Electoral Board Meeting   9/18/2025

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to the September the 18th meeting of the Albemarle County Electoral Board.

We don't remember how many, except that Jim has written the minutes for every other meeting we've had that's an official meeting.

We are now in session.

We have quorum.

I move that we approve the agenda as written.

either under new business or other items.

Yep, amended.

Next, we have a brief announcement from the board that we're gonna turn over to the registrar because the registrar has some wonderful new announcements.

We have had a very exciting and productive year in our office.

We have prepared, I believe both.

Alex has that up and ready to go.

8.30 tomorrow morning.

Could you announce the in-person absentee early voting hours just so we have it on the record?

8.30 until five, same as our office hours.

And we're not doing any early and late on Tuesdays and Thursdays, correct?

Correct.

And then the last two Saturdays before the election.

And we have mailed out our first emails, which is close to 7,000, have already been mailed out.

So that's our big bulk of ongoings have all

They probably will mail everything tomorrow.

I mean, tomorrow is the deadline across the state, so that's... And we will be sending them subsequent ballots as they come in in large groups.

As it gets closer to the end, we will not send them off.

We will make sure they go out from our office so that they

go out in a more timely manner.

It's just one extra step.

So everything is up to date on ours.

We're going to be emailing all our ballots today.

The email ballots will go out today.

Overseas.

To overseas people.

That's the UOCAVA ballots, FPCAs.

Anybody who's overseas has requested a ballot by email, which they can only get if they are overseas.

So those will go out.

Those are the ones who are overseas, but don't want their ballot emailed.

They want it mailed.

So those have to be mailed from our office.

And we just print the labels and mail them directly from here.

That's a small number.

And then the most exciting thing

What we have is that we have hired a new chief deputy registrar and she is, we are so excited and so lucky to have her.

She has a wide variety of experience.

She has been an election official, so she knows it from the ground up.

She has been in management, journalism,

She has a real exciting, real exciting background.

And she has already blended into the office.

She's gotten all her paperwork done and she will be serving long after I'm gone.

Alex and Jonell are going to be your go-to people.

So everything we do in the, everything that we are doing in the office, we are training together so that when I'm gone, we have two very

She does.

Yes, just for this week only.

Just this week.

Are you going all the way back?

She's going all the way back.

But then next week, she's gonna be in Lynchville, so she's still gonna be driving 29 every morning.

So she's on 29, I'm on 64.

Yes.

Do you want to add anything?

No, that was terrific.

Thank you so much.

Well, other than I'm really excited about being here, I cannot wait to get to work with everybody.

And I'm just, even though it's in the middle of an election, you know, I'm ready to go.

And the board especially wants to remember that you were on the electoral board.

Oh, yes.

She also served on the electoral board.

So she's got it down.

so yeah we're so excited and I can tell you the office staff is excited they're all buzzing in there everybody's talking everybody's working together well so it's it was hubbubing when I went in this morning we're doing a great great thing so and the nice we've thrown her into the fire coming in in the middle of election is really hard there's not time to sit down and train and

but she's learning by watching what each person in the office does and everybody contributes to, you know, oh, this is what I do, this is what I do.

So she's gonna learn, she's gonna learn all those things and jump right on.

Thank you.

You all have.

See you later.

Shut.

Almost shut.

Almost shut.

So the noise doesn't.

Public comment.

This board is always happy to take public comment during the first, at this point in the discussion and in the meeting.

We ask that you control your comments for three minutes, unless you have something really important that's going to take longer, that you introduce yourself and identify yourself by name and if you represent an organization.

We also are happy to take comments from the public during the course of the meeting.

Just raise your hand and wait to be recognized by the chair so we're not talking over each other.

This is Louis Johnson.

I may be jumping the gun a little bit if I am.

I do apologize.

At the last meeting, I was in-person meeting, and this is for Madam Chair.

I believe you had said that you had talked with some other electoral boards and some other places, and you decided it was a good idea to open up the meeting with a prayer.

Okay, and I understand that, but my problem with that, well, it's not a problem, it's just the observation.

We're having problems on this end.

Okay.

I understand about the prayer last week.

I thought it was going to be ongoing, but to decide a prayer last week, there was a lot of torment going on in this country.

So I don't understand why we cannot follow up and be consistent instead of having a fair for a particular situation.

You did mention a particular name, but when I pledge an oath to the electoral, I mean to the election as a chief slash assistant chief,

and poll worker.

We say that we are going to be nonpartisan.

I think we need to stick to that and basically squash all what is going on and hold ourselves accountable not to inject one opinion or another.

Thank you very much for your statement.

Is there anyone else who'd like to make a comment this morning?

information.

Okay, seeing none, we'll move on.

Minutes from September 10th.

I made a minor modification for your request.

Thank you.

And I think that's in this one.

Yes, third bullet on the bottom of the third page.

And waive the reading.

Aye.

And September 12th, did you get a chance?

Read them last night.

All in favor say aye.

Thank you very much.

I will mention one thing we talked about and then the question was asked

And we see when we're appointing new people, can we at least see who they are?

And I said henceforth, we'll append them two minutes.

Since we only had four last time, I just put their names right there where we went into those four.

Yeah, I probably should have taken that off.

ADA inspections.

I have been trying to get literally all week in touch with the ADA compliance person for the county, the ADA compliance person for the school system, because we use many schools

Marcifly, they are a great place to have polling places.

I have learned the first names, the last names, and I've spoken to many people in the school system, including Bucky Seinlaw, who was the wrong person to speak with, but he's a lovely man and we had a nice conversation.

Hopefully today we will have response from the school system and they can verify that the schools and the rooms that we use and give me something in writing so the board can assume the schools are ADA compliant and then we will go to all of the other locations.

and we're gonna divide that up amongst the three of us and we're trying to get the reason I'm trying to get the county ADA person involved.

They were very kind and they came over when we moved the Branchlands polling place from one location to a new location and they came, a lovely man and woman came and did the ADA inspection with the board.

having trouble locating those two people.

Question on that.

Yep.

Yes.

Well, I don't know that we are supposed to be sending that anywhere.

I don't know that we are actually supposed to be sending that to the left.

It's a guidance for us to carry on.

But we have to verify that we've done it.

Okay.

Okay.

Anybody else have any old business that's not on the agenda?

Okay.

This is a fairly technical topic, so I'll introduce it by explaining first.

We had occasion to create a test deck to test our ballot on demand printing capabilities.

A test deck are the ballots that you run through your scanner, in this case, a DS-300, and see if the results you get out are the results you expect, whether those are the counts of the votes, or detect overvotes, or undervotes, or blank ballots, and act accordingly for all of those situations.

So you want to make sure that your scanner is properly recognizing

The ballots that get fed into it.

In this case, we were testing the ballots printed by the ballot on demand printers in the early in-person absentee voting that starts tomorrow.

Seemed important to get that tested.

And state guidance is that for a race, for example, where you have three possible options, you cast one ballot for the first option, two ballots for the second option, three ballots for the third option, the one, two, three process.

And then if you've done that across all of your balance and followed that pattern religiously, when you get to the end, it's really easy to see that the totals come out the way you expect them to.

I might have

10 for this candidate, 20 for this candidate, and 30 for the next candidate.

It's great.

However, what that means is that for ballots in a general election where write-in is a choice, write-in gets the majority of the votes, which doesn't mimic what voters do at all, usually.

Usually write-in is only occasionally used, and therefore it made more sense to me

This was while I was doing it, but I wasn't going to change it without bringing it to the board.

Made more sense to me than in the future, perhaps a 3-2-1 approach.

Again, if there were three candidates, you'd vote three for the first, two for the second, and one for write-in.

Three options, that is.

If there are four options, you simply continue the repeating.

You know, 3-2-1, 3-2-1, 3-2-1.

So it might work out that write-in was the right loop in that sequence to get a whole bunch, but most of the time that's not the case.

And I just wanted the board to establish as an ongoing practice in the future, pick a system of numbering that doesn't make write-in the most counted vote you got, because that usually doesn't occur and is not a good test of our systems.

I think it's a great suggestion.

And I would offer to your explanation, the code says that all of the electronic loading equipment must undergo logic and accuracy testing.

And unfortunately, in the past, the ballot on demand system, which prints ballots, that's what it does.

You check in a voter, those of you who've worked in in-person absentee, which is the only place we use ballot on demand, you know this, but for those of you who are not, the ballot on demand, a voter checks in to the poll pad, the registrar's assistant hits check in, and the printer prints the ballot from a blank piece of paper, a blank card stock,

because each optical scan piece of equipment uses a different weight and it may be a different size paper so that that optical scan will work, will read that piece of paper.

We in Albemarle had failed to do any LNA testing on our ballot on demand printers because the printers have to print accurately

with the timing marks around the outside so that the optical scan will read it accurately.

Law in the printing, then the machine, the optical scanner will not read that ballot correctly.

So we, the board, the registrar, Alex, and our vendor for the printer elect, excuse me, for the whole pads,

did LNA testing, and that's what Bucky was describing.

So now we know that our ballot-on-demand printers print correctly, because if they're off just a little bit, they won't be read correctly.

So that's what we did this week.

Thank you.

I just said the board agreed.

I didn't think you needed a motion.

That's fine.

Then I'll move that we, in following the state guidelines, one, two, three marking, we adjust where we begin that counting so that write-in does not end up being the most popular choice.

Good.

I will mention normally in testing our DS300 optical scans, the vendor actually produces the test deck and the order.

And I assume that will be true when we do the

My suggestion pertained to TestX that we have to produce ourselves.

Okay, so we've gotten that.

Yes, particularly.

I kind of wish Debbie was here, but Sherry is here.

Yes.

A lot of in-person, I call it early in-person EIP.

I don't think any of the rest of you.

Yeah, and for sure, Rick.

So I believe for election day, dealing with spoiled ballots should be the way it's always been, because you're just replacing a ballot, and the ballot officer is marking the spoiled ballots.

This is at the polling places.

We're not talking early in person.

At the polling places.

but early in Kirsten voting, because we're producing ballot on demand, it's a little different.

And the vendor, no ink, said, oh, it's really easy to spoil a ballot and report it and produce a second ballot off of all paths.

And we said, great, I don't think we knew that before.

But when the vendor was here Monday,

He showed us how to do this but I think only Clara Belle and I were watching and he went through it so fast that there was no chance to take notes and it wasn't all that simple.

It did require a chief sober ride and then you have to go into one of the advanced things and you have to find an icon for a spoiled ballot and then you have to

check a reason it was spoiled and then it produces a receipt like the other receipts that says spoiled ballot and then it produces a new ballot for that person.

What system have we been using up until now for dealing with spoiled ballots with our ballot on demand printing?

It goes to the chief and the chief will

We've never been taught that.

Yes.

Well, that's why I thought there was some, when you had a spoiled ballot, there was some communication with the registrar.

And this would be a little bit different.

Jim, I think that to answer confusion, to correct confusion, I'll call No Ink and get them to present a printed outline of exactly the steps.

And then I would agree.

I think in order to spoil a ballot and get a new ballot printed, it's probably easiest and safest to go through the chief.

But that way, all the chiefs will have a written

If the chief knows how to do it, then there's not any need for getting the registrar's office involved.

And Alex, in your work, did you come across maybe an already written instructions for how to do it?

Well, I was going to suggest that Alex talk to Corey and get those steps, but... Alex is doing everything, the work of multiple people.

So I'm trying to unload him.

I'll take care of calling Corey and getting this.

Ann or Rick, do you have any comment on

You really can't tell whether what he was telling us is a new, easier way to do it than it's been done before or exactly what?

No comment.

I'll get the written stuff, the written instructions, and we'll have it available tomorrow morning and every other morning for 45 days.

And maybe this would be a good time for an announcement.

Alex.

Correct.

Thank you very much.

Along with everything else.

Okay.

Does the board have any other items before we schedule the next meeting?

Okay.

We have a meeting already scheduled for next week.

but since Abel, oh, I forgot to introduce.

Our Abel council is here with us.

Andrea Ruege, do you have anything you would like to add to that meeting?

Sorry.

See, that's what happens when you're here so frequently.

We get used to seeing you and we forget to thank you.

And I would be remiss if I did not thank Ms. Ruege for being with us

in our hours of need.

You have been so helpful and you've got other things to do.

So we appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay.

We have a meeting next week.

I think we ought to go ahead.

That's correct.

We have a meeting on the 23rd.

Someone like him.

Yes, sir.

Would someone like to propose a date for the following week?

There's no doubt we'll need it.

Do we want to have another meeting that week?

All right, then the following week would not be good.

So skip forward.

We should schedule another meeting next week.

I do.

Just in case.

Because we still have some personnel matter.

We do.

We do.

I would have to cancel.

Okay, well, can we do it in the afternoon?

What time is your shift in Monticello, Jim?

Another 15 to 4.15.

Bummer.

Well, I think we could start at 8.

or 830.

Or it's Thursday.

You can do Thursday.

OK, then how about 1 o'clock?

Let's go for 8.30 Friday morning.

Jim, I want to put it in the record that 8.30 was Bucky's suggestion.

Well, okay, I get to be the compromised person.

8.30 on Friday.

On Friday, the 26th.

Thank you.

Okay.

Then I know that we go into closed session.

Yes, I've got it.

I'm sorry, Jim.

Absolutely, that's what I'm looking for.

Code section 2.2-3711A, you code in Virginia under subsection 1 to discuss and consider applications

Personnel Matters and Conduct Interviews.

We're not doing interviews today.

Aye.

Thank you.

Okay, it is 1041 and the board has come out of executive session as per the code resolved that the board convene the closed session pursuant to section 2.2-3711A and we're coming out of closed session now at 1041.

We certify by vote of all board members that we have participated only in those things which we said we were going to participate.

And the only people present were, at the very beginning of the meeting, Alex Branch and our council and the three board members, both councilor and branch left after their part of the meeting.

We had convened before she left.

Back in open session.

We have no votes to take.