 and it was making a static noise and somebody sent an email to Peggy saying that. And so I had to stop flipping pages and then I muted myself. So all right, thank you everybody for being here. This is Senate government operations April 9th. And what we're going to be doing today is looking at the where our committee has kind of been tasked with funneling through issues of concern that might not have a particular place to live that it's not obvious where they should live and to make it easier for advocates and people in communities that are more vulnerable and more at risk. We're going to be kind of hopefully funneling some of those issues to other committees. So one of the things we heard the other day was an issue is around voting protocol and we know that the Secretary of State's office has started to think about those voting options because they can't wait until August or November to do those. So we thought we would start with the conversation around how different communities are affected by voting, remote voting and give the Secretary of State suggestions about how to best implement the voting so that we make sure that people have access to the ballots and in the best way possible. So although there are many, many, many, many issues that we need to deal with, we're going to start with this and hopefully keep our conversation today kind of around voting protocol so that we can give the Secretary of State's office some real information about how that might work. And so I think that what I'm going to do is just not think of this as kind of a testimony necessarily, but of a conversation that we can have with the different people that are here because it isn't really testimony. It's a conversation that will help the Secretary of State's office. And we have Will Sending with us, the Director of Elections and Chris Winters, the Assistant Secretary of State. And we have Betsy and Rask who is our drafter who will I'm sure be taking some notes and we'll be making sure that the Secretary of State's office hears about them. So with that, what I'd like to do is I'm going to look at the participants list even though it cuts off most people to see who is here. Do we have Susanna, Mark, Denise Wheeler? Is Marita here, Canado? No. Okay. So let's just start. Do you want to, Will, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the options that, and what I would say is that if you're on the screen, my, I only see nine people. So if I raise your hand if you want to speak, but if I, and I'll try, I'll try and nod. If I see you, if you don't see me nod when you raise your hand, it means that I can't see you and just say your name. And then I'll put you on the queue. Okay. Welcome, Senator Clarkson. I apologize, Chair White. I had a meeting that went to one and I had to get a yogurt. So I will be having my yogurt in the background. I apologize. Not an avocado toast? No, I'm missing avocado toast. Anyway, it's lovely to see you. Thank you. So Will, if you would like to just tell us a little bit about what your thinking has been so far and then we'll get people to chime in with suggestions and comments and how we might approach this so that everybody is addressed. Sure, I'm happy to, Senator White. Can everybody hear me? Yeah, hi Will. Hi, good to see all of you. And I'll keep it brief, Senator White. And I guess, and I wasn't entirely sure what to anticipate today. So I don't have notes in front of me, but I obviously think all I'm doing is thinking about this 24 hours a day for the last three weeks. So I think the biggest thing that would help this discussion and that people are talking about, one potential option is mailing a ballot to every registered voter in the state. Then I'm having, like I said, all kinds of conversations with different people about that process. But that's sort of one of the fundamental, when you hear people say vote by mail, the real distinction, what that really entails is that you proactively mail a ballot to everybody on the voter checklist. People don't request just each election that comes up, you send a ballot to every voter. We have sort of just short of that. We have sort of as much as you can do just short of that in Vermont, which is to say we have the 45 day early voting period to say you have many ways to request online, by phone, by mail or in person, that you can make a request, you can make one request anytime in the calendar year for all elections throughout the year. So people can go in now and say, I'm requesting August and November at this time. So sort of the two, the broadest way I can describe the two big options in terms of the early vote process right now is either just doing a big push under our current framework for people to submit requests that would probably involve a statewide mailing where we said put in your absentee ballot, provide maybe a postcard or our paper form to do that by that method and also a reference to the website, everything you'd imagine, to try and generate, to try and really encourage people and press people to put their requests in and vote early by mail from home. The ultimate goal of that of course would be to reduce pressure on polling places on election day, if we're still in a situation where we're trying to stay away from each other. To take that one step further, you would go to the vote by mail system and mail a ballot to every registered voter. That's a huge administrative undertaking for our office to make that change. And there are all kinds of nuances and different ways that could occur. I'll just put a few of them out there so that people can think about it. It's about how we deliver the ballots to the voters and about how that we process them coming back. And basically on both sides of that coin, you could think about the clerks being the ones sending the ballots to every registered voter on their checklist. Again, just sort of an expansion of what we do now. And then also receiving them back and doing the processing town by town through tabulators or hand counts at the town. Or whether either end of that might be done by the Secretary of State's office this year, given the circumstances, where we do a mass state mailing to all the voters of the appropriate ballot. That is a huge data lift. It's not a bulk mailing like other bulk mailings where you're just sending the same thing to everybody on a big mailing list. Each voter or there are 275 different ballot styles and you gotta get the right ballot to the right voters. Part of the inherent success of our system right now is that the clerks do that to their voter list and know their voters well and could do that really well. So there are benefits and drawbacks to having us do that versus the clerks do that. And then you think about on the receiving end, whether we might do central receipt of absentee ballots and processing. That raises a lot of eyebrows and concerns from people about how that process would work of course. But the benefit there is not having the clerks have to be processing a flood, a major increase in absentee ballots this year at a time when they might have reduced hours, office closings and poll workers who frankly are interested in doing that. Those are the kind of things we're talking about right now, Senator White. In under any circumstance, there will be polling places on election day for people to vote in person. We would never be suggesting that there not be an in-person option on election day. There might be less in-person options during the early voting period at the clerk's office. Again, just because of the nature of the closings right now and the public gathering limits. But we would have polling places. If we were mailing a ballot to every registered voter, the idea of that is that you're gonna get a lot more voters returning them by mail than you would otherwise. We're at 30% right now under our current system. That's without a lot of push and outreach. So again, if we didn't mail a ballot to everybody, but went with a lot of push, I think we could get that over 50, 60, 70, especially with people's fears about the virus this year. Vote by mail, sending everybody a ballot. Would in theory try to get us to that same kind of percentage, maybe 75, 80 returning those by mail. But like I said, in either case, you'd have polling places but maybe if you were mailing a ballot to every voter, just we would consider possibly reducing the number of those polling places. Could you do, spread them out among where all your registered voters are in an appropriate way so that everybody has access to one but we don't necessarily operate them in every town. I'm mostly thinking out loud to try and facilitate the discussion from the people who are here in terms of the concerns they might have. One of the reasons that we would continue to have a polling place option is to be able to have our accessible voting system available to people on those days, on election day, and as many days as possible in the clerk's office ahead of time. And then I just also wanna note that we're really uniquely and well positioned in that regard, even during the early voting period because we have the ability for somebody to use the online ballot marking interface that's our accessible voting system, essentially in their home for the 30 days before the election too. They still mail a ballot back. It's a ballot marking device. They make their choice and then print what appears like a voted ballot at the polling place for everybody else with their choices, package that up and mail it back to us. I think that's a broad framework and I see some hands up. If that's good for you for now, I'll take any questions. Yes, please. I didn't see any hands up. Oh, there, Mark. Go ahead, Mark. Thank you, Madam Chair. Hi, Will, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm well, thank you. And thank you for showing up today. We really appreciate it. I'm wondering if you could just kind of help me in my mind to understand the difference between what's gonna happen. I guess maybe I answered my question. We've already had our primaries, right? Or is there, there are primaries coming up, right? They're- Well, I guess- What would occur in, you know, in, maybe the primaries are in August. So the difference between what would occur locally in each instance, is that a question or do I need to unpack it a little bit more? No, I could tell you- So we had our presidential primary in March and that's what a lot of these other states around the country are still facing the challenge of not having held their presidential primaries yet. But we were a state that splits the two and we still have our statewide primary in August for all of our state offices and rep. And the answer to your question is we don't know yet how it's going to be different if at all. But that's what I was trying to describe is that the most likely and significant difference would be mailing a ballot to every registered voter rather than needing to request one. And, you know, Senator White, I wanted to say actually off the top, I appreciate the way you framed the discussion today and I just wanna make it clear to everybody that anybody on this call and anybody else who has these same or related concerns should contact me and should get in touch. And I'm happy to have these conversations over the phone. I am having them as we speak. Mark, did that answer your question? It did. Can I follow on? Yes, please. Thank you Madam Chair. So I'm trying to understand, I just posted up act 92, which is you're probably not familiar with as far as 681 or H681, whichever it was. And so I'm trying to understand what are the specific implications of this law change. You know, I'll also post up some other language some other language that we were trying to get in in an amendment process, not realizing that that crossover of that bill right there was so critical. We didn't, we couldn't afford any amendments in that bill. So specifically in act 92, what's changed? What was act 92 was that the emergency voting bill that we passed? Okay. Will, do you wanna address that? Well, what the provisions that were in that that might change the way we vote. Were you asking me Senator White? I'm happy to, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think you're really the topic expert here. So yeah. Mark, for your purposes and for the purposes of the August primary and the November general election the most important thing is section three and what is nice about section three and what should give you some relief, I think in terms of having missed this bill moving through is that what these folks did, I think in their wisdom was they deferred to and entrusted our office and allowed us throughout the course of the year to implement appropriate measures as we see fit as this whole situation progresses in agreement with the governor. And we've already established a really good working relationship with the governor's team on this front. And so it's a work in progress. And what that bill does is provide us with the authority to be nimble and flexible and to do what we think is required. And we're really working on that over the next two or three weeks very hard. We need to make some decisions pretty early like by the end of this month in order to put these processes in place in August and November. And so the best way to give input right now is to speak to me in our office directly as we're devising procedures for the fall. And I think that's why we wanted to have this conversation is because we know that you're gonna have to act pretty quickly and we wanted to make sure that everybody got a chance to weigh in on what the issues were. The other thing in that mark was that we did away with the need for people who wanna run for office to collect signatures on their petitions because of the, we didn't want people going around with a clipboard and a pen and talking to a hundred different people touching the clipboard. I understand the reason why I was asking you that is is that just as what I just posted up was, I think it's close to what we proposed as we're going to propose as an amendment. But the first thing that came to mind here, because I am here on Riverside Avenue in Burlington. So it doesn't get much more diverse in any place in the state where I'm sitting. And I know that our communities of color here, some of this I'm getting from them and some of it I'm making some assumption is they just wanna know what's going on. They just wanna know what's happening. And I think quite frequently, we just don't know what we don't know. And I don't know if any, I mean, half the people on the call didn't know what Act 92 was. So there's a, we wanna just make sure that there's not a disconnect, particularly in these communities of color and as it pertains to new Americans. So if you're gonna move to cheese, the question is, how are you gonna tell us? So that's rhetorical, but I guess what I'm getting at here is that it's critically important. When you start talking about stuff like, well, let me just frame this properly, Madam Chair, if I could just please. I can't. We know for sure that seeing what happened in Wisconsin is unacceptable. That people would think that they don't have an option but to go to the polls in a situation to where their lives are threatened. That's unacceptable. So how do we mitigate that? And these are not questions at you, Will. These are just rhetorical. These are thoughts, please. So despair with me. So these are some of the things we're kicking around. And then the other thing is, is if you move the cheese on the process, the process is how you always get us, is in terms of the fact, what do you mean? You mean you can actually run for office and not be required to collect signatures on a ballot? Well, that's not, we should've known that. So there are some things that are fundamental and underpinning to how we do business as a society that is just critically important. And I'm not pointing any fingers or anything like that. I'm just saying, next step, now we gotta figure out how do we get those things communicated out to these folks. So that's kind of where I'm mostly at on at least voting. So if I can jump in here, well, of course I can, I'm the chair. Anyway, that is precisely, those kinds of questions are precisely why we wanted to have people who have connections with vulnerable communities, whether it's the elderly communities of color, very low income, the disability community, deaf community. That's why we wanted to have you all be helping to inform the Secretary of State. That's what today is about, is what are the suggestions for how they can do that? Because while we all think that Will is probably brilliant about this, we know that he doesn't have all the answers. So that's what we're asking you all, what are some of those ways that we should be contacting people? To that end, I would say certainly in Jim and I also, Secretary and I also exchanged notes on this during that process, if you recall, Madam Chair. And he's feeling pretty comfortable about what has come across. And I think the biggest word in his communication was capital I, capital if we have to implement something and moving forward, so on and so forth, filling the blanks. And so it's a little bit of a difficult situation because we're dealing with something that could happen, but it may not. But at the same time, what I call flash to bang or is this whole, from here to here, if you think about it, and I know you know this Will, all of the things that have to happen between now and an election are immense. And there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen if we're gonna do it this way or if we're gonna do it that way. So I would imagine that they're gonna have to be certain decisions, particularly for August, that are gonna be made relatively soon. Not my business, but certainly I'm here to look at the outcomes, the recommendations because I'm not just here to be the consummate critic is that what we were thinking was is as I put up there that voters would be notified of all of the changes because I think it would be good for voters just to know what the changes were in the first place, as opposed to just telling the voters what's gonna happen, but just letting them know what changes have been made to the law that they would be provided to see. Let me just read this. It says, all the changes related changes and updates to elections, COVID-19 related changes and updates to elections and public meeting law, well, scratch public meeting laws, it's not your, that's not your wheelhouse, through United States Postal Service. Translation shall be provided by the office of the secretary, new American communities in consultation with the ALV and other community stakeholders. So it's thinking, what I was thinking was is that, get the word out and then also get some, get some translations happening. Like we did successfully in this last election with I think it was maybe six or seven languages that we did in translation this last session. Now, what the secretary indicated was, is that it's gonna come at a pretty hefty price tag. And I think that's the cost of democracy. I think that there's, if we're talking about the cost necessarily precluding us from communicating, then these are some very serious conversations we've got to make sure everybody's at the table because it's certainly worth the money to make sure that everybody is having equal access to justice. So I'm wondering, I'm sorry, I'm wondering if there was any money coming down, I heard rumors that there was money coming down from the federal government to assist you in this area. Can I go, can I jump here to, we didn't need to get some more people involved. Anthony, you had a question or a comment? Just two quick comments. One is this turns getting the word out to people so that they know this is gonna be happening. They know they're gonna be in a ballad. It seems like that would be an ideal time to really involve the boards of civil authority and other folks like justice of peace, people who would normally get elected to these positions but only get active maybe one day a year or so every other year. Which they, in a place like Burlington or some of the larger communities, they could break it down into neighborhoods. Like in other words, they could decide how best to get the word out. It could mean going door to door in some neighborhoods, sort of deputizing people to go out and talk about it, whatever it might be. But it's just that there are people there, as we all know in those local communities who have put their names on the ballot and got elected JPs or run the Board of Civil Authority. And this would be a good time to try to use their energy and get them involved. I also just wonder though, whether have you talked to town clerks about this at all? Yeah, I'm just wondering what the reaction might be from town clerks. I mean, because ideally it makes sense to me, but I shouldn't say it makes sense to me because it's too soon to have it make sense. But it seems like having it done on a local level makes more sense. In other words, no one like them because of the local ballots that are involved in the local, let's say of racism and whatnot. It seems like it makes more sense to bring it down to the local level. On the other hand, it's a lot of work for the clerks as you mentioned. I'm just wondering if you've had any talks with the clerks yet, what the reaction's been offending. Maybe it's too early to say, but on the other hand, we have to do these things quickly. Can I throw something in before? Will answers here. I think that one of the things that Mark brought up is about that the secretary keeps saying a lot, capital I, capital if. I think we need to go, we need to make plans as if it's going to happen because we can't wait until the ifs happens. We need to have those plans in place. So just saying that Will, would you, do you want to respond to Anthony's? Sure. Yes is the answer. I talk to clerks all the time. I talk to clerks five or six times a day. We haven't yet had a coordinated say, working group or meeting to get input on this particular subject, but I've gotten a lot of input from clerks in my individual communications with them so far. And we intend to sit down with a group also, Senator Polina. So that's a great suggestion. And leveraging the BCA members on the ground, I think also is a good suggestion. And that's sort of to circle back to what Mark was talking about. Of course, voter education is like absolutely critical, no matter what we do. If we do nothing, we need to educate voters that it's status quo. And Mark, I'm glad you referenced, when you said we did the translations in Burlington and Winooski, that was an eight month project that I organized and pulled off in those two communities, looking to move the ball forward in Vermont on how we communicate with voters who are new Americans and non-English speaking. So any outreach that comes from our office this year, we'll certainly have that in mind. That wasn't a one-off and I'm just gonna stop communicating with those communities right now. Put a lot of effort into it for a reason. And it's because that's important to me. And the last thing I'd wanna do would be to leave them out of the loop right now. It is a cost, I'm glad you mentioned that. I don't think it's prohibitive. And what's really nice about having done that project for the last eight months is that I've established a set of contacts that I didn't have before and can really much more quickly put into place the translations and the communication into those communities. I also learned a lot about, you know, a press release or a tweet or a Facebook post from our office that reaches and does a good job at outreach might not reach into those communities and that there are other unique ways that you have to reach out into those communities that I've learned and that I again intend to leverage. Senator Bray. I have a question, it's probably a will question, but Senator White, you just alluded to it and that is the timing on decisions, you know. I think about when an airplane takes off, it only has a certain amount of runway to use before it says we're committed to going up or we are staying on the ground. And so I don't know where that line is on the calendar right now for elections, but I'm guessing we're going faster and faster down that runway and we must be approaching a line. I'm just wondering to know when that date is so that people can start to replace ifs with whens. I'm already not sleeping enough to have the airplane. No, thank you, Senator Bray. You're entirely right. And I think, like I said at the beginning, we need to make the fundamental decisions about August and November within this month, if not within the next few weeks. And we're communicating with the governor, we're communicating with clerks. I think you all know from just having worked with me for the last however many years, like I said, it's a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces. This is a serious challenge we face if we're gonna upend our process or implement new processes between now and August. And so I'm working every day and you're right, we're getting toward the end of the runway for the decision and really nobody will feel better too when we've just made a decision and we're moving forward and implementing it. But at the same time, I'm trying to be careful and I'm trying not to jump to conclusions. We're getting suggestions and pressure from all sides to do one thing for the other and really trying to figure out what solution makes the most sense for Mont. Yes, and you know, I don't think it's gonna be an issue here but there have been some places, other jurisdictions outside the state where a vote by mail is being questioned in terms of the integrity of the vote. I've always felt like our vote here has very, very high integrity, including our mail process. Do you have any concerns about being, if we were to go to a full mailed ballot statewide, regardless of how it's actually received return counted that we would have integrity issues or what's your level of confidence on our ability to implement that way? Two different questions, but I would have full confidence and integrity. We can do this in a way that there's no question about that like normal. We're gonna be feeding these ballots through our standards. We're gonna be able to audit that process and there's all the same protections around those as usual. What I worry about and where I thought you might be... You went away. Will, we can't hear you. I'll have to do that mailing well. Chris, tell them it takes about 10 seconds. We just missed a whole bunch of what you said. Usually it takes about 10 seconds. Am I back? Yeah. Okay. There are those little 10 second breaks every once in a while. And now of course I lost my train of thought. You were talking about the confidence you had in the integrity of our voting process. Confident in the integrity for sure. What concerns me is the accuracy of the mailing and actually how effective we can be in mailing a ballot to every registered voter. The populations that don't have permanent fixed addresses for mailing to or time, you worry about in these circumstances. Being college students, lower income voters, people who move a reason, homeless voters. That's why I said off the top that polling places have to always be available for in-person voting. You could never rely entirely on a mail system. But that's where more of my concern and more of the work on my end will be. We'll be ensuring that we're doing the best we can to make that mailing as effective as possible. I have no concerns about the integrity of the count. Can we hear from, I know Susanna's with us. May I just ask a question of Will? Yes, and then I'd like to hear from other people who are with us. Do that first. It was just on the accuracy of the mailing and as we look at whether the secretary of state does the mailing or the clerks do a more local mailing. We can chat about that later, but I just have a question about if the accuracy has a concern in each one of those separate opportunities. But options, Robin. Well, as long as the question has been asked, Will, why don't you respond? Yes, but I do think less so if we had the clerks doing it. Because that part of it's knowing the voters and getting the ballots, making sure the right ballots are getting to the right people. But some of it really is just how, in what kind of shape their voter checklist is. And that's why what we'll go along with any of this is a big encouragement for voters to go in and update their records and provide accurate mailing addresses within their voter record. Yeah, I like that solution. And you at the secretary of state's office would not know how to get a ballot to the person who lists the ballpark as his permanent address, but our town clerk will know that. So can we hear, we have Susanna with us and Denise, who's on a callous select board. Do we have Gray and Karen Lafayette, have they joined us by any chance? No. Okay, so Susanna, do you have any comments that you'd like to, at this point, any words of wisdom for us or not make them? Yes, thank you, chair. I just wanted to raise up the point about the importance of broad, broad outreach when we talk about mail voting. I do support vote by mail and no excuse absentee ballots, particularly right now during COVID because it's really gonna have an impact on people's ability to get to the polls, which is already extremely strained for communities of color. In this country, we see voting rights under our best days as a nation, voting rights in different states are already under assault. So when you add a pandemic into it, it really does create an added layer of chaos. I also just wanna make sure that we're all aware, and this might have been mentioned, I might have missed it because of tech pickups, but we rely so heavily on the postal service as a constant and reliable entity, but the institution has long been understaffed and we should have backup plans to prepare for the possibility that their operations might be delayed or halted altogether if things get worse. So having things like ballot drop boxes, I think would be good as backup plan to make sure that we don't put all our eggs in the postal service basket and somehow that basket is full on the bottom of it. Another thing is, it was mentioned earlier to allow towns and neighborhoods to determine best ways to get the word out to their folks. And I think presumptively that's a great idea. However, given that different towns have different levels of capacity in staffing and funding, et cetera, it was really, I think to be prudent to develop a minimum standard for communications to make sure that towns can go above and beyond, but to make sure that they are hitting certain minimum points. And that's going to include tweeting and Facebooking and posting things prominently in the grocery store and whatever other measures they can implement. And last, I know that the challenges of in-person voting are much greater in the era of social distancing, but I would again encourage that when we consider having in-person polling sites, that we consider how many days we would like to see early in-person voting implemented and making sure that we're including at least one Saturday or Sunday in those days. Thank you. When you, Susanna mentioned using every platform, every social media to get the word out, we also have to be very careful that there are those people who put out false information on social media. And we saw that in the last election where people were putting out, not in Vermont necessarily, but where people were putting out notices that polls had been closed or that they'd moved or that they were someplace else. And I think we need to be very, very on top of that. And I'm not sure how we stay on top of that so that we make, I guess Chris Winters has an answer. Okay. As always. Okay, Chris. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have an answer, but I have a bit of a sound to make on it. Even before all of this global pandemic coronavirus stuff was hitting us, we were really focused on election misinformation and disinformation through the cybersecurity world. It's something that's been a big deal for elections for several years now. We're all familiar with the Russian troll farms and things like that. So we developed a direct communication channels with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. So if there is any election misinformation or disinformation, we have a direct line to them to ask them to pull that down immediately. It's worked a couple of times for us so far already. It's been a really good relationship that we've built to combat that because that is one of the greatest threats to our election is this misinformation and disinformation and any excuse for a crisis or a pandemic, things like that will be another opportunity for other countries to kind of sow division and chaos and try to undermine our democracy. So we're very much paying attention to that. We're watching social media constantly to see if there's election information that gets flagged for us to pull down. So it's something that really is on the top of our minds. If I may, another suggestion for that, particularly with social media would be using retweets and reposts from reputable sources. So for example, one thing that the state is doing with its COVID messaging is centralizing a lot of the messaging with VVH. And so other agencies aren't necessary. I mean, they are creating their own content but a lot of it is just redirecting folks to the VVH for accurate and up-to-date content. And so I think it would be great to encourage towns to do the same, those that use social media platforms, perhaps retweeting something that comes from the Secretary of State's account rather than creating new posts would help to centralize things and reduce the number of people who are using side accounts or personal accounts or campaign accounts to give information. And then something as simple as once every couple of days putting out a tweet saying, hey, remember only to believe the election info that we're telling you, you'll only see official, whenever there's a breach at our banks, they tell us, our bank will never ask you for a lot of information or will never ask you to do that kind of thing as well from the town, saying, hey, if you're hearing information about elections, you should be reading it from us, don't trust other sources. So those are some other techniques, I think that they can blow that thread. Oh, go ahead. Not likely. There's a whole campaign around it that the National Association of Secretaries of State has put together on Trusted Info 2020, all around elections, exactly what you were saying, Susanna, which is trust only, go to trusted sources for your election information. So in the case of elections, it's the Secretary of State's office, you have any questions, go to the source that knows about it and that's the Secretary of State's office. In the case of the global pandemic, it should be your Department of Health, your CDC, trusted sources such as that. So we've been working on that for the last couple of years when it comes to elections and it's a really good idea to have us reach out maybe to the town clerks and other election officials, have them promote Secretary of State's office information as the trusted source. So Susanna, may I ask you a question about, you suggested that we should have some backup plans around the use of the postal service and like for example, drop boxes for putting the ballots in. What about the other end? How do we have a backup plan for getting the ballots out if the postal service? We have to think about that too. Yeah, and perhaps I'm speaking a bit out of turn yet because these are ideas coming out of my brain here. So we don't attribute them to the admin just yet, but I mean, I would suggest that if we can't, if the USPS for whatever reason or some other courier service isn't able to do the mass mailing, then I would recommend that we designate certain either officials or entities. Again, state of Vermont entities trust that it would be good to have some kind of a backup worked out. Well, thank you. Yes, Allison. So just to go back to what Anthony had said, we have a trusted and elected local distribution system right at our hands with the Board of Civil Authority. I mean, there are, we have those mechanisms that we could empower to use in that capacity. Yes, Anthony, is this a follow up on that? And then I just a very quick thought would be to engage the National Guard in helping the local folks get things out of there. Denise, are you there? Yes, I'm here. I was just actually on this call for a different reason, but since I'm chair of the select board, I can tell you that I think a mailing from towns to our local folks might be looked at as a better opportunity to communicate with folks. They're gonna maybe pay attention more if it comes from the local sources. And I just wanna make a point that not everybody has access to social media or uses it. Tweets, Facebook, email, there's a number of people in town that I know don't have social media and don't even have a computer. And then my other question is who, if we mail out all these ballot, who's gonna pay for this? If the towns pay for it, can we get refunded or get a reimbursement through all this federal money that's coming our way? And we need to make sure all towns have a secure location to drop off ballots. We've had a problem in town recently was stolen and unreceived mail. So we purchased a lockbox just as a result of the COVID stuff to have it be a place where people can drop things off and it's locked and nobody can get into it but the town clerk. Thank you. Will, do you wanna address the money issue that Denise asked about? Sure, and a couple of other things that have been mentioned. While I have the chance, Senator White, I'm gonna have to go at two o'clock. I have a call that I have to get on then, it's 10 minutes. Thank you. A basic answer on the funding is yes, we've gotten significant federal funding that can be used to cover any increase in costs related to COVID-19 response. So any, if towns can figure out how much additional postage they were faced with, we're gonna pay for that as well as paying for additional poll worker hours. Getting back to Suzanne's comment about the Postal Service. She's the only person who I've heard bring that up other than people in my close election director's circle at this point. And the possibility of the Postal Service going under in June would be cataclysmic to the election period. We can think about whatever process is a BCA members bringing ballots to people here in our small towns. It will just upset the entire thing. My point in that regard is that what people need to do right now is advocate very strongly to the federal delegation that they put money into the Postal Service. It was in both versions of the COVID-3 bill until it was at the very end in the Senate and discussions with the White House, frankly, and the funding for the Postal Service came out of it. It needs to be included in the fourth round. That's my thought there. The thought of not having the Postal Service in late June and what Senator White was talking about is that is the exact time when we're mailing out the ballots. Forget about getting them back from people and how we're getting them out in the people's hands at that point. So I just think it's really not an option for elections or frankly for the rest of society, for the Postal Service to go under in late June, but it's a possibility. So it's worth raising it and thinking about it. So I'm doing my part for the Postal Service because I don't do things online and I don't use social media. So I mail all my bills by those little stamps in the corner of the envelope. I'm trying to do my part. Me too. I should also add that I've been in good close touch with them recently with the regional representative who does Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. She's really good. And so the Postal Service is on board as a partner at this point and that hasn't always been the case but they've really been stepping up their efforts in the elections realm. And they're actually well aware of the challenge we all face and that more than ever the Postal Service is needed to process ballots back and forth. And I think it's a very high priority for them right now which is good. I think Denise had sent out a little chat note. I don't know if it went to everybody about having people if we're still social distancing, having people checking and opening the ballots together and we'll have to figure out some way of doing that so that we can make, what? Chat notes, I'm just seeing they exist. Yeah, okay. So Anthony, did you have a comment? No, I'm overwhelmed. Senator White, when you start to think about it the way I've been describing it to some people the elections process from start to finish requires close human interaction in the normal processes. Sending ballots, getting them back, opening them up putting them in the tabulator or hand counting them getting together to produce the results. It's all based on close human interaction. And we have the whole issue of people who we have a number of people who live in assisted living facilities and nursing homes and in our prisons and many other places who all are eligible to vote. And many of them need help filling out the ballots because of sight or, so it's complicated for particular populations more so than just for the general of us. Yes, I think Mark has it. Just quickly, I would just say that I just want to piggyback on what Senator Polina was saying and also Senator Clarkson about the local, I guess, capabilities that we have. And I think that it's probably not an or, but it sounds like that will at this statewide level perhaps you're going down the right path with the coordination, perhaps with the coordination of not just the civil authority, but also of the clerks. And it's good to hear and I asked the question earlier probably they can get to you, but I was asking if you have funding coming in federally, it sounds like you do have the ability to at least offset some of those expenses at the local level. So that's good. So it sounds like we're going down the right path. And the last thing on that is is that let's not forget about UPS and FedEx as being private deliverers that can maybe back up the USPS on anything that we're doing. So I mean, Tatiana just had a great point that just made my brain smoke when you said it about USPS going down, but certainly can happen. And finally, I'll just say Will and Chris, I really appreciate you guys stopping in this afternoon. Allison, you had a comment? Yeah, no, I just have a question to Will Sunning, which is I hope that the Secretary of State is landing with full force with our federal delegation on this, on the post office service and the importance of keeping it going and that whole association you have of Secretary of State. Both are true. Yeah. Well, I think that our committee has just is about to send out a letter. Thank you, Chris Bray and Anthony for doing some fine tuning on a letter that we're going to send to our federal delegation about making sure that we have money in there in COVID for that they're thinking about now that goes directly to our EMS system because they are about to collapse and we can't see that happening. So we as the committee that deals with elections here, we can do the same thing around trying to encourage them to make sure that they have money for the postal system in COVID for particularly because of the disruption that it might cause with elections. That would be a great addition. I think so too. I'll write that letter and send it around for review. Good. Anything else that we have not been joined by Greg or Karen? Yes, not. No. I think there, so I think that this is, it probably is getting close to two when Will has to be leaving us. We are also going to be talking about at two, I think Jason is going to be joining us to talk about the impact of the census and where we are with that and how we're going to deal with making sure that we get a complete census. So census, I keep either saying sentence or consensus. You know what I mean. So I think that the election is going to take a lot of thought from a lot of people and Will has expressed his interest in hearing from people. So as people think of different ways of serving different communities, whether they're people who are living in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, communities of color, the elderly, the rural, the very rural elderly that don't have access to social media, the disabled, we need to think about all of those. We need to think about all of those. And Chris, Senator Bray? Yeah, just before we lose Will and maybe Chris as well, I'm not sure. Though we ask all sorts of questions, like there, you know, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this? Can you do that? We appreciate that how hard you're working behind the scenes to figure out the thousand details that we're not even thinking about yet. So thanks. Thank you. Brian? Oh, did you have a question? Are you just doing thumbs up? I was doing thumbs up for both Will and Chris. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And I know Will has to jump off it too, but I can stay if you need me. Okay. Well, I don't know if you're involved in the census or not, but. Well, Denise just clapped. Oh. Thank you. And Mark just sent a thank you. So, so let's. Thanks, everyone. And so let's. I think maybe continue this conversation another time next week with people to see if there are other other thoughts that have come up and other communities that might need to be represented that weren't here today that might have some thoughts. I know that AARP was very concerned about voting. It was one of the things they brought up. So can we do that? Sure. Okay. So is Jason with us? No. Gail, was he going to join us? I didn't hear back from him, Senator White. Oh, okay. If you don't mind, I'd like to, if you end up having this discussion on census, I'd just like to hang around for that one as well. We'd love to have you hang around whenever you want. I'll see if I can contact them via email. Okay. Are you, Susanna, have you been working on the census complete, complete census committee at all? I haven't been working directly with the committee because just when things were gearing up, that's when government was shutting down, not shutting down, but slowing down. So I haven't had a lot of direct involvement, but I have been getting regular updates from Chair Broughton about it. Okay. So if we can't contact him, can we just pick your brain a little bit? No, yeah. I mean, I can speak intelligently to the general issues, but in terms of our operational updates, I'm afraid I won't be much used, but yeah, happy to speak to whatever census related issues you might have in mind. Do, yes, Anthony? Well, I actually thought that the census had been stopped in some places or everywhere. I mean, is it actually happening? It is all happening. April 1st was the official kickoff. They have suspended ground operations for census takers. Oh, maybe that's what I was thinking. Yeah. So what's happening now is they're encouraging folks to respond by telephone, by mail or online. This is the first year that you'll be committed to respond online. And so the shift has, the focus has shifted to encouraging folks to do non-in-person responses. What's kind of interesting, because it's similar to the conversation we're having about voting, changing the way we vote, because when I hear you say that the person, the person stuff has stopped and now they're relying on phone calls and internet or online census, billing out census forms. I just wonder whether people are actually doing that. Yes, Senator, you're absolutely correct. And I would say that the implications of both are really similar because with census, in the state of Vermont, for every person who is not counted, that's about $4,000 of federal funds per person per year for 10 years that we don't receive. And so not only that, but so many other things and programs and activities and decisions get made based on census figures. So it's so important that people be represented in the census. Similarly, if we don't get the voting exercise right, then that's also going to be a certain number of years that people's interests aren't represented at the town and the state level as well. So I think the implications for both are pretty similar, right? We've got to pull out all the stops today to make sure that for the next X number of years, you're counted and represented. There is a map or some statistics that have been put out at the state level and it turns out that Wyndham County is very, very low. We have the lowest percentage so far. So when the Wyndham County delegation met, we meet every Saturday. And when we met last Saturday, we are trying to figure out ways of getting the word out. Brattleboro is okay, but the rest of Wyndham County is very low. Allison? So one way, Susanna, I don't know if we can coordinate this from a state level, but absolutely every listserv and front-port forum should have this sent out just on a weekly basis. All right. And that's something that we can do, but if you could coordinate that at a state level, every listserv and front-port forum with the dial-in number and the website, I think that's a key place people are going these days. Well, that's an excellent point, Senator. And I do know that because of the access, so the chair of the Complete Count Committee is the state librarian. And so what we really have to our advantage in that is that he has the full force of the libraries to disseminate that information at the local level. So to my knowledge, they are blasting a whole lot of information on that in all the libraries. Which is great, but they're all closed. So, but many have both in their websites. So Denise just sent a note about another thought about voting, and I think this applies to the census also, is that a lot of people who don't use social media and who don't have access to internet or use the computers do listen to local radio and watch their local television stations and their peg access stations. So we need PSAs on them all the time about both of these issues. Good point. Yeah, radio particularly. All right. I had never heard that figure that Susanna just cited $4,000 per person counted. I think that would go a long way to gaining people's attention. I think about here's a way you can help your state for the next decade. Make sure you and your friends are counted. Absolutely. And then I mean, I'd be remiss. That's an excellent point, Senator. And I'd be remiss not to say in conjunction with that. One thing that we see nationally, particularly with people of color, is that we're rude and courted when there's economic or electoral implications. And we end up feeling largely ignored for the rest of the cycle when that happens. And so in addition to what you're saying, making sure that people are aware of the fiscal implications of being counted or not counted, also that people recognize that it's not just that they represent a dollar figure to us, but also that we just want to do for them and do more for them. So I think those things go hand in hand. Yeah, thanks for that. I think there are, we need to, and I'm sure the complete census committee is looking at this, but we need to figure out ways of making sure we get to the communities that may be nervous about or reluctant to be part of it. And I know that there are a lot, like the undocumented workers, that's gonna be, we're going to have to be very, very careful about the way we approach that so that they don't feel that we're somehow tracking them. And there are probably a lot of other communities that have that same fear. Well, is Marie, is Marie on our call? I think not, I think that probably because the main topic of the beginning was on voting voting that the people she primarily represents aren't allowed to vote. So I don't know that she joined us for the second half, has she? No, I don't see it. Well, somebody's calling you now. Hello, this is Jason. Okay, okay. Hi, Jason. Hello, this is your state librarian. How is everyone doing today? We are just fine. Thank you for joining us. So we do have Susanna Davis here who has been giving us some information, but we are concerned about the census in general and then about how we make sure we reach those communities that are probably somewhat reluctant to respond to the census question there. And I represent Wyndham County and I know that Wyndham County is very low and the Wyndham County delegation is trying to figure out how to address that.