 This is Senate government operations. It is Thursday, January 14th, and today we are going to look at all things elections. What I'd like to do is, before we start the meeting, we had some training the other day on how to run Zoom meetings effectively, and so I'd like to just share some of those thoughts with you. Because, and if people are here who aren't normally in the committee, it might be helpful. Really, there are a few different types of participants in these meetings. There's the committee and our staff, Gail and the attorneys, and then there are people that we've asked to come as witnesses to testify, and then there are observers in the room who might be with us on the Zoom call, but they are observers, they aren't necessarily testifying, and then there are those people who are watching, if anybody is, on YouTube. I'm asking everybody except committee members, if you want to keep yourselves off mute, that's okay as long as you don't have noise in the background. But I'd like everybody else to remain on mute unless they're speaking or called on. And I know some people aren't used to the way we do this, but really in terms, we might ask for just general conversation after a while, but in terms of the way we listen to things is that the committee is, the committee are the people who are going to be making the decisions. So we are the ones who will be asking the questions and calling on people. So is there anything else that any committee member would like to add here to start off just in terms of kind of protocol and I will call on people. So everybody OK? All right, so yes, Senator Clarkson. My dear, I guess the one thing and it's an internal conversation and we should have it in committee, but I am reminded in this conversation that we we all need to be reminded about what happens if something disastrous happens, you know, which happens on some regularity, sometimes just technically and sometimes maybe an intent, something full of intent that would interrupt our work. So when we're off, when we're just us, we should we should discuss what our protocols are, you know, what we that we're what we're all clear about what we do. Yes. And as much as possible, we want to make sure that most of the committees are operating with the same set of rules. And I will say that I am asking people not to use chat. No, none of us are going to pay attention to chat. The only person that is going to be using chat is Gail. And that is if she wants to post links to documents that are referred to. Does that make does everybody OK with that? If we were if we were in the room, I consider chat sidebar conversations. And if we were in the committee room in person, if people were sitting on the side and having a conversation, I would tell them to be quiet or leave the room. So I'm asking people not to use chat. I don't know if we can't we can't disable it as long as we want Gail to have access to using it for posting links to documents. So. All right. So Secretary Condos, I think that we had a very successful election. We've just passed the town. We're calling it the town meeting bill, but we know it's more than that. It's the municipal annual meeting bill. And we just passed that out of the Senate and messaged it over to back to the House. So that should be on the governor's desk. I think I'm hoping tomorrow. So anyway, here we are. And what we're going to do is. Look at all things elections. We're going to hear from the secretary first. We does everybody know where their title seven all the committee members. Do you know where your title 17 book is? I think it's here. I just have to unearth it. Could it I might if you know I know Senator Rom, you don't have one. So I'm going to try and get you one. And then we're going to try and get the supplements that have to the to it, but not get new ones for all of us. So if you, Senator Polina and Senator Clarkson and Senator Kalmar, if you let me know where you think yours might be, if it's in the state house in your drawer or in your file cabinet or whatever, I will ask Mike to go rummage around and mail it to you. That's what I'm going to ask him to do to mail mine. So if you know where you think it is, I will ask him to do that. OK, I thought I'd brought mine home. But OK, well, we don't need to have it right now. Yeah, just OK. So and the way we're going to do this is we have one bill right now dealing with elections. Oh, first of all, I I really apologize. I should introduce Amaran first because Amaran has this is her debut kind of in terms of dealing with an issue with us in government operations. Oh, we welcome Amaran. Thank you. We I don't think we've actually all met you yet. I mean, we've seen you briefly. I'm Allison Clarkson, Windsor County. Nice to see you. You too. OK, well, everybody introduce yourselves then, I guess, if you haven't met her yet. Senator Polina, are you there? I'm back. Yes, I'm Anthony Polina, represent Washington County. Hello, Brian Call, more representing Rutland County. And Amaran's helping me with some bills. So I've had the pleasure to connect with her already. Keisha Rahm from Chilling County. Thank you. So welcome. And I think you'll find that this is probably the best committee to work. Or we like to think so. We tell everybody that enough times maybe they'll begin to believe us, right? It's a stupid competition. But what did you say, Senator Polina? I said it's a stupid competition. I said we've created a myth. Yeah, yeah, that's OK. So the way I think that we that unless there's a difference of opinion here, I think the way we are thinking of doing this elections issue, because there are so many, so many issues and so many things to address that we'll hear from people. We'll start making a list of the issues that we should be addressed and then start dealing with them one at a time for in groups as they make sense. We do have one bill already. I think I suspect we will have at least two more, if not more. So we'll kind of take them all and get all the ideas out. And then if that makes sense, because I don't I don't want to to get stuck on one bill. So committee, do you have anything to add to that or to disagree with? If you choose, I don't see anybody. I do see that we have somebody who normally isn't with us. I believe Tim, you aren't really aren't with us very often. Are you? Tim? No, no, I'm not, Senator White. It's good to see all of you. And I do pay my my respects, both to you as a fellow Wyndham County resident, fellow broadcaster, Senator Collamore, and long time contact of gosh, Senator Polina, a long time, but I'm still alive and well in my new role. Good, thank you. Well, we'll get to you in a while here. Thank you. Welcome. So with that, Senator Secretary Kondos, would you like to give us kind of a debriefing of what went well, what didn't go well, where we are, how the election went, where we should be going from now on? Absolutely, Senator White. And, you know, you and I have a long history on this committee going back many, probably almost two decades now. So that just shows how old we are. I do want to say before I get into it, I want to say thank you to this committee for the work you did on age 48 that just passed that you just moved through all stages to the back to the house so they could send to the governor. We certainly appreciate it. I know the cities and towns and school districts appreciate that work and we're ready to get started there. I know we had a very collaborative effort between town clerks, between VLCT, between the administration to get that bill to the point where we can move it forward in a quick manner. And you guys have come through with flying colors to get this thing out. So we really appreciate the effort you did there. I'm going to kind of give a kind of a background on where we were and where we are or where we've been. I can tell you that the elections team at the Secretary of State's office and, frankly, our town clerks have really had no downtime since probably last, I don't know, probably about a year ago. It's been one thing after another as we've gone. So I don't know what's the preferred method here. I've got I've got my presentation up, but are you guys using yours on your screen? We have your document here. OK, Madam Chair, if you'd prefer, I Gail has made me the giving me the ability to share my screen if you'd rather I presented it. Um, a committee, what do you think? I tend to not like it because then I can't see people. So I don't know when people have a question or a concern. So does everybody can everybody access it on the on our website? If if Chris, if you send it to Gail and she posts it, we can look at it on our other devices. He has it. It is. It's on our perfect document to our page today under documents there. And so you can if if that is best, that's the way I prefer just because I like to be able to see people in case they have a question or a concern. All right, well, we'll get started. So thank you. Obviously, slide one is just our title page. Slide two, to put it bluntly, it's this past year has been a blur. And in the order and timing of all the events that we've had that are I documented in this are approximate. And we have to recognize that the coronavirus first became a reality in Vermont back in around the March time frame. We had just missed town meeting day before staff was sent home to work remotely town town clerks were asked to reduce their hours or to protect themselves. So there was a lot of work, but we had to begin those discussions about what to do in case this thing continued on. And I think most of us thought it was going to go away before summer, but that didn't happen. So we started having phone meetings about the open meeting law about elections in March. Act 92 late in March was signed into law by the governor. And it granted both he and I the temporary authority to make elections procedures changes in order to respond to covid. And we issued a directive that the towns that had not either not had their town meetings yet, because not all town meetings are held on the first Tuesday of March or school districts that sometimes have school votes later on or revotes for failed budgets. So in April, we started to plan for the worst and hope for the best. We strategized how to safely conduct 2020 elections. We started having regular meetings with the clerks and with the governor's team. We came out with a directive that permitted new elections processes at the local level so that they could proactively mail a ballot, curbside voting, outdoor voting, polling place, health and safety. Chris, if you could get ready to post that drive up that we'd had in southern Vermont, that'd be great. The governor and I do not did not agree to permit universal mail ballots for the general election at the at this time in April. He wanted to wait until after the primary to decide. We told the governor's office that it was impossible for us to wait. There was too much work, too much infrastructure, too much detail. If we waited until after we had to we actually had to start making contracts, start doing the detailed work, the focus, you know, back in April. Will started having at that time weekly meetings with with the U.S. Postal Service in May, the governor continued to want to wait until after the primary, despite our discussions about the the needs that we had to be that needed to be completed before the legislature restarted the process to remove the governor's role at which was, by the way, at his request. He actually said I never asked for this and wouldn't bother me if the legislature took me out. We engaged in other partners, legal women voters, AARP, V-PURG. I'm just trying to think I think there's, you know, there was several other partners that we worked with and in order to build our election communication broadly, we had we watched other states primaries. Now, keep in mind that the majority of states have their primaries before July 4th or statewide primaries. So we were watching what other states were doing during this COVID crisis and trying to learn from what they were doing. We started to line up mail and printing vendors, getting ready for that. We tried to use a Vermont company, but they decided that it was this was too big a project for them. We started securing PPE, personal protective equipment for polling places. We actually purchased what we call infection prevention kits that included hand sanitizer, sanitizing wipes, gloves, face masks and sent that all to the to the towns to for each polling place that they had. Larger towns got two kits, smaller towns got one. And we continued that work with the Postal Service, which as you will see, that will be a theme that was constant during this whole process. In June, there was still lots of legislative work going on and we were still planning for a primary and we had to assume that we would have a mass mailing in June. We had to make sure that decision that a mass mailing to all voters would occur in the fall. We continued that work with the Postal Service. The legislative work continued with with proposed amendments. We had to deal with issues of fear of the voter fraud, of ballot harvesting. We prepared a primary postcard with a return card to the town clerks, and it was a slightly different process for this one than what we had for the general election. So the the postcard was actually open to be forwarded to wherever the forwarding address for that particular person was based on the NCOA, the National Change of Address system that the post office operates. We had to continue having clerk's meetings. We mailed out those ballot request postcards in late June, and we started to receive them back almost immediately. I think that you've got several clerks here on this call. They will tell you that they received a lot of them back. Some of them undeliverable and but they were all designed to help the clerks clean up their their checklist a little bit. We had Act 135, which did remove the governor, and that became law without the governor's signature. In July, we moved we were full speed ahead with the mailing primary. It was approaching real fast. We had continued communication and planning with the clerks. I think the many the clerks that are on this call will probably tell you that will was in touch with them two to three times a week during this from July on until November. Early voting began at the end of June. We had voter education and outreach beginning. We conducted media availability. Typically, we would hold one media availability before the general election. We chose to have several before the primary and another couple before the general election, just so that the media had all the information they needed to to convey to the public what we were doing. We continued that work with the Postal Service. And this was the the time period where the Postal Postmaster General and D.C. expressed concern about mail delivery times and said to plan on 7 to 10 days. We had a slightly different approach here in Vermont, but we still planned on using this 7 to 10 day marker as a kind of as a marker for for voters to use. And we'll get more into that in a minute. In August, we conducted the primary while still planning for a mass mailing to all voters in the fall of communications. We had a communications push to register, request and return to sign, select, and seal, and then send or come vote in person. And of course, we had a very successful primary election day. We had a couple of recounts. We had post-election work. Which included finalizing the ballots for the general election. Post office concerns continued. The Attorney General joined a national lawsuit to force the the post office to stop any changes that they were making at that time, that it was not helpful in the middle of an election process. In September, logistics logistics, logistics, and we had lots of them. We had to get the word out about the changes, the options that were available. We had to continue to hold the clerk's meeting to debrief, to learn from the primary, what we needed to do for the general. And as we were making changes for the general, we had to will and his team had to create and design and design and create the ballots in Vermont. We have 275 different ballots that had to be created, sent to the printers with a corresponding number of how many. I know we'll had several communications with town clerks about how many ballots they wanted besides what we were sending out to make sure that they had enough for in-person polls. We had two losses that challenged the vote by mail, one in federal court, one in state court, the Attorney General's office handled both of them, and both were dismissed. We were heavily engaged in with our communications partners for voter education and outreach. Example, AARP put out a postcard to all of its members, some almost 80,000. And that reaches something like 175,000 people, basically saying, you know, you're going to be mailed about it. It's coming to you, you know, fill it out and return it as quickly as you can, because we don't know what the situation is otherwise. Let's see, September, we continued. How, how are we going to get the word out? We had ballots starting to hit mailboxes, emails were starting to hit our inboxes. And I'm sure that the town clerks will tell you that they had a ton of emails coming to them and phone calls from their constituents as well. We had to continue to coordinate the ballot requests for after the mass mailing. So we mailed out about 438,000 ballots. To the active registered voters on the list, but then people would contact the clerk. If they were new, if they had moved, whatever the situation was, they didn't receive their ballot and the clerks had to handle those requests from their, from their offices. We had, what we did was we mailed out about 438,000. What we did was we mailed them out not all at once, but in the same time period. So we had about a seven to 10 day period where every few days there was a big batch of envelopes that went out, the ballots that went out. We kept a website active and updated on a daily basis of which towns had been sent their ballots. So people would know we had, of course, lots of media and lots of questions. We did have a barcode issue. It was not a barcode on the certificate envelope. It was the barcode on the outside envelope that created a little bit of a, the post office caught it right away and implemented some immediate steps to handle by manually those ballot, those envelopes as they were coming back. It was the code was wrong and so they couldn't use the automated system in order to move that, those clearly through, but we had a, as I said earlier, Will had a great rapport working with his Postal Service liaison who handles Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine political mail, political and campaign mail. And during this whole time period, as we got closer and closer to November, Will was on the phone not once a week, but probably two or three times a week. And we had just had a great rapport with the Postal Service here in Vermont. In October, we had completed the initial mailing of about 438,000 ballots by the end of, by the 1st of October. We had a little bit of fallout. There were a couple of us of towns that, well, I think Stacey's on this phone, on this Zoom call and Stacey can tell you there was, there was St. Jay and St. Albans had gotten, it wasn't, the ballot was wrong, it was that the envelopes were wrong, the return address envelopes. So we did have a couple of issues that we had to straighten out, but it was really, when you think about 438,000 ballots that were mailed out, we had very little problems with it. We had to continue to hone the polling place guidance, how they were going to, how people were going to, how the town clerks would set up their polling places, what guidelines they needed to follow as far as social distancing. We also had to provide some Election Day guidance for them on different issues as well. We also, starting back in May, actually, we started having conversations with some of the clerks to find out if they expected a problem with poll workers. And I will tell you that back in May, there was some concern that they may not have enough poll workers because people were telling them the clerks, some of the clerks were telling them that some of their usual poll workers were declining to work. But as we got closer, it really, I don't think that was as big a problem as we expected. We did have the Vermont Bar Association stepped up and did a mailing to make sure that, to their members, to ask them if they wanted to help to contact their town clerks. We don't have a clue as to how many of that may have occurred, but we do know that there were some attorneys around the state that volunteered. We applied for a grant with the Center for Election Integrity and Research. They had a sizable grant that they were awarding to the states. We asked for 400,000 so that we could help. And our mission on using that money was to, excuse me, was to focus on communicating to the voters about how to get their ballot back in the best way. I think the town clerks will also agree with us that early mail voting was at a record pace during this time period. Jim, may I just interrupt you for a second? I've gotten a couple texts, Madam Chair, saying we're not live on YouTube, even though it says we're live on YouTube. Gail, I don't know if you can investigate that, but I've got several texts from people trying to watch and they aren't able to access it. I am aware of this and you can direct people to our agenda. I've put up the link for today's live YouTube stream on our agenda. So look at the top of the agenda and it will have a link for today's live YouTube stream. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for letting me know. So as October was coming to a close, we started working with the town clerks about in-person voting preparation. We had our communications and outreach plans that we were using, which included the most interesting man in the world, the Dasecki's commercials, who happens to live in Vermont down in the Manchester area. Actually, all three of these folks, celebrities, did pro bono for us and we did a digital outreach that we could use as a media outreach, PSA on TV and on social media. We also had Grace Potter for another demographic. Many of you probably know she's a musician, singer, and she did a piece for us as well as the Lager, who was another demographic and we really hammered those on social media and the TV media to make sure that people were seeing it. It was all designed to help get people aware of how important it was to get their ballots in the mail at least seven to ten days before. So we did that. We had poll watcher threats and security planning. We actually did a lot of work with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. Those partners included the U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI, Homeland Security, State Police, the Department of Public Safety, sheriffs, state's attorneys as we were getting a lot of concern around what we were seeing elsewhere in the country. So we worked with them to ensure that we had a plan in place for not only communication but also what to do in the case of an actual threat. We issued polling place guidelines to the clerks. We had an addendum to the directive that included information about poll watchers, what the poll watchers are allowed to do, about how in-person voting should go along, and what to do about additional mailing of requested ballots. November came. It was finally here. We were braced for impact. And the good news is November 3rd was a very successful day for Vermont. Our election night's reporting system worked well. Our statewide canvass, the following Tuesday, went successfully. Republican Democrat and progressive representative signed off on the canvass. The town clerk, I can't say enough about the support and the work that the town clerks did during this whole six, eight-month period to make sure that this went well. They were with us at every step of the way, and we relied a lot on them as we usually do, but they really were the backbone of what we did. And a lot of the credit for Vermont doing it right goes to the town clerks around the state. And we've seen contested results in other states, and we've seen those contested results continue. You know, we did make a decision in late November, actually around the 30th of November, to postpone our election audit, which is supposed to occur within 30 days. And that was because the coronavirus was beginning to surge again. And we had consulted with Dr. Levine at the Department of Health, and since the audit team was coming out of Boston, and Boston and Massachusetts was having a higher incidence of surge than Vermont, he agreed with us to postpone. The good news that I think this committee probably knows is that the ballots, we have paper ballots, that's the first thing, but the paper ballots are secured in Tampa proof bags with sealed numbered sealed seals that protect the integrity of those. And we knew that the clerks hold those in their vaults, so that we were confident that we could do this at a later date when things got better. We will again consult with the Department of Health before we make that decision. But for right now, we're going to hold off on that post election audit. And finally, in December, it became official. We thought that the elections team was going to finally take a deep breath and get a few days off. I think if you were to talk to Will, he would tell you that that didn't occur. We started getting calls from town clerks, from citizens, from select boards, school boards. What do we do about town meeting day? And that's when we started to have conversations with the governor's team, with legislative leaders, with city and town clerks, with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. And we all agreed that we had to do something and we had to do it quickly because to put it bluntly, today is the deadline for issues to be placed on a ballot. So we knew that it had to happen fast. Next week is the deadline for candidates. By the way, along the way here, we had the Electoral College met and voted here in Vermont. Your committee member, Senator Rahm, was one of the electors for that. And obviously, the rest is kind of history there. I do want to, let's see here, let me go, so lessons learned. What worked well? Well, first off, from the August primary, I just want to say that Vermonters really embraced vote by mail. And here you can see turnout rates for the primary from 2012 to 2020. And then you can also see the after with the letters AB, which is absentee ballot, you can see the percentage of ballots that were cast. And you can see the difference for 2020. We had a large increase for overall participation for the primary. And keep in mind what a primary is. The primary is a party nominating process. It's not really an official state election, but we treat it that way. But it's really a party of nominating process. But the key number that I really was impressed with was 73% of the ballots cast, which we, by the way, set a record 73% of those ballots cast were done either by absentee ballot, early mail, by mail, or early drop off at the clerk's office. We had early voting, outdoor voting, curbside voting. Chris, if you've got that picture, this is a good time to show it. Sure. Give me just a minute here. Keep talking, Jim. I'll give it another key was the drop boxes. We provided funding to the clerks to purchase, whether it was a wall mounted through the door or through the wall or a freestanding outside ballot box drop box. We provided those. So this was Dorset, Vermont, at their drive up voting. Just to let you know. Great. And notice everybody had a mask on. Not the horse. XAO, the horse is missing a mask. So that was Dorset, Vermont. And we were pretty excited about it. And frankly, in Berry, you had the, they used their hockey rink where you would drive in one end of the hockey rink, right across the rink, vote, and out the other end. I think that's how it worked, didn't it, Carol? And that was pretty successful. So our town clerks really were creative in making sure that their, their citizens were protected, but at the same time, allowed to vote. So in the August primary, what are the things that worked well? Well, we had low numbers at the polls, which helps with the general health and safety for the, not only the voters, but also the poll workers. We had a lot of clerk communication and buy-in. We had the postcard mailing, which we did as a central mailing out of our, well, not our office, but as a mailhouse. We had the postal service in general really was helpful. There are many, I don't know if any of these clerks have any stories, but I can tell you that there were many tremendous stories about how the postal service went above and beyond. In Lincoln, the postal postmaster in Bristol would call up Sally Ober and let her know that she had just received several ballot envelopes, and Sally would send someone down to pick them up to make sure they got counted. In Randolph, Vermont, the postal workers were going around from blue box to blue box on street corners to check the box to see if there was any postal, any ballot mail in there, and then would pull it out and take it to the town clerk down that way. So we had a lot of stories like that. So they really were, it was a tremendous effort by the postal service here in Vermont. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but I know that Will and his team worked very, very closely with the postal service. The town clerks were able to do quite a bit of checklist cleanup via the postcard process. There's still some stuff that they have to follow the federal laws on, but they were able to clean up their checklist a lot more. We allowed the town clerks to have 30 days of early processing. It was up to them. It was not mandated, but they were given the opportunity to begin processing ballots 30 days ahead. As I said earlier, we provided PPE distribution. The state emergency operation center had contacted us and gave us additional PPE that we were able to share with our town clerks to make sure that they had enough. We also had Anhauser-Busch, believe it or not, had switched over from brewing beer to brewing a hand sanitizer, and they provided one gallon jugs with pumps on them to every secretary of state in the country. You just placed your order and they would ship it to us, and then Will and his team would ship it out to the town clerks to make sure that they had plenty of hand sanitizer. Again, we had tremendous voter education with our media and partners. We had the clerk processing of ballot requests and address changes, and we had that flexibility that you guys provided to use directives. What didn't work so well in August? We had defective ballots, more than we've ever had before. There were three main reasons. One, as you know, there are three ballots that have to go out. When anybody wants to vote in the primary, there are three ballots. You vote one, return all three. So some of the problems were that people didn't return the two that they weren't using, or they filled out more than one. And the third was that they didn't sign their certificate envelope. We also had some bad addresses that we had to correct, but we continued to work our way through it. As far as defective ballots, just so you know, we normally have 1% or less. We had 3.5% for the primary. The primary is always higher than the general election for defective, but that's because of the process of having those three ballots. And you know, we'll have further discussions with this committee about ways to try to diminish that in the future. Our elections and leadership team were sometimes overwhelmed. I can tell you that as a matter of fact. I mean, Chris and Eric and myself became honorary members of the elections team. Might I remind you, our elections team is five people. We have the smallest elections team in the country by far. And if they didn't work six and seven days a week, sometimes 10, 12 hours a day, we could not have pulled this off. The clerks also were overwhelmed. They were overwhelmed with requests, with processing, with phone calls, emails from their constituents. It was a constant battle, but I can't say, again, I can't say enough about how well the clerks pulled through. We also had that joint authority with the governor that we used to try to deal with some of these issues. Let's see here. So in the November general election, we had participation rates that again set records. You can see over the last five year, five election cycles. This also set a record this year. We had 374,000 voters who actually cast ballots. And again, 75% cast an absentee ballot either by mail or drop off at the clerk's office or bringing it to the poll place. We had early voting, the same as before. We did outdoor voting, curbside voting, and again, drop boxes. I don't know if I said it, but we had 175 towns that purchased drop boxes that we had reimbursed them for. Again, what worked well, we had low numbers and general health and safety at the polling places. We had that 30-day early processing, which I think the clerks will tell you was key to their being able to process and report that night. We had election night reporting. We had 98% of the towns reporting by midnight of election night. And they couldn't have done it without that 30-day window to process ballots. We had strong clerk communication. Will and his team did several, generally at least two-a-week directives or guidance to the clerks. We had law enforcement coordination, again, federal, state, and local. We were in constant communication with our central mailhouse and the Postal Service. We had to up our game on cyber defenses. I've always been caught saying that cybersecurity is like a race without a finish line. It's never ending. It's not going to go away. That is our new world, our new system that we have to worry about. We had very low defective rates. As I said, in the primary, we had 3.5%. In the general election, we had 1.5% of 1%. So it was amongst the lowest that we've ever had. And that I attribute to a lot of the voter education we did through the media, through our partners like VPurg and AAP and legal women voters, ACLU and others, through the celebrities and that we had help us with PSAs. It all helped us provide confidence to the voters that we had this. We were going to get this done. What didn't work well in November? To be honest, we did not much. But I will caveat that by saying if we're going to make this permanent, we don't expect that without making some serious changes to our systems. We actually have a lot of stuff that we need to look at. We have some checklist issues that have to be addressed for mailing errors. We have voter confusion, people thinking that there was no in-person voting. I'm going to be very blunt here. We've been fighting misinformation and disinformation from the president since probably October. He was out talking about how the election was rigged before the election even happened. And that was spreading through social media. Here's the concern. In 2016, we had very little contact with Facebook and Twitter. Fast forward to 2020, we had direct lines to both Facebook and Twitter. If we saw something online that was either factually wrong or misinformation of any kind, we could contact them and ask them to take it down. The problem is by the time we see it, millions of people could have already seen it. And so that became a real problem. I will tell you that we didn't have enough hours in the day for the Secretary of State's staff. And I'm sure the clerks will say the same thing that they didn't have enough time in the day, especially in the age of COVID, that they were strapped as well. Our elections team, we've made the decision. We've now had five people in elections for probably 10 to 15 years. We can't do this again without at least one more staff person. It just was overwhelming to us. I know the clerks were overwhelmed. And to put it bluntly, not all the clerks, as good a job as they did, they're not all equipped to handle the male volume that we had. You have clerks that work five days a week. You have clerks that work two hours a week. And that's not a knock because it's a function of the size of their town. But it really is, in some cases, overwhelming the amount of work. And everything we did this year from the Secretary of State's office was designed to try to take away some of that burden from the clerks, recognizing that there was still going to be some burden there because of all the mail that was coming through. As far as costs, we approximate the cost to be around $3 million. And there's a breakdown here. I don't want to go after each one of these at this time, but you can see what the cost was. We were fortunate. We had CARES Act money. We also had this grant to help us pay for some of this. But the CARES Act money, what we didn't spend is going back. We have no way of spending that. And going forward, we are going to need new tabulators. The ones we have now are, in some cases, 15 to 20 years old. And at the point, these are sold that the hackers don't even like to try to hack them. That's how bad they are. But they still work. And they work very, very well. And I want to be clear about one thing. Our scanners, our tabulators, all they do is count the ovals that are filled in. They don't do anything else. They don't create a ballot image that is kept or destroyed later. There's nothing like that at all. And they're not connected to the internet in any way. And I know that my former town, South Burlington, has been using these tabulators for many, many, many years without incident. When LHS is here, they're the vendor that we get the tabulators from. On election day, they have five people stationed in Vermont in different locations so that they can get to any town within minutes to be able to deal with any problems that may arise. So we were very fortunate in what happened here. There is a cost. If we're going to go forward, this is a cost that the legislature is going to have to determine where the money's coming from, because we don't have federal, we have some federal grant money. But a lot of that money is going to go towards new tabulators. A lot of that money will go towards new election management system upgrades. And the money is not finite. We don't get a yearly or annual grant from the federal government. Over the last basically 20 years, we've had three grant drops, one in 2004 or five in the last two in the last three years. And that's been the extent of the money that we have. But I'm very pleased that my predecessor, Will's predecessor, myself, we've been very frugal with that money. We have one of our five employees who is fully paid by the grant money. It can only be used, the grant money can only be used for federal elections. So we can't use that money for town meeting. We can't use that money for even House and Senate state legislative races. It has to be tied to federal races. Overall, Vermont's 2020 elections were a success. No Vermonter had to choose between their health and right to vote. Those were the two overriding criteria that we use for every decision we made. One, protect the right to vote for every Vermonter. And two, to protect the health and safety of not only our voters, but also our town clerks and their poll workers. We obviously shattered participation records in both the statewide primary and with the general election. We kept male participation high in person voting low and polling places safe. The unofficial report of results for both primary and general election were still reported on election night, unlike some of the other states around the country. We Vermont's handling of the 2020 elections has received accolades from across the country and universal approval from voting rights advocates and all political parties that Vermont did it right. And that really makes me proud as well. You folks should be proud. I know our town clerks are. We did a good job with that. We should carefully consider permanent vote by mail, but it's going to require statutory changes and resources if it's going to be if it's going to succeed. We can't do it the way we did it this year. So with that, I think I'll just end there and take any questions. So what I think I'll do before we ask you questions is let Will and Chris weigh in if they have anything additional to say here. And then I'd like to hear from the town clerks just a brief of what they if they agree with you of things they don't agree with just kind of how they how they saw it and from we have VPurg with us just kind of a very brief statement about what they saw. And so Will, I don't know if you have anything to add here, but we need to thank you. I think I'll let the deputy start if he does. Okay, thank you. Thank you, madam chair. I'll be very quick. I do just want to reemphasize a couple of things. Education and outreach I think was really key through this and we had so many great partners in that who are willing to step up and do their own little videos messaging to their constituencies, to their members. That was really, really helpful through all this and helped us keep the defective numbers down for the general and the voter participation rates high. So we were really lucky to do that. And we all got a crash course on how to get things out into the media and how to place digital and radio ads. And we were doing all sorts of things that we weren't used to doing in the Secretary of State's office. So it was like going through battle. We all came out stronger and closer on the other side and just really gratifying that we pulled it off successfully because this was just the it's hard to explain you just got a flavor of it from this PowerPoint. But this is one of the greatest professional challenges any of us has ever faced. And we made it through and hopefully no, as Jim likes to say, no Vermont or had to choose between their health and their right to vote, which was the goal throughout. And also just quickly want to emphasize how great the postal service was because we heard a lot of horror stories in a lot of other states. But our experience in Vermont was just really, really great. And then the last piece was this whole thing that was floating over the top of us with these security concerns, because we were hearing threatening things. We received threats in our office, ourself. All of our state and federal law enforcement partners were great. And we really coordinated around election day to include the state's attorneys to include the Attorney General's office, Homeland Security, State Police, to be ready to react if something happened on election day. And thankfully, we didn't need to activate any of that. But I want to thank them as well. And thank the committee for being the legislature for being so clear with how we were going to approach this. You saw the problems in other states where the legislators and secretaries of state and governor have been fighting and changing the rules right before election day. And that just left an opening for challenging the election and for voter confusion and long lines in the middle of a pandemic, which is exactly what we didn't want. We should be proud that Vermont did it the right way. Thank you. Thank you. Will, do you want to play in? Yeah, sure. And I'll keep it brief, too. I thank the secretary for reviewing a very high level of what we went through over the course of the year. But I would just say that, you know, that skim the surface. And there are so many stories to tell and additional details below that, you know, someday I may write a book. If I ever have time to do anything like that again. I was going to say, the deputy took the words out of my mouth that our coordination with the Postal Service was critical to a woman named Trina Stokes, who's their political male coordinator is an unsung hero in this process. There are a few of those scattered across the state that I could tell you about, too. One being the maintenance guy that works for the tabulator company, guy named Mike, another unsung hero in this process. But I think Senator White, I think the theme of the day was what worked and what didn't. And like we said in the slide, I think in a lot of ways, what we did is what worked. The results spoke for themselves. And I would characterize that that we embrace the concept of mailing a ballot to every voter. But then sort of with that as the starting point, we really incorporated it well into our unique existing structure of election administration, which essentially is the fact that we administer our elections at the local level in 246 towns and cities across the state with volunteer boards of civil authority and hardworking town clerks. And that's not an underlying election model that a proactive mailing of ballots to all voters has ever been laid on top of before. In the other states where it exists, those are big states with lots of voters in big cities, and elections are typically run at the county level in those states. And so counties have different voting systems, for instance. And it's just a very different model to lay the mailing of ballots on top of. I think it's interesting to me when I reflect on it that clearly because it was such a crisis and we needed to act so fast that that crisis forced us to only do what was necessary. We didn't attach a lot of bells and whistles to the process that were suggested. We didn't have time to overthink things. We really had to boil things down to what we needed to do that was absolutely necessary to get a ballot in the hands of all of our active voters to protect them from the virus at the polling places. So I think I would like everybody to keep that in mind moving forward when we're thinking about making this process permanent or some aspects of it permanent, that we do what's necessary. We don't overthink things. We don't latch on to ideas just because they've worked in other places. But we really consider what works for Vermont and our unique circumstances here. And I think the clerks, the ones who are on this call and the others will be a great resource in doing that, in telling us what they think makes sense and what doesn't. Our experience, certainly, we're going to bring a lot of knowledge to the table in that regard. But I think I want to keep focused on doing what's right and what makes sense for Vermont while embracing this concept, which clearly worked really well to increase turnout, which although the goal last year was safety, and it really was, it guided everything we did, a long-term and underlying goal for the office for me and for Secretary Kondo is the more people that participate in elections the better. And mailing a ballot proactively to all the voters for the general election clearly had that result. And so if we stay with that as the goal and we do what we need to do to get there, I think we're going to make some real improvements in the Vermont election system. To be specific, and I hope I don't get out ahead of my bosses here, but to me, to break it down a little more specifically for people, what worked was the mailing of ballots to all voters for the general election. What worked was doing that centrally from our office for a number of reasons, consistency being the main one of those and relieving the clerks of the work on that end of the absentee ballot process. We need to talk about August and what makes sense in August because the fact that we have to mail three ballots to voters and have them mail back to makes it much more difficult to do a proactive mailing in that context successfully. I think we certainly want to continue and expand the use of drop boxes. Jim mentioned a number over a hundred that actually applied for... Will, can I just... Sure. What I'd like to do is instead of getting into real specifics now about where we should go, just hear from the town clerks kind of about what worked and what didn't work because I know you have a long list of things that I've seen you present before, a long list of things that we need to address. And what I'd like to do is hear just from the town clerks now and then I don't know if you came with that list, but then I'd like to take just a short break to allow people to stand up and get their legs working again and then come back and then start getting into some of the details around where we go. Does that make sense? Totally fine and appreciated. I wasn't going there. I wasn't going to that whole list. I had about two more and I was trying to give you the what worked simplified from my perspective only related to the mailing of ballots. And all it was going to be was the drop boxes worked really well, the early processing worked really well, allowing the clerks to do that. And that I think where we need improvement is with the tracking of ballots, the notification to voters of whether their ballots defective or not, and an opportunity to cure those. Thank you. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I thought you were going to start going through your list here and that list is very long. I've seen it. I can be known to get long winded. Jim mentioned my bulletins to the clerks. I had I just wanted to quickly tell the story that I had at least two of them referred to them as literature over the course of the year. Okay, so while I see Donna seems to be offline right now. So let's go to John Odom. Do you want to weigh in here with and just a kind of a brief statement about what you thought really worked and not because what we're going to try and do is get real lists of real suggestions for what we need to do from now on. But I wanted us to have a kind of a general feeling about what worked and what didn't work before we get into those that list of details because I know I already have a list of about 45 things to change. So. Well, I mean, I'll be brief. Things worked really, really well. They worked. Identify yourself for the record, John. I'm sorry, John Odom, the Montpelier City Clerk. Yeah, things went. I mean, I was braced for all kinds of challenges and you didn't really get them. It went according to plan. Now I have a very supportive community, very supportive of this whole notion. So I certainly had that helping me. And I, that probably is something I should not understate because I'm sure other other clerks didn't weren't in the same situation. But I mean, in a real sense, even the things that did not go well went well. We had a lot of issues with our checklist and most of those were sort of worked out during the August process. So we did have a lot of balances. We did have a lot of work we need to do on the checklist in August showed that, but it also enabled us to do a lot of fixing it. So no, things were correct or fantastic. In terms of suggestions on going forward, I would continue the conversation that's been going on and really spend some time thinking about how this could work for town meeting elections because we do create the expectation then which could lead to confusion if we turn to all male in elections, but somehow not all male in elections, at least for those of us who use a ballot on town meeting day. I mean, not having that consistent as a recipe for all kinds of problems. And there are unique problems to doing it on town meeting day that we've been discussing, you all have been discussing for a while now, in particular that narrow gap between filing deadlines in the actual election. I mean, we were all in uncharted territory in November. Now clerks who are doing this, continuing to want to do this male end thing, we're in brand new uncharted territory. And it's pretty scary, but there'll have to be some consideration to structural changes unique to town meeting day rather than the other elections. That would be all. Thank you. Carol, do you want to? Yeah. And I have a list too, which I've already submitted to you guys, so you have it, of things to do going forward. But as far as recapping, I just want to echo what others have said that what was vitally important for us, of course, were the partnerships that we had with the Secretary of State's office, with the post office, with the league of cities and towns, with the legislature for putting together what we needed to move forward. But I think that the key to the success we had, and I think it'll also be a key for moving forward is options and maintaining flexibility. We looked at the different ways that clerks conducted August primaries and November elections, walk through, drive through, in person, outdoors. And we're talking about it for town meeting. Do we mail ballots? Do we do Australian ballot? Do we do mailing postcards? And I think that that flexibility is what's really important. As Will said, we're almost 250 different municipalities or different towns, I should say we're a lot more municipalities when you count school districts and things. And each one has its own character based on size, based on community. And we need to be able to develop what is right for our communities going forward. Thank you. Thank you. Tim, would you like to weigh in? Certainly. Thank you. Just one second, Tim. We will take that list. What I'd like to do maybe I said it already, I'm not sure, is come back after a short break so that we can get our legs working and then start looking at those lists. Because I know Carol, you've sent one. I don't know if the Secretary of State has their list with us, with them or not, but I bet they can quickly get it up. And I'm sure that town clerks have lists and VPIRG has a list, I'm sure. So we'll do that. Yeah. So Tim, I'm sorry. Not a problem. Thank you, Senator White. I think the thing that can't be overstated is the amount of support the Secretary of State's election team gave us as local town clerks, plus the fact that fellow clerks supported each other. And we kind of had to invent this on the way. I even found myself doing a YouTube video about how to fill out and return an absentee ballot because there have been so many in my town who've never done that before. So this is the kind of out of the box thinking that we've needed to do. Great. Thanks. And just so that you know, Tim didn't identify himself, but he is from Vernon. Yes. My apologies. Tim Arseneau, town clerk of Vernon. But many of you know me as Hall of Fame broadcaster Tim Johnson from WTSA in Gradleboro. Okay. Donna, are you with us? Yes, I am. Thank you. Yeah, most things worked out pretty well. The biggest thing that the Secretary of State's office gave us was a mail opener. It was the biggest hit in our office. It saved so much time. It was nice to be able to just put them through that the hours were saved were great. The biggest thing we had that allowed us to actually be productive and not kind of pull our hair out is the ability to open the ballots more than the day prior to the election. We received almost 11,000 ballots back early voting. There's no way we could have handled that on election day or the day before. So that's just my biggest thing that that was my lifesaver. Thank you. Thank you. Stacy? Yeah, same thing here that the ability to open the ballots and process them through the tabulator early was truly a lifesaver because it's not something we could have done either the day of the election or the day before. There was a lot of hours put in. August was a little rough for us in our office. We did 1,262 absentee ballots with a staff of two people out of my office. So I was the person stuffing the envelopes while my assistant was printing the mailing labels off and keeping us lined up. So we were putting out 100 to 150 ballots a day. And we're the clerk and treasurer's office. So everything else got put on the back burner due to that. So that was a lesson learned for us there. But yeah, the Secretary of State's office was great. I know I'm sure they all had their ears burning because at some point every notice that we got or directive, we might have been spitting or sputtering something, but it was always they were always there every time we had an email or a or call or a meltdown of some sort either by a clerk or a resident or something. But going forward, definitely some updates to the system and our checklist and how those get processed. We did have the few bloopers with mailing addresses from the system, but we now have them all worked out. Thank you. John? Yeah, I just want to add one quick thought first of all to echo all the compliments to the Secretary of State's office. They were terrific. But also, yeah, I know the Secretary of State referred to the money that would need to go into this, something to bear in mind from the other side. And again, I hate to always come back to money, but everything comes back to money. I think you're hearing some of the stories about how challenging this was for small staffs. And I know in our case, we were flooded with volunteers, which really made it possible. And we're getting a fair amount of volunteers for town meeting day, too. But probably think in terms of not necessarily thinking about floods of volunteers for every election being something sustainable. So that, you know, one of the things to think about is going to be probably some support for clerks to bring in extra help. So you can count on getting this done. Because there is, again, without that volunteer support for a lot of us, there's no margin for error. And it becomes a pretty questionable process. So money on the low end, too. I hate to throw that out. I'm not sure. But there it is. Sort of like election elves. Yeah, always are voluntary. So I'm going to ask Paul Burns to weigh in from V-PIRG from so from kind of an advocacy point of view and outsiders point of view, just kind of a high level what worked and what didn't work. And I assume you also have a list of things that you're going to present to us afterwards that you would like to see us going forward. But before we go to you, Paul, I just want to say, so we're thinking about huge changes here, right? And philosophical changes in the way we approach voting and everything. And the most meaningful thing was the letter opener. I just think that what we need to do is we need to not forget that sometimes those things that seem inconsequential are really, really helpful to people and make a huge difference. So thank you, Donna. Better late than never. Okay. So Paul. Thank you, Madam Chair. For the record, my name is Paul Burns. I'm the Executive Director of V-PIRG, which is the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. And I am pleased to join you today. I know all the members of the committee. And great to see you again virtually. We, as you know, work on a broad range of issues involving government reform and how to get more people to participate in the elections process. So we watched with interest and we were part of this process. I want to thank the Secretary of State and his staff joining others. Just tremendous work there, the clerks and the volunteers across the state. I will just want to echo others. I mean, it should be said and noted, just an amazing job. And you legislators deserve your credit as well, putting this program in place on short notice and even passing it twice. And that was important because we could not have waited. This would not have worked had you waited until after the primary to try to put something like this in place for the general election. I think that is really clear now. So credit goes to you, Madam Chair, members of the committee and the full legislature for making that happen. I should note, too, that there are many organizations that participated in the process of trying to make sure that this became the policy that a universally mailed ballot to all active and registered voters was something that happened for the general election. We had AARP and the League of Women Voters, ACLU, Rights and Democracy, Disability Rights Vermont, Justice for All, Main Street Alliance, Vermont Conservation Voters, VBSR, and there were others, including a number of individual businesses who participated in this and felt that it was really important for them to take a stand and to do this and to encourage their employees to get involved in a safe way. So lots, lots to be grateful for, I think, Darren. It's just worth noting. The lessons from my perspective, I agree with so much of what has been said that people were kept safe through this process or safer, at least voters, clerks, election workers. The turnout was tremendous. I will say that we have submitted to Gail just a bit of material on how, what the impact of vote by mail was in the individual Senate districts around the state as well. So you've heard that turnout statewide was 45,000 more voters than had ever voted before and about 73% of those voted early. And so we've, you, when you open that document, you'll see information about your own counties and how, you know, how did the rate of participation improve this year. I want to note too that this was not just a presidential election matter. Although voter turnout was higher than ever nationally, we also had some evidence in Vermont that vote, that sending all voters a ballot would increase the rate of participation going back to early May when the Essex Westford School District held their vote and found that participation in that local election increased. It was four times higher than the average rate of participation going back five years or so for annual votes there. So a 400% increase over more typical participation rates in that local election, which didn't have anything to do with the presidential race. So I just wanted to point out that I think that that this will is likely to increase participation even in a non-presidential year. Voters liked it for a number of reasons. Not only were they kept safer, but many of them told us and we included little quotes on some of the pieces that you'll read from people who we invited them to weigh in. What did you think about this? We had more than 100 people respond with their reasons for liking this system and a lot of them said that they could be more informed in filling out their ballots at their own leisure around their kitchen table, taking their time, maybe even taking the time to look up some information. They could go back to an article about the different candidates or what have you and so that was something that was appreciated by voters. It's important that we preserve the local polling places so that people can vote in person. There are people who feel that they need that or want that. This is important in particular for the disability rights community. There are a number of folks there who have particular issues where they can vote more effectively in person. The new American community, we heard from our partners there that it was important for them to have access to that in-person polling as well. So keeping that in place, keeping those options available, we think would be important as well. Having the multiple means of returning those ballots, we've already talked about that, but mail is one way, but the drop boxes or returning them to the offices, those are all important pieces. I want to say now that I don't think any of us probably doubt the fact that the election staff in the Secretary of State's office worked more than over time in this process. And if we are going to move forward as I hope that we will with making permanent this option for people to fill out their ballots at home by receiving these automatically mailed ballots, having more resources, more staff resources in the Secretary of State's office, certainly something that we think makes an awful lot of sense. So instead of just piling more on to those same five heroic individuals, maybe spreading that out among a little bit more human resources there, I think would be great. And we would keep a lot of what worked for 2020 automatically mailed ballots from the central location, the postage paid envelope. I don't know that that's been mentioned yet, but we think that that was important. And early processing of ballots and lots of public education as well. Hopefully we won't be swimming upstream against, you know, a lot of misinformation or as much misinformation in the future, but it's still really important to make sure that people understand how the system works. And so we also want to, if I don't know, do you want me to talk about anything else that could be improved now or do you want to hold off on that? Okay. No, what I want to do now is take a short break because I don't know about anybody else, but my legs have just stopped working and take a short break, come back in 15 minutes. Is that okay with everybody? 15 minutes? That'd be 10 after three. And then start looking at very specific lists of things. And I know that, Paul, I know you have specific lists. I know the Secretary of State has specific lists. Carol has some. I'm sure that everybody has, and what I'd like to do is ultimately get those lists and get them all in one single document, all the suggestions. And then we can start grouping them into kind of areas of, my brain has stopped working, too, in addition to my legs, I guess, but we can just start looking then at the individual suggestions and how we go forward and start taking testimony on them. I mean, that won't happen today, but we'll start looking at that so that we can have some reasonable conversations without looking at everything all at once. Does that make sense, committee? Senator Clarkson, I see you have. It does. I'd appreciate it if the committee could ask a few questions about this before we jump into the list making. Do you want to do that before you take a break, or do you want to take a walk? I want to stand up. Okay. We're going to take a break, and then we'll just have some general committee questions here before we go into the, yes, good suggestion. Okay. So we are on break. I think we're back. I'm just, yep. I want to make sure everybody's here. Anthony, are you? Oh, there you are. There you are. I'm sorry. All right. Well, I should have, I meant to just say let's have some committee discussion and questions and just discussion with the people that have just given us the information before we launch into specific requests. And we may not even get that far today. So what I would suggest is let's just have some general discussion now, Alice. Thank you, Senator Clarkson, for reminding me. And then we'll see how far we get today. And then when we're, when we've exhausted all our questions and comments, then we'll figure out where to go next. Does that make sense, committee? Okay. All right. So who has some questions, comments, concerns from what we have just heard from people? Senator Clarkson, I think you indicated that you had some questions. Well, I did. I did. I am thrilled about our elections. I think it went as well as, as I only had one constituent who was unhappy or, you know, at least was in communication. I thought they went wonderfully. And I have really applaud those clerks, the Secretary of State's office, all of us who were involved in making this happen. I guess I'm just a little frustrated that it's still only 73% of Vermonters turned out after having been handed their ballots on a silver platter. And I look at the other states that do mail, mail in, you know, vote by mail. And, you know, they, they have a range from 90%, 85%. Hawaii's is still pretty low, was lower than ours. And I just, you know, why, I guess my question is why, you know, we, I was really hoping we'd break 80%. And I guess I just was stunned that we given all the passion around this election that we're still at 73%. And I just wanted to know with all the clerks on hand and the Secretary of State's crowd, I mean, I think I just love to have any insights as to why we're still below 75%. So the way I'd like to do this is just kind of have a general conversation. So if you want to weigh in and respond to this and just have some conversation, just raise your hand so that we can do it in a kind of an orderly manner. So Carol. Yeah, I think that some of it has to do with the fact that, and I'm not against this, but I think that the automatic motor voter registration has had an impact because it has grown our checklists. I had before it went into effect, I had been working very hard to get our checklist down to a reasonable number. And I have seen a growth of about 20% or more in the number of voters since we went to the automatic voter registration. And unfortunately, there are people who don't care. And they're now on our checklists. And so, and I don't know if there's a fix to that, but I do know that that certainly makes a difference in the numbers. Interesting. Anybody else want to care, Donna? Another issue, I take these off, I can't hear myself. Another issue that we have is the fact that, and I don't know, Will, maybe you guys know more about this, but I think the ability to take someone off our checklist is tough. So we go through the challenge process, we go through the, we go through a lot of steps and two general elections. And even though it's really easy to add someone back on, it's really tough to get them back off, especially in South Burlington, when we have a lot of condos and transient people come and go and the registers of DMV and then they leave, but they don't get their license updated. You know, that's a lot of it as well. It does take a bit to get people off our checklist, but it's really easy to put them back on. Will, I saw you had your hand up. Yeah, just quickly, I was going to agree with Carol and Donna that it's, but essentially, what you're talking about, there's just what your denominator is, right, to determine voter turnout. And I'm sure, for instance, Paul's probably aware, there's a push out there that it makes a lot more sense if we all could start basing our voter turnout on the voting age population of a state rather than the actual registered voters, because it would give you a more meaningful sense of how turnout changes over time, because just what Carol said, as long as you keep adding voters to the bottom of your checklist, no matter if more people show up to vote, you're still going to be at the same or a lower voter turnout number. And then, and I think that the growth of the checklist surely is a result of automatic voter registration. And then Donna is spot on too, I ended with House GovOps this morning, given them a little lesson, I think everybody on this call knows that law, so I'm not going to do that. But the National Voter Registration Act is what controls the clerk's ability to remove people from their checklist for the reason of changing residency. And when you're removing someone from your checklist, just for the reason that they've moved out, you need to follow a whole process that Donna was referring to, where you send the challenge letter, wait for her reply, wait for them to show up to vote. And if neither of those two, if neither of those two things happen, you remove them after two federal elections. And then in general, though, I share Senator Clarkson's wonder at why we can't get people more engaged in the process of voting in this country generally. Senator Collomard. I have a whole different question. Sure. Okay. And I want to preface it by saying I don't mean this to be accusatory in any way. Will I have the utmost respect for everything you do for our elections? I'm not trying to imply there was any malfeasance or issues with our election here. But I think especially if we're going to consider making the mailing of ballots permanent, this is a fair question. Everything went well right now, but there's no guarantee that it always will. I read somewhere I don't remember where I think it was down south in Texas that there was a woman arrested for voter fraud. And I know that term is still very sensitive given what's happened in the country in the last month or so. But if if I were to have filled out my wife's ballot and or my sons, which arrived without them asking, in other words, they didn't request them through the absentee ballot process, but they just arrived. What security measures are in place now whereby we could have even known that let alone, you know, Remy did it and prosecuted me quite frankly. I think it's a fair question going forward. Again, I'm not suggesting that there was anything improper that was done in our own state. I think we did a really good job, but I think it's a fair question. Yeah, well, it's 100% a fair question, Senator Calamore. And if you were willing to forge the signature of your wife and or your son, so you fill out their ballot for them, put it in that certificate envelope and sign their name for them in some kind of manner that you plan will not be noticed by your town clerk is looking too much like your signature that also comes in with your own ballot. It's likely that that ballot will get processed and that your wife and or your son would be checked off the checklist as having voted at that point. The most significant check there, I've spoken with you guys about this before is that then if your wife or son showed up to vote on election day, their name would be checked off the checklist because the clerks are very diligent about keeping track of who they've received the ballot back from. And that's where questions would start to be raised. And the issue would start to be looked into at that point. We had instances of that this year. We get into more of the details of that at any point want. But it's really that one ballot for one voter that brings that to light at the time of the election. You can't get the vote back, but you can at least potentially go and prosecute the person for for voting on someone else's behalf. What your question necessarily sort of implies and brings up is a discussion of the concept of signature matching, which we don't do here in Vermont, but which we potentially could do. There are there's a lot to talk about there that I won't get into to their positives and negatives on both sides. I think of that policy. But for a process we could put in place to try and catch that earlier and right away would be a signature matching and verification process. Am I correct in assuming that in a town like South Burlington where Donna is, it's a different situation than it might be in Kirby or I'm just trying to think of a town where basically everybody knows everybody and and would know maybe have the potential at least to recognize a signature. You know what I'm trying to say? I think that's true. Yeah, I think I think it's more likely to go through the cracks in the bigger towns and cities. It's amazing to me how well the clerks know their voters. I know that's not a sufficient voter fraud protection, but it's amazing sort of the red flags that get raised if they they just see something from a household that they don't usually see over the course of other elections. Thank you. Anybody else want to weigh in on that? I'll burn test the little hand up. I don't. Oh, Paul, I don't. Okay. Yes. Okay. I see that hand now. I never look for little orange hands. I always look for this. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. I just on the first point that Senator Clarkson had raised. I understand that we would love to reach 100% participation, but the goal, I think, is to try to remove as many barriers as possible to voting. So that's why the automatic sending of the ballot to all active registered voters, in my opinion, makes so much sense along with automatic voter registration and other. We could even go further with automatic voter registration, for instance, as a separate conversation. But I think making it as easy as possible for anybody to participate, even if they make the decision very late in the process and they don't do it in every election is still a good thing from our perspective. And so they may not participate every time. And in those cases, they will bring down the overall percentage of participation. But you do what you can to remove all possible barriers. Why don't they participate? Well, there are lots of reasons for that. They don't see enough of a difference between the candidates, which is hard to imagine in this past election, in my opinion. But there you have it. With respect to Senator Collamore's question about the voter fraud, it's important also to recognize that in those situations, you may see an instance dealing with human beings, there may be these occasional situations where one person tries to steal and fraudulently send in a spouse's ballot or something. But that is illegal. They are doing so under a potential penalty of law here. And they might be caught. There are, as Will Sending pointed out, pros and cons to the signature verification. But in most places that have signature verification, I believe they have to have trained people who know how to check one signature against another. It's hard for me to imagine what the expense would be for Vermont to try to have trained people in every single clerk's office to verify those signatures. So there are challenges if we were to go that way too. Thanks for the opportunity. So Will, I have wanted to ask you about following up on Senator Clarkson's question about number of people, the percentage of people who vote. You suggested, and maybe I heard you wrong, but you suggested that if we took the percentage, if we based it on the population that could register and vote, instead of the checklists, then we could see a better better, better trends about it, because if the checklist numbers go up, but the base population doesn't go up. Am I wrong about that? Is that and is that something that can be done doing it that way instead? Yeah, like I said, and there's a trend towards that. That's exactly what I was saying is that you over time, you get a more accurate idea of how turnout fluctuates. Right. So why can't we do that? We can. Oh, how do you how do you do that? Well, you know the population. You know the demographics of people from 18 to death. The census provides, right, if a figure that is your voting age population by state. But isn't anybody on the checklist entitled to vote? Everybody on the note is what he's saying is that you would so you have a population. If you have a population of if you have a population of 100 that is eligible to vote and 30% of those people vote, whether they're what whatever they're on the checklist or not. Every time you can see if the next time 40% of them vote, you know that the voting trend has gone up. But if the checklist, if people are put on the checklist without them having any intention of voting, then that you can't see that increase in the trend. Am I does that make any sense? I think that's I don't. I guess I just don't understand that. I mean, I just assume everybody on the checklist is an eligible age to vote. Yes, but you have people who are not on the checklist who are eligible to vote. Everybody who's eligible to vote is not registered. Yeah, because Senator Rom. Madam Chair, I wanted to ask a different question, but I did want to underscore your point that that would actually be more accurate to redistricting as well because redistricting is all eligible voters, not just who's on the checklist and then you'd be able to see in a particular district, not who's on the checklist who voted, but how many of the eligible voters in that district voted, which helps in places like mine with UVM, etc. Before you ask your other question, can I ask the town clerks just to weigh in on whether that would be a huge issue to if we did it that way? Carol? I don't see it that it would have any impact on us as clerks. We're still going to work by the names on our checklist. Those are the people who are going to be able to vote. It just changes the denominator in calculating your percentage. Yep, okay. A different way to look at the data and just real quickly, if you guys are curious, actually on our website where we present turnout over the years for general elections, I forget the specific page. I can get it to you. We have a column that's voting age population too, so you can compare those two. Okay, great. That's good. Thank you. Donna, did you want to weigh in on that? Yeah, just a quick note. I always tell people, don't look at the percentage, look at the number of people who actually voted. That's going to tell you what you really need to know. You're right. Thank you. Senator Rom, you had a different... I suppose it's a little bit related, but I was more curious about how we might have closed the gap on people who tried to vote but had inaccuracies with their ballot or just what the... I know the percentage, I think, was a little bigger in the primary of spoiled ballots, and then it got smaller in the general. I'm just wondering what kind of tactics people deployed, and there are some bills, I think, that are going to come to us about trying to engage those tactics statewide, so just curious how that went for people. Anybody cared to weigh in? Will, I see you unmuted yourselves. Just from a number standpoint, yeah, it went down significantly. I think Secretary Kanda said it's about 3% or more in the primary and down to one half of 1% for the general election. Most of that is due to the nature of the mailing, the fact that you aren't mailing three ballots out and requiring the two unvoted ballots to come back in a separate envelope. Almost all of the defective reasons and the ones that are most common are related to the return of a ballot by mail. In the general election, basically the only two opportunities to have your ballot deemed defective are not signing the envelope or not putting the ballot in the envelope. And actually we've done work in these committees over the last four to six years to relax the requirements around defective ballots a little bit. We took the word seal out of the statute, for instance, so that the ballot envelope doesn't necessarily need to be sealed as long as the ballot's inside of it. A lot of the old envelopes that glue on them was drying out and so they were coming unsealed on the way to the clerk. We took out language, I think that implied that you had to, you're testing my memory here, but that you had to include the date in the town of residence when you're filling out the certificate and we made it more clear that the key thing is just the signature. As long as you have a signature on there, it's not going to be deemed defective at this point. But you're correct that that's a real point of interest for a lot of people is what we can do about reducing the number of defective ballots and providing an opportunity to correct it. Madam Chair, one follow-up was there were there were a lot of, not a lot, I shouldn't say a lot, a handful of people reached out to me and said they were very worried that they may have gotten it in the mail and then realized that their official name like Elizabeth is different than how they signed it like Beth. And I just wondered if that was up to the discretion of towns or how that's treated. Signed is signed whether it matches your official name on the checklist or not. Okay. I was going to say the same thing. I told voters who asked me about that, your signature is your signature. Whether it's your legal name or a sprawl that nobody can read, that's your signature. So that's where it would become an issue, of course, is if we moved into some kind of signature verification. John, I see you joined us. Did you want to comment? I just wanted to make sure you all saw me nodding my head in agreement. All right. So I, um, half of 1% is not a lot of defective ballots. I mean, I realized that it means that about 1,700 people didn't have their ballots counted. Is that, did I do that math right? I think so. And so 1,700 people, if all 1,700 were in one house district, that might make a difference. But only half of 1%, that's impressive. Yeah. I think that's pretty amazing. And I think everybody said that a lot of that was due to all the education that was conducted ahead of time. So anybody have any other issues or questions or concerns at this point or just comments to make about the election? Yes, Alice, Senator Clark. May I, may I just follow up? I want you just said that only half of 1% were defective. Does that mean, what does that mean, that they couldn't be counted or that they were like Brian's situation where they, where people had put them in by, you know, in error and or with mal and tans or what, what does defective mean in this case? Well, do you want to? Means they aren't counted. Means they, okay, for whatever reason, a whole host of reasons. There's five. Okay. And it's a specific statute. Yep. Right. For the five reasons that weren't counted. Anybody else have any, Senator Polina? Yeah, just quickly. I just want to add my appreciation to the others who've spoken about what a good job Secretary of State's office did and how much faith we had in the fact that you folks were going to be able to carry on and carry through the way you did. It was really impressive and felt good to know that you guys were doing such a good job. I also find it interesting that we're having a very positive conversation about what happened. I don't know what it is. I kind of feel like it's a little bit the quiet before the storm kind of thing. You know, I mean, it's interesting to me that I don't know whether interesting is the right word, but I'm glad that folks who are most deeply involved in carrying this through seem to be committed to trying to make it permanent or at least continue to improve upon the system. And I just, I just point that out. I thought there would be a lot more controversy then at this point than there seems to be. I know that's partly depends on who's in the room, but I still think it's more positive than I thought it would be. And I like that. I feel good about that. I will add on to that, that one of the things that I see as a real positive point here and a validation of the election and how we did it was the fact that in April and May and June and July, the governor did not was not necessarily in favor of mailing out ballots. And now the governor is in favor of mailing out ballots and has actually in our conversations about the municipalities annual meetings suggested that it should be mandatory. So, so it seems to me that the many of the doubters have been convinced that it was a good move, whether we move forward with it or not that at least it was for that time was a was positive. Tim. Thank you, Senator. My suggestion would be that if we go that route we should include lots more voter education because, as you know, we in Vernon are off the beaten track. So we would need to get ourselves up to speed there. Are you actually in Vermont? Yes, we are. We are indeed south of Route 4. We're hugged too closely by the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders. But it wasn't you that tried to secede. It was Guilford that tried to secede, right? No, we actually love being in Vermont. I wouldn't be any place else. I know. So any other comments, questions, concerns right now about kind of general what happened and where we might go. And then we will this is going to be a long conversation. I mean, this is because anything we do around elections has to be done this year. Because we we simply cannot make changes to the elections during an election year, which will be next year. So any changes that we do will have to be out of our committee. And I don't know the house might be doing the same things and we might have passing bills, but we'll work that out with House government operations. But anything we do has to meet the crossover in order to be finished by May, hopefully May. Carol? I just wanted to let you know, yes, the house is doing the same thing. They are setting up a very similar looking meeting next Tuesday. So. Oh, good. Okay. So do we want to jump into suggestions and lists here? Committee, I'm going to leave this up to you how you would like to do this. It's a quarter to four. I do know that the when the Secretary of State gave us the list of things that they were proposing, it took about an hour. Was that May, right, Chris? Was that about? Madam Chair, that was for all of our divisions. And I think. No, no, no, no, no. Well, there was a little bit with OPR, but mostly it was this long list of election. Please, please don't write in the amaran like that. She hasn't seen. In any case, so I do know that people have these lists that they would like to get to us. And committee, I'm asking you here, do you want to start getting into those now? Or would you like me to collect the lists that people have and put them all in one document and attribute them to the their source so that we can see the ones that came from. There might be a suggestion that came from the Secretary of State and the town clerks and the VLCT and VPIRG. And so that we can see where they came from and who and then have put them together in a in one long list. Or what's your pleasure committee? I think having you do what you said or having somebody do what you said makes more sense. I think, you know, for, I don't know, I hate to be a party pooper, but I've been sitting in this chair since about a quarter to nine. And I think if we start going through everybody's lists, we'll be very attentive to whoever goes first and whoever goes second or third is going to get short shifted. It's not the honest truth. I think it'd be better to start fresh on another day. I'm fine with that. Anybody else on the committee? Senator Colomar? I believe the Senator from Washington District has captured my field. Senator Clarkson? And I think it would reduce duplication of both time and ideas. I think it would be great to get it put together so that we can see where the overlaps are. And I think that's a great suggestion and we'll be happy to help you. Good. Senator Rahm? That sounds efficient and I'm a very visual person, so grids or ways to compare and contrast ideas helps me a lot. Okay, so what I would suggest is that at this point, Carol may remember this. I know I'm sure Donna does. A few years ago we asked for suggestions on all things elections. Any suggestion whether it came out of this year's election or something that you had a big idea in your sleep last night and you want to put it on the list. Everybody get your lists of whatever you would like to see around election changes. Send them to Gail and me. Okay, and I will get them together by, we have next week's schedule done, so it won't be next week, but it'll be the week after that. And I'll send it out to everybody beforehand so that everybody can see. Does that make sense? Yes. Carol? I was just going to say I submitted my document earlier today, but it's a PDF. Would it be helpful to have a word version that can be cut and pasted from? Yeah, yes. I think that that would be helpful for having had a discussion earlier today about PDFs versus Word documents and that would be helpful. Yes, anything that is easier for this non-tech person? Anybody else have any? So I would also Carol ask, oh, I'm sorry, Will. Complete your thought if you'd like to come out of chair. Well, I was just going to say I would ask Carol and the town clerks to notify other town clerks if they have, I don't know if you put it out on your listserv or whatever, and I'll also tell VLCT and we have VPurg with us. And if you would let those other partners know that you worked with and I know that the League of Women Voters and Campaign for Vermont and oh, and there's Gwynne. She heard her name. So we can kind of get the list from everybody and there will be, I'm sure, issues that are in complete opposition to each other, but that's okay. That's what we need to start dealing with that. Okay. I'll put something out on the listserv, but I'll ask them to send responses to me and I'll compile so that you don't get 8,000 emails. Well, that's very nice of you. Thank you. Okay, Will. I just really quickly wanted to go back to your comments about what we're getting into here, because it reminded me of something that I wanted to convey and that the Secretary wanted to convey also. You're right in both things you said, which is that we're talking about a really big sort of fundamental change to how we do elections and particularly the absentee and early voting part of elections. So it's a big deal and a big project and you're also correct that we want to do whatever we're going to do for 2020, 2022 this year and not next year. When you put both those things together too, I just think it's important to remember that we have a long game too. And we should all try and think about how far down that road we get this biennium, right? And then we come right back in 2023 and keep working at it and make the next set of progress and change. But that was part of my comments before too about thinking about what we need to do right now that's necessary to keep this thing going, keep the momentum going, and then continue to build on it two years, four years, six years out from now. Well, some of us might be back in two years, four years, six years, and some of us may not. Me too. But somebody will be here. So committee, does that all sound okay to you then to to thank you, Senator Collamore. I assume that's a thumbs up not I want to speak. Okay. So let's do that. And everybody tell if your best friend has a couple ideas, tell them to send them in. But and committee members, let me know where your title 17 is. And I will ask Mike to get it because sometimes going looking at title 17 jogs your memory and says, Oh, that on page 37 is really stupid. Let's change it. I don't know what's on page 37. But anyway, so and Senator Rom, we will get you one. But the rest of us should use are the current ones that we have. And we're going to get the supplements mailed to us because they haven't reprinted title 17. So we can use the old one with the supplements. Okay. Does that sound good? Anybody else have anything else I want to say today? Thank you. Just a big thank you. Yeah, really. All right, so we will see you tomorrow and tomorrow we're going to look committee at the cares money that is in the new batch of money and what might be there. So anybody who wants to join us, we look at what money might be available for if there's anything for local government, EMS law enforcement, the anything within our jurisdiction. Okay. And Madam Chair, I sent you an email, but I was trying to keep a heart stop at three tomorrow, if possible, because I'm supposed to talk to former residents of St. Joseph's Orphanage at three in it. I kind of want to be there on time. That's well, we start at one. So if we go from one to three, I think we will do that. And if we have more that we need updating on, we can do it the next week. Will? That reminded me. I got an invite for tomorrow afternoon. But I feel like the status of the cares money for elections is pretty resolved. So if you don't need me, I would plan to not be there. Okay. Yeah, no, we just wanted to get everybody that kind of is in our our purview here to invite it if they wanted to, Carol. Same here. Okay. Madam Chair, was there an OPR issue on the agenda for tomorrow? I saw that Lauren Hibbert was invited to that. Only if there is cares money that would affect OPR or other areas of the Secretary of State. Thank you. Okay.