Electoral Board Meeting   1/6/2026

Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to the January 6th meeting of the Albemarle County Electoral Board.

As the sitting vice chair, I'm going to call this meeting to order.

In the absence of a chair, our first order of business after establishing the quorum is going to be to reorganize and select officers.

As part of establishing the quorum, I'd like to introduce Valerie Dormady.

whom we have been duly notified of as having been appointed to the electoral board and having taken the oath of office for same.

So I welcome you to the electoral board.

And with that said, I see we have a quorum, all members present.

I would like to make some nominations.

Where's yours?

I would like to nominate William.

as Vice Chair, and Jim Heilman as Secretary.

Any discussion?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Is there any opposed?

Unanimous consent.

So now as the Chairman, we'll move on.

Congratulations.

And to you as well.

New member and already holding an office.

Approving our final agenda, I trust everyone's had a chance to look at the agenda.

I hope not.

No, I wanted to introduce the topic and send it off to get settled.

OK.

So if the final agenda is OK, then we'll take that as approved.

And we have an opportunity for brief announcements from the board and registrar.

And I'd like to start in, because in conversations over the last week, it's become apparent that some things that we, the electoral board, are doing aren't known to everyone.

And I'd like to make sure they are known to everyone, because they're part of getting the information out about what we're doing.

First off, the agenda for each meeting

evolves pretty much up until the day before the meeting.

But as soon as that agenda is on paper, it's posted on the electoral board website.

There's a 2026 meeting section under that website.

And as soon as that agenda comes into being, it'll be posted there.

It will be updated from time to time prior to the meeting

to be there, but for anyone from the public or on the board for that matter who wants to see what's on the agenda, there it will be.

Similarly, draft minutes, as soon as they become available, are posted in the same place.

The code says draft minutes have to be provided at least seven days before the next meeting.

We have not always met that, and certainly in the last six months, we often had the next meeting less than seven days later, so it was not physically possible to do so.

If that's timely for meeting the seven days before the meeting requirement, if the draft minutes

For example, our last meeting was just two weeks ago when the draft minutes came out more recently than that, and I posted those immediately.

But normally there should be an opportunity to correct any mistakes before the draft minutes go up.

Same thing for minutes.

As soon as the meeting in which the minutes are approved, the minutes are posted on the website.

And there's a sequence here.

When the agenda goes up, that's what you have for that meeting.

When the draft minutes come up, the agenda comes down and the draft minutes are up for that meeting because what you plan to do is irrelevant then.

What you did is what's relevant.

And when the minutes go up, the draft minutes come down and just the minutes are left.

Also after each meeting,

We post the video of the meeting that we reported and we're not going to keep those ad infinitum.

The minutes go back as far as we have digital minutes for but the videos will keep a 12 month supply of those.

We don't have a 12 month supply right now.

They only go back to July of last year but

I haven't looked at them.

If you go to the electoral board website,

I don't know offhand off the top of my head the address for that but it's right there on the county website down at the bottom it says you know video recordings are here click here and you click there you go to a YouTube page and the most recent the most recent video recording is at the top of the list and it just goes back chronologically in time so you click on the one you want.

Also posted on the website is the date of the next meeting or meetings if there are going to be a couple in the near term.

So you can always find out when the next meeting is going to be because that will be posted there.

So I just want to make sure everyone was aware of those that information was available.

Is anyone else having anything they want to announce?

Just a brief announcement.

I believe it was yesterday or the day before the governor-elect, Spanberger, nominated a new election commissioner for the Department of Elections, someone named Stephen Koski, who I'm told is on the staff, has been on the staff.

I don't know what his position on the staff was.

So if he appears, we will know not to make fun of him and send him from the room.

Anything else?

OK. OK.

I wanted to update everybody on just a few things.

First, our hiring process.

We've hosted, just before Christmas, three full-time positions that are open and then a part-time position.

The reason a part-time is also there is because we're still in election mode because we are expecting to have a special election in April.

So we are still in that mode.

So we need another part-timer to come in.

So the application

What is this going well?

For the chief position, I have 14 applications.

For the senior assistant registrar, I have six.

For the utility assistant registrar, I have 34.

And then for the temporary, seven.

So within, it hasn't even been posted two weeks yet, and I already have 61 applications across the four positions.

Okay, so that's going nicely.

I did want to mention that, as I mentioned in the last meeting, Brooklyn Eubanks, who's been here for several years, she resigned and Brooklyn moved to Brooklyn, New York.

And I moved one of our part-timers, her name was Christina Sprouse, into that position.

And then she has already been here for a while.

She's done a terrific job.

Correct.

Yeah, permanent part-time.

It's half a position.

Ralph?

Yes, S-P-R-O-U-S-E. First name, Christina.

OK, I want to mention a couple of things about contracts.

At the end of the year, it's just happened this way.

Some of these contracts were put into place three or four years ago, and several of them are just coming up as ending at the end of last year.

So it's actually good for us.

We're able to establish the contracts, take advantage of a few different benefits.

The first one I want to mention is that we're auditing the contracts that we have for the polling places.

We have 30 polling places, but we're talking about the non-school polling places.

There are 11 of them.

Some of them charge for the use of their facilities for elections.

Some of them donate the use of their facilities to the community.

Yeah, so for anyone who doesn't know, my name is Andrea Ruege.

I'm with the County Attorney's Office.

I'm representative of the portal board for a little bit of time now.

I'm going through the, as General mentioned, all of the lease agreements that we have in place with the non, most of our polling locations are Albemarle County.

So those polling places that are not part of the school district, just to review and see, some of them have been in place for quite a while, so I think we'll need to make a decision.

They are thankfully like evergreen lease agreements, so

There's not necessarily a need to update, but if it's been in place for a while, it might be a good idea to look at it.

So I'll have more information as we're moving through that process, but it is something that I'm currently working on.

Thank you.

My understanding is that they are required and I'm still kind of going through the process of the ones that I've seen thus far to have a six-month notice period there is a it's quite a process to

to adopt and move a polling location.

There's some pre-clearance work that needs to go through the state and then we need to have the Board of Supervisors pass the ordinance that does allow for the polling place to be moved.

Thank you.

And we're also auditing our equipment.

There's quite a bit of equipment in the office, but some of it we don't use.

And so we're going to get rid of the things that we don't use, and we're going to change some of the things that we do use.

For example, copiers, our mailing machine, those kinds of things.

And we're looping in finance on everything also, because many of these are,

are vendors that other, our colleagues in other departments in the county needs.

And so there are some existing contracts that we're willing to take advantage of there.

So everything so far that we mentioned, well, I'm sorry, not the polling places, but this equipment, all of them, I'm able to lean on the contracts that are existing and then to see and to work with the vendors that are already working.

I want to mention software.

The software, the largest software vendor that we have provides the election official management software for us.

The contract for that

the one that we have currently we ended that in December it was a clean break in December and so I mentioned this last at the last meeting also we now scheduled three vendors to come in and to bid for that contract the first one is coming today at two and then we have another contractor coming in the Thursday

and I'm sorry coming in virtually.

These are going to be virtual presentations that they do for us and then the third one will be on Friday because we need to make this decision very quickly and so we want to make the decision by next week so that we can transfer everything over if necessary.

I want to make sure more

I was looking to see if we had ever gone over, if Albemarle had ever gone over the 90,000 mark for registered voters.

I haven't seen it, but in December we did.

We have 90,000, according to this, these stats are coming from the Department of Elections website.

So we have listed 90,047,

Registered voters.

Now you know that the registered voters includes active and inactive and other things too, but I do stick with the registered voters cover.

That increased 758 over November.

So the number, I've checked with a couple of other registrars and they said that that's pretty good.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And also reflects the pre-registrations.

Interesting, the changes in laws, as well as more people moving into Albemarle County.

When I started as registrar in 1987, if I recall correctly, we had 23,000 registered voters.

We have over 90,000.

Quite an increase.

And that number, as you know, I just want to remind people that fluctuates because we have cancellations all the time.

We have people asking to be removed from the roles.

People die and people move.

You have a decent number of students in there who have some natural flux to them as they move in and out of the area.

So last few things I want to mention is the budget.

So far, our budget this year was about 1.3 million.

We have used 49.2% of that budget, so we're on schedule.

So just wanted to mention that.

The budget year ends June 30th.

Yes.

And then the new budget year begins July 1st.

But the few things, I'm going to mention the four main categories that are going to increase our budget.

The 2027 fiscal year, there'll be salaries because the full-time positions will be filled.

I'm not sure when the last time they were filled, but that's going to take up some money.

Part-time, we're using a lot of part-time.

dollars and people, we need help to come in just periodically, just to help us, not just with the heat of the election, but also we're establishing a new filing system that's not in place now, and so we need a little bit of help to do those kind of things.

Postage is going to increase because we are going to bring back some things local that have been done by third parties.

We believe strongly that our election should be local and should be maintained locally and managed locally.

Probably not, yes.

That's the big one.

And it wasn't just, beyond just the philosophy of that, look at the money.

There's a lot of hidden expense, well, not hidden.

There's a lot of unexpected expenses with the Printelect contract or with them doing that work for us.

as simple as them getting the ballots and then mailing them out.

There's extra postage.

There's the return postage.

There are upload fees.

There are freight fees.

There's all kinds of fees that are involved with that and understandable, but those are things that we probably can eliminate.

And also, it's not a unilateral decision.

I do a lot of things.

I talk to the staff first to see, because they're going to be, we're all going to be in this together.

So I'm going to talk to the staff about this more than once.

And we've had a good discussion about it.

And I think everybody's ready for it because some of the people that are there have done this before.

So it's not going to be brand new to them.

And then also we're changing the way that some of the things that were done before, just simply to be the most efficient that we can.

And then the last thing will be equipment.

And that gets back to the contracts.

We believe we need a second copier.

We're going to need a different mailing machine.

We have one now, but we want one that's a little bit different.

And again, our colleagues across the county are already using the vendors that we're going to lean on to update those contracts.

Last thing I want to mention is we've established something called standups.

And I just head out of the office and just say, hey, everybody, can we talk for 15 minutes?

And there's always an agenda there.

It's not just sort of a shooting the breeze meeting.

And I want to mention that.

Andrea is going to be our first outside guest for one of these stand-ups.

My favorite topic.

Exactly.

We have those about twice a week, and so she's going to talk about that.

HR, talking about HR, they're gonna come in.

IT doesn't know yet, but they will be invited to come in about certain things and to clarify some things for all of us, but also to let the county know that we exist and for let the staff know what the county does, people in the county affects the world, how we're all connected.

I think that's really necessary to show the staff and show

Open up the doors, open the windows a little bit.

Thank you.

Moving on, public comment.

This is the opportunity where anyone present in the room or online can have three minutes to address the board.

If there's anyone who would like to speak, please raise your hand either physically or digitally.

and we'll call on you.

Okay, having waited would seem like a reasonable amount of time.

We'll go on.

Next item is to approve the minutes.

We have minutes from December 11th and December 23rd.

They look funny to me.

And as you mentioned, Fairville had said you could have her proxy on approving them, but we don't really have a proxy process, but I'll just say that Fairville Wheeler, a former member who was here for these meetings, has said that they are okay.

All those voting in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none, minutes are approved.

Old Business, the organization of University Pulling Place, 202.

We had a very good session on our December 11th meeting with the team from University

talked about a lot of good ideas and the question before us is how do we move forward from good ideas to improved practices.

and I'm thinking it's something that not all of the board should be involved in so we don't have to have board meetings every time we want to talk to, talk on this topic, but undoubtedly some from the registrar staff want to be involved and perhaps we should have folks from the university team, but I'm looking for a go forward plan so that we translate that into changes.

Well, it's going to be interesting to see if we have this April thing.

My guess is it's not going to produce a huge turnout at the university.

We're anywhere.

We're anywhere.

So I think we could, first we have to determine who is going to be the chief officer there and that we can't really determine until after.

Seed.

I would like to, whatever we do, if we have this April referendum, I would like to drop by the city polling place that has most students.

I got a good indication from that chief how they operate, but I'd like to see it in person.

On election day.

With due permission from the registrar and or electoral board so you can go in.

I don't know, do you have?

What I would suggest is that we, I'd like to have one person from this board and at least one person from Jonell's team as the point person to coordinate and develop a go-forward plan and to enact that plan.

And if anyone who wants to do this can do this, I'd be happy to be on this group, but I don't want to keep someone else from doing it.

There's someone else on the board involved.

I'd like to think on it.

OK. And until February.

Can we wait that long if we've got an April election?

I guess we could.

We'll have a lot of things.

I think so, because whatever we do, it's not going to be something that will require lots of advanced work.

Yeah, hammer out what the process is going to be, which could take a minute, but probably not 10 sessions, you know, maybe one or two.

OK. Well, that's fine.

We'll postpone that.

But just serving up notice, if you could think on who's going to be on the point from your side for that.

And I can give you the names, at least of everybody, well, everybody that spoke at that meeting.

I think they're in the minutes.

Okay, anything else on that?

Next item is Elections Office Accounting Reports.

Jonell, you've already given us overall numbers.

Do you want to give us some more numbers?

Let's see.

You have to flip this around so everyone can see.

Look at the help codes in the middle of the page.

There's plenty of numbers on this page.

And what these numbers, the lines that you see, the line items represent different categories of expenses, everything from staffing to training.

Now, the ones I'm just going to bring up are the ones at right now are the host.

I want to bring up, or that were kind of a little, not surprising, but part-time wages.

Exactly, that's exactly right, yes.

Quite a bit less there.

We're only at 34%, 34.4% of our full-time budget.

equipment, that we're at 73, I'm sorry, 71.3% for equipment, but we don't really have any new equipment to buy between now and then, so we're okay there.

We've gone over the amount of

what's called, there's another category for equipment that includes ballots, software, that kind of thing.

With the cost for mailing, the absentee ballots have fallen into that number?

No.

No, no.

Well, let me correct that.

Exactly.

It is, yes.

But there's a separate cost for the return postage, and that's just postage.

And that's another one that I did want to mention.

Did I mention that was going to go up?

We are going to spend quite a bit more on postage in the coming year than we have in the past year.

It is, but also what's driving it are the changes of people registering, because we send a letter every time.

Over the past two weeks, we've sent out

2000 letters, we're using stamps for those.

And then for cancellations, we've had over a thousand cancellations.

That's another letter that has to go out for stamps.

So, I didn't think stamps were all that expensive until I bought more than one roll.

So now they are very expensive.

So... Just a question, what letter do you send out for cancellations?

Just a confirmation that it's canceled and why it's canceled.

Yeah, absolutely.

so and that's a big number but that number has been accumulating since just after the election because when the registration period ended for the election we stopped entering a lot of things into Veris just to let things settle in and we put everything into a couple of folders those folders have been broken open and so now we're catching up with all that that we're actually almost caught up with all that the cancellations really were the last big piece of that was sitting there those cancellations include canceling

It's not really, capital is different.

That's what I'm saying.

equipment.

I think that traditionally a real capital expense, like buying all the new DS-300s, goes into the county's capital budget.

That is true.

Because those costs are a quarter of a million.

So that's not in this budget.

We don't handle that big capital expense.

I don't have those kind of capital expenses in this budget.

This is the budget strictly for the department, the running of the department.

absent the big equipment expenses.

The DS-300s that were purchased, that's a separate capital expense.

The Knowings that were purchased, that's a separate capital expense.

I think those are the only two that I've seen that are- That's what I would expect.

Yeah, that's all I've seen.

Then everything else is in this particular budget.

What I do want to mention for next year, I've submitted budget requests for the 27th fiscal year.

It goes up

We, just in case we have that election.

So it goes up about 300,000.

So instead of the 1.3, it's about 1.6, almost 1.7, but that still has to be approved.

Let me make sure that I have this right for the minutes.

So you have submitted a budget request for fiscal of 26-27.

Well, no, 27.

It's just 27.

They just call it.

It's going to be about 1.6.

It has to be approved.

It sounds like you're asking for about a 25% increase.

that's reflecting what your actual expenses are.

Thank you.

Okay, any questions?

Very good.

Moving on, the DS-300 error follow-up.

No, what I did was I went back and I read all of the email that Claire built

while she was on the board sent to them and their response is, the latest one that she sent, it was right before Christmas.

They have not responded to that yet.

So I was gonna wait, everybody's just back.

They were out pretty much the whole time.

So everybody was just back yesterday.

If I hadn't heard anything, just ping them again and say, hey, what's- Given if we have the April extra election,

whether that's the 14th or the 21st or whenever it occurs, we'll start early voting in February.

Yes.

So, don't wait.

It's January.

Don't wait.

If not today, then tell them.

That's going to be, yeah, he's CC, but he's not the point person.

No.

We have somebody else, but we're CC-ing him on everything.

And let us know what you hear back.

And if they schedule their team to come in, please let us know that too.

on contingency planning for the April special election.

Yeah, I'll just kind of review the two main things on content.

Well, one, if this redistricting proposal goes through the General Assembly,

and I will, as we have said before, be planning some April referendum.

There is also talk of including the three constitutional amendments which have already passed one session of the General Assembly have to pass another session and there's talk of including those three in with the redistricting one which I think would somewhat significantly up the turnout because those are on

Sexy Issues, more or less.

So it still leaves us, I think the two main things is as soon as we know that we have contact with all of our polling places, including the public schools, because there will be places for sure that we will have to change rooms for voting.

And some I remember where they changed to before, but a lot of them

And I think the other thing that we have to consider pretty quickly is number one, if they keep the 45 days, are we going to use room A or are we going to use room B?

As I think I've mentioned before, the last time we had a primary that we knew

was going to be a very low turnout.

We didn't keep room A for 45 days.

We used room B so that the bigger room could be used for other things.

And as I recall, it worked out just fine because we were getting 10, 20 people a day coming in and room B was big enough to use that.

So room B could handle many more people a day than that.

We can sort that question right now.

I mean, if we have, does anyone object to using room B if we have an April election?

Melissa, what's on the slate?

Whether it's all three, you know, all four or just one.

Well, if it's just the redistricting, yes, I agree totally.

Not sure whether... A lot of reading to get through all those people on a voter critique.

Okay, well then we don't have to decide that today.

We can take up that question in February, since we aren't reserving the room yet, but as soon as

It might be reasonable as soon as the General Assembly hands down its verdict on this, and of course the courts will still want to weigh in, I'm sure, but as soon as the General Assembly hands down its verdict, perhaps we should reconvene and plan at that time.

And am I correct that I believe this is what I've been told?

Once we set up in room B, for instance, it would not really be very feasible to move.

The last two weeks is usually, right before the election, is usually the busiest time.

Is it feasible then to move into that room in the last two weeks, or is it too much unplugging and moving?

If we're seeing the suggestion that the room was being overwhelmed, that's an option.

That's great.

Because we're still in the same building.

We're just in a different room.

The address voters would come to would be the same.

Just change the sign to point down the hall.

if it occurs in April month.

All right, so the caveat that if the General Assembly acts, we may call another electoral board meeting to get moving on this.

New business attached to

The minutes attached to, I'm sorry, attached to the agenda was a document electoral board responsibilities and delegations.

This was something we had discussed with the registrar in July.

We wanted to sense the board and the strong suggestion to us from

State was we should clearly delineate which responsibilities are board responsibilities, which responsibilities are registrar responsibilities.

There are many responsibilities that the board can delegate to the registrar as delegated to the registrar and that we should have a record of which those were.

Practically speaking, it's not feasible for the board to do all of the things that are our responsibilities without having offices here working on a regular basis.

So since none of us want to do that, at least I don't think any of us want to do that, it moves us to have that well documented so that everyone knows what we're doing.

And we had voted in

in July that the registrar would take this list and work on it and submit it back to the board and then we'd go through it and agree or disagree or modify or what have you so that we could all have as of date we've all agreed this is what the list of responsibilities is.

The list you have before you is a list I culled from the code last year

in the May timeframe, probably just going through all hoping to indicate that there was something we could delegate.

And then I, where possible, reduced the language in the code to something that would fit in a table, but kept the references if you want to go try and figure out what my cryptic comment means that you can go still look it up in the code.

Anyway, the objective of getting that done did not occur because everything hit the fan in August.

and I'd like to get that process back on track if that's still the will to report.

And I'd like to approach it the same way.

I'd suggest that the registrar take this and go through it, figure out which are the things that she is doing, which are the things that she is not doing and then we can have a conversation about that at a subsequent meeting.

Two things.

One, memory's a little hazy here.

I did find when we did this 10 years ago, I'll share that with you tonight.

If you have that, I'll find the email and send it to Janelle.

because we did go through, I don't know that we touched everything that's on here.

The historical information.

We don't do it even though the code says we do it.

The historical information that we had at the time was limited.

That's what I remember.

So don't get your hopes up too much, but I'll send it around.

OK.

It looked like this.

I'm not sure why the date is there.

If we delegate something after the initial delegation, so if we, you know, let's say next February, you know, this coming February would be the fifth and we decide, yep, this is what we're doing.

And then later we change who's responsible.

We can update that as of this date, the board or the registrar is responsible for that thing.

So we can keep this as a living document and update when the responsibility changes.

We don't have to do that if you don't want to.

It could be a one and done and leave it in there.

Okay.

Same sort of deal.

We have had a couple of discussions about the notion of EOs assigned to their home precinct.

25.2-115A says basically if it's practicable, it's a good thing for EOs to be assigned to their home precinct.

Obviously, that's not going to be true all of the time because EOs apply to be officers of election when they apply.

And we accept them when we accept them.

When we accept them, we may or may not need officers of election in their polling place.

We assign them somewhere else.

Once they get assigned to a team, people usually develop a rapport with their team.

Often they're very happy with that team.

Sometimes that means they're driving across the county.

In some cases, they're driving in from other cities and counties to keep coming back and working in the same place.

So I'm not expecting a lot of officers of election are desperate to work in a different place.

And you can't accommodate all the requests anyway.

We have more officers of election out of

Ivy Precinct, I think, than any other precinct, far more than we could ever use in Ivy.

So it doesn't work out.

But trying to follow the spirit of, as far as practicable, it seemed like at the time, and you proved the idea, that

In July, we said that we would have the elections manager send out an email that we had reviewed and agreed to to all those officers who weren't working in their home precinct to say, hey, we are supposed to put you in your home precinct.

If that's practicable, we don't have to move you if you like where you are.

We may not be able to move you depending on how many people we have in different places.

There are a lot of considerations that go into that.

But if you are interested, please let us know.

And then based on that, the elections manager could see places where they could move people around and bring us a little closer.

By my computation, right now less than half of our officers of election work in their own precinct.

And it seemed like we might be able to do a little better than that.

And I don't remember, were we just going to send that to people that weren't working in their homes?

Just sending it to people who weren't working because we'll only confuse the people who are in their home polling place if we ask them that question.

And making it clear, you don't have to move, we're not planning to move everyone.

If this is something you're interested in, let us know, and we will see if it's a possibility, but there's no guarantee what I wanted to do.

And we agreed to do that.

And again, in August, everything hit the fan, and so we didn't follow through on that.

Alex, you have...

I think I sent something out last July because I remember Aaron asked me about it.

If you've already gotten feedback, fantastic.

We never heard back on it.

Yeah, let me dig through my emails.

I think I have some.

And we had iterated a few times on what the letter, you know, what the note ought to say because I'm not sure Aaron...

that initially understood what we were trying for.

So if you all could follow up with that and let us know, we'll take that up at the next meeting and see where we are.

That's OK. OK. Ah, yes.

The next item on the agenda is statement of results training materials planning.

In the process of going through the Canvas and provisional meeting from this last election, there were a number of things that came up, generally small items, but things that indicated a level of confusion or

Not everyone doing exactly the same thing with regard to how their statements or results were completed, and it seemed like this is an opportunity for training.

We could produce some training materials and teach people what we'd like them to do.

We haven't traditionally provided any training on the statement or results, and yet that's where all the results of the election are reported, so why not?

And as I was trying to lay out the kinds of things that I would include in such training if I were doing it, I ran into something that I knew had been true in the past because I'd hunted down the reference for it when I was an officer of election.

There used to be guidance from the state that said two separate officers of election, preferably from different parties, will complete a copy of the statement results and then they compare the two completed versions and resolve any differences.

Sounded like a great process.

I can no longer find any guidance from the state that says that.

which doesn't mean we can't have it be the way we want, but my first question to the board is, does anyone know where that can be found?

Well, I don't know about it disappearing from the elected guidance, but it could have for the very reason that

Forever and ever until we all went to optical scanners, the statement of results was a much more exhaustive document that had to be filled out by the election officer.

Some of you were around because you had three or four machines going.

You had to add the totals for candidates for all those machines.

So you had like

Well it went through the machine and how many provisionals you had and that's about it.

So there's nothing there for a difference between one party might do it this way and one party might do it that way.

We briefly blinked off here.

Okay, good.

I got a thumbs up.

And for Valerie's sake, we do have, I don't know whether you include into it, something we call the GREB handbook, General Registrar Electoral Board handbook.

And it's digital, but a year or so ago, staff printed out a paper copy.

I have that paper, maybe it's two years ago, a paper copy of that.

We've printed out everything for Valerie, including the GREB.

It's at the copy center.

Oh, it has to be over here today.

Oh.

So anyway, back to my question.

And I agree with you, Jim.

It's a much simpler process than it once was.

And even with that said,

And that's not just filling in the numbers.

Make sure you've got all the tapes on there that ought to be there, preferably in the order in which they're required.

I mean, it sounds like a good idea to me.

Sometimes they do come out with different figures, but it's always something totally technical, right?

It's not like a Republican will say, no, we had 500 voters and the Democrats said, no, we had 400 voters.

Yeah.

It is confusing to the EO.

because you have different chiefs doing it different ways.

You can start to get arguments among the various people as to what's the right way to do it.

And I think what we had in the chief's manual, I believe that's where I saw it, it does say have two different people, two different parties do the tape separately and then compare them.

So that's what's in there.

Clearly a lot of people aren't doing it that way.

I'm a firm believer that consistency improves our process.

Would you like to develop a statement on that that then we could approve at the next meeting?

Yeah, I'm filling out the SOR.

Pretty much just what you said verbally.

Sure.

I'll put something in writing and we'll vote on it at the next meeting.

That way we can immortalize it in our training and our documentation, et cetera.

And I'll send it around so if you see something glaring and gross in there, you can send it back and we can discuss that at the next meeting.

Okay, that ends the new business.

Are there any other items we need to discuss?

Business items, that's good.

Next meeting, we are required to have a meeting in the first week in February.

And I think harking back to when electoral board members got appointed in March, we're also required to have a meeting in March, although we don't have to reorganize at that meeting.

Why are we required to have a meeting in March?

They took out the part about and reorganized, but they left you'll have the meeting part in there.

I understand from bibliographers that it's no longer used in bibliography.

You can find it in 24.2.107.

Same difference.

Well, I read something that a lot of those things like IBID are no longer used.

Doesn't surprise me.

Okay.

February.

How are Wednesdays?

Wednesdays are okay if we're done by 1130. Who would like to stay longer than 1130 for a meeting?

General agreement on that.

How about Wednesday the 4th?

Nine or 930?

What's your pleasure?

Well, this meeting is going to be

Nine?

It's a good question.

And follow-up question is that do we want to set a calendar for the year or do we want to set a March meeting?

Those two kind of go together because the March meeting might just fall out of a calendar for the year.

Still fine with me.

Yeah, the 12th works for me.

Works for me, I suppose.

I'll go as good ever you want.

I'm probably driving a bit further than you, maybe not further than you, but nine's fine.

And do we want to contemplate the second Thursday of the month for the rest of the year?

We are agreed.

and Second Thursday at 9.

I'll update the website to indicate that.

One of the things you're going to be doing is update the website thing.

Before we go into executive session as a closed meeting, is there anything else we need to do here?

And I'd like to move that the Albemarle County Electoral Board convene a closed meeting pursuant to section 2.2-371A of the Code of Virginia under subsection 1 to discuss and consider the assignment, appointment, and other things having to do with employees.

Do we know that we have any business?

We do.

We do.

OK. We do have business.

Is there a call for a vote or is there discussion beyond that?

All those in favor?

Thank you all very much for coming.

If those of you on the call would drop off, that'd be great.

We'll take a five minute break.

Folks, we're coming out of our closed meeting, and I'd like to do that with the following motion.

I move that the electoral board certify by a recorded vote that, to the best of each member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed meeting.

Any discussion?

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none.

So I don't think we have anything to vote on coming out of our closed session.

So I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

We're adjourned.