be counted. And then second or third choices are only going to be counted. If an earlier choice has been eliminated. If a voter selects the same candidate for more than one rank, the vote for that choice will count only once. It will not count in future iterations. Next slide. We have. An example. This is the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This one has English Spanish on it. We are a bilingual County now. So all of our ballots will have both English and Spanish. Instructions on them. And you can see in this option, there are five ranks in this particular case that may have been because there are five candidates. They have a different language. They have a different language with the instructions up above. Next slide is San Francisco. It's ballot. They don't have Spanish. They have. This one's a different language. But they have up to seven rankings. And they have a little bit more instructions up there. As well as some visuals, so we'll get to that. Next slide. So with rank choice voting, when we come to the tabulation process, we will count all the first choice. Ranks. If any candidate receives a majority of the first choices, the contest is over. They are the winner. If any candidate receives a majority of the first choice, it will be 50% plus one of those first choice votes. So whoever received the fewest number of first choice ranks is eliminated. The ballots with that candidate as their first choice. Then we go down to the second choice. We recalculate all the votes. And then again, if any candidate hits that 50% plus one threshold. We'll get to that. So we'll go to the next slide. And then we'll go to the next slide. And then we'll go to the next slide where we look at. The person who has the fewest votes at that point. On the next slide. It's basically the same information. It's just a little bit more of a visual to help people. So. In that top orange corner. That first round. If somebody hits that 50% threshold. Then we're going to go to a round two. So in this example. The third option that got 12%. That person would be eliminated from the ranking. And their choices were whoever they had. Put as their second choice would be added to the first choice of the other candidates. So in this particular case on top. You would see that. The fourth candidate got 45% of the vote. And then they were given 6% of the. Eliminated candidates votes. So that hit the 51% threshold. On the bottom again, if those. Numbers did not push anybody above 50%. So. Next slide please. So I was asked about costs. I reached out to our vendor. The current estimate is 350,000 for the initial implementation. And then a $70,000 in will fee. That cost would be paid by the city because at this point, they are the only ones. That would be implementing. And then a $70,000 in will fee. And then a $70,000 in will fee. That cost would be shared. There would be additional printing and ballot design costs as you saw on some of the previous slides. Some of that ballot space is larger because it's going to take up additional columns. So that may not be in the same location on the ballot. It has to take up several spaces. And most likely it would be a separate ballot page due to the public service announcement. And then a $70,000 in will fee. There would also be additional education materials that we have to create and put in the voter information guide. Perhaps work with the city on. The public service announcements and everything like that. And then there would be additional time for our staff to do the manual tally. So after every election, we do go through. We do a 1% manual tally. And then we do a 2% manual tally. So that would mean that we would have to do multiple rounds for the city elections. The city ultimately would pay the actual cost for each election as they do now. Next slide. So the current estimates that we provide for a standalone election. For a citywide, it's just over a hundred thousand voters. So we would generally quote $200 or $2.50 to $4.50 per voter. With smaller contests that goes up because you don't have the same price savings with large scale purchases. So we would quote $3 to $6 per voter. That would depend on which district it was in because right now we have a very large range. So that would mean that those district numbers will be changing with redistricting. So with consolidated elections, the cost is lower because they're splitting the cost of the ballot of the voter information guide, the postage. So we would generally say $2 to $5.50 per voter. And then if you were adding on additional measures, it would be $150 to $4. Right now, we're estimating that it would add $1 to $3 per voter increase per election. That would be revised based on experience. So next slide. And then just to give a little bit of information about what goes into the costs, ballot printing costs right now, especially there is a paper shortage. And so the costs are increasing substantially. The same thing for the voter information guides. We also do all the layout, the type setting design, multiple rounds of proofing. We have to pay for the printing. There's different versions for every ballot type. So if you are in Santa Rosa district one, you are going to get a different voter information guide than Santa Rosa district seven, as well as Petaluma is going to get one unincorporated. And then if you're in Santa Rosa district, you're going to get one unincorporated. And then if you're in Santa Rosa district, Santa Rosa county is going to get one. Somebody in a separate fire district is going to get one. Postage. We do pay for mailing out all the ballots and voter information guides, as well as return service on them. So ballots cannot be forwarded. Those will come back to our office and we do have to pay the postage on that. The larger the ballot is, the more ballot cards we get, the more ballots we get. So we do have a requirement to send ballots to military and overseas voters prior to the ballots going out to the general population. So those are prepared and sent separately by our office. We have to at a minimum send those 45 days before the election. The cost will also depend on how many ranking levels were included. The more ranks. The larger the ballot space is going to be, the larger it may take us to go through rounds with the 1% manual tally. And then of course, whatever we decide to do in terms of educational materials, if we're doing postcards, there's different costs based on size, how often are we going to do things every election? Just once. Kind of depends on what the city would want to do with that. So that's what we're going to do. And next slide. And then just making sure everybody's aware. In 2021, they did pass a permanent bill that mandated that all active registered voters be sent a ballot in the mail. For all future elections. So that does increase postage. A little bit from what we had previously. We are transitioning to the voters choice act election model. So we're going to have to do the same with the state. So we're going to have to vote in the same number as the county that will be assigned neighborhood polling places. For our current numbers, we're going to have seven vote centers that are open for 11 days. So starting the Saturday before the Saturday, before election day. And though that will be open a minimum of eight hours per day. County. Voters can vote in person at any location. This is very important, especially right now with the multiple disasters we've been having, so that if one area is affected, those voters are not disenfranchised, they will be able to vote at any other location in the county. We also have ballot drop boxes. Most of them are installed, but our current numbers require 21 locations around the county, and we do like to remind people those are picked up by our staff frequently, so they're not just sitting in there. And then, of course, we are looking for a vote center. So if anybody knows of locations that would be good, please let us know. Santa Rosa is one of our harder cities to get locations. So we have most of our locations for June. I'm hoping for one or two more in Santa Rosa. So next slide, I think that's probably it. Yep. And then my contact information in case anybody has any questions. Great. Thank you so much. Committee members, this is a time for you to ask questions of Ms. Proto and or of staffs. When we get our questions completed, I'll go ahead and open it for public comment. And then after that is done, I'll bring it back for our discussion and offering our opinions. So any questions right now? And could you use the raised hand feature so I know who's talking? Okay, great. Karen. Hi, Diva. Thank you so much for the presentation. And I do have a couple of questions. Who would you said that probably if we went to rank choice voting that the city and the county would do the education to the community together? Has there been any thought about that? How that would work? Who would take the lead on that? Or is it way too early because we haven't made the decision? At this point, I think it would probably be too early. My guess is that we would work with the city to kind of get a rough sketch of everything, what information, when, what is the city willing to pay for? And what information does the city really want out there timing? Ultimately, we're the ones that have the voter information. So likely we would be doing the actual mailings. And then we have people in our office who currently work on drafting postcards to voters and information. So we have some of that infrastructure set up, but we'd probably want to have a longer discussion about that. Thank you. And I have just two more quick questions. You said that there would be additional time for the county to do the manual tally. Do you have any idea what time frame you're looking at? No, it depends on the contests, how many rounds there are. So it's very dependent on the actual race. And then Petaluma possibly could do rank choice voting to the only other community. Have they talked to you at all about that? Or do you know if they're talking about that? I believe they're possibly interested. They've asked a couple of questions, but not to this point where I've been asked to speak to anybody. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Diva, for giving us some time tonight. I'm getting a little confused on the math. So you mentioned the three to six per voter, per district, basically, and the $70,000 annual cost. Would that three to six be, if we did a, to me, the alternative is a primary system. So we have a primary election that a secondary if necessary, or a general on a follow-up, I don't know how you call that. But would that be the three to six dollars per district if we had a follow-up election? Is that what that would be? Just looking for some clarity, I don't even know if my question makes sense. We have, so the 350,000 was specific to the implementation of the system software that would be required. We quote the elections on a per election per voter basis. So the three to six dollars would be for an election in a district. So if you had a council member currently where you were going to do an election, if, so for instance for November, because we know we have four contests on the ballot, that's going to be a certain price. If the city of Santa Rosa adds on a measure, that's going to be a different price because there's an additional cost to it. So it's the cost is variable depending on the actual situation, how many voters there are and what's shared. One of the reasons generally speaking, the costs come in on the low side or under. That tends to be because of the state costs come in higher. We are kind of quoting basically worst case scenario when we are giving you a quote because we have no idea how many state propositions might go on and every state proposition that goes on is going to be shared ballot space. And so that's going to be a reduction in the cost to the city. Let me try to ask it another way then. So if we did our November primary, but we had a runoff, if there was not a 50%, how much would that second election cost just for the one district? It would be the same as the cost for one district. It would be the quote three to six dollars per voter. Currently, the city has everything in November. So it's not necessarily a 50%. I believe it is whoever gets the most will win. Great. Thank you. Chris. Yes. Thank you, Eva. I have three questions. I don't know if these are for you or Sue Gallagher or for now or later in the meeting or never. But three questions would be number one, is there any accepted wisdom in terms of what type of runoff avoidance system most accurately or faithfully represents the will of the voters? That's one question. Secondly, I've heard of positional voting, which is used by a lot of organizations or sports and so on, where you say first place is three, second place is two, third is one. And I'm wondering logistically, is that something that we could do, leaving aside all the other issues? And then third, is there any experience or comments on what type of runoff avoidance model most faithfully opens the field to diverse, qualified candidates who wouldn't be otherwise disincentivized because of a runoff, the second election? So there you go. I think for one in three, I don't know if Sue has information about research. I don't really have good information about what's best. We've never done it here. So I'm not aware of studies or anything like that that have been done. On the second question with are there alternate ways? This is the way that our election vendor and I believe the other election vendors in the state have available. I'm not sure if there's options to work with the vendor to design a new method, methodology for doing it, but that would be a question more towards the vendor to see if that is something. And I'm not sure the systems have to be certified through the Secretary of State. So I'm not sure if that might also be a Secretary of State question statewide. We can't use right choice voting, but they still certify the systems. So I don't know if they have a say in that at all. Great. And okay. And then Sue, do you have anything to add on Chris's first and third question runoff avoidance questions? Sure. I did prepare a PowerPoint with just some data from the Bay Area. It may not get exactly at Chris's question, but it will indicate kind of what the results have been of just some jurisdictions that have that are using the ranked choice voting and how that has played out. I did not include, I did on a separate sheet include information about race and gender, but I did not include that in the PowerPoint, again, trying to just keep things shorter. But I can, it was also hard to make any judgments from that, given that I only looked at 2020 election and 2018 election. So I don't have a historical perspective of whether the adoption and use of ranked choice voting had, in fact, increased the number of minority candidates or minorities. But I thought we'd go through all of these questions for Diva and then once, and then that I would present the data. Okay. Ron. Say hi, Ron Miller. I have two questions. If I understand correctly, if in the first round, if somebody gets 48%, that's the highest. When you move to the next round, those votes in the first round are ignored. They're not added to the second round, right? The first choice of all the candidates still remaining in the race are still counted. So that 48% would still hold because that candidate's still in the race. What's added to it would be whoever came in last, all the second choice votes, that the people who had voted for the eliminated contest number one, or candidate to be number one, it would go to their second choice. So it would take all those second choices and add it to the original 48%. And when somebody is eliminated during the first round, somebody is eliminated, their votes are counted in the second round. Are they also counted in the other rounds? Yes. So if somebody had voted for candidate one, for rank number one, candidate two, for rank number two and candidate three, for rank number three, we do the tally. Candidate one comes in last. So they would take, so they would go to their rank number two, which would be candidate two. And so that would be added to candidate two on the third choice, or on the third rank. If candidate two was the next person eliminated, then it would go to their third choice and pick that one. But if candidate two stayed in the mix, would never go and look at the rank number three or rank number four, because that's only going to be calculated if somebody's eliminated. And then we'll immediately take everybody, all the votes cast for the eliminated person and redistribute them based on what round it is. Thank you. So my question is about the estimated cost of implementation. So I heard you said that if another city come on board, there will be that 70,000 annual fee that will be split among whatever entities. So for the 350, is that a cost that each city would have to pay for the implementation? Or is that a cost that just, Senator, if we was to move to that, we wouldn't have to pay that, but then everybody else could benefit from that. The $350,000 is specifically for the software setup from our vendor. So it's a one-time cost. If Santa Rosa was moving forward alone, they would have to take that cost. It may be something that could be talked about if Petaluma was interested a couple years later. There might be conversation about that where, hey, in order to use the Santa Rosa paid for it. So that kind of concerns me a little bit because this is the process that we're doing here in Santa Rosa, but maybe a year or two later, we'll have other entities that's doing that, but then we pay for the cost for the system, but then yet it benefits us, but it's also going to benefit other people. So is there something that could be put in place if we ever choose to do this, that if other people come on down the line, that there be maybe some type of kickback to the originator of the cost? Because that wouldn't be fair. People could be like, oh, they have the money, let them do it, we'll jump on later. So is there something that we can put in place that if we was to move to that system, that Santa Rosa gets some kind of kickback from the other entities for the implementation of their process as well? I think that's a very good point. So we currently, the county, because we administer the elections, we currently have contracts with the different cities, so individual contracts. And so it may be that when the city attorneys are talking about doing the contract, because we'll have to rewrite it if we move to rank choice voting, it may be that that's something that we could put into the contract, that Santa Rosa is paying the implementation fees if other entities want to use it. There's a reimbursement back to the city or something like that, that maybe would address that. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure. But I'm sure there's something, especially if that's something that's noted in terms of the county, we're not getting any of the fees, so we don't have any. We're not trying to get 350 from Santa Rosa and 350 from Petaluma or anything like that. So I guess that would be a question for Sue going forward. If we were to do this process, could that be something that is written into the contract that anybody there after, I don't know how many years, five years, 10 years until we maybe recoup our costs or half of that cost or something like that? Is that something the city lawyer can put into play? Well, we could try, but those contracts, that kind of term would have to be agreed to by the other cities, and I'm not sure that we would be able to get that agreement up front at this point. If there was a city of Petaluma, for example, was deciding to implement in two years or three years or four years, maybe they would be willing to do that, but it would be voluntary. We're not able to compel that reimbursement. Logan. Thanks, Patty. Diva, good to see you, and thank you for your time tonight. So you said it can take a little bit longer to count the ballots. So you said maybe like a few more days. Is it possible it also could take less time? I mean, hypothetically, if you had a rank choice election where one can, it gets 90% of rank one, would that be easier to count than the current system where you would get a similar result, or would it just be the same counting process? It would be the same counting process in terms of the computer tabulation. There's not going to be any extra time because it's computer-based. We have the formulas written in there, and we would be able to run it for each one, but we could also get a result very quickly. The results will take longer to be known because when we put things out on election night, at that point in time, we're going to give everybody, we will not eliminate anybody, where currently, if you just have one election, you can say, okay, well, this person right now is running at 45%, this person's at 30, this person's at 12. So even though the election is not finished, the registrar voters may still have 40% of the ballots still to count, but statistically speaking, this person is winning, and the media and other people can call the election, that would not be the case with rank choice voting because we would not be able to run those eliminations until we had processed signature checked and scanned all the ballots that were going to be counted. But that would not take longer. What would take longer is simply our staff time to do the 1% manual tally because each rank is going to be its own contest or lack of a better word. Okay, that makes sense. And it's not like days for each contest or anything like that. But it would be more than it is currently. Okay. And do you know of any research or data on two questions I have? Do you see before and after rank choice any increase or decrease in voter turnout? And then do you see any increase or decrease in campaign spending? Do you know if there's any of that? Do you have any of that data available or do you know? I don't have any of that data. I don't know if Sue does. I know that we already have a very high percentage of turnout, but if they could push us higher, that's always good. Okay. And then this is sort of maybe more of an opinion question. Do people do other registrars talk about this issue? Is this something that folks see growing, or is it like being discussed at conferences? Have you ever talked to the registrar from San Francisco and done it for a while? Just any thoughts you've heard from other jurisdictions? So I'd appreciate it. We don't talk very much about it every once in a while. It'll come up generally because somebody else will be implementing and they have questions. But for the most part, there's not that many jurisdictions that do it and so those were kind of done on a side basis. So not necessarily talking at conferences, but I did reach out to the city of San Francisco, Alameda County to talk about what systems do they use? What do their ballots look like? What are those types of things? Generally speaking, it fits within our current processes. So it's not a huge change. It's simply a difference. Okay. Great. You've been very helpful. Thank you. And I think Sue might have a response on that. Oh, I was just going to indicate that there are some articles that talk about voter turnout under rank choice voting. I haven't seen any articles that are coming to my mind regarding campaign contributions. I did not have a chance to really delve into that if we went further. I'm happy to look at some of those numbers as well. Was that in our agenda, Sue? The stuff on turnout? I didn't see that in any of the studies. No, I don't think it wasn't in any. Those were some separate articles or separate clips. So I don't have it right now. I could find it. If you have it handy, I think that would be useful for our next discussion. If you can find it. Sure. Thanks, Mark. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Patty and Diva. Thank you very much for the presentation. It's helpful. I had one technical question on the instructions to voters. It says, do not fill in more than one oval in a column. And it also says, do not fill in more than one oval for a candidate. So I'm assuming if they did fill in one. So I'm not sure what would happen if a voter was to vote for, say in this example, Peter Ives as their option number one, their first choice and then also voted for Peter Ives again as their second choice or third choice. Would their first choice ballot count or would the whole ballot be spoiled? The first choice would count. It would be the other options that would not count because that person would have been eliminated. And so there's nothing for that vote to be attributed to. On the other side of that, if somebody voted for multiple people, if it was a vote for one and you voted for multiple people in a column, that would be considered an overvote and neither candidate would, it would be counted for either one. So. Okay. Thank you. One more question. If you had information on this or an inkling of how this would go. How often does a number one vote getter in the first pass not also receive, not also eventually win? So the number one vote getter take kept 50%. How often do they not win? I don't have any statistics on that. I know there's been a couple of articles over the last couple of years, I think more on the East Coast and everything like that, where it's been a surprise. It has come down to, you know, for choices in and the person was not the first selected, but that's anecdotal. Those are articles I remember seeing. I don't have any statistics on how often that happens or anything. Okay. I do have some of that information when we get to my presentation. Okay. Thank you, sir. Got. Just a couple, again, thanks, Diva, for the presentation. If somebody, and this is just to make sure it's clear, if somebody votes for the, that makes their first round choice on number one, but they didn't vote the second, third, their first was eliminated, then their votes just gone. They've basically given up any other chance at voting, correct? Correct. Okay. And then, and then the other one I know there is Chris made a reference to, to, to runoffs and, and, and Brian about, you know, primary and whatever in Santa Rosa right now, the most votes in one round is elected. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Well, really, thank you again, Ms. Proto. This is this so great that you, you're willing to spend this time. And it's kind of a complex system. You're helping us wrap our minds around it. Any other questions for Ms. Proto before we move on to letting Sue do her presentation? Not seeing any. So again, thank you. All right. Did you need me to stay on longer or am I fine for now? And then if there's any other questions that come up, I'm happy to answer those later. Yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I want to express my appreciation again, and I know the appreciation of the full committee for your time. And I really leave that to you. You're welcome to stay and, and hear the discussion in case there questions that come up. But we also know that you are a very busy person and holds you here. So I leave that choice to you. Well, thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to come. Great. Thank you. So if you want to put up the, oh, there we go. PowerPoint. Um, so what I did, um, what questions were coming to my mind as I was looking at the different articles and looking at all the information was, well, how does this actually, how has this actually played out? And how might it play out in Santa Rosa? So next slide. There are currently four jurisdictions in the Bay Area that use ranked choice voting. San Francisco has been using it the longest since 2004. Berkeley, San Leandro and Oakland have been using it since 2010. Next slide. I want to let you know that all of the information on the following slides I pulled from data in innovation.org. The link is right there if you want to look at yourself. They are very comprehensive. That link leads you to results from across the country. But it also includes, of course, these four jurisdictions and it includes a number of, you know, it does let you know for each race, you know, how many people were running, whether they were incumbents, challengers, whether it was an open seat, does indicate the race and gender of each candidate. And then it gives the actual voting numbers in round one and however many rounds it took. It lists all that information. So a great resource. Next slide. So Berkeley 2022, I'm not going to go through each individual election. So on each of these slides, you can take a look at it, but I'll just give you kind of the summary. Look at it. This was five different elections. Four of them were determined in the first round. I will note that all of the elections had more than two candidates. If there's only two candidates, then it never goes to further rounds. So four of these five were determined in the first round. And one was determined in the fourth round. That one that was determined in the fourth round, the winner had led in each of the four rounds. So there was no change in the outcome from the first round to the fourth round other than that the winner had at that point received more than 50% of the vote. Next slide. We go to Berkeley 2018. Similarly, five elections. In this set, there was one election for city auditor that only had the two candidates. So that was of course determined in the first round. One election was determined in the third round. And once again, in that case, the winner had led in all of the three rounds. So again, same at the first round and same at the third round except for had gone up to the 50% threshold. San Leandro. Next slide. San Leandro 2020. Three elections. One had just the two candidates. All three were determined in the first round. So never went to any second round. Next slide. San Leandro 2018. Four elections. There were two of those elections that had only two candidates. So of course, those were determined in the first round. The other two elections were also determined in the first round. So no, never went on to the further rounds that would be entailed in ranked choice voting. Next slide. Oakland 2020. And this has two slides because it's both for council and for school board and also for city attorney. So in this first page, two, three were decided in round one. One in round three, one in round four, around one in round five. Next slide because I'll give the summary at the end of the next slide. Again, four additional races in 2020 in Oakland. All of these went on to multiple rounds. So the total of the 10 elections in Oakland in 2020. Three were determined in the first round. Two were determined in the third round. Two in the fourth round and three in the fifth round. And in all of those cases of the third, fourth and fifth round, the elected candidate had led in all of the rounds. So again, no change from the first round through to the final vote. In San Francisco, next slide, San Francisco in 2020. This is where it starts getting a little bit more interesting. Five elections. There were multiple candidates, more than two candidates in all elections. Two elections were decided in round one. One in round three and two in round six. But the supervisor in district seven, in that one, that was the only one that we've seen so far where it was a different candidate that won at the end of the day than had started as lead in first round. So the winner, in that case, the winner took the lead in round six. So next slide, because I want to look at what happened in that one. So there were eight candidates. The election was decided in round eight. Candidate A led in the first five rounds, rounds one through five. And then candidate B took the lead in round six. And in that round received more than 50% of the votes cast in that round. So candidate B had 18,561 votes out of the total of 34,931 in round six. So the question came up, because this was mentioned in a number of articles about the idea of voter exhaustion. And it's been hinted at in some of the questions. If you vote for one level, in this case, unless you had, there was a real potential that your ballot was going to be exhausted before they got to round six, if you had voted for anyone else besides A and B. So and in fact, from round one had 39,253 votes. By round six, we were down to 34,931 votes. So the candidate, so those 18,561 votes in round six were actually less than 50% of the total votes that were in round one. So that's a little bit of a quirk of how this works. Again, of all of the, of looking at Berkeley, San Leandro, Oakland, and San Francisco, this was the only one in those elections that had a different result than was in the first round. I also looked at just in first, just for saving time, I did not put into the power point Oakland 2018 or San Francisco 2018, but I did look at that data. And it was in line with this. So next slide. So then I wondered about, well, was that a fluke? Because it was only two years and just four jurisdictions. So how does it compare nationwide? In nationwide, and this was from the fair vote.org website that's there at the bottom. Fair vote is an organization that focuses on ranked choice voting, is very supportive of ranked choice voting, and has lots of good information on their website. So I do recommend that website. So they had, this is nationwide, 289 single winner elections. That means you're voting, only one person wins, it's not multiple people. And they also narrowed that down to only those elections that had at least three candidates, because if we only have two, you're never going to go to a second round. So out of the 289, 120 of those elections, a majority winner was identified in the first round. So that's pretty comparable to what we were seeing in our numbers. 20% of the election, I mean, I'm sorry, not 20%, 20 of the elections, 20 of the 289 were won by candidates other than the first round leader. So that's 7% the ranked choice voting process led to a different result. And in 103 of the elections that went beyond the first round, the ranked choice voting winner did not have a majority of the total votes originally cast. So that 50% threshold does shift and go down a little bit over the time. How much it goes down, I think will vary. But it does go down a little bit. So that's some of the nationwide data. Next slide. In addition to the four of the area jurisdictions currently are in ranked choice voting, there are three additional cities that I found have approved ranked choice voting systems Albany, Eureka and Palm Desert. All of those will begin this year with the system. Next slide. So what would it look like in Santa Rosa? Hard to tell, one never knows. But if we look at what I was trying to get at was so how many would have gone down, gone to second round or third round? In 2018, we had three votes, District 2, 4 and 6. District 2 and 6 both were over the 50% limit. District 2 only had two candidates. District 6 only had one candidate. So District 4 that had three candidates, the winning candidate, the council member Fleming, had 45% out of the three candidates. So that one would have gone to a second round. Next slide. In 2020, we had one of those districts just had two candidates. That was District 3. We weren't going to go into additional rounds for that. And that was council member Tibbetts, one with 99%. So District 5 was over the 50% threshold in that single vote. So the two districts, District 1 and District 7, District 1 had four candidates and the winning candidate, council member Vice Mayor Alvarez, had 46%. So that would have gone to a second round. And District 7 had three candidates and that vote was pretty, you know, was split among the three. But council member Rogers had 43%. So Districts 1 and 7 would have gone to a second round. We, you know, we have no idea what the result would have been, but just kind of an interesting of would we have gone to additional rounds? And next slide, that's it. I'm happy to answer any questions. Any questions of Sue right now before we go to public comment and then come back for our discussion. Chris. Yes, hi. Sorry, Sue, but Scott's comment made me wonder about the assumptions I'm making. So the current situation is that the candidate with the most votes wins in a multi-candidate race. And if we do nothing, then that's a situation and we don't need to change the charter language or do anything. Is that correct? And there's no legal requirement for 50.1? No, that's correct. We okay. Okay. Thanks. Sorry. Anybody else wanting to ask Sue any questions here? And I am not seeing any. I have one. Oh, okay. Didn't see your hand. Oh, there you are. Chris. No worries. I'm wondering, Sue, I know you provided some awesome resources, but I'm wondering if you could summarize in your own words the pros and the cons of rank choice voting. Don't know his lie, and that's like our whole discussion, but I guess I would just appreciate hearing from you and the research that you did. Sure. Really, the pros are that I guess where it works best, this might be a little bit roundabout way. I think there should be a quick summary of me being able to say what the benefits and the pros and cons. But where this will work the best is where you have, say, three candidates. The example that I read in a couple of articles was the Bush v. Gore. And you had Ralph Nader. If you had had rank choice voting, Ralph Nader would have been eliminated. He got the fewest votes. His votes would have been transferred. Would they have gone to Gore? Would they have gone to Bush? It could have made a difference in that election. So when you're in that kind of situation, that's where rank choice voting is going to have the most impact. So the idea is, so that's kind of the key benefit. Some of the other benefits are that it is intended to give people a little bit more flexibility in terms of who they are voting for. So you can really vote for who you really want as your first candidate, as your first choice, even though maybe that candidate might be a long shot, because you know your vote won't be wasted because your second choice will inherit those votes. There is also a suggestion that it makes elections more civilized because you don't want to alienate people who might put you down as a second or a third. So you don't want to be as aggressive against potentially the leading candidates because you want to still attract those, potentially attract those voters. The evidence of whether that actually works or not is mixed. Elections right now are pretty animated and so the evidence is unclear. There are also suggestions that it'll help with voter turnout. There are also arguments that know it'll lower voter turnout because it's just a new system. It's more complicated. And the cons are potentially more complicated. Does it suppress votes? Does it really make as much difference as people would hope? When we look at the Bay Area cities, there was only one election out of four jurisdictions. I don't remember that 40 elections and it only made a difference in one. So those are some of the pros and cons. And I don't know if Diva is still on if she had some other ideas. I think those are a good summary of that. I don't have anything else to add. Yes, hi Sue. So I just kind of had a quick question. So I remember that last week you touched upon that undocumented people could vote. I was wondering if you could give us a presentation maybe next week more about that because I feel like it would also help with voter turnout if we were to go down this route. So yeah, that's all I have to say. Thank you. Logan. Sue, do you know how write-in candidates would work under ranked choice voting? Would that person be, I guess their name wouldn't be printed. So can you do write-ins or have you run into that in any of those elections? Yes. Or Diva either one. Sure. And I will say that in a number of the elections that I looked at in those four Bay Area cities had write-ins. And the write-ins, you do have to be certified. You do have to get approval to be an official write-in. But the write-ins generally garner so few votes that they are eliminated usually in that first round. So it does not have any significant impact that I saw on how things play out in the right choice voting. In terms of the ballot, we would continue to have a space for a write-in candidate and then also those same ranking options next to them. So a write-in candidate could be ranked as a first choice or a second choice or a third choice just as any ever candidate. And I do recognize that there have been elections across the country and I don't remember if there have been any locally where the writing candidate has won. Not in, you know, setting aside ranked choice voting, but I do know that that is a possibility. So I didn't mean to minimize the options of write-in voters voting. Okay. Thank you. Annie. So I was reading it shows that it's $350,000 is what we're estimating to implement the RCV. And now I learned that it's just for the software. Do we know what the estimated cost would be for outreach literature and whatnot to the community? And would that include a budget to reach out to obviously the BIPOC community and whatnot? I don't know of any budget, but I would ask Ms. Proto. Currently our estimate would be that it would add $1 to $3 per voter for an election. But that would be very dependent on what type of outreach the city wanted to do because the city would be paying for outreach specific to ranked choice voting. Okay. And that would, and I was referring to the outreach to educate the community. Is that what you were saying? That's a dollar? Well, that would be, that's our estimate at this point, just kind of based on what we would see as kind of the minimum, you know, maybe an extra ballot card with instructions, extra information in the voter information guide, perhaps a couple of postcards. But that could be dialed up or dialed down and that would affect the cost. So it would really be dependent on what the city wanted to do. Right now our best estimate, just based on the fact that we would have to do additional outreach, would be the $1 to $3 for everything, not just outreach, but for extra printing costs and paper costs and time, that type of thing, as well as education and outreach. Thank you, Diva. Yes. I was going to ask the same thing that Danny asked about the, you know, how would that look going out to the public in education because it's complicated now when we do our voting system and to ask something that seems rather complicated to have it go out to the public that might be, that might be a lot of DEI challenges and stuff in that capacity. And then the other thing is, can we get some additional data on, you had last year, I mean, the two elections that we had since we've been in districts, can we get some additional data of what it looked like previously before we were in districts with the numbers? Because I don't, I can't really see how this would benefit us when we have such, now that we're in districts, we don't have huge candidates that, you know, like we don't have eight candidates and I don't see no benefit in delving into something when, if we have eight candidates, I could see that working. But since our numbers are like three and two and so forth, I don't see no benefit in that. So maybe taking a look at additional data from previous times, what it would it look like when we had a whole bunch of candidates learning? Adriana? Hi, good evening. Sorry, this is more of, I'm listening in and I think maybe I'm missing some of the answers of some of the committee members are asking their questions. I don't think I heard, what was the response to Ms. Villalobos' question? Regarding the undocumented. Yes, that if the committee wishes for more information or presentation on that, I'm happy to prepare that and provide that. Okay, wonderful. If I missed that, if you guys said it, I apologize. No, no, no, I think I, I think I didn't say so. Yes. Okay, any other questions of Sue before we go to public comment and then come back for a discussion? Okay, so let's do that. I'm going to go ahead and open the public comment period on this item. And if you're a member of the public wishing to speak on this item, if you're participating by Zoom, please use the raised hand feature. If you're calling in, please dial star nine and the host will recognize you and allow you three minutes to speak. All right, Chair Sisco, I do not see any hands being raised via Zoom from our attendees. And we, sorry, and still no hands. Okay. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Okay, so with that, I'll go ahead and close the public comment period on 4.2. And let's bring it back to the committee for discussion. So Scott, you've got your hand up. How about you? Yeah, a couple of things I noted in the material that was handed out that I thought was interesting. One of them kind of goes along with Sue's presentation is the article where it talked about vote ranked choice in Australia and that 90% of the time with ranked choice, the candidate that would have won anyway didn't change 90% of the time. It didn't change anything. So I'm making a note of that. I'm also a little concerned about the other article, the two sides of ranked choice where voter fatigue and complexity that there's an argument that it disenfranchises people from voting just because of the complexity of it. And so statistically, some of the statistical things showed that to be the case when there was a drop off. When you get down into third choice and fourth choice, the number of people just fatigued just goes, I don't know beyond this point, who I want to support. So with both of those, I'm looking at it. This again seems to be sort of a solution in search of a problem to me. If that said it, if we were talking eight candidates, I could see a point to it. But with the size of our districts and we're talking two or three candidates, and you look at the cost, I don't see that as the cost benefit is hard for me to wrap my head around. That's my comment. Karen. Thank you, Patty. I agree with Scott and Yvette. I think it's, you know, what problem are we trying to solve? I don't see what the problem is right now in Santa Rosa. We just went to districts. And it's, you know, we don't have, you know, like in the old days where you'd have six or eight people running citywide, you know, you have two, three people in a district and the cost. And I guess what I keep going back to is, how do you explain this to the voting public? I mean, I have watched forums on this. I've read on this. And I'm still confused. And granted, I have an old brain now, but still, it just seems, it just seems like it could, as Scott said, and I believe Yvette said, disenfranchise people and get people, you know, it's too confusing. I'm not going to vote. So I would not be in favor of going forward with this. Annie. Oh, I'm sorry. You say Annie or Danny. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. I said Danny. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. All right. Well, I read a couple articles that suggest that it actually helps out with diverse candidates, because it makes other candidates reach out to a broader audience, which I think is a positive. My concern is more of the cost of what we're doing. Is it worth it? And it isn't complicated to understand. And that's why the outreach to me is important to find out what kind of outreach are we going to do to our broader community, the Spanish speaking community, most importantly, in my case. But what does that cost to that? And if it's going to cost us, you know, right now, 350,000 that we're going to look at to implement, does that in the long run save the city money with run-offs and all this other stuff? And how long would it take us to recover that money with the savings that we're going to do on there? So I don't think it's a bad idea. For me, it'd be important to see what kind of outreach we're going to do to the community to educate our community members and also the cost to find out what we're spending. Are we going to recover that? Chris. Thanks. What I'm wondering listening to this is, is there a reason to believe that having ranked choice voting would open up the field to diverse candidates or candidates who otherwise might be discouraged from running? And I'm not hearing that. Also, would rank choice voting avoid the election of someone who really doesn't represent the majority view of the people in their districts? And I'm not really hearing that either. So, you know, and I'm not sure that Bush v. Gore is much of an argument for anything, really. You know, what lessons does one draw? So anyway, I'm hearing it being kind of tepid. Thanks. Okay. Jen. Hi. Thanks. I'm just going to add a quick plus one to I don't, to I don't think that we need it now after district elections. We don't have that many candidates. And so perhaps later, we will have that many candidates and it will become more important. But I'm going to agree with that and Scott and everybody care and everyone who followed on that. Thanks. Thanks for the good presentations. Logan. Good discussion, everyone. Thank you for your thoughts. I this is it's something new. So it's okay that I don't understand it and that most of us don't. I think it is important to remember though that for basically like the easiest way to explain is it won't change most of the time. Like we saw 90% of the time the round one person wins. And so I think you still have kind of the core of our current system if you get past 50% you win. So I think people get that I what I want to pass on from the mayor is some of his thoughts on it. And I think one thing and try to review that we're trying to do that's tough is we're looking forward to right not just back. And so we want to try to anticipate problems. And you can foresee a scenario where you have a lot of Canada in a district. That doesn't happen yet, thankfully. But you know, maybe it'll be great when it does. Maybe we'll get a lot of different voices involved and they'll all have, you know, something unique to say. And I think what the mayor is worried about is that you could have people in that process who, you know, under the current system might be a spoiler or might, you know, not be a serious candidate. And so I think what ranked choice also does is it is it forces people to look at everyone. And so that's that's been his thrust is that it'll have more involvement. It will prevent that outcome from happening. But it's true, that hasn't happened yet. So that's part of our challenge is trying to predict the future. So I'm going to support it. But I definitely do still have some questions. And I, you know, it's going to be up to the city council ultimately, if we approve it. So they get to decide on how they're elected. Yeah. So I, thanks, everyone. This was a good conversation. Ron, how about you? I think that people might think that it's not fair because they don't understand it. They might be skeptical. Oh, I'm talking about the public might be skeptical of the outcome, especially when you put through when the results are posted in the newspaper. And oh, I have one more. Come back to me. I'll look it up. I made notes of it. You want me to come back to you? Okay. If that I'm going to pass over you just for a second to get to Brian, since he hasn't had a chance to talk yet. And I'll come back to you. Brian. Thanks, Patty. Very quickly, I'm on the leave it as is and not take this on. And I think for me, it just the tiebreaker gets this is educational for me. So I appreciate our conversation tonight, but the tiebreaker for me is we want it as easy as possible to vote. And if a candidate is looking at a ballot and gets confused, the likelihood of them just not voting at all increases. So that's, I guess, the tiebreaker for me to leave it as is. Ron, you ready with what you wanted to. Yes. Okay. Yes. Traditionally, historically, throughout the country, and all of the elections, the down ballot candidates get less attention. And I mean, for instance, in the national election, maybe only the president gets the votes for many people. Well, the problem is that if it's as complicated as it is, I think you're going to have fewer people willing to participate in the down ballot candidates. Okay. Evette. I see Mark saying, I don't know if he had a comment. He's before me on this one. Yeah, I'll go to I'll get him next. Go ahead, Evette. So I just have a clarifying question. So with the, the R.C.V., it would have the candidates would have to be 50% plus one, right? So that means we just recently had our election in district one and district seven. So had this been in place, we would have had to go back and vote again. No, may I through the chair clarify? Yes. So it'll be one ballot and you'll rank each person. So you would rank, you know, candidate A as your first choice, candidate B as your second choice, candidate C as your third choice. And then if your first, if candidate A had the lowest votes, that would be eliminated. And the registrar of voters would then count your number, your second choice. So the voter does not need to go back to the ballot at all. It's all in one group. It's all at the registrar of voters where that counting takes. Okay. Both of those districts was below 50%. So we would automatically went into the rank choice. Right. Whoever, right. So the one would have been eliminated, the whoever had the lowest votes, whichever candidate had the lowest votes would have been eliminated there. If those ballots identified a second choice, those votes would go to that second choice. Yeah. And so because based in those two districts, because so thinking back to those districts, district, Natalie's district, there was two candidates or three? Pardon. There was three or two. In Natalie's district, there were three. Three. It was three. Yeah. And in district one, there were four. Okay, Mark. Well, thank you very much. I think it's a fascinating topic. My head's a little spinning still, but I thought the presentations were very professional. I'm not leading heavily towards rank choice voting. I'm probably leading against it due to potential for confusion and maybe disassociating some vendors or some voters. Sorry. And then the process for the council appointments for vacant appointments, I think it's something that we should, we should fix first when we clean up the charter, because it sounded a bit confused during the council meeting or the government policy, procedure, ordinance or what. And that was, that was confusing to folks right there. So they've got to just type that up in the charter. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else want to add anything to the discussion? Because I think what we'll do is just take tonight an audible vote so that we can kind of complete this thing. I'm hearing most of the people that are speaking are against it. So if we want to continue the discussion, let's do that. But at the end of the discussion, I'd like to take an audible vote to see whether we're going to pass this along to council or not. So Scott, you have something else to say? Yeah. Again, pulling off of what Ben mentioned, you know, and, and, and Logan to a certain sense, say looking forward to the time when there's eight candidates. I know how my mind works on this. I have like a higher level. There may be three candidates I'm really interested in, but if I'm doing ranked vote after I go one, two, three, and if there's four, five, six and seven, and they're all the same, then I'm just randomly putting numbers on them or I'm not voting. And so I think, I think some of the stuff it shows by the number of people that drop off because I'd be afraid to vote. For someone I don't really feel strongly about, you know, and I think that's a that's a downside to to the right choice. Okay. Ron, you have more to say? I would like to know how do what the difference in the prices of the old system versus this system, the cost to the voters to the public. I don't know if Ms. Provo is still on through the chair, would you like me to respond? Yeah, yeah. And I think if not, maybe we could access her presentation because I think that had that it was like, it is. Yes, it is. So the current election for a district election is three to six dollars per voter. The ranked choice voting would add another dollar to one to three dollars per voter per election. So it's a, you know, instead of it being three to six, it could be six to nine up to six to nine. Thank you. That's that's great. And then so that's the election process, just the election cost estimate. And then as Ms. Proto indicated, you know, would have the startup cost of the 350, the annual costs of the 70,000 annual fee, and then the printing and ballot printing and educational materials cost as well. But currently, the district election is between three and six dollars per voter. And that number changes depending on how many measures are on the ballot and how many days. So that's that's what effect. That's why it's a range depends on what else is on the ballot. Actually, I was thinking about the total cost as opposed to as opposed to per voter because we've got other costs that we're going to have to be considering over the next few months. So they have any idea first last year, compared to last year, what would the difference in the prices have been the total cost? I think that those those numbers are pretty similar to what they were before. I'd have to do if I did a quick calculation, you know, it would be the prior cost would have been let's say it's averaged to 10,000 voters in the district would have been, you know, between boy, if I'm going to do my math right, 10,000 times three, 30,000 to 60,000 for each district election, it would now be between 60 and 90,000. Don't have to consider all the rest of the costs. Right. And I don't have income. Yeah, I don't have the cost of all the other associated increases. I don't have that in those dollar figures. Okay, big increase. Chris, you have another comment? Yes, just a very briefly pile on. I think also the very concept of ranked choice voting as a decision making tool to me is troublesome because I think that by its nature, it gives the most power or weight to the voters who by definition, supported the least supported candidate in the field and therefore can lead, I think, to results that do not reflect the majority of the will of the voters. But that's just piling on. Okay. Anybody else have, Ernesto? Thank you, Madam Chair. I really don't have anything to add. I think a lot of good points have been made by those that see this is not a place for us to be going to right now and I would support that. So I'm ready for a vote. Okay. Okay. Well, unless somebody else has something to say, what I'd like to do is Ms. Williams have you call an audible vote so we can kind of see where we are on this and where we're going? So if you could do that, that would be great. Okay. And I will just take a tally and I will start at the bottom of my roll call. Okay. Starting with member Weeks. I'm not in favor of right choice voting. Member Walsh. I'm not in favor. Member Villalobos. I'm against. Member Pitts. In support. Member Oliveris. No. Member Miner. Absolutely not. Member Miller. No. Member Mazia. Not in favor. Member Martinez. Support. Member Ling. No. Member Close. Not at this time. Member Diaz. I'm not in favor. Member Cunningham. I'm not in favor. Member Condren. Not at this time. Member Byrne. Forb. Member Bartley. Not in favor. Member Baddenford. This one was not at this time. Member Barber. Not at this time. Member Arizon. Not in favor. Chair Siscoe. I'm also not in favor at this time. So my tally shows three in support and 17 not in support. Okay. So with that, I'd like to, when we give our report to the city council report that the committee by these numbers is not in support of putting this on the ballot at this time. So anything else on this before we move to the next item? Okay. All right. And again, thanks to Ms. Proto for taking her time to do this presentation. So our next item is committee chair, city attorneys report. So Sue, anything to report? No, I don't have anything to report. And neither do I. We have no subcommittee reports, no written or electronic communications. We have a little bit more work to do on our future agenda items. I think what Sue and I were planning with this is that we would go through our remaining list of items that the council gave us. This might be a time to add your preference in if there's something else that you want the committee to be taking up. Am I correct about that, Sue? Yes. Thank you. Okay. So does everybody have a copy of what our remaining items are? Okay. Let me, I got some questions happening here. So, Brian, got a question? Just a future item. Last week, the selection by the council for the appointment, the open appointment for the district, it just got messy after the first two rounds. And my recollection is when Dick Dowd was appointed what three years ago, it was the same kind of got messy the third or fourth round. And maybe I think at least Ernesto was on council at that point. It feels like it's something that needs reviewed. And at that council meeting, they referenced that if there was going to be a change in that process, it had to come from here. So maybe that's just something that council can comment on. Doesn't have to be right now, but it might be something we want to look at. Sue, do you have any response to that? Sure. I'm happy to respond. Yes. It's been both this time and the just the last time have been not the cleanest process. But I do want to clarify that what's in the charter is the charter gives the council the choice of you can appoint someone or you can call a special election. If you appoint someone, then that person serves until the next general election. So Ms. McDonald will serve until next until certification of the November election. That's all that's in the charter. I believe the charter also provides that the council can provide additional procedures. So it's a council policy that sets forth that elimination system that they've used that they used both last time and this time. But that's by council policy. It's a resolution that the council can adjust. I do think it's would be worth the council looking at that policy and considering if there should be some changes to it. Again, it does provide for very specific process of the number of votes that are cast each round, how the votes are counted. You do need to get to four votes to take any council action. So that's that's the threshold. But in terms of a charter amendment, the charter just simply states you can either appoint or you can call a special election. If this committee wants to consider whether to adjust that language, maybe to require that the council call a special election, you know, we could certainly consider that. That answers my question. My concern was on the ultimate selection process, not which way we should go. So we'll keep it off our agenda. Thank you. If you have a question. Yes, it was in regards to the same thing. I was one of the 19 that was going for Julie Cone C and that process was really tough. And so I know soon stated that it was an ordinance or resolution. And is there any way possible that this information can go back to the city council for us to take a look at that because I have a fear that this is not the only time this is within the fourth year period that we've had to do this process. And it's a possibility real soon that we might have to do it again. And so it's I hear a lot of flak that comes from the community when the process is not done right. So I think that is something we really should take a look at and delve into that a little bit more to really clarify and get the voting down because it almost seemed like the ranked choice voting that is like what they were doing for that. And so we really need to make sure that the community feel like we're getting a fair shake when it comes to picking the next council member. And it doesn't feel that way every time we have one of these elections that go on. So I don't know what would be the next step for that. But I definitely want to have conversation about it. So to respond. Yeah, what would we do with that? Sure. What I would suggest is that, you know, maybe that this committee, it's not within the realm of this committee to decide the resolutions of the council, but it would certainly be this the committee could decide to give that message to council that this committee feels that the council should reexamine that the existing policy and consider revisions to that policy. So we could make that at the conclusion of our the work that we're doing in mending the charter. We could make it as part of the report that we hand off that the committee would like this taken up. Is that a method we could use? Okay. Yes. Okay. Logan. Sue, can you talk about what you envisioned being in the omnibus ballot measure? Sure. I don't have it all pinned down yet. So this is just kind of preliminary. One is that we will be looking at some changes to procurement procedures that are set forth in the in the charter to streamline some of our internal processes. We're looking at whether there's some as a charter city, whether we can carve out some exceptions to state law, we're looking at that. But those all have to do really with kind of our internal procurement procedures. I'm also anticipating that we will be looking at eliminating some of the provisions in the charter that are simply no longer relevant. They don't have to come out, but they're not relevant. We have provision about school districts and there's I think one or two others that just simply are no longer applicable. We'll also be looking at what I thought I would bring back to the committee when we look at the omnibus bill is the proposal that council made to consider a two-year budget. That's not technically within the omnibus bill. Maybe, maybe not. But I figure that's kind of a procedural, internal procedural issue that would be appropriate to discuss at that time. And yeah, the others, you know, maybe I'll bring back a little bit more discussion on the vacancy just to kind of pin that down. But those are the things that are in on my list right now. Okay. Can you, yeah, can you help us understand why all that can fit into one ballot measure? Why, why is it that I mean, I guess someone can sue us, but in your legal opinion, why would that pass legal muster? Because they'll be all internal, particularly if it depends on, on what all gets included. I realize that they're going to be some boundaries as to what might have to be carved out. But to the extent that it can be about kind of cleanup of the charter to streamline procedures and to eliminate unnecessary provisions, I think we can do that all on one ballot. The other element I'm sorry that I should have mentioned is that we are going to need to look at bringing the charter in line with district elections. I actually do not see that as being able to be part of the omnibus bill. Maybe I could be talked into it, but I think that's going to need to be a separate ballot to confirm that to confirm the district elections. Okay. Just one last thing. If you can find another example of an omnibus charter amendment that that'd be helpful so I can understand what other cities have done. Sure. And I can also bring we've done it the last several years so I can bring back what was included in those measures in the past as well. We'll think about a better name like the buffet table or appetizers spread, something like that other than omnibus. Yes, and I appreciate any suggestions on that because I just took that from kind of what gets used in the legislature and it's not a readily understandable term. Yeah. Okay, thanks a lot. Karen. Thanks Patty. I do have a couple things that when reading through the charter, the term citizen is used and I think maybe that needs to be revised or I know that needs to be revised to something else like resident. I can't remember if we talked about this last time, but talking about changing the review cycle for the charter so it doesn't coincide with the census. I mean, actually the way it's written now because it says no, I think it's no has to occur at least every 10 years so I think it's okay language now but it just would be a matter then of when we submit information to the council to say these are the things that we would like to occur even if the language doesn't change. And then Community Advisory Board is in the charter. I don't know if it needs to be. It's other than Board of Public Utilities. I think it's the only board that's in the charter and so I think that that needs to be looked at. And then also I know we reviewed early on the items that could only be accomplished via the charter versus those that could be done via ordinance and so I'd like to maybe revisit that list and so we only have a couple more items on the things that can only be done by the charter. Also in the charter they use the terms his and her and so I think that that needs to be updated. And then anything about campaign finance changes now that we're in districts I don't know if people have thought about that or not. So those are just some things that I've been thinking about. Mark. Okay, great. Thank you. I would be in favor of defining the process that the council uses to fill the vacancy. So right now in the charters either or the council can either leave the vacancy alone until the general election or make the appointment. If we're going to include making the appointment I think that we should know how that appointment will be made. And then I agree with Logan that if we're going to have an omnibus bill that we rename it but say and put in all else. Those are the two items with the budget process. It's possible we may want to spend some time on reviewing what actually what what parts of the charter are actually implemented now and what aren't. There may be some finance things that that haven't been implemented because they're too complicated. They're out of date. And they really don't serve us well. So I'd be interested in looking at the budget. What they mean by I don't know the budget all funds. I would kind of clean that up because it would be difficult to implement for for anybody. I think we ought to clean that up to help staff. Thank you. Anna. Hi good evening everyone. I'm kind of surprised that nobody I'm sure I'm not the only one that got that email I want to say last week but I want to say it was by Gregory Farron. Going off by what you bet was saying earlier. I mean if that's what the public is saying and you know community members are probably coming together and speaking about this topic I think that it is important for us to speak about especially when it was an email sent to all of us. And then also I wanted to make sure our recordings being posted on YouTube because I have a couple members of the community ask what the easiest way to actually process these videos and maybe somebody from the city from the city review charter committee also want to watch the videos as well. So I did notice that other YouTube videos of other committees are being posted so I just wanted to clarify that. So I can answer that part Anna. Our IT person did post those on YouTube after I received your email he was going to post those but just so you know that is not our official portal. All of the videos are on the city charter web portal the videos the minutes and the agendas that is our official archive and YouTube is not considered an official archive if the YouTube chooses to take those down we don't have any recourse to have them put it back up because it is not considered our official archive but after your email I did ask him to upload those to YouTube so they should be there but they are all of the videos are on the meeting portal for all of our boards and commissions for all our board and commissions videos agendas and minutes are posted. Okay thank you for clarifying that. Danny. So I'm in favor of also reviewing the appointing process of the city council members because it seemed like it was at the buck when it did kind of reflect the rcv that we've all been complaining about earlier today but one of the things that I wanted to see if we can talk about on the charter review is section nine for staff for the city council as we already are talking about making sure that they're compensated right properly I know the workload is pretty heavy for the city council members so I wanted to see if we can maybe review about staff for the city council and make some adjustments to that to the charter review they'll set also section 10 of the charter review number one says the council shall establish each year an allocation for public improvements within each district you know which the district representative after a notify public hearing can determine where that those funds are spent I'd like to I have more for more questions on that area specifically how is that calculated do the council members even know that that's there for them when is it available all the criteria's that are not in in number one I think we need to know that and I think that if we know in the council members understand what's available to them instead of thinking that it's a handout versus it's what's owed to them could help the community really thrive in knowing what's available to each council member under section 10 number one so can you respond to that but section 10 is about section 10 I have to pull up my my my charter section 10 is a bad believe is with the um with the cab money I believe it's the cab money it is okay it's the cabs community improvement grants that they allocate every year and then they bring those to council for approval once they make the that grant award to the different quadrants and associations but it is through the cab grants yeah so it's not money that the individual council members have to spend within their districts correct note also that at this point the cab districts are not aligned with the council districts but the council has indicated its intent to to align those um so I know um we were hoping to maybe prioritize the next set of items so that you could begin to prepare presentations but I'm wondering um rather than do that tonight from the existing list of the city council um if we could incorporate some of these suggestions have a new list but also have in front of us because some of the things on the list from the city council um kind of like the appointment process are handled in policy or handled in ordinances so that the committee has a real clear understanding of um what's in place now um and then um and then what we could do as the committee we could go again an audible vote give me your top three and we'll find the top three kind of a rank choice voting thing um does that sound okay or do you do you have a different feeling about what we should do with um I think that's fine I guess my only concern is that um where with the the calendar that um that I proposed and it was just a proposal um is that we would start to deal with we would start to address the committee's next priority uh at our March 16th meeting if we wait until our March 2nd meeting to get that direction that gives us a very short period of time um it gives us one week to pull materials together so um we can we can work with that um and and I do understand I do recall that we were gonna I was gonna provide and I'm sorry I didn't to do that um as to what is left on the council's list that could be done by ordinance versus what needs a charter uh amendment so yeah because some of those things we're already talking about including in an omnibus thing and I just think for clarity's sake I mean I realize it starts to put us up against a crunch but um we can yeah I can I can do that and uh we'll we'll just be we'll we'll we'll make some educated guesses and start preparing a couple of things and um so we can be on on board for the for both the 2nd and the 16th so okay so so maybe we can start with that before we move on to um the council compensation and um because we don't need to do any proposed ballot language for at large or rank choice voting right and then we can do the presentation on the omnibus which may help sort of narrow down the list that we have this set right that'll that'll okay with everybody I'm trying to make sure we handle this of a new name so that we can yeah find a new name for a new proposed schedule so okay and so yes we'll do that okay I just don't want us to go through the exercise of prioritizing something when we don't really know whether it's already been handled or whatever so if you're okay with that I think that that would be a better way to handle it is just start with that prioritization with some of what we've got here and and that list of things that have been handled by ordinance okay okay I will do that and I'll also mention that a couple of the things that were mentioned by by committee members were things that I neglected to mention but are I was considering as part of the omnibus measure again whether they end up all in one right a separate question but at least that we would be considering them and particularly the timing of of charter review so right right and then and we need to get a question the answer as to the potential for voting non-citizen voting okay yeah have a bit more information on that for the benefit of the committee so yeah okay um anything else on that sue any other questions okay I do have to do um ask for public comment on this item so I'm going to go ahead and open the public comment on this last item or future agenda items if you are participating by zoom use the raised hand feature if you're dialing in by phone dial star nine and the host will recognize you to speak for three minutes here Cisco I'm not seeing any hands be raised via zoom okay great um so with that I think we are unless anybody has anything to add we're safe to adjourn and I'll go ahead and adjourn this evening's meeting uh to meet again on March the second and again thank you all so thank you church take care