 are now recording there we go yeah it popped up great so finally good start meeting again welcome everyone I declare a forum so we have everyone here except Rob and seeing no members of the public will skip item one public comment and move on to the minutes and so the minutes from last time were really brief and everyone have time to take a quick look see if I can yeah me and Rob weren't there so he probably would have abstained anyway and I will be abstaining on a vote as well just because I haven't got a clue okay look at that welcome to Rob nice all right hey Rob no what do you mean Rob this is we're viewing Tanya's oh did Rob pop on Rob join I miss it I was looking down he's still getting set up oh there we are hey Rob like a reunion I'm just happy that I can see all you healthy and if not you know gotta stay that way until Thanksgiving here right yeah because just so be counting absentee balance oh yes I told my husband you won't be seeing me for months and months and months it's gonna be a lot upon oh boy it's already started yeah any comments on the minutes yes see I mean no and this can be kind of a way to remember where we were that we still we still met with LHS and maybe you know it may still be crazy days for him with the election only a few months off so we can ask him if he's still willing to do like a zoom demo maybe later we can talk about the item of like a list of questions that we can yeah I mean our own deadlines have blown by so so we probably don't need to rush him to get in before the election anyway so should we vote on the minutes yes it sounds like nobody has any so or memory of the meeting I move to approve them and that's I second all right so it's how should be you voting do you want we can raise hands you know see like that if you close this off the screen you can see there are some reactions you can do that you can vote like that but it might be easier because there's more than just yes and no if we just go through person by person yes and there aren't that many of us I think that's a good idea yeah I should be no I should be no how's it going hello everyone I'm sorry I'm late I couldn't find the zoom invites I was going through all my emails I'm sure you don't have a lot of emails to sift through what are you talking about I was just short of going across the hall being like what is the ID I'm in the back corner town hall in a meeting room there's nobody here it's a wonderful yeah it's quiet I was everyone I'm sorry to fuck in the meeting no that's alright healthy pretty happy awesome I got a haircut cool yeah now I got it back in a ponytail because of the heat yep I think yeah well I proved it hot outside I'm like trapped in my little air conditioned room yeah I just came in to all right so minutes look good to me all right Susan ah I John yes Ellen I Peggy hi Tonya hi and I abstain I also abstain okay I had it my agenda to make sure that you do this in right order all right so next I had listed assess progress in next steps and it sounded like as part of that we should really think about the potential timeline that while we may not have a particular rush I'd also like to get our work wrapped up I don't see real need to drag it out if we can get answers to our questions sooner than later yep I mean there's also the question of given the state ballot major on ranked-trace voting how would that affect this maybe this is a question for the town manager like does he want to or the town council you know would that make everything easier if we just find out what the outcome or should we just submit all of our recommendations and they'll find out what the outcome is and that will help them proceed I think if we get it you know done relative I mean we were about halfway through writing that report right yeah I'd like to just get it done before we completely forget all that stuff we learned yeah if we can get that done relatively soon you know we're also gonna probably have to incorporate some new information that we find out when we do the mail-in ballot stuff like at least I've been thinking on my end the you know the requirements definitely need to now include not that they didn't before but it'll be more important you know high speed scanners for the for the ballots because if everybody's you know sending in ballots by mail then we're gonna need have enough high-speed scanners that can handle this as opposed to the small amount of absentee ballots that we usually get and there's also the issue then if it's gonna be more than one page how to make sure we get all the pages back so that's something we have to think through as well and then also with the state looking at the language they're using and probably adapting ours from that since the town council should be familiar with that language or that's that's stuff that you know is being presented to the whole state so anything we can use due to leverage what's being done for the state I think would make it our life here and everyone else's lives easier too yeah should be and I feel like you're looking at me just that picture she is looking at you I'm working too sorry that's why I put it up so that you guys don't see it's one of those pictures of I'm looking at you I know what she's about I got that same picture you do have the same yeah that's right me and Chavina have both the angles covered right stop staring at us we've got our eyes on you I think you bring up sort of two of the key concerns I want to highlight in the report for like is there considering us this doable you know is the given the complexity of a ring-choice ballot can we scan them fast enough to really make it feasible and I don't like the idea of two-page ballot having that two separate pieces of paper so I think them being able to for a regular election get it all on one piece of paper is really important and I think the writing candidates was another key issue that if too many of those you know every time somebody writes in if we have to manually enter that whole ballot that becomes problematic and the other thing I had written down was hand count it was a really key concern is that feasible the mandatory hand count in case of a recount right yeah because you need to be able to exactly recreate say we went with LHS we'd have to be able to exactly recreate the algorithm in some way right and there's all kinds of restrictions by the state and how you can actually handle the ballots and if the algorithm is too complicated that becomes unreal I think that's a concern to think about well we also needed to get an answer from legal about what constituted a hand recount right because it's obvious that using an Excel spreadsheet is you know considered at least by you know Minnesota to be acceptable for a hand recount but that's a computer assisted program for a hand recounting so where exactly is the boundary there and you know what's considered you know a hand recount and what's not considered a hand recount right so that's important to us because it could turn out that like hey we can actually still use a program to calculate the results in a quote hand recount it's just that a specific part of that action needs to be performed in the specific way yes yes I agree that's a good point yeah I remember from the interview that they said the scanning of the ranked choice ballot I forget I don't think it was any slower than a regular ballot was it I don't believe so I think it was or just marginally so I don't think this is gonna be an issue because the scanner is just recording data it's not doing the calculation so theoretically it shouldn't be slower but how long is it on a single page I mean we've done multi-page ballots before they're horrible for their own reasons I just don't know if they're worse for ranked choice voting than they are for plurality voting I just mean if you have two separate pages need to scan presumably that takes twice as long yeah absolutely standing one piece of paper yeah it's a bummer also two pieces of paper is like having a double-sided ballot and voters are inherently they're bad about flipping the ballot over they'll vote one side and leave and then miss the second side and be very yeah yeah yeah also if they're doing absentee there they may mail back just one page and we're not there to catch it or no reason yeah right yeah yeah and the the point I'm making is that that's just not different from plurality right yeah it's not a good idea in general didn't we find out that we couldn't scan the state doesn't allow scanning the state doesn't allow you to take photos of the ballot for scanning is fine but that means we can't use the functionality from some of the equipment that they have which takes a picture of the right in bat of vote and puts it in the data for us that's right that's what is super obnoxious that's something you'd recommend make a recommendation to town council to submit a bill to the state legislature to allow yes exactly now the voting machines I mean that sounds convenient I don't know if I'd make that suggestion until we actually find out the reason why they don't want the photographs in the first place because we don't want to open a can of worms by trying to solve our one particular problem right but if they could make an exception just for this kind of case that would be fantastic shavina do you have any insight into the the history of that prohibition yeah so I my thought on that is and it's only because I have sat in on a few of the of the demos and I've also done some research on the right choice voting and based on how I know the secretary kind of feels about elections in general I think it's just to keep the security and to reduce voter fraud you know voters are always concerned about people knowing how they vote and so if we use the scan function on the tabulator on the DS 200s then voters voters get they they ask us those questions anyway about their absentee and early voting belt well who handles them at the polls well then you'll be able to know how I voted and I think that that may be part of the reason I'm not quite sure yeah that sounds like we need to take a look at that and maybe talk with somebody who's gonna have problems with it so we can devise a way to deal with that and so it comes down to just like we do in regular elections it's about building the confidence with the voters that their vote is going to be secure and right are there other logistical issues that we haven't mentioned that we should be thinking about that may be particular to rank choice voting one thing I mean that again if a huge amount of people are voting by mail now then we can't reject we can't have them fix a ballot that is incorrectly filled out so we were hoping that you know at the polls when the some person put it in the machine it would kick it back if there was an overvote or something some other and that's not gonna happen if we're all voting by mail yeah we won't be able to do voter education at the polls which is never ideal but of course you have to yep so in in states where they've had places like Washington state where they've had all vote by mail for a long time now does anyone have any sense as to how they've been handling that kind of issue has there been an extra voter education effort or my memories foggy does Washington state have ranked choice voting no yeah but I mean whether it's ranked choice or some other plurality voting yeah it's the same problem with voter education my concern is now gonna be that if we get ranked choice voting and we still have vote by mail we're gonna have the first election with ranked choice voting and an enormous number of ballots are gonna be tossed out because of misvoting and then people are gonna say oh well this is obviously a problem with ranked choice voting we have to get rid of it and so I don't know if Sue spoke to this or not so the vote by mail legislation that passed on July 6th is temporary that's only for this year right so moving forward vote by mail will revert back to absentee in early voting okay yeah no I have this year and and ranked choice won't won't be implemented until what fall of 2021 it's a passes making a transition to a whole new system until we're settled down and back in a regular voting situation so that most people are doing it in person and can get support in that filling out the ballot get their questions answered you know have it checked well the good news yeah I'm starting to try if it does pass the good news is that the state will be focusing on educating voters and so we can ride the coattails they're the only differences here you're voting for two people go for you know a position rather than one and also that you you know we have different algorithm for then processing it but aside from that I mean the general education for the state will really help us a lot but we're still hoping right that if it doesn't pass at the state that will still be able to get the legislation approved for ranked choice voting at the town level yeah okay so maybe in the report we need to include a contingency on how we might handle it if in fact God forbid we aren't returned to some sense some seeming normalcy until when this is is put into place in the fall of 2021 yeah probably don't need to spend a ton of time but I think you're right we need to add something in there saying like hey you know in case we are doing mail-in voting next year for whatever reason you know whether it's because more pandemic or people end up liking it a lot and just want to do it and so legislation passes or something just sort of a note in there that talks about like you know we're gonna need to actually reformat how we do voter education to make sure it's not a giant mess is it even still given how delayed we are and presumably everything else is is it even a likely option would be able to do ranked choice voting for next year's local election I mean are we getting too late now Vivina you want to talk to that maybe that I'm well it depends on planning so the if it passes in November what would have to happen is you'd have to we'd have to be able to get the approval from finance for the budget to buy the new tabulators yes and yeah and so ESMS is already has the DS 200s that are you know coded to handle ranked choice but that would be and I I got a quote from ESMS just for regular tabulators not to do ranked choice voting and finance says that that's that would be considered a capital purchase and so it wasn't going to be feasible in FY 21 maybe for FY 22 which would be in time for the November local election of next year so I can't say for sure but that would be that would be the next hurdle so it is the fiscal year runs July 1 to June 30th okay so if it does pass for the state Chavina which would be November of 2021 will every town then need to get tabulators that work they choose this that's the town if the municipality chooses to do a ranked choice style of voting they don't have yeah oh so my thought it was be for all state seats yeah but if it's for all state seats sorry go on so first if that passes for I haven't read the question so if it passes for state seats and if Tony and state election which is in even number of years it could be 2022 okay so yeah I don't I didn't read it carefully to see what besides state seats are on it that might be in 2021 okay also if the towns already have machines that are capable of scanning ranked choice ballots then you know it's not an extra expenditure for them because for statewide seats the tabulation is going to have to occur at the state level so the town's not gonna have to buy any equipment for that it's only you know like us where we want to pass you know we want to get it implemented at the town level too that we actually need tabulation machines here we need tabulation machines for all elections so we use the same tabulator for state and for local elections yeah yeah just that if you have with the rank choice voting if you have if it's for a state seat the results need to be collated at the same time for all municipalities so the towns wouldn't have like they wouldn't have those machines the state would have those machines well unless the system where you have the towns actually scan the ballots and you send just the little memory thing oh yeah yeah no I I I understand that what I mean is they then don't have to like get the by the tabulating machinery itself yeah whatever that is no so it's called it's so most towns use what's called an ERM which is an election result machine that tabulates votes and so you use the same equipment and you use the same equipment for every election you use the same tabulation function so if a town already has a DS 200 DS 200 is the only machine right now that will do rent choice voting so those municipalities that already have DS 200s would have them when they have their maintenance done annually would then get their maintenance upgraded so that it can do rent choice voting so that is the only change so they wouldn't have to buy all new machines like we would right right now the machines we have our active votes they can't handle that I'm also using the wrong terminology which is probably leading to confusion because it's been a while as you're saying the tabulators are the ones that are at the precincts that are scanning stuff whereas I'm actually talking about the the machine that calculates the actual result of the election which has to be the ERM yeah the ERM yeah oh man I got to get back in it it's like anything you know it's like riding a bike I can't do that no I can ride a bike no worries we got you all right okay so it sounds like we need to just get back on board with the report we have a couple of tasks associated with that that we need to investigate but unless something's drastically changed with the state of available machinery in the last four or five months not that we know of no I'm sure that's still the same the two things the sort of the two people we've really been hoping to meet with were the town attorney and the Jeff Silvestro the LHS rep so I guess one question is did we do we feel like we still need to do that or like some of the things like the you know getting stuff to the legislature is kind of moot depending on how the ballot major turns out we still proceed with trying to get although we may still have questions for like the hand count that we really need to either get her to send us an answer or talk to her about has that question been posed to her about the hand count um no we were we originally had a meeting with her set up where we were going to ask her about it like she had raised when we met with her you know a year ago way back when she raised that issue she's very concerned about the hand count issue because they're they're very specific like you know everything's bundled in the groups of 50 and it just sounds very difficult to do that with rank choice but we didn't at the time specifically ask could it be interpreted as allowing say an excel spreadsheet supported recount where you're just using the ballots to kind of verify that things are entered in right but then use the excel to actually calculate um I can find out I can talk to um Paul and see if we can just have like some targeted questions to ask her and see if she can just get us some answers instead of having to have a whole meeting that's probably the most useful at this point because that won't take a lot of her time and we're probably going to end up having more and more questions as she answers questions so yeah and I think also as we watch what happens at the state level that could yeah a whole bunch of questions for her I think the biggest benefit if it passes at the state level is that they're going to run into the same problems we're talking about right now and in order to deal with it they're probably going to end up having to change or at least well define some of the details around hand counting and stuff like that which would mean that you know we wouldn't necessarily have to find workarounds rather we could just you know deal with actual solutions although as Shavina said it's for 2022 for them and aren't we hoping to do this next fall 2021 so I mean our our schedule Shavina was just saying that our our finance doesn't won't allow us to buy uh machines fiscal year 21 which ends in June so we could get them by November sorry we're currently in FY 21 so yeah for November of 2022 for next for 21 would be FY 22 right so there is a possibility of there being money in the budget could be yeah we're always one year ahead fiscal year one year my understanding is we the town was hoping to buy new voting machines either way is that true that we just we need new voting machines we do um and that was that was the reason that I um got the proposal for the new machines and so that was my response back in finance that it probably wouldn't happen in FY 21 and so it was something that I have to add to the budget for FY 22 I would be really hesitant however to have us figure out a whole sluice solutions for the fall of 21 if the state is figuring out stuff for the fall of 22 we just would want to postpone yep well and plus we want to go off of their education I mean that's a huge part right both right yep yep yeah it sounds like though what we do need is a recommendation for machines that would you know since we have to replace them anyways and we should have that recommendation in place so that um if shavina needs to go forward and you know get the ball rolling on that then uh we can uh have a recommendation that would both serve our current needs and also you know give us latitude in case the massachusetts bill passes yeah that would be ideal yeah yeah and I think we should also um but you know I think we've had some big ideas about wanting to really provide a ton of information at town council but our our mission is really to provide recommendations I think you know for example we could make recommendations about how to go about voter education and the kind of um procedures that need to be reworked up but we're not responsible for actually generating all of those um let's hope not I mean we don't have to do the implementation but we are still writing the legislation right well we have a draft up it's yeah don't know if it's worth proceeding and that that's what we're going to meet with the town attorney about yeah March um because we wanted her feedback on the appropriateness of that well I know at least for my section of the report that's where the recommendation is going to come from so at least for the technical side of things it makes sense for me to just proceed and finish that out um and then you know that report itself will mostly just be data about what's going on why it's going on you know technically wise what's available and then you know our our recommendation can change based on what's happening right so you know we can make an initial recommendation that includes you know machines and techniques and stuff but also say like you know this is based on the current state of everything's effed up and we don't know what's happening in the fall with the law so our other recommendation is maybe to hold off and see what happens at the state level first right and these are only recommendations so town council whenever they're making these decisions can of course be you know basing it on the current information if yes and s comes out with a great new software that can handle our multi-member rink choice scenario then it'll open up more options for instance okay so we're going to go ahead with this report and as much as we can yes so i have like bits and pieces from various people so one question is just about process what's the most efficient process for putting the pieces together and getting the whole thing edited not doing it in open meeting law as a part of the town that would be the most efficient way of doing it are you originally tanya you were collecting the pieces right seems full of all kinds of pieces from different people yeah it would seem to me to make sense to complete the process so that we have all the pieces and then assess whether for example some of them are uh two summary and others are overly detailed figure out what the the common course needs to be for the report then begin piecing it together and and probably get uh one person to produce a coherent draft for everyone to review and mark up we can also leverage i mean you know zoom and internet technology is you know uh this is something my wife talks about a lot because she's dealing with us over at UMass where now everything's suddenly switching online and you know you have a whole bunch of faculty or like what's email um it's that we shouldn't just think of zoom and stuff as a as a temporary replacement but we should talk about leveraging what makes this kind of meeting useful and one of the things that immediately jumps out is we don't have to ahead of time send a document to tanya who then projects it on the screen we all have screen sharing ability so we are able to go through our own sections of the report and show people uh you know from you know from our computers which we're already set up on so that would be something I'd like to see too is people can walk us through their own sections uh on screen share it's a good idea I like that approach that maybe we can target a couple sections for meeting for a next series of meetings and get everyone's comments back up back on them the person can kind of present what's in there get feedback on it update it and then send it to me to put together in a master document okay so for I would I would I would argue though that trying to give useful feedback real time through screen sharing doesn't work very well for me I mean I I need to have a document in front of me that I can go through more carefully and highlight and make notes and that sort of thing absolutely yeah well I can I can send the documents out well in advance to everyone and for example if you have suggestions you could screen share your marked up copy of the document show us your suggested wording or the places you know that you had comments on mm-hmm yeah and then tanya will have the master document and she can make those changes while watching your screen and stuff yeah um okay so for the action plan we have continue working on the report we have compile questions uh for the lawyer uh there was a third one what was it um well what about the lhs and we also have some questions we wanted to send to jeff silvestro just um can we get some sample ballots from him just I think we already did we have those yeah like ours where they have you know 12 candidates running for x number of seats I mean that's I'm just trying to remember what the matrix looks like I forget do we make it like candy or something whatever we need to see a big matrix for the number of um people we'd have um perhaps you know running for a school committee yep or libraries so I'd like to see some not just for our numbers but I don't care about the numbers I don't see what the ballot looks like or something like that yeah I remember we sent those out a long time ago uh I think or maybe we got them right before everything got cut off and so we didn't send them out so I'll let me let me check and see check for a sample I think what we saw had just one um contest per page though and that's not going to fly if I'm thinking correctly so we definitely limited what he was going to send us simply because he had limitations on his time but I remember me and Tanya talked together and we basically covered the major necessities for our ballots and had them include it so even though it wasn't going to be even though the sample ballot wasn't a an exact replica of what our ballot was going to look like it covered what we needed to see in it in terms of the number of uh people running for a position uh a two-sided ballot that kind of stuff they got that from I think the the follow-up I wanted to do with them was he claimed that he couldn't double-sided and if that's true then we're looking at like three pages for the ballot or something it just starts to get completely unworkable yeah but you recall there was also the issue of it's not being two-sided because of the potential for bleed through right and we we thought that there was perhaps a way around that through positioning Tanya your idea was to flip the ballot so that it wouldn't print over over print itself on the back as well they'd be over the white space it looked like the bubbles were only they were limited to just yeah and so if you just have the bubbles on the other side on the other half it shouldn't be able to prove so yeah I didn't I didn't quite understand that no that was the issue that's right um we also he'd feel that he'd sent us like a a stack of ballots that um I bubbled in and sent that sue I gave you way back when to send back to him and we've never followed through on that so maybe we should follow through on that with him too just that that would generate an example output I think was what we're looking for an example output from a rank choice election like what one of our local elections would be okay so that's also on the list send ballots back to LHS yeah we already did I think oh okay soon as that right we already sent that stack back I can't remember I'll have to look it up I'll look at my old emails I'll check out that was the sort of middle of March I think I handed that over to you okay so Sue will check for that yes the questions that we need for LHS are essentially the ones that Ellen and Tanya are bringing up which is the like the multi-page double side that kind of stuff in terms of the actual having him come down and show us the equipment it was more just for a visual inspection and see how it works and get a walk through and get a feel for it because all the tech specs were already published and pretty clear the LHS rep has been really helpful in going through all that stuff also I think in part because the town's done a really good job of developing a relationship with them for our current machines do they have a video that you know of I wonder if they have a demo online when I look at it right on YouTube yeah when I looked a while ago I didn't see the demo so I'll go check it out most of what I saw on their page was just advertising material that told me absolutely nothing about the product and everything about how great they are with catch phrases but I didn't hold that against them because that's everybody trying to catch your eyes right that's right okay all right so I will look for the demo video yeah so it maybe we really don't need even a zoom meeting with him if we can just get some um answers to sort of our pressing questions just so we know what what the ballot would be like in terms of number of pages and maybe um if you can we can just finish off that experiment we started with the the set of demo ballots just to see what the output looks like for the the result of the fake election did this is something I wanted to ask everybody in your research on other states implementation right choice voting did you happen to get any information on the machines they were using other than Minneapolis or Minnesota which we covered pretty pretty substantially and because I'd be curious to see what kind of when I was writing my report I realized there just wasn't enough information like there was all the technical information that was provided and what kind of fits our needs and stuff like that but there wasn't a whole lot of you know here's what the other state has done with one of these machines that we're looking at and here are the things that they ran into that we should you know learn from so I can say that there I did get that information from Maine um and I don't remember what I learned but I'm going to go back to my notes and I can let you know thank you and I'll do the same for the Bay Area because I know they actually switched machines they have something they did not like and they switched so I'll uh I'll look into that as well in the Bay Area actually had the multi-member districts the issue with Maine I think they only did single uh can't single member just elections but I think the Bay Area had more like what we have is that true I think so and they first started off not doing a matrix they had it with check marks and this thing that they couldn't stand it was a balance were horrible so they switched to uh the bubbles that would be super useful I would really appreciate that no pressure I'll find it so Jesse I just found some of my notes um about Maine do you want to hear now is that helpful or should I summarize and give it to you if these are notes that have already been presented at the meeting uh I believe it's fine for you to just send them to me through Tanya okay and then I'll be able to go on it on my own I also don't want to take up a ton of meeting time I'm sure people okay I'll go back and look and see what's in the minutes and then okay I mean if you screen share right now real quick and scroll through it everything's recorded so then it will have been shared at a meeting so then you can definitely yeah I can't yeah I don't think I can screen share with notebook because it's really like hard to okay all right but uh yeah I think it's I think I may have mentioned all these things in the past so we'll um I'll go back and look great yeah but I know all the places I checked up on were essentially they were more hounds that were doing it and doing it by hand because they couldn't afford the software yeah not happy about it I wouldn't be over there like man if I had to do that by hand like people would be not no not happening no I'm not that's not my lane at all I was an English major not a math major there's no way the challenge yeah it makes no sense yeah no maybe here for a month even if Minneapolis style copying pasting extravaganza is just just that makes no sense that seemed just miserable and not it's not a good process and it's open to error you don't want anything to be open to error that was actually something I was thinking about when we were talking about pitching you know the the taking a picture of the write-in ballots or the write-ins to you know use for ink choice voting and I you know I didn't mention it because I was like we probably don't want to point that out and we probably don't have data on it but man wouldn't it be useful to say like hey here's the you know error percentage when we do it by hand here's the error percentage when you do it in a machine right so if you're trying to tell us that not taking a picture of this is safer you know the other side of that is that here's how much error occurs but you know we don't have the data for that so Ellen you're muted yes I'm back I did find my San Francisco notes and it said that there when they first held their rcb election in 2004 they used sequoia the hanging chat company hired by dominion and then as of november 2019 they switched to dominion democracy okay the one through the lhs was that that's the one through lhs yeah yeah we can make stuff between our es and s and image cast evolution i wrote down that's the es and s right no am i wrong there it's been a while i have my report open let me look at the names are ridiculously similar well you've got to have some sort of a patriotic name in there so es and s was the original manufacturer of the dominion and they sold it to lhs just as the same with the active for es and s held the license for those machines originally and they sold a lot of those licenses to lhs interesting right because lhs is just a distributor right correct yeah yeah let me see that's because as far as we know the democracy suite is currently the only voting tabulated software is that correct commercially available oh man i'd have to go through the one uh the dominion ones that were uh from my memory uh produced or being sold by lhs are yeah the only ones that had uh ranked choice uh not tabulation but the calculation stuff so both companies have machines which can scan ranked choice voting and produce the uh what it's called the uh the vote data set or whatever it's called um cast vote record cast vote record there you go uh but yeah dominion was the only one that had the ability to uh to do the actual calculations okay um but we did also find that there's that third party uh third party system which can also do it right but that hasn't been certified by the state right yeah and i played a bunch with that and it has some issues and i think we're comfortable recommending that as an option you're talking about the third party software yeah yeah the open source stuff yeah you know it sounds nice but the town doesn't really want to get into the business of fixing and writing election software so boy are we a quiet group yeah is that it went down we have our tasks yeah i think we got stuff we have do we have uh any portions of the report that are not yet assigned to someone to to write um i think everything was assigned the question is if we actually if we kind of got cut off from meeting right the point when we were kind of really gearing up to get all that written up so some of it may have kind of halted in its cracks i can um send around again to everyone the pieces that we have so far and if anybody has stuff they haven't sent to me just so we kind of can find out where we're at um then we can evaluate what might be missing um and proceed from there yeah i was doing in sorry interrupt the intro um the intro and the overview and that a lot of that is a moving target so uh that'll take me a while to get back in the swing of that since uh who knows what's changed since february when i or january when i dropped it and i always set up and then i wrote and sent in the section on tabulation methods but i volunteered to also do the the voter uh outreach and education and i haven't done that yet so i need to do that and send it to you yeah that's also going to change yeah okay for next meeting do we have uh ideas for an agenda or should we pick one or two sections of the report that we can uh you know go over and work together or should we all just have like some smart goals for the next uh for doing the report for the next time and then we'll just kind of do a quick overview uh co-olate them but then spend most of the time on something else like you know questions for the lawyer or whatever and then after that meeting we would all be able to go over the sections of the report that were complete and provide you know feedback and stuff on our time as john said you know i'm kind of the same i gotta have some quiet time to go through something to actually process it do we want to update our timeline would that help seems to me as though meeting with the attorney is really important she seemed to have some opinions about how galvan's people ought to be approached and what the legislators are going to want to see and not see and in light of the current situation the the um the rcv issue that will be coming to the ballot and also in light of the covid situation she may have some guidance that would be really helpful in helping us focus going forward and she doesn't have to travel if she's zooming well i can check in with paul to see what her availability is if the group would like to meet with her that you know she's not available until three months from now i would say we need to just move on but if she could meet with us say you know three weeks from now that could be really useful um so let me check in to find out what what our options are on that right yeah we should get her on the calendar if we can in the meantime we should definitely send her a whole bunch of questions because i think if we you know if we send her a bunch of questions about this hand recount stuff the time when actually talking in person is going to help a lot is if the answers and the questions that follow that start to get really messy and need sort of real-time communication and it's best if we kind of unearth a lot of those before we start meeting so that if we do have a time set to meet with her we're ready to hit the ground running as opposed to you know trying to go through that process in a 15 to 20 minute period with her over zoom do we have a list of questions for her we don't as of right now so so before we meet with her we need to generate that list right the one about the hand recount that seems like the most pressing one but there are i think there are others floating around so right so that's it is that it could be a sort of high priority item for our next meeting to generate that list of questions but we could still you know i can still push paul to try to set up a meeting with her as soon as possible right the questions ready at the time that we set up the meeting that makes sense by the time of the meeting yeah but even before if we can send her all the questions as soon as we you know create them if she can just send us answers back to those questions and it's you know really easy you know then you know if we still need the meeting time we can use it for some of the other questions we have you know yeah like we shouldn't we shouldn't constrain ourselves to you know waiting for a zoom meeting with her because stuff's crazy so okay so first priority is that we should be generating a list of questions for her um and getting those questions to tanya and then tanya's going to talk with paul about when we might be able to meet with her or you know what her scheduling is like it seems to me like we should also have maybe one or two sections of report that tanya's already received that we can review before our next meeting um and so if we have time we can start digging into those sections yes yes that sounds good and my other question is for uh for you jesse do you feel like you have enough information to contact jeff silvestro and get get some answers from him on some of our questions at this point is that yeah we we need those questions too though right like we talked about a couple of them here but we should have more than one or two before we send them off to him i can you know just send them those two questions just to start getting in touch with them again he's probably going to be like this guy uh but you know yeah who's this guy who keeps staring at me over zoom i don't what's going on all right he's gonna want to talk to you he wants the business so then on the support front was there anybody who wants to volunteer that they feel their section is ready to be discussed that they wanted to put that on our our next agenda to discuss the section that they have submitted a draft on we could take a look at the tabulation methods section that i wrote up it's i think three and a half pages and we could look at the ballot errors too that would be fine that's two pages i think that sounds good so we'll have those two sections um finalize the list of questions for the town attorney so you know is you're sort of getting your head back into the game here um if questions that we should be asking or refer to you email them to me i'll co-late you know the whole set of suggestions and then at the meeting we can go through and kind of figure out a finalized set sounds good sounds good actually i just saw something that might be an error in the last in the minutes from the meeting and i apologize for reading carefully now um so we called the meeting to order at 2 13 and we just missed it at 2 35 did we only meet for 20 minutes yeah we did quick yeah wow that's impressive i don't remember so a lot that seemed to get done for 20 minutes so i just wanted to double check 20 minutes longer than the average meeting should be about 18 that was good though thanks are we going to set the date for the next meeting today um do we want to do i got my calendar out ready i am free all next month except for uh the week of the 17th through the 21st i am gone and by gone i mean on vacation but probably not actually gone it's vacation yeah yeah yep well for me we have early voting starting on the 22nd going straight through so i'm from the 22nd on i'm straight out yeah i'd be fine meeting next friday as well it seems like most of what we have to do for next meeting anyways is just kind of getting our heads back in the game and you know creating some questions for the lawyers i don't think uh that's gonna you know require an enormous amount of time for any of us the woods 230 next friday works for me yep that's fine august 7th yeah 7 30 but i think i can move it so let me i should be able to move it so let's go for that or we could do three o'clock or it's 2 30 better three's fine for me he's all right okay you could literally say anytime after 10 30 i'd be fine i assume that uh we need to finish by four pursue four 15 four 15 we may well be you know i don't like meeting more than much more than an hour anyway okay so three o'clock three o'clock a week from today yep August 7th okay let's see for another 20 minute meeting yeah this was exactly an hour so that's impressive all right more time trying to figure out what we will what we've been doing yeah yeah i know okay you know i don't blame anybody or myself you know a lot of stuff's been going on it's going to take a while to kind of refocus yep you know all right so anything else before we wrap up move to adjourn my second on favor of adjournment hi hi hi thanks everyone rob good rob okay all right see you next week thank you