Electoral Board Meeting   8/13/2026

All right, so we are recording.

It didn't make an announcement saying it was recording, but it shows it's recording at the top of the screen, so we'll take that as given.

If you can't hear me, somebody make a noise.

Not all at once.

There we go.

Thank you very much.

All right, so we'll move along.

Establish a quorum and call to order.

I'll observe the presence of all of the elected board members.

Thank you so much for coming this morning, and thank you to all of our invited and visiting folks.

With regard to approving the final agenda, Jim has made a couple of suggestions that I would add to the agenda before the last item under new business.

So before we look at changing the date of the next meeting,

The first one is ADA compliance, and the second one is Office of Election Salary.

Any other suggestions for the agenda?

No.

Then I'll move to approve it.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The agenda is approved as amended.

Now we come to brief announcements from the board and or the registrar.

Before the storm broke.

Thank you.

You were all involved.

I do.

I just wanted to, number one, just thank you for everybody for the work from the election, the hard work.

We really did appreciate it and it actually showed some of the things that we saw.

The other thing that I want to mention is we did an internal audit of things.

I'm not going to talk in depth about it now, but we mentioned our internal and we talked about things that we see the need to adjust

So I'll talk about those later on.

Ryan Weathers is the new elections manager.

He sent a note out to everybody, not all the election officials.

He didn't get it out.

I will forward it to you to make sure that you got it.

So yes, the reason he's not here today is he had a pre-arranged vacation already.

So he's off during the second week of voter voting, just a little bit.

He's pre-arranged.

But yes, and we also have, I want to mention one other new employee.

His name is Evan Weaver.

He's a part-time employee.

He's joined us on a full-time basis right now.

Yes.

Working full time hours.

Cismont.

Yes.

Does this mean you're full staff?

Oh.

Oh, yes.

OK. All right.

Moving on from our announcements, public comment.

Anyone from the public would like to participate.

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you, Bucky.

I see that on the agenda you're going to do election process lessons.

And that will be a full discussion of some of the things that occurred on that day, or if we have any, should we bring them up now?

Go ahead and bring them up now.

Anybody else have anything?

Couldn't see that right?

Just quickly, if we're not going to have a high wash, would it be possible for you all to send out to all the election officers a listing of the problems that you found in the canvas?

That is the sort of thing that we usually try to address when we do the chief's

So we will do that and we will have a hot wash after the November general, which is our typical approach.

Thank you, Mr. Sharron.

I've gotten several reports from people who are voting that there seems to be a lack of clarity in how to check in a voter.

We think it's pretty simple.

Ask the name and address.

Repeat the name.

Ask for the ID.

Check the ID.

But that apparently isn't happening.

Can you be specific?

The election officer never repeated the name of the voter.

He was one.

asking for repetition of address with the ID in the hand.

We know the ID address does not have to match the ID in the computer, in the banderas, or in the poll book.

It's the ID address, registered voter address that the voter states.

It's just, you know, it's just not following

I only know the people who said something to me, which means just the people with whom I've chatted since the election.

Address, trying to...

They were trying to use the address on the... Yeah, and the third one, thank you, Jim, is not availing themselves of the scanner.

It should scan.

So that might be something just to write exactly, reiterate, really remember that.

We'll have more check-in training.

Thank you.

Until you shaded it.

Right.

And decided that we have to be careful now.

Right.

Yeah, the same thing happened.

You know, you have to just remove the change.

Yeah.

It's a good thing.

Good observation.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Okay, minutes.

We've got two sets of minutes to look at.

I have had a chance to review the August 4th minutes.

Good.

So we've got the July 9th minutes and the August 4th through 10th minutes.

It's newly approved.

Second?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Thank you, sir.

Turn it over to you, I guess.

Yeah.

I sent you all the most recent one to the different weeks.

It starts with the week of July 1st and ends this week.

So you won't see very many differences yet.

The bigger expenditures won't hit until the next, between now and the next, the next electoral board meeting.

But I will tell you the categories that will go up significantly.

It'll be wages, postal services, for all the money that we're doing,

Copping Center will go up, the office supplies will go up, furniture and fixtures will increase, and the technology, maintenance, and support.

Claire, did you have a question?

Yes, I was gonna ask if Rachel can speak up.

I thought Rick was gonna, we're having trouble hearing her.

No, I'm sorry.

Can I repeat, should I repeat?

Yes.

So the latest expenditures for the department have not hit the budget just yet.

So they will between now and the next electoral board meeting.

But I can tell you the categories that will go up significantly.

It'll be wages will go up, postal services for all the mailings that we do, copy center.

We send out a lot of copy and we do a lot of copy in house, but we send out a lot of copy.

Office supplies, furniture and fixtures will go up.

And then also what's called the technology maintenance support category.

That's what we pay for the ballots.

And then we pay for the people who come in to support us during testing.

Any questions?

Okay.

Old work materials in the warehouse, Jim?

I'm not going to let this one go.

I will mention that I looked at what was on top and there were all the campaign finance reports.

I don't have anything to do with those.

We're going to see what needs to be thrown out.

And if I'm going to go in there and try to go through that junk, I need a retention schedule because I don't know.

Andrea, can you dig into the library website and get that?

I am wondering if one of the new staff could be assigned to help, Jim.

Because I think Alex was part of that project previously, right?

He was, yeah.

He was the one that put it all together and said,

We know we're going to keep the old minutes forever, but the rest of the stuff, we're not sure.

Nothing else on that topic.

Moving on to possibility of half-day shifts for officers of election.

We had discussed this in the past, and then we could turn over in our elections manager, so that wasn't something we were dying to do.

We now have a brand new elections manager and a pretty significant election coming up.

about this in terms of maybe something we would try at one or two polling places.

And so I put the question forth, is this something we would be interested in trying for this election?

I have an opinion.

I think not.

I mean, I think that November is going to be a busy election.

And I don't think that we should be rolling out new initiatives for a general election.

I think I agree with that.

I did ask one chief, and he said nobody on my staff wants to work a shift.

They want to work the whole day.

One of my other thinking is if we do it as a pilot, which I was kind of tending towards thinking,

We'll tell everybody that that's our plan.

And that the ones who like the best are the ones who will let you half-day shifts and the ones who are not in favor.

Well, names out of ideas.

You'll get more people.

For example, Ivy Precinct, more of our EOs live in Ivy Precinct than any other precinct.

So there's a rich bunch of officers of election out there.

Maybe that would be a good criteria to consider.

All right, so we will table this until the beginning of next year and pick it up again then.

I offered to the registrar's office to think about how

We'll make sure we bring it up as something that we talk to the chiefs and assistant chiefs about.

Okay.

Moving on, new business.

There's a bunch of things on here.

They are, to some extent, interrelated, the first three or four, in some extent separate.

But anyway, election process lessons learned

One thing we did was we had this idea internally that we want to

bring in more people to the process of voting and the entire process of voting and so we regularly now have election officials involved in the testing.

We have them involved in some things in the office and also during the off season already we've had some men who've helped move the cages around.

We're going to have them in to help

and also the DS300s.

So that's one thing that went well for us.

We were kind of surprised at how well it went, but it did.

And everybody who helped us was nice and cooperative and was really an asset for us.

Several are in the room.

So now let's talk about some of the things that we need that we know that we need to adjust and some things that maybe didn't go well.

Passwords didn't go well.

So we've already addressed this.

We've actually already changed.

We really can't hear you.

There was an issue with passwords.

Yeah, so passwords were an issue.

So what we were trying to do was to keep everything secure, but we ended up, in our efforts to do that, we were confused.

So we understand that.

So we've limited the passwords for election day and for early voting to one chief's password and one admin password.

That's it.

There's not gonna be anything more.

The chief's password are for things like undoing a check-in, avoiding a ballot, spoiling, that kind of thing.

And the admin password would be if ever the chief needs to go into the settings for anything.

So there'll be one, so just two passwords pulled together.

And they'll be the same for early voting and for elections.

So that would, if you think that's gonna solve things.

And I have one thing for that that I think would be helpful for people.

But the one thing, if it's not too much work to add on the three by five cards is this, you use this password for item one, item two, item three.

Sure.

That's a great idea.

And I think that another step to add in there would be to have somebody double check.

Yes.

Okay.

So we got calls after the chiefs picked up their materials.

We got some calls, people wondering what goes where.

And so what we thought we'd do is in every cage, we're going to have just a bigger checklist.

And when you're looking at the cage, we're going to facet it on there where the chief can just see it.

On the cage, it'll be something that you can't just pull off, not just a piece of paper.

And we'll list everything that's in the cage and what

goes, what is where?

Like an index, an alphabetical list, and what container to find it in?

Yes.

Okay.

okay then signs um i voted at my precinct for the first time and um i was a little confused by the signs um it's not that the signs weren't clear it's that they blended in with all the campaign signs so what i thought we were we thought together and we said well what if we put a background on our signs something that that's clearly our sign so maybe everything has a yellow background everything has a

of Green back brush.

So it's clearly the differentiated self along the campaign signs.

As we're on the topic of science, there were a couple of things on that.

One was the presence of some Spanish signs in some polling places that were posted in lieu of English signs, which is a great nod to learning other languages, but may not communicate as well as we want to with most of the folks.

So we should have some consistency there.

If you're going to have a prohibited activity sign,

Exactly, in multiple places.

At Monticello, they only had Spanish signs.

Also in my experience with elections, I'm not sure to what extent there has been any kind of review of the signage needed per polling place in the last 10 years.

and I know when I went to look at Earlysville, at least two, maybe three of the normal outdoor signs were missing.

They were not to be found there.

I found some other places that didn't have their 40-foot line signs posted, other places that didn't have clear curbside, here's the phone number to dial signs posted.

So I think we need to, on a polling place by polling place,

in consultation with the chief, look at what signs are needed to get people into your polling place, park where they need to park, get into the building where they need to come in, and also denote your 40 foot, maybe 100 foot, if we get more guidance on that, and then your curbside, and what those signs need to look like and say.

And it may be the case that if we're going to use a cell phone,

then we get from the chief beforehand what's the cell phone number that needs to go on there and you know we'll put that on your on your curbside voting design and I've had I had at least one chief tell me yeah we've put my number up on the sign but my phone treats them all as spam calls and

Now, I view that as a deficiency of the chief who, in using their number, didn't know how to stop.

They let spam calls through.

But it's something to pursue to make sure everyone understands we need to use a number that will ring through that day.

You don't have to take spam calls the rest of the week, but we need our curbside voters to have easy access.

So I'd like to see that done on a site-by-site basis before the next election.

That's the biggest project we'll do before the election.

It's really large and we're going to do what you said.

We're going to ask the chiefs to actually draw the inside of their schematic of their polling place as well.

We'd like to know what our polling places look like and just a basic schematic.

I think it's really important to involve the chiefs, as you said, because I did have feedback from a voter that there wasn't a sign, a required sign, and that the chief in the polling place was, you know, kind of- Dismissive?

Yeah, I don't know.

who can answer this question, either the registrar's office or the electoral board.

With all this torment and transition with the registrar's office from different places, including the registrar, the election manager, I personally think that they did an acceptable job, but it seems like right now we're just saying what went wrong would be better.

So my question would be to the registrar's office or the electoral board, what did you do to train for alert

the registrar's office to look at or hone in on to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

It seemed like to me that they were doing the best they could and maybe no one fed some information to them that they should be looking at.

Thank you.

So in the chief's booklet there's a list that's very clear that says where are the required signs and what are the optional signs and oftentimes I believe the chiefs have the right signage in there they're just not putting it up and so because there's a lot of signs in that packet and I think that that's something that I'm pointing fingers but I think that

when we talk to the chiefs that we need to be reminded which signs do absolutely have to go up and then based on the layout as Jonell says it's how you use all your other signage because we go through the required make sure those are on and then we look at the other signage and that's going to get somebody into the into the precinct.

I think Jonell has a great idea about how to differentiate the signs

from all the campaigns signed.

There weren't that many during the primary.

I mean, there were some, but not a lot.

There'll be a full vote in the next one, like, a lot.

Absolutely.

I had worked with Alex to make sure that that was going to go out with the signs, but then I think that information may have left with Alex.

I don't know if we are putting a copy of that list into the signs.

Yeah, it's in a couple of pages at the beginning of the Chief's Manual.

It says where all the signs go.

You've got to make a copy of that and give it to whoever's putting up the signs and say, here, do that.

There's a perfectly good guide.

It doesn't tell you things like, you know, you've got three outdoor signs.

This one goes by the street.

This one goes to the entrance to your parking lot.

This is where you tell people to enter the building.

One, just to mention, the 100-foot line, in my opinion, they should not be trying to mark off a 100-foot line.

They should ignore that because we're not going to have somebody out there running around 100 feet out just to check for guns.

Secondly, just a question.

The Spanish language sign, I guess they came from the state.

I ordered some.

We can order them.

I know that twice in the last two hot washes, there was a chief that specifically asked for Spanish lines.

Did we have enough for all precincts?

One of the things I keep hearing here, I realize I'm retired Chief of Staff, I've trained a lot of people.

One of the things, you know, the Chief, the Assistant Chiefs, I attend all this training and it tells you about the forms and you have to do this and that.

But one thing it doesn't say, tell them that all the training I'm

for the past 30 years is once you get it pulled in place, you need to, the chief is responsible for this, make sure it's smooth running.

And as a suggestion, I know the electoral board comes around to all the precincts, everything else, but there's nobody there to sort of mentor, especially the new chiefs.

And we had a lot of new chiefs in the past couple of years saying, hey, you know,

I want to take a look at you, pull in place, make some suggestions, you know, you should be doing this, this is how you do this, and give them the opportunity to be really good chiefs.

And I don't know how this will work or anything, but you know, some experienced chiefs are not working anymore.

and just sort of mentor the people happy cheap in the polling place.

Oh, I was just going to say, back on the Spanish side, I remember reading something about a new law that our governor has passed, probably have it in my book here somewhere, about

Benish only defines it in places where there is more a population that requires it.

So maybe by precinct, it might be heavier than others.

So is it necessary for everyone to have it?

No.

It's hard to know.

I mean, I don't know exactly where we would get it.

Does anyone know where we would get that kind of data?

Oh, the census.

In Bombay?

The view?

amendment to change the law, and now it's a new law signed by the governor that is in effect now, says that it used to be if your population of your registered voters, and it did not, it was not precinct specific, it was your locality, had more than 5%

of their voters residing in a house that spoke a foreign language predominantly.

And those people then were presumed to not be able to converse in English well enough.

That was the presumption.

But it's 5% of your population.

The law now is 3% of your population.

and that hones down into it used to be 10,000 people, now it's 5,000 people.

Exactly.

Something that came up in early voting that I'm not sure that Hillary even went on, but just being open and transparent, we ran the tabulation for early voting, early.

And we have a lessons learned from that to not doing that again.

Yeah, it's going to dovetail into what I call how-tos, and we were talking about this during the canvas.

Now we're going to have how-tos on all these different processes, how to open up the DS-300, how to close it down, how to close it down without printing anything.

you know, how to check in all of these different things where they're necessary.

We're just going to have a how-to.

Everything probably will fit on one page, and we're going to roll some of those out.

In fact, there's just one example that I brought because we've heard a lot in the precincts about the color of the cloud, whether or not they were thinking.

Yes.

And so we came up with, this is a simple how-to where we're going to say this.

And this is very simple.

We need to massage the wording a little bit, but just something like this, when we hear from people a lot about something that needs just a quick explanation, we can include those.

I'm going to attribute this idea to Bucky, the notion of a checklist similar to what airplane pilots run through every single, right?

Yes, absolutely.

And custom, I mean specific detail to us.

Yes.

Right.

I think you have a lot of very clear, some are not clear, but one of the problems we have, I'm sorry there, is you can have detailed instructions, but if some people don't follow it, it doesn't happen.

For example, it was in DS-300.

We're not removing the thumb drive before shutting the whole thing down and locking it.

It happened in my precinct.

but our instructions say to remove it.

I think, Tyler wasn't here for the last go around but I think the rationale there is that that's the

Anyway, yes, consistency in our expectations and our documentation and getting people to adhere to those are all critical.

One of them would be the phones in the precincts.

I think we need to, we've had all the phones checked by IT and they all work.

We've done that twice.

We've done it twice recently, once before the April election, and then once after that.

That's what we're wondering, if it's the jack and not necessarily the phone.

Yeah, the presumption, I think, has been that

in schools but typically we're not using those in places that aren't schools and some of the schools we didn't have very good access so in some of those places we're using phones that officers have.

My inclination would be to use the phones that are convenient to the people to the officers of all

One last thing I'd like to mention is CAP.

So, as you know, one of the long time chiefs left CAP and so we have plans to a couple of different things.

I'd like to have a team of about 20 to 22 people available for CAP or who will say that they would like to have for CAP.

And then on election night, I'm going to talk with Betsy and Sarah about this.

We're going to have two teams do the results.

So one team and the assistant is doing the results for the early

the other one is doing the results for the bi-mail so that that will speed the process for all together.

Exactly.

Because that struck me last time.

I said, how can I make this thing shorter for them?

But they also need enough teams because we're going to get a lot of balance.

We know this already.

And so we have to have more than two teams.

When I was going around to the polling places talking to chiefs about what was working, what wasn't, several of them mentioned, gosh, it would be nice if we could get our pages delivered on Friday as opposed to on Monday.

And several of them were in schools.

And I said, you know, sometimes that's something we can do in school.

Sometimes it's something we can't do in schools.

The one in a church, I said, you know, there's a problem here because they don't want this in the back of the church all day.

But I know you're going to be looking at a different mover because the county is changing.

stored over the weekend, and now being sure that that's going to be secure.

It was a money saver if you had them all done on Monday, but... No, no, that was about money, that was about security.

Okay.

Well, we ran into problems once or twice where in polling places, officers of election would come in because their material wasn't delivered on Friday and they'd put up all their signs and stuff and somebody would do something with them over the weekend.

So getting the stuff there early doesn't necessarily mean that if you take things out of the cage, they'll be just as secure as they would have been in the cage.

Yes?

I didn't know if you were going to move on to Kent yet, but before we get out of the morning, let's just continue.

Go ahead.

Jonell, I just want to put a plug in your ear.

I would just be really waiting to look at the chief's logs.

What do you mean, the chief's logs?

Yes, we have them.

Yeah, so we'll have them before you can.

That would be great.

Yes.

Do you want to go to the next meeting, or do you want to go to this meeting?

Because either.

I would love to just.

Just have a chance to.

Yeah, I just want to read it.

We'll do it.

Yeah, we have those.

Yeah, we have those.

We sent those to you electronically today.

I'm going to check my email.

Yes.

All right.

OK.

For those who don't know, I was a long time chief at Dunlora Precinct until I retired at the presidential election.

I got recalled twice now, achieved someplace else.

I've been active in elections for, I don't know, since 1990 something.

I've been a long time.

So several of us who have worked early elections several times requested to have a hot wash after the last early election.

And our rationale was that we've been doing this for several years and we've never had an opportunity to give feedback to the registrar's office or to the board or anything else.

and Jonell had one after the last election.

And one of the things that came out was the people who were there sort of requested to have, you know, we got a chief's manual and I was one of the original chiefs along with Bucky who originally put this thing together and to put together something that what is different about election day and early elections.

And so,

and several of us volunteered to do that.

And then one day during an early election, I think I was serving as chief that day, Jonell said, well, kids could do this along with Liz.

And so I put together something and got together a bunch of people via email during an early election and people saw what we were doing.

And we put together a document

of what we thought was different between early election and election day.

And one of the reasons for that was we had a lot of people, and I saw this year too where we had people

working pull pads and didn't understand that you have to initial sign the receipt.

And so why are we doing that?

And we have to explain to them why we're doing that.

And to tell you the truth, one of the things, pull pads, I agree with.

you on that, allowed them to know how to ask questions.

And so we put together a number of things about what is different about early election and poll back.

And the board got

where the people are working with, and several of them are here today, and we will receive a couple comments, more than a couple, a lot of comments.

I'm pulling them together, and I left copies of the thing at the chief's table, and a lot of people saw the thing and thought it was pretty good.

And this is a document that the Russia office wanted to have input to, and last night Janelle sent me

Her version of a bunch of corrections and things that I know one thing I always want to do was some graphics in the document.

We want to keep it simple and short.

because a lot of people come in election day and say, well, this way we do on election day.

Well, it's not election day, guys.

It's early voting.

We have to do things differently.

Because I can't tell you how many people we've had come into the election on the first couple of days early election and they come back again or go to election day because they forget about how they voted.

We have to be careful how we do things early voting, make sure we can keep a record of that, tell the people.

So anyway, I put together a document that was commented by a lot of people.

A lot of them are here today.

And most of the people I've talked to or gone back to me really like what we put together.

They thought it was simple,

complete of what the differences.

And one of the things we emphasize in the document is after we tell some procedure, we say, this is different from election day.

So people will know that is different.

and that's what we did.

And now I have to, I have to, I guess I will be working with the rest of our office to put together a final version of this thing.

And hopefully we can get it done before the next early election.

I think it's gonna be a good document for people, for train of what people work early elections because I can't tell you how many people we have come in that have slightest clue what to do.

and this goes along with Karina in general and with different election officers working

I'm here to tell you

was contributed, a lot of people contributed, Ann, Leddy, Liz, I can't name all the people, Sherry.

A lot of people saw this thing because I left copies of the thing and I'll come in one of the days I was working, I'll get an email and say, hey, we really need to include the Jim comment, they have a very good comment because I left something out.

And so that's how we did it.

and so a lot of people are involved in this thing.

So anyway.

Yeah, one thing that maybe we should add is a little caveat to the dual primary because the dual primary is an issue for people not understanding the two different ballots or anything like that.

I thought I added that.

I call it guideline, cheat sheet, or whatever.

And I can immediately know that, and the reason why is that the cheat also ordered cheats to be consistent.

Right now, the only consistency is inconsistency, and sometimes you have inconsistency cheat trying to take consistency cheat, only they was both in there, what's wrong, what they like.

That's not good, but I think

One of the issues we had was we did have a couple of chiefs come in and never worked during the elections before and they were chiefs the other day and said, this is the way it's going to be.

I mean, I think it was the next last day, maybe it was the last day.

We had two people come in, first time they worked early election,

and on election day before I asked what they did and they were assigned to poll pads and I tell you talking about trying to train somebody it was somebody has to sit behind them for quite a while to say this is what you do because they kept forgetting about initialing the receipts, checking the ballots because it's a print on demand so you have to make sure you get the right ballot

Occasionally, very rarely did we get the wrong ballot, but occasionally we did.

As we move this document to its final form, we will set up the Chief's Manual online so that it's readily available for folks to review.

Not to get into the weeds, but because I see one page there.

I just want to raise.

This is about spoiled ballots.

A spoiled ballot must be clearly marked spoiled by who?

I don't know.

This is an inconsistency we've had.

I mean, you know, countless like that appreciate it.

We tried to follow what the coach said and what we've been doing in the past.

And we did something wrong in the past.

Well, you know, we need to be corrected.

So, yeah, I think we should insist on that.

And some voters may not be able to write.

A lot of people worked on this and this has contributed time to the county's album off.

It should have been done a long time ago.

Haven't really had early voting a long time.

Well, since COVID.

And I know when we first did COVID, a lot of things have changed.

Ballots have changed the demand for and there.

And Sherry used to have to keep track of 30,000 pens and things like that.

If you were lucky, there were only 30,000.

Yes.

I do want to mention that for the office, it was my team that did the work.

Yeah, well, like I said, I got this thing last night.

I looked at it.

We'll get back to you.

I think it would be good for all the early vote home EOs to know about this.

Thank you very much.

OK.

The first thing I'd like you to note that I've moved everything up.

I felt that last election was a jammed hat in the last couple of years.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, the last four years.

So I've spread things out.

The first thing to note is that I would like to see if we could do LNA testing for CAP for reloading of the lunar machines on the 27th of this month.

It's the first one, yes.

We should.

The State Board certifies on the 18th and I should have

Exactly.

So I should have them and that's, and I also put another date on here just in case I don't have them.

It works for me.

Board, our person who does the test decks, I think goes overboard.

and I think the test deck is going to be ridiculously long this time if she does it.

I think it's the way she normally does it.

Can we get the person at Printelect to make a test deck that's a valid good test deck but not with every precinct having

for undervotes for every office.

We have so many overvotes in there, it just seems, why do we have to have all these ballots that we know there's an overvote ballot?

Great.

Undervote ballot, great.

Why do we have multiples of them?

I think we had more.

overvotes need to be tested for everything you're checking because there's an overvote for any one of the races.

You need to be able to detect that.

If we don't know that it can detect that, then that's a problem.

I'm not sure that there's any shortening that I would be comfortable seeing done.

In fact, I am sure.

I would not be comfortable seeing any shortening of the test decks that we get from Prinalectic

Well, you did a test deck once and you sorted the damn thing.

No, I changed it.

And it became shorter?

To explain, because we're allowed to have write-ins in these elections, if you use the one, two, three pattern that the state

with three write-in votes, which means your write-in tape prints out really long.

And if you instead just use a 3-2-1 pattern, then the write-in vote, you just get one write-in vote, which tests the write-in capability, which shortens the amount of printing time you've got to have.

So when we handed a test deck of, I think it was ballot-on-demand ballots, these went to a 3-2-1, the same principle, just fewer write-ins.

So yes, I did shorten it, but we are still testing all the functions.

Is it worth it to talk to whoever creates the test deck?

Yeah, we can give them a pattern.

It's up to us what the test deck looks like.

They normally do one to max, whatever the maximum is right now.

So that's maybe what Jim is talking about.

We are actually already approved three, two, one when we have to hand tool a test deck

Okay so the pattern that I set here is I was looking at maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays for almost all the testing to kind of give you a sense

and then you'll see throughout.

I've also added we're setting up things so you can see when that happens.

A couple of other things of note that are coming quickly.

So we have early voting on the 18th, so I'm looking to finish all of our testing for early voting by the first week in September.

That was another one.

That's another option.

Okay, great.

Great.

Well, I think you guys want that date.

And for now, because the meeting happens often.

Gotcha.

So, and that's another thing.

I want to get on the schedules of the vendors sooner than later, because they're stretched.

So I have two poll pad training sessions before early voting.

Early voting, absolutely.

I won't let it be here, but you probably don't need me for some machines.

Yes, and that's gonna be in the office, the center from there.

They're gonna now have the two- It depends on the water level.

Okay, so have you decided what date it's going to be?

No, that's the next one.

It's later in the agenda.

Okay, gotcha.

So then now let's see what else I'd like for you to note.

Oh, the next thing to note here is I separated again, I thought that worked well, the express vote testing from the DS-300 testing for the precincts.

So I'd like to test the express votes for the precincts on the 24th of September.

And then LNA testing for the DS-300s on the 28th of September.

Absolutely.

If I may, Mr. Chairman.

Some of these have to be tested for early voting purposes as well as election day and express votes.

Are you testing them separately?

And this is just going with the precinct machines.

We're going to do it the same day as on the 28th, is that what you're saying?

27th.

Part of the express rate testing is testing with ballot on demand.

I thought we'd usually do the ballot on demand the same time as we're doing the poll pass, which would be on the third.

Last time we did it with... We just print the ballots from one of the machines and print them out.

I don't really care how the thing is configured as long as it'll print the right ballots on that day.

We also use that instead of, we just transport it from there to over there.

I'm just separating no-wink equipment from residential performance.

Now, is there just one early opening and late close or are there two?

Are they in person?

Okay, Tuesday, one each.

Just one at one each.

Okay, gotcha.

So I took that.

I know in November we just did, I know it wasn't more than two days.

We're not required to do anything.

Do we see a lot of turnout?

No.

How many do you think we need?

That's my suggestion.

So one early opening and one late close.

Every week?

No, just one for all of early voting.

The numbers for November were not remarkably different because Alex and I talked about

I think that I don't think it's a major deal either way.

So changing your schedule after it's been posted is

Let me make sure I understand that.

So just anywhere between the 18th and the 31st.

October.

And it's the Tuesdays, open early on Tuesdays, the two Tuesdays before.

Yeah.

And all the other days of the week.

Well, then that leaves a bunch of training on it because I have the election official training at six on the 20th.

Yeah, that's on the 20th.

Yeah, impact the 22nd.

Yes.

Because that's late.

No, no, the chief training can stay right where it is.

The only people you're impacting are the ones who are working early voting, I think.

It's not going to be more than one chief.

I got it.

All right, now, what else?

Cap, one more than likely.

I put subject to change on the first two dates, which will be October 10th.

Before we leave, the days were open.

Sure.

I would ask that we get a report back as we're going through this.

By day, how many voters came in each day?

And for the days that we had early and late, what the count was early and late.

which will help us make an assessment in the future how valuable these things are.

Yes, we do track that too.

Looks like we just put this on.

Okay.

Going back to the cap, I have them starting, which is subject to change on the 10th, sticking with the Wednesday and Friday schedule for cap.

Hang on, I think I'll do the 10th.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, the 7th and the 9th.

Yeah.

Now, please take a look at the training.

I put in the SDR training, provisional training, on October 13th and 15th.

Should those be further apart?

The provisional training.

October.

Is there a place we can see a copy of these people?

We'll send out all the dates of the training, yes.

Should they be further apart or are they okay together like this the same week?

I've put one at 6 p.m. and another one at 10 a.m., so different people according to their schedules.

Well, let's hope we do.

OK, we don't want to wait until there's five of the ballots and only two teams to process is what I'm saying.

I got it.

I understand that.

Yeah, the SCR training dates look fine.

Well, plain-ish.

I'm not available.

Can we look at the chief and assistant training and the election official training?

Those are the two biggies.

The chief and assistant training, we usually do very early.

and here it's kind of late.

I would rather move it up.

I would rather not have election official training before we do people assistance.

So, can you do all your EOs at once, honey?

Can we put the chief and assistant training on the same day as our proposed electoral board meeting, which is the eight.

Yeah Lane is available.

Then you can use that Thursday slot to pick up the other half of the letters and officials on October 22nd because you've already got Lane for that date.

So yeah, keep the 22nd, then we've got to find a date.

Hopefully, it'll be the 8th.

OK. All right.

What time does the lake close?

I thought it was 7.30.

That's too early.

Nevermind.

Yes, of October, sorry.

Yes.

See the early voting on Sunday and Saturday.

And let's see, in the last, on November, these are standard.

It was staggering to me the number of voters who will say to you, I always vote here.

They have lost track of the fact that they have a polling place they could go to.

It's just amazing.

They're all trying to vote here.

Now, is there anything else?

Now, the make-up trainings with chiefs and assistants.

Now, is that standard, the Saturday, the last Saturday of early voting?

Because I have it there.

It's pretty standard.

OK. Now, is all the training on here?

We need DS-300 and express vote training, at least one session.

Typically, that's on a weekend.

Oh, okay.

Could it be within a while of when we're voting?

Yeah, sure.

We're not going to do it down in room A.

So there's not a conflict there.

We have a schedule.

And on the 10th, there's UVA.

Well we have makeup training already scheduled for the 31st.

Which day?

Now do you want a second session for that too?

No.

Just one.

Okay.

So that would be at 10.

No, I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Okay, just so you all know, I have that on here.

Well, since we have a moment, I wanted to take myself, I tried to take myself off the permanent absentee list since I am in this role, I see that it's extra work for the staff.

so but i couldn't i was having trouble finding anywhere online where i could do that is that not something that's you can but we're just we have a perfectly good form yes you want to thank you no it's not that okay yeah for myself yes i can fill in the form but for i just didn't

Yeah, as a voter.

It was there, I was certain it was theirs.

I believe the form is kind of logging in too.

Log into the citizens portal.

there.

There's only, this is important.

Right.

I was just going to say people.

Yeah.

People know that on our website, we have a notice for this November 3rd election.

We also have the ballot, not the ballot, but we have all of the offices

We have the text from the state for those.

Well, not from the state yet.

Okay, let's talk about the county referendum, Andrea.

So I guess we will want to send that brochure also.

If we have it available, if we do not.

Yes.

I would like to mention that the elect has sort of heightened their

attention on safety and security of the polling places going into November.

And they're having a tabletop exercise, which we're going to participate in the office.

A tabletop exercise several years ago, it was actually locally done, a tabletop exercise getting ready for the election.

I think it's October 2nd.

I have to check it.

I think it's October 2nd.

I need to check it.

I think.

Let me just check that.

I'll check it while we're going.

Anything else about the schedule?

It's a good schedule.

And post the voting schedule online?

Yes.

Jim?

Okay.

Does everybody have an agenda?

I'm not talking about the order of candidates, we're talking about how many ballots to order.

Remembering that we don't use pre-printed ballots in early in-person voting, but we do use them on election day and then absentee voting.

Yeah, yeah.

and what I didn't break down was how many absentee ballots they sent out for the polling place because the number you send out is a factor of two different numbers.

So, yeah, well, you know,

So I had taken Jim's idea and put it into a spreadsheet, which I've given you copies of.

And I looked at this and you could do your order a couple of election orders.

It seemed to be one of those had a percentage of the registered voters for ballot style and the other looks.

Just looking at our historical data on the ballots we had used, but I did not include absentee ballots in the number we had used.

registered voters, and 150% of the maximum number of ballots we get used per polling place.

Those are both configurable numbers, so I can't change it on the pieces of paper that you have in front of you, but I can change it on the screen in front of me very easily.

I don't know if we can do anything to get to our numbers.

if we, and they're not distributed evenly across all of the polling places, but they are probably distributed proportionate to the number of voters in each polling place.

Would that be a better number?

I think that's a better way to look at it.

Yeah, and so.

Yeah, one ballot for seven.

And we'll have a different ballot for Scottsville too, Scottsville Town, but we don't have enough useful historical data, so we'll just flag numbers for those.

I would add 1,000 to that, Bucky.

We have gotten lots of registrations.

1,000 to what?

To the number, because of the new registrations.

I don't think we're going to figure the whole thing out sitting here.

I think we are if we need to tell the rest of your company to order.

I was thinking that if she sent us a this is my proposal we could time in on email we don't I mean at the same time we do not have to have a meeting I do not believe we need to meet.

and

Distributing the absentee ballots proportionally the same way we have registered voters per polling place.

For example, in Woodbrook, that would add 316.2996 ballots for absentees there, which moves there.

I think the better number to use is the maximum number of ballots that we've previously used based on provisionals and early

and voting in person on election day.

So we had 150 percent where it was in the printouts you've got in front of you.

That was two thousand.

Now it becomes twenty one hundred.

And now we're ordering sixty five thousand ballots.

I think that's plenty.

We just print them.

Had that historically been a large number to come in?

Just as a question, I guess maybe we're going to get there today, but I did have a question.

Andrea, we have a difference of opinion here.

Working on this ballot order is a little time consuming and number consuming, and I suggested that

Jonell put together just what I intend to order, send it out to us, and that we can just individually email, yes, that's fine.

Like you said, no, we need a meeting for that.

You're still conducting business.

Anyway, so I've got a set of numbers here that now factor in the absentee ballots, which totals to 65,600 ballots for an order of which that's using 150% of max and adding an absentee ballots, which will embrace it.

65,600.

as well.

We will share that more specifically.

Right, in some cases, yeah.

So are you still comfortable with

Yeah, absolutely.

Because what you see is that precincts like Country Green that are right down the road, lots of people vote here, but people coming from Earlysville, for example, relatively few of them vote when they're voting.

Right.

And so the number of ballots you need in the precincts is not consistent.

Right.

Based on the number of voters they have.

Well, if we had a 60% turnout, and I'm basing this on the total voters at 92,000, that would be 55,200.

If 25% of those were early in person, then I think the figure of trouble is going to be higher.

So if we have 65,000, we got that covered easily.

I would not vote for any more than that.

I would send this to all of you.

I move to accept these numbers that no one else but me can see.

I move that we get 65,600 printed ballots.

Very good.

All right, moving on to the general date.

No, we've got two things we've added in here, ADA compliance.

Now, since we did this last year, none of our holding places have changed.

That is correct.

However, in at least one polling place, they discovered that what they thought

Right.

So we're supposed to submit our compliance

And this is a forum, first time I've seen it, thank you.

Thought I'd save us some steps.

The following was confirmed by a majority vote of all members of the board present.

We seem to have lost...

The camera's been off for a while.

Yes, the audio's cutting, right?

It's simply recording.

Yes.

So...

Number one, all polling places in the Lark Battle Street stated above have been assessed for accessibility using maybe a checklist provided by the OJ.

Yes?

Okay.

Reviving Accessibility for the Elder and Handicapped Act and the Virginia Disability Act.

All in favor say aye.

That's what website.

Thank you.

This is all physical access to.

Yeah, it's 46.

I have a little concern on this.

Handicap button on the front door of the school is not working, and those doors are locked unless you have a staffed badge.

We have signs to use the left door, but that presents an access issue.

But we don't have to use.

Is that the only entrance to the school?

No, it is the entrance that everyone takes to the polling place.

But the issue is that for some reason, the door is locked unless you have a staff badge, which is a school badge.

Upon the signing of this confirmation, the original confirmation is...

There's a filing system that Janelle has to share.

I think you can file it online.

Okay, moving on.

We're settled there.

Officer of election salary, Jim?

It was mentioned by someone, I think on election day to me, when are we going to get a raise?

And I thought, and I believe it's been about three years since election officers got a raise.

Not too much longer than that, but I can go back and find it, maybe four years.

Anyway, I think it's probably time for a raise.

And I would propose either $10 or $20 for election officers as a raise.

$20 for chiefs and assistant chiefs.

And do we still pay specialists more than we?

At one point specialists got a $10 extra or something like that.

But right now, regular officers I believe are $165.

Yeah.

The Viva, at least the western district of Viva, was doing a survey of its members for what they pay their officers of a lot of them, chief and assistant chiefs.

Right.

But for budgeting for next year, you won't really get into that until January or something.

Yeah.

So what fiscal year is currently?

27.

No, 27, 28.

No, it's 26-27.

Well, we're currently in 26-27.

My question is, has your budget been submitted and approved for 27-28?

No.

Okay, I was thinking in the past that

I guess you can do it.

Okay.

We'll probably find out that most of the counties pay less than we do, but I'd at least like to look at what they're doing.

There may not be a part of the cost of living here.

Okay.

Are there any other items that we need to review?

Yes, setting the next meeting.

So as it currently stands, if there's enough water in the Danube, I will not be here on September the 9th.

And I see that some lines, I don't know about the Viking, are getting people to switch to a Rhine cruise, which has enough water in it.

Anyway, suffice it to say right now I have a conflict and you guys can have one even without me here, but I was thinking that it might be nice to attend.

And before the 10th is not particularly good because my travel schedule will have me away basically from, well, Friday the 28th of August is the last day that I'd be available.

I'm not sure that makes sense.

On the other hand, when are you supposedly getting back?

I'm asking you.

I'm at your mercy.

Any, okay, so Tuesday the 15th is not great for me.

We start early voting.

Right, okay, so now.

Yeah, but.

The 14th would be good if there was anything you need to do right now before early voting.

Good point.

Can you do the 14th?

It won't be as bad as doing LNA on the DS300s from my last trip.

So, yeah, that was a room.

I will put it down.

Very good.

OK. Do you want that room?

and I'll release the booking that I put in for this room.

All right, any other business that we need to take up before we go to closed session?

I think we had a really severe problem with high school.

He's saying you had parking problems.

Well, we had no parking.

Right.

I think that that was an oversight in the superintendent profit.

Someone who was supposed to do that forgot it because there's been a lot of.

Right.

A lot of.

Yeah.

issues there.

So the remaining people are stretched, right?

But I absolutely agree.

Right.

You know, if you look at next year when the primary would be, school would have been out of session for a couple of weeks by then.

You can make a comment, construction.

At the corner of Lyle Road and John Wall Parkway, they are closing roads at nighttime, early evening to early morning.

Last night, I was coming home and I had to take a big tour.

So on election day, it might be really bad, because a roundabout, and they were closing roads.

I don't know if you can talk to the...

So they might not have an impact on Dunlora.

Hang on, Janelia.

Law by keeping voters from coming to a polling place.

Do you know what intersection is?

Which intersection is it?

It's where Rile Road leads.

And John Wonder Park.

We had a neighborhood that was told that it was going to start soon.

So something else, too, when you're talking to the very nice person who we asked to find out about.

Let's just clarify.

So that's the one we were talking about.

That's the one we were talking about.

Mr. Cameron, I apologize.

I should have asked this for your budget.

There was so much going on in the budget.

I wonder if the registrar can tell us, if she can today, the actual cost that she and Albemarle County incurred for the referendum and how much

The state has actually compensated the county.

We had that.

Okay.

Dinell reported that out of approximately 240,000 expenditures, she requested $154,000 reimbursement.

We only received $70,596.

Our next regular meeting is going to be on the 14th of September at 9 o'clock in somewhere to be determined.

and we'll get that posted and noticed appropriately.

And at this time, I'd like to move us into a closed session.

So I thank everyone who's attended, anyone who's online, if there is anyone.