 Secretary of State for Congress. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair and committee. I'm excited to be here. We've today's been up. I've got to go. I have to. Is it something I said? No. I'm sorry. I will be right back though. I've got to be built. So, my share, it's all a little takeover. For the record, Jim Kondo, Secretary of State, with me is my deputy, Chris Winters. Also Marlene Batey is our corporation's director, and Alex Ivey has been our business analyst on the business portal. So today what I'm here actually is to talk in general about the office and kind of fill you in. And then I hope that we'll be able to come back to talk about the business portal in more detail with you. We'll give you some very brief stuff today, but for the most part, I just want to talk really about the office because there are some new members, and I think it's always good that we provide that information. So thanks for the opportunity to provide you the overview. Our responsibilities are many and very diverse. Most people don't know what the Secretary of State's office does beyond elections. In fact, it's probably the number one question I get during the campaign season, what does the Secretary of State do? And to put it a little bit of perspective, when I was first sworn in as Secretary of State in 2011, I brought my parents up from Florida, and my father on the way back to the airport turned to me and he goes, does this mean that you work for Hillary now? And I said, no, Dad, different Secretary. So he then promptly smacked me on the back of the head and said, don't get cocky with me. As a former state senator and a chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee, I fully understand and appreciate the important work that the legislature does and all the important work that goes on committee by committee. Now, with eight years behind me as Vermont Secretary of State and head of what I consider to be a very important agency, I have a greater appreciation every day for the idea of a necessity of smart and focused government. Specifically, the role that it plays with interagency government operations, commerce and economic development, and most importantly, the integrity and trust of our citizens. Setting public policy is one thing, but enacting that policy is in a smart way too often gets lost. We are proud of the collaborative and nonpartisan relationship we have had with legislative committees over the years. Good government knows no political labels. And I mean that sincerely. I also have over 30 years of private sector background working for a Fortune 100 company as well as a Vermont based distribution company that generated over $100 million in sales and for a regulated utility. So my background is very diverse as well. As Vermont's 38th Secretary of State and head of the agency touching so many people, I'm honored to continue to work to move forward working towards open transparent government, good government solutions that are well designed, efficient, customer friendly, while still protecting the citizens that we serve. For example, our office is well known for having implemented six different IT solutions in my time. We completed a website overhaul the corporation's new corporation system, including the rudimentary business portal that we currently have. Elections, campaign finance, lobbying, professional regulation, and accessible voting. And we did those all on budget and they're all working well. We operate on a very fiscally constrained budget. That's Marlee's job is to keep me in line and well thought out. We eliminated back in 2012, 13 time frame, we eliminated 1.8 million in general fund dollars that we were receiving. And really it was just an accounting issue. On July 1st, 1.8 million we get dumped into the Secretary of State's fund and we'd operate off of that. June 30th, whatever we had, which usually was more than 1.8 million, we get swept away. The next day we get 1.8 million back. And it was just this constant entry, a counting entry that had to be done. We realized actually in my first five minutes as Secretary of State, when I sat down with my budget director at the time, I stopped him and I said, excuse me, why do we get the 1.8 million? And he looked at me and he said, what do you mean? And I says, well, it seems to me we can operate right off the fees that we already generate. And he says, oh, you understand this. And I said, well, it's not rocket science. But in any case, we gave back to the legislature 1.8 million. The only general fund dollars that we use or get is in an election year, we get about 400,000, and that's to help us with ballot printing. Other than that, we're self-funded. And I'll get in a little bit later. I'll tell you how much we actually give back. We operate on our fees. We operate within our budget that we develop and you approve. When I say that, the legislature is a whole. And one thing that I've been very proud of is the fact that the Secretary of State's office under my watch has never been before appropriations for budget adjustment in January. That means we operate under the budget we have. As you probably know, we have four divisions at the Secretary of State's office, the Office of Professional Regulation, better known as OPR. They protect the public's health and safety through professional regulation, leading the way with efficient, effective licensing and enforcement. Vasara, the state archives, preserving and protecting our state's most valued history, public records, and access to those public records. And working collaboratively with state government on public records management. Elections, obviously, safeguarding the integrity and accuracy of our elections. While increasing voter participation and creating more effective election administration and corporations, ensuring the proper registration and public protection while facilitating business and commerce in Vermont. Our fifth division is actually Marlene's other half. And that's the administration office, business office. She makes sure that we live within our means, provide true accounting of our budgets, and the resources needed to provide services. And we do have on our website, you can actually access our budgets. So we post that on our website. In addition to these divisions, we also have some other programs. Our municipal division, or the municipal program, fields inquiries every day from municipal officials and many of your constituents all across the state. We receive over 1200 calls per day. And that includes some of our publications, I'm sorry, 100 calls a year. Including publications. I was trying to get away. The next step was to ask them for money. Public records and open meetings. As many of you may know, I do what we call the transparency tour every other year. We're now over 50 stops around the state where we actually explain public records law and open meeting laws. And we have the Safe at Home program providing address confidentiality for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. We have over 150 participants. That's men, women, and children that are on that list. Essentially, they use our office as their legal address. And all their mail comes to us. We then repackage it and send it to the correct address. That list is kept in a safe so that nobody else can get access to it. So we don't put it on our website or any place else. And I always like to tell this story because it really talks about how important the Safe at Home program is. First of all, we were the third state in the country to actually implement it. Back around 2000 or 2001. About three or four years ago, we had a call that came in and the person that was managing the program called me up and said, I got a really upset guy on the phone that's insisting I give him information. And I said, okay, send it up. This guy told me I'm in law enforcement. I know how these programs work. And I insist that you give me this information on this woman and her child. We need to do a welfare check. And I said, that's great. I says, he was from out of state. I says, you know the process. If you have a court order, file it with me and I'll review it and we'll release the information. He's okay, never received anything. A week later he called and I think he must have thought Vermont was a big place because he thought he was going to get somebody else, he got me again. And I explained to him that last week I told you I did the court order and you didn't send it to me. He says, well, I'm in law enforcement and I know how this stuff works. And I said, that's fine. Something just didn't seem right. So I called the state police and I asked them to do a welfare check on the woman and her daughter. It was in southern Vermont, not your side, the other side, your side. And the state police went and checked it out to make sure that the family was okay. And then reported back to me. The guy that was calling me was a strange husband who was in law enforcement of the woman and child. And I'm just so pleased that we were able to protect that family from any potential harm. And that's the meaning of that program. It really does work. We also have the temporary officiant program which allows individuals to register with our office so that they can perform a single marriage. Started out with less than 1,000. We're now over 1,500 per year. That system is now up online and you can access it on a 24-7 basis. During the busy spring, summer, and fall, we receive anywhere from 40 to 90 applications per day. Mr. Secretary, I'd like to add something. Sure. I had a food cart in Bennington and this couple met at my food cart. And when they decided they wanted to get married, they did it at my cart. Would you the officiant? And that program, by the way, brings in about $150,000 to the state. Yeah, that's good. We also maintain the APA, the Administrative Procedures Act rules and legislative clerk duties. The rules are when agencies file rules that they're going to operate under. They have to file it through us. We make sure that they file them correctly. Make sure that they've done the public outreach. And then report back to Elkar to make sure that they have before they approve it. So with that in mind, let me quickly go over a few of our major initiatives. The corporations division is responsible for registration of business entities. From small proprietorship, such as trade names to the full incorporation process. It's also the filing repository for uniform commercial code filings for the state of Vermont. The corporations division, by the way, they have five people. They do over 100,000 unique transactions per year. They've had no fee increases since 2014. Every year at the end of the year, a general fund sweep occurs pretty much out of their fund. And in FY17, the general fund received about 2.8 million. And in FY18, it was just under 2.75 million. We also, in this past year, implemented what we call the one click filing of annual reports, which is when you have to, every business has to file an annual report on January to March. If you have had no changes to your filing in the previous year, you can just hit one click and be on your way. One click, submit your credit card information in the way you go. Whereas before you used to have to fill in the whole form and everything else, all the details. So we're really pleased with that. And we're now over 60% of our filing for annual reports are done through that process. So that really allows businesses to focus on their business rather than focusing on the paperwork for the state. We continue to work with Department of Tax and Department of Labor. Specifically in labor, it's the unemployment division on the shared business portal and service to the customer base. This past year, we implemented the first in the nation registration of data brokers and we're just in its infancy at this point. Our business portal, let's see, I was going to talk a little bit about the other, but okay. So let me just back up a little bit and just describe, in 2011, and I knew this because I had been in the Senate for so many years. In 2011, we were getting ready to put a new IT system in place for corporations. And the vendor we were using said, hey, this is a great time to do a basic business portal. So we approached the Shumlin administration and it had been tried by Dean. It had been tried by Douglas. Nobody could ever seem to get their hands on it. But because we were putting our new corporation system in place, it made the perfect time to actually do this. So that it was very basic from the standpoint of, when you're starting a business, you put in your name, your address, your DBA, all your contact information. And guess what, when you go to tax department after you leave the Secretary of State's registration, you have to give them your name, your address, your DBA, and all this stuff. What we did basically was set it up so that this stuff would carry over. The information that was pertinent would carry over. And what it would do is it would just ask, when you got to tax department, when you're going for your tax ID, it would ask the specific questions that you needed to answer for tax. When you got to labor, it would ask the specific questions for labor. Then last year, this committee and the Senate Commerce Economic Development Committee asked us to look into a business portal. They set up a steering committee with Mia's chair and Mike Shirling, ACCD, and John Quinn from the ADS to move forward on a plan. The legislature also gave us a authorization for someone to do that work for us. That's Alex, and we proceeded. And you should have a report already on file with the legislature we submitted on December 14th to talk about what we could do. Alex did a tremendous amount of work reaching out to organizations, reaching out to businesses, reaching out to agencies about what are the next steps. And talking with, we talked, I know that Alex and Chris talked with other states, Indiana, Georgia, Nevada, who already have operating systems. And we talked with some of the, San Francisco, was it? Yeah, San Francisco, which has a business portal for their own city. And the report is the culmination of that. And I have to, I want to give thanks to Alex because that report, I think, is one of the finest reports set to a legislature that I've seen in my time. And I've been in this building since 2001, so, and I know how many reports are filed. There's no way we could all read them. When you get the chance, you're still chair, are you still chair of the National Association? I am president of the National Association of Senators. Could you talk a little bit about the security of our election? And also, sir, I'd like to overview of what's happening nationally, because you actually know. Sure, as many as, okay, yeah, I'll get into that. I think, let me hold off and go through the rest of this first, and then I'll get back to it. Our goal with the business portal and the goal that the committee's charges with this committee and the House and the Senate committee was to try to simplify the process to make it easier for businesses to actually run their businesses and not have to focus on filing paper with the state. Just to give you an example, when we first took office, when I first took office, I walked into the office and on the top of one of the clerk's desks was a stack of paper this high with a check attached to each piece of paper. It was annual report time. In those days, it would take 10 to 12 weeks to process all of that. And when I asked how quick did the checks get processed, they said, well, we process them as we process the paper, so 10 to 12 weeks. We had to hire temporaries to be on staff, to come on staff to actually input the data, because we didn't have a very good system. It was clunky, it was inaccurate, it was messy, it was, I can't describe it, it was just bad. Today, when you file your annual report, when you hit submit, it's done. It's up, it's posted, the check is already deposited in the bank. We used to accept only check and cash or drawdown. And what we ended up doing is we accept all forms of payment, bank to bank, credit card, everything, all kinds of credit cards. So, you know, we just improved everything so much. And I have to say that it also helped us with our revenues, because now we're capturing, for sure, capturing all of our revenues. So we're, the report, we'll come back to talk about the report in more detail, but the report basically lays it out. We did do an RFI to find out what are we talking about here with vendors. We got, what was it, three replies back. And the range was, you know, I hate to say it in terms of, for media purposes, but you know, I was asked at one point, how much is that going to cost us? And I said, it could be one million or it could be 10 million. And of course the headline was, it's going to cost 10 million. And I said, well, that wasn't fair. It depends on what level of system we put into place and how many agencies actually get on board. And the only way that this is going to work, because you can't do it all at once, the only way that this will work is if you phase it in as separate projects going along the way. So in any case, I'll continue on. We, as I said, we have the data brokers up and running. And any corpse legislation that we have will come through this committee. So if we have anything that needs to be addressed or updated, it will come through this committee. I'm not going to, I'll just briefly talk about, like, the Office of Professional Regulation, 50 professions, 70,000 licenses. This year, we just enacted the go to republics. But we have over time, over the last couple of years, we've added some licensing. We added the Department of Environmental Conservation Foresters, which was newly licensed. LADCs, the licensed alcohol and drug counselors. That one we're especially proud of because we worked with the licensees. We were able to take 30 pages of rules and reduce it to 10 pages. It's been a real boon from the standpoint of making it easier to get people licensed and operating in that field so it's an economic workforce development piece. And we're working that way now. We have, we were awarded this past year, last summer, a grant of $450,000 over three years from the U.S. Department of Labor to conduct work specifically on, continue work on the LADCs, but also on cosmetology, funeral, and real estate. And how do we can streamline those and make them more efficient as well? We are considered. Sure. The community hearings for contractors, is that through your office? Yes. And that's one that will be in the upcoming OPR bill, which will be coming out? I'll just say, Jim, that's going to be a separate bill from the OPR bill. Oh, it is separate. Home improvement contractors, and we think it's going to start on the Senate side. Senator Sorotkin has been an advocate of this for a while. It's going to start in Government Operations Committee bill, I believe. And we did extensive outreach with that, as well as, to be honest with you, a lot of the responsible contractors are actually in favor of this. It's what we're doing, basically, just to give you a little bit of a heads up, is it's going to be basically a very minimal approach. It's going to be a registration, and you have to provide your insurances so that we know that you have insurance and that you have a contract that you can, a model contract that you use or whatever. Other than that, it's really not going to be, we're not going to whack people, you know, for filing. It's not a license, so to speak. It's a very minimal. And that's really the key to the Office of Professional Regulation. Vermont's OPR is considered a model for the nation. It was considered that way by the Obama Administration when they did a white paper on it. But also CSG and NCSL, Chris goes often to many conferences to talk about how we're doing it in Vermont. And we've worked closely with the legislature to, we not only have a sunrise review for when you want to add a license, but we also have a sunset to when we want to reduce or eliminate a license. And we can get into more on that, but there really is some, there was a court decision, the North Carolina Dental Supreme Court decision that basically was looking at how some of these commissions and boards basically are protecting their profession by restricting the ability of other people to get into it. And it was considered a, what's the phrase, restraint of trade? You're also doing some wonderful work with the military. And OPR has done, and you're continuing to do that, just looking at particular training, the MOS is a military designation, and then being able to transition into a licensed profession in Vermont. And that's also, that's actually groundbreaking in the first place in the nation, so it's wonderful. So, yeah, so there's a lot that we've been doing to try to, you know, and we've been working closely with the governor on much of this as well. Really, if you look at some of the other states, many of the other states, they have one place where you go for licensing and registrations. Whereas here in Vermont, we have 50 professions. There's another 30, 40 throughout state government. You really have to know where to go in order to find out more about your license or whatever. You have to know where you have to go, whereas in many states it's one location. I remember I was at a secretary's conference in Austin, Texas, and I looked up, I was right across from the hotel was this building and it said, the Office of Registration and Licensing, and I'm, wow, and I, you know, it was, it was, they've made it really simple from that standpoint that they have one place where you go for registration and licensing. And, you know, we're already having conversations with Department of Liquor Control, with potentially with the YAG department about some of their license as well. It's just, it makes sense. We have got it down to a science. We, we know what we're doing with it. It's, we're efficient. And I'll just give you some quick numbers. In 2000, it was 2003, 2003, we had 35 professions. So we're almost, we're a little, about 40% more now, but we had 35 professions and only 35,000 license holders. And we had 35 employees. In 2014, 10 years later, we had 50 professions, and we had, well, at that time, 60,000 licensees. So we'd almost doubled everything, and we had almost the same number of employees. And the reason is because we used technology to offset and become more efficient and more accurate, actually. The amazing part for me, even with our election systems, is that the technology allows you to be more accurate by far, besides the efficiency. We also have the state archives and records administration. Just to clarify, when you're just saying, how's the licensing in your shop? You're advocating to trade to the training and all that stuff. That would stay with the home department or administrator. You would just be handing out the license. We handle the administration of the license. Right. And everything else is done, if there's a training involved or something. It could be, yes. It depends on how it's set up. And I mean, ultimately, that's up to the legislature to make those decisions. So the archives, we protect our most precious documents, as well as offer other state agencies records management, training. We've been upping our game on digital archives, putting a lot of... Every day, there's more stuff on our website than ever before. You can now access newspapers back to the late 1700s. And Vermonters can access that for free. It's done through ancestry.com. They did all the scanning and uploading. And one of the deals was, because they wanted access to the newspapers, and one of the deals was, okay, well, Vermonters get access to them. And that's how we got ahold of it. So there's a lot that the Office of State Archives does. And we're certainly... We operate a record center. It's got over 100,000 cubic feet of records, as well as the archive itself. One of the things that's kind of an awesome thing, I remember when I first was elected as secretary, and I went out there, and Greg Sanford was a former state archivist. And he took me out to the archive into the vault. It's a climate-controlled vault. And he hands me this document, it was in a plastic sheet, and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, holy cow, this is the original Constitution of the state of Vermont. And it just, you know, it wows you when you actually see that document, when you know that it's there, that it's been protected. And there was a time when the archives were in the basement of the Pavilion building, and then it moved from the basement of the Pavilion building to the basement of Terrace Street, where our office used to be located. And in both basements, you had water pipes and sewer pipes going right through the archive. When the flood of two... What was it? The early 1990s here in Montpelier, legislators were over at the archive helping get all the documents and stuff up to a higher location to protect them. So it's just what we have done, we've now got, it's out in middle sex, it's a state-of-the-art facility, it looks like a warehouse, but it's a state-of-the-art facility out there, climate-controlled, and we're very proud of the work that we've been doing out there. A lot of states have been actually reducing or eliminating their archives, but we've been going the other way. Elections, you asked about elections, so let me... Sure. Do you advise other agencies on their own records? Yes. And keeping them in compliance with shredding and all the... Well, we offer them guidance on it. We don't control it, but we offer them... We wish we did, but we offer them guidance. So, in the elections area, two years ago, actually two and a half years ago now, the world of secretaries of state, this is in response to your question, the world of secretaries of state across this country changed and changed drastically. We were called to a conference call with the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State... Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Jay Johnson, was on the phone with us and informed us that 21 states had been attacked. They suspected the Russians. There was only one state that they knew of that was breached and that they were considering putting elections under critical infrastructure designation. We didn't know what that meant. We thought this was going to be a federal takeover of our elections. So, we had lots of questions. It took almost a year before they actually answered them. We did, in January of 17, declare us a critical infrastructure and we still didn't know what that meant. It was not until June or July of 17 that we actually got information to explain to us that there were going to be more resources available to us. Vermont, though, I will say, we were well ahead of the game. In 2013, we had actually started to focus on cybersecurity well before we actually implemented our new election system. So, we were well ahead of the game and we were working hard on our cybersecurity at that time. We did a complete vulnerability and risk assessment of both physical as well as cyber of all three of our facilities. So, we really were a leader as far as secretaries of state across the country. This past year, past election in 2018, I will just say, no news was good news. There was no breaches that we are aware of. In either case, there was certainly no votes that were changed. We know that. What occurred in 2016 was an attempt to get into our voter registration databases. Part of our new system, we not only on our voter registration database, we not only back it up every night, but we also have something called same day voter registration, so nobody will be denied on election day. So, that's some of the redundancy that we put in place. We also, well, we're now one of 40 states, but we were, we have been a state that's considered to be a voter marked paper ballot. We also do post-election audits. These are all things that help with that security issue, whether you want to call it cybersecurity or not. And, you know, we continue. As I tell people all the time, I'm constantly being interviewed on the national press, and I tell them, you know, cybersecurity is like a race without a finish line. It's never going to end. It's the new normal for our secretaries of state. We have to be focused on it on an everyday basis. Last August, August 24th, to be exact, my IT manager came to me and said, we blocked a whole bunch of attempts to get into our system yesterday, and I said, okay. And he goes, I want you to see these two. And he gave me the document and in both of them it said country of origin, Russia. So, I immediately said, okay, you're sure we blocked it? And he said, yes, there's nothing in the system. I said, okay, then we need to send this down to the Department of Homeland Security. By the end of that day, they received it and what's called an MSISAC, which is an information sharing analysis center at the Center for Internet Security. By the time they finished that day, they had issued an alert across the country to all states to be on the lookout for these IP addresses. So, we played a hand in that and I'm pleased that we were, but I'm also very pleased, obviously, that our systems worked, our defenses worked. Yes. Well, going through voter registration files this year, I noticed there was a lot of folks that were born in 1915 or something like that. I can't remember. It was a lot of people that had been voting regularly over the last 10 years. And the reason I came upon was because I actually talked to somebody who said they had re-voted in 10 years, but had a voting record. And that's why I was at their door. I think I did talk to the Secretary of State's office about this because it felt like a security potential security issue. I figured there must be a very simple explanation for why there's a bunch of people that are born in 1905 and 1915 on their voter registration files. Well, I can't speak to the 1905. 1915, some of those people are still around. So, they're still around, yeah? And they're good voters. But I will say that the system, you know, Secretaries of State across the country are criticized because there's dead people on the election voter registration databases. There will always be dead people on the voter registration databases. And part of it is because the dead people, unfortunately, don't call us up or send us a document saying, I died. Don't take me off the list. And there are restrictions. And actually, the restrictions about taking people off the ballot, off the registration database, we have to follow federal guidelines and it isn't easy to take someone off. And frankly, it shouldn't be easy. So, you know, we have the capability now when we are doing an audit to make sure that, you know, nobody voted more than twice and all this stuff. But let me put it in perspective. In 2016, because we haven't got the final numbers yet for this year, but in 2016, 68%, and that was a presidential year, 68% of our registered voters voted. 68%. I really have a tough enough time getting people to vote once, never mind twice. So, it's, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say to you there is no voter fraud whatsoever. What I will say to you is there is no widespread voter fraud. And frankly, from my standpoint, and I think most of my team will agree, when I say the real voter fraud in this country is denying an eligible American the right to cast a ballot. And that happens far more than any occasion of actual voter fraud where someone's impersonating someone. I appreciate how open our election is. Mr. Secretary, we both don't cast you for our vote. After the election, she expressed some frustration with me and was worried, frankly, about same-day registration and how the state does not require someone to provide ID. And I find that troublesome. Well, first let me say that ID would not stop someone in that case. We could determine their address. Well, here's the thing. If someone moves into Bennington the day before, should they be denied? And they wouldn't have a driver's license. They wouldn't have a utility bill at that point. And in some cases, we have three or four people living together and then only one person probably has a utility bill. So the others wouldn't have a utility bill. So it's really difficult and if you look at the Vermont law, it tells us how we can go about this. As I said, we find it very difficult to find there's an argument about same-day because the ones that use same-day most often are college students. All right? So that is something that we have to still consider. Now, this was the first general election with same-day. So it was the first time I can tell you that the numbers so far are there statewide. We had 8,000 people that voted that registered and voted on election day. That doesn't mean that those people didn't deserve to be. Voting is a constitutional right. You should be allowed. We should reduce and remove any obstructions that are in the way while we still have requirements as to making sure. You sign an affidavit when you register. You sign an affidavit and if you are convicted of voter fraud. I wasn't aware of that. So at the same day, they sign an affidavit. The application is actually an affidavit. By the way, Cassie Barbrough is our town court. They didn't mention that. And I'm aware of Cassie's concerns because you do have a college in your town. So I understand that. Burlington has, I think they had 2,500 or 3,000 same-day voter registrations that day. But same-day voter registration also offers that protection to voters whose name might for some reason have been removed from the checklist. We don't remove. It's really up to Cassie and her colleagues across the state that the way our system works is the town clerk is the one responsible for their voter checklist. So they add and remove. If someone files with our office online, it goes automatically to the clerk of jurisdiction. And that clerk has to review it and approve it before it gets added to the list. Then it gets fed up into the statewide. One follow-up. Is there any way currently, Cassie's argument was that somebody could come in to my town and go to Shaftesbury. And there may or may not be any cross-referencing as a way for the secretary of state to check for duplication. Yes. Unfortunately, unless they're online at the polling place, they can't do it from there. But that's probably in the future will be allowed. But the statewide voter checklist is online. They can access it. The town clerks have access to the overall and they can look to see if someone is registered in another town. And when they find someone, if someone's registering in Bennington and they move there from Shaftesbury, she can actually click and notice to that town clerk to remove this person they just registered in Bennington. So that's available to them. There are some one of the things that we will be coming to the legislature for, there is a a group an organization that's actually state-owned and I say that there's 26 states I think that are in it now. It's growing. It's called Eric and it's electronic electronic registration information center or something. And basically what happens is states will send their voter registration data to this group and they will massage it within their system of the consortium states and decide if there's people that should be removed like dead people, people that have moved because we don't have any system between states there's no system between states so but there are ways that we can find out some of this stuff. Thank you. First I just want to thank you for websites amazing and I spent way too much time on it in the last six months so thank you for that. It's incredibly easy to use and I was glad that you're hosting a business portal because I think that bodes well different state technology in Vermont and thinking about workforce development and how many disconnected workers I think we have right now who are trying to find their way and how sort of different government systems are really challenging for those folks. I think things like ease of voter registration is a really great way to start to get people connected to state systems enough that they might think about sort of next steps of employment or housing or something like that so I think any way that we can connect people to a sense of community and voting is a really good one of those. We might be able to grow the workforce from there so thank you. Thank you. Is it the town clerk's responsibility or the BCA's responsibility to manage the checklist? Well both. The town clerk's receive stuff on a regular basis and they actually can do it. But the Board of Civil Authority ultimately gives us that information. She's a member of that. She's a member. Typically when I was in South Burlington on the City Council there we were on obviously on the Board of Civil Authority as well and we would receive the town clerk would say give us a list and say here's the people that I'm removing or adding or whatever and we would get a chance to look at it and say or we think this person still lives there. That's the thing you don't want to remove someone if they still live there just because they didn't vote because you don't know when they're going to vote. So it's wrong to just take someone off the list and that's what same day offers the opportunity to protect that person. Thank you. This is actually a follow up on which was a point earlier so the same day registration really happy that exists and that we're doing that all about opening transparent elections. Our clerks are struggling with the additional time that comes in and heard some complaints from constituents about not being able to register to vote the day before the election because money was closed, the office was closed to prepare with the folks who voted early and things like that. So it seems that a fix there would be to provide some additional funding for our election workers being to hire somebody to come help on that day. I'm not sure exactly what the cost of elections are if there's overtime then who's that cost but it does seem that our election workers need help and I think I've heard some frustration that I'm forgetting the name of the person that's from each party that's supposed to be there and help with the elections but some frustration that progressives are not going to happen. Well let me just say there are duties listed in the statute about what the Board of Civil Authority with their job titles or duties are and we get complaints all the time from clerks who say I can't get some of my members of the Board of Civil Authority to do anything on election day they don't want anything to do with it. My only response to that is they probably shouldn't be able to do anything on election day and I think there are this issue of we don't pay the town clerks or the towns for their labor or the work that they do at that level. We do pay if a town is a we have 246 towns we have 135 of them are what we call tabulator towns a tabulator machine those 135 towns which is a little over 50% of the towns actually generate or receive 80% of the votes that come through. There is a state law that the legislature passed several years ago that any town of a thousand voters or more must have a tabulator. We provide that tabulator it doesn't cost the town anything to purchase that tabulator so we provide that. We also provide the first 500 for the memory card creation which typically is about 1200 it depends on the election and how many people are on it it's about a thousand to 1200 we pay the first 500 of that and if there is a recount we end up putting the bill on that as well. The whole idea I mean we now have data we didn't have data before what we do now with our new election management system that was put in place in 2015 and for instance we can tell you that before it used to have to register and the close of registration was the Wednesday before the election day we now know that from the Thursday Friday, Monday and the election day we can tell you how many people and for instance this year I think it was close to 13,000 people during that week that voted early we know that there's 8,000 people that registered and voted on the same day on election day we know that the day before elections there were over 7,000 people that voted that day early ballot and I know that many of the clerks wanted us to give them what they call a gap day where there would be no registration no voting in that one day, the day before elections with numbers like that it's kind of hard to say what are we supposed to do with those people that are voting early and in fact a Republican member of the Senate actually said well I think they ought to be open on Saturday before election day there is one of the things we always run into is that here in Vermont you have some professional clerks who are open 5 days a week and we also have some clerks in some small towns that are only open one afternoon a week or one day a week Mr. Chairman are you open 5 days or 3 half days but we have a town administrator who is also an assistant clerk so it basically is open 5 days so I mean it varies across the state and I don't think there is any question now I will tell you that there is a bill in congress HR1 that would require a minimum of 3 days of early voting including weekends I don't believe that that bill will go anywhere at this point but it is there and there is a growing support for at least the weekend before elections to be open and I know that several of the towns here in Montpelier John Odom will be open on Saturday until I think 2 o'clock in the afternoon on the Saturday before election day to register people and allow people to come in and vote it's just we allow 45 days for early voting but that doesn't mean 45 days where the clerk is actually available we also have an online request system where you can actually request your early ballot to be mailed to you as soon as 45 days ahead of time so we are offering as many ways possible for people to be able to register and cast a ballot I will tell you that the numbers are 75% of all the registrations for 2018 January through December 75% of those registrations came through the online voter registration system the election day registration system the automatic voter registration system which is our AVRs with the DMV the nightly file from DMV for anybody that accessed DMV that day and if we check it against our system to see if anybody and if they didn't opt out we will automatically register if they're 17 years old but will be 18 by election day we will automatically register them because they're eligible to vote in the presidential primary and the general election primary and if they're 17 or they're 17 and they won't be eligible we actually in essence pre-register and we park them off to decide until their birth date pops up and then we automatically will register them so we're doing everything we can to get people on and that's not a bad thing and I didn't mean to say that I don't mean it in that way just that when we do provide those options recognizing that their clerks are feeling overwhelmed despite that we have all these options there's still a lot of, as you said, 8,000 people to register at the same day but also the writing votes make it challenging for them I'm just wanting to communicate that there was some and we recognize that and in fact everything that I've been doing with our new election system and by the way, just to give you a background in the office we were 38th in the nation in 2012, that was the first election I oversaw 38th in the nation after the court for elections performance index it's a data driven it's now done by MIT it's the most coveted of the election performance indicators so we were 38th in the nation we started right after 2012 putting stuff online the online voter registration things like that and we've crept up the list after the 2014 election we were 16th in the nation after the 2016 election we were number one congratulations I'm very proud of our team the work that they've done to implement and much of that information comes from what's called the EAC report it's a federal commission and the clerks used to have to fill this report out it was 40 pages long and it had to be done within 60 days of the election required a lot of data points in it they hated it we hated it because then they would send it to us so we would receive 245 reports we had to aggregate it into one report and then supply it to the federal government what we did when we put our new election management system in place as long as the clerks are doing their job we have the information we can just click a button and the report is filed so we've taken that off their plate a lot of the voter registration stuff we've taken off their plate actually we've reduced the amount of work that they have to do so we've been working on the other side too I know that a lot of folks don't hear that from the town clerks but that's not a knock on them they're busy they're the hardest working municipal officials we have and I'm sorry for those that are select board members I was myself but the clerks are the hardest working municipal officials we have and it's a constant battle and we're trying to find ways that we can improve the efficiency the accuracy the fact that we used to get paper literally paper forms for voter registration and send it to the clerks because if they came to our office we would send it to the appropriate clerk and those paper forms had so much inaccuracy on it because you have to try to read someone's chicken scratch whereas now with the online system and the automatic voter registration system that stuff is automatically updated so our system is far more accurate today than it ever was we don't have an answer for dead people dying on us we don't have an answer for people that move out of state within the state we do within the state we do and it's just a constant battle thank you I appreciate that we'll get to maybe it's a question and then a shorter point of view when we voted on the same day voting I checked with my town clerk and she said that basically we've had it all long anyway it's called a provisional ballot I don't know that's not just one thing I could ask you that's what I understood from her she treats it like a provisional ballot the second thing I wanted to know was are there any rules on how you use the voter rolls for other state functions I know like the jury duty was often taken off of voter rolls and the DMV there is state law one of the restrictions and I don't have it on the top of my head but I do know that at least once a year we have to send the copy of the voter roll to the judiciary I'm assuming it's for the jury duty issues but I will say the provisional ballot, Vermont has not used a provisional ballot for years we've used what we call an affidavit the affidavit basically if someone came in and said well I registered through human services here fill out this form and you attest to the fact that under penalties of pains and perjury that you actually did do this and what actually occurred at one point was this is after the 2012 I think it was election two weeks after the election was over I got a stack like this from DMV of voter registration forms and I called Rob Ida the commissioner and I just you got to come over and see this and these things dated back to July so somewhere these things were being held and not getting to us so it was two weeks after the election that we finally got this information so we started working with DMV to improve that but we still have other designated agencies human services the health connect are considered designated registration agencies as well we don't get a lot from those agencies most of it comes from DMV you know people remember to change their address on their driver's license but not from their voter roles and it's it's just you know we're constantly dealing with that but now with the automatic voter it actually which by the way, and you might remember this Representative Dickinson when it actually was passed it passed the house unanimous passed the senate unanimous they made one slight change it had to come back to the house there was one no vote in the house on that last and final vote and it had nothing to do with the bill itself it had to be that the person that voted no was upset with the person that was reporting the bill two things what is the name of the award that you won? the other thing is general opinion on mail ballots I know what they do in the state of Washington because Washington ends up with a voter turnout somewhere around 70% on a regular basis so any opinions on that but first give me the name of your number one it's the elections performance index that's put together by the MIT election and security data center and that was after the 2016 election it takes almost two years before they actually produce that report so we won't know about the 2018 election until sometime next year just prior to the election it comes out usually in August, September timeframe of the election so mail ballots there are three states that do all mail ballots and what they do is they basically send a ballot to every registered voter that they have in their system and people that can mail it back they can bring it back to a polling location they can also go to what they call a vote center they can drop it off at a vote center mail ballots do have a tendency to have higher participation rates but I will tell you that the state that has the highest percentage is Minnesota and they have for many years now they've been in the mid to high 70s they just have a different approach to elections in Minnesota it's Oregon Washington and Colorado don't be fooled by the comments that it might be cheaper to do it that way than to have to do it the other way because first think about it this way you got a mail a ballot to every not 68% as we had voted but to 100% you have postage that has to be paid for both going and coming back so there are costs to it and I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do we do have we're kind of a hybrid because we do allow mail ballots so if you request your early vote ballot you can request it by mail and you can receive it and then send it back by mail so we're kind of in the middle between now we have about 30% of our electorate or 30% of the votes cast are cast by early ballots we have no excuse absentee and you know there are states that have like in New Hampshire they do not have early voting they do not have no excuse absentee you have to have a reason and they force you to come in on election day I don't even know what their percentage is I don't know the quality of the test everyone votes on Tuesday are there any states that have looked at state elections on other days well, if you're talking about the general election it would be difficult to do that because it's federal races many states have tried South Burlington used to be we used to vote on the third Tuesday of May and then they moved it and the reason why they did that is at that back in those days it would take that long for the legislature to decide how much money was going to be set to them for schools so South Burlington voted third Tuesday of May and then they realized it didn't make much of a difference so they moved it and the vote percentages were down for that we called our town meeting so they moved it to the same as town meeting and the vote percentage didn't change we've had other states once I think Milton may have done it for a while where they were voting on Saturday didn't change their percentages people have tried at different times and whatever I know congress in fact I just got an email this morning from representative Welch that there's a bill being presented to make Tuesday election day a holiday he asked what my opinion was and I said great idea I don't know if it will pass but it's a great idea you know there was a house member just yesterday said to me I'm going to put a bill in that requires businesses to give two hours of time off paid time off to go vote on election day well I think in most cases I'm not even sure but we might already have that on the books um I think it might be on the books I'm not sure they can't stop you from going to vote I'm not sure if it's considered paid time off or if you have to use leave time to do it but there are so many things that people are looking at to try to increase the number of voters participating anecdotally the town I'm from had a lot of road construction this year we had two the big town called the mobile early primary early voting up for primary and for the regular and so we had this huge turnout on saturdays and the comments from of course I was out there but the comments from every person coming by was that they just wanted to beat up the vote we had a really big vote on I'm not saying it doesn't work you know in every city or town might be different you don't know it's the one thing I can say is we have to have a finite date at some point for instance we do not accept any ballots that are received after 7pm on election night even if someone were to mail it back it's postmarked ahead of time we don't accept it it has to be in the hands of the clerk by 7pm on election night for it to count that's not trying to diminish it but that's just the way it is we have we've been working to improve I'm on a co-chair committee with the secretary of state from I'm sorry Washington state of Washington on overseas and military votes for council of state governments and our biggest obstacle is the post office we actually had a case it was sent to me in New Hampshire someone had they actually had a picture of their envelope where it said un address not or undeliverable and if you looked at the address and then looked at what the department of defense regs put in for that for the state of New Hampshire but if you also go to their website and look at it it was the correct address but for some reason the post office deemed it as undeliverable and I immediately sent it to the person on our committee from the post office to find out what's going on do you send a checklist to motor vehicle given that person registered to vote has 60 days to go to the law license that's not something that we're involved with so can I get off the elections for a moment? sure so in terms of licensing because with a contract of licensing I just have a question if anybody, is there any other profession that requires only a registration for the secretary that we have? there may be one or two out there so is there anybody that started as a registration to automatically went to licensure? no that's always a comprehensive review either through the sunrise process or by this body I can think of say athletic trainers started out as a certification and then went to a licensure at some point as an example but it's never just an automatic jump it's something that is thought through carefully just to take you one step further we've also had requests like for instance from the legislature to license because of various issues that have occurred from massage therapists and we've done two reports on it to the legislature two sunrise reviews and in both we don't recommend it the issue for most people was to try to stop the nefarious stuff going on at massage therapists and frankly there's already laws on the book for that having a licensure system isn't going to necessarily solve that problem and you should focus your attention on solving the crime versus solving the licensure issue so we've not chosen and the legislature has not chosen after receiving the reports to license massage therapists and it comes up every couple years so seeing the state of professional and occupational licensure across the country we are really lucky that we have the sunrise statute that we do it's the envy of a lot of those other states so that's what I'm getting called to go talk to other states about I've talked to teams in Wisconsin and Illinois, Arizona and Florida Vermont, Vermont, Sunrise Statute to help control somewhat out of control professional regulation in other states and there is there's a legitimate concern about overextending the level of licensure and what professions you actually license some people you would be shocked at some of the professions that are licensed so I've got a couple more questions so actually since we started I actually did my annual renewal for my corporation for the online school but I was paying attention you used the one-click? I did, it didn't work so I had to go back it was wonderful anyway but we heard from the Department of Labor earlier about 23,000 employers but I think that's covered employees not necessarily the number of sole proprietors doing business so I wonder if do you have stats on number of sole proprietors and that kind of stuff as well that they filed every year are you asking about the interview? this is my leave of tea we have numbers of annual reports that does break down by entity type to some degree at a certain point would be able to break down any further so you have that annual report is that probably on the website? it's actually a the interview and reports we can look into that and pull it correct, okay one more question UCC filing still done at the town level? some some with us the vast majority are done with us so I talked a little bit about the annual report and how long it used to take to register a new business you should take anywhere from 10 to 15 days and now it's done in less than 30 minutes to file a UCC 15 claim you should take 5 to 7 days to receive process and post it's now done instantaneously so we've really improved that efficiency that's why our agency for the most part has really stayed relatively stable as far as staffing although we are maxing out at this point we've taken on so much more that we are going to probably need a couple more bodies it's if you go back to what was called the SEA report which was back in 2003 or 4 it was the strategic enterprise initiative at SEI strategic enterprise initiative and then challenges for change in 2008 and 2009 both of those said there was this large bubble of state employees moving through there approaching retirement it was a huge problem when all that happens and unfortunately what was happening was the state figured oh well we can start reducing our staffing without the corresponding investment in technology to offset it and as I said earlier we've almost doubled the amount of work that we do with the same number of employees and you know I mean whenever we have an opening in our shop I asked three questions of my director and Chris can tell you because I used to ask him one do we need that position do we need it doing what it's currently doing or do we need it doing something else and I would not just fill a position just because it became vacant I wanted to do an analysis to determine what are our needs or chart for the Office of Professional Regulation in 2010 when I came in on to today it's unrecognizable it's so different the way we've reorganized the office I remember as a backer I was a pain in the ass to talk those things out could I make a mistake well Marlene could tell you we also had a problem and Chris and Elia we had a problem at one point where we had just gone to the online system and all of a sudden we had to pull down the UCC's because back in around 2001 or two or someplace we had taken off tax ID numbers and social security numbers we had taken them off the form but a lot of the banks were sticking it in the comment section or writing it on the side of the form and we were just scanning the forms and putting them up so we had to go back and then redact all those we were talking about several million forms that had to be looked at so we were fortunate we hired a vendor that could do a lot of it automatically so I'm sorry Marlene when you review the professional regulations do you check for felony status because I know there's a few cosmetology for instance I know you used to you just qualified I mean Chris Winters for the record I was the director of professional regulation before I became the deputy secretary so a little bit about professional regulation we can and it's a may not a shall deny an applicant for a crime related to the practice of the profession or a conviction of a felony that's not even related in any way we look at things like rehabilitation and the type of crime and how long ago it was so it's grounds to deny but it doesn't always result in a denial and then separately do you collect demographic data on a person who's certified or registered very little on professional regulation and very little on corporations as well we've had requests before about how many women owned businesses it wasn't required by the legislature we follow the law that's in front of us bringing it back to elections I guess just curious I know Keith Stern didn't have to there's this new ethics regulation everybody has to file the financial disclosures but my understanding Keith Stern never did and there are several candidates that never really have so it just seems like if that's a requirement but then people aren't required to actually do it to run for office is there a means of actually enforcing this do you know what I'm saying the simple answer is no that the legislature did not put a penalty if they didn't follow it the financial disclosure form itself most people didn't file and we've since taken down the candidates page which is where those were but we're going to put back the financial disclosures of the if you want to call it the winners but the statewide had to file also their 1040 they could redact certain information but they had to file a 1040 and Keith Stern was the only one that did not file but there's no penalty if I remember the debate correctly there was a lot of discussion about maybe keeping people out of it but the legislative council said there were constitutional issues with that perhaps and that public shaming would hopefully be enough and you can see that didn't quite work yeah it didn't quite work thank you any other questions we're going to have an opportunity to ask you questions about the specific report we're planning to come back for that it was nice work I think that credit Alex he did most of that work so alright very good committee there's actually a chance to understand what Bob's goes through also because a lot of what Secretary of State doesn't concern us as a committee just the business part of it but we were able to have time with you and to go through everything everyone had a chance to understand everything that you do it's pretty extensive and we're pretty flexible we can get over here pretty quickly you know give us some time if you want to good report you know it's uh we work with the legislature don't forget I was one of you guys this is one time and Jim's eyes and ears over here I spend a lot more time over here than he does by design it's a good thing any questions for Jim or about the Secretary of State's office I'm always happy to help in any way that I can or just call or email we'll be back soon to have a real deep discussion that's really exciting I'm looking forward to it alright thank you