 So, for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Caitlyn Penya, I am the Director of Operations and Programs for the Center for Election Science. We are a nonpartisan, non-profit dedicated to empowering voters with voting methods that strengthen democracy. So the main thing that we advocate for is called approval voting and it allows you to vote for as many candidates as you like and a candidate with the most votes wins. And we've got today Kunal Goyal, he is here from Ballot Ready, he's a business development representative and he's going to fill us in on how we can make sure that we are able to vote safely and vote informed this election. So thank you so much for attending Kunal. Thank you, Caitlyn, and thank you to Center for Election Science. We're obviously sort of partners in this space, but I can definitely say we're big fans of you all at Ballot Ready and love the topic of this call and love the work you all are doing, so I appreciate you having me. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I love the work you guys do. It's really important to make sure that voters know how to vote in the first place and then also that they know they're informed about everybody, all of the people who are on their ballot and all of the issues because so often we go into the polling booth and we're just thinking about, you know, the president or the governor or some of those top line races and people aren't always ready to vote on these random, you know, city council members or judges or those sorts of things. So I think it's really helpful to have a tool to be able to know what's going to be on your ballot ahead of time so you can vote on every issue and every person. And I think this year, so it's election year, obviously people are always concerned about making sure that they can vote, but this year things are even more uncertain, even more different because of the pandemic. States are changing the things that they're changing their requirements. So some of them are expanding vote by mail, some of them are expanding the absentee ballot access. And so I'm curious, like what have you all at ballot ready been hearing from folks on the ground or organizations that you work with about what people are going through this year as far as voting. Well, absolutely. And you nailed it on the head, you know, to start, as you mentioned, it's already difficult for voters to know about their down ballot candidates to know their rules. Even pre pandemic that was already a sort of sort of a challenge of ours and what we embarked on doing was making it much easier for every voter regardless of what state or county you're in to be able to find the information you need to vote and to vote informed. And just as you mentioned that challenges, you know, grown exponentially this year, do do the pandemic changing voter rules at the county level at the state level at federal level. And then also a perception problem as well right so you know if you look at certain polling data, people feel worried about voting this year they feel uncertain about about the vote. And yeah, that's exactly the gap that we want to help fill and that our partners want to help fill is that uncertainty but nonetheless that desire that people have to vote and be engaged to this year and to be informed. What's interesting is that in terms of you asked like what we hear on the ground and you know what what that looks like is the reality is that we just have to turn out the vote as much as possible right we have to do what we do in that sense and that is make all the data that is out there easily accessible people to people, provide people with their options on how to vote. You know whether it be by mail drop off in person early in person on Election Day, give voters their options let them make a choice for themselves on how to vote. You know, it's very difficult for Val ready or for any of our partners customers users to account for a lot of the issues that are going to occur within county election offices within certain institutions that we ultimately have no control over. What we can do and the best that we do is we just try to be as communicative with county offices that we work with with different services we work with in terms of vote by mail and just be clear about our goals. So ultimately you'll hear it all the time but through all the uncertainty through all the changing rules, our goal remains the same and that is just to help people vote. What happens on Election Day or after Election Day is not totally within anyone's control. Yeah, I think. I think focusing on getting the information that we are able to get and controlling the things that we are able to control is really important right now right there so much uncertainty and there's so much that feels out of our control. But just getting the information that we can get is really important and so we're, we're about, I think 47 ish days, maybe away from from Election Day on November 3. So seven weeks. Yeah, seven weeks, seven weeks. So for anyone who hasn't registered yet is there still time. How can they find out how to register. There is still time. It depends on what states you are in so registration deadlines vary from state to state registration is coming up soon I would say the majority of states have registration registration deadlines in mid October. There's a couple ways, which you can find to find out this information so one thing I do want to say to that I didn't mention is that already is a non partisan organization. And we are we are literally non partisan and what I mean by that is that all the data that's available through our website is sourced directly from county election offices from the state and then from candidates themselves so there is no piece of data on the website that comes from anything but the source that is directly presented. And that goes to for everything registration vote by mail. We work with county election offices and and that's what makes it non partisan. Two ways so the first is the non ballot ready way which I just will offer up in case it's useful is to visit your state, your Secretary of State website for your for your whatever state it may be so for me I'm in Georgia you can just type in Georgia you can also most states I should say when you go when you click on that link will have a portal. It's not always the most user friendly portal it's not always the most easy understand and we'll get into that ready in just a second but almost all states should have a portal where you can check registration and then get registered directly. Again it varies from state to state so I don't want to give a blanket coverage of like you can do this no matter what. But so most states do have portals you can also call your county elections office so again the best way if you're not going to use a voter tool would be just to Google your county and just the words elections office and a number should pop up and you can call and confirm that. With that said to simplify all that process. You can also go to about ready.org and type in your address into our tool into our widget and pull up all the information you need. I'm happy to go through that now if you'd like or shall I go ahead and share my screen. Yeah sure go right ahead you should have screen sharing privileges. Fantastic. Alright so are we looking at the right screen here hopefully. Yep. Awesome so this is about ready.org and my wife has been a little funky so bear with me hopefully everything goes the way we hope. You can get here type in in www.bowleray.org Google bowleray.org about ready it should be the first thing that comes up. And you can see right away there's this bar where you can type in your address and hit get started. There's a bit more to the website. We can talk about that later but for now we'll go ahead and try this out. So I will go ahead and type in my address and hope that no one shows up at my door. So you just got to select your dress hit get started. And yes so our tool is called the election center this is a new tool actually for us in 2020. Basically we had all these separate tools for separate tasks just as Caitlin mentioned researching your ballot finding out registration we figured okay let's put that all together in one. When it first starts it comes up with a little prompt with a little helper to guide you through. I'm going to exit out of that because today I'm your helper to guide you through so we're not going to need that. So you can see here hopefully this is easy and I'll make sure it's on that we organized it so that it goes in sort of the order of all the steps of what you need to do to vote and vote safely and vote informed. And this first panel you can see the very basic so you type in your address my next election is Tuesday November 3. And simply for typing in your address it gives you this sort of you are 20% ready to vote. The idea here being that people like seeing a progress bar. People don't like seeing an unfinished progress bar so you know we all want to just make sure we're finishing our plan. So the first step and I know you mentioned registration so we'll get to that Caitlin but one step is you can pledge to vote. This is sort of the simplest tool that becomes kind of available all year where you can just sort of commit sign give a reason why you're pledging to vote in this election. Useful for times like June July, you know, keeping people engaged and so, you know, if anything please come and pledge your pledge to vote. And then you also have this check your rights about that real quick I think I have actually heard that there's research that shows that even just the act of someone saying I am going to vote this election increases the chance that they actually follow through and do vote. And that and that's exactly right and that's exactly why we had it and you know it's it's not the most dynamic part of this process but you're absolutely right you know just by saying you're going to vote committing to it verbally digitally. It makes a big difference and it's helpful to to get an idea of how many people are committing to vote you know what is the excitement like so absolutely right. And then there's the check their check your registration box. So if you go to about ready.org. You type in your address, it will help you walk through checking registration for that specific address. Depending on your state, and we won't finish this flow just for now, because I am hopefully I'm quite sure I'm verified and registered. But one thing you'll notice is that this flow will vary from state to state. So Georgia was fairly straightforward in terms of registration, we're able to check that ourselves. Some states you'll see that it'll take you to the vote the state portal instead they prefer that they do it on their site. So it's configured differently for all 50 states and that makes it usable for voters in all 50 states as well. So just keep in mind we're going through the Georgia flow right now, but that may or may not be what you see exactly for your check registration so it's whatever is most readily available. That's, that's super helpful. And so that I see the next step is requesting a ballot and that was that was one of my next questions is, you know there are some states that are 100% vote by mail there are some states that are expanding the access to ballot or to absentee ballots so states where normally there are only certain requirements that you have to meet. Now, more people can can have access to that. So, yeah, what's that step to request your ballot. If you want to vote by mail or absentee. Absolutely. And you're right again, all these rules have have changed somewhat a record number of states will have vote by mail option this year. I actually think just today, a new state opted in for some form of vote by mail so up to 46 states that are offering vote by mail. Some states, I think it's four states including Washington and Colorado, send absentee ballots to all registered voters. So that's also important to know. Recently a few organizations have pushed out vote by mail including the United States Postal Service and Washington, Colorado became upset because the wording did not apply to their system. So, you're absolutely right there are tons of caveats and different rules. With that said, again, we put together this FAQ page for voting by mail. You can go to about about ready.org slash FAQ, and just very straightforward for your state I'll do Georgia again because I'm partial. You can find out all the very important details you need all the dates. Whether your state has vote by mail so there are some states that offer conditional vote by mail so you can only vote by mail if you, you know, qualify based on certain criteria, you're a veteran or something like that. And then there are states that have no excuse absentee voting Georgia is actually an example of one of those states. And on this FAQ page you can see. So let me break it down actually just a little bit farther just because I do want to be clear on this so there's a couple steps to vote by mail the first is getting registered. The second and these are the basics but the second is to apply to vote so we mentioned only four states send out ballots automatically and all the other states you need to apply in order to get a ballot and vote by mail. Let's talk about the application process in the tool just a little bit. So you have dates on when is the first day to apply when is the last day to request about to apply. Once you apply to vote by mail you wait and your county election office will send the ballot to you in the mail, along with a return envelope. Some states stamp their return envelope some states don't that's another team thing to keep an eye on but you get that about in the mail you fill it out, you put it in the return envelope you put it in the mailbox, and can emphasize this enough everyone hears it all the time do this as early as possible. You know, there will be a lot of people who will attempt to request ballots in mid October and it's a fine line you know that that's when you want to be returning your ballots at the latest so it says here, you know, for example in Georgia, when is the last day to request about Friday October 30. Okay, but you have to get your ballot returned postmarked by November 3 at 8pm. So what you have to ask yourself is if you apply that late do you think you're going to get about and be able to return by then. So here I'll, you know the rules per state there are being updated but I encourage you if you're interested in voting by mail to check out your dates mark your calendars. And then we can also talk about the the tool itself, if you're interested in that. But yeah any any other questions on vote by mail, Caitlin. I don't think so not right now it's it's such a. It's such a state by state thing that it makes it difficult to say this is what you're going to do or this is what the rules are because literally every single state is different. I think what you emphasized about requesting it as early as possible is really important. I know I was listening to a podcast last week with the Secretary of State, or the deputy secretary of state for Ohio, and they have similar to Georgia. Request state, I think is it's actually that Saturday. So October 31. And he's like the deputy secretary of state has been asking for that to be moved up because he was even saying there's no way for us to even get those ballots to you that fast it's kind of even have this as our as the deadline because it's it's just about impossible so request it as early as you possibly can. Absolutely and and also when you get your ballot to you know if you get it a little bit late. One key thing and again will mention as always this amendment that it does vary by state but for most for most states. It just needs to be postmarked by November 3 and order to be counted. And the reason that's important is that you might be a little bit better off if you get that ballot late, not dropping it in a mailbox but instead going to the post office and having them kind of just doing it there because they'll post market right away. So even if that mail doesn't get delivered until maybe a few hours after because that postmark will be set the ballot will count. So that's another another tip to. Yeah, actually another question that I just thought of with that is, I know that a lot of states I don't know if all of them do this but a lot of them have the ballot drop off boxes. And or you can take your ballot and drop it off at the polling place. Do you know any more information about that or how people can find those details. Okay, so it gets tricky quickly. Yes, you one great option is also dropping off so you apply to vote by mail you get your ballot, and instead of mailing it back, there are various drop off locations in your county provided by the county office. Usually the county election office itself has a drop off location. And there are certain dates, some are 24 hours some are limited where you can drop off your ballot instead. You know, for me I'm always going to encourage you to go to about ready.org in the request about it flow, as well as the find a kind of polling place flow you can also find drop off locations. And you can sort of make a plan for yourself so you can choose your time choose your location, email it to yourself, and you just have that information it also provides directions, and we can potentially look at that and just a second depending on what's available through this flow as of now. And then Caitlin you mentioned as well. People who apply to vote by mail but then choose instead to vote in person. This does happen, you know, probably. I think in the Georgia primary, there were about 500,000 voters who applied to vote by mail but instead decided to vote in person. Again I just use Georgia as a reference but either in early or on the primary election day. Rules vary by state. This is one where we are still collecting data on what the state rules are so it will be included as well in these frequently asked questions, how to vote if you applied to vote by mail and instead want to vote in person. As I mentioned, we're still collecting that information. Frankly, a lot of counties and states are still determining those rules for themselves. This is such a dynamic election with vote by mail. So we're still collecting that but most for most states, the rule is that if you apply to vote by mail and you want to vote in person you just have to bring that ballot with you that you've got in the mail to your in person polling location. That way you're not don't have a ballot, you know, at home and a ballot at the polls. So again Georgia for example you just bring that ballot with you and they all get you set up in person. So that also is an option. It is out there if you apply to vote by mail. You can for the most part in most states vote in person should you wish. And I'll add one more one more thing to Caitlin is that I think voting by mail and dropping off are safe choices. So if you go by mail and get a ballot and do a drop off location that's actually my preferred choice of voting personally. But you know I just want to express that like, these are secure ways of voting if you do it in time. Yeah, I think that's really important to emphasize as well. It's, it's completely secure. There are many states, as you mentioned earlier who have been doing 100% vote by mail. There's at least four I think maybe now five states that do 100% vote by mail, they've done studies, and the incidents of voter fraud is not any higher than what we see for in person voting and voter fraud in general is very, very, very, very small. It's, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent. So I think people should feel confident in voting by mail voting absentee and especially if they drop it off because then they know exactly when it got there where it went. 100%. Awesome. Well, and so if people do choose to vote in person or maybe that's the only way that they are able to vote due to their, their state's rules. How can they find their polling place and this year obviously people might need to be concerned about is there social distance distancing enforced do I have to wear a mask, am I going to vote from my car, like there's lots of other things to consider as well. Absolutely, there are. Yes, so absolutely agree with what you said regarding vote by mail and voter fraud and vote by mail historically has always been a secure way to vote. You know, we started the year emphasizing vote by mail because of COVID right you know that why vote by mail is playing the role it does because people feel somewhat insecure just as you mentioned, I'm going in person. With that said, a lot of people are going to vote in person this year. You know, again, just a recent poll doesn't anything happen but more than 50% slightly more are planning to vote in person either very early on Election Day. In terms of finding your polling location again would encourage you to visit ball ready.org. There is the find your polling place box. When you type in your address again it's going to pull up unique options for your specific address it's to you coded all the way down to your address. And here it's as available soon. So right now, we are still collecting and states and counties are still determining early voting locations. Early voting actually starts tomorrow I believe in two states and sort of gets rolling throughout the month. And then obviously becomes pretty much widespread. I think through almost all 50. Now there are a few that actually don't have a person in voting but the majority of states do have early in person that will get going in October. States and counties are still determining that. So if you're curious if it's not yet available about ready.org. Again, would recommend calling your county elections office if you're trying to find out that information. You can also try their website. That's exactly where we get the information from. And it's not always the easiest to use. So that can be tricky, but would encourage you to visit your county election office or call, or come back to about ready in a week or a few days and find find that information. In terms of election day polling locations. That's done a little bit differently that you should be able to find on through your state portal. So we are all we are still sourcing those as well, but they will become available through about ready.org. At least with a few weeks to go. But for most states you should be able to if you're again keen on finding your election day location right now. In the same portal where you check your registration it should also tell you your registered election day voting location. Unfortunately, I can't go through this flow of find your polling place because it's not available for for my precinct in Georgia, but it does look a little bit like this, the request about flow. And here's another really useful page. By the way, if you click request about you see your vote by mail information, the dates, how it works, who is eligible, and then the same thing for in person. You can find your early voting dates. When you if you click find your polling place here, it'll ask you to sign up for a reminder. So feel free to go to balleray.org. Go through this flow sign up for reminder and will text or email you when your location becomes available. So that's a really great feature. But basically, it'll take you through a flow where you'll verify all your information find your polling location. This obviously is for requesting about another incredible flow that allows you to apply to request about digitally online. But basically there's a flow for each of the options that are presented here. And that should do the trick to help you make a plan to vote and vote either by mail or in person. Awesome. Yes, I hope everybody will make a plan to vote, especially this year with things just being uncertain. It's really nice to have this tool to, you know, get those reminders have an email or a piece of paper that tells you that you requested your ballot or where your polling places that you've checked your registration and you verified it if you're like me and you recently moved. That's really important to do. So I hope folks will do that. And part of making that plan as we talked about earlier is just knowing what is going to be on your ballot. Right. So how what are the tools that ballot ready has available for seeing who the candidates are what they stand for and the same thing with referendums and initiatives. Absolutely. So already is covering the ballot and all 50 states this year. And that is very much underway. So counties are releasing the lists of their candidates for different races. We're adding those lists verifying them and then conducting research on those candidates. And we will provide a voter guide for every single address. That's the goal anyway. And yes, just same in the selection center. You can still on the same screen if you look at research ballot and if you click on that it will take you to your personalized ballot guide. And just to give you a really quick look at this, you can see on the left hand bar, all the candidates and measures that will be on on your on your ballot you can sort by the level of the races. And I believe we have finished candidate gathering so these lists are finished and then you can also see your measures to. What you can do is you can click on the race that you're interested in. You can read a little bit about what that race is that's more useful, especially for down ballot positions that people are a little less familiar with. And then you can see the candidates up for election in that race, you can click on a candidate profile and view the research research that we have sourced so far for that candidate again a process that is very much underway and will become much more popular. But for a big Senate candidate like John Ossoff we do have some most information. We have all the social media links a website link to the campaign website. I think that is as useful as anything, especially for some down ballot candidates to just go to their social media and go to their websites, not always easy to find. Again, very key. This is all sourced from what candidates themselves provide so nothing nothing here issue stances as well so you can see where they stand on various issues broken up into specific categories. This, this wasn't me writing this this was this is John Ossoff on his campaign. If you click on it you can see it's hyperlinked I won't do it right now but it'll take you right to the spot in the site where we pulled this exact quote. So you can see issue stances for different categories and then you can also see endorsements again endorsements that he provided. So you can see key endorsements and should you wish to should you decide okay this is my pick you can also click add to my ballot and make a sample ballot for yourself. So what I would recommend is whenever maybe a little closer to when you plan to vote when you get your ballot after applying for in the mail or a few days before you go to early vote. Go to about ready.org typing your address go to the ballot guide and just one by one go through and add in each each race your ballot. You can save it email it print it share it with your friends. And again, Caitlin just as you mentioned the real value of this is in the local candidates. We're still collecting data but, you know, being able to see okay who's who's up for election as my county sheriff. I'm getting to read a little bit about her. That's the value add that we have as long as well as the measures here. So, as I mentioned, you know, data research is underway. But we have will have comprehensive ballots and I encourage you to go ahead and check it out as well already and start getting familiar with races candidates. And this is one thing Caitlin unlike many of the other things that I said that you can't find on county portals or state portal so this is a very unique thing that we do. And it's one of the big gaps we wanted to fill something you mentioned the beginning so hopefully people find it useful and I encourage people to use it as much as possible. Yeah, I love this especially for the the local race part and for the the ballot measures and initiatives, because, you know, so much of government happens on a local level we just have all of this attention on on the national races and that's where, you know, the drama is and people like to fight and complain. But, you know, the things that affect us every day are being decided in our city governments and in our state governments and so it's really important for people to be informed about that and be able to vote on those candidates and know who they are. And then, you know, similarly with the initiatives lots of times there there are important initiatives on a ballot, and maybe you, you had never heard of it, and you have to go read the ballot language on the ballot and that's all the information you have. It might be difficult to understand sometimes that ballot language, the language of those initiatives it's written in kind of some legal ease, you know, and it can be it can be hard to decipher. And so getting this information ahead of time gives you the chance to read about it on ballot ready and then also do your own external research to know what's going on. Absolutely. And to your point, you know, you can't you can't totally blame the voter for having difficulty knowing what's on the ballot. It's not always really available. So, you know, that's what this is for. And, and yes, this is an opportunity to conduct your own research as well. And that's why we also just provide the racism and the names and keep it all 100% nonpartisan. Yeah, I love that. It's great. So if somebody wants to use this site, it's available online and then there's also an app, I think. There actually is not an app in the app store. But for some reason. Yeah, so there is a very mobile friendly version. So if you Google already on your phone, it's designed to there's a whole different design for mobile so it's very easy to use. But yeah, would encourage you to go to ballot ready.org on your phone on your computer. And there's also the flip side of our company, which I'll just allude to really quickly, which is that we also provide that widget and this data to other organizations who help us reach different communities and different groups. So we have both pay products and of course all this data is available for free as well. So, you may be using about ready tool through another source and not know it and that's great and that's what we want. So, you know, this this data will get out as much as possible. And if anybody's interested in learning about obtaining this data for your organization or these tools for your organization. You can also visit civic engine calm and find out a little more. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that we should know or anything we didn't cover that that you'd like to share. I think we covered, you know, a lot of the the main things that that we wanted to, you know, I might my sort of last word I think would just be that, you know, I do think there is some fear of voting this year, despite the excitement and I would just say, fear stop you, you know, go check your registration request a ballot. If you don't want to request a ballot vote in person research your ballot you know do do everything you can. And if you don't don't let it be that fear that prevents you from from doing it right so, you know, excitement for this election is super high I know there's uncertainty but the only thing we can each control as individuals is to try to vote and vote informed hopefully not ready or provides the resources you need to do that and even if it doesn't that's no excuse either so. But yeah otherwise like I think we covered what we want to and Caitlin thank you so much for your time. Awesome, thank you so much canal and yeah I will I'll just reiterate that I hope everyone who wants to vote will go vote this year and that they don't let any concerns about safety or about security stop them there are lots of ways. There's early voting, there's vote by mail, depending on your state. And if you have to vote in person, wear your mask just stay far away from other people but don't don't let everything that's going on stop you from expressing your opinion and having your voice be heard. And as everybody knows we love approval voting we want to make sure that people are empowered and that their voices are heard. And so if you like approval voting if you want if you want more people to be empowered with that if you want to see more events like this one. You want to hear from more people. We can always use contributions and support from you so you can go to election science.org slash donate to help us out. But thank you to canal thank you to all of our supporters who help make these awesome events happen. And yeah, go out and vote everyone. Thank you have a great day everyone. Thanks you too.