 Great. All right. So, Greg, did you have some questions or comments for us? Yeah, I did. Thanks. I'm Greg Dennis. I'm from one of the co-founders of voter choice Massachusetts, educating about ranked choice voting in the state. I just want to first thank you because I read a lot of the minutes and I've read all the minutes but I've seen how much you've really dug into the issue. I know also you received a report from Howie Fain some time ago that you looked into. Just as a general point, we're trying to pay attention to a lot of these implementations that cities and towns are looking into around the state and just feel free to reach out to us. We don't have all the answers, but maybe we could help with something in the future if you have any questions or want to try to rely on us in any way. I am curious. I do have a few questions. I was curious what the quote was for Democracy Suite from LHS. I've heard it was quite high. I know that East Hampton didn't pay a whole lot, but you know that they could have quoted you a lot more and how that price compares to the cost of holding a preliminary election each year. Is using Democracy Suite? Yes, they are. They paid an initial fee of $8,000 and they pay $800 a year for the license on that. Okay. I imagine that now that that's been negotiated that we could probably negotiate something similar to them. The quote they gave us at the original was not one that they expected us to pay, but was rather one based on statewide or region wide usage of the software, not municipality. So, yeah. Do you happen to have the number or can you can you share the number? I do not have it on me now. I also want to say that there's, there could be, I don't want to make any promises, but there could be grant money available to help defray any cost. There's enough sort of nonprofits interested in seeing this happen that some money could be perhaps made available from one of the nonprofits. And if you're interested in that, you could ask us and we could follow up. And then I also just had a question about the, the, I know you're looking into buying new voting machines so you're choosing between the ESS model and the Dominion model. Whether or not using the ESS and then you're putting those cast vote records through an off the shelf tabulator, like the universal tabulator or maybe something else that's free is possible even though that system as a whole isn't certified I'm not sure whether or not, but you could use it anyway, like Cambridge uses something else anyway, even though the system as a whole isn't certified. And I don't know if you investigated that question what the result of that was. And so those are my comments and my questions. Yeah, one of our, we'll answer because it's short. One of the, you know, solutions we looked at was using the whole democracy suite and that's certainly an option. And so is the, you know, open platform for the open source software for calculating it. But, you know, those are only a couple considerations. So, yeah. Thank you. Actually, can I ask Greg a question. Quickly, in 30 words or less, why do you think it failed in the state. The primary, we tried to replicate the successive main, which was a lot of door to door organizing a lot of house parties and meeting people and it's very hard to educate in a 30 second ad it takes a, like a two minute conversation, and with COVID, we couldn't have those conversations I think that's the primary reason. Okay, not a lot of things. It was very little educated opposition so much as there was just lack of education about what it was. Well, some of the concerns put forward by the, the governor and supporters were valid. You know, they just, you know, we didn't have time to also, you know, point out to people that, you know, those are valid concerns but this solution is still better. If that makes sense. Yeah. Something I would, I would note I went on to one of the webinars from the Facebook group promoting rank choice voting for the state. And I was kind of disappointed in it. The people who are presenting it were much more focused on how they got involved and their campaign, instead of educating the public. There was a question or two about well, if, if in fact, question to passes for the state. What are the implications of that for individual municipalities never got answered. Instead, there were these these long discussions of how can you get involved in this campaign. And that's a, that's a turn off to people who are wanting to tune in and get educated. Talk about every zoom meeting ever. I've been on for the number of zoom meetings I've been on for like half an hour to an hour and they spend half that time introducing themselves and it's like, don't care, just want to know how my retirement funds can be affected. Anyway, on that note, should we get started. I just want to briefly address the question we did meet with the town's attorney to get clarification on some of these voting system questions. And it sounds like so long as the underlying machine is certified, we can work with the state elections division to kind of get them on board with whatever software solution we then decide to pursue. There's some flexibility there but we need to work with them and keeping them happy will help the whole thing kind of move forward. Right, doesn't require formal approval as such. If I could add one more I'm sorry I'm taking up time but one more comment I would try not to let the Secretary of State's office scare you away from certain solutions. I think if you ask them what to do, they'll tell you to do the home rule that's like fully specified down to the minute detail and that you could you should only do using certain solutions and certain software systems whatever. East Hampton forgot about all that wrote a very, as you know, general home rule, and just did what they wanted to do and as soon as that gets passed by the legislature well now that's the law. So, you can, I would just avoid letting them scare you away from certain solutions that seems like it might make sense for your town. So we're ready to move to approving the last minutes. See if I can pull this up. See is this the last one when was our last meeting. September 29. Okay, so this one is seemed like long ago, I guess because it's all the elections and everything it's been that long. Just been a crazy time. All right, so this is the meeting that was really entirely focused on meeting with Lauren. So changes that anyone would like in these minutes. No, no changes by me. It's all right. There's one RVC in there as opposed to our CV. Sorry. Where's that. Where's that at. It was on the first page. There it is here. Yeah, it doesn't help that then cast vote record is CVR. So it's like the same, the same three letters and just keep scrambling them. Although she doesn't want us to use CVR. Yeah. But in the report, I just wrote it out that we should avoid too many acronyms anyway. Starts to look like Jingo. Anything else. Oh, I see another ranked boy. Question six. That must be my fingers. I don't see anything else. Move to approve as amended. Second. Right. On favor. Oh, hi. Hi. All right. So I guess the only changes are sketching those two. RCB things. So, yeah. Yeah. You can do anything. All right. So what's officially next. So, um, The main two things we need to get done are to get some of those last bits on the report done. And Lauren finally just sent us that special app language. And I think there's a bunch of things in there. And some of it's kind of relevant to what reg was saying that she wanted us to get fairly specific. I think we're going to need to think a little bit about that just exactly how. Specific in detail. We want the special act to be in terms of specifying the, the ring choice voting method as opposed to being more of a generic East Hampton approach of just broad strokes. So I guess officially following the agenda, we need to start the report and then the special act will kind of fall under things we couldn't to foresee because it just happened. So let's pull up. And John, I saw you just sent me some comments. How timely of me just sort of sprinkle those in as we go. I have comments as well, but I can just mention them as we pass by. Super. All right. So let me pull this up. I had one sort of global comment. And it's closely related to the, the recommendations section. It seems to me that it would be very helpful for the town council if we had a section. That explicitly identifies all the decisions that they need to make. Yeah, it should be read up front. So that they can essentially use that as a checklist. Yeah, we should present our findings right up front. And then they can go through the rationale and the reasoning afterwards. That makes sense to have an abstract. And I think that'll tie in with the timeline as well. With what they need to do as part of the timeline. Yeah. I mean, as much as we'd like to think that people will always go through and read everything. The reality is as many may not. And, you know, if, you know, under that assumption, we need to make sure that the most important information is right up front, which is here's what we want you to do. And I think the distinction that I was making was. That there are certain nuances that get explored in the text. Whether they should consider this or consider that. And it would be easy for them to miss that they have to make a decision regarding those sorts of things. So it's not, it's not like a large recommendation, you know, by this piece of equipment or best software. But rather the more subtle kinds of things that could easily be lost. All right. So, so we have a bunch of different things to do. So would you like. To start with, would you like to first go through the existing text and give me the comments you have on that? Or do you want to start. By drafting some of these. Parts, you know, so I think they're kind of related. So the timeline, these list of their. Things to highlight that needs to make sure they get done. By the town to implement. And one of my comments was also a much like a larger issue rather than going into the details. So. Before we jump in the details, I would like to address that, but. Yeah. Oh, okay. Basically the I, there was a lot of confusion for me around tabulation methods for rank choice ballots. And how that gets approached through the whole thing. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point because. Having read through it, there is a hard assumption that. This document's making that the person understands why multi choice or sorry. Multi seat races are more complicated to calculate. It does not explain it up front. It really has to because otherwise none of the details matter. Right. Like, oh, there's these different, you know, you know, we, the document basically says like, oh, well, multi seat, we have is more complicated. And so we have to discuss these different methods of calculating results. And if all the people go into, you know, go into this knowing the basic pitch that they've gotten about single seat victories, they're not going to understand any of it. And they're going to miss that logical first understanding of what the problem is. And so what follows is all these methods of dealing with that problem, but they don't know what the problem is. All they know is that it's theoretically more complicated and they don't really know why other than that. So I think that's a good idea. And I think that this is a good idea for us to be able to calculate results or winners. So I really strongly think that we need to put, like right upfront, a visual representation of, here is how, you know, votes get redistributed. In a general sense in multi seat elections. But how that gets calculated can vary based on, you know, how we decide to implement this. Here are the different ways that people have done it in the past. Right? Cause right now all it does is say multi seat winners are more complicated. And we've looked at Wiggum and, you know, the other come ones and, you know, well, we, you know, here are the pros and cons of those. And people really have like, even like going into it, just, you know, imagining myself as somebody with no information. I was like, I have no idea what they're talking about. Right? Like what does this apply to? How does this apply? I thought we just, hey, if the last person, you know, didn't get enough votes, you know, I'm not gonna let the next person off. And then we redistribute the votes. What's with all this, like calculations and stuff. Right? So we really need to make that case solid right up front. And I just want to interject. Um, I think Peggy is in the room, but Tanya, I can't get at her with your document up on the screen. Thank you. Let me get her. It will not let me in there. Why will it not let me in? Yeah. I see she's in a 10 day, but I don't see her. I don't see her. I don't see her either. That's how I promoted you out of panelists. Yeah. Was it because we're recording? You think. No, I see Andy there also. Oh yeah. There's Andy. Yep. There's Andy, but, um, I'm sure Peggy's under attendees and she can't, she's not in here because I can't click on it. I don't see Peggy under. I don't see her listed either. No, she's under, she's not in the panelists. She's in the attendees tab. I don't see her either. All I see is Andy. Oh, I see what you're saying. Nevermind. You're right. That's just the Andy. Okay. No, she's not here yet. Okay. All right. Okay. I'm putting the Andy in there as a panelist. Okay. There we go. Okay. Sorry, everybody. Still looking for Peggy. That's why. Thank you for the promotion. Okay. So I guess my question would be. We have an appendix that has a whole calculation and you can see. Sort of how complicated it gets. I didn't want to embed that in any early section. So I'm not sure how that helps. So then you have sort of a vision for where, like where you wanted to fit this in. As long as it's above any discussion of the different tabulation methods, it's fine, right? You know, the core problem is, is that without understanding what the problem is, you know, I am, and I certainly would, and I would expect anybody else to just skim over a section about tabulation methods or just be very confused by it. Right. Cause I don't know what the problem is, right? Like, I don't know. There's multiple winners and, you know, it doesn't even discuss, you know, the overflow, not the overflow votes, the surplus votes until a later section, right? It doesn't mention it in the first section from what I remember. So, you know, Well, I have the, which version you're reading. I added a whole example that moved surplus votes around. Whichever one you sent out late yesterday. Okay. So let me scroll down here. By the way, Peggy just emailed me. She's got mixed up on the time and she'll be here in a minute. Oh, okay. I understand what you're saying that we want to make sure it's clear that the, the choice of method is, is important. But I also don't want to. Right. So like. Right. All I'm saying is that, you know, the discussion of tabulation methods might as well not even be in there. If they don't understand why they're there, right? Like right here, it says when implement in section three, it says when implementing RCV for local elections, the town will need to choose which specific multi-winner RCV method to use. That raises an enormous number of questions right off the bat that there are no immediate answers to, right? You know, and it says like, oh, the literature on social choice and electoral methods finds fault with every, so it's like, we're diving right into a discussion of like the methods, but it doesn't answer the core question of like, what are the methods? Why are they used? What's the problem that's being solved? Right. Okay. So we could just insert at the very beginning of section three, the context for the rest of section three. Right. Exactly. You know, it could be, you know, I'm not, don't, don't write down what I'm saying because I'm just, you know, getting the, you know, zeitgeist of it, but right, like, you know, when dealing with multi-winner elections after a, you know, winner has met the calculated threshold for being a, you know, for winning the seat, the additional votes need to be redistributed so that they are not wasted. There are several ways of doing this, you know, these are the methods that we have, you know, looked through and discussed that are most fair and most representative, right? Just with something simple like that, it's like, okay, I understand. There's extra redistribution that happens in a multi-seat election that doesn't happen in a single seat. I may not fully understand how that occurs or why it happens, but now I have some grounding and basis for going through, you know, clearly that's a problem that needs to be solved. And here are the different methods that they've looked at to solve that problem. Even if I don't fully understand it, I can follow along, right? It seems to me that it's good not only to highlight it either in bold or in a different color, what are the summary is, but at the beginning of each section. So because a lot of people are going to skim. And so maybe in the beginning, you know, just say exactly what you're saying, but then say, and here's the method that we select, read down to find out why, you know what I mean? Yeah. And pictures are great. Like every time I came across a chart on this, I was like, excellent, like, right? I could read this paragraph, but I can also just look at this picture and understand what they're trying to get at, right? You know, so if we just had also, you know, one of those nice, you know, examples where it just shows like the extra votes on top of the winning threshold and an arrow, you know, pointing towards redistribution. And it's like, well, how does that happen? Here's what we've thought about. Exactly. I mean, we do have to remember that a lot of these folks on the who are reviewing this really know nothing about it. So, and, you know, we'd also don't know how much they want to dive into it. So we kind of have to have, you know, just the overview for everybody and then be able to dig deeper for others. And you're absolutely right that the more graphics we can have, the better. We do have the time constraints. You know, in a perfect world, we'd have the same names throughout, for examples. You know what I mean? We have it through, but again, that's something that we just don't have time to do. I see Peggy. Yep. Peggy's in. Great. And let me add to the list. So, so one of the suggestions is kind of slid in there as it be, maybe beginning of each of these sections to have a little summary of the pop to summarize the content of that section to help guide the reader. Is that what I was hearing? Yeah. I think anything we can do to help guide the readers will be good. First, let me apologize. I had two other zooms today. I just got mixed up on the time. I'm so sorry. Thank you, Ellen. I would have come at three 30, which is when I thought. We will never forgive you, Peggy. I know it. I know. I know. I know. I know. It's hard for life. Just on this last point, this little summary at the beginning of each section, is that in addition to an executive summary, or is that instead of an executive summary? So this, we're just talking about at the top of each section. So yeah, so the whole report will have a. First bit that will emphasize. The steps that the town needs to take. So that's our executive summary. Okay. So that if they're, you know, okay, they've read the executive summary very closely, because everyone does because they're like, I just want to know what the whole thing is. I want the cliff notes. And then at the head of each section, it'll give them a very succinct, you know, you know, quote unquote embold item. If they're just skimming to say like, here's what this section. Recommends or is about or the problem it's addressing or whatever it is. Okay. That was the only really, you know, not nitpicky thing that I saw everything else looked pretty solid. Right. In terms of the overall ordering. So I wanted to maybe just take a minute just to think about overall ordering of the sections and the appendices here. Did anyone want a change to any of that? I would probably move section five and six above section three and four. To be in that order and I'll fix the numbering later. Right. Cause we're going from more broad to more granular as we go down the document, right? Yes, I might. Yes, I get that on the other hand. In terms of like understanding how rank choice voting works, the tabulation method and ballot errors give more, they're sort of more background. And before we have to actually think about the actual steps. That's true. Like that. Yeah, I'm not heavily committed. I just, you know, I just put it out there. That's something always easy to change later. So if you think later of a, a good method, a good reason for why a flow might, you know, you need some kind of previous sections information to feed into the next one. We can always switch it around. So for now, I'll just leave it since there don't seem to be strong feelings for definitely changing it. So we start maybe drafting a timeline. So, sir, if we could collectively think of all the steps that we want to recommend to the town council, what do they need to be doing things? For example, Lauren really recommended they immediately start to get in touch with the elections division and work out. A plan for how they're likely to implement it to get them on board to help with passing the special act, you know, contacting people like Mindy dome. And other key legislative state legislatures who could help, you know, advocate for the special act. And then of course, we're getting the special act submitted. So there's a couple of things that have specific dates that need, you know, stuff need to be have, we need to have stuff done by, and I think we should include those. Some of these things. We don't necessarily have the expertise to really be able to say how long it's going to take. And therefore how early people need to approach it, like purchasing. I haven't got a clue, right? I don't know. You know, Peggy might have some experience upper sleeve about like, how long it takes to buy voting machines that she hasn't told us, but, you know, I certainly don't. So for the rest of it, we might, we might not want to, you know, pretend to have a comprehensive timeline for when stuff needs to get done, but we might want to have, you know, several specific dates that we know things need to be in by and how long we think stuff is going to, you know, maybe we have an idea of how long we think something is going to take. And then, you know, let the people who have a lot of more information about how long stuff like that takes to get done to actually fill it in. Sure. I didn't mean to actually have dates by timeline. I really meant to do list was the town councils to do list. And we can insert dates as we know them. And the rest may be a little. Just this needs to get done before this can get done. So we can sign the legislation or the bylaw, whatever it is, and get approval. Yeah. Emergency approval, right? Yeah, I'd call it action items. Action items, that's good. Yeah. For town counts action items. Yeah. So going back even a step before that, are you then presenting this Tanya at one of their meetings in December? What's that plan? I don't know how this works. I was going to ship this off to them on December 1st and wait for them to invite me to do whatever the next steps are. They will. They will probably set a meeting once they get the agenda set, whatever meeting that goes on. That's when you'll find out. And then is it one of those things Sue, where they're going to have to get. They're going to have to get a. Input from the town from people in the town, or is it something where they're just going to be able to decide on their own? I think the way the charter is worded, I think they just sat on their own. Okay. Yeah. So when we send this report off December 1st, we may want to include a. A transmittal letter that. Clues them into the fact that there's a list of action items. And some of those items are going to require a lot of lead and just really being able to look into it rather quickly. You don't want them to say, well, this is an urgent, we're going to put this off until March. The first thing they need to do is right. To proceed with implementation. Right. Based on the charter, it's probably they're going to be. Approve or amend. And approve or submit for revision, right? Because they have to pass something. Yes. If they decide the time is too tight, then they'll need to submit some. Essentially, I know this is another special app officially but essentially just requesting that we could run the next local election and the current way to give more time to get all our ducks in a row. So are the local elections every other year. Yeah, yep. Okay. So next year is the first one. There's actually the charters worded right there's just nothing there's a vacuum for what the next local election will be is that correct. Yeah, what, what do you mean there's a vacuum that there's nothing, there's nothing governing how the next local election will run. Oh, we have to something has to be put forward saying this is how it's going to be run. We actually fall back to state law, plurality voting. I was just a meeting with Paul and he was asking me the same question. You know, in our very first meeting with he said, like we addressed this issue. And said that, you know, he might want to submit a special election request to allow us to run the election the same as we always had in the case that we don't have a rank choice voting. And my understanding was that he was going to go do that. Interesting. But it sounds like that's not the case. I think you would have to come from the town council. Sorry, go ahead. Well, it may or may not be the case but it does seem like. If Paul thinks it's, it's the case then Paul should do that and he should do that no matter what happened what the town council decides about our CV. Right. Yeah, he could do that right now. If we don't have a new thing in place. We keep running it like we did. Yeah, I remember he mentioned that, you know, he could have it worded so that any subsequent special request would supersede, you know, the initial request so that in case we do get it done in time, it would, you know, overrule the, the one he had already put in. So what are the other things that we want to recommend the town council. So there was the interacting with the the elections division to right reaching out to the elections division and reaching out to our local legislators. If the, if the town council is going to decide whether or not rank choice voting is feasible based on a cost issue, then they need to get that information from LHS and yes and s but particularly LHS. You know, if, if we are implementing our CV then they need to start doing stuff buying machines, voter education staff training budgeting for, you know, increased election staff. I think the budget is the most important. Exactly budgeting is going to be the most important because who's to say what your budget it'll be in. We need to think about preliminary elections, or at least when those preliminary elections would happen if we need them. I'm not clear on who decides that. That's a state requirement or what. It has to do with the number of candidates. So if there's more than four candidates for the two seats and there's a preliminary, if not, they don't have to have one. That's in the chart. That was the very first, that was the only for the very first election though that's not for preceding elections. I mean succeeded election so there is no rule at all right now. No, there's nothing in state law either. Even better. We'd have to determine. Right. Basically, we can't fit the number of candidates on our ballot. Right. Yeah. And they'll save really short names. And then also it's actually hiring certain staff to do the implementation because I don't think there's current staff available for all these things so they have to figure out. If there's additional staffing, if there'd be a committee like ours that's in charge of overseeing implementation or how it's going to be done or Sue gets to hire a whole bunch of people. Yeah. And if they're consultants or full time. For the training stuff. I mean this is for voter education but LHS does training seminars on the use of both the machines and the software. For money or gummy bears. I'm not sure which one but I strongly suspect the former. So, we got a bunch of stuff down here and when I send the sort of our, our next draft out feel free to add, you know, modulate these I think we got the main things down. So we're going to keep moving along. We had some other things here. So I think the other big thing I'd like us while we're all together that we really should be discussing as a group is the, are the recommendations to really finalize that we have some sort of recommendations built in to the draft already but we should really make sure we all agree that those are what we want to recommend. This was. So maybe we can just go section by section let me know if your is go along let me know if there's other things you wanted to do the different sections so it's maybe just back up here second section by section. In the first section that anyone have comments on changes, they want to this. They should be able to fill in that number now since we know exactly how many total meetings will have I can fill that number in. Just a quick note. The example one in section one, it lists Pam and Pete. And we're we mean I know it's the first name versus last name but we do have Dorothy Pam as a current counselor, we should make sure to avoid using names which are mapped to current counselors. That's that section to learn section one. Oh, I miss it. Oh, my layout's weird. Okay. Okay, so just check if there's anything else that we did in ours part of our work that you wanted added to this list of stuff that people were okay with our summary of what we got up to. You know, the only thing I saw was that the to educate Amherst voters about anticipated changes to rank choice voting. So I think that was a good work that we did at the same time. I don't know, there's just something about putting it in a document where we're trying to convince the town council to change to rank choice voting that feels weird. But that may just be me. So, I don't think we are trying to convince them. It's mandated through the, through the charter. So I think that the work is more about implementation rather than a persuasion. Yeah, document is something we did so and it's posted on the committee website so I thought we should, there should be in there is something, something we did. And, and it's exactly what I mean we educated voters about the anticipated change. You know, if the town council decides it's impossible to do this. That's another problem. But as far as we know we're going ahead with it. Not everything we anticipate actually happens I guess so. I mean would you feel more comfortable if we just change that. No you don't have to change it at all I like I said that you know it seemed a little weird to me but I also recognize that it might just be me and it seems that that's the case so then it's no problem. I would also refer to it later. In the section John wrote about our experience with that so I think having it in this section is important. Yeah, that's fine. Right. All right so then see the two seeds want to change. I'm happy I just, I was just doing P names for purple and names for magenta, just to not have things be blue and red, but something else. Yeah, I would, I would find another color that's has different, a significantly contrasting value than purple and pink. I would also suggest as a game developer says that some people are going to have problems with that and depending on what kind of monitor they're looking at it on, it may not stick out as much as you want it to. Okay, what would you suggest for the two colors. I'll, I'll look at the wheel a little later and come up with one. Okay. Okay, I would also suggest not using such Caucasian names. Maybe have Maria. I mean think about our town. Sure. Yeah, so send me. I should pick. What was it? Oh yeah I found the example introduction a little confusing because it's implying that people are voting by platform when we vote by candidate and I know that that's not the case for the actual example but the text makes it seem like that. So it says suppose the 500 voters in the district are evenly nearly evenly divided between the two platforms. Right, like without further context that that seems to imply that like well some people voted for this platform and some people voted for that platform and I understand the intent is to say like, you know, maybe you know, 20, 20% voted for, you know, Pam and then, you know, 30% voted for Pete, you know, and that's 50%. Right, but it makes it seem like you're voting for platforms not individuals. Oh, I see so the. Yeah, I had, I had to read further into the example to be like wait, wait, does that mean that, you know, they're on a ballot together does that mean, you know, is it like president and vice president or does that mean it's, and I had to actually look down at the example and be like wait I got different numbers of ballots each and then I calculated I looked at 155 plus 100. Okay, I got you. I could just get rid of that and just say 500 voters and this many approved those two and this many approved those two. Right. Yeah, 500 put their votes towards Pam or P and then 500 put their vote towards Meg or Max. Yeah, you get a vote for two right. Yeah. But yeah, if you can think of a better wording than platform I was just trying to make an example where you have kind of you know this constituency and some other constituency and making sure they both get representatives, but I don't know what the best wording is. I just wanted to make a simple example to contrast the current system with the current system where as far as I understand it from talking with Mandy how they were really envisioning these two districts to a counselor districts to work that the voting was kind of tied in with making the representation work better with having to do this. Instead of single side to member districts and said single member districts. Because I'm remembering the ballot the first time we don't vote. We still vote in precincts, you still have precinct one. I'm going to have to look at an old ballot. I'm not sure this is accurate. When we have the ballot. Where are we here. The ballots. It's so long out there's like on and on and on. No, no, that's that's the one you're proposing but the original ballot. It's in here somewhere. Oh, it is towards the top. It's in. All right, we're like crazy on you. We only put in the school. We didn't put in the whole ballot. But they're still voting for five people. So you're still on each in each precinct they're still voting for five people. Well, this is school committee. I think that's a good one. We're going to have a polling for councilors. She's still voting for, well, 13, but spread out between five districts, but 10 precincts. Right. So I think I remember it to so. For your precinct, it would say pick two vote for no more than two. That's what I'm saying. And you've just got, you just have the people in your precinct and then it says for the, for the seats for the town, where separate races for the town. Yeah. Precinct only, and then it was for the ones across the town. Safe. All right. The at-large seats, that's what they're called. So there were two separate races on each ballot. Well, this coming November, it's going to be all the races on one ballot. Councilor, school committee, redevelopment, housing authority, elector, and Jones Library. Yep. But there will still be separate. But there will still be separate ballots for each of the different precincts. Yeah, you still have to, yeah. We still have our precincts one through 10, yeah. Right. Or districts. There'll be five. Well, it says it does say on the ballot, I believe precinct one, district one, or whatever it's in. Precinct two, district three. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Exactly. We're still voting by precinct, so. Hey, look, and I thought I had a hammer's ballot right here, but it's somehow eluding me. But yeah, so maybe it would help there is once I figure out where I put that, to stick in a little snippet of what the current ballot looks like to remind people. So we've only voted once this way, so it's not like people will be super familiar with the new district councillor set up. I could share one. There, it's on the web page. If you just go under Town Clerk and upcoming voter information and then upcoming and past elections, you'll see the last town election and the ballot will be there. And I know I have it downloaded. Just disappeared where it went. All right. Let me just make a little note to myself there. It's that example up a bit. And I guess so here's one of the comments John just sent me. So just some wording. Yes. Other other concerns about section two. One question I had is whether the Amherst specific implementation should be a subsection of section two or whether it should be its own section. Yeah. That strikes me as something that will that's an area that the town council should zoom in on, even if they're skimming everything else, that they want to be able to find by the way. Yeah, that's a good point. So yeah, we can easily do that. So what else did we have here? Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yes, was really just talking in general about ranked-trace voting. And then here we really are getting to more details. OK, that's good. Yes, we'll make that its own section, but kept in this position overall just elevated. I guess. We'll see. Paragraph on preliminary elections at the very end of the section. It says if the number of candidates running in one of the local elections is too large. And I think we ought to define what we mean by too large. Too large for a ballot. Too large for ranking purposes. Give them some kind of guidance for how they make that decision. I don't know what the answer is. Zaren, have a feeling about that. What should be the purpose of a preliminary election? Reduce the number of candidates to amount that can fit on the ballot. Are we limited at all by the machinery? What was that? Are we limited at all by the machinery, by the tabulators? No, we're limited by the ballot design. More or less one of the same, but yeah. Yeah, so we should say that. Getting back to what Sue said, the reason they did it for the town elections was just to simplify things for the run-offs so that there weren't so many candidates to have to look at it once. And people could then narrow it down and then have to choose from among four as opposed to choosing from five, six, seven. That's why. Oh, it was in the charter. We basically were just following instructions based on the charter. Right, but in terms of, yeah, let's go ahead. I was going to say, yeah, but it was the very first election and there were more candidates. Yeah, yeah. Right. And having worked on the election, it would have been very confusing if there were seven candidates for two seats. I wouldn't find that confusing. No, I know. A lot of our races have a lot of people in them. And all you do is say, like, well, I only know these two people, so I'm voting for them. Oh, do you remember town meeting? Yeah. Yeah, it was crazy. And nobody knew any idea what they were doing. They're just like, I know that name, I know that name. Yeah, yeah. But no one ever knew their platform so what they were standing for. I think that's a problem when you've got so many candidates. If the town wants to end up doing its own preliminary for other reasons, that's fine. But in terms of us, I think all that really matters on our end is that they may have to run a preliminary area just to whittle down the number of people so that it fits on the ballot. So when we say fits on the ballot, are we talking about in order to try and keep the election to a single page? No, because the more people you have, the further the list expands horizontally because the number of rankings that you have to provide. Because you have to provide some number of rankings, which we can limit. We can decide that even if there's 100 people in the race, if there's only five seats, we're only going to provide eight or 10 rankings for people to choose from. But yeah. Plus, don't forget you have to have a write-in space for every single candidate. I mean seats. Yeah. Sue, do we need to have? So I guess you're right, John. It is about keeping it to at least two pages or at most two pages, if possible. So we might just want to expand some of the explanation here to express what it is we're trying to get at. Otherwise, I don't think they'll know what too large means. Yeah, that makes sense. And, Sue, just for clarity, if we're electing to two seats, we would need two write-in spots. Is that correct? That's correct. Got to be able to write Kanye West two times. Yes. Oh, we saw some of those ballots. Yeah, I did too. I saw the map of the number of people who voted for Kanye West by state. And I was like, they don't have any for mass. That's a lie. I saw at least one. They had to get five votes or more to be written down. Otherwise, they go into all others. Yeah. We only saw a couple of them, actually. All right. So it's keep chugging. So for section three, we already had the suggestion to we need to beef up the beginning part to really motivate why we need to be worrying about tabulation methods. Right, what's the problem that we're trying to address with this section? Yeah. Right, but then otherwise, so if we beef up that first part otherwise, it may be added visualization if we can. Anything else with this section? No, I think it's fine. I mean, it's easily one of the more detailed sections. If you ended up wanting to shorten it down, you could probably just remove explanation of random and weighted or no, the inclusive Gregory method, because those don't meet our criteria. And then just dive into the details of weighted inclusive Gregory method versus Meeks method and why we chose to recommend Wiggum. But no, I don't think we need to worry about shortening it, I think. Yeah, I think the only comment I had on this section other than that was the very bottom in point four. Yeah, that last paragraph where we recommend using the Wiggum method, I think it's also important to specifically point out that random and inclusive do not meet the criteria and while I'm on board with everybody that we should make the actual legislation broad, we should write it so that it excludes those two previous methods so nobody does crazy things. All right, so here you want to add a sentence simply saying random and inclusive or like that. Just out of the two methods that meet our criteria, Meeks and Wiggum, we recommend the use of Wiggum, right? Oh, I see, okay. So I'm sorry, perhaps I missed this when you were talking, did you already talk about Lauren's special act? Because she really wants us to name the method that we're going to use. Even though- That's up to us. East Hampton didn't go anywhere near that detailed, so I'm not sure we want to go there. Well, I agree with you. And so I just wondered whether other people on the commission felt the same, so. I also wouldn't be opposed if we wanted to write it. I don't even, I'm sure we could talk to Lauren and figure out how to do this, but so that on initial implementation, they have to do it a certain way, but it doesn't prevent them from changing it in the future. Does that make sense? Right, so that the council has less choices to worry about. It's like, nope, you're going to go with a wiggum and you're going to do this and that, and if you want to change it in the future, that's great, but for the initial setup, go this. All right, so let's move on to section four. So there are a couple things Peggy had highlighted that we should just touch base on. The first is on the sentence about the types of errors that could be caught by, you know, and you scan your ballot in what the wording should be. Identified instead of caught. And Sue, when people vote early at town hall or the bank center, are those votes tabulated then or are they just stored? No, they're stored. That's what the central tabulation facility was all about. Okay. So any early voting and mail-in voting will not be tabulated at the time. Not according to current state law. That could change. We wouldn't be able to, if this is what you're getting at, we wouldn't be able to run it through, discover an error and then get back to the people and say like, hey, you made a mistake. No. Yeah, no. No curing of ballots as they call them some places. Exactly. You make those calls? No, if the tabulator can't read it, it becomes a hand count. And then when the voter, the workers look at it, if they can't determine voter intent, that race doesn't get counted or if it's an overvote or in the current system. Yeah. All right. I think as we stayed, I mean, it depends on exactly the machine they get, which errors could potentially be caught. So I don't think we need to specify here. It alerts them that there can be some things caught, but not everything just so they're aware of that. Is that right? Yeah. So then the other question was the recommendation for interpreting certain of these ballot errors. With everybody else on the first ones, but I still, and I remember this meeting, I still strongly disagree about the multiple skipped ranks. I do believe that, and I understand the argument the other way. I believe that even if there are multiple skipped ranks, while there are, it adds to the potential number of things that the voter could be intending, the only thing we can still really say for sure is that they did mark that person as a rank. And that rank falls after their first choice. And I think that it more closely honors the intent by just racking it back up to two for that example. And I know that's position differs from others, but that's mine. It's a good argument. I really don't know what to do on that one. I think that it comes, in the end it will come down to voter education. We wanna make sure that people understand what will happen if they fill out their ballot that way. And some people won't know. So we have, I also think it's more in line with how the other errors are handled, right? Cause if you skip one and it just shifts up, your assumption would automatically be that, well, if I miss any number, they'll just shift up. But in this case, it would be different, right? Oh, but if you miss more than one, you lose it all. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, right. If there were, if we were ranking like six people and you ranked one, four, five and six, it would be a shame to lose the rankings on four, five and six all together. So yeah, I see your point. I'm not, I don't know what the answer is. I'm, I'm okay. What's the counter argument? Why have some jurisdictions used other, this other approach? I'm not sure what other jurisdictions have done. My thinking when I wrote this was that if, if it were the case where somebody ranked a first choice and a last choice, and there were several rankings in between, that that would be a clear indication that somebody had a first choice and a last choice. And so moving that last choice up to number two would be against their intent. However, I, you know, it's, it's very tricky because at what point do you know whether it's a first and last choice and just a misunderstanding of the ranking or whatever. Right, and given that they only ranked two, even if you shifted it up to two, it's still their last choice, right? Cause we don't cover the edge case where, you know, some voter might want to say, well, this is my first choice, but if they get eliminated and then also using this example, let's say, you know, Julius and Robert get eliminated. That's not even possible, but yeah, it's just, it's confusing. I don't, but if you look below where Peggy wrote other municipalities have decided to shift up or am I confusing it with the multiple marked? You're confusing it with the multiple marked. I see. Yeah. I would strongly suggest just having them shift up. It's less things to explain to the voter. It's like, hey, if you skip a couple of spots, we just shift them up, you know? Yeah. Well, if we do that, I think it's important. I just remember when we were doing the candy thing, a lot of people put something as our last choice. They said, oh, I don't like that one. I'll make it my last choice. I'm like, well, is that one of your choices or you don't want that one to end up? Well, I wouldn't want that one to end. I said, well, then maybe you don't color it in. So it's part of the education process. Because I think a lot of times people do put their last choice as something they don't want, but they feel like they should vote for everything. Yeah, I agree. And that seems like something we need to address with voter education rather than getting into the muddy waters of trying to interpret somebody's intent too carefully when we don't have that information in this kind of situation. Well, how is this ballot counted? I mean, is the software going to be knowing that if we choose to do it this way, it's gonna automatically move everything over? Or are these gonna be hand counted ballots? Oh, man, my memory is a little foggy here, but I think the cast vote record will actually still just record it as first and fourth. And it's the RTR software or the central tallying software that will actually handle those issues. Although it will... It won't be a manual adjustment. No, it won't be a manual adjustment. Yeah, and that'd be something to say that the town did decide to go democracy suite of working out with them, what options we have for interpreting voter intent and what choices we have for in terms of, can it do it this way or can it do it that way? Hopefully it has a lot of flexibility. I mean, it should be easy enough for them to program the question of just whether they have bothered. Want to or not, if we're big enough fish, yeah. Does the universal tabulator support that? I know it supports several error handling, but you dug the most into that, Tanya. I don't remember any more. Definitely has some different options that you can... The universal tabulator, sorry to interject, does support both options, multiple skipped and no skipped. Okay. And democracy suite has a ton of all of these options, whether you do multi-skipped is truncated or you promote the later ranks. Okay, that's good to know. Do you know what most jurisdictions opt for? With the multiple skipped, it does vary. So Cambridge does promote. So if you go to Cambridge Bony Booth, you vote somebody first and somebody 25th. That 25th vote becomes your second vote, which some people do. Interestingly, Minneapolis used to do, if you skipped multiple, it was truncated and they switched to promoting them. So that's one where it went the other direction, the way I think Jesse was suggesting. So there's variety there as to what people do. There was a comment that said, oh, some people in the candy election are saying, that's my last choice, so I'm marking it last. I just wanna be clear, that's fine so long as the other ranks are filled in and it's the same intent. The only question is whether there's multiple skip. Yeah, if I put Cherry as my first and Licorice as my last on the fourth choice, even though it gets promoted to second, it's still my last choice, right? Cherry's first, Licorice's last, it still carries the intent based on what we absolutely know, rather than trying to interpret their intent and also interpret generalized intent, right? Because if we're making a computer programming rule that says, if you skip two, then we're assuming you mean this, but that's making an assumption about every voter's intent based on information we do not have and I think that's risky. Okay, I'm convinced, I think we should promote rather than truncate and that we should or at least we should recommend that. However the town council decides to implement this, I can't imagine that they're not going to need some sort of committee to make this happen and this level of decision could be left to that committee. So what I'll do is we can, so to provide full information, we can provide what are both options here and then say, so does the others on the committee agree now that you would like us to recommend the moving the vote up or? Yeah. Yep. Promote and educate. It's ultra important to minimize these sort of errors to really make sure the voters understand how to fill it out. Hopefully these cases will be minimal. Yep, and I think that'll be easier when we just have the general rule that if you miss on, it's shifted up as opposed to an extra edge case which they have to pay attention to. Sue, any thoughts in future elections about mail-in voting if it's gonna stick around or is it a one-off, we hope just one-off here? Well, actually it's funny, the legislators are meeting today about voting for the spring elections and they're going to have mail-in voting. They're still working it out, but it's for the fall, I don't know. I really don't know, it was an emergency regulation. So yeah, there's absentee voting, that's still gonna apply, but... Right, but I'm like California... Yeah, I wonder if they're gonna stick with no excuse like California and so many other states. I couldn't even begin to guess. What would you recommend, what would you want? No comment. This is being recorded. All right, so there was that recommendation, but then we... Let's see, so what are all the cases? So the repeat candidates rank more than once, so that's simple enough, you just keep them at their highest rank. So the skipped ranking, we just talked about, so then duplicate rankings, so... So when I called them duplicate rankings here because Lauren had suggested we not use overvote. Yeah. She used overvote in the legislation, so I just saw that out. I think... We should maybe remind her that overvote for us is different because that was a confusing point earlier and she said it's defined in law as to what an overvote is and that's not what we're intending, right? Which is why you put it in there as duplicate rankings, right? Well, it is actually kind of what we intended, which is that more than one person gets voted at the same time, in a single seat plurality vote, if you vote for two people, that's an overvote. And here, if you vote for two people at rank number two, she's calling that an overvote. Oh yeah, that makes sense. It's essentially the same thing, but I'm not sure, like I just wanna be clear, maybe we should say we could call it duplicate rankings here and in parentheses put overvote or something like that. In the terms that she sent back for the act, she did say the word overvote shall be the result of a voter ranks more than one candidate at the same ranking, one of the definitions. So we could tie it together. All right. And what was our recommendation for this? So we have marked that we follow the model of discarding the candidates with equal rankings as well as all candidates with lower rankings than those equally ranked candidates. So is that still the recommendation that we wanna stick to for this case? Say that again, just discarding everything below the duplicate candidates. Yes. Yeah, I think that makes sense to me. All right, good. It'd be nice to preserve the further ones, but then you run into the problem I was mentioning above, which is that assumes something about their intent, which we can't assume. And I think it's likely that people will get pretty pissed off if they found out that, the candidates they overvoted for lost because their lower ranking vote ended up counting towards a different candidate. Right, and then we have forgot, we already have this section that has some of this information. So I can blend in sort of the action items in to fill out some more of the section five. This is really, I guess, focused on state approval. Just a heads up, it's 425. And I think I only set the zoom up till 430. So I guess, just so you know. So yeah, so maybe we should just catchphrase some strategy. Are people able to stay a little longer to get a little more work done collectively? Or do we want to, at this point, switch back to the email me your comments and I will keep collating them model. I do need to bail out at 430. Okay, so let's plan and wrapping up and we'll... One of the things that you identified that we need to do is to write up some additional material. I am willing to take a stab at the executive summary. I mean, we don't want to stab anybody, we just want them to read it. I'm dangerous that way. Super, so yeah. So if you could write up an executive summary, is anyone willing to, I guess, maybe Jesse, are you willing to, since you brought up the, where was this way back in like section three or whatever, the part you want to... What is the problem? Yeah. Yeah, where we are, yeah, here. So Jesse, could you maybe send me some text for how you'd like to sort of fill that out to better justify? What were the other things that needed still to be written? We need to change the example in whatever the last section we recovered is to be one where they shift forward instead. We can actually just eliminate that example. I mean, if what we're doing is shifting forward for all skipped rankings, I don't think we need to give more than one example for that. So we just take out that second skipped ranking example. Great. And maybe the text, maybe we've written a little bit, why don't I do that? Yeah, like one or more. Yeah. Or any number of... I'll clean up that section with that understanding. Great. And we do need to figure out our recommendations. Section eight. We need to write them down. We've pretty much figured it out, right? Yes, so they're sprinkled like at the end of all these sections. I thought it would be good to gather them together. Absolutely, yeah. It's all in place. So yeah, so if you're, Ellen, if you're willing to kind of read through and see all the different recommendations and put those together into that section, that'd be great. And one thing that's kind of been niggling at me is when the section with the magenta and the purple, when we talk about the different platforms. So I don't know if you know the history, but with the first run for town council, there's actually a group called Amherst first or whatever. And some people were accusing them of being a pack where they're really not a pack. They're not taking money the way a pack would do it. And it just became a major confrontation in town. So when you refer to different platforms, it might actually, it will bring that up. Like, okay, these are the people who are in favor of change in town, these people who aren't. So I don't know how to get around that with your example. I can just drop the mention of platform and just say this many people approve these two and this many people approve these two. And how many voters did we make happy with the outcome and avoid that issue altogether? That's no problem. Okay, great. All right, well, we better wrap up. I will save this and send it out to all of you. So you have that as the base to be building on to then make your changes, send it back to me. I'll collate them all together and just see the document, send it back out and we'll just try to keep iterating. We'll have to discuss the special act in more detail at our November 30th meeting and just really crack down and get that done at that meeting. And do you want to do anything with the glossary at this point, the Lawrence terms? So I pasted in there the things that seem most relevant. Feel free to add any further terms you think would be helpful to have compiled into there that we use in the report. So feel free to sprinkle those in as needed. Probably be important to make sure that it coincides with Lawrence with the special act. Yeah, I would add Lawrence terms to it. Well, the Lawrence special act will be pasted in as the first appendix, so that's already there. Right, but if someone goes to a glossary looking for a definition, that's where they would go. And this is, you know, again, I don't expect people to read this cover to cover. Yeah, well, you could add to the glossary all of the terms that are in her special act so that we have just duplicate that glossary in our glossary. Yeah, I would. We have a plan. Is it? Yeah, we have a plan, go ahead. Yep, so we just gotta dig in and just get these last things done. When do you want them back? We need deadlines. So like before Thanksgiving, so people can get it to me by like Tuesday, say, I can pull away with it on Wednesday and get something out to get sort of the next round of stuff going. Sounds good. All right, I call to adjourn. So moved. Second. All right, great. Thank you all. Thank you all. Have great Thanksgiving, everyone. I won't forget. Yeah, you too. I look forward to seeing my family on the computer. Yeah, Thanksgiving. Well, thank you, we're all alive. There we go. Antonia, oh, let me stop recording.