 government operations on Wednesday, I believe, the 26th of August. So, we're going to, we've been asked by appropriations to do a couple things. But first, what I want to say is that I know that these, the way we are having to do these meetings is seems a little odd to people who are out there watching, and it does mean more people can actually watch the proceedings without having to drive to Montpelier. But it also means that it's a little bit harder for people to be able to kind of testify and let us know because they're not really in the room. So, I would say that if on any of these issues, if there are people who feel that they really want to testify about something or have something to add, please contact Gail and myself, and we'll find out what it is and get you into some meeting at some point when we deal with the issues because we do want to hear from everybody. So, and you can find both Gail, Gail is GKarrigan at leg.state.bt.us and I'm J. White at the same address. So, okay. So with that, we've been asked by appropriations to look at the CRF funding and how that, there was a list of questions there. Did everybody get that list of questions? It was, yeah, did the money go out? How much of them? Well, first of all, were there any issues setting up and administering the program itself? And then, did the money get out? How much money got out? How many recipients? Is there money left over? And so what was the kind of the total expenditures projected? And is there money left over? And if so, what is the plan for getting that money out to people? And then kind of any other issues that you think we need to address either now or in the future and how we can be helpful and keep an accounting of that. So does that make sense? So we thought we would, we have in our charge, EMS, the digitizing program, the municipal municipalities, secretary of state, I don't know that they had any funds to administer DPS and the training council if they had any, but we thought today we would start with, start with the EMS program and how, what money there was there and how it's been handled. So I guess, is that you, Dan, or is there somebody else that's going to speak to that? It certainly can be me. However, I would welcome anyone else who'd like to chime in as well. Senator White? Yes. Doug Farnham has some time constraints and he was hoping to be able to testify before too. Oh, okay. Sorry to get that message to you. Thank you. Okay. I didn't, I didn't know that. So, Dan, I'm sorry. I'm going to bump you. No problem. Happy to yield. Okay. And go to Doug to talk about the digitizing of land records program and how that worked and is the money getting out and all that, all those questions. So, Doug? Thank you, Madam Chair. For the record, Doug Farnham, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Taxes, and thank you, Dan, for being gracious. I apologize for the last minute shuffle. So, Madam Chair, do you want me to just focus on digitization and not the local government expense reimbursement program or talk about both programs? Well, I, we're going to kind of separate it into the digitizing and then the municipality, but if you want to address both, if you have time to address both before you leave, then that would be fine. Okay. So, I'll start out by walking through digitization. And by the way, the number of times we have tried and failed to say that word over the last two months is massive. Luckily, it's easier to type. So, the setup, the first question that we received was set up. Did we encounter any issues with launching the application? The interest of that is no. Actually, we were able to create a very simple application in Microsoft Forms and make that available to the towns. I believe we had it available within two weeks of the bill being made into law. And so, we feel like we did a good job getting that application up and available. One reason it was up quickly is because we made it a very simplified application. And that is because in evaluating how we were going to be able to issue these grants, we determined that applicants would need to be able to complete a project for digitizing their land records by November 1 and that in order to reimburse them from the CRF, the Coronavirus Relief Fund, we would need to have documentation of the money that they spent prior to actually giving them the grant. We could award the grant upfront through a simplified application, then receive documentation later on and complete the disbursement for the grant. So, that leads me to question two, the funding. How much of the funding has been sent to recipients? Because we're doing this as an application award and then disbursement after documentation is received, we haven't disbursed to any projects yet. But we have had 45 towns apply, which is actually excellent news. To be honest, it exceeds the number that I thought would be able to apply. The word on the street is that some of the vendors involved with this have really started to step up and starting to move much more quickly to try to make sure towns can take advantage of this. We initially went out with a $20,000 cap on the grant and that was to make sure that at least 100 towns could apply for this grant. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't consumed by larger towns and that we offered the opportunity to as many towns as possible across the state. It's looking like with those 45 applications in that $20,000 cap, $795,523 has been requested under the cap. If you pull in removal of that cap, which in our guidelines early on, we said there's a $20,000 cap, but please tell us your total expected expense. You will remove the cap if we are able. That is at $996,633. With a little over about a week to go in applications, we're pretty confident we're going to be able to remove that $20,000 cap. It's a certainty that we'll have less than a million encumbered at this point. It's just a matter of seeing how much less than a million will remain unencumbered. That covers how much is committed, when these funds will be sent. Between September 1st and September 15th, we're going to be reviewing the applications further. We've already been taking a look at them, but we'll be walking through them and issuing award letters between September 1st and 15th. We hope to have all the award letters out by the 15th. That's our target date. After that, as soon as a town finishes a project, they can submit for the disbursement for the grant award. That would cover 100% of their of their project cost, provided the $20,000 cap is indeed lifted. Now, the nice thing about the way we're approaching it is the award amounts can be amended if the cap is lifted, especially if there's additional funding. If their expenses come in higher than the additional application, we can adjust that. But we've asked towns, if anything, high ball year request a little bit, so that we don't have an issue where your expenses exceed your award amount. That program has been going pretty well. Happy with the vendors, happy with the towns. I know that they had a very difficult election day this year. The fact that the towns were able to participate in this program at the same time as dealing with the election issues is quite impressive. After the 15th, probably around September 15th, we'll know how much we have uncommitted. Then at that point, it would be a question of, I personally don't think reopening the application for this particular program would make a lot of sense. We can check with the communities to see if there's, we do intend to send out a blast email right before the first. I think our director of PVR actually recently sent out an email, maybe this morning, reminding towns that this opportunity was out there. I think the word is out. I think that the towns that are able to participate are and that because it's a simplified application, it only takes five to 10 minutes to submit the application because we're not asking for that documented exact figure at this time. I think most likely we'll be looking at a situation where those unencumbered funds, it would make sense for those to be eligible to be allocated somewhere else by the legislature. Because we're covering 100% of expenses, I don't think we could be more generous in this particular program. It's not possible. Can I interrupt you a minute there? Of course, Madam Chair. You said that without the cap, it amounted to about $996,000. Didn't we allocate it a million? Is that right? Apologies, Madam Chair. That program is two million. Two million. So we have a million left unencumbered at this point. Okay. Okay. And as I said, the towns have already exceeded my expectations as far as who's applying for this. I'm very, very happy with how I was going. So I don't know how many more can take advantage. We only have three or four vendors in the state that are really doing this activity. So I would be of the opinion we've probably reached about critical mass. But I've already been surprised once in the last several weeks. So it could happen again. Great. Thank you. Any questions about that? Or did you have more on the digitizing? Just one thing, Madam Chair. Just for context, we have right around 40 towns right now that have digital land records. So this is actually doubling not the amount of records, but the amount of locations with digital access, which I think is a huge victory in the current environment. Okay. Any questions about the digitizing? And then we'll have Doug talk about the municipal grants. But if there's any questions or comments about the digital first, I'm watching his time. Allison. I think if we can double this with two million, I would hope that we could consider going into the future, figuring out a way to double it every year. I mean, that's still only 85 towns out of 251. So it's as great. You're actually right to double it in this short time period is fabulous. But wow, we clearly have our work cut out for us continuing this. Yeah. So Jill, did you have anything that you wanted to add about that? No, thank you. Okay. Thanks. And Karen, did you have anything you wanted to add about that? Where are you? There you are. You're muted. No, I don't have anything to add. I think that's that's amazing. We had actually heard a lower number just on Monday. So the applications must be coming in at quite a good pace right now. Carol. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah. Karen, to your point, I submitted our application for Berry City yesterday. So we're one of the newer ones. And I will say that that 45 number does include some communities like Berry City that are already digitizing but are using the grant funds as an opportunity to extend our records back to the 40 years, which is covered under the grants. I've been pushing over the last couple days out to the listserv, particularly after I submitted my application and saw how easy it was encouraging clerks to apply. I know there's a lot of clerks out there that are still exploring what options would be available to them. So I would hope that that number will grow maybe by as many as another five to 10 between now and Monday. Good. Thank you. I think that's very encouraging. And I'm glad to see that you made it a pretty simple and user friendly application process. So hey, do you want to talk to us about the other municipal grants? Yes, Madam Chair. So the local government expense reimbursement or ELGAR as we've taken to calling it, because we can't resist putting an acronym on something at tax. So as far as the setup goes, we followed a very similar approach. We prioritized the digitization applications first because we had a deadline there for publishing guidelines. It was also viewed as much more time sensitive because the towns need to put in a project and actually accomplish the work this year. We put that in front of the line. So the local government program, the application for that was put up, I believe, a week later than the digitization application. Very similar. I think one thing to note in the application process and one reason I believe we only have 11 applicants right now with 289,000 requested. One reason is the application hasn't been up as long. This application is much broader because it's covering both what you've actually incurred up to this date and an estimate of what you expect through the end of the year as far as coronavirus related expenses. But also there's the question of have you applied to FEMA? And as soon as we knew that that was going to be a requirement to apply to FEMA before applying to the local government grant program, we put a blast out to the listserv. But again, municipalities are incredibly busy right now. So I think that additional step of having to consider what you're applying to FEMA for and then applying to this program, it's causing applicants to have to walk through a bit more and to do a bit more work before they fill out our application. Again, we kept it as simple as possible with that same model of kind of line items where you're talking about what you've incurred and what you estimate for the remainder of the year. And then later on, after the documentation for those actual expenses is submitted, then we would do the disbursement. So the two programs were built with a very similar model. So at this point, we haven't sent any funding. And the application period is open through September 4th. And we know that that's a bit tight. It was slightly under a month of an application period when we posted the application. And we, again, it's a bit tight. And I think that's one of the aspects we're keeping an eye on. We would need to evaluate if we do need to extend the application period. I think that is, of course, an option. But I ask about FEMA, because I know that your application process might be pretty simple and user friendly, but FEMA is far from. And just one of the things that I'm dealing with that where I work is that we applied to FEMA and were told that because we had a cleaning contract to clean, you know, to just do general cleaning of the buildings, that the extra expenses like the deep cleaning and cleaning all of the common rooms and all of that kind of stuff, we couldn't apply for because we already had a cleaning contract, even though it was $100 and we'd spent $900. So is there any way of allowing towns to apply at the same time they're applying to FEMA so that during that time when they're trying to deal with FEMA and getting all this run around, they can actually have put in also put in an application with you to meet the deadline? Yes, they don't need to have successfully finished the application process with FEMA, but we need to know the town has applied to and is working on that application with FEMA. And we have been working with Vermont Emergency Management, I believe it is, Jill can correct me if I got that wrong. But the process would be if there are elements of your FEMA application that you're counting on for FEMA and you so you didn't put them in our application, that can be rolled into our application when you learn that FEMA is disallowing those uses like for example with that cleaning contract. I think most people would think that the additional expense would automatically count and that certainly would count for our program because we're looking at the actual numbers, not whether or not a contract existed in the past, but additional expense. So navigating that interaction with FEMA is certainly a challenge, I don't want to understate it, but we're trying to make it so that if there is a determination from FEMA and it's an expense that we believe is coronavirus related, we are going to roll that into our grant application. So we will allow for adjustments to that grant award up to of course the statutory caps that were placed in Act 137. And that's the controlling mechanism there that makes it so that the towns I think worst case would be looking at a 75% proration. If every town out there applied for the maximum amount, which we know isn't going to happen, then it'd be a 75% proration. So in my opinion, proration of that $12.6 million in grants is unlikely to be necessary. And if it did occur, it'd be very minor. Any questions, Brian? Thank you Madam Chair. This might be a better question for Betsy Ann, but I'm not sure. Doug mentioned that the application deadline for the municipal grants, I think you said it was a week from tomorrow, September 3rd. Apologies for local government, it's September 4th. For the digitization, it's September 1st, yes. So it's a week from Wednesday, a week from next, whatever. My question is, was that set in statute or session law or is that something that you could change if you needed to? Senator, we can certainly extend that application due date. So it's not set in statute, but of course, there was an imperative from both the legislature and the governor to get this money out as quickly as possible. So I think that how many applications we've received by September 4th would dictate whether or not we just extend that application period, or I think if we have more than enough money left to go, left in the $12.6 million appropriation, then we could continue accepting applications and work on processing the full payment, issuing full awards. We just don't want to issue full award amounts. If it turns out later, we're going to have to prorate. That is not a conversation we want to have to have with anyone letting them know they're going to get less money than they actually, we told them they would receive already. Okay, but it's good to know that you could, your set of control of your own destiny in terms of the deadline date. We do appreciate the flexibility the legislature gave us in that area. Thanks, Doug. Any other questions for Doug on that one? And I'm aware that you have one minute left. So Karen, do you want to just comment on this and what they're going to promote? Thank you. So we held a webinar on August 19th, which amazingly was just last week. And I sent the webinar to Gail and to you, Madam Chair, and maybe it could get posted. And it was explaining what all the grant programs available to municipalities entailed. Jill Remek was on there, Kim Kenarecki from the Vermont Emergency Management, and some other folks. We had 120 people on that webinar, so it was very well attended. The other thing I wanted to mention is that given the interaction between FEMA and the Elger, I think it should be a soft G, Elger. That sounds better. Anyway, that there are 140 applicants registered with FEMA to date. Not all of those are municipalities. My understanding is about 80 of those are municipalities, but it's a kind of a two-step process. First you register and then you actually submit your application. And according to Kim, again on Monday, there were 40 who had actually submitted their applications already. So I think that the timing is a little bit slower of necessity with this program, but there's definitely a high level of interest. Also, as you said, FEMA is much more of a pain in the neck than anything the state is going to put together. So there's that hurdle to get over. But we're probably pretty confident that we can get enough. I mean, if 40 have already put them in and there's another 40 out there who've registered, those people will be in a good position to send in their applications to the state. Right. And just one other consideration is that if you have less than $3,300 in COVID related expenses, you're not eligible for FEMA funding. So you would go directly to the Alger program for those reimbursements. And I don't know if there's any of those folks in the pipeline yet. Okay. Any more questions for Doug or comments? Okay. Well, thank you. I think you're getting out of here just about on time. Thank you, Madam Chair. I truly appreciate the opportunity and the flexibility. And thanks for working so fast and so hard on these. Well, it was primarily Jill Remick and her team that did a lot of the work. So. Well, and I see she's gone, I think. So thanks, Jill. She must be working on something. Oh, she is. I don't see her. But okay. All right. Thank you. All right. So we can move to EMS. Thank you. So Dan, do you want to, Dan, are you the person that's going to mainly talk to us? Or we'll just turn it over to you and let you handle it from here on in. Okay. That's fine. Thank you. So ours is a bit of a work in progress. And as you know, we have several different areas of funding that were given to us. The biggest chunk of funding was for EMS education. That was given to us in two buckets, if you will. The first was $500,000 for paramedic education. I'm very happy with the progress we've made there. What we've done with that funding is to create essentially a voucher program for students to apply and take emergency medical services licensure programs. The paramedic program we have right now currently 27 completed applications for paramedic training with a cap. If we measure it as the standard tuition for Vermont technical college, our cap is about 28. Now, not all of those paramedics are applying to VTC and some of the programs that they're applying to have a little bit of a lower tuition. So we may have the ability to put more than 28 on and we've created a waiting list. We've had probably somewhere in the order of about 35 to 40 inquiries, including those applications. So we've been adding people in as we go. So I'm anticipating that we'll have an even higher number of paramedic applicants before we finish off that bucket of money. So very pleased with that. That's going to put a lot of new advanced life support providers on the street. And I think it's an injection that's long overdue. So that's great. The challenges with that one that we're still dealing with a little bit. There are really two elements that need to happen in order for us to process that funding. The first is that the programs need to be approved. Now, Vermont technical college has no problem. They've been an approved Vermont EMS program for a long time. There are about four other programs that students have applied to that are either out of state or are not previously approved by our office. It's a very minor hurdle that we just jump over. There's a national accreditation process that we're just double checking on. But we've had some communications that have to kind of go back and forth to get those documents and all that. The second element is that in order for the programs to invoice us, they have to become a vendor of the state of Vermont, which is not entirely complicated, but does require several communications back and forth with college and school administrations and all that. But we don't anticipate any of those to be a major hurdle. And we feel like that's going to go smoothly. We're still in the process of squaring that away. But for any of the approved students thus far, we are ready for the programs to invoice us at any time and disperse that funding. The second bucket of money was $400,000 for EMT, EMR, and AEMT training. We've had a little less success with that. Right now we have about 35 applicants and probably somewhere in the order of about 50 inquiries. I think there's a few challenges with regard to this one. So we did set up a statewide hybrid EMT program and that is actively accepting applications. They have three cohorts ready to go between now and the December 31st deadline. So that's poised and ready. But the challenge that we've seen, I think, is that we just don't have the programming that we ordinarily would have because of the COVID-19 response. The University of Vermont announced today that they're not going to run any of their outside EMT programs this year. They usually account for, you know, in this fall semester, they're good for at least four classes, if not more. They're going to do programming for internal full-time students, but not for the local districts. That's a pretty big challenge. I think we're also finding some challenges with hospitals allowing our students into clinical. There's some significant hurdles there to keeping that local programming at a level that we would normally expect it to be. Now, I will say that that 35 number is a really dynamic number, and we're going to do our best to keep marketing it and pushing it and doing whatever we can. And with a number of inquiries, I would not be surprised to come back in three weeks and say that we've doubled or tripled that number. And it's just a little hard to predict because of that. We have a lot more capacity in the hybrid class. The hybrid class can take up to 100. I think right now, there's somewhere in the 45 to 50 range. So we have more capacity if we can get that pushed out. But I think some of the other programs that normally would be there are just not going to be there necessarily. So I think we have a great sense of exactly how much of that funding we're going to be able to push out the door, but we're going to do our ever-loving best to do what we can and get as much of it spent as we possibly can. So those are the two big ones. Can I stop you here and ask if there are any questions about those two before we jump to next one? And if anybody on the committee has questions, and then I'd like to go to Jim and Drew, but Anthony, did you have a question? I just wondered why the UVM thing is not happening. Is there a reason why UVM is not going ahead with these other things? Yeah. So I want to be pretty clear that I'm not speaking for UVM. What they've told us is it's just the COVID-19 restrictions that they have on campus and allowing non-full-time students on the campus. And it relates to the COVID-19 response that they're dealing with. Okay. So it's trying to limit contact with people coming onto the campus who are not really a part of the campus. It's a bit of an assumption on my part, but I would think that that's a fair assumption. Okay. Thanks. Allison? Dan, thank you for this. How many had you hoped for? What was the number that you were hoping for? Thank you, Senator. We'd hoped to spend all the money, right? I mean, we hoped to drain every nickel out of the bucket that we can because the reality is it's not about spending money. It's about putting EMS providers on the street. So for every dollar we spend, it's one more person that's answering a call somewhere, and that's ultimately what we want. I hope that we could fill that hybrid class at 100. That would put us in a pretty good place. And again, I also want to be respectful that not every student is going to be capable of taking that hybrid class and online experience. We want to support the additional programs that we have out there with this money. We've certainly had a lot of inquiries from both in-state and out-of-state programs. And as long as it's a quality program that Vermont EMS can approve, we're happy to push students in every direction. But I think most places are seeing that very similar pinch that they are locally here in Burlington with the UVM. It's just challenging. Schools aren't letting us use the spaces that we normally would use. Again, hospitals are having difficulty with clinical. It's a complicated time right now to get EMS education done. Right. And how are you marketing it? I mean, is there a great EMS network? Yeah, so that's a great question. And we definitely need to do a better job on that. And we have some things in mind. What we've done is kind of what we've always done, which is to use our districts and to use our agencies to find those folks that are sort of inquiring. We post everything up on our website. It's the historical pathway for almost everyone that's in EMS, the methods that we use. I would suggest, though, that we probably could do a better job and try to get some communications out there to reach the folks that are not traditional. And it's something we've talked about a lot, but haven't gotten to yet. So, Jim, I saw you add your hand up and did you want to comment? Yes, thanks. On the EMT and the EMT and the EC or EMR program, just to say that this information coming out and normally they have like 400 EMTs taught a year that it still is hard with the COVID going on, but the numbers will go up because I know there are many programs that are trying to figure out and be able to get it into place so that that number will go up. Good. Thank you. Drew, did you have a comment? You're muted. Is that better? Yeah, better. So just some information to remind you that we do lose on a typical year between 400 and 500 EMS providers. So just to kind of maintain our substandard staffing of the previous few years, we need to get that EMS education number up to 400 or 500. We're way behind with the EMS education that was suspended in the early spring and no EMS education being run over the summer months. We're way behind in that make up and catch up that we typically see for EMS providers. So it is a little encouraging to hear about 40 people in an EMT class, but it's far short of the 400 that we need just to kind of stay at par. And that's not addressing the workforce crisis that we've been discussing for the last few years. So I know that the announcement from UVM was kind of a big hit. They were working on some hybrid education as well as online or on-campus education. And it's going to be a lot of people kind of scrambling over the next few weeks to figure out how to put education courses together. But my hope is that we can, as an advisory committee, we can support those districts and services so we can get that education out because we do need to get to that 400 mark. Yeah, and market. I mean, it sounds like you really need to market it more fully. What's the deadline for the applications for people? Senator, we'll take applications right up till the end of December. So we'll get as many of them in as we can. You know, the other chat, and Drew's absolutely right. I fully concur that we're in a rears here in terms of students. On an ordinary year, we train about 600 students and about 150 to 200 come from UVM. Now, again, to be clear, a lot of those students are not seeing the back of Vermont ambulances because they're UVM students. But that's a big hit for us. And it's something we're taking pretty seriously. We are working with the district up here to try to reproduce some of those course offerings. And I think we probably will be able to do some of that. But it's a big challenge. It's a big challenge. And you're right. We do need to do more marketing. And of course, we can only market what's available. And that's also part of this problem as well. Are there, I might have missed this someplace, but are there, I know that some of the career centers have some level of programming. Is there any possibility of them just beefing up the programming a little bit and qualifying here? Sure, we've been working with the career centers for a long time. We have a very nice program going on up in the Northeast Kingdom at the Newport Adult Education Center. Forgive me if I'm giving you the wrong name of the facility, but they have a very nice EMT program that runs up there on a regular basis. We're happy to host an EMT class and to support EMS education wherever it can be done with a, you know, the right degree of quality. And we're happy to push it out as far as we can. So, I mean, just on that, what Jeanette just said, and what you, that exchange, you know, marketing it through our career and technical education centers and our adult ed is a great, you know, that isn't already being done. It's a great thing for high school students to do too, because it, that helps keep them here if they have an additional bond to Vermont and are helping and coming in at an entry level on our EMS squads, that, you know, what a great, you know, additional lure to keeping them here. So, I'm just, I'm gonna, Sarah, were you here? I, pardon me, but this has happened so fast that I can't remember why you were coming. And then there's an, I think, additional, a couple additional pots of money that Dan wanted to talk about, but I wanted to make sure that all the time. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Sarah Clark. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for the Agency of Human Services. I'm here in partnership with Dan. The $3 million was actually appropriated to the Agency of Human Services, $900,000 to be transferred to VDH, which has been done. And that's what Dan was just updating you on. And then the next, I think, where Dan was probably moving next was the $2.1 million. Okay, thank you. That's what I thought, but I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't ignoring you. Thank you. So, Dan, do you want to? Absolutely. So, as Sarah mentioned, there was an additional $2.1 million. The .1 of the $2.1 million was earmarked for a single source vendor to assist EMS agencies with the completion of grant applications and assistance for COVID-19 relief. We've been working with DFR to finalize that vendor. I understand that the contract is either in process or has been signed. It's been executed. Okay. So, we now have an identified vendor. The next step of that is to set up, is to make the connections to the agencies. It's our vision, and we've been working with the EMS Advisory Committee on this as well, to match them up. So, they selected a CPA firm, which is wonderful and a great resource to help these agencies sort out the financial elements of these applications. But the fact of the matter is, we also have to give them the education about those grants and help them navigate with a little bit more of the nuance of EMS. So, our vision and what we've talked about is to create almost like a virtual conference, if you will, where we can bring some of those resources in for our agencies. Jim Finger and I have talked about utilizing some of the folks from the American Ambulance Association. We have some resources to make that happen and offer that as a resource to connect some of those folks to the grants. I've also talked to Vermont Emergency Management and their folks who are managing a good number of these COVID-19 relief funding projects and have them participate as well. And then, at the end, connect all of those folks with this vendor to help sort out those applications. So, I would anticipate that's going to happen very soon. We are waiting simply to get that contract executed and the vendor to be selected and then we can move to this next phase. So, I anticipate that will happen right away. It's a little difficult to predict how much of that money will be used because it relies upon agencies stepping up and saying we need to use it. And the stark reality that we're faced with is the folks that pay attention closest are the ones who've probably already applied to all these grants. And the ones that have the resources to be present and to take these courses and all that are there the ones that are stepping up. So, we're going to have to work extra hard to capture the ones who probably need it the most but don't have the infrastructure to do that. So, we're going to work on that. So, it's a little hard to predict where we're going to end up with that. But, again, we're going to do our best to try to spend as much as we can of it. Is that an area where you work closely with the EMS advisory and all the yeah, I mean, certainly they have the expertise that they can offer us to how to navigate this, you know, what we've tried to do from our office on a great number of issues is to connect, right? I mean, the expertise and the experience of Drew and Jim, we can't reproduce in a classroom. And, you know, to the ability to connect those folks to folks like Jim and Drew is really the important element here. They're the ones that can talk about their experiences and how to navigate this process. So, yeah, we'll absolutely be involved with the advisory committee on this and certainly are wide open to any thoughts and suggestions they have on how to market this the right way. So, remind me, who is it that would be eligible here and how do we reach those people who are eligible, but the least likely to have the resources and the for whatever to to get in touch and apply? So, it's a bit of a complicated question, Senator. And the only reason why is because it depends on what part of the relief they're going after. There's municipal grants, there's employer grants, there's nonprofit elements to this. And they're all a little bit different depending upon the makeup of the organization. It's something that we've that's challenged us a little bit to begin with, you know, for example, the hazard pay grant that came out was different for volunteers as it was for municipalities as it was for nonprofits. And, you know, we've had to come up with three different solutions for three different types of organizations. So, it's complex as I guess probably the answer that I'll give you. But at the same time, I think what we can try to do is connect some resources that have experience in all of those fields and work with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and some part of our advisory committee as well. We try to find and connect those resources as best we can. So, just to follow up on that just that little example that you gave about the firefighters. Is that a legislative decision that created these kind of three different buckets and three different places to go? And if so, if not, then I guess we can't do anything. But if it was, is there a way of making it simpler so that there is one kind of bucket for hazard so that if you're a volunteer fire department that's connected to a municipality or not connected to a municipality, is there a legislative fix for this? So, I should be clear that I'm not an expert on that particular grant because we were not a part of the development or procedural elements of that piece. I do know that there was some legislative purpose to separate municipalities away from other organizations simply because municipalities were eligible for hazard pay in another bucket of money through COVID relief. I can't say what the other, how the other challenges came to be. I don't have enough experience working with that. But I think there are some legislative solutions, but I don't, I'm not exactly an expert in that circumstance. Sarah? Yes, if I may. I believe as it relates to the hazard pay for essential employees program, there are some technical adjustments that are being discussed in the Senate related to that grant program. Do you know where, what committee, is it health and welfare that or is it appropriations or? Appropriations is my understanding. Okay. All right. Great. That's my understanding as well, Senator. I'm working on those with Senator Kitchell. Oh, there you are. Yes. Okay. So, you are working with them on that? Yeah. I've been working with Senator Kitchell and the program and a couple other senators to work on those. They don't include any addition of the municipal employees at this point. So, that would be something else that you may want to discuss with Senator Kitchell if that's something you think is, needs to happen. So, Damien, Alison, just let me ask this first. So, our town, for example, has a volunteer fire department. They are considered a department of the town and they're in the budget and we pay for, well, we pay for a lot of the equipment the town does and we pay for a stipend for the chief nobody else gets money. Sometimes they get a per dia or a very small amount when they go out on a call and then they turn that back into the hose fund. So, they don't really give money. So, that it's a volunteer fire department. Are they considered? So, how do they fit in here or in Guilford? It's completely, it's a volunteer fire department that's completely kind of removed from the town. And the same in Newbrook, New Fane, New Fane, Brookline. So, I can only speak to the essential workers hazard pay program, which specifically excludes municipal employees. The reason it includes the EMS is because there are some private EMS services in the state that aren't municipal department. I can't speak to Guilford and whether it should have been included in the hazard pay program. So, but what I can say is that my understanding as we were drafting this was that the bucket of money put into the municipal assistance bill was supposed to be used in part to cover any hazard pay and that it would be up to each municipality to determine how they were going to use that, whether they were going to provide some form of hazard pay, including for volunteer workers, it would presumably be a one time lump sum bonus versus for full-time professional firefighters and professional EMS and police officers, it would probably be something more tied to either a bump in their hourly wage or some other maybe a one-time bonus. So, there would be different ways to do it. But all of that was excluded from the actual hazard pay program because the municipal funding bill was also being done at the same time. So, in Putney where we have one paid person and the others are all volunteers, they're not town employees, they don't get a salary, they're not eligible for benefits, nothing like that. Why wouldn't they have been eligible for the hazard pay through the essential workers instead of through the municipal program? Because the definition of essential or of covered employer and the hazard pay program specifically excludes the state and all municipalities. But they're not municipal employees, can we change that? So, the application in the hazard pay program is through the employer. So, your employer has to use to apply and then the employer pays, gets a grant to basically provide you with a hazard pay bonus through their own payroll system. That's how that program works because of the some of the administrative issues with the state sending checks to over 10,000 workers. So, the idea was there that employers could apply directly. They would be in the best position to know which of their employees had been working in close contact with the public versus which employees would be working remotely or from home or in a location where they're socially distanced from everybody. And then the decision was made somewhere early on to exclude the state and municipalities because of the other CRF dollars for public employees or that could be used. But I don't know anything more than just that that was a decision that was made. And I was told to exclude state and municipal from the bill. Right. Well, you're the only messenger here, but I might talk to Jane about this because it does seem to me that the volunteer firefighters and volunteer first responders and stuff are completely left out of this because they have no employer. Well, the town isn't their employer and so they have no employer. They work for the paper mill and they work for different places and they work, but they're not considered mental workers there. It's worth noting that a one time sort of lump sum bonus would not lose them their volunteer status, probably. Right. Yeah. This is something, I mean, so there's nothing that necessarily prevents municipalities from providing that sort of pay except perhaps for the fact that municipalities like so many other folks right now are struggling just to balance their checkbook. So I guess I can't make policy proposals, but it would be possible to set aside grant funds for municipalities to provide a lump sum to volunteer first responders. And then we just would need to review the sort of labor rules around how to escape that line where you keep people as volunteers rather than employers. But I'm fairly certain if my recollection is correct that you can do this with sort of one time or non-regular payments where you get a bonus or a little bit of a stipend to workers without making them actual employees where you have to follow the hourly wage laws and so forth. So, committee, I think that we should have a little more discussion about this and we'll talk with Jane about, I don't know if the rest of you are hearing from your volunteer fire departments and Anthony, I assume you are. Yes, I've been hearing from AMT people. So maybe what I'll note to Jane from the volunteer fire department EMS people and just see if there's a way of putting them in one bucket or the other to allow that to happen. I'm happy to work with Tucker to get language set up for the municipalities so that they could get a stream of funding to provide those bonuses. I actually don't care which bucket it comes from. It can come from the hazard pay bucket also. Whichever bucket seems to have the most unexpended or that might be the most appropriate to do it because of other pressures on those funds. Yeah, I think hazard pay may be close to maxed out, if not maxed out already. Sarah could definitely answer that question. That's correct, Damien. Okay. Yeah, so that will probably need additional funds anyway because the demand's been greater than expected. Okay, so could Tucker and Damien, could you maybe just start, figure out this a little bit and see if we can then get it to Jane? Yeah, if you wouldn't mind just giving her a heads up. I'll under a note right away. Yeah, if she wants to end that bill, I can add it to that. Otherwise, Tucker and I can work on a standalone vehicle to get some funding out there. New Hampshire has a model that could also work where the chief of the department basically certifies the hours that volunteers or department members worked and then applies to the state for a lump sum that's then dispersed or it could be for individual checks too potentially, but I think in New Hampshire it's done as a lump sum that the department then disperses. Okay. All right, Tucker, did you have your hand up? No, okay. So are there any other questions about the 2.1? That seems to be a little bit. If there's anything we can do on that one, Dan and Sarah around that, you should let us know about how we can get that out. Jim? Oh, Brian first. No, I was going to advocate for Jim. Okay. Jim. Thank you. I just want to say that we appreciate everything the legislature's done. This is very complicated for both the state and everyone to figure out. The hazard pay is very difficult for people. It was simple for the services that can have the payroll know the hours, figure it out. Volunteer issue has been very much talked about. Appreciate anything you can do for the municipal. Those departments can't apply themselves, so therefore they ought to go through their towns. When you talked about the volunteers, it's very complicated to figure out their hours. But if there's a way, the Vermont Ambulance Association wants to help. We've made some contacts, but haven't got information back from those people. If there's somebody we can talk to on each of the grants that we can be an advocate for our services and try to give information, we want to help because we know you're doing the best, but we don't have the information to get back, which is the same on the 2.1, with the band talks about the H.C. Human Services, I think, picking a contractor. We want to have a little import on that, work with it to get the information out. People haven't applied for the other 2 million because I don't think anybody really knows how to yet. So we want to be part of it. And if we have contacts to each of it, that would be so much helpful and be part of what we'd appreciate. Good. Anybody else have any comments or concerns or, Drew? So do we have, as far as I know, there's no application yet for the 2 million dollars in ambulance stabilization funds that we, I'm talking, I don't think that's been dispersed or applied for at all yet. It's correct. So what's happening there? I think that's what Dan was referring to earlier. Oh, that's a good point, Dan. Yeah. Yeah, under development. Yeah, okay. So if you can work with Jim and Drew and people on getting that out and developing that. Yeah. It's not a lot of funds, but just for the committee's awareness, I think you're aware that the agency of human services and the kind of immediate aftermath of the crisis stood up some emergency financial assistance programs for healthcare providers. There were, I believe, seven EMS providers that did receive funds from those programs, roughly $68,000. So not a lot of money. So I know this next phase of the program is very important. Good. Okay. Anything else that anybody has to add on these? Thank you. And pretty soon, next week, we're going to start looking at the governor's budget. So Dan, we might have you back in and whoever wants to come in and weigh in on the governor's budget and how it'll impact your department, your agency. And Sarah, you wouldn't, I mean, we're not going to look at the agency of human services budget, obviously, but we will look at the EMS budget and how the impact of the governor's budget on you. So we'll send you a note next week, or we'll send it to you before next week. Any other questions or concerns? Thank you all for being here. And Damien, I didn't mean to, you were just the messenger about that hazard pay stuff. That's okay. Careful about being a messenger. Yeah, I've learned that over the years. It's the municipal side that's been really screwed up, because they also have to be employers that are willing to apply for it. So I look forward to more conversation about this. Yeah, right. And I'm happy to try to figure this out. Obviously, they've been putting themselves at extremely high risk. And so I'm happy to do what I can to help get the bill drafted for you. Thank you. Okay. So I believe we're ready to move on to our next topic unless, and we certainly welcome all of you to stay with us to talk about elections and an update on the elections and how that's going, but realize you probably have other things that you need to be doing. So thank you so much for coming. Okay. So who do we have with us? We have Chris and is Will with us by any chance or I can't hear you. Will's not able to attend today. Okay. All right. So you're going to give us, and I see we have Greg and Paul Burns and Thomas Wise is on the phone. So we wanted to hear a little bit of an update on where we are with the elections, what's happening, some of the issues around the spoiled ballots or I don't know that they were called spoiled ballots, but the whatever they were called and how we're doing toward the general election. And then as long as you're here, I don't know if you, if the Secretary of State's office got any CRF funds or if you could report on those to us if you have a chance, but let's start with the elections update. Okay. Great. Thank you, Madam Chair. And good to see everybody again. Will Senning can't be here because he's been really burning the candle at both ends for a lot of weeks now. And it's got a number of things that he's doing today that I'll mention as we talk about prep for the general election. But sounds like it's your plan. Maybe I could do a quick overview and debrief on the August 11th primary and give you some numbers on total turnout and defective ballots, what went well, what didn't and things like that. And then I'll move into what we're doing to prepare for the general election. Okay. Great. Does that sound good? Yep. All right. Thank you. I'll start by saying that the primary in August, I did not identify myself for the record. I don't know if that is that required anymore, if it's recorded and my name is underneath. Yes, it's required. I should still say it. Some people do it and some people don't. Okay. And some people are listening and not seeing. Sure. Well, in any case, my name is Chris Winters. I'm the Deputy Secretary of State and happy to be here today with you all. The primary in August really went as well as we could have possibly hoped, given the circumstances. You know, in fact, we're calling it one of the most successful primaries that we've ever seen. We had record breaking turnout. We had all of our results reported on time. And we did all of that in the midst of a really challenging health crisis. And we were able to do this thanks to the law that you passed that allowed the Secretary of State, Secretary Condos to issue temporary elections directives for 2020. So we put out the guidance and the options and your hardworking town and city clerks did the rest. They did an amazing job. We saw a lot of creativity and compassion on full display as the towns offered a lot of different options for their voters, ones that were right for their town. They offered drive up voting, including one report of voting on horseback. They had outdoor polling places. There was voting in hockey rinks and other polling place setups that I think made voters feel safe and confident in casting their ballots on election day. And we were able to do this and keep the polling places manageable by reducing in person voting on election day. So even though we had record breaking turnout, we still had manageable polling places. This was accomplished by sending every active registered voter a postcard. And hopefully you all got one with a postage prepaid tear off that you could send back to request your mail and ballot. And I'll get into those numbers around that in just a minute. I think it's important to point out here that those postcards were multi-purpose. First of all, it made it really easy to request your ballot and meant much greater participation by mail and possibly much greater participation overall in this election. But secondly, these postcards served to update our voter checklist and clean it up like never before, which will be important for our next mailing that's coming up soon for the general election. So on to the numbers. Last Tuesday, we held the primary canvas and certified the results. So the numbers I'm referencing now are the official numbers. We had 169,000 ballots cast. And that's a record by far. Our previous record was about 122,000 in a statewide primary. So 169,000 came out. And of those over 123,000 voted earlier by mail. It's going to be almost all by mail. There was very little early voting due to a lot of the clerk's offices having limited hours due to COVID. So 123,000 voting by mail, that's about 70% of voters. And in previous years, we would see something around 25% of people voting earlier voting by mail. So that was way up. Madam Chair, you mentioned one downside that we saw. One lesson learned, I think, from this election was that we saw around 6,000 ballots deemed defective. That's about a 3%, about 3% of voters. Typically, we might see around 1% in previous elections of defective ballots. We think this was due to a combination of things. This was a primary, our most, you know, also use air quotes, complicated of elections, not terribly complicated, but the most complicated of the elections that we run, given that it's three elections and one for the three major parties. So the top three factors that led to defective ballots from the data that we have. One is people voted on more than one ballot. We didn't understand that they could only vote one ballot. Two, they failed to return the unvoted ballots. And three, they failed to sign the certificate on the envelope. Those are all reasons for considering a ballot to be defective. We also think there was a higher proportion, and we don't know this for sure yet, but we think there was a higher proportion of first-time voters and first-time mail-in voters. And those are also contributing factors. So on the good news side, more people were voting, people were voting for the first time. On the bad news side, there was some misunderstanding of the primary process. The other good news is that two out of those three reasons are not going to be an issue for the general election because there's only one ballot and there aren't three ballots. So we expect that percentage to go right back down again to what we would normally see in defective ballots for an elections. Maybe I'll pause there and see are there any questions about the primary before I move into what's happening for the general and what we're doing to prepare for the general. Thank you, Madam Chair. Hi, Chris, how are you? Good, thanks. Good. You mentioned that the postcards that were mailed out would act as, I think you said, a cleanup of voter lists. How exactly is that going to work? So if they were returned on deliverable, those go back to the clerks. And if someone receives one in error, they can call their town clerk and say, hey, this person doesn't live here anymore. They were forwardable. So if they would follow people, if they moved to a different address, that would give them the heads up like, hey, my address has changed, call you town clerk, get your voter registration updated. The ballots themselves that are planned for, it's an important distinction here. The ballots will be mailing out for the general election will not be forwardable. So they're not going to follow people into other states. They're not going to follow people to other addresses. They're going to be returned to sender return to the town clerk. So the town clerk will know that that ballot did not reach the voter who it was addressed to. Okay, so I'll just give you my own personal example. I had three postcards mailed to my house here if you're rotten. One was to me, one was to my son, and one was to my wife. My wife hasn't lived in Vermont for four years and has already voted twice in Florida in the cycles down there. Will she still get a ballot in November? Well, she will if her address is still there and she's still on the checklist as an active voter, what should have happened and perhaps didn't appears not to have is that Florida didn't notify us that she's changed her address or she didn't notify the town clerk that she has moved. And we would hope that when those mailings go to someone like you that you would let them know or you would let your wife know to contact the town clerk and update the voting information. Okay, but still, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say purging someone from a checklist is a very careful process and has to be a careful process. We need people to let us know. If we don't know, they're going to remain on there for a certain period of time until the BCA challenges them. And even then, they get a challenge letter and they get an opportunity to say, I'm still here. I'm still a voter or say now I'm no longer a voter, take me off the checklist. So for the general, if they're still listed as an active voter, that ballot may still go. But if they're not a Vermont resident, if they're voting in somewhere else, those things are all illegal under Vermont law, they can only vote once and they can only vote in the state where they're the resident. So when I went to vote being me, I asked whether my wife was still on the list and the person, you know, the clerk at the polling place said, oh, yeah, she is. And I said, well, she hasn't lived here for four years. Why don't we take her off? And of course, she said, well, you can't do that. You have to have her do it. So it's still incumbent on the voter somehow to get the list purged, which I still see a sort of an issue. But anyway, that's my question. So thank you. I couldn't the town clerk in your town challenge, send a challenge letter and challenge her. And if she doesn't, I mean, now that you've said that to them, it seems to me it's incumbent on the town clerk to send a challenge letter. And if she doesn't respond to the challenge letter and say, I'm still here, then she would get booted off. Okay. I think that's the way it works. Allison. So, Brian, I also think you could you do something with that postcard and return it to the town clerk and do a change of address or whatever moved. But anyway, I'm Chris. I are town clerks. I talked with the Woodstock town clerk and his assistant and they thought it went very well. They felt that the postcard was too small and confused people and a lot of information, which we knew that was going to be the case. But they they and there was it was a pretty labor intensive primary for them on the whole. But they thought it went wonderfully. They thought the best option was the barcode on the return envelope, which was life saving in terms of time. So they were they applauded that that piece and the option to close the office the day before, which I would hope that they also will hope that that will be for the general election that helped them count. And that's part of why we got returns on time is that people were able to do that work ahead of time. And it was anyway, it went very well. And they were stressing the importance of promptly mailing things back. And the checklist, they felt for the general election, you know, that the one ballot will help and that it's being mailed from you guys is super helpful. We have a clear issue with elderly people being confused still. And we're going to need to I think you might the SOS's office might reach out to senior centers and assisted living facilities to really assist people with this because they're not in COVID. They're not going to have the BCA come in and help people vote. So it's incumbent on those assisted living facilities like where my mother is to help my mother had no idea what that postcard was. I mean, sadly, she didn't end up voting because of because of that. But they felt that needed clarity. Also, there's evidently an issue with DMV and coordinating the check things with DMV at the moment. And towns are going to need ballots for the general election because as people call and say, I've moved or we have new residents there, even though you're mailing it out, they're going towns are going to need their own set number of ballots for people who are going to call and need ballots who aren't already on the checklist or who have moved. I'm going to ask Carol and Greg and Paul if they have comments about the primary here before we move to that. Is that okay, Chris? Of course. Okay. So Carol? Yes. And taking a page from Chris, this is Carol Dawes, Berry City Clerk and Treasurer and Legislative Chair, Vermont Municipal Clerk and Treasurer's Association. For us, we were the ones who voted in our hockey rink in our field house. It worked beautifully. The voters loved it. They loved the sense of safety by being able to stay in their vehicles. And yet we were under cover, which allowed us to have all our equipment set up in our tabulator. We actually rolled tabulators up to their windows. They had credit ballots right into it. It worked out perfectly. So while it certainly was a lot of work and we were kind of making it up as we went along, it went very well. I did want to respond to Senator Collomore's questions about the postcards and Chris's comments with regards to the benefits of changing addresses and updating the list. We got back probably 5,600 deliverable postcards, which was a pain in the neck, but great because we were able to, after the election, go through them, identify the ones that we still have on our checklist as active and living in the community and send challenge letters out to them. And that changes their status in the system to challenged, which means they will not be getting a ballot unless they respond to our challenge letter and get reactivated. And I know that there were a lot of clerks around the state who are in the same process. So I agree that it's helping us get the lists cleaned up. Many of us, myself included, have also put out calls weekly on Front Porch Forum asking people to go into the system, which they can do through the My Voter page on the Secretary of State's website, and update their information. And I'm getting notifications through the system daily about people who are making those updates. So again, we're really using this as an opportunity to get the lists as clean as is possible. Thank you. Paul? Do you have any comments? Yes. Thanks so much. Madam Chair, nice to see you and the rest of the committee again. For the record, Paul Burns, I'm the executive director of V-PURG, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. I want to say, as others have, that we are tremendously appreciative of the Secretary of State, Secretary of State staff, the work that they have done. It's really a huge amount of work and it has been done in a really excellent way. I thank and congratulate this committee and your colleagues in the legislature for giving the Secretary of State the authority to move forward in the way he and the staff have done there, and also tremendously grateful to the work at the local level by the clerks and the other poll workers. And just in a difficult time with an awful lot of work, things were done incredibly well from my perspective here. So thanks to all for helping to make that possible. I have just a couple of thoughts or questions and I recognize that despite all best efforts, there are still, you know, it's still an unfortunate thing when 6,000 people have attempted to vote and their ballots are not counted because they were defective. There are presumably a number of others who sent in ballots, but they were received too late to be counted and that's an additional problem of some number of people who were unintentionally disenfranchised because of the way they participated in the process. And certainly if they sent in a ballot, you know, closer to the election than seven or eight days, they were doing so against the advice of the Secretary of State and, you know, local clerks and others. But that seems to me, you know, is going to happen. And so that remains a question out there. I'd be very interested to know what that with the data show there for how many of those ballots came in too late. But my understanding from the Secretary of State's office is that we won't know that for sure for about 60 days post primary. And so that, but it kind of relates to what we might want to do looking forward toward the general election, even if a regular spoilage rate or let's say a defective ballot rate is closer to 1% than 3%. And I totally agree that's a reasonable assumption to make that it would be lower in the general than the primary because you don't have those additional ballots and that there was a somewhat more complicated process there. That would still be on the order of 3,000 people in a general election. And because you're going to have roughly 300,000, maybe more, we hope people participating in the general election in leading up to November's election day. So we may never get to a place where that number is zero defective ballots. I understand that, despite our best education efforts and everything else, but we should strive to make it as close as possible to zero. And I think there is work that we can all do as part of that. But one thing that we are interested in is the process by which individuals might be able to cure a defect if they take advantage of mailing something in early and discover that perhaps they didn't sign the envelope, for instance. Easily curable if they are allowed to potentially come in in a safe way and sign that envelope in front of whomever they may need to at the local town clerk's office, for instance. I am not suggesting, though in a perfect world, I might be that clerks would be required to reach out to somebody who sends a ballot that is defective in a way that could be cured. And there I'm talking about a missing signature as opposed to somebody who fills in every single oval on the form. I don't think there's anything you can be done about that, except giving them a do-over. And I don't think that's going to be something that we would want to do. But for those where the cure is, gosh, I just forgot to sign the thing. And there's time and it's possible. We'd love to see that person have the ballot count. And yet, as I say, given this year and everything else the clerks are dealing with, I don't know that it's reasonable to assume or to think that the Secretary of State should require that of clerks. But if at least people now have the technology to track their ballots and see, did it get to the town clerk and where is it in the process and might even be able to learn that if for some reason it has been considered defective, what if they then could be encouraged to call the clerk and see what was the defect or is there a way that it could be cured? I guess all I'm saying here is that maybe short of requiring the clerks to reach out, we could just do a little more public education about the possibility of a voter curing a potentially defective ballot in that way. Maybe the Secretary of State could do more education. Maybe the clerks could be encouraged to do something like that too. And maybe you can encourage clerks to reach out, but not require that of them. I don't know, honestly, what the perfect answer is. I know some states allow this activity in terms of curing defective ballots and others don't, but if there is anything that could be done in a situation, it just seems unnecessarily kind of tragic if somebody goes through the effort to fill out the thing and send it in beforehand and then find out that they forgot a simple thing like signing the envelope. So that's one thing that we might be able to do even for this general election time. I don't think that's, by the way, anything that would require legislative activity. I think there is a question about just how the Secretary of State's office may approach this and how the clerks office or clerk's offices might approach that. So that's one. The other goes to that question of might we consider allowing voters to have right up until Election Day to send in the ballot and have it postmarked as of Election Day? 17 states, I believe, allow this now. And it is, there are challenges with that and I understand that, but my greatest concern is trying to find a way for people to not be disenfranchised. And again, because elections sometimes see great activity leading right up until Election Day, I can't imagine that there aren't some people out there who will ultimately get their ballot in the mail too late for it to be counted. And that may be a particular problem because of all the challenges with the post office and the administration in D.C., some of their cutbacks and so forth. I don't know that those, that we will see negative effects on the post office ability to move our mail, particularly the ballots. But with all that kind of out there as background noise, our position is that it would be great to give voters the greatest possible time to get those ballots in. If you did allow postmarks up to Election Day, I still believe that you would need some sort of cutoff for them to be actually received by the clerks in order to be counted, and that might be an additional three days, for instance. In Vermont, that should be, generally speaking, plenty of time for a ballot to actually reach the clerk. There are things that that would then necessitate, which might be delays in certifying the elections, etc., etc., delays in recounts, delays in other things. All of that is true. It's an imperfect world, but I'm just suggesting that in order not to disenfranchise or to prevent the disenfranchisement of a certain number of voters, we should at least consider very carefully something like that. So I think those are my main thoughts and just point out again that if we have more than 300,000 people participate in the general election, and perhaps significantly more than that given the turnout for the primary, that's at least another 130,000 people participating in the elections process. And if at least 70% of them are participating by mail, sending their ballots in by mail, that's again well over 100,000 more ballots coming in through the mail than we saw for the primary. And most of those people probably will not have used the vote by mail process before. So again, totally agree all the education in the world that we can do, but these are a couple of other ideas that we hope will be helpful. And I will just finally note that VPurg is among the different organizations trying to help do some education around this as well. We put out video and lots of other educational pieces to our members and the broader public and shared with coalition partners. And so I think that work is going to be important and we have a vote safe Vermont ambassadors program where people are trying to identify several other folks that they will remind to vote and to vote early. And so these are all ways that I think civic organizations can help in the process as well. So thanks very much for the opportunity. Thank you. I'd like to hear from Greg first and then maybe Chris could respond to the couple of suggestions that were made. Thank you, Madam Chair. I remember the members of the committee. I'm Greg Marscheldon. I'm the AARP Vermont State Director. And again, thanks for inviting me to join this important hearing. I echo much of what Paul said. I want to thank Chris, the Secretary of State, Chris, the team. We've been working closely with them. This is a huge job that they have taken on and they have taken it on with extreme professionalism and looking at this very, very carefully. We've been really pleased with our ability to collaborate with them and their understanding of sort of the large swath of AARP members that we're working with across the state. So I have nothing but high praise for the Secretary's office. And again, for this committee for pushing this and making certain that we were going to be able to have a safe and secure election in 2020. We did not, AARP did not engage our members in the primary. It was a little late for us to jump in. We're sort of large enough with the complexities of our organization that getting stuff out quickly was not something that we were able to do. We have heard back from members. We reached out through email change and asked how that experience was. Mostly what we've received back is it went well. Voting by mail was a absentee and voting by mail was a good thing. People did have some questions. I'm sure that some of our members are amongst the 6,000. In the primary voting when it is, as we've said, a bit more complicated than what's coming up in the general election. And I think also what we heard from Carol is something that we've been asked about and we haven't been able to sort of provide answers yet and we will when there's concrete ones. But the voting in the hockey rink, people are certainly some of our older members are definitely looking for that to be an option if it's possible in a community where it's larger and safer as one of the options they may have to vote in the general election. I just want to just brief the committee and let you know sort of what we have done and what we're going to continue to do. We, in some time between today and one week from today, about 70,000 pieces of direct mail will hit AARP member households across the state. It's going to discuss very thoroughly all the options that they have to vote in the in the upcoming general election and dispels all that stuff out clearly. We're closely with Chris and his team on this mail piece so that we could have similar messaging and that we could create a very clear piece for our members to read and use and save as they get closer to election day. We are going to repeat that process and in about mid-October drop an additional 70,000 pieces of mail. That's member households, so that's 70,000 households that we receive. It's more members than that with two in the house. That will be a little bit more focused on the vote by mail piece although they'll have a lot of the same messages. But that piece will also include sort of very clear this is if you're if you're choosing to vote by mail. Here are the instructions on how to do that and all of our pieces are providing direct access via the web to the Secretary of State's office. So that'll be 140,000 pieces of mail between now and election day. In addition to that the AARP bulletin, those of you that are unfamiliar that's our monthly news magazine newspaper not a broad sheet but sort of a smaller fold that goes to all of our members. So that will hit every single member household in early October. I think the second Tuesday that will drop that will have all this information as well. So we feel very good about using the mail assuming that it moves well which so far at least appears to be in reaching our members with sort of three big waves of written communication about how to do this. We are a lot more concerned about our members sort of 75 to 78 and older the feedback that we've received from some of them who are either unfamiliar or have not voted by mail before or are very concerned about the virus and have taken real precautions and want to protect themselves and are nervous and scared about that. So we're we're going to be preparing something more targeted and more directly deal with that sort of older section of our member population. We're working on that piece right now. That will also be another direct mail piece but it won't go out as broadly as the first two. We're going to be also really paying close attention. I'm hoping to link up with a colleague of mine in Washington state who is starting about to roll out a really interesting program on misinformation and voting focusing on a lot of the stuff we've seen targeting older voters. He has a partnership that he has with the Center for Public Information at the University of Washington and I've spent most of today and I'll spend most of the rest of the week trying to figure out how we can ignite the large numbers of AARP members in the state to look for very simple things if they're active in Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of the social feeds about how to detect bogus bogus messages about what can and can't be done particularly around voting here in Vermont. I've already found a few examples and that didn't take me very long. So I'm hoping that that we're going to be able to do something that way and if not we're certainly going to at a minimum run this stuff by the Secretary of State and also use Snopes and other sort of very credible online outlets to make sure that we can debunk this stuff. This is a major concern of ours not just in Vermont but nationally and that's another effort that we hope to bring to the table the question is with how much time we have left how robust it can be and then I just think finally I would say that you know where I feel like from what we've been hearing back from our members the mail piece does not seem to be overwhelming them in you know in any kind of way they don't seem to be concerned that their votes won't be counted that they're that the mail won't arrive and we're not we're certainly not hearing from them well a couple but certainly not hearing from them any sort of wild conspiratorial theories about this particular action for folks participating in in this election upcoming which has been very heartwarming for us frankly and again we think tackling some of this misinformation will be helpful that way and then finally you know I agree with a lot of what Paul said on the back end I don't know what can be done about that right now our biggest concern frankly at this point is to have a safe and secure election and we're committed to continuing to work with this committee and with the secretary of state and with great organizations like VPIRC to make that happen thanks everybody for your time Greg I'm going to ask you a question before we go and then I'll see if anybody else has questions for you and then we'll go to Chris or questions for Paul and then we'll go to Chris for some responses to the two suggestions that were made by Paul what I I don't use social media I'm I'm a throwback I guess but what what kinds of misinformation is have you seen in Vermont and do you have any idea where it's coming from well okay let me answer that in two ways first the missing for some of the misinformation that we've seen some of it both the sort of a Twitter and Facebook we found a few pieces it is one clearly states that if your if your ballot is not postmarked by a specific date and this date was arbitrarily picked at about October 25th I think your ballot won't count which is just an absolute complete falsehood and then there are others that are a little more amorphous than that but are all about trying to discourage people to vote from mail that it's unsafe that it's fraudulent there'll be people will be double counted triple counted but the one I spoke of first is the kind that we're most concerned about because if that seeps into the system and gets thrown around and social and people pick it up and it gets amplified that can be a very very dangerous thing for people to believe is true one of the reasons why I'm trying to see if I can link up with this project in Washington which I'm hopeful about is that it's these two really brilliant data scientists and what they're able to do is find the origin of the tweet and the origin of the post so they can take that all the way back to the source and usually when you take that kind of thing all the way back to its original sourcing you can find a bad actor and you're able to amplify it in a way that is very powerful to people now I'm hoping that we're going to be able to do that but any minimum we will certainly take tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram posts like that and put them on our feeds and categorically call them out for for the for these for the untruth that they are and we'll do that with also again using Snopes or some other very credible online fact-checking vehicle the Washington Post has been doing a bit of this recently just to provide some extra credibility to make people sure that you know our our concern is is that this becomes like a political football and we have to sort of rid ourselves of as much of that as we possibly can this has not really been done a lot before so there isn't a whole lot to sort of benchmark it to but like the first three madam chair that I that I referenced about saying if it wasn't postmarked by October 25th I think is what it said that is just a simple untruth that the secretary of state's office can verify that VPIRC can verify that members of the legislature can credible people and credible institutions in our state can verify those things but this is happening I don't think it is happening here as much as it is probably in battleground states that are much more pushed toward the presidential election but it definitely this briefing that I was a part of yesterday was showing it is happening in states that are going to be doing a lot of mail-in voting and that would definitely put us in that category thank you thank you any other questions here should we go to Chris to respond to the Allison did you yeah I mean I'm just having a 95-year-old mother who's very eager to vote and not being while we're in COVID not having the the board of civil authority being able to go in normally as they do to assisted living places I hope you're you have some plan working with senior centers assisted living places all all of your constituents you have a wide range from 50 to 100 and you know they they they are going to need additional help and so are the people who run those facilities and I I'm anyway I'm fairly concerned about that group I'd like to respond to senator Clarkson that's a really important point and I neglected to point that out we are preparing a special letter which are going to nursing home administrative administrators folks folks at lead assisted living facilities folks in adult residential care homes I'd be happy to share that through the committee once that letter is done and approved but we're going directly to staff and administrators in those facilities to provide them the information that we're providing all of our members as well our members if they have an address at an assisted living facility they'll get our stuff but we're going to double back and be talking with professional staff and reaching out to them as well thanks we could also legislators themselves could send a letter to nursing homes and I know in Brattleboro for example it isn't the BCA that all that goes out it's the activities director that actually helps people do the voting and we're talking to senior centers and meal sites any places that are really connected to particularly again that for us that sort of older cohort of our AARP population which we're looking at it's 78 and above right now well in that place is right it's going to be the activities directors who are going to be yeah we're going to probably be organizing this and so it's key uh Greg to get them looked in as well as the directors of these facilities yeah thank you senator but we also can inform people that um whether it's by a letter I mean how many facilities do we have in our counties not that many that's right oh oh in Windsor county I've got more than that I mean just right here in Woodstock I have three three yeah you have an excellent senior center in Woodstock as well yeah but I'm not I'm not even talking about senior centers I'm going to live yeah but their connectivity to that environment we see is is really important so yeah we're going to be getting to all those places um and again we're putting that piece together sometime right good good good good so Chris would you like to respond to the two suggestions that came from Paul but that Greg agreed with sure and we'll move on to the general election okay sounds good I'm just real quick I want to say I'm really glad that Greg is focusing on this misinformation and disinformation that's something we had flagged as our main concern coming into 2020 until all the other concerns came up uh right off the bat any other things we are worried about that disinformation online and people being susceptible to it and having it affect their ability to vote so looking forward to working with Greg on that and I will say thank you thank you thank you to the partners who are helping us get the word out education and outreach is something we really need to do as as voting changes a little bit for this year and we're a small staff with um we really don't have the ability to do it all to reach out to all the different populations that need reaching out to so we rely on those partners and D Bergen AARP are two of many who've done a really great job working with us we have a big list of people regular meetings trying to help get the word out and educate voters and spread the word about voting in 2020 so we're we're thankful for our partners for sure um on the two issues that Paul raised you definitely agree these are are are worthy of our attention and it is a tragedy anytime someone's vote doesn't count you know we had some of those instances in the primary where it's just heartbreaking to talk to somebody who realizes I didn't sign my ballot or I mean I didn't sign my certificate envelope or I forgot to send my unvoted ballots back in and they're just distraught on the phone with you or online or whatever saying is my vote really not going to count and we don't want that to see that happen with anyone we want to get that number down to zero even though that's that's not completely realistic so it's a worthy goal and it's terrible when you hear about it and we should address it but we're just very reluctant to do anything about you know curative provisions or changing that date of election day at 7 p.m. to a postmark date um this year we just can't put more on our team on town clerks as far as election changes go this year and there are other issues that are problematic with respect to curative provisions and postmarks not everything gets postmarked um there are you know time delays that factor in that you have to account for not saying it's not doable I do think we ought to end the Secretary of State agrees with this we should take a look at those going forward but please don't deal with him right now on top of everything else that we're having to deal with any questions about that well we have we do are keeping some kind of a list of things that we might be looking at whoever is back in the next session that we might be looking at for permanent more permanent changes so we'll put that on the list yeah we'll have a lot of material for that list I think I bet all right you want to move on to the general election and sure just pull my notes up here again so for the general um of course we've turned immediately from completing the primary to moving right on to the general um mailing is going to start going out the week of September 21st so we're talking less than a month from now and you know as we've spoken about this over the last several months with you you know our focus has always been on ensuring that no Vermonter has to choose between their health and their right to vote and we've been really fortunate that in August you know we didn't have a huge spike Vermont's been been fairly lucky no significant outbreaks but we when we were dealing with this back in March and and moving forward we've had no way of knowing what the future is going to bring so we are constantly preparing for the worst and hoping for the best here so as part of that we took that authority that you granted us to mail every active registered voter reballot and as you know prepaid pre-addressed return envelope and our hope in doing that is that many many Vermonters will take advantage of this and will vote by mail keeping polling places manageable um will is not here today because here are just a few of the things that he's working on just today um he's got a long list and one of the things he's doing today is assisting with a chitin and senate recount and of course that has to be done very quickly and in a COVID safe way so we can get all of our ballots finalized in order to meet the printing deadline for those ballots that are going out in less than a month so right now he and his team are creating and reviewing some 275 different ballot styles and those have to be finalized before we send them to the printers we're also working with our vendor to prepare that mass mailing of ballots to make sure we pull the right lists and we match them up to the right ballots again all has to be done and ready to go in less than a month we're finalizing the envelopes and the instructions and the designs that will go with the mailing we're figuring out the logistics of getting some additional drop boxes to towns that want them a number of towns do want to either improve upon the drop boxes they already ordered for this year or already had in place or perhaps purchase new ones and one of the other things that we did today was we had a great meeting with a group of clerks in which we got some very valuable feedback including one of the clerks that's on the call here today that's just you know that's a typical day for us right now as we kind of that we're 10 weeks out from the general election so there is a lot of logistics to handle I think as you know we decided to centralize this mailing and you heard a little bit about it today already because we think that's the most efficient way to get this task done and to avoid overwhelming all of the clerks with the ballot requests that will be coming in would be coming in constantly up until November 3rd if we didn't centralize that mailing and do it proactively as soon as the ballots are ready to go so you know the other thing that we've briefly touched on we've seen news about possible postal service slowdowns we haven't seen it excuse me drink we haven't seen it in Vermont and we're fairly confident that that we aren't going to see slowdowns in Vermont we have a specific point person a specific contact that's been from the post office we've been dealing with on a daily basis we've had a lot of reassurances we're still being very mindful and watchful that that slowdown doesn't happen but we we think Vermont's going to be okay with that respect but we are still encouraging people to vote early to leave at least seven to ten days for your ballot to get back in the mail but you know one of the great things is by proactively sending this out at least you know 45 days out from the election we're eliminating one of those trips back and forth for a request or for the ballot to get to the voter so those ballots will be in the hands of Vermonters just as soon as they're available with ample time to return them you should have about a month to get your ballot back to your clerk and how you return that ballot it's going to be up to you again by mail is one way it's going to be pre-addressed and postage paid and we recommend seven to ten days for for getting that back to your clerk by the mail you can bring it back in person so by drop box if your clerk has one or delivery to your town clerk and we always say check with your town clerk first to see what their hours are and availability to come drop that off or you can get it back on election day no later than 7 p.m. when all of the polls close and then lastly if people want to vote in person they can still vote in person our hope is that it's not very many people voting in person but that's still up to you some people have to vote in person some people really want to vote in person so you know we're going to allow for that of course so our message out to the public and our message today is you know first of all register to vote be sure your address is up to date and make a voting plan and we hope that that plan is to vote early and and to vote by mail or to know how you're going to return your ballot by 7 p.m. on election day so that's a very quick rundown of what we're we're looking at it's a it's a million things a day we're we're really out straight for a long time and we're really lucky to have an elections team that really loves their work and is dedicated to what they're doing and dedicated to serving for monitors and and really passionate about elections because if they weren't i think we would have lost them a long time ago we've really pushed them to the edge these last several months and now we still have a couple of months to go with that i'll stop and i'll you know answer any questions anyone might have about the general election right thank you madam chair so chris you said the mailing would be going out by september 21st can i assume that if everything's working properly voting itself could start by around the 23rd or so in other words if it takes a couple days to get to the voter and they fill it out the first chance they get and put it back i'm just sort of trying to get a sense of when early voting would begin i'm guessing around the 23rd yes senator that's a that's a pretty good assumption it's a huge mailing so it's going to start on the 21st and i think with the postcards it went alphabetically by town so it it takes a couple of days so depending on where you are in the alphabet you might get yours by the 23rd you might get yours maybe a week later our goal is to get them all out by october 1st and i'll also just note that overseas in military will get theirs first and that starts uh september 19th i think and a voter could still request an absentee ballot correct you can still request an absentee ballot what's going to happen is when those are all mailed out you're going to be flagged as having requested an absentee ballot in our system we do know already that there are 140 000 pending requests already in our system on the postcard you can you could select for the primary and for the general some people have already selected to have absentee ballots for the entire year so we know there's already 140 000 that are in there everyone else is going to get every active registered voter will get a ballot and be flagged as having requested those that come in perhaps new voters people who've moved will uh you will request and we're looking at how to segregate those the town clerks will be responsible for sending out ballots for newly registered voters after the mailing happens and people who move and do a request after the mailing happens i want to thank carol too for the information you were provided with respect to the uh three to five hundred that you said you got i thought that was very helpful thank you you're welcome chris bray did you have a comment yeah i think i heard most of the answer already um from chris winters the but what's so 45 days is uh what date is like the 25th 23rd where are where is that on the calendar i think that's the 19th senator but don't quote me it's right thank you so i i do i think it is really important to as brian just pointed out this um the people who have been challenged will not get a ballot and they would have the ability then when they get their challenge letter to go into the town clerk and say i am still here i'm not dead and i haven't moved i still want to vote and then they can get their ballot so but i think it's important that people know that that um those people who are challenged will not be getting a ballot chris bray did you have a comment well yeah so uh is that challenge for returned sorry i just want to make sure i have this clear was this is this going to be town by every town that received a bounced return to postcard will automatically challenge or that's a town by town decision carol can probably speak to this better than i can but i think that's a town clerk and bca decision and whether they want to use that returned right card as a grounds for challenging voters it is a town by town decision um however there has there was um recommendations coming out of the elections division at the secretary of state's office that this would be a good opportunity to use the returned postcards to do such a challenge um and there's been a lot of talk on our municipal clerk and treasurer association listserv about the benefits of doing that so i i know of quite a few clerks who are doing this taking the same actions that i took okay um the other quick question is so is one form of voting actually eliminated and that is walking into your town clerk during the 45 day period requesting a ballot in person and voting is that still available or and you'll just be flagged as already have voted it is available but it's it's a little modified because you're already going to have been sent a ballot so you can that ballot you can fill it out and put it in the envelope and you're basically voting absentee even though you're handing it to your clerk i suppose you could you could still show up and say i want to carol maybe help me out here that i want to show up i want to i want to actually vote right there and i want to see you take it out of my hand i don't i don't know well there certainly could be people who want to walk into your office and register to vote right then and there they've just moved in from out of state and they want to vote um at while they're there um however uh senator bray not every clerk's office is currently open to the public um berry city hall is not we're working here but we're we're not open to the public um so access to in-person voting early voting uh will be big town by town based on what their current situation is under coven okay and now you've raised yet there's a lot of permutations to this thing for so for the person who just moved in and their town clerk's not open how are they going to go about registering to vote they um in our instance because we've had people that we've been dealing with since before the primary um what we have done is we have uh driven people to the online voter registration page which is available so they can uh register online uh we have mailed applications to them with a postage paid envelope for them to fill out the the application and mail it back to us or they can drop it in our drop box um there are a number of different ways that that we've helped uh we've been able to try to accommodate them and their need to register great well you know other people have already said it but I'll chime in as well thank you so much for there's been a tremendous amount of work I'd say be very hard for me to imagine anyone in Vermont doesn't know that uh government in Vermont wants to make it as easy and safe as possible for you to vote so thanks so I'm going to um right now I'm gonna Thomas I know you're with us on the phone did you have any comments you'd like to share and I don't know if you can unmute yourself or if Gail has to unmute you there you are I can do that um thank you for doing this thank you for letting me participate I have no questions I think some of the questions and issues I'd been thinking of have already been discussed uh here in the hearing so I'll mute myself back up again and listen some more okay thank you well thank you for being here with us um anybody else have any questions concerns suggestions um Allison uh I I just wanted to reiterate the question I think our town clerks had was on the DMV coordination are you working with DMV closely I mean are people that that seem to be a little bit of a hiccup at least in our neck of the woods there was you know that's always the classic oh I registered with DMV and it doesn't show up something like that that's one concern is the DMV and the other one is particularly during COVID and with all the challenges we face I would hope people would be thoughtful about same-day voter registration uh showing up at quarter of seven for that whole thing is really a I think a challenge for for many town clerks particularly now and this year so I don't know if we want to include any kind of thoughtfulness message but um I think having what you said Chris is having a voting plan and being thoughtful about that voting plan with with clerks who are already have a huge amount of extra work what is really important yeah thank you senator on the DMV issue we get a night we upload from them on any any new registrations any address changes so I guess I'd have to see the specifics to know what was what was going glitchy there um yeah having a voting plan is really important we try not to promote election day registration uh too much leading up to the election then you know but because we know it can be difficult for town clerks but that's always a backup for someone who who shows up on election day for whatever reason their registration isn't showing up for you know I think the better news here is that people are really engaged we're seeing more participation than ever our registration numbers in Vermont are really high which is great thanks to automatic voter registration thanks to work of a lot of groups trying to get people registered reaching out um you know the fact that inmates can can vote in the state of Vermont we get a lot a lot of things going for us to drive our registration numbers up really high and I'll just point out real quick a little plug for us that you know two years ago we were ranked number one in the country on the election performance index by MIT that's the coveted one that all the election geeks try to get their ratings came out again a couple of weeks ago and we did drop out of first place but we're still in third place which is pretty good number three in the country who beat us Minnesota your oh yeah that's right and North Dakota oh sure my two my two states and it just might be interesting for the committee to know that if you go to mvp.vermont.gov to your my voter page you can track your ballot so you can actually go in there and see if your ballot has been returned you can see if it's been marked effective that's when then we when we start getting the phone calls you can see that it's been mailed out to you so mvp.vermont.gov gives you and you can see a sample ballot you can update your your voting information where you want your ballot mailed all that right right there at mvp.vermont.gov and Chris could you just clarify what were numbers what what it means I mean number one in the country or number three in the country in what aspect of voting yeah they call it elections performance it's a whole whole bunch of different data but it does include the things like voter turnout online tools that are available to voters time spent standing in line we do really really well there less than a minute on compared to some states where it can be it can be ours you know tragically it can be have to stand in line on election day so a whole variety of factors and we turned up number three this year great congratulations Chris bray did you have a question yeah i'm guessing next time around you're going to be back to number one based on what's going on around here this year so we're always shooting for it did anybody else have any questions or comments oh anthony and then paul just two quick things i think first of all given the work you all had to do on the primary the general election is going to be a breeze compared to the primary so i appreciate all the hard work i'm curious so i heard about this thing and i'm not sure what exactly it was a call true the vote something out of texas that was sort of sent to the town clerks the day before the election implied that they were going to have to provide a lot of different information and whatnot can you just tell me what that was about sure it's it was a public records request and and had a lot to do i think with um election data that they're looking for sent to all the town clerks um we had a bunch of calls on it as well and right you know the day before the election so you know of course they're not going to be able to reply to it right away it's a lot of information that we can respond to so our advice to them was to respond but to say that the secretary of state's office would be responding to the majority of the information that they're looking for i think we can reply to all of it i immediately reached out to them asked for an extension of time said as the records officer for the secretary of state's office we would be responding on behalf of all the town clerks i have not yet responded to that and i did not actually get a response back to my email so is it a real thing it's a real thing and they're doing it for 50 states okay thanks well um chris has mentioned of the my voter page and the opportunity for people to track their ballot was just a another reminder for me as as i was discussing before the opportunity to potentially cure your ballot um i understand that chris's explanation that he's that the secretary of state will not require clerks this time and i i want to be clear i i understand that i don't disagree with that rationale i think what we may be left with though is a patchwork of different responses that clerks may give to citizens who track their ballot and may find that um that it hasn't been counted that has been declared defective for instance and so and there may be nothing that we can do about that that you get a different response in burlington than you do in brattle burrow but i think one thing that the secretary of state's office should should advise would be for each office to to have consistency in the way they respond to people who are inquiring about their own defective ballots and if two people have the same defect that is that they both forgot to sign the envelope the response to them about the opportunity to cure that defect at that place should be the same otherwise of course we run the risk of if you're treating different people differently that that that could raise valid concerns for folks i hope the response isn't then therefore we do nothing to allow any defects to be cured but but at least i think you could have in other words a consistent response that is more than just no um to to everybody who inquires about it so i think that there could be uh without a blanket requirement and a lot more work for all clerks at least something to be said some guidance to be offered about the need for consistency and and perhaps encouragement to at least respond favorably if even if they are not proactively reaching out to voters to say hey you've got a problem with your ballot if somebody tracks their ballot on the my voter page sees as a defect inquires about it there i think we need to have some sort of consistent responses within those offices thank you that's ian hi i just i had been i've been curious about what the law says in this regard because um the defective ballot statute 17 vs a 25 47 does provide that if upon examination by the election officials it appears that any of these number of things happen the ballot shall not be counted and marked defective and one of those is that the certificate is not signed separately the return of ballot statute which is 17 vs a 25 43 subsection b reads once an early voter absentee ballot has been returned to the clerk in the envelope with the signed certificate it shall be stored in a secure place and shall not be returned to the voter for any reason um so the general rule is to not return to the the ballot to the voter for the for any reason what's an interesting part of the law is that it's returned in the envelope with the return in the envelope with the signed certificate so i think we could put that at least on the list for a potential legislative review at some other point but reading those together i i just question whether a clerk could return the ballot to the voter once it's once the clerk receives the ballot back chris do you have any or carol it's interesting the the um the one comment that i would say because i would love to find a way to repair defect with regards to defective ballots it's heartbreaking every time as we're opening them and processing them that we find the defective ones my biggest concern would be um regarding process um how do i reach out to the voter how do i let them know and how do i do that consistently across all my voters that's what i was going to say as well carol that paul's comment is dead on i think in the you want voters to be treated consistently and with defects you know clerks may handle them slightly differently right now when they enter them you know what kind of notice they give back to people that the ballot is defective so that that presents a real challenge um and something to look at well any more questions or comments or concerns i just have to say that um actually i i you know i love this committee and i love the issues and i think that this committee um over the years has worked really hard with in cooperation with the secretary of state's office and the town clerks and advocacy groups to remove as many barriers as possible to allow people to vote and while we'll probably never get it perfect and never get everybody there i i think that the effort um from the town clerks and the secretary of state's office and the advocacy groups has been and just remarkable and um we should be really proud of that here here here here really extraordinary this year so any other um questions concerns issues anything else i have a question for the deputy secretary i'm wondering if you want to guess what our participation rate will be in the general election oh good idea we could have a bet for everybody i thought the question might be about getting a haircut that was where i was going to go but no what are you hoping for i don't even dare to venture a guess i would i would love to see twice the the turnout that we had for the primary and so that would you know put us somewhere around three hundred and forty thousand three hundred and fifty thousand out of four hundred and fifty thousand yeah it's gonna be i was just gonna say is again does it get us past 70 percent yes yeah yeah slightly all right thank you and what the highest we've had chris a voter participation wasn't it no eight yeah oh it was a big year i think that might have been the record i don't know off the top of my head i want to say i don't know for sure but yeah have we ever broken 80 percent i don't believe so that that's just shocking given that we send people to die for this right it's just amazing to me that we fight for this right that we all honor it and applaud it and yet can't be bothered to go and vote and now making it super easy so we all in every town we should have one of those things like a thermometer and fill it up and so everybody is like super aware of how many people have voted you know particularly early ballots in and you know get people a visual reminder that they need to vote just one more thing that the clerks can take on the day before the election oh back to me other people right i think we one year waybridge got like 81 back when i was a house member wow i asked secretary markowitz to create an award for the municipality that had the highest participation rate it's just sort of a pr you know little friendly competition and help get the word out there but um maybe it's not for i'll pass that same recommendation along you could have an award for the highest participating town you'll never get it we have a town here that has three voters yeah there are a few land grove and victory always go way high but they're fairly small so okay so we'll have a tiered competition and i the other comment i want to make is that i just love seeing isabel well she's answering to e and the outside i figured she was so i going to ask if there's anything else we need to do and we'll see you tomorrow great thank you 130 right uh yeah 130 130 thanks thank you