 If you've seen Talk of the Town before, you know that we like to take in this series the opportunity to introduce folks to Arlington and Arlington to certain local officials. In this case, we're actually going to be introducing a new committee to Arlington. And to help us do so, we've got Jim O'Connor with us. Jim is the chair of the Election Modernization Committee, which was recently born. So Jim, to start off, first of all, thanks for being here. We always appreciate it, and we hope that you are well. Yes, I'm fine and so far so good. Good. Great. Why don't you just take us a little bit? I know that before we went on camera, you were saying that this is born, the committee and the project, born of Town Meeting of 2019, so very recently. So why don't you just take us quickly through both the origins and then what the intended goals are, et cetera? Okay. Initially, in the spring 2019 Town Meeting, there was a warrant article proposed by Christa Keller-Hur and 10 registered voters, which was intended to establish an election modernization study committee. The purpose of which was to look at options like rank choice voting, voting by mail, more efficient use of our polling locations, questions about issues of disability access, ease of voting principles, how we go about procedures for qualifying voters, and to make recommendations to Town Meeting for any potential bylaw changes and or recommendations to the select board to submit home rule legislation. That's like the slag of tasks there you've got. Yes. Well, the, so the committee was actually approved 188 to 2 by Town Meeting back in Spring of 2019. And we began our work in August upon the filling of all the slots. There's 13 members, six of which are ex-officio department appointees, and seven members, five appointed by the moderator, and one appointed by each of the political parties, the Democratic Town Committee and the Republican Town Committee. Sounds good. And the moderator, five appointed by the moderator, are you talking about the town moderator? Yes. The town moderator, John Leone. Great. And, you know, it is fortuitous in a lot of ways that we're getting to have this conversation with you in the midst of both our current election, because we're speaking to you right at the end of May of 2020, and also within the pandemic that everybody is hyper aware of, of course, because if anything, this current situation has once again, exaggerated and exacerbated perhaps and highlighted for sure, the need for modernization of our election, our election procedures. Several of the things that you've mentioned have been part of conversations we've had with the town clerk's office and others about the current election. So in other words, we are having to rely a lot more on mail in voting than we ever did before. How in other aspects of increasing access, which sounds like a big part of what you guys are wanting to do, are all, it's clear that all of this is very important to the Arlington community for sure. What is the time, like what do you understand your mission to be? We've laid out the things that you're supposed to do or at least make progress towards. Is there, are there timelines attached to those? Well, initially, the committee had a lifespan of one year, which was to expire after a report to this year's town meeting with our recommendations. Obviously COVID-19 both changed part of our endeavors and our prioritization. But also postponed the opportunity for this warrant article to extend our membership to two more members and extend the timeframe for which we'll be in play. So that would have, sorry to interrupt you, but are you saying that would have happened if without the intercession of COVID-19, that would have been presented to this year's town meeting, the expansion of two more members? Our committee realized early on that a few appointees in town or designees from boards and et cetera felt that they didn't want to participate if they didn't have a vote. So as chair, I talked to a John Leone and we both decided that we would get a straw vote of the full membership and let the voting members have the official membership to be in compliance with town meetings wishes. But we felt that we wanted to submit three articles this year before town meeting. The first article, article 21 was intended to both extend our life at least one year in addition to 2021 and potentially to 2022. But the other was to give all current members a voting status and to add a member from the young community of Arlington, someone under 25, and the other was to have a representative from the League of Women Voters. So that article was postponed by the select board until a special town meeting that'll occur likely later this fall. We also had two other articles. I'm sorry, before letting you go on and describe that, I wanted just to clarify that you were saying that the designees to the committee didn't want to proceed forward without having a vote. I think you had explained to me before we started the interview officially that in fact the committee, the voting members of the committee are those who were appointed by the moderator and the representatives of the two parties, I think, all of the town officials who are designees on the committee do not have a vote as it currently stands. Yes. The moderator's designee myself, the designee or Marika Palca from the select board, the town clerk's office, the registrar designee, and I'm missing two people. The disabilities commission is a fifth one. It's okay, we won't cast you to knowing all of them. You were mentioning the other two changes as well, which I guess have also been the proposed changes also postponed till the fall session. We had the first one, article 23, was intended to change the format in which we vote for town meeting. Every time we have a full federal census, the town like the state has to realign their polling locations depending on density and location of residents so that at each of those intervals, there's a full slate of all the candidates for all three years of terms that come up for the voting ballot. The way it's done is when a precinct turns over like that, the first four voting members that get the most votes get the three-year term, the second four highest get the two-year term, and the least vote getters, the third group of four would have the one-year term. We were proposing that perhaps that sort of format also occur for town meeting elections on a regular basis, and that would be because if there's a vacancy currently, the way that a vacancy is filled is that the members of the town meeting precinct vote in a new member until the next annual local election. And at that local election, we have a slate that includes four people that have the three-year term and then perhaps one for a one-year term or one for a two-year term. What happens sometimes is people think about it and say, well, the four incumbents, you know, have been in service for a long time, so why don't we go for the shorter term and have a better potential for being elected? Well, sometimes what happens is the person that runs for the three-year term gets more votes than the person for the three-year term. So we thought it would be best to say the recommendation that we were going to put forward to town meeting was to change the town manager act to enable the election of town meeting members so that the person with the four with the highest votes would get the three-year term and the next highest person would get a two-year term or the one-year term, whatever was remaining. And that could change the outcome rather than have people, you know, select one race. So that would require legislative approval. So that was one of the things we considered. Article 24, go ahead. What's your new proposal as in you guys really looked at the situation and figured out something very novel as a way of dealing with it, or is there precedent for it? There is precedent in other communities. They do things like this. So we presented a report to the select board back in September of our initial recommendations and then before town select board members, in January we had a meeting where we recommended their approval of our warrant article submissions. Okay. And we will go ahead. The third warrant article was rank choice voting. That occurs in a few places, one of which is Minneapolis, Minnesota. Some of the towns in Massachusetts are already doing that. And it involves with a town-wide election, which is all we'd be, you know, trying to change. For a contested race, if nobody got more than 50% and there were three candidates for one position, you would drop the lowest vote getter and then re-examine who was the second choice and who was the third choice to determine really what the people chose and not necessarily just because the results come out one way. Somebody could win with just a few more votes than another candidate only because it was a split vote, but nobody got 50%. Right. So rank choice voting would have voters indicate who their first, second and third choices were, and then you would take that whole into account in terms of deciding who among the three, if there's again nobody with the majority, who among the three should in fact be the winner in that case. That's correct. Okay. So in our next full-town meeting, which will probably be the special in November, we'll bring this article up, make recommendations for home rule legislation and present it to the town more thoroughly. Okay. And curious about have there been costs associated with your efforts already or will there, it seems like there are sure to be, how are your, how is the work of the committee being funded right now, if at all, and what is the funding piece in general? For our committee, all our committee members as many committees in Arlington are, it's comprised of volunteers with an initiative to develop new ideas and attempt to implement them. And so we, if we, you know, did some research, several members in the committee have various ideas about good things to research. One of the things we did is we did a collaborative effort at the invitation of Envision Arlington to add several questions to the townwide survey, which went out in January. As to any concerns that people had, first we asked, did you vote in the last election? Have you ever gone to a precinct meeting? Have you ever encountered any problems and please indicate what they are? And in large part, there was a question about parking, parking availability at the schools where we currently have several polling locations. At a major election, if school is closed for a professional day, then the teachers are elsewhere and there's more parking for the voters. But such as the presidential primary, it, in some polling locations was a big problem because the teachers were there, the poll workers were there, and the voters had to walk significant distances to get to the polling location. What we're trying to do is increase the access, the turnout, and dispel the voter apathy by getting the voter to feel that they're being heard. In that last sentence that you just said, basically, is that an encapsulation of the mission of the committee and the effort, basically? Well, it's in large part part of it. Anything not included there that you would want to make sure people understand about the work of the committee? In other words, we know expanding access, reducing apathy, as you said, just kind of doing everything that makes sense to increase participation. I think everybody is on board with that, I assume. But is there anything else that is important for our viewers to understand? Well, I think the other focus is to look at ways to modernize the voting process. So we were certainly looking at the option of voting by mail, finding out where that was currently happening, and looking into ways that we could maybe instrument that in Arlington. As of January, none of us had any idea that we'd be voting by mail in this local election. COVID-19 and the pandemic just totally forever changed everyone's perspective on the way we do things. And so voting by mail was the first recommendation that members of town government, including the manager, the select board, the town council, the health and human services, directive facilities and myself as part of a planning team looked at what can we do to meet the voter need. And one of the needs was to assure that everyone would be able to vote safely. So the legislature back in March voted X for the chapter 45 of the Acts of 2020 that enabled voting by mail for this upcoming election. And that totally changed the process where the first step said, well, we could ask people to download a ballot application for voting by mail or absentee voting. And some people don't have printers. Some people don't have access to a computer. And so the decision was made to send every individual postage prepay to postcard. So our first effort is in the last week, more like last weekend or Monday, people should have received a postcard in the mail. There's information on the town website to this effect. And people should make every effort to return it as soon as possible. And they can put it in the mail. Once the clerk's office gets it, they will initiate immediately the process of mailing someone a ballot. That way they don't have to go to the polls and they don't need an explanation as to why they're voting by mail. And who put that postcard together? I ask in part because there has been some confusion, as you may be aware, in terms of the wording on the postcard and not being clear enough for some voters for them to understand exactly what they needed to do. Do you have any idea how that, just basically how that was. Yes. Well, it went through several drafts. The final draft was reviewed by both town council, which because it's a state law for absentee voter applications, the state law states that an individual can request an absentee ballot up until noontime the day before the election. So on the postcard, which I happen to have right in front of me, the postcard clearly states, request for ballots must be in the town clerk's office by noon on June 5th. The day before the election, postmark is not valid for acceptance. And several people have emailed me as the election modernization committee chairperson after we had public forums and we somewhat addressed this. Why is that on the postcard? Because if I put it in the mail and it gets delivered by Friday, June 5th, how on earth am I going to get the ballot by June 6th in return and be able to postmark it? But that was put on there by state compliance requirement, which unfortunately, as town council, Doug Heim told us, when the legislature put this acts of chapter 45 of the acts of 2020 together, they tried to work in early voting by mail with the current procedure for absentee voting. So that's why the requirement states that you can request a ballot up until noon the day before. But on the town website, we have asked people to send them in as soon as possible. It's been on the town website ever since. Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's not worth, you know, delivering this too much. I think that the clearly the confusion derived from what you've already explained, people not being sure how they would get a ballot. And so the combination of both the sentence that says you've gathered until June 5th and the one that says, hey, when you get this, get it back to us in a reasonable time for us to be able to get you the ballot, that that just didn't give people, I think, maybe a specific or concrete enough, you know, idea about what it was that they needed. Well, the other part of this, because of COVID-19, the town hall is closed. We can't go into town hall to the clerk's office and request a ballot. But that's where legally this came from, that any voter up until noontime the day before the election could present a request at the clerk's office and receive a ballot right there. It's like one stop shop and you walk in, I need a ballot. You could vote it then or you could take it home and you could return it the day of the election. But because of that, that's why that that seems to be confusing to people. And sometimes the law gets in the way of, you know, simplicity, because we have to help people. Yes, this is the absolute deadline. And we're hoping that people respond quickly. There's been reports that the requests for early ballots have been coming in very strongly. And ballots are being sent out. The town has also authorized staff from other departments to work in the clerk's office to help with the additional workload so that they're trying very efficiently to return the ballots to individuals as quickly as possible. And then they request that those ballots come back. One note for clarification that I can tell you is the reason for the noontime deadline on June 5th is that the voter lists that are issued to each of the polling stations have to be generated by a computer system called the VRIS. That is the voter registration information system. When an absentee ballot or in this case an early ballot application has been requested, then what happens is they indicate that on the voter's list via the VRIS system. And then the day of the poll, the actual election, those lists indicate that these people have gotten an absentee ballot. And that's to protect the system in a way because somebody could have a ballot at home and then say, well, I want to go to the polls and I want to vote. And we don't want duplicate voting. So we at least know that a ballot has been issued and that the ballot's been returned to the clerk's office and it should come out to the polls. That was a question that is in the FAQs at Dugheim Town Council issued is what would happen if I wanted to change my vote after I've submitted an absentee ballot? And the fact is that the law provides that someone can come to the polls. They can fill out a affidavit that says, I acknowledge that I received a ballot but because it has not yet been processed, I would like that ballot spoiled and stored for record keeping. And then I would like to process my own ballot right here in person. So they can request to vote in person if they, if the election workers can determine that their name is not crossed out. One of the things that is also confusing to the public is that although people are voting by mail, by state law, none of those votes are actually counted until the polling stations are open the day of the election. And each of those ballots then has to be manually inserted by the poll wardens or workers that are present at the polls. They go through the checks and balances of being checked in and checked out for dual accounting and then they're inserted into the machine. And that's when the ballot is actually cast. So that's what makes this issue about appearing in person. So I'd like to make sure that people watching understand that you can change your vote. If you were thinking that one of the contested races, you chose one candidate then learned something a week later and said, this is my candidate. They could actually appear in person. We're hoping that that doesn't necessarily happen a lot because the whole idea of the mail-in voting is to reduce the exposure to COVID-19 to both the poll workers and the people. But we're making a significant effort to provide enough PPE so everyone that comes to the polls must wear a mask. They'll be asked to sanitize their hands before they enter. All the poll workers are going to be issued gloves, masks, face shields, and they'll be behind a plexiglass window when they talk to the voter. So we're doing everything we can to prevent exposure. Yeah, all conditions we're getting more and more used to, that's for sure. But the very good that you were able to clarify all of the procedures themselves. And also what you said makes clear why we here at ACMI, as you probably know, we generally provide live election return coverage. And we have found out that we may not be able to do that this year because for all of the reasons you've outlined and more, there just may not be the results may not be coming in in the usual timely fashion that they do. And again, your explanation for how that is all going to happen helps you to understand why that would be. Let me ask you something. Well, this election also has another caveat. And that is because of the drop boxes. Legally, we close the polls and in each of the precinct locations. So there are eight precincts, the seven schools and Town Hall. If a ballot is mailed in and the Postal Service receives it prior to their closing, they would deliver to Town Hall. And if those ballots then have to be recorded in the system as having been returned by the absentee voter because there's a signature envelope that that voter sign saying I completed my ballot. Here's my signature. That has to be checked before it goes out to the polls. So if it comes in late in the past, the town clerk's office would process those manually if they were to come in. But because of the fact that we're going to be working late, they may be distributing them to the actual poll locations later in the evening. Those will also be hand counted at eight o'clock though the machines will be started their summary reports. We'll stop the poll receipt by walk in voters. And if the because of this special circumstance of the election, the town clerk's office will with a police officer pick up all ballots dropped off by eight p.m. at all three drop boxes. So if you couldn't get from East Arlington to your polling location, you could drop it off quickly in front of Fox Library. And then, in fact, it's moved a little bit. So the exact location may be slightly different. But there's one in front of ACMI and there's one in front of Town Hall. If you drop it there by eight o'clock, the officer and the clerk's office representative will pick up those ballots and they will be processed. One of the reasons we will have later hours of operation where those ballots have to be counted. So people just to be perfectly clear and especially because it could again help to reduce traffic at the actual polling places, which would be a good idea. People have the option of using these drop off boxes, putting the ballot into the box up to, you know, up to the same time to which they could vote. So, PM on election day on the 6th. Yes. Great. Let me ask you, clearly, your committee has been busy from the get go here because an awful lot of ideas and proposals are being presented and going to be considered a town meeting and beyond. Wondering, though, do you, is it part of your mandate or simply just part of how you did business that you would establish criteria for how you would know whether this was successful or not? We always like to ask around any kinds of programs or initiatives. How are we going to know? How are we going to measure if this is successful or not? Obviously, even I can think of, OK, if the percentage of voters increases, we can declare success on that on that level. But I'm just wondering whether you've established criteria and if so, what those are? Well, in some in some ways, the full committee has not been doing some of the actions that I did. I've gone beyond the chairperson ship of the committee and working with the town for the reason that I was concerned watching the select board meeting of March 30th, where unlike the meeting of March 23rd, when the open forum was more public comment in open forum, the the question about what does the state of emergency that the town declared do in Arlington? Are we going to be under martial law? There was a lot of apprehension and concern. What I heard on the 30th was several people were still asking a lot of questions. And I personally was very concerned that Arlington should be working together, should be full of love and not consternation. So that's when I approached the manager and I asked if we could have in a meeting of our election modernization committee and include a public comment section, which was quite extensive. And I know there's a copy of it on your website. And during that, we had approximately a hundred and forty four people attend via Zoom to go over questions and the manager, the clerk's office and candidates were all there to try to help kind of illustrate what our process was going to be. And I got a lot of comments from people about the fact that it was a very open process that people felt they were being heard. For me personally, that's the biggest benchmark of what our committee is trying to do and what I personally wanted to do. So then I approached the manager again about having a public forum on the elections, which I moderated later in April. And then in May, we just had a meeting of the EMC and we also enabled part of that meeting to be for public comment and the elections and invited both the manager and council to answer questions. I think in terms of success, one of the things that we won't know until we can get some statistics of the total number of voters in Arlington that are registered, how many actually requested a early ballot or previously requested an absentee ballot so that they exercise their right to vote. Secondly, how much did all this effort do to alleviate the risk of voters coming to the polls by being able to vote conveniently from home? I think those are two questions that we would look at. A third would be how many total votes were cast in Arlington for a local election that routinely reaches 10 to 15 percent. If we were to get a 40 percent turnout, I would be totally elated. Furthermore, I think the fact that we have contested races for school committee, for housing authority, for select board, for town clerk is going to really enhance the voter interest because no matter which candidate you choose, you're going to decide to vote because your vote makes a difference. Right. And of course, we don't want to forget the assessors, which is also a contested race. But it's an unusual year. We've got five contested races here. One thing I'm wondering about, though, I think if I heard correctly in the various innovations that you guys are considering and changes that you'd like to see made, we're still sticking with what is fundamentally a kind of physical paper oriented process, right? Yes. Is there any, you know, how much thought, I guess, or how much propulsion is moving in the direction of substituting some kind of technological voting process to reduce the paper kind of physical, you know, and the inefficiencies that come from that? Well, we are New England and our legislature is highly reluctant to consider they have been highly reluctant to even act on mail-in voting so far for September and November's election. The acts of 2020, Chapter 45, stipulated that only elections through June 30th could actually be done by this special process of early vote by mail. And unless they extend that, we'll be back to the old system of only absentee voter applications would be accepted. It is certainly our hope, and I'm sure many others are thinking, we got this process now. It's kind of the cat's out of the bag. Let's see if it works. Arlington's election is one of the largest local elections around because the cities in town of the cities, you know, normally have their elections in the fall. So this is really going to demonstrate the effectiveness of this. Some of our neighboring towns had an election back in March and got it in just before COVID-19 really had its impact. So we'll have to see. But I really think that it will be one of our initiatives to look at whether online voting was possible. I think that because of the fact that the current executive branch opinion is that voting by mail causes more fraud. Well, that's being questioned by both the media and Twitter. And there certainly is a lot more fact checking of what the fraudulent opportunity risk is. And I think that we're moving in that direction of enabling everybody an opportunity to vote. So just to make sure I understand, though, what you're saying is unless the legislature or state legislature does something else, as of right now, both the presidential primary later this summer and the president. The state primary and the presidential election. Right. Excuse me. And and then the election itself in November will be returning to the old system unless the legislature says otherwise. Correct. And it requires an act of the legislature. The Secretary of State only has certain authorities for the online systems, which is for voter registration, which there's a big change this year. Unfortunately, we're speaking today on the March of May the 28th. Yesterday was the last day to register to vote. But one of the things says I've been a warden in the town of Arlington at a precinct for 22 years. And occasionally I've had people come up and say, I know I registered to vote because I saw this on my driver's license application or my change of address application up until this year. It was an opt in checkbox. It said when you go to do your license update or request a license or an ID that you also check the box and request that your city or town gets notified and that you're going to be enabled a registration via that method to vote. That would then require that the registrar of the city or town send you an acknowledgement notice. And it would inform you as to where you vote and that you are in fact registered. If people don't get that notice, then they may not be registered because of a glitch. But when the Secretary of State changed the policy this year, it's an opt out rather than an opt in. So if you change your license or your registration address and you change your ID or information, then it'll automatically notify the city or town unless you say, I specifically do not want this to happen. Yeah, that's going to enable a lot more accuracy of the system. That's for sure. And one simple, you know, one simple change. I say simple, you know, that can that that can really be galvanizing. I would I would think that that was a pun, wasn't it? Secretary Galvin. There you go. Good. I'm glad I'm talking to somebody who gets those things. Yeah. This has been a long conversation. Hopefully people have stuck with it, though, because there was a lot of information for you to share with us and you've done an excellent job. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Well, I'm happy to do it. And as you know, I've been watching the public interest in these things. There's a lot of questions that are raised about the postcard, about the voting process, about the drop boxes. And we don't want this to fail because people, to me, it's a failure if even one person doesn't get a chance to vote that wants to. So we want to get the word out to respond as quickly as possible for a ballot request and then respond by sending the ballot back. And we want everybody to feel they they know where the poll locations are, if they want to vote in person, that they will be safe. That we're taking all the precautions that we can to enable everybody to vote. I've designed schematics for each of the schools so that you enter from one door, you follow a lead like you go to the grocery store that says you go here and then here. And you exit another door so people are not going to be passing one another and we're going to do everything to maintain social distance and protection of everyone involved. Okay, I'm happy and thank you for having me. Absolutely, we really, we really appreciate both your efforts and you're taking the time to explain those to us. I've got maybe one or two more things, then we're going to let you go. Okay, it's just a clarification. Again, it sounded to me like what you were saying is that all of the warrant articles that you guys would have generated as part of the committee are being pushed off to the, you know, To the fall and that the June meet meeting that is going to happen. Who knows exactly how on Pierce field just to deal. I think with the most essential business will not include any of those Yes, all the citizen warrant articles or committee articles were put on A no action Postponement so that they can come up in the fall. And the only things we're going to be dealing with since I'm assistant moderator of the town. I can answer this question that we, John Leonie and I Have discussed it together, but as moderator, he is establishing in the scent agenda for specific housekeeping articles that will flow quickly like what we we allow certain things with free cash and with funding that has to happen. And then we're going to be talking about the finance articles, the CPA appropriations, the CBTG funding and the budgets, right. Right. The idea is to make sure prior to June 30. In fact, by the 22nd. We need to have a meeting so that There's a seven day period before the close of the fiscal year so we can operate under a new budget in July. Makes sense. And do you expect Is the is the election modernization committee now in some kind of no man's land because your mandate original has expired. You haven't had a chance to introduce the extension or So does that mean your guys are just like lame ducking at the moment or will you be Oh, hardly because of COVID-19 we've had a breath of life infusing us to discuss these things and help to propel new ideas amongst the talk of the town, if you will. And When I talked to the moderator, I requested that he take the article 21 up so that our committee would have an extension of its life and he said Under the provisions of postponement and the provisions of extending these articles until a later date that there'll be no change in our committee composition or Useful life that we will continue until the next town meeting when we give our what would have been an annual report our year and a half report, perhaps. And are there we are going to continue Do you just your committee actually release minutes or anything like that. Is there a web. Yes, the minutes. The minutes are posted on the town website on the election modernization page and the Greg Dennis is the clerk of our committee and he has Suggested that the storage of last two meetings. That is the meeting of April 7 and the meeting of May 19 We have not actually posted minutes to the town website because we've got a posting on YouTube and a posting on the ACMI government channel for our meeting and he said, I don't really think I could do a better job of minutes than what somebody can see by viewing the audio and video combination. Yeah, it seems like a duplication that, you know, again, just go to ACMI. So, you know, you will get all the information you need. Well, actually, just listen to hear for the last 45 minutes hour, whatever it's been and you would have gotten all the information you would need, I would say so. Thanks again, Jim, for joining us today and for being a font of so much useful information and context for people. So we I expect we'll talk to you again because your work is not yet done the committee's work is not yet done and there will be elections coming forever. Right. Yes. And before I go, let me say that the select board is still inquiring of Arlington's members of community that would like to work at the polls that there are a few openings left and they were looking for competent people who would like to work during that day and will be protected with PPE. So that if there's anyone that would like to do that, they could contact the select board. I assume those are all those are volunteer positions. No, these are compensated positions. Okay. And if a potential applicant contacts the board by tomorrow, the first thing they do is to see that they are registered voter that they do live in Arlington and unless there is some extraordinary reason why they shouldn't be appointed, they would be brought up on Monday night's meeting of the select board to be approved to work at the election on June 6th. All right. Excellent piece of useful information with which to end. Okay. Thank you very, very much. You've been watching Talk of the Town. I've been talking to Jim O'Connor about the work of the Election Modernization Committee and about our elections generally. Jim, appreciate it and we'll see you again and to you in the audience. Thanks for joining us. I'm James Milan. This was Talk of the Town. See you next time.