 We have enough of this and hopefully Jesse will pop in any second. Um, and we have, so we have a quorum so we can, our meeting started. I see no members of the public other than our invited guests. So just proceed straight to, uh, talking with, with her. Um, so Lauren, so, um, essentially, you know, so I, I sent that list of questions, uh, we need some feedback on our draft of the special act language. Um, I'm not sure what you think might make the most sense to start. So I kind of leave that open to you. Um, what guidance you want to provide to us. Yes. Um, I, uh, why don't we start talking about the questions and then we can go and talk about the special act. If that sounds reasonable. Okay. I just want to flip over to the questions working from home stuff. Uh, great. Here's Jesse. Ah, welcome, Jesse. We just started about a minute ago. So would it be, I was, uh, trying the old link to the meeting, not the new one. Sorry about that. Oh, um, would it be helpful if I screen shared those, the questions or Lauren, did you have something you wanted to screen share? I can screen share and then I can send it to you. It just, it's like, doesn't want to cooperate. Um, so let me just see why I have to be fighting with my computer. Bad tech week. Yeah. I like to say that my husband is my, um, my IT director, but he's very busy right now, so he can't help me, literally just saved it. So where did it go? Well, maybe you just want to get us started while my computer tries to do what it's supposed to do with what the questions were. I said you want me to share them, you mean? Yeah, that's fine. Um, I'm like working on getting this to come up, but it hasn't. So, um, I don't know why. Okay. All right. Um, it seems to me that the, the statewide ballot measure passing, the benefit of that is that it, um, makes it more likely that the legislature will support you switching to rank choice voting, um, you know, in, in town. I think, you know, obviously we know that Cambridge does this in that many communities across the country do it, but, um, I can tell you, having worked in the elections division, that the Cambridge way of doing things, you know, has evolved and it's much, um, better now than it used to be. I'm sure you have read about how it used to take weeks for them to say who won and now that the computer programming works much better. Um, so again, I think, uh, more likely to find legislative support if the legislature is already dealing with language and any tweaks that are needed from the special, uh, from the state initiative. Um, and, you know, I, I'm, I say that as kind of, um, and I think this goes to the, to the whole thing, that there is definitely, um, any time, and I've said this to you guys probably more times than anyone wants to hear, but any time that you kind of try to change the way elections work, you run into some resistance because, uh, especially right now where everything is so political, um, it's hard for, uh, you know, to kind of get the support you need at the legislative level to make these kinds of changes. Um, now that being said, we already have some in Massachusetts and so hopefully that would be, um, an easier, an easier, uh, uh, convincing, very legal term, um, than it, than it would be otherwise. Um, but I do think that the, uh, secretary will have a lot to say about this. Um, and so, and I think I've said this to you before, I think it's good to, to run the draft by them and see what kind of feedback they have now rather than waiting till later, especially where you have a draft that is so evolved. Could I ask a question about the, um, the potential overlap between question two, if it's successful and, uh, our own intentions, uh, the actual language of the question says that, uh, R.C.V. will not be used on regional school district committees and, uh, of course, the school committee in Amherst is something we do want the local, uh, implementation of R.C.V. to apply to. It, the, the passage of question two would not prohibit us, would it? No, um, a special act can make changes to, um, to the general laws with respect to process for electing, appointing, et cetera. And I'm sorry, there's like three, uh, three meetings going on right now in my home. So I apologize for that. Um, everyone's dealing with it. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Um, so I, your special act can deal with that. The, the issue I think that they're having and the reason why that comes up is that, um, there's different manner, there's several different manners of electing regional school district committee members. And so how that would work kind of statewide, I, I think is a bigger, a bigger bite than they're ready for at this point. Um, those offices do show up on ballots with state elections. And so that's why I think it's saying that the regional school district committees won't be elected, um, using proportional representation. So the things that we would have to watch out for us to be sure that the, the legislation that we want passed would be specific enough to, uh, deal with any potential conflicts between question two and our intention. Yeah. I mean, we're going to know sooner rather than later. Um, so I think that's, you know, when, when you guys are formally ready to move forward, I mean, we'll probably know November 4th, um, whether the question passed. Um, and I say probably only because this election season is just so funky. I don't want to create any false expectations, but, um, you know, if we know the night of the third or the fourth, um, you can make whatever adjustments you need to, to the draft that you want to submit. Um, what else? Uh, yeah. So the other, that, and that's kind of the same point I make over and over. And I, and I'll send you back my written comments, but, um, it's just that we just don't know what the secretary of state is going to do. So, um, we kind of are waiting to see. Um, I do think that if the secretary is required to adopt regulations, that's a great thing for us because it gives us a framework from which to base ours on. And even though multi versus single, I still think it provides us with a really good foundation. So, um, you know, not that there's a right or a wrong way to do this. It's basically uncharted, but I think, um, you know, this state, especially the secretary's office will be more comfortable with the concept if they're looking at it as a statewide issue rather than just as a local one off. Um, so that's my perspective on that. Is that it for question one or should we move on to question two? It's it for me. Actually, hi, this is Ellen. So, um, here we go for regulations without include the certification of machines and software with that fall under regulation as well as other issues regarding education and also timing, I think would be a huge thing for us too. Yeah. So the answer to that is probably yes. The secretary does all the certification stuff by regulation. So the process is in the general laws. I mean, in the special, sorry, in the regulations right now, 950 CMR, that's where you're going to find all the secretary's regulations and they do have a section on approving election equipment. Um, with respect to the software, I think that I don't know what they do right now with Cambridge, but, um, the secretary has a vested interest in elections coming out right. And so even if there's no formal certification process, it's my guess that he has worked closely with LHS or ESS or whatever it is, who's helped them kind of synchronize their election machines and the results and how to tabulate. Um, and I know Cambridge uses like a different tabulation system. Again, I know that they worked with the secretary's office for years to improve their accounting. And I think right now with the national kind of national focus on elections and fraud and, you know, control election, you know, hacking of elections, et cetera, that that is going to be something that he, that the secretary will want to manage. So even if he doesn't right now, my expectation is, is that he would by the time this legislation were passed, if it were passed. And even if you don't have to have it certified under the existing law and the existing law does not change, my recommendation, my strong recommendation would be to work with the elections division. To come up with a software that satisfies their interests, especially for recounts. So just to be clear, what you're saying is that the law may not prohibit us from using software, which isn't, which is certified because we're sort of in uncharted territory in terms of certification. But even if the law does not prohibit that, you would very strongly recommend that we work with them on software that they feel is OK. Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what I'm saying. And again, I think some of this has to do with unwritten rules and the unwritten rule is, I mean, we know it to be a fact that the secretary is a chief election official, but it's kind of an unwritten rule that an election law would not get approved by the elections committee unless the elections division supports it because they go to the elections division and ask for or the secretary and ask for feedback. That's one of the first things they'll do. So I think we want to have at least demonstrated that we've worked with the elections division, that we've gotten feedback from them and that if we need to respond to that feedback that we figured I have to do that too. And that could go right in our legislation. We could intentionally put that in there where it says that any, you know, software shall be. I mean, software choices or whatever shall be reviewed by the secretary or something like that, even if we don't want to give full power to approve, because that shows we understand this is, you know, the results of an election and Amherst are not just about Amherst. It's about the election system as a whole. Just to confirm, because there's a lot of ifs going around here, do we have to, by law, get the software certified? I don't see a requirement for that right now. OK. But again, I don't know how they deal with Cambridge. And I do know my my personal experiences when I was at the secretary's office is that Cambridge worked hand in hand with that office to improve its process, because at the beginning, it was I mean, there was like weeks until they could get results and there were issues with the way that they were doing a transferring of votes and blah, blah, blah. And I expect that even if that's not regulated today, Jesse, that it will be in the coming year. I don't I mean, I don't think any of us have any problem working with the Elections Commission, you know, and coming up with something that, you know, and leveraging their expertise and finding something that's going to be, you know, really workable. I just wanted to know where we are standing. And the answer is not that I know of. OK. OK. The counting, which is done by the machine, has to be certified. The machine has to be certified. Right. Oh, you treat the results after that. I don't know that there's any particular authority required from the state. That was kind of our assumption because in plurality, you know, after you count them, it's basically just using a calculator and adding up the different precincts. That's right. So, you know, there there probably wasn't going to be too much detail in terms of that. Whereas with ranked choice voting, there is another equally important step afterwards. Yeah. Yep. Yes. So it relates to the special act. Do you know offhand if East Hampton had any trouble getting theirs through? Since there's no. I haven't heard that they have. When did that happen again? They're currently working on it. Did they actually get it through? Yeah, they got it through immediately. It was probably a year ago, maybe time slot. It was last September. Yeah. Yeah, I know that they got the special authorization through very fast, but I believe they are still working out the kinks of how it's all going to work. Oh, I think so, too. But I know they got it approved and that's that happened very quickly. And that's what. And again, it's also well, winner as opposed to multi. But so I would I would just say that the legislative process is the legislative process. Right. So to the extent that you can say, hey, they did it in East Hampton and they have it in Cambridge and look, the state thought about it. I mean, that's a packaging issue and bringing it to the legislature. It's finding who has the, you know, the the way to make it work, right? Because that's really what we're talking about. It's it's a legislative process. But I would say equally as important is having a program or process that works. So I, you know, I don't know exactly what the process East Hampton went through. But I really do believe that you guys don't want to start off on this road until you know how it's going to work. Yeah. And I can dig a little behind the scenes on the East Hampton thing, which I will do. Yeah, we'll we'll look into it too. OK, great. We can also reach out to them and ask them what's going on. But on the legal side, it would be good if you dug in. Yeah. OK, got you. All right. Any more on question two or question three? Sounds like the question two is pretty clear. I think. Yeah. We had more questions. And again, I think some of it was the ambiguity in the word count that is we're trying to like read the regulations and interpret it. For. Account is both the sort of process of creating the cast vote record and just adding up the votes and then the sort of the results. But for ranked choice, it's like it makes a big difference since we weren't sure how to read like what the word count meant. Yeah. And that's important for hand recount guidelines like whether it would even be possible under current hand count regulations to really do it for a multi better ranked choice vote method. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, as far as I I reached out to someone at the office and they said they do not certify the the software and they have not been involved with these after. So again, I would I would say let's use the resources that exist to help us and you know, try to kind of bring forward what we think is a decent plan so that not only once you're arguing for yourself, you know, you have the ability to say, look, we've thought through this, we've gone through this whole process and we think other communities can use this easily. Here's how it's translatable, blah, blah, blah. And I think that that helps the legislature to kind of look favorably upon it and also the secretary's office. OK. So the next is the hand count recount guidelines require breaking ballots into blocks of 50. Yeah. So there's a couple issues we're going to have with that one is well, yeah, but we wanted to know can we sort them into a set of similar votes for the contest in question. So like if we're doing a recount of, you know, town counselor, can we put all the number ones together for the same person as we're going through? Somebody else correct me on this. Yeah, we were kind of thinking because one of the ways you can block out rank twist voting is by finding putting identical votes into sets. Like people who ranked one, two and three the same essentially. I don't think there's anything that prohibits you know, the sorting of ballots before a hand recount. So I think that's probably fine. I do think it's very smart to be thinking about how you would do a recount because that's really hard, even in a regular situation. So, yeah, I think I think that would be fine. I don't know if there's an easy way to do that, but I'm sure you guys have looked at that more completely than I have conceptualized it. You don't see any problem with, for example, going through all of the ballots contest by contest, but that arranging them differently in each contest. So if you're going to do a recount, it's usually one, you know, it's pursuant to a request for a recount of a particular office. Of just one contest. That's right. So the likelihood of having more than one is small. But even if you did, I think you'd have to do them separately. And so and I would probably recommend that, especially where we have a one, two and three type of scenario. It's hard to take all that information off the ballot. It's very, there's a lot of pressure on the recount workers to recount correctly. And if they're recording the one, two, three is not just one or whatever it might be, I think that creates more work. The other thing is that you will be counting by precinct, typically. When you do recount, it's by precinct. And the person requesting the recount has to bring in and that's going to be funky because I guess if it's work counselor, you know, we would only do a recount in the precinct that they requested. So perhaps what we need to say is that in the event of a recount, I hadn't even really thought about that for a particular race. If it's not a precinct race, then they have to, in order for us to do it, get 10 signatures from every precinct. Otherwise, we won't do it. Because you would never be able to get the right outcome. And another question is if we are able to sort the ballots ahead of time, ahead of the recount into whatever kinds of packets we want, it's very unlikely that there would be 50 ballots in a packet. There'll be lots of random numbers. So are we going to just run right up against a problem there because the regulations say 50? So there really aren't regulations. That booklet is kind of a best practices guide that the secretary has. But I do think it's very helpful. Now, when I run a recount, what I typically do is have them break the ballots into blocks of 10 first and then create the 50s. So I think you could use a smaller number. I don't think you have to use a number 50. The idea is you want those blocks to be as equal as possible because that way, when you go to add everything up, you know, there's 50 votes for each of these precincts. And if we don't have 50 votes, I mean, for each of each block, I mean, if we don't have 50 votes, they did it wrong. So, you know, maybe the better course would be to say we'll do blocks of 10 or blocks of 20, something like that rather than blocks of 50. So that's actually really good to know because I think under rank choice voting, that sort of organization is just the wrong paradigm to follow. Right. Because since we're dealing with ranks and it's not just individual votes, there actually is very little, I mean, and except in terms of counting the actual ballots, there is little benefit to having them in stacks because the stacks are just having a stack isn't like you can't just label it and say like, you know, you know, this 10 is, you know, for this candidate and this 10s for that candidate for rank choice voting, it's most likely more efficient to still stack the ballots. But to stack them in piles where the votes are identical, like they all rank one, two, three and four the same or whatever. Right. So let's say you had that, Jesse, with a one, two, three and four, the same package. So the problem is we keep track of every ballot, right? We don't want to lose track of it. We don't want the numbers and the precincts to change because then there's all sorts of allegations of, you know, we didn't handle the election right now. Those are my best helpers at home. Anyway, that we didn't handle it right. That, you know, we made errors, etc. So maybe what you're talking about is having is, is in each precinct, you know, if you're, you do each precinct, you try to block the ones together that go together and then you would do tally sheets for each block that match the number. So maybe again, you do it by 10s. So you have 10, then you have 10s. And you do it by 10s. So you have 10, then you have another 10, another 10, and then you have three. But at least you're doing it in a consistent way throughout so that it would be 10 or a lower number rather than 50, you know, 32 and 31 and this and that. And frankly, and, you know, I'm not telling you guys anything you probably don't know, but it's a heck of a lot easier to count to 10 than it is to count to 50. So less opportunity or fewer opportunities for mistakes and counting the number of ballots. All right, so setting a maximum stack size might, it would be something we should seriously consider. Now, do you have to do that in your special act? I don't think so. We can in the special act ask for authority for the, do you guys have a board of election commissioners or board of registrars? I can't remember. Registrar's. So, you know, we could say that the registrar's following consultation with the town clerk can promulgate regulations relative to implementing the ranked choice voting system including recounts. And then you have by regulation. Yeah, that makes sense because the attitude we're taking is sort of, we don't, we want to put into the recommended law just sort of the essentials that have to be followed for, you know, it to work well and to get the major points in there. But we do not want to box in the clerk's office or the people running the elections. Because if they define, you know if they find something that doesn't work that can be changed that doesn't actually, you know affect the outcome of the election, right? It's just like, oh, well this methodology works better than that for whatever reason. We want them to be able to do that. Yep, and that makes sense to me. I think, you know, again I think there's a difference between and I always say this one we're talking about charters you might have even heard me say it when we were talking about the new charter is that it's really a guideline, you know meant to kind of do an overview of what's going to happen. And then the nitty gritty of it comes in the form of bylaws or regulations. And so in this instance you're talking about something similar. The one big difference is that there's special there's laws right now, you know chapter 50 section two that says the winner is the person that gets the most votes. And so, you know, I think we you know, we're trying to build in opportunity to interpret winner differently and to vary some of the regular rules relative to elections. One thing I did want to point out is that I know that the secretary's office did work with Cambridge to come up with their plans. So at least at some point and it was obviously not that recent they did look over and kind of approve the process. I think we've done a lot of learning since then because I know that, you know even when I was there they were still giving Cambridge advice about how to you know, better run their local elections. But needless to say, you know I think I did look at the Cambridge process but I didn't look at the law that because I think they just have an E form of government but it's worthwhile for us to go and look and see how much detail is there and do we have more or less and do we want more or less? So that's good to know that they were comfortable that the state is comfortable with what they're doing. Yeah, I think, yeah, so Lauren what we decided with the special act is to keep it as general as possible so we're not locked into anything. That was your advice. Yeah, it makes good sense. It's pretty general, yeah. Yeah, good. I'm glad I advise that. Yes. Good to hear. I'm consistent, you know. Yeah. So, hand count is to keep working with the elections division to a lot of these things are they're just trying to set up best practices and if those don't work for us to work with them to create our own best practices for whatever system we end up being able to adopt. Absolutely, that makes a ton of sense. And you guys know I do work frequently with the elections division so I can get us some FaceTime. I would expect after the November 3rd election to talk about, you know, the best way to kind of go about getting this assuming the council approved, getting it filed and, you know, tweaking whatever we need to ahead of time so that when it's filed it's in the form that the elections division says it's fine but I think that will go far towards making it, you know, a smooth process. I think is that it for that one? I think that's it for that one. The next one is sort of a segue into or from that one, which is about specifically counting ballots. And we wanna kind of feel out what the limitations of hand recount means, like, you know, is there a difference between hand recount versus, you know, mechanized or software assist recount, right? Like would be using Excel considered a hand recount or is a hand recount limited to or would it be analogous with creating a cast vote record for rank choice voting, right? So in plurality, you would just look at the ballot and say they voted for this person. The comparative value for rank choice voting would be to look at a ballot and create a rank, a cast vote record. So if that's because trying to do the actual calculation of who won and run all the elections by hand, I mean, you can do it because they're kind of, they're doing it with Excel in Minnesota and Minneapolis, but it's a mess. We don't wanna do that. So if the actual legal requirement would simply be to buy hand, you know, tally, create the cast vote records and then we could still run those through the system, that would be much better. So the short answer is that the difference at least as it exists right now, that a hand count means a person records the vote, a person reads and records the vote. So it is essentially meant to allow for, quote unquote, intent of the voter to be captured even though machines are programmed to say something's yes or no or checked or not checked. So my expectation is that the secretary would require the town to use the actual ballots. So is that something that you guys are really? No, no, no, let me clarify. That part is fine. I mean, it's a lot of work, but so is, you know, a hand recount is always a lot of work. So in that case, what we would do is, you know, for each ballot we would go in and for the race in question, we would look at the ranks and we would manually do data entry to create a cast vote record, which would go on a machine. It's a, you know, a cast vote record's a digital, you know, piece of information about who the person voted for and what race. And then after we did all of that by hand, it would essentially have just been manual data entry to create all the vote records that were automatically created previously by the tabulators. And so once we had that alternative set of cast vote records that we all entered by hand, we could run it through the calculation software, which actually runs the race results. Yeah, so there are several towns right now in recounts, especially in Boston we did this, where precinct by precinct, we recounted the ballots cast and recorded the votes. And then that was on paper, it was on the tally sheet for each block of ballots. And then there was that block of ballots, that tally sheet was then entered into a spreadsheet and used, you know, to get a final number. So I don't think there's a huge difference between that in what you're saying, but I do think you need a human being to read off one, two, three, four. And I think you also need a human being to enter that into a computer. I don't think you can do it directly into the computer. So this is really the, it's about, it's about detecting voter intent. Yeah. And in order to do that, you need human eyes on the ballot itself. That's right. So that's what a recount is for, essentially. That's why people do hand recounts. For example, if there is an elderly housing building, you might find that a number of those people believe that you circle the name instead of filling in the oval, or you find underlines, or you find they cross out the one that they want. You know, with rank choice voting, I think it's gonna be looking at, is that number one dot really filled in, or is it really a number two and that kind of thing. And again, voters make mistakes and we try to effectuate their votes, even as long as we can tell the intent of what they were doing, even if they didn't follow all the rules. So that's why things change. Yeah, that's excellent. Because our major concern was that, the law was gonna be very specific and require a level of human interaction that is not scalable for rank choice voting because of how you have to run the elections. In terms of just reading the ballots and putting the data into a computer by hand, we can do that. Yeah, so let's talk about, let's say we have, how many counselors get elected at one time? Oh gosh, 13. 13, so I mean, and so are they, do they run separate races or are they all in the same race? It's the same race. The same race was separate, yeah. Okay. There's three at large seats and then each of the district gets two counselors. Right. Okay, and each district, do they vote separately or do they vote together? That would be separately. Okay. Yeah, each district race for counselor would be its own race. And that large ones would also be its own race. Okay, so let's say we have, how many at large you said five? Three? Three. So if there's three, then we would be writing a one, two, three, right? There'd be three choices for each. Well, that's how many are elected, right? Could be more than that, could be five people running, right? But they'd still only get three, one, two, three, right? Nope, they can, I mean, we will have a practical limitation on the number of people they can rank, but they can rank up to five because their first three choices might lose. Okay, so they would have five. So that means that for each ballot, we're recording five votes. Yep. And so that's where it gets tricky. And so, I do think a recount would take a while for a town-wide office because even when we're doing, like, vote for two, it doesn't double the time, but it definitely makes it longer. Oh yeah. And we'd have to probably, you know, I think we'd want to do some training in terms of who worked at a recount and we'd also want to have some rules that people could look at ahead of time. But that being said, it is possible. And I do think, and right now I'm sorry, I have to go in this room, it's good. You guys get to look at my house a little bit, you know, guess what you're hoping for. So I do think that we could manage to do the recount. It could happen, you know, and we can use the existing kind of rules that we use to do recounts to do it. But just be aware it would be more complicated. Oh, absolutely. And it would be more complicated than just doubling a standard election too because you're dealing with, even just from a data entry standpoint, you have to actually say off the person's name and what rank they are and then, you know, so, right. But, you know, while that is obviously difficult and not something that we want to have to do, I think it pales in comparison with the complexity of actually trying to run the election with those records by hand or in a spreadsheet. I mean, we watched them do at Minneapolis and we were like, that looks like hell. We don't want to do that. That looks terrible. Why would any human being ever decide to do something like that? I mean, I guess the only choice would be is if there's a way to define voter intent in such a way that we say, unless, you know, someone challenges the results of the election in court, you know, the electronic record of those votes is what stands and we can go back and look at write-ins but we won't be doing the whole thing. Well, I think, yeah, we could do that. I think something's being lost in translation though because there's two distinct separate parts of this. One is getting the cast vote records from the ballots. The second part is taking all the cast vote records from every precinct and running it through a separate piece of software, right? To actually say, does anybody have 50 plus 1% of the vote? If not, yeah. So we can keep that, yeah, sorry. I just didn't know, like, if as long as we can keep that second part mechanized, because that's the one that, man, that would be rough. Yeah, I think you can because the results of the election would be based upon those cast vote records you know, however we're calling it, it's not gonna be electronic, but it will still exist. And then you'll essentially be entering that into a, you know, result spreadsheet. And then that information with those total numbers will get run through the machine to decide, right, who got the most votes. Yeah, and sometime in the future, you know, whether it's the state or the local, we, you know, we may end up wanting to take a look at, you know, at just now as you can, you know, call for a hand recount to challenge and see it like the voter intent stuff, you know, it may be that people will eventually wanna take a look at or sort of somehow audit the way that the actual calculation is done at a later time, but I'm not sure that we necessarily wanna worry too much about that right now. Yeah, and again, I think if we put in language that said that the board of registrars after consultation with the clerk can establish appropriate guidelines for, and we can, you know, for implementing this special act, including with respect to recounts, then we can do that through adoption of regulations. Right, yeah. Anything else on four folks? All right, question five. So the answer to question five is in theory, yes. And whether that's a change that the secretary is comfortable with is a different issue. Okay. Because a special act is essentially different than any other, it stands at the same level as state law. And so if state law says this and we wanna do that, as long as we have a special act that says we can do that, then it's okay. So. Is the prohibition on the use of scanning and storing images? It was taking pictures, yeah. Is it simply because of the taking pictures prohibition and has the regulation interpreted optical scanning to be equivalent with photography? The secretary has taken the position for a very long time that pictures of ballots are not the same. We have the, I forget the name of those machines. It's gonna come to me. We have machines that do that, and it was a major, sorry, it was a major job to get that passed. I think it took the Help America Vote Act to the HABA for that to happen here in Massachusetts. There's just a lot of distrust of these electronic systems. And so maybe what it will take, and again, I think we're talking about trying to satisfy the secretary so that we don't wind up kind of the target of their concern. And so I would suggest that it's worthwhile to talk about this idea. Maybe we are just talking about write-ins rather than talking about, again, the CVR, which by the way, Central Voter Registry. So we need to think of a different thing to call it here in Massachusetts. Oh, okay. Because that's an elections thing, the Central Voter Registry, CVR. So what was I just saying? So maybe they'd be more comfortable with that. It's basically something that can't be read by the machine, it has to be read by a person. I think we'd need to be thinking about the standards we would need for that kind of a process. So for example, how clear are the pictures? Where would they stay? Are we gonna print them out? What kind of record keeping are we gonna do with that? What kind of records retention? Are we able to destroy them when we destroy others? And that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I think we'll be able to make a, I mean, whether or not he'll agree or not, who knows, but I think we'll make a good pitch for that because the way that the scanner works is it doesn't wanna do any sort of recognition on the write-in votes. It doesn't pretend to have that kind of ability. What it does is it snaps a photo of the write-in fields and it appends it because the cast vote record is basically just think of it as an Excel spreadsheet, right? It's a common delineated file. So, and it just inserts an image, the images of the write-ins in the rank, right? So if you cast a write-in for Mickey Mouse and you put it as number one, right? It'll put that picture in number one slot. And we still as election workers have to then go in and say, okay, this person wrote this name, now we're going to actually fill in the field properly so that it has the right, it has a matching name on it. Right, so for example, let's just take Mickey Mouse because I think that's a good thing to start with. So Mickey Mouse is a blank, right? Yeah. But the machine would probably count that as a number one vote, right? So Mickey Mouse would get one vote in the number one category, correct? So then you'd have to go through and adjust it. So the issue I think you have is how clear are those pictures? And again, what do we do with them? How are we storing them? Are they stored on the software? We don't want to store them on the, certain we wouldn't want to store them on the regular town system because someone could hack that. We want it to be a closed system. So those are things I think, that you're just going to need to be thoughtful about. Also, the machines usually, once we're done with them, we have like a printer pack, which is like this big, it's kind of like a, like a Wii size thing, like a game size console. And that gets put into this black bag and it goes into the storage facility. But the actual memory for that computer, I mean, for that computer, yeah, it's on a stick. Is that going to be the same type of thing? Is it the stick? Is it the machine? And are we able to reuse the sticks and what kind of record retention stuff do we need to be thinking about for that? That's actually a good question. I don't think we had really put much thought into that. The way that it'll work with the machines here, regardless of what machines we end up getting is that the precinct level ones will have USB sticks. They're more secure, but they're USB sticks. And then they'll all get transferred to the central counting machine, whatever we end up using for that. And however we want to do that transfer, whether it's the election clerk or an officer or whatever. And then once they are all put together on that machine, yeah, we had thought through running the election on the machine, but then, yeah, maybe for records and stuff, we have to export all the correlated cast vote records onto a single USB that would then get put in storage, along with all the other ones that had been used. Right, so typically with local elections, you need to keep it for 30 days. With state elections, you need to keep it for 22 months. So it's a huge difference. And if there's a challenge, then typically people will file something that says, please do not destroy any election records in which case you have to keep it until the matter itself is resolved. Just immediately when we're talking about the USB sticks, I would say that if this is something you guys do, that you buy neon green envelopes, cloth envelopes that have the ability to put a numbered seal on the outside. And part of the end of night procedures is to take that USB stick and put it inside that bright green or bright pink or bright yellow bag and have the police officer bring that back with them. So one more question on this. So if the measure passes for the state, won't every town have to start dealing with this as well? Once it's implemented? Exactly, and I think that's a good way to help you. I think that is a plus for you guys in terms of moving forward. Yeah. All right, is that all we got on question five? All right, question six. I think actually we already... Yeah, we already did this. Yeah. Okay, seven. Right, so I guess this information about a voter's lower rank choice is not allowed to impact the likelihood of a higher rank choice being selected. So that's in the proposed legislation, correct? Not in the charter. That's the charter. That's the charter. Yeah. I think it's a... The charter said that we needed to propose a rank choice solution. And pretty much one of the only requirements it put on there was that a voter's lower rank choice is not allowed to impact the likelihood of a higher rank choice being selected. The clarification I wrote on my notes here is that the alternative scenario we may have discussed was if an override, if an over vote rank is discarded, is it then not considered a rank? And so does not actually get involved in this higher lower rank stuff because it's been discarded, it's not considered valid at all. So it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, the basic rules relative to over votes are that you can't vote for someone who's already on the ballot and you can't vote for more offices than exists. So if you had three offices, obviously you guys will have a different scenario. You'll have up to, and five candidates, you'll have up to five. If however, are we gonna have more? I'm probably not. An over vote in our scenario is specific. And what it means is if somebody has ranked two candidates for the first position, right? So if they put a one next, because they got confused, they forgot that they had to do two or maybe they got confused and thought that, oh, I'm ranking them like how much I like them, right? One, one, you know? And so for us, that's one scenario where we pretty much can't gauge voter intent because they're both ranked the same. Yeah. I think in that case, I mean, there's no way to tell the voters intent because after those two ones comes two, three, four, but we don't know really who was two or who was three or who was four. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a problem. And I don't think that's a, excuse me, in the lower rank, I don't know that it will matter. So if it was like six and seven and they said six and seven or this, you know, six and seven, they did six and six, we don't have a problem until we get down to number six. Yeah, we actually have two options for dealing with this. And one is we can just basically discard. So say, you know, it's Mickey Mouse one, Mickey, Minnie Mouse one, right? Whatever. And we can actually discard both of those and then treat two, three, four as if it's one, two, three. The second option is we can say, well, we don't know which of those Minnie Mouse or Mickey Mouse they actually wanted, but we do know that they wanted them more than the other votes. And so we're actually just going to discard the whole race because we can't tell, we don't want a situation where, you know, they're giving their early votes to basically compete directly with Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Yeah. So I guess that's going to be a policy question that we can answer in the special legislation. So I think we have to say which one we choose and then be ready to defend it. And, you know, I think there's good arguments for both options, but because there is a statute that says what an overvote is and it's not those things, we have to specifically address it. Okay. So we actually also need to address that and overvote in the current legislation. Not actually, yeah? I was going to say, we can just see what East Hampton said. Yeah, we should. Because it's the same for single and multi. Right. Yeah. And if anything's been used before and it's been approved, then yeah, that's a good place to go. I would also say that that instruction for the voter should be on the ballot. Again, I don't think you need to have that language in the special act, but that is something that we'd want to put right on the ballot. Yeah, this question and other folks, please correct me if I'm wrong because I don't believe I wrote this one, but I think mostly our intent with this question was to find out if that option of discarding the number one and reassigning two, three, four to one, two, three was just off the table because of this language in the charter that said, you couldn't have lower votes impact the higher rank. So the answer, if we're talking specifically about whether you can do this where the charter says something else, the answer is you can because it's a special act and a special act and a charter on the same level. So that's available as an option. And we would say notwithstanding the provisions of the charter to the contrary, blah, blah, blah. Oh man, these special acts seem great. We should just see if we can settle elections by potato flipping. Yeah, seriously, I know. There's so many details, there really are. That's actually incredibly useful information. I don't think it's, I can't think of it changing anything we've been talking about, but I know a lot of our past discussions have been framed around like, well, we didn't wanna use certain multi-winner counting methodologies because they had an effect on potential outcomes in edge cases for the higher and lower rank stuff. I think we settled on choices that it wouldn't matter anyway, but it's good to know. I think we can, again, I think there's like an effort to frame. I think we would frame that issue right in the special act. And so it would also say, and such instructions to voters shall be provided for such purposes or something so that everybody looking at it is able to see what the rules are. And so we would basically be saying as a legislative body, and I don't mean me, but you know what I'm saying, the council would be saying as a legislative body, for our purposes, we're going to treat a mess up, one and one, two and two, whatever it is, as a blank and go to the next, essentially as a blank, and go to the next. So we'd have to write that in, but I do think that that's a smart thing to do. Okay. That's the end of your list, correct? And this has all been extremely helpful and sort of clarifying what are things that really need to work with the elections division with, what things might need to be in the special act and just to really clarify a lot of things is really helpful. Oh good, I'm glad. Now, I did go through your special act and I think I can get that to show up for me. You know, why should it? But I thought I did. Let's see, I think this is it. What the heck? I think something saved in a way that it should not have because I'm not seeing that. Are you just looking for our correlated report so far or? I was looking for the edits that you guys made, I mean that I made to your draft. I got you. But for whatever reason, I cannot understand it will not come up. So that is not helpful. Let me just look at this one. Oh there, so I'll look at it. I know what I thought about it so I can talk to you about it as we go. Let me just get it up. Unless do you want to put your draft up there? I can certainly share screen if that's easier. Okay, that's fine. It won't have your edits but maybe you remember some of them. Yeah, I will remember probably and then I'll find the other one. I know it's there. Just a question of what my computer chose to do with it. And I blame the computer. It has nothing to do with me. It's not an end user problem. Blame IT. Exactly, especially the IT in the house. All right, exhausted, overvote. So in overvote we already talked about so that needs to be addressed, how we want to deal with that. If we go down further, leaves a ranking blank. Maybe that's a way that we deal with this. A skipped ranking. Maybe that's the way, maybe we treat two for number one or two for number two or two for number three as a skipped ranking. Okay, would that be a lot clearer? It sounds like overvote is something that will mean something rather different to a lot of people. So we should avoid using that in the language here. Yeah, I think that would be useful in terms of how to kind of conceptualize the issue. So we'd say something, for our purposes, a ballot in which the voter has cast the same rank for more than one person will be treated as a skipped ranking. Exactly. Okay. If that's what we decide to do. If that's what we decide to do, yeah. But otherwise we could come up with a different term as long as we don't use overvote. Yeah, because the overvote, well, the overvote would happen if there's too many rankings. But so it would be, for example, if somebody ranked from one to seven, one to six and then wrote in two names and did seven, eight. Because now they voted for eight candidates. That's still possible. They can do that. In ranked choice voting, they can do that? Yep, they can rank as many people as they want as long as the ballot will fit it. Okay, so yeah, we're gonna get rid of the word overvote because that just doesn't work. Yeah, it just doesn't, it's not applicable in the way that it apparently means or the meaning it has for plurality voting. Right? Yeah. Okay. We will replace that under a different. Yep. Yeah. That's good. So the ballots are tabulated in rounds in which votes or fractions are distributed. So I think that's a decision point for you guys right, whether you're gonna use fractions? Oh, we're gonna use fractions. The most of the voting methods that we use, use it. Okay. And it is one of those things that we acknowledge if a voter just reads that line it's probably gonna be like, what? Right. But if you look into it at all, you very quickly understand that it, that's the only way it makes sense. Okay. Right. That's the application of these multi-winner election methods. Right. Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, it just, I just wanted to make sure that's where you're heading cause fractions are different. You know, obviously if you're using them that's a little bit different. Yeah. Very popular this afternoon. Okay. So let me see. I found, all right. So the ranking, we're never gonna get to too many. So if, what if someone like ranked blank seven and eight? They'd be skipped. Okay. Yeah. All right. Threshold, do we need to specify a formula? A bit tricky because various options are available. I mean, I think the answer to that is yes because that's gonna give kind of meaning to the rest of the process. It looks to me that the threshold, and this is, I looked at Cambridges to see what they did. And I'm sure you guys have too, but there seems pretty easy in terms of how to address it. And that is to say the threshold is a total number of valid ballots cast divided by the number of positions being elected plus one. And that seemed like a very reasonable definition. Folks, did we write that this was tricky because some of the tabulation methods recalculated the formula in each subsequent round? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Some like rounded up, some leave a diffraction and all these choices affect the outcome. Right. Lauren, the reason that happens is, well, I mean, maybe you already know, but basically when people don't, like say there's five people, but somebody only ranks two because they just don't care about the other candidates, if it gets down to subsequent races, you actually have less people voting in those races. And so, and this is a decision point for us, right? We can just count and say like, okay, well, the threshold is still determined by the overall number of people who voted at all, right? Or you can calculate the threshold based on the number of people who have active votes in that particular round, which decreases as time goes on. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a tricky question. That is, but you have a little wiggle room here though because when threshold, we specify it to be in a round. And so we could give a formula that makes sense within the round or formulation here that I think keeps a lot of doors open for these minor variations. Yeah. It doesn't have to be a formula across rounds. Right. Within single rounds. We're just saying how to calculate in this round and use, essentially say the formula that Lauren said and I don't think anybody, like you're not being held to minor tweaks of that. Like if there's how many significant digits you calculated two or things, I don't think you need to specify that level of detail here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think we, we're all sort of toying with like, how specific do we get so that, we don't want to get trapped in a situation like in the future like Maine did where it's like, they very clearly stated that, it was whoever got the majority of votes, right? And so it actually caused it. So a lot of the races over in Maine couldn't actually be done with rank choice voting. Right. Effectively. So, you know, we're kind of hesitant to be overly specific, but we understand we have to be specific enough that you couldn't actually create a non-functional rank choice voting system because we left stuff out. Yeah. I'm wondering if we say, for example, even though normally we don't do that in special acts, or if you say to be elected generally or in a round of rank choice voting, something like that, I don't know. I mean, I have to tell you from my perspective, just knowing what these election officials go through in a regular kind of straight up voting election, according to the rules, like it is so complicated. And I also think it's very hard to explain. It doesn't mean that those answers are the answers that provide you answers to your question about which to do, because it's a fundamental fairness issue and not so much an administrative burden issue, but I do think that there, you know, that that has to be factored in to at least the thought process. Yeah. How are we going to do this and how are we going to have the clerk essentially, you know, or the election, the board of election registrars explaining this? Obviously you would have to have it programmed into your software. So it would be in there and there would be a rule and it could be explained as just, you know, exactly how it would work would be a question. Well, and we also want election officials, I mean, at least at the higher level to know how it functions. So when the body politic asks them, they're not like just shrugging and being like, I don't know, software does it. Right. No, I absolutely agree with you. So it would be for the threshold, if you were going to do it by round, it would be the number of votes sufficient for a candidate to be elected divided by the number, hold on, divided by the threshold as a total number of valid ballots cast by, so it would be cast in that race divided by the number of positions or something. If you're trying to do it by race or in that rank, if you're doing it by rank. Or in that round. Or in that round, yeah. So there's really three choices there. Just generally the race, which is the number of people that voted in the election essentially, then it would be the number of people that voted in that round. So how many people voted number one choices? And then it would be, if you move past that, it would be how many people voted for number two? How many people voted for a number three? How many people voted for a number four? Right, so that bottom number would change the totals. Okay, it seems like we need to chew this over, exactly. I like to characterize that as obsessing. One needs to obsess. All right, then the next thing. Oh, and I just wanted to point out that sometimes people do say what mechanism they're using, the Cincinnati method or the Minneapolis method. So that could also be a way to explain what it is you're doing. Okay, ballot format. Yeah, I see how you left that open. The ballot must indicate yes, a number of votes and must comply with all, yes. So the ballot I think we added must comply with other applicable provisions of general laws, relative to elections. So that's things like size and directions to voters that are reasonable, that kind of thing. Okay, again, what? Something like, and I can, I'll send it over to you. I have a marked up version because yeah, I don't know how to do it, but it's something like ballot must comply with all other wise applicable provisions of the general laws, relative to elections. Okay, each contest will be tabulated on rounds of votes over. Oh, I see, so you have that same language from the charter in there. No voters ballot will have a total vote value greater than one, what's that mean? When we reassign fractional votes, right? It's important that we keep track of what the fractional votes add up so that rounding errors don't cause the person's total vote to go over one. I got it, not smart. There's one vote problem right there. Yeah, it also constrains which methods, like if it really reduces astounds, what's often called the Wigam, the weighted inclusive Gregory method, because other methods, the issue exactly is that they may over count people's votes. Gotcha. Okay. Let's open this into a specific method, which is commonly used. Okay, let's see what else. Just a note on that. I think actually what we've learned about the recounts means that we could consider the Meeks method. Technically. Technically, right. Oh, you're saying things that are making my heart beat. There are other reasons why we may not want to consider Meeks. Right. But I think it's back in the running, in terms of. I think the door opens to that as well. Yeah. So the next thing is in, let's see. Okay, let's skip the rest of that. See a method of tie breaking. Yep. Makes sense. Okay, so when I skipped. Oh wait, I might have missed something here. Each contest on the ballot will be tabulated in rounds. So that's up, I'm sorry. Each contest on the ballot. We tabulated. Okay, yeah. The predetermined rule must be used to calculate the threshold at each round. So this is kind of what we were talking about. Who is going to be in charge of that? I think we probably want to say. Is it the clerk? Okay, so. Who determines the rule? Well, you guys can determine the rule. I mean. No, I mean that's your point that we need to specify. Exactly. Because once the rule specified, the software handles it. Yep. And I guess perhaps we don't need to address it in this section if we add something that says that the board of registrars after consultation with a clerk can adopt regulations. Because then we could, you could delineate that at that time. Yeah, there's, as you're probably gathering, there's a couple of different way kind of methods to use in terms of tabulating multi-choice winner. And so, and also then how to calculate threshold and stuff like that. And those are kind of things that we want to, like there's definitely a couple of methods that we want to rule out because they're old and have been improved on for obvious flaws in those methods. But we understand that this is a rapid, well, a rapidly quote, evolving, you know, field because more and more people are adopting it. And, you know, as the technology of mathematics continues to improve, people will come out with better methods. And we want the town to be able to adopt those as they make sense going forward. Right, yep, that makes sense to me. If we use language like this sort of specifying how these rules will be set, would we then not have to specify the formula up here with the threshold that we could leave that vague, but below say that will be set by this group in consultation with the state? Yeah, well, I think it's probably worthwhile to have another section that says, specifically the board of registrars following consultation with the town clerk shall be authorized to promulgate regulations to implement the provisions of this act. And then we also say that are, you know, in the initial implementation, this is what will be used but that they can change it later or something. Yep, that makes sense to me. Yeah, so you guys can make the initial determination and by, you know, you guys suggested the council, the council could decide, we'll do it like this for now, but that following, and maybe we say, you know, following one election, the board of registrars with after consultation with the clerk can provide regulations to vary from what's been presented, if that's what you want to do. So sometimes like in charters, you'll see general stuff all about the way that people are appointed, et cetera. And then at the end in a transitional provision, it'll say until such time as the so and so act to change this by bylaw, the following shall be appointed for rotating terms of three years or something like that. And so that would be similar to me that we could do that here where we say, here are the general rules and the board of registrars after consultation with the clerk is authorized to promulgate regulations to implement, but in addition, you know, here's what we're suggesting for the first election. Is there a way to word it so that we can basically say, this is what we're using, but it can be changed to a later date, right? In a way that's not necessarily as transitional, like, cause I think our, there's at least my impression personally is that, you know, there's a couple no-brainer obvious ones. I mean, not that they're no-brainer, but that like the WIGA method seems like, you know, a good way to go right now. It's the most common, it solves a lot of the problems that are obvious with rank choice voting. And that is probably what we're gonna decide to start with. And so we wouldn't want to necessarily give the board of registrars or, you know, anyone else involved the idea that they have to go in and make a decision on this, you know, but we want them to be able to, you know, without having to change the law. Yep. So again, I do think it's kind of a transitional provision that you add at the end where you say, not withstanding any of the above, you know, the board of registrars and election commission, sorry, and clerk can make changes to the calculations or whatever it is set forth here in by taking the following action. And maybe it's the council that we want to change, not the board of registrars, but that's something to think about. I still would say that the town clerk, you definitely want to be part of the decision-making, you know, or if you want to take the politics out of it all together, let it just be the town clerk, the town clerk is appointed, you could insert a public hearing requirement so that in addition to a public meeting, the council would have to hold the public hearing or the clerk would, and that public hearing, the difference between a public hearing and a public meeting is that people are quote unquote entitled to participate. So it would be, you know, it's a way to make the process public, but to maybe take some politics out of it. Yeah, okay. Lauren, town clerk here in Amherst is not appointed, it's appointed, not elected, is that what you said? Right, yeah. That's what I just said. Sorry, sorry, okay. No, no, that's okay. For some reason I heard elected. No, I was saying because the clerk's appointed, I mean the clerk basically is answerable to the council and the manager in a way that the clerk isn't if the clerk's elected. So in some ways, you know, it is still political for the clerk to make a decision because the council might want one thing or the manager or someone else, but it's somewhat insulated from politics. Right, and the clerk's gonna have hands on experience having dealt with this stuff during elections and so isn't gonna be coming from a purely political space that the elected officials really, they would be, right? Right, and my, again, I think the concerns that people would have about that would run to, this is, you know, these decisions can't be made in the dark. That's not right, you know, this is how we're tabulating our elected officials. We need to be able to provide input, et cetera. And I think the way we do that is through mandating a public hearing before any changes are made. Yep, yeah, I mean, we kind of ran into that with the, I'm sorry, what was the other method, not the Wigam, the Meeks, where at least, you know, my impression of Meeks was like, oh, you know, mathematically this provides more accurate, you know, better results in my opinion, right? But when you actually try and explain it to people, it's like, no, no, like we spent, you know, two weeks trying to figure this out. And even then towards the end, there were some questions about how it worked, so, you know, I could easily see a situation kind of the reverse where people are like, oh, but this one is much easier to understand, you know, whereas practically speaking, you might be like, yeah, but that's gonna lead to really distorted elections, even though it's quote easier, you know, I mean, that's the whole plurality versus RCV argument from some quarters, which is, rank choice voting is hard to understand. So, you know, we should just stick with plurality even though it's, you know, distorts our elections and it causes all these problems. So, yeah, I mean, and that's, I always say that with any kind of special legislation or charter, anything like that, you have two jobs. One is to write something that works, right? That's legal, that works. But the other is to be able to sell it. And, you know, there are times when even though you know that you think X, Y, or Z is the right choice, that you know you're not gonna get people to approve of it. And so then the question becomes, you know, which is better, smaller change and then more, you know, but still change or no change at all. So, I think that, you know, the way that politics influences this is you need the council to vote yes. And so, you know, thinking about what can be explained and how not only from you guys to them, but from them to their constituents is also gonna be a factor. What's that saying? Oh, perfect as the enemy have done. Yeah, perfect as the enemy of the good. And we are good. Yeah. It's true. It's true. The other thing I would remind you is that, let's say you do get some of this wrong and, you know, we have a problem, right? We can't calculate the bottom rankings or whatever it might be. It doesn't mean that we can't get special legislation to fix that, number one. And number two, it doesn't mean that we can't change this act through another vote of the council and another legislative action. So, yeah, you're taking a step towards quote unquote, permanency when you adopt a special act, but they are still able to be revised and amended and in many, many, many communities that go with significant charter changes. There are changes that are needed later. So, you know, I think it's fair to say, this is the best version you're able to come up with for Amherst right now, but that, you know, we'll obviously learn from our experiences. And if there's change that's needed in the future, we can make that happen. This isn't an unchangeable piece of legislation that will never, you know, be able to be revised. I have another question, but I've been hogging the mic. So, I wanna make sure other people have an opportunity. Go for it, Jesse. How common is it, if at all, for laws or like a special act to specify negatories, right? Like if we wanted to include in our special act and say specifically like, you know, the, you know, the board of registrars can use any of the methods to calculate multi-winner elections, but are specifically prohibited from using the standard Gregory method or one of the earlier ones. Like how common is that? It's more common because that's so specific when you think about, you know, about rank choice voting that there's these different methods to do it, blah, blah, blah. I mean, typically they're written in the positive, but I don't think it would be, you know, otherworldly to say something like, notwithstanding any other provision of this act to the contrary, the board of registrars after consultation with Clark may decide to use any, you know, method for rank choice voting that, you know, results in a, however multi-vote, whatever, however you wanna put that, provided, however, that the Gregory method and the so-called Gregory method and the so-called whatever method shall not be utilized. Okay, so it would probably be better if we actually, you know, generalized why those methods don't work and then use that as a, in a posatory sense where we say any solution which addresses these issues can be used, which would by nature exclude the other ones. Absolutely. Okay. And in your letter that you provide to the counselor, to the general court, you can make that point however you wanna make it. It's fine to say, you know, this is specifically why we didn't choose these and this is specifically why we wrote this paragraph like this. Okay. So tie breaking, what are you guys thinking about that? We're just gonna have Peggy choose. Nice. I think, you know, that's a really important thing. Under state law, if there's a tie neither candidate wins and it's a vacancy. Really? Yeah. Oh. I think I'd rather choose. There you go Peggy. Wow. Actually, because with rank choice voting we have more information available, potentially we have more information available to make that tie break. So, the issue becomes what's the, what procedure, like what kind of procedures are you talking about? Are you suggesting the flipping of a coin? Are you suggesting that neither of the two that tied get the position and the person that got the next highest, I'm gonna post that out. Tonya, can you walk us through it? It's more that you then look at their support, you know, sort of down the line. So like if you say tie in the number of first place votes you can say, okay, well, what about second place votes and whoever has more second place votes then is the winner. So you're using the information. So I would almost really say that's part of the method and if we need to avoid this language of tie breaking if that really means something different where like you've run out of your rules and now you're down to the level of, no, you need a coin flip that that's just not allowed. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think if we wanted to leave it open but not leave it completely willy nilly we could say a predetermined method of tie breaking must be used, blah, blah, and then we would say such options could include but not be limited to and would exclude, you know, things of chance or something like that. Yeah, that would be a crazy town if we ended up with a legitimate rank choice voting tie after having gone through all the rank choice voting options that we had to flip a coin. Yep, so there's one other really important thing that doesn't like come up at all in the, so wait, we have an over vote in D. So I think it's subsection D in case of an over vote. So we wanna change that out there with whatever we're gonna call it. And then the other thing is what are we gonna do about vacancies? How are we gonna fill vacancies? Because normally, especially with town councils and city councils, it's like the person with the next highest number of votes who wasn't elected might be a substitute, you know, and that happens automatically so that it doesn't give the council a chance to make that political. A lot of times, especially with just a straight on regular voting, one of the problems is that that second person who, I mean, the next highest person got 20% of the vote or 7% of the vote. So are we going to be looking either to change the charter or to say here how, maybe it's changing the charter but I think you need to be cognizant of the relationship between the rank choice voting and the process for filling vacancies in elected positions. Yeah, we might not have to, I mean, I haven't looked at the specific language but based on what you're saying, we might not have to change the language of the charter but actually specify how the next person in line is figured out because unlike in plurality where you just look at the person with the next vote count, in rank choice voting more often than not what you'd do is you would actually rerun the election with the candidate who created the vacancy removed, right? Because you can't just look at the last round of voting and say, oh, the person who got the next number of votes is the winner because that's not an accurate reflection of, like that person might have ended up and fourth place if the front runner wasn't in the election at all, you don't know, you have to actually run the results again. Yeah, so I just went over to the charter quickly. 212, filling a vacancy. Whenever a vacancy occurs in the office of councilor at large or district councilor, the vacancy shall be filled within 45 days of the vacancy by roll call vote of the remaining members of the council. District councilor vacancies shall be filled by a vote of the district and filled by a voter of the district from which a vacancy occurs. Councilor at large shall be filled by any voter. Notice of a town councilor vacancy shall be published on the bulletin board blah blah blah. No councilor elected shall be entitled. Okay, so it looks to me like we don't have to worry about that for the council because it's basically completely up to them. And then let's see if the school committee, is school committee is elected, right? Yes, yeah. Yeah, they have five seats and library has six, I think. Well, let's look at library. I have to go to the elections. There's so many, there's 41 times the word library comes up in here. That's a lot. Okay, eligibility vacancies. Whenever a vacancy occurs in the office, this is four, one, C. In the vacancy and the school committee, library trustees elected housing authority or Oliver Smith will elect her. Vacancy shall be filled from eligible applicants by a rural call vote. And then 45 days of call special meeting. Notice of the vacancy shall be published, no person appointed. Yeah, okay, so that's fine. It looks like for all the other elected officials that it's also, it's a choice. But that choice is by the council plus the remaining members of the board. Or, so we don't need to worry about that. You know, that may be information for the council. Actually, I think they know that because they did have to appoint someone to the school committee earlier this fall on Eric Nakajima left. So they did go through that. Okay. Yeah, this is true. Yeah, okay. So then we don't have to worry. I was thinking it was one of those, the next highest vote or the next highest, the candidate who received the next highest number of votes, but that would be funky under that. So we would want to explain that. Okay, good. So I brought that up and it's completely useless. And so we can keep going. What's that? We resolved that. Okay. And then severability. Yep. So, and the way that this would be issued as an order of the council. So we have, and I know that Paul gets annoyed with me in my wear as is, but here I think we need somewhere as is. So we would try to do a more forward whereas plurality voting doesn't blah, blah, blah, whereas rank choice voting, or whereas this committee has been formed and investigated rank choice voting and as reviewed, whatever it is. So I think that'd be important to have in there because when we send it to the legislature, it's nice for them to see, hey, you've thought through all these things already. And this is why you're kind of at the place you're at. So I would put some of that in even if it annoyed Paul. Did you say that normally this would be accompanied by a letter of explanation? Well, so what I always recommend is so that your perspective, the town's perspective gets shared appropriately with the legislature. Remember this goes like, goes to this committee and that committee and that committee. I like it to go with a letter that explains the background. Why do we do, why are we asking you to do this for us? So that letter would do more than the where as is, but sometimes they never look at that. And so I think in a case like this, the where as is would be useful. So basically the where as is would be an executive summary of the letter. And I suppose that it would be acceptable if the report that we're currently composing could be appended to the letter for a full explanation. Absolutely, so now you're basically talking about an executive summary of an executive summary of the report. Okay, thank you. And Paul, you're gonna send us, do you have a suggestion on the where as text and where that goes? Yeah, so this will be issued as an order of the council. So it'd be town council order number 21, let's say, what are they gonna act on this in the next, in the upcoming year or right now? When are you thinking you're done? Our deadline is December, sorry, December 1st, is it? Yes, right. So if it's December 1st and we're gonna get it to the council, we anticipate that they're gonna vote it within the next six months, I mean, the next four weeks and get it filed. This is gonna be the beginning of a new term. There's a huge rush to get things filed. In theory, towns have the ability to ask and cities to have things to be found at any time, but getting it in at the beginning of the session and having everybody know that this is a priority and that you need it, but you basically need this done within a couple months so you can get the software part going and the planning for the next election because that would be November 21, correct? Yeah, so you do, you need a really quick action on whatever you submit. So it'd be an order and then the whereases would come first. So it is hereby ordered that, well, it'd be like whereas, plurality voting has been shown to be this and whereas, da-da-da, whereas and whereas, now, therefore, let it be ordered that or it is hereby ordered that the town council request the general court to adopt legislation in the form set forth below and that it would be what that is. So the whereases are like the introduction. I can send you something, and again, Paul's gonna be mad at me, but I'll deal with him. But he'll deal with me is really how that'll go. I think under these circumstances again, I think it's just useful because it gives some information right up front and it kind of sets a stage for why you're asking for this. And if you guys were to put in that, for example, like whereas the committee appointed by the town council met 37 times and that kind of thing is useful, even though it'd be in the report, even though it'd be an executive summary to the report which is the letter, it still seems to me that that would be a smart move. So that comes first. And then the legislation be enacted as follows. And so then we need, am I going, are you going back to the top? I like that. We need a name for this. So an act relative to proportional representation, voting in the town of Amherst or ranked choice voting in the town of Amherst. So that would be the title. So then you'd have the where as is, it is hereby ordered that the special AFI file with the general court as follows. And then it would be the next thing would say, as follows, it would be an act relative to ranked choice voting in the town of Amherst. Oh, I'm confused you're talking too fast. I'm not following. Okay, right there, you're gonna, you need to write a title. Above the where as is. No, right below him actually. Hello? Yep. So that would be the title. And then section one of the special act would be notwithstanding the provisions of any general or chapter 50 section. I mean, I can do this for you guys. No problem. But notwithstanding chapter 50 section two and any other ethical provision that the general was, the following shall be the manner in which voters and Amherst cast or register votes in Amherst elect candidates for elect elected officials or something like that. I'll make it prettier outcomes. And then Lauren will make it prettier. Then when then this comes as like after that then this comes as what we want it to look like. So it would be like the definition would probably be two and, so that the numbering will change a little. But I can put it in the right format as soon as we know where we're going. And it would say like definitions for the purpose of this act, the following words or the following words and phrases when used for the purposes of this act like the meetings, blah, blah, blah. So there'd just be some language changes to make clearer talking about the special. Unless you guys wanna amend the charter as part of this to add it to the charter rather than a separate document. I think this is easier. Okay. And it's the same exact process. It just wouldn't be two separate things. Remember how you used to have the town government act? Yeah. So the town government act was replaced by a charter and it has in it more things than the town government act had. But the method of voting could appear in a charter. So that's up to you guys in, or whether we have our right choice voting at, that's what I'm gonna really call this in the future. My gut impression is in town, if the minute somebody hears that we wanna modify or amend, modify the charter, it just creates more havoc. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The only reason I can imagine doing it together is if the town council has another reason that they want to amend the charter. So if there's already works to amend the charter going, then we could, you know, how hop onto that. But otherwise, I agree with Ellen. Yeah, that's a great point. I don't know if they do have any plans. And perhaps we need to what we want us to be known as. So perhaps right in section one, we say to be known as the town of Amherst, right choice voting act. Yep. Just so that we can later on call it that without having to say it every single time. So Lauren, would we say it in this document or in our executive summary that it's for the town council library and school committee? Are those are the only elective positions, correct? Those are the ones that this applies to. I'm pretty sure that all the single seat are just, are not, am I right about that? Well, we're still gonna do bank choice for the single seat. So it's for all the elections. We are doing single and multi. It says for the annual town election. Okay, so it's for everything. It's everything. No wonder our ballots can be so long. It's gonna be really long. Yeah. Okay. So I don't think we need to say so, but what we probably do is include charter as a defined term and refer to the Amherst charter there. And then say, you know, they shall apply to all election, election of all officers under the provisions of section dotted out of the Amherst charter. And that way if that changes, we don't have to come up and change this. Oh, we can keep going. You wanna keep going? I'll come up with more things to add. Yeah, I know. I know. I can't help it. I'm a critic. All right. So why don't I, well, you guys are gonna make the decisions about the substantive stuff we discussed. I will send you over my notes so you can see the way I was thinking about it. But even since I wrote down what I wrote down, I think it's a little different after talking with you guys. So what I'm thinking I'm gonna do is just update that to include a section saying that either the council or the board of registrars without the consultation with the clerk and the holding of a public hearing at least two weeks prior to the change or something like that can promulgate regulations to implement this act. And then I will take out a two places that I've put in board of registrars after consultation with the clerk. So I'll take that out and put in that one section that will be a list for that. Thanks, sir. Do you want me to draft it with the clerk making the decision after public hearing? By the board of registrars? I would prefer if the clerk had the choice as opposed to the committee. I think that, I mean, because the committee still has influence so the people have input, but it's a level removed. Okay. All right. So I'll do it kind of, I'll have the board of registrars hold the hearing because they're a public body and so they would more typically have a hearing, but the clerk will be the one that makes the decisions. That makes sense. Because the clerk is on the board. Clerk is one of four members. Yeah. Okay. And as we know, even with the best of intentions there are sometimes when appointees who haven't been educated about the underlying issue don't take conclusions. And so I think it's kind of smart to have the person who's profession that is make that decision. Lauren, what do you think about a multi-page ballot? There are lots of work. Just remember guys, technically we can have as long of a ballot as we want. Yeah, but they jam. They do, they do. Hey, we're getting a new system. Maybe jams aren't as big of a problem. Yeah, I was going to say. I think your ballot box would need to be six feet tall for it not to jam and then we're going to have to get step stools. That might be the case, yeah. The other thing about that is when they go in, if they don't easily fold, now you have a problem and they try to go down the chute if they can't get down there. Yep. Probably complicates mailing them too. Mail and vote it. Yeah, mail and ballots, sorry, nightmare. Heavy or maybe. There is not the end of the world to have a multi-page ballot. And there are cities and towns that do right now, even with plurality voting, you know the question of whether you want to kind of cut off the number. So normally what you would do if you have six candidates, I mean, six offices to fill and you have, you know, six candidates names appear in the ballot and then you have six write-ins and that would be it. And I mean, there may be some value in saying we're not going to go to ad infinium with respect to the number of write-ins. We're going to say you have these 12 spaces to fill and that's it. Yeah, I mean, we've already, I think we've already gone down that road and that is definitely something we're going to do. At the same time, we're still looking at a multi, yeah, multi-ballot. Yep. It's probably something we're not going to be able to avoid and just something voters are going to have to get used to to the point where they're going to get used to, hey, it'll be more weird for there only to be one page rather than two pages. All right. Is this going to apply to special elections? Rank choice voting in general? Yeah. It should. It's going to play. So I think we'll say so as well. Because for example, like in a lot of cities, they have a preliminary election for regular elections, but not for special elections. Kind of like a quick and dirty version of an election. Why would we have a special election? Yeah. Well, the council, let's just say hypothetically that somebody is elected to a position and immediately, you know, doctor, but they die or they move out of town or something like that. There are times when... Basically the same thing. Yeah. The council, yeah. They're all dead to you, otherwise. The council might say, look, we kind of point to only have the right to, but we'd rather hold an election and have an elected person serve for the majority of us. So it's theoretically possible. Okay. One of the other things that we've talked about briefly is what seems unlikely, but that is that we have enough successful filers for certain elections that we end up with a very long ballot and we have the potential for a long number of rankings. If we were instead to want to say that if the number of successful filing candidates exceeds a certain number, that there will be a preliminary election, how would we do that? Yeah, we'd put that right in here. We'd have to write it in because it'd be a little different than than what the normal preliminary would be because I'm assuming it would be a ranked choice preliminary election. Right. To identify the number of candidates. So a lot of panels will say if there are more than, their charge will say, if there's more than double the number of candidates, then they'll have a preliminary. And here it might be, that might be kind of a necessity, except that, because they would make the election simpler, except that you're then you're standing the amount of time for the election process over it. Right. So you're adding basically 64 days to the beginning and then I think it's four weeks or five weeks in between is the typical amount. And in such a preliminary election, you would only be electing in those races in which you had that excess number of candidates. So I suppose that the one big advantage of doing that would be to trim the length of the ballots that the voters eventually face. Yeah. So it seems like we want to have the possibility of preliminary ballot elections available to us, but it's not at all clear to me that we'd actually want to ever do it. Yeah. And that's the kind of the, that's the rub, because if it says in here that you would, if you had, for example, more than double the amount of voters, then, I mean, as candidates, then you'd have to, you know. I keep thinking about that Minneapolis mayoral election when they first implemented rank choice voting, they had 35 candidates for a single seat. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe that's another option to consider that if there's more than double the number of candidates that the, I mean, I was gonna say you can only write in the number of candidates. So if it was the vote for three and you had 15 candidates, you could only write in three more in that one. Could we say something like, if there are a large number of candidates for position, the town council has the option of calling for, the clerk has the option of calling for preliminary election? So in theory, I think we could, but think about how political decision would be. Even if you are the appointed clerk, you know, you have to then decide, let's say it's for a councilor at large, you know, we have 30 candidates. You know, some people would want you to do that and some people wouldn't. And it's hard, I think, for the, you know, as a clerk to be able to have the distance needed in those circumstances. The council president is saying, no, come on, you know, basically, not that they can use their office, but if the council president is like, hey, people want 35 people, they want 35 people, that's not them thinking about how hard that's gonna be for the clerk, thinking about their own watching. And again, I'm not ascribing bad motives to anyone, but I think, you know, the elected officials are gonna be in a position. You know, they're, they will be affected by the process that's used. So maybe it's not more than double, like maybe it's, maybe that's too low. Maybe we're talking about, you know, for the three at large, if we have more than three times a number of candidates, if we have more than four times a number, something like that, so that we're increasing the number, but at the same time, trying to control the length of the ballot. Okay, so we'll think about that. Any free time, you guys can roll that over. What else? I can't think of anything else yet. Yeah, my brain's toast right now. Yeah, I think we've been filled to the brim with information. Okay. Thank you, Lauren. Oh, wait, pleasure. Thanks for doing so much work for this. It's like, you're doing all the heavy left day. I just have to help, you know, package it up the right way. So, but you guys have done a tremendous job. I can't wait to hear what comes next. Either can we. Winter is coming. I do think you want to keep in mind the deadline. The reality is that deadlines in charters are really directory rather than mandatory. So like if you didn't have an answer by that date, it's not that you violated the charter or anything like that. But if you want this to be available for the November 21 election, the sooner the better. We also want to finish it. Yeah, I get that. Also, have you already spoken to your state senator and state rep? Not formally. Not formally, yeah. So that's something I would check in with Paul and the city council president about. If they're likely to want to move forward with something, then the political side of this is that someone should let them know and prepare them for it and kind of give them a preview of all the work you've been doing and the timeline where you intend to make a decision and when the council will get this so that they're prepped and ready, so that, you know, again, maybe in the first two months that they're in session, they can get something to turn around. Good advice. Yeah. Yeah, just this whole COVID thing just completely messed up our timeline that we were large, we were hugging and we were so on time. Oh, dear, you COVID. We'll blast it out of the water. I have a lot of objections to COVID. We don't have time to raise them all today, but I agree. It's really messed with accomplishing, thankfully, multiple people. It's different to sit in front, sit at a table together than it is to be on the Zoom. It just is. So on the other hand, very convenient for a quick meeting. No driving, no being anywhere. Just quick log on. So yeah, we'll take the good advice. All right. Yep, I think, I think. Does that conclude the Lauren Goldberg segment of our presentation today? Yep. Thank you so much. We look, you're sending us your annotated files with all of your fancy language. Absolutely. And again, thank you for all your time and all your hard work. And I will send something over shortly. Thanks, Lauren. Thank you, Lauren. Nice to see you. Thank you, Lauren. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye, see you. OK. So Ellen had to go to do something with her daughter, but we still have a quorum here. Did you want to just get the minutes done quick before you wrap up so that we kind of. Yes. Sure. Put those up. All right. So did anyone have anything, the minutes from the last meeting? I had an addition. The third paragraph under number four, where it says, John said it was instructions that a group could use. I would say just add to that, instructions and materials a group could use to run an example election. That's a good edit. And then in the fifth paragraph, where it says, we're talking about finding a graphic designer. My impression was that we talked about a graphic designer for the education materials, but not for the actual ballot. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but that was my understanding. I think that's right. So just to clarify that. Just get rid of this line. Is that what's happening? Because maybe my understanding is the vendor does create the ballot, right? So it's yes. Yes, I think just eliminating that sentence. Take that out. Yeah. Yeah, they use a specific software to design the ballot. And then with the case of LHS, they will print out the ballot for us as part of their support package and do all that. Whereas ES&S will send us the ballot design on a USB drive for us to print out, or they will print them out if we pay them to do so, which is basically describing the same thing from both companies. That's how it's done now. LHS prints our ballots. We do pay for it. It's a town election. So we need to change this phrase. If our only choice for ballot design is using the vendor, should we say that in conjunction with the vendor, the ballot design worked out or something, is that essentially what we really envision happening? This is really working with the vendor. Yeah, I think so. We need to get to that. The vendor does the design no matter what. The only question is, who prints it? Is that the question? I think here we were just trying to say we need to give careful thought to how many pages the ballot will be and what it will look like. Right, which you can tell the vendor, and they'll work it out. Simplify it way down. I think that's the essence of what we were trying to get at. And then I have one more comment, which is in the next paragraph. Peggy asked whether our only choice for tabulator system is through LHS. I think commercially available. If we just add that in, that makes it clear. Because there's the freeware. ESNS is, I mean, not that this should go in the minutes, but ESNS is software equivalent of LHS and Dominion's results tabulator. It does not support multi-seat rank-twist voting. So yeah, if it's going to be commercial, it's got to be, well, at least if it's going to be commercial from the company that makes the machines, it's got to come from LHS and Dominion. So I have another meeting I have to go to. I'm ready to vote yes on this as amended. Second. I abstain. OK, second. Yep, yes. All right. Move to adjourn. Move to adjourn. All right, be free. Thank you. Thanks, all. Bye, everybody. Let us know when the next one is. Oh, she's gone. Whoosh. So let me just stop recording here.