Electoral Board Meeting   5/14/2026

Welcome to the Albemarle County Electoral Board meeting.

This is our regular meeting for May 14, 2026.

I'm establishing a quorum.

Note the presence of all the electoral board members, as well as the registrar, our elections manager, and our council.

So I move to the board first.

I'll be satisfied with the agenda.

Okay, brief announcements from the board and registrar.

Does anyone have any announcements to make?

None from the chair.

I don't.

I would like to announce that we have the early voting hotwash on Monday.

From early voting.

From early voting.

You were right in front of me.

Well, no, I was going to thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I was going to thank you, Rev.

Starr.

I don't think that alcohol's ever done an early voting chief's hot wash. Maybe I missed it.

It was an idea of me way before I got here.

Any other public comment items?

I see a hand up.

Rick, you've got your hand in the air.

Yeah, I just want to make a couple of comments.

The suggestions about the assistant chief training modules, they're great.

Karen's taken them and they're really, really good.

One suggestion, though, is I think they might need to be sold heavier.

in order to get more participation.

So one suggestion, it would be not cost you anything, is maybe once a month, send an email to all the election officers just saying, hey, we have this program, just to publicize it more to maybe get more people to participate.

The other suggestion is I think the emphasis on assistant chiefs having to step in at the last minute

and serve as chiefs, maybe keeping people from signing up, because I know an awful lot of the assistant chiefs that I know have no interest in being a chief.

and I think a lot of the new people maybe wouldn't either.

So a suggestion to think about is could we assign a chief not to be on a precinct but to be the person who's responsible for filling in at the last minute.

This would need to be an experienced chief who could drop in at the last minute and that way you wouldn't put that pressure on new assistant chiefs.

I know you would have to have basically be a floater.

They would not be assigned to a regular precinct, but for that election, they'd be assigned to be the last minute person if there was a need.

If there's no need, they wouldn't work.

Kent was exactly the kind of person I was thinking about because I think Kent has said many times he really doesn't want to continue being a chief but he would fill in and that's the kind of person that I was thinking, someone who's very experienced

could really get in at the last minute and not have a problem handling a precinct.

Anybody else?

All right, we will move on.

I apologize for not having any minutes but I have been ill from April 11th and this and that and this and that and I just have not felt up to sitting in front of my computer and typing the dang things up.

We'll carry that forward to the next meeting.

Old business.

Has Elect given us a chance to apply for their measly $5.2 million or whatever?

The total that we had last time was about 137,000.

So when I added a few more charges for January to March, plus all of the new charges, we end up with 234,329.

This isn't over your normal staff, expenses, things like that.

Wow.

Heavy sigh.

Anything else on this topic?

No.

Any questions?

All right.

We'll move right along.

May I ask a question?

So how does this look relative to prior, let's say, primaries or special elections?

The board would have no way of knowing.

Well, I mean, I have made the point to people that the public

The Supreme Court and the General Assembly do not understand that the cost of putting on an election, an April referendum is much different than the cost of putting on a presidential election.

Well, they allocated $5 million for it, Jim.

So Valerie, I can't compare it to primary August.

Yeah, I can have the report, but I actually can say from the report I gathered.

I'm sorry, you don't have the report?

I don't have it printed out, but I wrote my notes and everything, so I'll explain what we need to say on that.

But I'll send it to you guys virtually.

So I gave a,

Precincts, the opportunity to voice if they wanted to work at their own precincts or not for this past election.

25 precincts turned in their documents and paperwork and I went through that and checked.

A lot of people are at their home precincts right now, so they kind of like to be where they are.

Some people don't really want to be moved.

25 returns, you only got 20 people?

Yeah, like 20 precincts.

and the five precincts who didn't respond.

Jonell?

Okay, so for the security plan, we have three deadlines, which we have, which are passed already.

What I did was I sent you all.

The document's too big to print out.

Well, it's not too big to print out, but I thought you'd refer to it electronically.

So I sent it to everybody electronically, and I also sent you the letterhead.

The spreadsheet.

Yes, the spreadsheet.

Is not what we will be submitting.

It's not what we do for the security.

You don't submit it at all.

Right, but the security plan is a separate document from that.

It's actually a Word document.

Oh, I don't have it then.

It won't have changed much.

I've been trying to keep it updated, but we've updated our inventory of which machines we have and those kinds of things.

I saw that.

Yes.

and Jim was looking for a small change to that.

It's probably something, can we edit that?

Absolutely.

So you just go into it.

Sure.

Yeah, easy to do.

Okay, great.

Thanks for getting out in front of that.

And I will send you a copy of the document.

Thank you.

Alex and Jim, I'm going to guess that you have not had a chance to do anything with the disposition of all materials.

All right.

That takes us into new business changes in election law.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

So just two pointers.

First, I wanted to give an update on the referendum that we had.

The Supreme Court of Virginia last week issued an opinion and determined that the way that the election was structured and set up was not constitutional.

As of this moment, the existing map that was in place last year and the year before is the map that will be governing in November.

I say this moment because the Democrats have petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to review the case.

They are not obligated to review.

They have the opportunity to take the case up or not, but because the opinion from the Supreme Court came out just at the very end of last week, it was just noted up for appeal to the Supreme Court.

We haven't heard yet whether or not they're going to take it up.

I'm inclined to say they're probably not going to take it up.

I would tend to agree with that as well, as well, Jim.

So I think the old map is the map or the existing map is the map going forward.

So it does look like we had a rather expensive endeavor for not

But that is what the Supreme Court said.

So the other thing before diving in, the General Assembly this year made a lot, a lot, a lot of changes to election law.

I by no stretch of the imagination covered everything in this presentation because we would be here until the end of the day.

And I did not want to hold you all hostage.

If there are questions or if there are things that I didn't cover and we need to do a follow-up session, I can do, you know, maybe a more brief and pointed update in June.

So, here's what we're going to talk about, just kind of a list of themes that happened with the General Assembly.

There was a lot of things about election administration and board duties.

So because you all are the board, I want to make sure that you understand your need to do some possibilities.

There was a lot of updates with respect to voter registration and list maintenance, as well as absentee and provisional ballot processes.

I don't need to read this to you, but polling place regulations and ballot counting, candidate filing and confidentiality.

And then I do want to point this isn't

That was just on the news yesterday.

All right, so the first section we'll talk about is election administration, specifically for duties and risks.

So just so you all are aware, there has been changes in how elect can remove local electoral board members.

There needs to be a public hearing.

The state elect board needs to pass or decide to remove with a two-thirds vote.

The grounds for removal include neglect of duties, misuse of office, incompetence, or a clear indication of refusal to perform duties.

So what's important to note here is that the decision is final.

There is an appeals process, but it goes through the Administrative Procedures Act, which is very complicated.

and Elect will be coming out and establishing actual hearing procedures.

Absolutely.

And that was kind of a theme that's kind of happened persistently throughout, which actually leads directly into this slide.

So House Bill 78 made the certification of election results, the non-discretionary ministerial duty for a board.

If you have, if a board refuses to certify, that does constitute grounds for removal.

You can be subject to a civil penalty of $2,000.

And then if the local board refuses to certify the election, the state board can come in and certify.

So, you know, you don't do it.

You can face penalty and then the state board's going to do it anyways.

So take from that what you will.

No, this is the big, big one, right?

Elect is going to be issuing ID badges to board members.

They must be worn on election day while you're performing your duties.

They're going to have your name, locality, position, and the term expiration date on them.

Governor wrote this down.

It was $1,000.

It did not.

So if you want to find that one, I won't.

Me neither.

That was my question.

Me neither.

It seemed odd.

It was really, really short, Bill.

I have a feeling it was just someone's pet project.

So that would be, you've been given a badge, you know you have to wear it and it's election day and you say, I'm not listening to what the General Assembly says.

I don't think it's, I put it on.

And it fell off in my car.

It fell off.

That would not be a knowingly refusal to wear.

That would be an accidental or neglect, neglectful failure to wear.

This is a big one.

House Bill 909, it makes the in-person, excuse me, all in-person absentee voting locations are subject to the same conduct rules that polling places and precincts are subject to.

on election day.

So that's loitering or solicitation or any influencing voters.

So that is now the law of the land.

The other thing that it does is it expands the firearm-free zone.

It's no longer the 40 feet.

It's 100 feet from the door.

All other conduct is restricted still at the 40 feet.

So this may impact signage.

Yeah it's you know it's a

I mean that's well I mean candidly county buildings our county at least has enacted legislation or has an ordinance that says that firearms are not permitted on county building and county buildings but that's not necessarily

the law everywhere so I mean it doesn't necessarily change anything with respect to schools but it is now the law so it might be more of a restriction or a regulation without having much of an impact at least with respect to schools.

The next section this was also a really big area was voter registration maintenance

The cancellation of registrations, it's really tightened up what can happen before cancellation can happen.

Notice generally has to be provided to the voter before the registration should be cancelled.

There's a 14-day window where people can come back and they can dispute the cancellation.

One thing that it does is it prevents the removal of active duty military, overseas voters, and then their eligible spouses and dependents from being removed from the list.

So, I'm not sure I understand that one.

Bill's had an application in Arizona and said they were previously registered in Virginia.

Yeah.

And there's another bill that we're going to talk about in just a couple of minutes that's going to require us joining Eric, which we don't have to do anything.

Right.

Yeah.

So that will help with facilitating the communication between the states as to.

who's registered or who's moved.

So, and Jim, that's a good point.

And I can provide you more information on that, but again, just cause I wanted to give a higher level summary on this, but there were a lot of provisions in there.

If someone comes in and like self authenticates and says, Hey, I'm moving to Arizona, that cancellation is not going to be subject to this, but it's, we get a list from wherever that information at first has to come from a department of elections approved source.

Oh, I. I think if you just click it.

There it is.

Yeah, so actually here's where I was just referencing with Eric, the Department of Elections, we have to join, so it's going to help facilitate that communication between the states.

And then any third party voter approved memorandum of understanding has to be approved by

and two-thirds vote of the state board.

So there's gonna be a lot more oversight about who's being removed from voter rolls.

It has to come from very specific sources before that could happen.

There's requirements that special unique identifiers have to be included on cancellation requests.

So it's not just a straight, I don't know if any of that was happening here, but- No, the state's done is centralized more control for these activities.

This one is not effective until next July, so it has a delayed effective date.

Typically, when the General Assembly passes new laws, they're effective July 1 of the year that they were passed unless they provide for a delayed effective date or some other effective date.

Again, just back to Bucky's point about centralizing and providing additional state oversight for

of list maintenance, standardizing identification data for list maintenance sources.

There's a confidence score that's assigned for certain record matches and a record has to have a certain confidence score in it before it can be relied upon to remove people.

So again, it's just, it's going to be a new regulation and a new lot of oversight.

Here, notice that the important thing here is that notice must be sent to voters before the cancellation, including any citizenship or felony-based cancellation.

So it's, again, more control.

So if we can click ahead.

Oh, and one more thing on that, I'm sorry.

There is an annual review of all the data sources that can be relied upon.

Systematic, if I may answer.

Sure.

Thank you.

Right.

OK, so this is one of the constitutional amendments that will be before voters in November.

This allows for the automatic restoration of voting rights when people are released from incarceration.

So someone's convicted of a crime, they go to jail, they serve their time, they're released, their voting rights.

If this constitutional amendment passes, their voting rights will be restored upon release.

The constitutional amendment differentiates violent felonies?

And then the other thing that's important to note on this is that they're very specific in what incarceration means.

So incarceration means you're in a facility.

So if you're released early and you're on parole or on probation, you are available and you can register to vote.

All right, we'll talk about absentee and provisional ballots next.

So this is going to be a big one for you all in addition to the Saturday early voting.

We're now required to have Sunday early voting as well.

The second and third Sunday before Election Day and the polling place must, excuse me, the precinct must be open.

for a minimum of five hours between the hours of 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. You can obviously elect to have additional Sundays.

I didn't see any hint, but I expect one day we'll get to midnight voting.

So this is, and I had heard some conversation about this one before, you know, kind of internally, not internally here, but just from other registrars that I know that this was kind of a point of contention.

So as of right now, absentee ballots, provisional ballots,

or excuse me, absentee ballots have to be received by noon the third day after the election.

It's gonna extend that deadline to 5 p.m. on the third day after the election.

That's also now going to be the deadline for provisional voters to provide certification of their identification and then also secure any absentee ballot errors.

So I do think, I'm sorry to say that the third day after the election might also now be a later evening.

What's changed?

It used to be 1 p.m.

Noon.

I mean noon.

Right.

It's provisional.

So this is absentee ballots.

You can have the deadline now is the Monday after election day to cure any deficiencies in the absentee ballot.

This also, Jonell, is important for you because registered are required promptly notified voters of correctable issues.

I would say if that's what currently promptly is, that's probably still what promptly is.

and it does allow you, this bill also allows you to issue replacement absentee ballots.

So Jim, here's I think what you're talking about.

This is extending and allows provisional ballots, voters can cure errors until noon on the Monday after election day.

Elect is supposed to be issuing some uniform procedures that will help facilitate and administer this.

including those provisional ballots cast by same-day registrants.

Two comments on this.

One, it doesn't take effect till next year.

The second is the second bullet there.

Yeah, I mean, I think in that case, the distinction might be, you know, is the error with the registration or is the error with the ballot?

That will be a fun one to work through.

This bill, House Bill 774, Senate Bill 582, they're identical, eliminates the requirements that ballots be received by the Friday before election day to be cured.

So anytime they're received, they can be cured.

And again, Jonell, here is just that prompt notification requirement.

You can provide cure instructions by email, which is an interesting thing.

You've done that.

and then again just reiterating that they cure the issues until the noon on the Monday after the election.

Absentee ballot list must be updated daily showing acceptance, rejection and ballot status.

If the ballot's rejected, it has to be noted in the voter's record and must send notification to

send notification of the rejection to the voter within 90 days.

So to make sure that we're able to fix that.

This free access system, I believe that's gonna be made available to you all through elect.

Okay.

Okay.

All right, you can click ahead.

So House Bill 640 eliminates the ability for in-person voter challenges at polling places and at the legislature's office.

Any challenge has to be brought in circuit court, and it has to be signed by three qualified voters.

The challenged voter is given 15 days notice, and then the court's gonna make a summary decision, so that means there's not gonna be a jury or anything like that.

And I spoke with Bucky about this one, which will have kind of a significant impact on how I think we do things.

This will be effective on September 1.

Any machine-readable ballot has to be counted by a ballot scanner.

It can't be counted by hand.

It can only allow hand counting.

If the scanner is inoperable, if there's

There's no backup scanner available and if waiting for repair or delivery of an alternative scanner is unreasonable.

So you got to be down and can't have an alternative to hand count.

What's interesting here is that if there is a damaged or defective machine readable ballot, the ballot has to be duplicated by a bipartisan team and then substituted for the original.

So we'll have one member of each party obviously will duplicate the ballot and it'll be run.

The duplicates have to be clearly labeled as duplicates and then cross-referenced with the damaged ballot.

How do you cross-reference it with the original ballot?

Yeah, this is one.

You can go ahead.

This is a brief topic.

Just currently when candidates register, they're required to provide personal contact information on their filing forms.

So this bill is going to allow candidates to use a unique identifier, not provide their personal address, phone number, email address on any required filings.

And they are also able to now use a P.O.

box instead of their address as their

as their address of record, just because we don't want people to know where these candidates are living.

So there's- Moving you along.

Yeah, we'll just go ahead.

Ring choice voting, this is not mandatory.

This is discretionary.

This allows local bodies to adopt ring choice voting if they want.

and then the state board's gonna set a whole bunch of standards about how that works.

Again, this is just, it's permissive authority granted localities that it's not required.

We currently have a magisterial system where there's different districts and I don't know if there's any conclusions.

So you can advance.

All right.

And then here's the constitutional amendments that I mentioned.

So first, there's an item on the ballot that would remove same-sex marriage ban.

So it'll allow for gay marriage.

There's also a right to reproductive freedom amendment, which Jim notified me that there's currently litigation ongoing on that.

And then we've already talked about the voting rights restoration for felons upon lease.

You shouldn't anticipate that people will spend more time in the polling place in November.

I would say that, and I would also say that a lot of these are really important issues to a lot of voters.

I would imagine that they're

Okay.

So what you all need to do is we'll need to cross reference and make sure that our policies are up to date.

We may need to update our training materials.

You'll all need to prepare to wear your badges on election day.

I know you're very excited about that.

I think they might take it out of the $5 million.

We may need to request additional signage with respect to the firearm zone so we'll have to kind of talk through that as we get closer we'll need to request that signage through I would assume through FES so just give them advance notice and then just any sort of coordination with law enforcement and courthouse personnel which we already do all that so that just might change what we talk about a little bit it's not going to you know change the package.

and then, next slide, yes, we'll begin policy training or policy training updates, look out for those badges and then so many of the absentee and provisional ballot changes go into effect in September, so that'll have some changes as we're going into the November election.

and then by July 1 is when a lot of the list maintenance provisions go into effect.

So we'll be working through that through the next year or so a little more than a year.

Next slide.

Is there any, that's all I have for you all.

Are there any questions or discussion that we kind of had some ongoing?

Thank you very much, Andrea, for putting that together.

That's not even all.

There were a lot.

There were, I think, 58 items that passed.

So for your sanity and mine, I did not include them all at this PowerPoint.

A lot to digest and changes coming to what we do for an election.

Yes, I have it.

I can't seem to print it out.

Could I just run into the next room and fill it with a comment?

You didn't put- It'll be at the end in the closed session.

Security concern.

Wow.

Yeah, that's my computer telling me it would really like to restart.

I fixed that.

Thank you.

taking a brief pause as we gather materials to continue the

Schoenreidle ballot.

So, particularly in CAP where you see a lot of that, you don't see this so often in the precincts.

Okay.

We see it in provisional ballots, we have hand count on provisional ballots.

CAP gets mailed in absentee ballots that need to be hand counted.

Instead of hand counting them,

Now, theoretically, the code does specify that if you're out in a precinct and your machine goes down, it's the end of the day and you don't have a replacement machine, you're supposed to hand count them.

That's still going to be true if we can't get a replacement machine to them.

Or it tells you to do, which is the other choice in that case, which would be, no, please don't hand count them, just bring the ballots back.

If you're hand-counting five ballots, that's one thing.

If you're hand-counting a thousand, that's not a recipe for a good time.

This notion of five, I had completely missed that this thing was talking about, oh yeah, you gotta fill in.

It's not, I'm just looking at it logistically.

It cuts out one source of error for you.

Thank you.

That'd be lovely.

So still

That's what I remembered, but I wasn't on it.

So that's when we find out what the party's going to look like for the primary, which I meant party in the celebration standpoint of the

I'm good.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

Rick, you still have your hand up.

That's correct.

OK.

Thank you, sir.

I can go on and cover this last item under new business following the ES300 with the P log error.

This was the Stone-Robinson machine that failed on election morning, and we replaced it with one of the loner ES300 scanners that we had received from ESNS, which had been qualified for all the precincts.

That machine failed with an error that was

different in labeling from the error we experienced in November but in talking to the folks at ES&S it was exactly the same error pathway it came from the same place and I wonder if the fact that we had different

at a different point in its process with no knowledge about that.

We had a meeting with a VP from ES&S and our account manager and in that discussion we determined A, we were the only location in Virginia to experience a failure like this.

and B they have based on the help we provided to them in January and the machines that we sent back to them they've worked out what they think is a working approach to correcting this problem but it will still take some time before that's implemented and pushed out and basically it's a version of the the error is a timing problem and if you simply retry

everything seems to work fine.

So the software is attempting to write every time a ballot is put in the scanner.

The information on the ballot is scanned by the hardware in the machine and then several things are written to the USB stick.

One, you update the public account, you update the private account, you store images of the elements on the screen that were

and then you update the totals for each of the election items that are in there so there's a lot of writing to files that happens on that USB stick and somewhere in that process

One of those files, it's unable to write to it.

So it gets an error.

It goes to write.

And they believe it's a timing error from the way it goes.

But right now, if it fails once, it stops.

It throws up the error screen and goes, I'm done.

We're done for the day.

I don't have a public count anymore.

I don't know what's going on.

And we have to recount all the ballots in the machine.

But they have found in testing that if they alter the code and tell it try again, it works just fine.

So it's a transient timing problem.

And they've got a lot more testing to do.

That's not something that we can do.

We can't do anything about this.

And how would we?

You'd never see it.

Anyway, that's where they are.

They're confident that we aren't doing something wrong.

So there's a working theory that, or a potential theory, a hypothesis maybe better than a theory.

It's a hypothesis.

that it may be that in some large number of machines in a certain serial number, that's where all the errors are coming.

They hadn't seen any correlation before, but as they get fewer and fewer further errors and all of them fall in this same range, we happen to be in that really good range.

to address that hypothesis.

They're gonna send us three more loaner machines on top of the three we already have.

So we'll have a total of six.

And we- So we're keeping the three loaner machines- And getting three more.

And we open the question of, if this continues, when do we reach the point of we'll just swap out all the hardware we have with hardware that won't fail?

And they said, yes, that's something we will have to look at.

That's where we are.

It was an important problem during the meeting.

They were worried about it.

And it was us again.

It was like an experiment I have.

I note that at this time, this had only brought us through what was or failed, whereas previously we were seeing

300 and 400, coming back to a failure point.

That's a move on than it should have.

But I realize you can't break from here.

You have to be closer.

It was happening on the network, the government network from here earlier.

Just to start prior conversations.

I mean,

My bottom line was I really wish we weren't experiencing this and our vendor is doing everything they could to figure out what the problem is and make sure that we're not screwed over too badly.

I think if we go into the primary and we see this happen again, then it's time to advance the theory that we got 27 other machines, we ought to just replace them, or 26 other machines we ought to replace, let's just do that.

This is a work in progress.

So what I need to know from you all is what training are you going to do for this election?

My vote definitely is just to do chief and assistant chief training and newbie training and whatever hands-on kind of

Should we do an SOR training?

We've got an online course, but based on the SORs we got back, I would say it was sparsely viewed.

I haven't looked at the statistics.

particularly with the primary will have potentially two statements or results depending on how that shakes out.

Pretty standpoint might just be one, you never know.

Alongside that today, but we don't, I don't think we need to get all the EOs together.

We don't need to get the big room over at the county office building.

And that's probably the biggest thing that needs to be sorted now.

So you mean SBIR training?

Yes.

Yeah, we'll see a lot fewer provisionals for this one.

I think we can pass on that this time.

Okay, very good.

Sure, might have provisionals, might have SPRs.

How did you like the templates?

I'm going to ask them to seam this so it just becomes a flap and just put the envelope in there and just shut it so you don't have two pieces you just have one that makes sense yeah so they said they're not sure they can do it but

So the highlights I just want to mention here.

The first thing coming up for us would be LNA testing for rheolium that begins on June 18th.

Just a reminder, June 19th is a holiday.

So that's on June 9th.

I message you all, that's the one day that Tyler is available.

He's available for us.

I will do my best to achieve that goal.

You say that's the

Remember, early voting begins the 18th.

Yeah, because he wasn't- I had it scheduled earlier, but he couldn't make it.

Couldn't do that day.

10th through the 12th.

Or the 11th, we could always move the electoral work meeting.

That's true.

It'd be so weird having early voting beginning on a Thursday.

On this calendar, what I don't see is when are we going to ensure that the poll pads have been properly configured and that the poll prints are printing the ballots, et cetera.

We will need to have... You mean for early voting?

For early voting.

You're looking at Tuesday the 2th?

Yes.

Will you have your ballot template by then?

It's very tight.

Yeah, that would make more sense to me.

That's the good Friday.

and then I will add, I'm gonna clear this with you so you can just see the changes.

And so I will add all of the dates about early voting, sorry, when the registration, the close of books is all about semi-voting, I'll add that.

We were, yeah, we have.

When does that start?

We'll have Sunday voting in August of this year.

I think that one will be a little different.

That's my memory.

That's what I thought too.

I am informed by our crack early voting game we don't do in the general election.

No, but we do need to decide if indeed we have to do the Sunday stuff for this.

Yes.

Thank you.

So when do we want to decide that?

I put the question to the registrar.

At the regular time and close early.

Immediately proceeding.

That would be the 26th and the 19th.

Just for your info, my understanding was what I originally put in had the Sunday before the election.

Yeah, thank goodness they fixed that.

We've got LNA testing for July 21, the S-300s.

There's another pull pad testing date you'll want to have, although we might not need it until close to the end.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah, CAP will come in.

It's going to be.

We'll wait until they're required to come in.

I would suggest, I mean, we'll have to take a look at what's available, but usually start looking at your month before.

So Wednesdays and Fridays are the best days for them.

So on July 1st, we'll look and see how many ballots we have in.

Let's see, they need to meet that early.

So we can postpone that scheduling right now.

So I have a conflict on the 21st for the LNA testing.

We'll look for the three of you.

You've got Tyler signed up for that date?

Yeah, I do.

So we'll go to Tyler.

What date do you want?

Do you want to change it to?

Can you give them two dates just in case?

any time that week other than Friday is fine for me.

So you're already going to be calling him about the LNI.

Yes, right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yep.

So Tuesday is so hard.

I'm sorry.

Wednesday or Thursday, can you do Wednesday?

Wednesday or Thursday?

Oh, right, because we already had it on Tuesday.

Yeah, Wednesday, what I was saying is Wednesday the 22nd is also hard for me.

Oh, I see.

I have a little.

something going on.

They're not shipping the cages anywhere for a little while, so that's not a big deal.

If the only thing left to do is put the DS-300 in the cage, you can't do that until you take everything else out.

I'll ask him for the 23rd and get back with the interview.

Okay.

And let me just clarify for June,

Okay, so I'll ask him for the 12th first.

Okay.

Okay.

It's actually not in.

Next thing I've got here is revisiting officer of election half-day shifts.

The prior registrar and staff were adamantly opposed to this notion.

We had some discussion about it last year.

I raised the question because I feel like there are still a lot of potential officers of election out there who, well, let's face it, officers of election have an average age around what mine is.

For a lot of us, a 15-hour workday is a little bit more than we're capable of signing up for every time.

And we offered half-day shifts.

We might have more people involved.

And you're still talking an eight-hour shift.

In this scenario, according to the code, the chiefs and the assistant chiefs must work the entire day.

and these folks in some settings you can have them work any length of time you want but if it was just as an average it would be sort of a five to one and a 12 to

you know, closing or packing up sort of schedule.

So 12 to eight kind of split shifts.

Concerns that have been raised before have been, well, what if the second person doesn't show up?

Which is exactly the same concern as what if the first person doesn't show up?

So there's no material difference there.

We had talked about having people find pairs where one person might pair up with another person they'd agree to shift together.

You know, I don't know.

And obviously, to implement this, you run the risk of having all of your current EOs say, well, we just want to work half day shifts, and so you immediately need 300 more people to sign up to be officers of election.

But I think the pool of people we might draw from would be larger, which is why I raise it again.

I am fine with it to do the paring thing and I don't know how much I want to publicize it but if somebody says can I do a half day shift the answer is you have somebody that can do the other half day rather than staff have to find the other half day person

Part of our problem with this is that the city does and people know that the city does.

And so why don't you do it?

City uses less than half the number of selection officials that we do.

Keep track of all the election officials.

But I'm fine with it.

People have expressed a concern that, well, how can people sign the statement of results?

They haven't been there the whole time.

The way the city handles that is that, I believe the way they do it, let's say the morning person will go ahead and sign the statement of results before they leave with the notation next to it saying left at 12.30 p.m.

and the person coming in that signs it says arrived at 12.30 p.m. And you're saying that's how the city handles it now?

We have these in Newport News and we did exactly what Bucky described.

It went from 12 to one, I'm sorry, from opening to one and from 12 to closing.

And we found that at the beginning, it was pretty popular.

We didn't have problems with people not showing them.

We just didn't have that.

No, no, we did that.

We absolutely did that.

But what we found is people wanted to do that.

They were happy to be involved.

And they just did it.

They did those hours.

Well, the people who wanted to work a half a day stopped working altogether.

They have been holding elections down for many, many years.

And so they had those are the people who wanted to still be involved, but not as long.

It became time for them to quit.

Nobody ever did that.

I just filled it.

Yes, to opine.

I was just wondering if, I think it's a very good idea in many ways, because you're right, we have a lot of people who say they can't do it because they can't work all day.

Could you do it as a pilot, where you just select one or two precincts?

You don't publicize it, but you have one or two precincts.

You kind of answered that.

Yeah, far more polling, far more jurisdictions do not do this than do it, but there are some that do.

Mr. Chairman, we've discussed this a lot in the past, and I would concur me there are two attorneys in the room, at least two, and I would agree with you.

Signing the statement of results, I don't think you can sign something to which you cannot attest.

Yes, there would be details to be worked out if we went down this path.

Any other comments?

Not sensing as much enthusiasm for this idea as I have.

And we caught the data on this for months.

One more, this is Rick again, sorry, raise my hand.

Yes, the statement of results, I guess I'm a little bit confused because it seems that realistically the only people who would need to sign the statement of results are the people who were there at the end when the tapes are run because who cares who was there in the morning, you're really sounding that the tapes are coming out of the machine and you're witnessing that happening, right?

That would be informative.

Okay.

Okay, then let us move on from this unless there's something else that needs to be said at this time.

We've already done follow up on the BS 300 and I'm now to other items.

No, as in how, yes, how many do you want to order?

So primary coming up

It's gonna, I think it's gonna depend on what we get in terms of a primary.

Until we know, is there going to be a 5th district Republican primary?

No one seems to know whether Mr. Goode, who said

You're asking me if there's a woman in the ceremony.

There are two people running for the Republican nomination, Beth.

My understanding is that there are also two people running for the Democratic primary, and there are at least

as of today, three people running for the Republican Senate nomination.

No, no, it's no good can come from this comment.

Oh, that's right.

So we will be having two primaries then.

So that answer is sorted.

Again, I don't think we need to order 100% of ballots for each primary.

and the question is what do we need to order?

If memory serves.

We do have some historical primary data as far as the outcome and that we have had primaries where total votes 10%.

Yeah, 12%.

I'm feeling like primary was like 20%.

And you'll have the same.

Yeah, what is your, yeah, you'll have a lot of notes to send out for absentee stuff.

It's gonna go up.

and we got 2024, 2022.

Having once been in the circumstance of running out of Republican ballots in a polling place and voting people on the express vote, in the last 20 minutes we were open.

I would prefer not to put folks in that circumstance.

Fortunately, it was only the last 20 minutes.

We had enough express vote ballots.

It all worked out.

So for the 2024 Democrat primary, it turned out 7%.

5,865, that's 7%, 5680.

Well, there was one primary, was it?

It's a Republican primary that ended up not happening.

We already had the ballots.

Yeah, when we accidentally put out some Republican ballots to a primary that was not existing.

That was 2020.

The regular House of Delegates went out on general election also.

June 21st, 2020.

So, it seems like given the current configuration of the district, I guess I would be surprised if Democratic

Well, and I'm getting back to whether the other two announced candidates besides Mr. Perriello are actually going to make it on the ballot.

I've not filed yet.

Do you have to get

When do you have to put in a ballot order?

We have time.

We don't even have the media back yet.

So we have some time.

So in the past, have you taken the historical numbers and absent any changes, just bumped up, you know, obviously the absentee ballots, we know what those are going to be.

Yeah, I was thinking 40 of each party.

So 40% of the registered voters as a Democrat ballot and 40% of the registered voters as a Republican ballot.

Which means we're ordering 80% of the total.

80% of the total.

It is high, but I'm back to that, I really don't want to be the chief who runs out again.

There's cost.

It's some cost.

But we never want to be in a scenario where a voter is or even significantly delayed.

As all lawyers.

So that's what I would propose.

80% of the registered voters split that half and half, Republican ballots and Democrat ballots.

And in the case of Scottsville, something reasonable.

We don't have any Scottsville in the primary, not for the town.

So we won't see a primary.

And then we've also got the 7th District Free Union, different ballots for them.

But not very many.

It's like a pack of 100 is more than we have voters.

So the registrar should pick a convenient number to use for that.

Republican and Democrat contenders as well, so you maybe have two, they may end up with four ballot styles in free union.

So, but only there.

That was the one improvement of the proposed new congressional districts, was at least Albemarle fell completely in one congressional district, but we have what we have.

It does, yeah.

Okay.

So let me recap.

Registered voters.

Oh yeah.

Okay, gotcha.

So some of those will be folded.

That's what this is for.

Yeah.

When I talked with paralects yesterday, I was talking about that.

And they actually have something where you can just go one to max.

So however many candidates there are,

So let's say if you have instead of designating whether it's a one to four or doing that manually this or coming up with it manually if there are six candidates you when you set the if

The good news is already it's sounding like we don't have six candidates for any of these races.

And the state has recommended a one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three repeating patterns.

That's okay.

That's good.

But the question does obtain when you do the LNA testing for the 13 I guess it'll be scanners that will configure for the first LNA where we're configuring for all the polling places of all the precincts is three test decks going to be enough?

and it'll depend somewhat on how big the test decks are.

If we only end up with one or two or even three people per race, then your test decks won't be that large.

So three test decks will be enough.

It was in the, you had five or six people running, then suddenly you're at a 400 page tech test deck and now it's taking an hour per machine to test them.

So it's looking like we won't need more than three test decks.

Can we review very quickly how many people we think are going to be in each?

So there will be a Republican Senate.

That's already set, right?

Should be, yeah.

And that is three people?

Yes.

Okay.

And

I am, there was somebody that was going to be running against Mark Warner in the primary, but I don't know whether that ever materialized.

Up on that issue.

I don't know how valid that information is.

They're pretty good.

but there isn't an independent on the primary and on the Republican history.

We don't know yet, but we think what?

The Democratic history.

I'm going to guess that one of those other candidates will not have signatures.

Is it the 6th or the 7th?

The silly sliver.

The 7th.

We don't get anything about that.

Right now, these candidates are all results of the null and void referendum.

They're all jumping around saying, well, now I'm not going to run because I'm not going to run against my incumbent friend.

Anything else?

Then that will conclude the open portion of our meeting.

We'll take a break now and then come back and convene in closed session.

Thank you all very much for attending.

Thanks for being online.

You guys would drop off.

That would be wonderful.

We turned our recording back on so we can have a closed meeting motion.

I move that the Albemarle County Electoral Board convene a closed meeting pursuant to section 2.2-3711A of the Code of Virginia under subsection 1 to discuss and consider applications of prospective candidates as officers of election and to discuss the annual performance review process of the registrar.

as required under 24.2-1091 and to discuss the performance of officers of election and the staff in the elections office and also under section 24 point, I'll give this to you, under section 24.2-625.1b to discuss security with regard to specific local electoral procedures

All those in favor signify so by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none we'll go into a closed session.

So, to come out of our closed meeting, I move that the electoral board certify by a reported 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.

I vote yes.

There we go.

Okay, and I move the appointment of 18 new

Officers of election for a term of one year beginning March 1, 2026.

Second.

All those in favor.

OK.

Very good.

Sounds very good.

Our next meeting is scheduled for June the 11th.