 Great. All right. So, Greg, did you have some questions or comments for us? Yeah, I did. Thanks. I'm Greg Dennis. I'm from one of the co-founders of voter choice Massachusetts, educating about right choice voting in the state. I just want to first thank you because I read a lot of the minutes and I've read all the minutes but I've seen how much you've really dug into the issue. I know also you received a report from Howie Fain some time ago that you looked into. Just as a general point, we're trying to pay attention to a lot of these implementations that cities and towns are looking into around the state and just feel free to reach out to us. We don't have all the answers but maybe we could help with something in the future if you have any questions or want to try to rely on us in any way. I am curious. I do have a few questions. I was curious what the quote was for Democracy Suite from LHS. I've heard it was quite high. I know that East Hampton didn't pay a whole lot but you know that they could have quoted you a lot more and how that price compares to the cost of holding a preliminary election each year. Is using Democracy Suite? Yes, they are. They paid an initial fee of $8,000 and they pay $800 a year for the license on that. Okay. I imagine that now that that's been negotiated that we could probably negotiate something similar to them. The quote they gave us at the original was not one that they expected us to pay but was rather one based on statewide or region wide usage of the software not municipality. So, yeah. Do you happen to have the number or can you can you share the number? I do not have it on me now. I also want to say that there's, there could be, I don't want to make any promises but there could be grant money available to help defray any cost. There's enough sort of nonprofits interested in seeing this happen that some money could be perhaps made available from one of the nonprofits. And if you're interested in that you could ask us and we could follow up. And then I also just had a question about the, the, I know you're looking into buying new voting machines so you're choosing between the ESS model and the Dominion model. Whether or not using the ESS and then you putting those cast vote records through an off the shelf tabulator, like the universal tabulator or maybe something else that's free is possible even though that system as a whole isn't certified I'm actually not sure whether you can use it anyway, like Cambridge uses something else anyway, even though the system as a whole isn't certified. And I don't know if you investigated that question what the result of that was. And so those are my comments and my questions. Yeah, one of our will answer because it's short. One of the, you know, solutions we looked at was using the whole democracy suite and that's certainly an option. And so is the, you know, open platform for the open source software for calculating it. But, you know, those are only a couple considerations. So, yeah. Thank you. Actually, can I ask Greg a question. Quickly, in 30 words or less, why do you think it failed in the state. The primary, we tried to replicate the success of Maine, which was a lot of door to door organizing a lot of house parties and meeting people and it's very hard to educate in a 30 second ad it takes a, like a two minute conversation. And with COVID, we couldn't have those conversations I think that's the primary reason. Okay, not a lot of things. It was very little educated opposition so much as there was just lack of education about what it was. Some of the concerns put forward by the, the governor and supporters were valid. You know, they just, you know, we didn't have time to also, you know, point out to people that, you know, those are valid concerns but this solution is still better. If that makes sense. Yeah. Something I would, I would note I went on to one of the webinars from the Facebook group promoting rank choice voting for the state. And I was kind of disappointed in it. The people who are presenting it were much more focused on how they got involved and their campaign, instead of educating the public. There was a question or two about, well, if, if in fact, question two passes for the state. What are the implications of that for individual municipalities never got answered. Instead, there were these these long discussions of how can you get involved in this campaign. And that's a, that's a turn off to people who are wanting to tune in and get educated. Talk about every zoom meeting ever. I've been on zoom meetings I've been on for like half an hour to an hour and they spend half that time introducing themselves and it's like, don't care just want to know how my retirement funds can be affected. Anyway, on that note, should we get started. I just want to briefly address the question we did meet with the town's attorney to get clarification on some of these voting system questions. And it sounds like so long as the underlying machine is certified, we can work with the state elections division to kind of get them on board with whatever software solution we then decide to pursue. There's some flexibility there but we need to work with them and keeping them happy will help the whole thing kind of move forward. Right, doesn't require formal approval as such. And if I could add one more I'm sorry I'm taking up time but I one more comment I would try not to let the Secretary of State's office scare you away from certain solutions, I think, if you ask them what to do, they'll tell you to do a home rule that's like fully specified down to the minute detail and that you could you should only do using certain solutions and certain software systems whatever. East Hampton forgot about all that wrote a very, as you know, general home rule, and just did what they wanted to do and as soon as that gets passed by the legislature well now that's the law. So, you can, I would just avoid letting them scare you away from certain solutions that seems like it might make sense for your town. Right. So we're ready to move to approving the last minutes. Let me see if I can pull this up. See is this the last one when was our last meeting. September 29. Okay, so this one is seemed like long ago, I guess because it's all the elections and everything it's been that long. Just been a crazy time. All right, so this is the meeting that was really entirely focused on meeting with Lauren. So changes that anyone would like in these minutes. No, no changes by me. It's all right. There's one RBC in there as opposed to our CV. Sorry. Where's that at. It was on the first page. Here. Choice voting. Yeah, it doesn't help that then cast vote record is CVR. So it's like the same. The same three letters and just keep scrambling them. Although she doesn't want to see you CVR. Yeah. Well, in the report, I just wrote it out that we should avoid too many acronyms anyway. Starts to look like Jingo. Anything else. Oh, I see another ranked boy. Question six. That must be my fingers. I don't see anything else. Move to approve as amended. Second. Right. Okay. Hi. Hi. Hi. All right. So I guess the only changes are sketching those two. RCB things. So, yeah. Yeah. You can do anything. So what's officially next. So. The main two things we need to get done are to get some of those last bits on the report done. And Lauren finally just sent us that special act language. And I think there's a bunch of things in there. And some of it's kind of relevant to what reg was saying that. She wanted us to get fairly specific. And so I think we're going to need to think a little bit about that. And I think we need to think about that. Exactly how. Specific in detail. We want the special act to be in terms of specifying the, the ring choice voting method as opposed to being more of a generic East Hampton approach of just. Broad strokes. So I guess officially following the agenda, we need to start the report. And then the special act will kind of fall under. So let's pull up. And John, I saw you just sent me some comments. How timely of me just sort of sprinkle those in as we go. Sure. I have comments as well, but I can just mention them as we pass by. Super. All right. So let me pull this up. I had one sort of global comment. And it's closely related to the. The recommendations section. It seems to me that it would be very helpful for the town council. If we had a section. That explicitly identifies all the decisions that they need to make. Yeah, it should be read up front. So that they can essentially use that as a checklist. Yeah, we should present our findings right up front. And then they can go through the rationale and the reasoning afterwards. That makes sense to have an abstract. And I think that'll tie in with the timeline as well. With what they need to do as part of the timeline. Yeah. I mean, as much as we'd like to think that people will always go through and read everything. The reality is as many may not. And, you know, if. You know, under that assumption, we need to make sure that the most important information is right up front, that the most important information is right up front. That the most important information is right up front. Because here's what we want you to do. So. And I think the distinction that I was making was. That there are certain. New nuances that get explored in the text. Whether they should consider this or consider that. And it would be easy for them to miss. That they have to make a decision regarding those sorts of things. And I think that's a. A, a, a, a large recommendation, you know, by this piece of equipment or best software. But rather the more subtle kinds of things that could easily be lost. Right. So, so we have a bunch of different things to do. So would you like. To first go through the existing. Text and give me the comments you have on that. Or do you want to start. To start with. To start with. By drafting some of these. Parts, you know, so I think they're kind of related. So the, the timeline, these lists of their. Things to highlight that needs to make sure they get done. By the, the town to implement. Our CV. And. One of my comments was also. I think it's a little bit of a larger issue rather than going into the details. So. Before we jump in the details, I would like to address that, but. Yeah. Oh, okay. Basically the I, there was a lot of confusion for me around. Tabulation methods for rank choice ballots. And how that gets approached through the whole thing. Because. Having read through it. There is a hard assumption that. This document's making that the person understands why multi choice. Or sorry, multi-seat races are more complicated to calculate. It does not explain it upfront. It really has to because otherwise none of the details matter. Right. Like, oh, there's these different, you know. You know, we, the document basically says like, oh, well, multi-seat, which is most of what we have is more complicated. And so we have to discuss these different methods of. Calculating results. And if all the people go into, you know, go into this knowing the basic pitch that they've gotten about single seat victories, they're not going to understand any of it. And they're going to miss that logical first understanding of what the problem is. And so what follows is all these methods of dealing with that problem, but they don't know what the problem is. All they know is that it's theoretically more complicated and they don't really know why other than that. There's more winners. So I really strongly think that we need to put like right up front, a visual representation of here is how, you know, votes get redistributed in a general sense in multi-seat elections, but how that gets calculated can vary based on, you know, how we decide to implement this. Here are the different ways that people have done it in the past. And this is our recommendation. Right. Because right now all it does is say multi-seat winners are more complicated. And we've looked at Wiggum and, you know, the other commons and, you know, while we, you know, hear the pros and cons of those, and people really have like, even like going into it, just, you know, imagining myself as somebody with no information. I was like, I have no idea what they're talking about. Right. Like, what does this apply to? How does this apply? I thought we just, hey, if the last person, you know, didn't get enough votes, we kick the last person off. And then we redistribute the votes. What's with all this like calculations and stuff, right? So we really need to make that case solid right up front. And I just want to interject. I think Peggy is in the room, but Tanya, I can't get at her with your document up on the screen. Thank you. Let me get her. It will not let me in there. Why will it not let me in? Yeah, I see she's in attendee, but I can't click on the tab for some reason. I can't click on it. I can't click on it. I can't click on it. I can't click on it. That's how I promoted you out of panelists. Is it because we're recording? You think. No, I see Andy there also. Oh yeah. There's Andy. Yeah. There's Andy, but. I'm sure Peggy's under attendees and she can't, she's not in here because I can't click on it. I don't see Peggy under. I don't see her listed either. No, she's under, she's not in the panel. She's in the attendees tab. Yeah, I know. Oh, I see what you're saying. Never mind. You're right. That's just the Andy. Okay. No, she's not here yet. Okay. All right. Okay. I'm putting the Andy in there as a panelist. Okay. There we go. Okay. Sorry, everybody. Still looking for Peggy. That's why. Thank you for the promotion. Okay. So I guess my question would be. I mean, so we already have, we have an appendix that has a whole calculation. And you can see sort of how complicated it gets. I didn't want to embed that in any early section. So I'm not sure how that helps. So then you have sort of a vision for where, like where you wanted to fit this in. And as long as it's above any discussion of the different tabulation methods, it's fine. Right. You know, the core problem is, is that without understanding what the problem is, you know, I am, and I certainly would, and I would expect anybody else to just skim over a section about tabulation methods or just be very confused by it. Right. Cause I don't know what the problem is, right? Like, I don't know. There's multiple winners and, you know, I don't know what the problem is. I don't know what the problem is. But it doesn't even discuss, you know, the overflow, not the overflow votes, um, the surplus votes until a later section, right? It doesn't mention it in the first section from what I remember. So, you know, Well, I have the, which version you're reading. I added a whole example that moved surplus votes around. Whichever one you sent out late yesterday. Okay. So let me scroll down here. By the way, Peggy just emailed me. She's got mixed up on the time and she'll be here in a minute. Oh, okay. Um, I understand what you're saying, but we want to make sure it's clear that the, the choice of method is, is important. But I also don't want to. Right. So like. Right. All I'm saying is that, you know, the discussion of tabulation methods might as well not even be in there if they don't understand why they're there. Right. Like right here it says when implement in section three, it says when implementing RCV for local elections, the town will need to choose which specific multi-winner RCV method to use. That raises an enormous number of questions right off the bat that there are no immediate answers to, right? You know, and it says like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what literature on social choice and electoral methods finds fault with every system. Like we're diving right into a discussion of like the methods, but it doesn't answer the core question of like, what are the methods? Why are they used? What's the problem that's being solved? Right. So we could just insert at the very beginning of section three. The context for the rest of section three. Right. Exactly. You know, it could be, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying the, you know, zeitgeist of it, but right. Like, you know, when dealing with multi-winner elections after a, you know, winner has met the calculated threshold for being a, you know, for winning the seat, the additional votes need to be redistributed. So that they are not wasted. There are several ways of doing this. You know, these are the methods that we have, you know, looked through and discussed that are most fair and most representative, right? Just with something simple like that, it's like, okay, I understand. There's extra redistribution that happens in a multi-seat election. That doesn't happen in a single seat. I may not fully understand how that occurs or why it happens, but now I have some grounding and basis for going through, you know, clearly that's a problem that needs to be solved. And here are the different methods that they've looked at to solve that problem. Even if I don't fully understand it, I can follow along, right? It seems to me that it's good, not only to highlight it either in bold or in a different color, what are the summary is, but at the beginning of each section. So because a lot of people are going to scam. And so maybe in the beginning, you know, just say exactly what you're saying, but then say, and here's the method that we select, read down to find out why, you know what I mean? Yeah. And pictures are great. Like every time I came across a chart on this, I was like, excellent. Like, right? I could read this paragraph, but I can also just look at this picture and understand what they're trying to get at, right? You know, so if we just had also, you know, one of those nice, you know, examples where it just shows like the extra votes on top of the winning threshold and an arrow, you know, pointing towards redistribution. And it's like, well, how does that happen? Here's what we've thought about. Exactly. So we have to remember that a lot of these folks on the, who are reviewing this really know nothing about it. So, and, you know, we'd also don't know how much they want to dive into it. So we kind of have to have, you know, just the overview for everybody and then be able to dig deeper for others. And you're absolutely right that the more graphics we can have the better. We do have the time constraints. You know, in a perfect world, we'd have the same names throughout, for examples. You know what I mean? We've it through. We've it through. And that's something that we just don't have time to do. I see Peggy. Yep. Peggy's in. Great. And let me add to the list. So. So one of the suggestions is kind of slid in there. Is it be. The beginning of each of these sections to have a little summary of the pop to. Summarize the content of that section to help guide the reader. Is that what I was hearing? I think anything we can do to help guide the readers will be good. First, let me apologize. I had two other zooms today. I just got mixed up on the time. I'm so sorry. Thank you, Ellen. I would have come at three 30, which is when I thought we. We will never forgive you, Peggy. I know it. I know. Bored for life. Just on this last point, this little summary at the beginning of each section, we're going to do a little summary. I think we're going to do a little summary. In addition to an executive summary, or is that instead of an executive summary? So this, we're just talking about at the top of each section. So yeah, so the, the whole report will have a. First bit that will emphasize. The steps that the town needs to take. So that's our executive summary. It's an addition to Peggy. Okay. So that if they're, you know, okay, we're going to do a little summary. And then at the end of each section, it'll give them a very succinct, you know, you know, quote unquote embold. Item. If they're just skimming to say, like, here's what this section. Recommends or is about or the problem it's addressing or whatever it is. Okay. That was the only really, you know. Not nitpicky thing that I. Saw everything else looked pretty solid. Right. In terms of the overall ordering. So I wanted to maybe just take a minute just to think about. Overall ordering of the sections and the appendices here. Did anyone. Want a. Change to any of that. I would probably move section five and six above section three and four. To be in that order and I'll fix the numbering later. Right. Because we're going from more broad to more granular. As we go down the document, right? Yes. I might. Yes. I get that on the other hand. In terms of like understanding how rank choice voting works. The tabulation method and. Ballot errors give more, they're sort of more background. And before we have to actually think about the actual steps. That's true. Like that. Yeah, I'm not heavily committed. I just. You know, I just put it out there. That's something always easy to change later. So if you think later of a, a good method. A good reason for why a flow might, you know, you need some kind of previous sections information to. Feed into the next one. We can always switch it around. So for now, I'll just. Leave it since there don't seem to be strong feelings for definitely changing it. So we start maybe drafting a timeline. So, sir, if we could collectively think of all the steps. That we want to recommend to the time. Town council, what do they need to be doing things? For example, Lauren really recommended. They immediately start to get in touch with the elections division and what. A plan for how they're likely to implement it to get them on board to help with passing the special act, you know, contacting people like Mindy Gohm. And other key legislation, state legislatures who could help, you know, advocate for the special act. And then of course getting the special act. Submitted. So there's a couple of things that have specific dates that need, you know, stuff need to be have, you know, we need to have stuff done by, and I think we should include those. Some of these things. We don't necessarily have the expertise to really be able to say how long it's going to take. And therefore how early people need to approach it, like purchasing. I haven't got a clue, right? You know, Peggy might have some experience upper sleeve about like how long it takes to buy voting machines that she hasn't told us, but, you know, I certainly don't. So for the rest of it, we might, we might not want to, you know, pretend to have a comprehensive timeline for when stuff needs to get done, but we might want to have, you know, several specific dates that we know things need to be in by and how long we think stuff is going to, you know, maybe we have an idea of how long we think something is going to take and put that there. And then, you know, let the people who have a lot of more information about how long stuff like that takes to get done to actually fill it in. Sure. I should give it a different name. I didn't, I didn't mean to actually have dates by timeline. I really meant to do list. What is the town councils to do list and we can insert dates as we know them. And the rest may be a little. Just this needs to get done before this can get done. So they need to sign the legislation or the bylaw, whatever it is, and get approval. Yeah, emergency approval, right? Yeah, I'd call it action items. Action items. That's good. Yeah. For town council action items. Yeah. So going back even a step before that, are you then presenting this Tanya at one of their meetings in December? What's that plan? I don't know how this works. I was going to. Ship this off to them on December 1st and wait for them to. Invite me to do whatever the next steps are. They will. They will probably set a meeting once they get the agenda set, whatever. Meeting that goes on. That's when you'll find out. And then is it one of those things Sue, where they're going to have to get. You know, like almost to a second reading where they get input from the town, from people in the town, or is it something where they're just going to be able to decide on their own? I think the way the charter is worded, I think they just sat on their own. Okay. Yeah. So when we send this report off December 1st, we may want to include a. A transmittal letter that. Clues them into the fact that there's a list of action items. And that's a matter of time. And therefore they need to. Look into it rather quickly. You don't want them to say, well, this isn't urgent. We're going to put this off until March. First thing they need to do is right side, whether to proceed with implementation. Right. Based on the charter, it's probably they're going to be. Approve or amend. And approve or submit for revision, right? Because they have to pass something. Yes. If they decide the time is too tight, then they'll need to submit some. A essentially a. I know there's another special app officially, but essentially just requesting that we could run the next local election and the current way to give more time to get. All our ducks in a row. So. So are the local elections every other year? Yeah. Yep. Okay. So next year is the first one. The way the chargers worded, right? There's just nothing. There's a vacuum for what the next local election will be. Is that correct? Yeah. What do you mean there's a vacuum? There's nothing. There's nothing governing how the next local election will run. Oh, oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So something has to be put forward saying this is how it's going to be run. Well, it would probably fall back to state law. Florality voting. I was just a meeting with Paul and he was asking me the same question. You know, in our very first meeting with. He said, you know, like we addressed this issue. And said that, you know, he might want to submit a. Special election request. But he said that he would not want to submit a case. But he said that he would not want to allow us to run the election the same as we always had in the case that we don't have a rank choice voting. By then. My understanding was that he was going to go do that. Interesting. But it sounds like that's not the case. Yeah. I think you would have to come from the town council. Sorry. Go ahead. Well, it may or may not be the case, but it does seem like. Yeah. If Paul thinks it's, it's the case, then Paul should do that. And he should do that no matter what happened, what the town council. Decides about our CV. Right. So we have a backup. Yeah. He could do that right now. If we don't have a new thing in place. We keep running it like we did. Yeah, I remember he mentioned that, you know, he could have it worded so that any subsequent special request would, you know, the initial request so that in case we do get it done in time, it would, you know, overrule the. The one he had already put in. So what are the other things that we want to recommend the town council. So there was the. Interacting with the, the elections division. Right. Reaching out to the elections division. Reaching out to our local legislators. If the, if the town's council is going to decide whether or not rank choice voting is feasible based on a cost. Issue. Then they need to get that information from LHS. And yes, and S, but particularly LHS. You know, if, if we are implementing our CV, then they need to start doing stuff. Like buying machines, photo education. Staff training. Budgeting for, you know, increased. Election staff. I think the budget is the most important. Exactly. Budgeting is going to be the most important because who's to say what your budget it'll be in. Maybe they need to think about preliminary elections, or at least when those. Preliminary elections would happen if we need them. I'm not, I'm not clear on who decides that. That's a state requirement or what. It has to do with the number of candidates. Right. So if there's more than four candidates for the two seats, then there's a preliminary. If not, they don't have to have one. That's in the chart. That was the very first, that was the only for the very first election though. That's not for preceding elections. I mean, success in elections. So. There was no rule at all right now. No, there's nothing in state law either. Even better. So that's something. Yeah, we'd have to determine. Right. Yeah. Basically, we can't fit the number of candidates on our ballot. Right. Yeah. And they'll save really short names. And then also it's actually hiring certain staff to do the implementation because it's, I don't think there's current staff available. For all of these things. So they have to figure out. If there would be additional staffing, if there'd be a committee like ours, if there's a committee like ours, if there's a committee like ours, if there's a committee like ours, or if Sue gets to hire a whole bunch of people. Yeah. And if they're consultants or full-time. For the training stuff. I mean, this is for voter education, but LHS does training seminars on the use of both the machines and the. The software. So. For money or gummy bears. I'm not sure which one, but I strongly suspect the former. I think we have a lot of things. Yeah. So we'll move to the next thing. I think we have some other stuff down here. And when I send the sort of the, our next draft out, feel free to add, you know, modulate these. I think we've got the main things down. So when I keep moving along. We had some other things here. So I think the other big thing I'd like us while we're all together that we really should be discussing as a group is the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the recommendations built in to the draft already, but we should really make sure we all agree. Those are what we want to recommend. This was. Oh, so maybe we can just go section by section. Let me know if you're, if we go along, let me know if there's other things you wanted to do. The different sections. So it's maybe just back up here. Yeah. In the first section that anyone have comments on. Changes. They want to this. They should build a fill in that number now since we know exactly how many total meetings we'll have. I can fill that number in. Just a quick note. The example one in section one. It lists Pam and Pete. Okay. So we're going to go to the next section. We're going to have Dorothy Pam as a current counselor. We should make sure to avoid using names, which are. Mapped to current counselors. That's, that's section two. We're in section one. Oh, did I miss it? Oh, my layout's weird. Okay. Okay. So just check if there's anything else that we did in ours, part of our work that you wanted added to this. List of stuff that people were. Okay. So we're going to go to the next section. Okay. Yeah. The only thing I saw was that. The two educate Amherst voters about anticipated changes to rank choice voting. That was important work. That we did at the same time. I don't know. There's just something about putting it in a document where we're trying to convince the town council. To change to rank choice voting. That feels weird. I don't think we are trying to convince them. It's mandated through the, through the charter. Our work is more about implementation rather than a persuasion. Yeah. Document is something we did. So, and it's posted on the committee website. So I thought we should. There should be in there is something. Something we did. Yeah. And, and it's exactly what I mean, we educated voters about the anticipated change. You know, if the town council decides it's impossible to do this. Then that's another. Problem. But as far as we know, we're going ahead with it. Yeah. Not everything we anticipate actually happens, I guess so. I mean, would you feel more comfortable if we just changed that? Yeah, I think it's important. You know, it's not going to be to me, but I also recognize that it might just be me and it seems that that's the case. So then it's no problem. We also refer to it later. In the section John wrote. About our experience with that. So I think having it in this section is important. Yeah, that's fine. Right. All right. So then smooth the two seeds. I mean, I just, I was just doing P names for purple and M names for magenta, just to not have things be blue and red, but something else. Yeah, I would, I would find another color that's. Has different, a significantly contrasting value than purple and pink. My experience as a game developer says that some people are going to have problems with that. And depending on what kind of monitor they're looking at it on, it may not stick out as much as you want it to. Okay. What would you suggest for the two colors? I'll, I'll look at the wheel a little later and come up with one. Okay. Okay. I would also suggest not using such Caucasian names. Maybe have Maria. I mean, think about our town. Sure. Yeah. So send me. Well, depending on the colors you pick. Go for the names. What was it? Oh yeah, I found the example introduction a little confusing because it's implying that people are voting by platform when we vote by candidate. And I know that that's not the case for the actual example, but the text makes it seem like that again. So it says suppose the 500 voters in the district are evenly, nearly evenly divided between the two platforms. Right. Like without further context that, that seems to imply that like, well, some people voted for this platform and some people voted for that platform. And I understand the intent is to say like, you know, maybe, you know, 20, 20% voted for, you know, Pam and then, you know, 30% voted for Pete. You know, and that's 50%. Right. But it makes it seem like you're voting for platforms, not individuals. Oh, I see. So the. Yeah, I had to, I had to read further into the example to be like, wait, wait, does that mean that, you know, they're on a ballot together? Does that mean, you know, is it like president and vice president? Or does that mean it's, and I had to actually look down at the example and be like, wait, okay, no, they got different numbers of ballots each. And then at calculating, I looked at 155 plus 100. Oh, okay, I got you. I could just get rid of that and just say, there's 500 voters and this many approve those two and this many approve those two. Right. Yeah, 500 put their votes towards Pam or Pete, and then 500 put their vote towards Meg or Max. Yeah. Well, you get a vote for two, right? End of the current system. Oh, yeah. But yeah, if you can think of a better wording than platform, I was just trying to make an example where you have kind of, you know, this constituency and some other constituency and making sure they both get representatives, but I don't know what the best wording is. I just wanted to make a simple example to contrast the current system with the how they were, as far as I understand it from talking with Mandy, how they were really envisioning these two districts to counselor districts to work that the rating voting was kind of tied in with making the representation work better with having the two districts instead of single, sorry, two member districts that single member districts. The thing is I'm remembering the ballot the first time we don't vote. We still vote in precincts. You still have precinct one. I'm going to have to look at an old ballot. I'm not sure this is accurate. When we have the ballot, where are we here? The ballots. It's so long out. There's like on and on. That's the one you're proposing, but the original ballot. Is it in here somewhere? Oh, it is towards the top. It's in. All right, we're like crazy on you. We only put in the school. We didn't put in the whole ballot, but they're still voting for five people. So you're still on each in each precinct. They're still voting for five people. Well, this is school committee. But that would be the same for counselors. They're still voting for, well, 13, but spread out between five districts, but 10 precincts. Right. So I think I remember it too. So for your precinct, it would say pick two vote for no more than two. And you've just got, you just have the people in your precinct. And then it says for the, for the seats for the, for the town. There were separate races for the town. Two separate races. Yeah. So it was precinct only. And then it was for the ones across the town. Sorry, the at-large seats. That's what they're called. So there were two separate races on each ballot. Well, this coming November, it's going to be all the races on one ballot, counselor, school committee, redevelopment, housing authority, elector and Jones library. Yep. But there will still be separate ballots for each of the different precincts. Yeah, you still have to, yeah, we still have our precincts one through 10. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or districts will be five. Well, it says it does say on the ballot, I believe precinct one, district one, or whatever it's in precinct two, district three. Yeah. Yeah. We're still voting by precinct. Look, and I thought I had a hammer's ballot right here, but it's somehow eluding me. But yeah, so maybe, maybe we would help help theirs once I figure out where I put it. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. To stick in a little snippet, what, what the current ballot looks like to. Remind people. So we've only voted once this way. Not like people will be super familiar with the new district counselor set up. There it's on, it's on the webpage. If you just go under town clerk and. Upcoming and pet or voter information and then upcoming and voter information. And then you'll see the next elections. You'll see the last town election. And the ballot will be there. And I know I have it downloaded. Just disappeared. All right. Let me just make a little note to myself there. It's that example up a bit. And I guess so, so here's one of the comments. John just sent me so just some wording. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Other, other concerns about section two. One, one question I had is whether the. Amherst specific implementation should be. A subsection of section two or whether it should be its own section. Yeah. That strikes me as something that. Well. That's an area that the town council should zoom in on, but. Yeah. That's a good point. So yeah, we can easily do that. So what, what else did we have? Here. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yes. Was really just talking in general about rank choice voting. And then here we really are getting some more. Details. Okay. That's good. Yes. We'll make that its own section, but kept in this, this position overall just. Elevated. I guess. We'll see. Okay. Paragraph on premier preliminary elections at the very end of the section. It says, if the number of candidates running in one of the local elections is too large. And I think we ought to define what. We mean by too large, too large for a ballot, too large. For. Ranking purposes. Give them some kind of guidance for how they make that decision. I don't know what the answer is, but. They don't have a feeling about that. What. What should be the purpose of a preliminary election? Reduce the number of candidates to amount that can fit on the ballot. Are we limited machinery? What was that? Are we limited at all by the machinery by the tabulators? No, we're limited by the ballot design. We're limited. We're limited. We're limited. We're limited. More or less one on the same, but yeah. Yeah. So we should say that. Getting back to what Sue said, the reason they did it for the town elections was. Just to simplify things for. For the run-offs so that there weren't so many candidates to have to look at it once. And people could then narrow it down and then have to choose from among four as opposed to choosing from five, six, seven. That's why. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the instructions based on the charter. Right. But in terms of. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, but it was the very first election and there were more candidates. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And having worked on the election, it would have been very confusing if there were seven candidates for two seats. No. I wouldn't find that confusing. No, I know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say. Like, well, I only know these two people. So I'm voting for them. Oh, do you remember town meeting? Yeah. Yeah. And nobody know it. Any idea what they were doing. It's like, I know that name. I know that name. Yeah. Yeah. But no one, no one ever knew their platform. So what they were standing for. And I think that's. That's a problem when you've got so many candidates is. If the town wants to end up doing its own preliminary for other reasons, that's fine. But in terms of us, you know, they may have to run a preliminary area just to whittle down the number of people so that it fits on the ballot. So when we say it's on the ballot, are we talking about in order to try and. Keep the election to a single. No, no, like the, there's a, because the more people you have, the further the list expands horizontally because the number of rankings that you have to provide. Because you have to provide some number of rankings, which we can limit, right? We can decide that even if there's 100 people in the race, if there's only five seats, we're only going to provide eight or 10, you know, rankings for people to choose from. But yeah. Plus don't forget you have to have a right in space for every single candidate. Yep. I mean seats. Yeah. So do we need to, so I guess you're right, John. It is about keeping it to like at least two pages. Or at most two pages, if possible. So we, we might just want to expand some of the. Explanation here to express what it is we're trying to get at. Otherwise I don't think they'll know what too large means. Yeah, that makes sense. And Sue, just for clarity, if we're, if you're, we're electing to two seats, we would need to write in spots. Is that correct? That's correct. Got to be able to write Kanye West two times. Well, we saw some of those ballots. Yeah, I did too. I saw the map of the number of people who voted for Kanye West by state. And I was like, they don't have any for mass. Yeah. I saw at least one. They had to get five votes or more to be written down. Otherwise they go into all others. Yeah. We only saw a couple of them actually. All right. So it's keep chugging. So for section three, we already had the protection to, we need to beef up the beginning part to really motivate. Why we need to be worrying. That we're trying to address with this section. Yeah. Right. But then otherwise, so if we beef up that first part of the wise and maybe add a visualization, if we can. Anything else with this section? No, I think it's fine. I mean, it's easily one of the more detailed sections. If you ended up wanting to shorten it down, you could probably just remove explanation of. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we need to worry about shortening it. I think. Yeah. I think the only comment I had on this section, other than that was. Random and. Waited or no, the inclusive Gregory method. Because those don't meet our criteria. And then just dive into the details of, you know, weighted inclusive Gregory method versus Meeks method and why we chose to recommend. That was. The very bottom in point four. Yeah. That last paragraph where it, we recommend using the weapon method. I think it's also important to specifically point out that random and. Inclusive do not meet the criteria. And while I, you know, while I'm on board with everybody that we should make the actual. Legislation broad. We should write it so that it excludes those two previous methods. So nobody does crazy things. All right. So here you want to add a sentence. Okay. So I'm sorry. I missed this. When you were talking, did you already talk about Lauren's special act? Because she really wants us to name the method that we're going to use. Even. Us. Random and inclusive or. Out of the two methods that. Meet our criteria. Meeks and Wiggum. We recommend the use of Wiggum. Right. Oh, I see. Okay. So I'm sorry. Perhaps I missed this when you were talking. Did you already talk about Lauren's special act? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's up to us. East Hampton didn't go anywhere near that detail. So I'm not sure we want to go there. Well, I agree with you. And so I just wondered whether other people on the commission felt the same. So. I also wouldn't be opposed if we wanted to write it. I don't even, I mean, I'm sure we could talk to Lauren and figure out how to do this, but. So that. On initial implementation, they have to do it a certain way, right? Right. So that the, the council has less choices to worry about. It's like, no, you're going to go with Wiggum and, you know, you're going to do this and that. And if you want to change it in the future, that's great. But for the initial setup, go with this. All right. So let's move on to section four. So there are a couple of things Peggy had highlighted that. That we should just touch base on. The first is. On the sentence about the types of errors that could be caught by, you know, and you scan your ballot in. What the wording should be. Identified instead of caught. And, and Sue, when people vote early at town hall or the bank center, are those votes tabulated then? Or they just stored. No, they're stored. That's what the central tabulation facility was all about. Okay. Yeah. So, so any early voting and mail in voting. Will not be tabulated at the time. Right. Not according to current state law. We wouldn't be able to, if this is what you're getting at, we wouldn't be able to run it through, discover an error and then get back to the people and say, like, Hey, you made a mistake. Yeah. Yeah, no, no curing of balances. They call them some places. Yeah. Did you make those calls? No, if the tabulator can't read it, it becomes a hand count. And then when the voter, the workers look at it, if they can't determine voter intent, it doesn't, that race doesn't get counted or if it's an overvote or in the current system. Yeah. Okay. All right. I think, I think as we stayed, I mean, depends on exactly the machine they get, which errors could potentially be caught. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, just it alerts. Them that, you know, There can be some things caught, but not everything. Just so they're aware of that. Is that right? So then the other question was the. Recommendation. For interpreting certain of these ballot errors. Yeah. Yeah. I still, and I remember this meeting, I still strongly disagree about the multiple skipped ranks. I do believe that. And I understand the argument the other way. I believe that even if there are multiple skipped ranks, while there are, it adds to the potential. Number of things that the voter could be intending. The only thing we can still really say for sure is that they did mark that person as a rank. And I think it's a good argument. I don't know what to do on that one. I think falls after their first choice. And I think that it more closely honors the intent by just racking it back up to two for that example. And I know that's, that's position differs from others, but that's mine. It's a good argument. I don't, I really don't know what to do on that one. I think that it comes in the end, it will come down to voter education. We want to make sure that people understand what will happen. And so we won't know. So we have, you know, I also think it's more in line with how the other errors are handled, right? Cause if you skip one and it just shifts up, your assumption would automatically be that, well, if I miss any number, they'll just shift up. But in this case, it would be different, right? Oh, but if you miss more than one, you lose it all. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's great. If there were, if we were ranking like six people and you ranked one, four, five and six, it would be a shame to lose the rankings on four, five and six all together. So yeah, I see your point. I'm not, I don't know what the answer is. I'm, I'm, what's the counter argument? Why have some jurisdictions used other, this other approach? I'm not sure what other jurisdictions have done. My thinking when I wrote this was that if, if it were the case where somebody ranked a first choice and a last choice, and there were several rankings in between, that that would be a clear indication that somebody had a first choice and a last choice. And so moving that last choice up to number two would be against their intent. However, I, you know, it's, it's very tricky because at what point do you know whether it's a first and last choice and just a misunderstanding of the ranking or whatever. Right. And given that they only ranked two, even if you shifted it up to two, it's still their last choice, right? Because we don't cover the edge case where, you know, some voter might want to say, well, this is my first choice, but if they get eliminated and then also using this example, let's say, you know, Julius and Robert get eliminated. That's not even possible. But yeah, it's just, it's confusing. I don't, but if you look below where Peggy wrote other municipalities have decided to shift up, or am I confusing it with the multiple marked? You're confusing it with the multiple. I see. Yeah. I would strongly suggest just having them shift up. It's less things to explain to the voter. It's like, Hey, if you skip a couple of spots, you can shift them up. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, if we do that, I think it's important. I just remember when we're doing the candy thing, a lot of people put something as our last choice. They said, Oh, I don't like that one. I'll make it my last choice. I'm like, well, is that one of your choices? So you don't want that one too. And then I wouldn't want that one too. And I said, well, then maybe you don't color it in. So it's a, it's part of the education process. Yeah. A lot of times people do put their last choice is something they don't want, but they feel like they should vote for everything. Yeah. I agree. And that seems like something we need to address with voter education, rather than getting into the muddy waters of trying to interpret somebody's intent too carefully when we don't have that information in this kind of situation. How is this ballot counted? I mean, is the software going to be knowing that if we choose to do it this way, it's going to automatically move everything over or are these going to be hand counted ballots? I, oh man, my memory is a little foggy here, but I think the, the cast vote record will actually still just record it as first and fourth. And it's the RTR software or the, the central tallying software that will actually handle. Those issues. Although it will be, it won't be a manual adjustment. No, it won't be a manual adjustment. Yeah. And that'd be something to, you know, say that the town did decide to go to democracy suite of working out with them, what options we have for interpreting voter intent and what choices we have for in terms of, you know, can it, can it do it this way or can it do it that way? Hopefully it has a lot of flexibility. I mean, it should be easy enough for them to program the question and just whether they. Want to or not, if we're big enough fish. Yeah. Does the, does the universal tabulator support that? I know it supports several error handling, but you're, you dug the most into that Tonya. I don't remember any more. Definitely has some different, different options that you can. Universal tabulator. Sorry to interject. Does support both options, multiple skipped and no skipped. Okay. And democracy suite has a ton of all of these options, whether you do multi-skipped is truncated or you promote though, no later ranks. Okay. That's good to know. Do you know what most jurisdictions opt for? With the multiple skip, it does vary. So Cambridge does promote. So if you go to Cambridge voting booth, you vote somebody first and somebody 25th. If you go to Cambridge voting booth, you'll see that 25th vote becomes your, your second vote, which, you know, some people do. Interestingly, Minneapolis used to do, if you skipped multiple, it was truncated and they switched to promoting them. So that's one where it went the, when they are the direction, the way I think Jesse was suggesting. So there's variety there as to what people do. So I'm not saying that's my last choice. So I'm marking it last. I just want to be quick. That's fine. So long as they're, the other ranks are filled in and it's the same intent. Right. Yeah. If I, if I put, you know, Cherry as my first and licorice as my last on, you know, the fourth choice, even though it gets promoted to second, it's still my last choice, right? Cherry's first licorice is last. So I'm not saying that's my last choice, but I'm not saying that's my last choice. It still carries the intent based on what we absolutely know, rather than, you know, trying to interpret their intent. And also interpret generalized intent, right? Because if we're making a computer programming rule that says, you know, if you skip two, then we're assuming you mean this, but that's making an assumption about every voter's intent based on information we do not have. And I think that's risky. I think we should promote rather than truncate. And that we should, or at least we should recommend that. I, you know, however the town council decides to implement this, I can't imagine that they're not going to need. Some sort of committee to make this happen. And these, this level of decision could be left to that committee. So what I'll do is we can. Yeah, so to give provides for full information we can provide, you know, what are sort of both options here. And then say, so there's a commit the others on the committee agree now that you would like us to recommend. The moving the vote up. Yeah. Yep. Promote and educate. I mean, it's ultra important to, to minimize these sort of errors to really make sure the voters understand how to fill it out. Hopefully these cases will be minimal. Yep. And I think that'll be easier when we just have the general rule that if you miss some, it's shifted up as opposed to an extra edge case, which they have to pay attention to. So any thoughts in future elections about mail and voting, if it's going to stick around, or is it a one off? We hope just one off here. Um, well actually it's funny, the legislators are meeting today about voting for the spring elections and they're going to have mail and voting. They're still working it out, but it's for the fall. I don't know. I really don't know. It was a. It was a emergency regulation. So yeah, there's absentee voting. That's still going to apply. But, um, right. Yeah, I wonder if they're going to stick with no excuse like California and so many other states. I couldn't even begin to guess. What would you recommend? What would you want? No comment. This is being recorded. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So there was that recommendation, but then we, um, let's see. So what are all the cases? So the. Repeat candidates or candidates rank more than one. So that's simple enough. You just keep them at their highest rank. The skipped ranking. It was talked about. So then duplicate rankings. So. I don't know. I think we called them duplicate rankings here because, um, Lauren had suggested we not use overvote. Yeah. She used overvote in the. Yeah. Um, legislation. So I, you know, I just saw that out. I think we should maybe remind her that overvote for us is different because that was a confusing point earlier. And it's, she said it's defined in law as to what an overvote is. And that's not what we. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, there's duplicate rankings, right? Well, it is actually kind of what we intended, which is that more than one person gets. Voted at the same time, you know, and in, um, in a single seat plurality vote, if you vote for two people, that's an overvote. And here, if you vote for two people at rank number two, it's a, she's calling that an overvote. Oh yeah, that makes sense. It's essentially the same thing, but I'm not sure. You know, you could call it duplicate rankings here and in parentheses put overvote or something like that. In the terms that she sent back for the act, she did say the word overvote shall be the result of a voter ranks more than one candidate at the same ranking. Right. One of the definitions. So, right. Good tie it together. All right. And what was our recommendation. We're going to do this. So we, we have marked that we. Follow the model of discarding the candidates with equal equal rankings as well as all candidates with lower rankings than those equally ranked candidates. So is that, that's still the recommendation. We want to stick to for this case. Say that again, just discarding everything below the. Duplicate candidates. Yes. Yeah, I think that makes sense to me. All right. Good. It'd be nice to preserve the further ones, but then you run into the problem I was mentioning above, which is that assumes something about their intent, which we can't assume. And I think it's likely that people will get pretty pissed off if they found out that, you know, the candidates, they overvoted for lost because. You know, their lower ranking vote ended up counting towards a different candidate. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I forgot. We already have the section that has. Some of this information so I can blend in sort of the, the action items. In, in to fill out some more of the section five. This is really focused on state approval. Just a heads up, it's 425. And I think I only set the zoom up. So 430. Okay. I think we should. Just a touch base and strategy are, are people able to stay a little longer to get a little more work done collectively? Or do we want to. At this point, switch to back to the. Email me your comments and I will keep collating them. Model. I do need to bail out at 430. Okay. So let's plan and wrapping up and we'll. Yeah. One of the, one of the things that you identified that we, we need to do is to. Write up some additional material. And I was, I am willing to take a stab at the executive summary. We don't want to stab anybody. We just want them to read it. I'm dangerous that way. Yeah. So if you could write up an executive summary. Yeah. I guess maybe. Jesse, are you willing to, since you brought up the, where was this way back in like section three or whatever the. Part. What is the problem? Yeah. Yeah. Where we are. Yeah. Here. So Jesse, could you maybe send me some text for how you'd like to do that? What were the other things that needed still to be written? We need to change the example in. Whatever the last section we recovered is to be one where they shift forward instead. We can actually just eliminate that example. I mean, if we're, if what we're doing is shifting forward for all. We need to, we need to do more than one example for that. So we just take out the. That second. Skip ranking example. Great. Maybe the text. We've written a little bit. Why don't I do that? Like one or more. Yeah. Or any number of section with that understanding. Great. And we do need to figure out our recommendations. Section eight. Yeah. We need to write them down. We've pretty much figured it out. Right? Yes. So they're, they're sprinkled like at the end of all these sections. Yeah. I thought it would be good to gather them together. Absolutely. Yeah. On place. So yeah. So if you're, Ellen, if you're willing to kind of read through and see all the different. And put those together into that section. I think that's kind of been niggling at me is when the section with the magenta and the purple, when we talk about the different platforms. So I don't know if you know the history, but with the first one for town council, there's actually a group called Amherst first or whatever. And some people were accusing them of being a pack. Where they're really not a pack. They're not, you know, taking money the way a pack would do it. It just became a major confrontation in town. So when you refer to different platforms, it might actually, it will bring that up like, okay, these are the people who are in favor of change in town, these people who aren't. So I don't know how to get around that with your example. I can just drop the. Okay. So I'm going to mention a platform and just say this many people approved these two and this many of people approved these two and, you know, how many voters did we make happy with the outcome and avoid that issue altogether? That's no problem. Yeah. Okay, great. All right. Well, we better wrap up. I will save this and send it out to all of you. So you have that as the base to be. So then make your choice, your changes, send it back to me. I'll collate them all together and just see the document, send it back out and we'll just try to keep iterating. We'll have to discuss the special act in more detail that are November 30th meeting and just really crack down and get that done at that meeting. And do I want to do anything with the glossary at this point? Yeah, I would add Lawrence terms. So, so I pasted in there, the things that seem most relevant. Feel free to add any further terms you think would be helpful to have. Compiled into there that we use. In the report. So feel free to sprinkle those in as needed. Probably be important to make sure that it coincides with the. Yeah. With Lawrence with the special act. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would add Lawrence terms to it. Well, the Lawrence special act will be pasted in as the first appendix. So that's already there. Right. But if someone goes to a glossary looking for a definition. That's where they would go. And this is, you know, again, I don't expect people to read this cover to cover. Yeah. Well, we could, you could add to the glossary. All of the terms that are in her special act so that we have just. We have a plan. Is it. Yeah, we have a plan. Yep. So we just got to dig in and just get these last things done. When do you want them back? We need deadlines. So like before Thanksgiving, so people can get it to me by like Tuesday, say. I can pull it on Wednesday and get something out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That gets sort of the next round of stuff going. That's good. All right. My call to adjourn. So moved. Second. All right. Great. Thank you all. Thank you all. Have great. Thanksgivings, everyone. I won't. Yeah. Yeah. I look forward to seeing my family on the computer. Thanksgiving. Well, thankful. We're all alive. There we go. And Tonya. Oh, let me stop recording.