Board of Supervisors Adjourned Meeting - Work Session   11/4/2022

I'm going to call to order this meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors at 9 o'clock on Friday, November the 4th, 2022 in Lane Auditorium.

You'll see five of the supervisors here at the dais.

Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley has requested to participate remotely in accordance with applicable

applicable board rules of procedure, rule number 8B1B enacted pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

She is unable to attend the meeting in person due to a medical condition.

I will make a motion to allow Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley to participate remotely.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right, a motion by myself, second by Supervisor Andrews.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

All right, thank you.

I'd also like to mention that at the dais this morning is our

County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, and our County Attorney, Mr. Steve Rosenberg, as well as our Clerk, Claudette Borgerson.

All the Supervisors are now present.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley attending virtually at the dais.

We have Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District,

Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District and myself, Supervisor Donna Price.

of the Scottsville District.

I'd also like to welcome and thank our officers from Albemarle County who are present today, Officer Ben Chisholm and Officer Steve McCall.

As the Board knows, this is a special meeting to deal with ranked choice voting.

I want to welcome Delegate Sally Hudson from the 57th District of the Virginia House of Delegates who will make this presentation.

But Board, I do need to advise everyone present that we have a hard stop

between 9.45 and not later than 9.50 because we have to set up for a 10 o'clock meeting in another room and our staff will need time to be able to do that.

Thank you Chair Price and thank you all for your interest in this topic.

I know we've had some opportunities to talk about this in pieces one-on-one but this is our first opportunity to have a shared discussion and so I'm looking forward to providing a little bit of a framework and then digging in on your questions because my goal is really to turn things over to you fairly quickly so that we can talk about the pieces that interest you most in this.

Ranked choice voting is an election reform that is now being adopted across the country on both coasts and everywhere in between.

It's a very practical thing that we can do to encourage more participation in our elections from candidates and voters alike while also ensuring that we promote and elect consensus builders who are invested in the very real work of bringing people together.

to get good governing done.

And so that's what has motivated me to be so passionate about this topic for some years now.

And I'm excited to have the opportunity for us to discuss it in our community so that we might consider adoption.

In my experience, rank choice voting questions fall in sort of two buckets.

The first bucket is the broad set of general questions that anyone encounters when they're relatively new to the topic.

What is rank choice voting?

How does it work?

Where is it used?

How has that gone?

What do people like about it?

What makes people concerned about it?

These are the big broad questions about considering any policy reform.

There's a separate set of questions that are more specific to Virginia and to Albemarle County in particular

that we can dig in on about implementation once we feel as though these bigger questions are addressed.

And my sense is that folks are coming to this conversation perhaps with more exposure to some of these broad questions and the goal for this meeting is really to dig on the latter set.

But I did want to take just a moment to frame the conversation and make sure we touch on some of these bigger pieces.

before we get into the nitty-gritty details about how the county might consider adoption if you were so inclined.

So for that reason, let me just take a moment to review for all of us what ranked choice voting is.

In a ranked choice election, you don't just vote for one candidate, you get to rank the candidates from most to least favorite.

So let me show you a ranked choice ballot

from Maine, which has been using ranked choice statewide since 2018, so four years.

This is their general election ballot from November 2020, the presidential election.

So you'll see some names that you recognize, like President Joe Biden and now Vice President Kamala Harris, along with some U.S.

Senate candidates, some of which you may know, and their representatives to the U.S.

House as well.

Sometimes a ranked choice election is just like any other election that we're used to.

Sometimes only two people run, and so the options are fairly simple.

Whoever is your first choice candidate determines who your second choice would be, and that's a pretty simple election to execute.

But in the event that more than two candidates run,

The rank choice voting really starts to come into play.

When you're filling out a rank choice ballot, instead of just voting for one candidate, potentially your favorite, you get to rank the candidates in the order that you like them.

So your first choice, your second choice, your third choice, and so on.

You can rank as many or as few as you want.

Nothing requires that you fill out the whole ballot, though it's to your advantage to do so because that ensures that your vote will be counted and your voice will be heard even if your favorite candidate can't win.

So let's understand how a ranked choice ballot is counted to know what that looks like.

Here's some voting data from an election in Payson City, Utah, which is one of the 22 cities in Utah that now use ranked choice.

Utah has gone all in on ranked choice voting.

They really like the idea.

This is from their city council race back now three years ago.

And there were three candidates running for this open city council seat.

And in the first round, a candidate named Linda Carter ran away with the race.

She won 60% of the first choice votes and the election was over.

She had already demonstrated that she was the clear consensus candidate.

No one else got close to even a quarter of the vote.

In this case, a ranked choice election is very simple.

The person who won the most votes is also the person who won majority support from their community.

But if nobody wins a majority on the first ballot, then we conduct what's called an instant runoff.

And we identify the candidate who has majority support from the broader electorate.

So here's an example of a recent ranked choice election.

This one from Alaska in a special election that happened earlier this fall.

where the second and third choice votes turned out to be important.

So Alaska had an open seat in the U.S.

Congress.

They have adopted ranked choice statewide and so they filled this seat in a special election in August.

That's why this month is not November.

And there were three candidates running.

A woman named Mary Potola, a candidate named Sarah Palin,

and a candidate named Nick Begich.

And on the first ballot, the candidate Mary Patola had close to 40% of the votes but still not a majority.

She had not yet demonstrated that she had majority support from the broader community.

And so in an instant runoff election, you identify the lowest vote getter in the first round.

In this case, it was Mr. Begich.

And he was eliminated from contention.

and his supporters' votes were transferred to their second choice.

So you look at all of the people who cast a ballot for Mr. Begich and ask who was the second choice vote in their case?

Who do they like as their backup if their first choice couldn't win?

And it turned out that while the majority of Mr. Begich's supporters

preferred candidate Palin.

A sizable share preferred Ms.

Patola and so she was the majority winner on the last round ballot and was elected to the US Congress.

She just became the first Native American to serve Alaska in the US House.

So this is how ranked choice voting works.

Sometimes it's very simple.

If somebody wins broad support on the first ballot, the election is over.

Only if you don't have a majority support candidate in the first round do you look at those second choice votes as a tiebreaker.

In that sense, a ranked choice or an instant runoff election is just like the runoff elections that have been conducted in the south for years.

You just don't drag everybody back to the polls and make them cast another ballot to determine the winner in the head-to-head final race.

You just ask them when they vote the first time, in the event that we need to do a runoff, who's your second choice?

So computers have made that easy enough for us.

So I skipped it in the interest of time, but there were write-ins.

One percent of the people cast write-in ballots.

Those are the Mickey Mouses and the Donald Ducks.

So in the instance where there's a very small number of write-ins, it is unlikely to affect the ultimate outcome.

Thank you.

Sally, when you say majority, I imagine there are some nuances, so 50%, 51%, 50.1%?

The last one, so 50% plus one more vote.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

So as you can see,

Ranked choice voting starts to matter more the wider the field is.

So if you think about the very wide fields that we've seen, especially for presidential primaries, where on both the Democratic and Republican ticket you've seen four, five, six, seven, nine candidates running at one time.

Delegate Hudson, so if I understand, in ranked choice voting,

As long as your first choice candidate remains in the running, you're always keeping your first vote there.

It's only when your candidate falls out that then your second or potentially third or fourth would take place.

would get counted.

Exactly.

As long as your first choice candidate is still in the race, no one ever looks at your second or third votes.

It only becomes relevant if you need a backup plan because it turns out that your first choice candidate is not popular among your fellow voters.

In that sense, ranked choice makes voting less like gambling.

You don't have to think about who everybody else is voting for.

to vote.

in the not too distant past, especially in some of these really wide races that we've seen where you go into the ballot box thinking, should I vote for the person who I think can win, who I think is in the running, or can I vote for the candidate who I sincerely support without wasting my vote and not having a voice in the final tally ranked choice

solves that tension by ensuring that if it turns out that your favorite candidate is not as popular among your peers, you can still have your voice heard in the final vote.

So for all of those reasons, rank choice has become increasingly popular around the country.

This is a map of where rank choice is currently being used.

You can see that the purple states, Maine and Alaska,

are the ones that are now using Rank Choice statewide.

The purple dots are the cities that are currently using Rank Choice.

So you can see all of these dots in Utah, which has really gone all in on Rank Choice.

You can also see several cities in the Bay Area.

That's San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley.

You can see here a cluster of five cities around the Twin Cities.

That's Minneapolis, St.

Paul, Bloomington, the two largest cities in New Mexico, Santa Fe and Las Cruces.

and then last year, New York City, which is the largest city in the country.

As they say, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

So, I think it's important to note that if the county were to explore RCV adoption, you are not forging new ground.

This is relatively new to Virginia, but rank choice has been battle tested in cities big and small all across the country.

You'll also notice in the south, this cluster of states in the navy blue,

where ranked choice has been in use for military and overseas voters for quite some time.

These are the southern states that have long conducted runoff elections and they needed an efficient way of allowing troops who are stationed overseas

to participate in a relatively tight turnaround runoff election.

And so for years, Louisiana and Mississippi and their neighbors have been sending ranked choice ballots to veterans stationed or to active duty service members stationed overseas so that they didn't have to ship two rounds of ballots

across the ocean.

So that's just a sign that rank choice technology has been used in lots of different ways in lots of different places.

Here in Virginia, you'll see that we're in the salmon colored pink.

That's because rank choice was up until recently only legal in party primary elections, in conventions and firehouse primaries that you may be familiar with.

And both parties in Virginia have chosen to use rank choice

ballots in those party primaries.

Let me see if I can pop this back up here.

Both Republicans and Democrats have exercised the current legal authority to use ranked choice voting in party-run primaries.

On the Republican side, they nominated their statewide candidates for office in 2021 using ranked choice ballots.

That's the current Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General.

and then again this year in the 10th and 11th congressional districts in Northern Virginia.

Democrats have been a little slower to adopt but the Arlington County Democrats have used ranked choice internally to nominate their county board candidates for some years as well.

This was a recent quote from Steven Knotts who happens to be the GOP chairman in the 11th district and was in charge of running this process in the party run primary this spring and he came away with a very positive impression.

He said, the takeaway for me personally is that the system works.

The downside to using ranked choice in party run primaries is that you don't get to use any of the formal state resources.

You don't get polling places.

You don't get election hardware.

You don't get all the election staff.

You have to do it ad hoc by hand.

So you've got folks reading those ballots in the back of a hotel conference room somewhere and counting up all the votes, which is

Good on them for being willing to shoulder that work.

But what we're now able to do in Virginia, because of some steps that the state has taken, is to authorize, at least at a pilot local level, the use of ranked choice voting in formal state-run primaries and general elections.

In 2020, the General Assembly passed a bill that I carried that now authorizes local governing bodies to adopt RCV for use in their own primaries and generals.

Since then, Elect has gone through the process of adopting the supporting regulations, which includes ballot standards that govern the conduct of RCV elections.

This is the nitty-gritty stuff that the electoral board sweats.

and for the last six months or so there's been an active work group of elect staff, a representative from VEBA, which is the Virginia Electoral Board Association, some local registrars from interested localities and General Assembly members like me who care about this stuff that we continue to move forward on discussing the technical implementation details.

The current frontier of the conversations in that group have to do with presenting

Clear information to adopting localities about software costs and vendors.

So that's something that the work group is working on right now and will return to after the election rush for election officials is trying to more clearly publish a menu of potential costs to folks like yourself who are considering local adoption.

But things seem to be proceeding at pace.

From my own personal experience, Elect has been very responsive and energetic about working on this.

So it's been great to have their partnership in this work.

Who are your partners at this time who might be considering?

Arlington County is the furthest down the road.

For the last six weeks, they have invited public comment as a county board about adopting an ordinance to use RCV in their elections for next year.

So the board, I think, intends to start formal debate and discussion about that in the coming month.

Charlottesville City Councilors have also indicated that they intend to start having this conversation just like you.

in November, just like you have had their hands full with some other things recently, but are now digging in on this in earnest after the election staff are done with the current rush.

I would love to talk just nuts and bolts about what would be required if you wanted to move forward.

Procedurally, it's relatively simple.

The local governing body would have to pass an ordinance by majority vote

to

a lot of technical requirements at the ordinance level.

The technical investments fall into three buckets, hardware and then two different kinds of software.

Albemarle County uses Unison voting systems, is my understanding, which are already RCV capable in terms of their physical construction and all modern voting system hardware is.

Of the 133 localities in Virginia, only one locality

has hardware that is not currently RCV capable.

So all of the major vendors are incorporating this as their default.

at this point.

But in addition to the physical machinery, you need at least two different kinds of software.

One of them is the software that scans the ballots and recognizes a grid ballot as different from a single column ballot.

And Lauren Eddy, and I would love to defer to her on the details here, has indicated that the county would need to update its ballot scanning software if it wanted to use ranked choice next year.

Importantly,

All ballot scanning software is also moving in the direction of being RCV capable by default.

So if it turns out that you needed to adopt, you needed to upgrade your software next year, it's likely that that's the software you would need to buy at some time in the next five years or three years or whatever your upgrade cycle is.

And it's just a question of when you choose to go in on that upgrade.

It's kind of like the

the upgrades that your phone pushes you every six months the default is going in this direction whether you want it or not it's up to you to decide whether you want to use those features and then in addition to the ballot scanning software there's a tabulation software which does the counting does the first choice in the second choice and drop the last place person and that software is available fortunately for free through a fantastic organization

called the Rank Choice Voting Resource Center, which is full of wonderful election administrators who are supporting RCV adoption nationwide.

The financial costs of RCV adoption, I am going to defer to Lauren and Elect just to make sure that you get the most recent accurate numbers because I know they've been in the middle of a lot of active conversations with vendors.

My memory from the conversation we had with the electoral board back

in September or August was that the software cost was in the ballot tabulation software cost was in the low five figures.

So something like 15,000, 10,000, 15,000.

and that the tabulation software is free and open source.

Importantly, because I know that you've heard some concerns, the original legislation that was passed in 2020 included a backstop which would have put localities on the hook for any cost that the state incurred for upgrading its systems to support an RCV election.

The state has since learned that those concerns are those potential costs are minimal.

and that it doesn't anticipate needing to pass any of the costs of adoption for ELECT's internal systems onto localities.

So the costs that the locality would bear would be the upgrades to its own machinery, but there would not be coordination costs to incur in order to prepare ELECT.

Elect is in the process of updating its statewide systems to be RCV capable in the event that Virginia ever wanted to use ranked choice statewide like Maine and Alaska, but that's a two plus year project and can move in parallel to potential local adoption without putting any costs on your shoulders.

And so from there, the question is what might a timeline look like?

To my knowledge, there are no known technical barriers to Albemarle using RCV in a 2023 fall election in terms of software availability costs.

The candidates and parties, I imagine, would like to know the rules sooner rather than later so that people could think about whether or not they want to run under those rules.

In particular, in most jurisdictions that have adopted rank choice for local elections, they eliminate party primaries entirely because party primaries typically serve to winnow the field, but rank choice solves that problem.

It's not a problem to have

three or four people run at the same time.

So many places, especially in Utah, the ability to shorten the length of the campaign cycle and the cost to candidates, the cost to the electorate has been perceived to be a benefit of rank choice.

It allows everybody to run at once in an election cycle that looks more like your current school board elections and less like the two-stage

primary general of a more of a federal or a state office and you know if you were to try to stay on track with a similar timeline that Arlington County is pursuing they allowed six weeks of public comment so I do want to acknowledge that if you were thinking about doing this for 2023 it does start to get a little tight in terms of

having a couple months for the public to simmer on this and then having things squared away in time for spring candidates.

The good news is if you were considering adoption and the parties were inclined to forego a primary, the world only gets easier if you make that choice.

You could tell them in January or February and they would discover that they had more time, not less.

But those are all of the pieces that I wanted to make sure that I covered.

Thank you, Delegate Hudson.

Board, we do have a printed order.

Unfortunately, we did not get copies to everybody.

So I'll just call each supervisor out in the order that has been prepared.

Well, thank you, Delegate Hudson.

I feel like after this, I should be referring to you as Professor Hudson in your day job.

So I have to admit, I said this a few weeks ago, I'm very uneducated on ranked choice voting.

So this, to me, was important to start understanding what this is all about.

And just the simple how the second goes to the other was very helpful to understand that.

So I guess my first question is not knowing a whole lot about it walking into today, what are the criticisms?

I can't play devil's advocate because I don't know it well enough.

Sure.

So this document, this RCV FAQ that I tried to share with you earlier this fall, I hope outlines the most common ones.

The first question that people ask is exactly the one that you just did, which is, do voters get this?

Do people understand what's going on?

And there are really two ways that we can measure that in any objective fashion.

The first is exit polls.

We can ask voters who have voted in jurisdictions that use ranked choice

Did you get it?

Did you like it?

Do you want to do it again?

Those are the three questions that always get asked in exit polls.

And there's some research here that you can review on your own time from the New America Foundation, which has tried to do a really independent job of corralling objective research on rank choice.

They show that overwhelmingly those exit polls say yes, that people say, I got it.

I liked it.

I want to do it again.

The other objective take that we have on whether or not voters get it is that there are many jurisdictions that have a ranked choice and a traditional election on the same ballot.

So if you're voting for mayor of Oakland, you've got ranked choice local elections and governor and president on the same ballot.

And so we can compare error rates between the two.

Do we see people more likely to make mistakes on the ranked choice section of the ballot than they do on the traditional section?

The answer is there's no difference between the rates.

There are always rates of overvotes.

There's a small set of people who miss bubble in every election.

But the rate of overvotes between the ranked choice and traditional section of the ballots don't differ.

Apparently, there are just some people who don't read instructions or don't follow them.

But that does not vary with whether or not they're casting a ranked choice ballot.

And the good news is that the ballot scanning software is designed to kick a ballot back out

if it is bubbled incorrectly so you know when you stick the ballot in and you get the happy American flag that says you've done your duty the the software can check that for you so if you're if we're worried

that people might not understand it and therefore might be functionally disenfranchised.

I think the two best pieces of evidence we have to answer that question suggest it's not a major concern, provided that communities invest in appropriate education.

If you went and grabbed 100 voters today and shoved a ranked choice ballot in their hands, they would probably have some questions.

but there are best practices now developed by communities all over the country about how you do good ballot design so that the instructions are easy to follow, so that the graphics are laid out in a way that is intuitive, the language that you use to train staff to talk about how to do rank choice and then especially I think in the communities that do this best

They really engage broader civic institutions, your schools, your local businesses in getting their rank choice buzz going.

One of my favorites is in the Twin Cities where they've been doing this for a decade.

Fair Vote Minnesota is a non-profit advocacy organization.

that works really closely with the restaurant community to get people practicing on ranked choice ballots with food and beers and wine so that they get to do it in an apolitical context, right?

Like you walk into the ice cream shop and you say, well, my favorite is midship, but if you don't have that, then my backup is chocolate.

And okay, if the only thing you're selling at this baseball game is vanilla,

than I still want ice cream, right?

That's the idea.

In Minnesota, they have an annual festival called the Best of the Worst, which is the bratwurst festival.

And they use ranked choice ballots to pick that.

So you can make it fun.

You can make it apolitical.

You can get a lot of people involved so that there starts to be community buzz around it and people understand what they're getting into.

The next question that people usually ask is like, OK, so you just changed the rules of the game.

How do I game the new system?

What does this do to candidates?

Does it affect how they run?

And the really good news is that ranked choice voting aligns candidates' and voters' incentives because it gives candidates a reason to coalition build.

It gives candidates a reason to talk to everybody, not just their base.

And for me, I think some of the most powerful evidence of that comes from this video, which includes a short clip from the first female mayor of Minneapolis.

What it meant as a candidate was that the campaign was remarkably positive.

There was relatively little elbowing and attacking.

There were some, but relatively little because of course every candidate wanted to be the second choice.

of their opponent's supporters.

So I, if you and I were running against one another and ranked choice, I want the second choice votes of your supporters.

So if I'm talking smack about you, it's not going to go well for me in the ballot box.

So as a candidate, it also played to my history background and

complete what I would do anyway, which is a grassroots campaign because you can't just play to your base.

So what I think makes that really attractive is that it allows candidates to identify what they have in common and then try to distinguish themselves on substantive dimensions.

In Maine, you will now actually see candidates for governor appear in ads together and say, I want you to rank Supervisor Price first and Supervisor Galloway second or

rank the opposite.

They'll campaign together and they'll say, I want to be your first choice or your second, but if I'm your first, make her your second because I want the issues that we have in common to rise to the top of this election pool.

And so it allows candidates to identify what they have in common

and then try to distinguish themselves on more substantive matters.

We have about 10 or 15 minutes, so we do want to make sure everyone has a chance.

I prefer your second part of that example.

I appreciate that.

The only other question I'll have, and I suspect I know the answer, three of us who just most recently ran for this board ran uncontested, including myself.

It sounds like this could be helpful in terms of participation, perhaps, because that to me would be a positive if more folks felt like they could participate and now hearing that, if the animosity of running a contested campaign goes away, it could help bring some people in.

I suspect there's some

You read ahead because the next question is in particular how does RCV affect historically underrepresented candidates?

How does it affect candidate diversity?

And consistently what we see in communities that adopt ranked choice is that we see a wider range of people choosing to engage as candidates in politics, particularly those who have historically been the target of the worst form

of Nasty campaigning.

And then once you get more candidates who represent the breadth of the community running, voters get more engaged because they say, hey, there's somebody who's speaking to my slice of our community.

And so there's this positive feedback loop between candidate and voter engagement.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, once again, following Supervisor Galloway is a tough act because that was exactly where I was going to go with this, the fact that I have one election and I was the only candidate and that was it.

So it wouldn't have made a lot of difference there, but I do think that this is an important point that people's decision to run as candidates.

I think we are all thinking about that very issue because we've talked about how can we best get our board to look more like the community.

It's been really striking.

In New York City, for example, which is kind of like a small state legislature, their 51-member city council is representing 10 million people, which is more than I do.

They've never had more than, I think, 18 women, and the year after they adopt ranked choice, they have the first majority women city council in their history, and the vast majority of those are women of color.

I'm not sure exactly how to ask this, but is there any data on how this affects financing of campaigns or outside influence on monies because we do see that.

Maybe not so much with our campaigns, but I'm just interested if there's any

It's a great question.

I don't know off the top.

If there is, I would imagine that it would be included in these resources from the New America Foundation because they've tried to consolidate.

I will say that consistently what you hear from candidates is that ranked choice tones down the negativity because negativity sticks out like a sore thumb in a ranked choice election.

So if you did have somebody coming in and, you know, air dropping a bunch of

extreme mailers from an outside advocacy organization, it would be more noticeable to voters.

The other piece that I think is important is that particularly in communities that have used ranked choice to eliminate a long party primary followed by a low turnout general, it also lowers the financial cost to candidates.

Because we do have, it's certainly pretty obvious that at times, and I'm not speaking necessarily just locally, but you do see

Extremely wealthy people who can self-finance.

So just trying to figure that out.

I have one more question, and again, it may be a little harder to answer.

We've heard the concern in our community, not a wise concern, but some concern about the cost.

another a year later that's not what happened so I mean I'm just being honest understood so trying to figure out the monies absolutely so let me show you where I think the initial concern about costs came from so this is the bill that passed in 2020

and at that time the General Assembly had not yet allocated funding for the state's upgrade of its statewide voter registration system, VRIS, which is also where results get reported and it's the main software headquarters of everything that Elect does.

and there were concerns at the time because Elect hadn't yet researched ranked choice thoroughly that there would be collisions between local adoption of ranked choice voting and their need to update their own systems and so at their request we included a provision in the initial bill that said that any costs incurred by the Department of Elections related to changes in technology that are necessary for yada yada

shall be charged to the localities exercising the option to proceed with rank choice voting.

What we have since learned in the time since is that no such technological changes are needed.

That the changes that Elect needs to make de virus will occur over the next two years and they will position Elect to potentially support a statewide rank choice election but that at a local level they can handle results reporting

without needing to go through virus.

So it's not that you're counting on the word of the General Assembly that we will continue adequately funding a state agency because I also share your concerns about those promises, but rather that in the time since the bill was passed

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

I know we're running short on time.

One quick question though.

Is there anything in the law that says, I believe you said Arlington was a six-week public comment.

There's not a legal requirement to have a certain amount of time.

Machinery certified was a real hangout for many years.

Understood.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Delegate Hudson, for being here and for that wonderful explanation.

I, along with Supervisor Galloway, was not sure how everything worked and now I am, so I thank you very much.

Exactly, so if you, in principle, you could have a first choice candidate who was on the ballot, and your second choice could be a right in, and your third choice could be somebody who was declared on the ballot.

All right.

One quick comment and then a question.

Clearly, again, thank you, Delegate Hudson.

We really appreciate the time and effort you put into explaining all of this.

It becomes clear to me that you want to use every bubble, every option on there because if you only vote for one person and they are eliminated, your voice is not heard.

So you do want to use all of them.

I am very supportive of this.

I am not an election denier.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

I was an election official for 10 years in two different jurisdictions in five different precincts, and I have great confidence in the system.

But we live in an era where there are election deniers, big lie, conspiracy theories.

Because of the necessity of the software to do the elimination process, how complex is it if you then have to do a manual tally of the ballots?

It's a great question.

It's a question that Jim Nix from the City Electoral Board asked me early on in this process.

And so there are resources here that I'd be happy to talk with you about when there are more time about how to conduct the standard risk limiting audits for a ranked choice election.

which is the same procedure of selecting a random subsample and identifying whether or not they match the results.

The folks at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, I really cannot sing their praises highly enough.

They are the experts in this and are very responsive.

I'm certain that if we would like to have them hop in on your next meeting or talk with you each personally, it's the kind of people who know election hardware down to the serial number by heart.

and its attorneys and its techie folks and I'm sure that they would be happy to dig in on the details there.

Thank you.

That answers the question I would offer to the Board that if we desire to proceed with this that that would be very helpful to have as part of our process to help our public understand

that this is not a real risk.

Happy to follow up with that.

Anything else?

We can adjourn till 10 o'clock in room 241, where we will have our next session.

Clerk and IT, I think that will give you enough time to make the transition.