 Good evening. Welcome to Montpelier Civic Forum. Today we have a very special Civic Forum. We have John Odomar, a city clerk who's going to be discussing elections with us. He's going to be discussing when the election will be, how the election will be held, and election integrity, all of which are extremely important issues. John, thank you so very much for being here this evening. Thanks for having me. Was it the open Washington County Senate seat, do you think, that brought people out? That helped, the Democratic primary, that was a pretty active primary, but it's more than that, because we also had it a couple of years ago. So I think more than anything, it's just that the election is finally on everyone's radar, and they're coming out to it. So that's a difference, and it's a great difference, actually. The other difference I would cite would be, behind the scenes, the way the statewide database is structured, the way we clerks interact with it, the way it makes voting easier, and its level of security. The system we had when I started was, I was problematic. What was problematic about it? From the consumer's perspective, we still go, we still see our name in the list, we give them our name, and then we get the ballot, and we put the ballot inside, and we get the sticker. Well, there's functionality to it that enables us to do a lot of things a lot faster, especially early voting, so that's the big thing. There are fail safes in place, there are redundancies, so that we, it's a lot harder for a clerk to screw up now when they're entering data, when they're checking someone off the checklist. The biggest change, and it's also a much more robust system. Checking someone off the checklist, how do people get tossed off the checklist? Oh, no, I just meant checking off as in you're coming in to vote. Oh, okay. Let's go to that one just for a second. How do you get tossed off the checklist? Well, if we get a notification, if we get a death notification, if we get a notification from another state, that, you know, or another part of the state, and that actually is a big change with the new checklist. I should mention, because that goes back to your other question, now that we're all feeding in, you know, really in a direct way all the different clerks into this database, when somebody registers in one, we immediately take them off the other. It happens at the same point. We capture that voter's record, it comes over. That was not the case before. So it really helps us, it really helps the integrity in terms of watching out for fraud. Because if someone gets checked off for that election, they're not going to be able to go, first of all, you're not going to be able to have as many duplicates. You're not going to get the double vote. And if they go to another town, they vote early in one, and then they go to another one and re-register and try to vote there, the election that they're trying to vote for will already indicate that they have voted that time. So it's a sweet new system. It really does a lot of good stuff. What if I came here from Massachusetts and still maintained the right to vote in Massachusetts as well as registering in Vermont? Would that be captured? Not necessarily. Well, it would be captured from our end if you tried to register there, because we are good about letting the other states know that someone has just registered here. They're supposed to let us know the reciprocal. And I can't say for sure how well that does or doesn't work. I know that we do our due diligence on our side, but it's theoretically possible. I have no sense of accountability for whether Massachusetts would let me know in the opposite. Now, having said that, it's very interesting in the elections world. There's a couple networks, one in particular that's called ERIC, which is a network of that different states feed into. I think it's up to around 15, 16 states where they do data share in a more direct way, sort of like we do here in the state. And they can track those interstate registrations a lot more carefully. Are they tracking by social security number? No, because none of them... There must be John Odoms all over the place. The standard way to verify and track voters, and this goes back to some federal legislation after the 2000 election debacle, is either through a DMV-issued ID, either a driver's license or a non-driver ID, or the last four of a social security number. This is what we do in Vermont, but it's the same system that other states use too. Now, you guys have training in Vermont and meet every so often the city clerks. What's the fraud that we're seeing in Vermont? I've heard a couple of anecdotes. What would those anecdotes be? That somebody came in and tried to vote in a jurisdiction next to the one that was appropriate. With the operative word being tried? Yeah, I think at one point somebody was given a provisional ballot that didn't go anywhere. What is a provisional ballot? A provisional ballot is something that's been all but eliminated in Vermont. Provisional ballots were also created after the 2000 debacle as a failsafe. If people should be on the ballot or aren't, there's some sort of question. So those are the people down in Georgia who have hyphens in their name and it doesn't match exactly. They can vote with a provisional ballot. They vote with a provisional ballot. And it was originally conceived as a way, again, to create failsafe and to protect people's right to vote. Now that the systems have gotten more sophisticated and the tracking is better, you more often see it used as a way potentially to marginalize someone's vote, to put it in a separate stack and push it to after the election and then maybe take it to a court to decide whether it should or shouldn't be counted. In Vermont, we basically eliminated those just from our own, our board registration system. And in fact, what was the, what did I hear from Will Senning, the elections director at the Secretary of State's office? He had a training one time and he said, you know, there's never really in Vermont any need to give anyone a provisional ballot unless maybe someone goes across the street, gets roaring drunk, comes in and demands they get a ballot where they should or not give them a provisional one and tell them to go away. And then that provisional ballot goes before a court and you could say, you know, I couldn't verify this person. Back a couple of years ago, you had, I was going to say some fun, but I'm sure it wasn't fun, Francis Brooks and Ashley Hill. How many votes separated those two? Well, when all was said and done, it was one when the dust settled. Did you have training on how to ascertain what the intent of a vote was? You know. And who was involved in ascertaining what the intent of that vote was? Well, since that's a county level vote, it was actually in the hands of the county clerk. And they got folks from all the different towns, didn't have to worry about different political parties because it was all within one political party. And yeah, people were just generally guided on, you know, we defer to the will of the voter. What does that mean? Or the intent of the voter. Excuse me, that's what I meant. But someone in a case where the intent, we're back to the hanging chat of 2000. But if somebody like put in a ballot and had written in or had voted for Ashley Hill and then crossed it out next to it, it said, no, I really mean, and then pointed here, then that's a case where the intent is clear. It's less clear if there's like maybe a little dot in one and the other one is all filled in. It's like, did they mean to vote for this one or did they think they were voting for two? Was it one person? Was it our county clerk who was the ultimate arbiter of that? The ultimate arbiter was the judge. So the county clerk oversaw a new recount, which was sort of a de novo recount, just counting everything from scratch. All of us clerks brought in our stuff. We were all there. Well, many of us were there. We actually used the Montpelier tabulators for that. That's why I was there really. And at the end of the day, they determined that there was a two-vote difference. But there were some ballots that had been challenged by one side or the other is questionable. So those individual ballots were reviewed by the judge. And there were four, I think, ballots that were ultimately in question. And so the judge ruled on all four. And based on his rulings, that gave Francis Brooks the one-vote win. Overseas votes that are coming in from people living overseas or people serving in the military, the Peace Corps, whatever. When did those come in? When do they have to be in? And when are they counted? What's the number? We have a hard and fast deadline. And the Secretary of State is on us for, you know, make sure these go in and make sure they're in there by the day. And I believe it's 60 days. I'm not sure. Right. But when do they have to be back? Oh, they have to be back the same time as everybody else has under Vermont law. We have to have them in hand by the time polls close on Election Day. So the military dozen who are serving in Afghanistan don't have an extra buffered window? No. And that's built backwards the other way. The idea is if we go back far enough, then that, you know, by all rights, should guarantee that they would get back in time. How far we go back 60. Do most states go back that far? You know, I'm not even sure about that. But my guess would be no, because a lot more states will have provisions for, say, post-mark ballots before the election. You can have ballots continue to come in under various provisions or other in a lot of other states. But here they have to physically be here. Here they have to actually be here. So given that there's a little more wiggle time on that end, I would imagine the front end time is a little less than ours. How do I get an absentee ballot right now? And when does it have to be back in? How do I get it back in? Oh, there's a number of ways you can get it back in. You can drop it off. Here in Montpelier we have a drop box by the back door of City Hall, which is where people will put payments and things if it's off hours. You can also put your ballot in there. You can mail it. That's not all kinds of waste. That's three. But there are three. And I can get that by how? Do I have to stop in the office to get that? You can call in. You can request it on the internet. You could also call it in. How do I request it on the internet? There is, what is it? I think it's O-L-V-R dot S-E-C dot state dot V-T dot U-S. So it's a state and not the city site that we request our absentee ballots. Right. If you want to do it online, there's a state portal. And it's the same portal which you can go and check your, you can actually go back and check on the status of that ballot. See if it's been issued or is still under review. How does the state know that it's actually me that's requesting it and not somebody pretending to be me? What do I say? Well, perjury attaches. Historically that's not something we've, you know, I think the small rural nature, it's not something we demand IDs. And currently under state law, yeah, you don't have to show an ID when you shop. I always tell people if another U comes and tries to vote, then one of you is going to jail. I don't care which one. Or at least a fine. Why don't we have jail? Why don't we have an ID? Why don't we require some sort of identification? I know we're a rural state and the people at the polls most likely will know most of the people who are coming through. Yeah, two reasons. One, because this is the system going way back historically. Two, because there hasn't been a compelling need yet to change it. If fraud increases, if there actually becomes an issue of fraud where right now there really isn't, then I think you'd see, you probably see a broad range of people saying we need to implement this. But right now it's, it would be a solution searching for a problem, basically. But other states are moving towards that solution searching for a problem? Yeah, and it's very controversial. I mean, I'm not going to characterize other states, particularize problems with or lack of problems with fraud. But certainly when these voter identification laws have been put into place, there have been a lot of arguments, many of which have stood up in court to say that the way they are structured is disproportionately affects one population or another demographically. If you're going to create a legitimate, genuine, if it ever comes to that, and Vermont, that we need to create such a system, it's going to mean to be done thoughtfully in a way that doesn't disadvantage one population over another, or you're doing a lot more harm than good. What happens after I put that piece of paper into the machine and the public has done? What happens at that point? All of those pieces of paper have gone through the machines, been collected. What happens? Well, then that we print out the results from the tabulator. We get an aggregate total. We report that to the Secretary of State's office. Is there any double checking on that before it goes in? No. I mean, we depend on those machines. We test them in advance to make sure we can depend on those machines. We actually will be testing this week all of our other machines. We usually will be running through ballots, running through every possible way, make sure the counts come up correct. If there is a question, if it comes down to one, two, 20, 25-oh difference, then that's why folks have a right to a recount. And we've got the physical backup. Physical backup is we were moving away from that in this country for a few years. Now the trend is going back, either paper ballots. We never moved away from it in Montpellier. We never moved away from it in Vermont. And now we're more of a model, right? But the trend is to go back to paper ballots or for ballots, paperless voting machines to then produce a paper product afterwards. So you have that. So once I have that, once you have that number in hand, what happens? How do you convey that number? Well, the first priority I have is getting it onto the Secretary of State's website. And they collect that information in one spot online so people can go and check. The second priority is not a priority, but I like to keep the press from driving me bananas. So I send them real quick the same thing. And then I get it out on the Facebook page, ASAP, because a lot of people look to that. And as you say, I need to try to see if I can get it onto the clerk's webpage proper a little more quickly than the next day. Right now it's on your Facebook page. It goes up on Facebook like that. And what is your Facebook page? It's Montpellier VT City Clerk. I mean, it's facebook.com. Approximately what time in the evening? Would we anticipate that those results would be up? Oh, it depends on the vote. It depends on how dynamic the vote is. It depends on whether there's a lot of write-ins. I would say this one closed at seven. I would say, you know, nine o'clock. I would think so. So you're putting this tally into a password protected area of the Secretary of State's website. That's correct. Is there any possibility that, you know, some malevolent person like organization like M13 would hack into that and change those tallies? Well, the more detailed his answer is that it's extremely unlikely, but the short one sentence answer is sure. There is no system that is 100% secure. And, you know, I don't want to frighten anybody, but I'm also, you know, I'm a credential penetration tester. Okay, I have to ask, what is a credentialed penetration tester? I know, it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. Well, I'm a certified ethical hacker, which means penetration testing is testing security from the outside in rather than building walls. And I've got some certification in building the walls, but that's not as much fun. Penetration testers start from the outside and try to get in. They look for holes. Have you ever been successful in the Secretary of State's site? No, because of the rules of ethical hacking makes anything like that illegal. I would have to sign a contract with them that laid out very clear terms of engagement for me. So no, to the extent I get to play with this stuff, it's in sort of laboratory type environments. But, I mean, my point is that if there's one credo of people with this training, it's never tell anyone that any system is 100% guaranteed secure because it's not necessarily. And having said that, this is a very secure system. They, in fact, just implemented two-factor authentication, which is... What is that? Two-factor is, you know, a lot of folks who do online transactions have that, where you have your own password, but then you get a dynamically generated password, or else comes through text. You want to log in, you use your local password, you get a number of texts down that's unique, and you get that so that you get in that way. And that doesn't solve all your problems, but boy, it's probably the biggest single thing they could have done for help. Why are elections in Vermont so latent in terms of the total vote coming in if everybody's got computer access across the state? All of your county clerk, or your town clerks, have access to their website to put their tolls in? Well, I have to say, I'm not... You're not driving, you're not... I'm not aware that they are that late because we're required now. All of us are required to put that stuff in on election eve, even if it's a first pass. Because you're not driving it anymore. I could see when you were driving the tallies into the pailier or whatever. Right. No, no. We're supposed to, the law changed recently, we're supposed to get in those, at least not so much the detailed, with the overvotes and the undervotes and exactly... What are overvotes and undervotes? Undervotes is when somebody doesn't leave something blank. They don't use their full voting power and they don't vote on everything. An overvote would be if somebody votes for too many, like vote for one and you vote for two. We push that through. If we don't catch the person, because the machines will spit that out, they'll say, yep, no, overvote, overvote. So if the voter is right there, I'll say, you've got an overvote here, you want to try it again and I can rip up there and give them another one. But if they're not there, then we just have to push it through. And that ballot line that they overvoted on doesn't count, but it goes down on the list as an overvote so that we can track that. What happens if I get 10 votes as write-in? Do those go to the state as well? Do you give the write-ins that evening and the frequency of the write-ins? We put the write-ins in, although the way the law is now, if it's fewer than 30 write-ins, then it doesn't really count. 30 aggregate across the state or 30 locally? Well, it's going to be aggregate across the state if it's in across the state. That's what I'm saying, in the gubernatorial race. No, we put that stuff in. So every vote that's cast one way or the other is going to end up in the Secretary of State's office. For those kind of elections, yeah, they'll track them. If it's local, it's a local election, if it's less than 30, you just ignore it. How many people have registered this time? Are we seeing a spike in voter registration? Not really. And I think that's due to, first of all, Montpelier has pretty high registration already. But we've also... What percent are registered roughly already? I want to say, what is a six out of eight? So that's going to be around 75, 78 percent, something like that, maybe closer to 80. Yeah, I mean, that would be my guess. I don't have those numbers specifically down. So Vermont has been successful in terms of accessing voter registration with other kinds of... We've got automatic voter registration now at the DMV, which is fantastic. And that's part of why I think our in-house registration numbers have come down. Now when you go... And this has tripped a few people up, but for the most part, it works. When you go into renew your driver's license or get a driver's license, used to be you could opt in, check something, and then you get registered to vote. Now it's opt out. You're automatically registered to vote. So if you go in and check that little box, it means you're opting out. Now once the last time, can we do same-day registration in Vermont? What does same-day registration mean? Well, it means if you're not registered to vote and you want to come in and vote, then you can register that day and then you can vote. That's something... It does create some more work for a lot of clerks, which is a drag, but it's a terrific thing in that it encourages participation. But also to get back to your security question, it's a great bulwark against a lot of mischief that could be done. Also... Well, the lowest-hanging fruit for anybody, especially a foreign actor, who wants to cause mischief, is going to be those statewide databases that all the states have that we have. That's internet-facing. It's something that somebody might be able to get into. Now, what are they going to do if they get into it? You can't change vote totals in there, but you can change voter rolls. You could mass disenfranchise a whole bunch of people simply by taking them off the rolls. And that's one of the attacks that people are most concerned about. So if somebody did that, if somebody messed with somebody's voter registration, moved him around, deleted him completely, then that same-day registration creates a firewall between that because then we can put them back on. What happens if I moved after the election? I'm in District 2 right now. What if my wife and I moved to District 1 and we didn't inform you of our address? After the election? Last election, we voted in District 2. We have a different place in District 1. I go over to vote. They look at me in the book and it's my old address. What do I do then? Am I allowed to vote? Oh, sure. If you're in the same... Especially in an election like November, it's not District-based. So if my address is changed within Montpelier, I'm allowed to inform you of the new address and vote? Yeah, yeah. And we would like to know that. And you can certainly do that even if it's a District race. You can inform us of the address. We'll switch you over. We'll let the folks working in the different District checklists know and we'll get you a ballot for the appropriate District. We do that quite a bit. And that's another... That's actually where we capture a lot of our... The addresses that need to be updated are on these District elections because people will move and generally they won't let us know. So we get... That's where we get to do a lot of our list cleanup is on those annual city meetings. A lot of us are reading how absentee ballots are coming in strong in other states. How are they doing in Montpelier? Oh, boy. They're... Yeah, they are robust. We're getting quite a bit. We are going to have upwards of 40% of our ballots in Montpelier are going to be cast early, maybe not quite that high. But it's a lot. It's a big jump from the last couple elections. What do you ascribe that to? I think people are getting used to it. I think people... I mean really what we're creating with the early vote is less of an election day and more of an election season. And I think people are starting to think of it that way. You know, we certainly... We get regulars, certainly. The folks who have early voted before tend to early vote again. But then every year there's a few more and so then they get on that train and so we go. When all the votes are tallied, what do you think this will be like versus the last non-presidential mid-year election? Oh, it's going to be more, for sure. I think the last... I didn't check the numbers before I came in, but I'd be willing to bet the last non-presidential was in the 2600 range. And we're going to be more like 34, 3500. So it's going to be a... It's going to look a lot more like a presidential. People are really energized. There's been some discussion across the nation in terms of local elections. For Town Meeting Day, what percent of us actually do get out and vote? It varies. Actually, Town Meeting Day in particular varies quite a bit. But it usually varies between 30 and 60 percent. Well, that's quite a bit of variance. It is. When would 60 percent come out and vote on a Town Meeting Day? You know, that's a good question because I'm not always sure what drives that number. Certainly, if there's active controversy, which there isn't usually, but it has happened, that drives turnout. City Council races, where there's a challenge, where there's a race. Mayor, if there's a race, I think Mayor, the last time we didn't really have a race. But these contested, particularly open seats in the Council will bring out more. But on the other hand, you look at the numbers and sometimes they don't. So it's odd. It's a little hard to track. What are changes that are under discussion? I know the Secretary of State's office probably queries the city clerks as to how the system could be improved. Are there any changes that have been discussed but not implemented or stuff that other states are doing possibly that we would keep our eye on? Well, I know the Secretary of State would like to bring electronic poll books into the state. I have to ask, what is an electronic poll book? Electronic poll book would be something like some like a tablet or something. And these would be hard wire. They wouldn't be over wireless. Wireless is a big no-no. Why is wireless a big no-no? Too hackable. Way too hackable. So what is the poll book attached to? Poll book would go into some sort of depending on how they set it up. It could go straight into the Secretary of State's side or it could go into some point in between. And that would enable you to, right now we have to enter all the voter participation afterwards. And it's very time consuming. It's very boring. But this, with an electronic poll book, when people are checking in voters, boom, that participation is immediately noted. And that would, that makes our life simpler. Electronic voting. Internet voting. Yes or no? No. Why not? It's not secure. I mean, there's a... Aren't there states that are trying it? West Virginia is trying it. And I think most IT people you ask are going to say, don't do it. They're working in some sort of proprietary blockchain through a corporation. I'm not sure who they are. What is a blockchain? How much time have you got? A thumbnail. Oh my God. Is there even such a thing as a thumbnail of blockchain? Blockchain is a new technology that essentially works like a distributed database, cryptographic database that's used for, you know, the highest profile you hear about is Bitcoin. You have it used because it creates tremendous level of security, takes out the middleman in transaction. It's very trustworthy. It's very transparent. It's very stable. So it's a platform essentially. So they are using that platform, this very, very secure, this very robust platform as the means between the voter and the, you know, the centralized system. Instead of using U.S. postal, this is evolving from postal into a form of email. Right. But blockchain can give you a false sense of security because you're still susceptible at the user end to various types of hacking. You could have your, as they say, your session key hijacked. So somebody could take over your session on the computer and change something. You'd be susceptible to something called a man in the middle attack between you and your ISP. Is there anyone susceptible to intercepting a ballot sent through the mail and then sending it back to you? Well, theoretically, but it's a lot less likely. Taking it out of your mailbox or whatever? Yeah. I mean, that's what it would have to be. Somebody would have to lurk around, take it out of your mailbox and put it back in. That's not something you can do very large scale. That's something you can do by sending out a mass email with a phony link that you click on and your computer is infected. If I'm going to the polls on November 6th, what time am I going? Oh, 7 o'clock. 7 o'clock in the morning. 7 to 7, regardless of weather. Absolutely. I think that we've covered just about it. Is there anything that I didn't cover? No, probably, but it doesn't leap to mind. The topic is endless. What's the weather forecast for the 6th? I'm sure you've looked ahead. I have not looked ahead. I am day to day at this point. The work is so difficult. I'm just keeping my head down, processing those ballots and getting to the end. That's 40% come in early. It will, or close to it. It will. John, thank you so very much. And I'd remind you either to be part of the 40% and get your ballot in early or be part of the 60% and show up on November 6th. But do one thing. Urge your family and friends to vote either way because it's not only a civic duty, but it's civic responsibility. Thank you very much for watching this.