Election Commission Worksession - June 10, 2025

All right, you guys are live. Perfect. Thank you so much. All right, um, present today for this work session: Katie Nolan, Chair. Lauren, say your name, whatever.

Oh, Lauren Lehman, and I'm the Vice Chairman of the Election Commission. Ann Courtney, Commissioner. Mead Treadwell, Commissioner. And we have a featured present— presenter today, Pete Nolan. Okay, and Pete's going to talk about advertising.

That's the purpose of this event, this work session, is so that we can all be on the same page about advertising. Um, and I explained to Pete part of the challenge is that we're tossing hundreds of ballots every election that are stupid mistakes that could be solved if we could reach people and educate them about what they need to do to make their vote count, and about curing their ballots. The biggest reasons that people are messing up their ballots are their signatures don't match what's on file, and they're doing dumb things like returning them in some other envelope, or returning 3 ballots in 1 envelope, or stupid stupid things that— shouldn't say stupid, but things that could be easily corrected if we could educate them. And we want to talk about advertising to address some of these issues. And to start that off, I'd really like to have this be a conversation, not a presentation per se, so that we can all be on the same page about what advertising is, what it's supposed to do, the different types of advertising that are available, and how we can effectively use them to educate the voting public.

So Pete, you want to just tell us what advertising is? Well, one of the interesting things I noticed when Katie sent me the notes about, about the difference between '24 and '25 selection was that you had to eliminate 113 ballots in '24, and you dropped that down to 793 ballots in '25. So clearly something happened in there, and I see that you did some advertising. On the radio, and it looks like you tried to do some advertising through social media, but I'm not sure what all of this means here in regards to Facebook pages predating Meta changes and so on and so forth. So it doesn't sound to me like that part of it worked out.

So most of the advertising seems to have been done through the radio, which actually is probably the most effective means of reaching people about something like this. Advertising, of course, is, you know, designed to do several things. One is it's designed to sell a product. This is kind of like that in a sense, the product being the election, but not really. It's also designed to inform, and that's more of what this is about, is to inform people.

It is also a call to action. To— so for people to do something. And so it can be done in a couple of different ways. One is through a positive message, the other is through what we call a negative message advertising. The positive message is kind of what was done this last time around.

I think the advertising went sort of like, you know, "Anchorage voters, Election Day is April 1st." Does anybody know who wrote these ads that ran Man on the radio? No, Seth. Okay, Anchorage voters, Election Day is April 1st. When you vote at home, you have time to research your choices and your vote remains secure and confidential. Mark your ballot, read and sign the voter declaration on the return envelope, and return your ballot envelope in a drop box at a vote center or mail— or by mail with first-class postage.

For more information, go to, you know, muni.org/elections. I tuned out after vote at home, you know, trying to research your choices. So I'm either changing the radio channel, which generally people don't do, they stick around but they just don't listen to it. If they hear this more than once, they really don't listen to it. It's what's called positive messaging, you know, it's to tell people, you know, the things that they need to do and it's fairly ineffective.

Now it worked to some degree because either that or people wised up because you did have a drop of about 400 in the surveys and the number of ballots that you, you know, you didn't have to toss, so to speak. A second one that was done was Anchorage voters. Election Day is April 1st. When you vote at home— oh, those are the same. Yeah, when you vote at home, your vote remains safe, secure, and confidential.

Well, we assume that anyway, so that, that is really just— and you just lose people. Well, yes, yes and no. I mean, I I feel like if I'm putting in the machine, putting it there, there's— if somebody else is opening up the envelope and they have my return address, or I mean, very honestly, there are a couple of places here in our process where we could have found out who the identity of the voter was. It would have been improper for us to do so, but anyway, it is a concern that people have. You bet.

Absolutely. That, that things— making things safe and secure And people who do have a concern about that, there's no doubt about that. I mean, you know, we've got a problematic system. Yeah, you do, but that, that's not cured by advertising. That is cured by, you know, transparency, by just making sure everything works right and such.

What you're trying to do is stop people from having the ballots thrown away. That has nothing to do with, you know, transparency or or whether or not, you know, they trust elections. Although it can certainly have that negative effect on trusting elections when their ballot's thrown out. So the point I'm making is that if you're running an advertisement that you want to catch people's attention on and you want them to focus on the 4 main reasons that their ballots are being thrown out, number 1 is they're not signing it, number 2 is they're not signing the envelope, number 3 is they don't send it back in the proper envelope, Number 4 is that they get it there after Election Day, whether by turning it in after 8 PM on Election Day or not mailing it soon enough. So those are your 4 main things that are stopping people's ballots from being, from being counted.

So an ad that you might want to consider would be something more like this: Anchorage voters, Election Day is April 1st. Your vote will not count if you don't sign your ballot, if you don't return the ballot in the official election envelope, if you mail your ballot too late or if you drop your ballot off after 8 PM on Election Day. So make sure your vote counts on April 1st. For more information, call the voter hotline or go to www.michigan.gov/election. That is, that is a form of negative advertising, if you will.

It's a negative messaging advertising. In other words, it's saying to you, you're not— your vote's not going to count if you don't do these things. It gets people's attention. Hey, Anchorage voters, Election Day is April 1st. I know.

Your vote will not count. What do you mean my vote will not count? If you don't sign your ballot, if you don't return the ballot in the envelope it came in, if you don't drop it off before— Oh, a couple others. If you stick more than one ballot in the envelope. Exactly.

Or if you use last year's ballot. Oh, does that happen a lot? That happens enough. Well, you could actually add that. And don't put more than one ballot in the— So you're telling people what not to do in a way that tells them that If you want your vote to count, you have to do this.

This is just one example of how advertising can work that way. There are several places, ways to advertise. One, of course, is through newspaper. You do do a lot of advertising in the newspaper in regards to the announcements about the election, but not about how to vote in the election. What newspaper is that?

Exactly. Well, I read it on my phone in the morning, or Katie reads it on the tablet. So we still are subscribers, but you're right, the advertising is limited. There's not very much in it anymore and it doesn't have the cachet it used to have with people. They just don't read it.

Number 2, of course, is being on television. Television is very costly. There's really only 2 places to advertise in which people are going to watch the commercial potentially, and that is during the news because it's live or during a sporting event. Katie and I like The Voice. We like America's Got Talent.

We never watch it live. My God, the commercials are annoying as all get-out. And so people DVR it, even if they just DVR the first hour and then they watch it. So people fast-forward. GCI has just taken away our DVR.

Do what? GCI has taken away our DVR. Well, they have, but you still have that. Like, we have YouTube TV and you can record stuff on YouTube TV. So people record it and they just go through the commercial.

So it's not a very effective— it's expensive and not very effective unless you're on the Channel 2 News, for instance, which is the most expensive. Then there's digital, which that's Facebook, YouTube, putting ads on there. It has an effect over a long period of time, but you are really talking about something that's in a short period of time, usually 2 to 3 or 4 week period of time prior to the election, prior to ballots going out, that you want to get this message out to people. And so the most effective means is what you guys are actually using, and that is radio. So, so hearing and understanding, agreeing with the intent of your message, um, I would say that the most of the, the place to— there is, when you seal your envelope, it says stop, make sure you have.

Okay, but even to make sure you have on the envelope I don't handle all the reasons why they throw it out. Does your signature match one on file, such as the signature on your driver's license? Right. Does—. Did you put more than one ballot in?

Did you mark things properly? Did you— but it also would seem to me is, did you give us your email address? If you have, if we have your email It makes it easier to cure a problem than snail mail, okay, an email or a phone number even. And invite that. We're not invading your privacy.

We're not going to give you junk calls, but there were many people who could have cured who didn't. So you have that. But even a little card or something like this, here's what to do, here's what not to do, on the how to vote would help. So I would say that on the material itself, that's number one. And even—.

Would that be included with the ballot that's mailed? Yes, yeah. And in fact, if you look at the envelope today, it does give you a little things. Don't put in the envelope without the hidden outside envelope or your ballot may not be counted because, well, anyway, it doesn't protect your privacy. So, so you've got those things.

And then, you know, the weird thing about advertising is that the campaigns have figured it out. We can, one, suggest messages to give the campaigns because they are always looking for a way to close. And the weirdest thing about mail-in voting is it used to be, it used to be, I'll go back to when my father ran for office in a small town, we were calling— if the polls closed at 8 o'clock, we were calling people up until about 7 saying the polls close in an hour, we noticed you haven't voted yet, we really need your vote, you know, and we'd even offer rides to the polls and that sort of thing. It's hard to do on a mail-in thing. You can figure out whose mail has been received, But the other thing is the finish line is actually a month long now, you know, and so a last-minute charge, already half the people have voted.

For example, if the guy is, you know, the old joke, I'm not even going to say it, but, you know, whatever it ends up disqualifying, it could be John Lindauer financed by the mafia, but you're already, they've already voted half of it, you know. And so the point being is that You've got campaigns that are doing advertising, so you might figure out a message that could be approved by the campaign without it sounding like the elections office endorsing you. You could also just have a combination of an Anchorage area by— if I'm, if I'm in Dubai, my social media still thinks I'm from Anchorage and is telling me about something on the Park Strip that afternoon. All right, I noticed that in Dubai last week, as a matter of fact. And if you have a combination of a buy with newspapers, social media, radio, television— and the weird thing for me is that television now, it costs me about 5 minutes to turn on my TV.

Yeah, make sure that the password is still up to date, pick among 20 different apps that are going to show me some fun show, or make sure that we've still paid for the sports channel. And it's nonsense. And so the idea that I could turn on— if I was watching late night TV the night before, I'd turn on, The Today Show would be on— I can't even do that anymore. You know, and so The local advertising market has really kind of dried up. I'm going to lunch with Ryan Binkley, who's publisher of the paper, where I assume he's going to tell us how much news advertising has dried up.

Uh-oh. Pete, excuse me, you listed when you started talking, you listed 4 main reasons that you had distilled from your reading. Would you mind repeating those? You mean, um, the 4 reasons that people advertise? No, I believe it was the 4 reasons why votes are not counted.

Oh, um, the 4 reasons that I understood, um, from looking at what you have here for the main reasons are that, um, people don't sign their ballot. Not signed at all. Not signed at all. Uh-huh. That they don't mail the ballot in the official ballot envelope, mail it in some other kind of an envelope.

That they don't drop off the ballot before 8 PM on Election Day, or they don't mail it on time.

However, I see another one here that's a significant reason, and that's no signature match. Yeah, that seems to be the largest reason. 602 In '24 and 386 in '25. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Oh, there's no signature match.

Those, those are curable, you know. In fact, all of everything's—. Everything's curable if we could mix up for—. If you had the phone number or their email address. So, um, so we may never And you may never solve all of this, but clearly getting some of the message out has helped to drop that down somewhat from '24 to '25.

Of course, it also could be just the realization that a lot more people voted in '24 because it was— I'm sorry. Mayoral election. The mayoral election was in '25, right? '24. I'm sorry, '24.

So, so last year, so you had a mayoral election as opposed to an off-year election in '25, which really didn't have that many seats that were open on the assembly. They weren't very competitive. I think only a couple of them were, and I think you had a lot less votes that were made, which could account for that discrepancy between the two. However, it also could be because somebody wrote some ads here, put them on the radio so that people could hear them, and went, okay, you know, let me pay attention. It could be because they were reading the envelope better.

It could be for a multitude of reasons. Advertising could be just one, one part of that. Your main thing that you're trying to do is educate the public about how to make their votes count. That's the thing that you want to do. And you have to, you know, a card that's inside of each ballot that says here, these critical things must be done to make sure that your ballot works or is effective and can be counted would be one suggestion.

That's certainly something that would help, but you already have that on the ballot itself for people to read. Did you sign it? Is that correct? Is it on the ballot? Yeah, it does, but it's, it's a good reminder.

One of the things that we talked about about as we went through that list of hundreds of different things is, you know, a question that this Commission keeps asking is, well, did they cure? Did they have a chance to cure? One of the weird things about curing is if the election office tells you, well, we're going to be— the final count on the election is 2 weeks from now, you've got 2 weeks to come down to cure, but it's it's announced that the mayor's already won or lost by this many votes. So why bother? Why bother?

You know, I'm not going to change the results, so I won't go. So there's people who are given the chance to cure who don't, right? That's fine. There's also a lot of people in relatively close elections who don't get the cure message until it's too late, all right? And that's why you want to put their email or their phone number in.

Another thing that could possibly help, I'm just thinking of strategies because, because you've got your 5 or 6 reasons which are, which are good, but the fixes are obviously advertising.

I would suggest a letter with the new ballot that says, uh, Ms. Jones, here's your ballot, or, or a postcard, Ms. Jones, we've sent your ballots have been sent differently. This is just to let you know that "Hey, one election ago we had to discard your ballot because it didn't have a postmark in time," or something like that. I mean, that's a possible campaign, right? And it at least lets people know. What's interesting is we asked them for information on serial folks being thrown out, and we saw an improvement, but one of the improvements was Well, I, I don't know, but we suspect that there's a number of older voters whose signatures don't match because their original signature on their driver's license or whatever, or the state doesn't have them.

There's actually a chunk, and we've, we've several times voted to count somebody's if the government doesn't have the signature. Remember that one? Yeah. But the other thing is there is this notification system which is, you know, which will tell you, Mr. Lehman, your ballot has been received. Do you ever get that email or that text?

Right. You know, we might also send out a notification system to that list, which may not be everybody, but it's everybody who signed up asking, here are 5 ways to make sure your ballot doesn't count. We threw out this many ballots in the last election, you know. Would that be an effective advertising strategy, is to just show them the numbers? I think it's a communicate— an effective strategy, you know.

And the weird thing about the negative thing, and this is, this is something to be aware of, to, and one reason why sometimes people don't do negative advertising on this, is because it, it lets you know a way to, to invalidate somebody's ballot that you're dropping off for them or posting for them. And, you know, I mean, my wife and I disagree on, have, you know, certainly on the presidential candidates, for example. All right. So, so could I invalidate or— yeah, honey, I mailed your ballot. Well, I forgot to put a stamp on it or I mailed it past 4 o'clock or what, or I dropped it in the thing at 8:02.

I mean, you know, it's in a presidential election. That's a state thing. But there's, there's always a concern about that. I'll tell you, there's, there's a different one in a very different business that I've done a lot of work in, which is trying to get America to build effective defenses. And after Ukraine managed to demolish $7 billion worth of Russian aircraft with drones that were snuck into Russia just right outside the bases—.

That cost about $1.98—. Right, but the, the point being is a long time, a set of thinkers on defense, we've had the argument, and we've never published the article that we could very easily call America the vulnerable, pointing out our vulnerabilities, simply because we don't want to put that target on our back, if you know what I'm saying. Somebody else can also figure that out, but, but the fact is, is that on some of these vulnerabilities, we haven't done anything in 20 years to fix it. Some are new vulnerabilities, but you don't necessarily want to do that. So anyway, it's— I, I still think the idea of that that.

There's also kind of a way of engaging humor, which may well be not the official language. We still got to publish this official stuff, right? Right. But, you know, maybe the Commission itself gets on talk radio every day during a mail-in election. Maybe we get a comedy PSA that says, here's the top 5 ways to not vote when you vote, you know, or something like that, and try to do it a little bit more viral and see if we can engage this.

And there's campaign groups and others where we could even invite— the Commission itself could say, a week or two before, at the same time that we're coming together to learn about how the signature machine works or whatever, we have these workshops for observers. We could also invite campaigns and say, hey, here's a message that you really need to get out to your people and do this. And just, you know, Katie, you're the chair, let's get you on all the news channels, on on, you know, public radio, on the— there are 3 or 4 people who actually do news. The Anchorage Election Commission Chair Katie Nolan says that her commission will be meeting on, you know, this date, 2 weeks after the election, to count the ballots. Last year, says Katie, we threw out X hundred ballots for these 4 reasons, you know.

And so I'm just making sure that we're telling voters this now before before they vote rather than after. All right, and if you— if it says put your email down, put it down. We're not going to invade your privacy. We're, uh, we're going to use that to contact you if there's something wrong with your ballot, you know, that sort of thing. And just interact.

And whether it's the group of us or you as chair or whatever, I think it makes sense to do that. And frankly, you can do that without any authority from the city clerk. You are a commission. You're a commission. But, and it's purely educational, but it makes sense to do.

What's the most effective way to get these messages out? I don't get Channel 2 anymore, or if I want to get it, like Meade said, I've got to go through, you know, 10 steps to find it somewhere. So I don't get the local news, I don't get the paper.

Is Facebook a broad enough demographic? Wait, is the demographic of Facebook broad enough? Well, you know, digital marketing, that's what that is. You know, Google does it. Meta, which is Facebook now.

Yeah, it can be very effective, but it can cost. I mean, you have to have your ads rotating in, in, into the cycle with all the other ads that people see when you come up on Facebook or on YouTube in particular. And if you want your ad to play out on YouTube, not just the first 5 seconds and then people can skip it, it costs more money. And then there are boosting so that you can boost the amount of people that see your ad. Those are all things that a digital person would sit down and talk with you about.

There's certainly— that is available. What if I could just speak to what Amit is talking about here for just a moment. I think that all of those are very effective ways of educating because you're not trying to sell a product. This is not a product sale here. You're not promoting any kind of a function other the election is won.

What you're trying to do is educate the public about, you know, how that you make sure that their ballots will count. Certainly negative advertising could cause somebody who was nefarious to say, hey, boy, that's, man, I could make sure that, you know, my wife's doesn't count, you know, but more than likely that isn't a huge challenge. Right, it's more than likely not a huge challenge. Exactly. But in the same token, you know, there's all the things that Mead is talking about here and laying out are excellent ways to educate the public that are outside of necessarily advertising in the traditional way, but they're all advertising.

So each one of you getting on the air, talking about a TV going on—. Yeah, just call it communications. My question is, do these forms of communication reach Mountain View and Fairview equally with South Bay. So let me just give you an answer, or my answer. I was looking at my phone earlier to find the name of the guy I know at MEDA who was my guest at dinner after I was at a family wedding where it turned out we were on the same airplane to New York.

He's in charge of all of Meta's advertising with one of the big drug companies, Briggs Stratton, or whatever. And, and so they don't want to sell me, say, a drug for women in menopause, but they do want to show me, you know, something that men look at for their prostate or for their bladder or whatever. And the point is, is they have figured out ways to slice and dice their membership, uh, very well so that, so you can do it. And you can say, okay, we're going to do a test marketing program with doctors in Winnetka, Illinois, uh, on this drug, uh, for this 2-week period, and we are aiming to get, uh, we're aiming to see how well your stuff works because we're going to give a premium to people who call their doctor about this eye drop, okay? And they can slice and dice that market.

I will tell you, because the people who used it against me in the Senate race, literally, when I lost to Nan Sullivan and Joe Miller, what's his name, Lotzfeld, had the best Facebook thing on what I'll call the black helicopter crowd, who just are totally suspicious of government. And they had negative ads about me that we didn't even see until after the election. Well, uh, because I, I was a founder of a company that had a technology that has a very tiny little piece of Real ID, but apparently Real ID was my problem and I had created this. Okay, we also did some work for the National Reconnaissance Office, which was called persistent surveillance. And apparently, according to Lutzfeld, to all this black helicopter crowd in Alaska, I was the one who was helping the government spy on them from space continuously, which is not the case.

We were actually helping the NRO figure out how to find bin Laden at bin Laden's cave. Okay, but it was that weird, but they— we never even saw the ads until afterwards, but we did see the numbers move of people who moved from us to Joe, you know. And it was just— it was just— they picked the vulnerability. They knew from all the things that these people click and from all the affinity groups that they joined and, and so forth. They had that.

And so there is a huge science now to find— do you want people in Mountain View? If you are a Facebook person but you've also posted on Nextdoor about a bear running around Mountain View, you're suddenly in a mountain— you know, the AI will figure out, okay, we're going to stick you in the Mountain View thing. And, you know, if you're a legislative candidate in Anchorage, you don't want to be paying for ads in Fairbanks that turn up. You will, some of them will, but they're very good at finding you all sorts of ways, including the fact that your phone is telling them in many cases where you are as you are browsing. I guess my question is, is simpler than that.

Um, do—. Does every demographic now have equal access to phones and laptops and Well, I couldn't know that for certain, but I think if, for instance, from radio, you can say that there are certain radio stations, KFAB for instance, that are targeted toward a particular demographic, younger people, African American, you know, to white, to all kinds of, but the demographic itself, because of the type of music, the programs and the shows that are on there are going to skewer more towards that younger audience. Program a radio station like, I don't know, country stations. There's religious, country. Exactly.

They all skewer to a particular demographic. Jazz, classical, all those things. Talk. Talk. And talk radio is an older demographic mostly and skewers more male than female.

So, you know, you look at the demographics of the radio station, they ran on a number of stations here on the last election across a number of different places. There were some radio stations that they didn't run on that are like very high-rated popular stations that are demographic that probably, we don't know for certain where these uncured ballots came from, that got dropped, but probably from, from maybe lower income neighborhoods and stuff. So hitting that demographic is important. But can't you also, on Facebook, can't you target your ad by zip code? Well, you can, you can target it through, like, like, um, uh, uh, Meade is saying, um, Meta will target your ad towards the demographic you want.

Um, they don't— if you're a legislator running in Anchorage or an assembly person and you're advertising on Meta, they're not going to send your ad to Fairbanks. They're just not going to do that. They have a way of knowing and targeting. But I think your question from an equity standpoint—. That's what—.

All right, that it used to be that the newspapers could say everybody's got a newspaper, okay? And if you publish it in the legal, everybody's got a shot at it. Yeah. And that argument is still made. It's a general circulation thing.

You don't have to be to be a member of something in order to get it. So the newspapers have fought to keep legal advertising, and it's a constant fight. I can tell you because when I was Lieutenant Governor, we had to publish certain legals, and there were all sorts of bills flying around to say that. And sometimes government agencies will pick not one of their— not the biggest newspaper, but their favorite newspaper or things, things like that. So anyway, that's one issue.

I think, I think one thing that we might do, Ann, and I don't know, I seriously doubt we could get the Anchorage elections people to do it, but it is probably possible for some group to get a list of everybody who's dispatch and figure out what is the demographic. I have my suspicions because, uh, I look at the list of the folks we're throwing out. A lot of them are old-time Alaskans who are probably not being thrown out because they're old, but because their signature may not be in a deal, or they are, uh, college kids who've changed jurisdiction. Uh, I mean, there's one other thing that is important is And we did throw a whole— we do throw out a regular group for what I'll call registration issues, right? All right, where you didn't register in time, or you, you know, you're— or you change venue, or you said— I mean, there's a question that is asked, is this your current address?

And if you say no, then, then, you know, there's a chance your ballot's being thrown out when you were really just trying to change your address, you know. So it would be very interesting to find out, is there any particular group— young, old, rich, poor, uh, pre— Black, white, registered before, registered after— that didn't get this, that, that somehow is discriminated against? Now, the opponents of ranked choice voting have said that there's much— there's many, many more wasted ballots, so to speak, or exhausted ballots is the term, in the bush, right? That's not our problem on this Commission, but it may be interesting to encourage that kind of a study. And, and, you know, the people who have studied it— I mean, the only person The smartest person I know on any party who's studied this is Randy Rierich, who, you know, sat in my living room one day and said, you know, Republicans don't like mail-in voting.

We're actually doing better on mail-in voting. Whatever. But I think it would be worthwhile to study to see which groups are disenfranchised through this process more. Well, I don't know the answer to this question. The ballots that we tossed last time, are they destroyed?

I think the names are kept. The names are kept. Yeah. And we have names—. Otherwise they are destroyed.

With some of them we have phone numbers and addresses.

We have addresses for all of them. Uh, we don't have email addresses for all of them, though weirdly enough we're coming off a database where the state doesn't share with us the email addresses that they collect. Um, what is that? Uh, I started to get— I, I, I better not answer because I'll be partially inaccurate, I'm sure. But we started to collect email addresses.

I remember insisting on it, and I think we put a disclaimer saying we wouldn't share this with anybody. And the state has said, well, that includes municipalities or something like that. But we were doing it to get people to do it so we could cure at the state end. Right. And it should be shared with municipalities.

I think we were trying to protect people who didn't want to get campaign notices. Oh, sure. Yeah. So essentially, you have a problem. You have an issue.

My, my expertise, if you will, is from an advertising standpoint. I think that this is something that goes beyond advertising, though, to, to a sort of an all of the above type of approach that, that has been talked about here, where, you know, certainly educating the public is what you're trying to do here. You're trying to stop it where there's no, you know, thrown out ballots. And so educating the public as best you can. You can do that somewhat through advertising, which they did.

They ran some ads to do that, and that's one way to do it. Radio is probably the most effective only because it reaches so many people. People are doing it. It doesn't take a membership. You don't have to be on Facebook.

You just turn your car on and some people listen to radio. But then doing all the other things that Keith's talking about, putting a card in, letting people know. That your ballot won't count if you don't do these things, and we want your ballot to count, telling people how many ballots get thrown out. The only problem with that is that you get back to the, you know, the helicopter, black helicopter crowd going, see, you're throwing out ballots, you know, how many of those would have changed an election. So, but at the same token, educating people that we don't want to throw out ballots, that if you do it right, your ballot will count, so make sure you do, is hugely important.

So, so, Madam Chair, Just, you know, as a possible outcome of this workshop, besides maybe committing ourselves to do this or recommending a change in advertising policy, it might make sense to do a letter to the assembly that said, we call ourselves into order informally to do this. We looked at this issue and here are the statistics, you know, the last 3 elections or something like that. You know, the trend is improving. We would like to see it improve faster. Here's what we plan to do as a commission.

Here's what we hope you will do as an assembly to help us. And, you know, maybe number one would be a study like that helps answer some of the questions that Ann had. Maybe number two is ask us and the clerk to come back with you with changes of the ballot envelope and the card in the envelope sooner rather than later so that it doesn't become— you know, a lot of times, especially with the last clerk, not necessarily this clerk, they think that we're there to criticize them. We're not here to criticize them, we're here to improve things and to actually develop trust in the elections. Is, you know, and if we see anything that isn't trustworthy, we should raise the alarm, but In this case, we're just trying to address that.

And if we did it as a thing to the assembly that comes at an off time when people aren't all razzed up, oh my gosh, is this one party trying to change the rules? I mean, if something as silly as saying you couldn't give water to people in line in Georgia, uh, yeah, you know, is, uh, was, was seen by, gee, this is something the right is doing to keep the left from voting, or something stupid like that. You don't want to be doing anything that suggests you're depressing the vote or challenging people or making them feel their vote doesn't count. It's make your vote count and put it in the positive thing. But if we— and that to me is pretty important.

So having a central theme, Make Your Vote Count, something simple like that, and planning the whole campaign around it, it would include advertising, the personal interview visits, whatever we did, and working towards, uh, uh, we— whatever advertising we do, we need to have in line far before election date so that we know what the exactly what our message is going to be, what message is going to go out in the ballots themselves. One other thing that's kind of weird, but it's a possibility, is in your house, who makes sure everybody votes? Do you call your kids and say, Joseph, you know, get— all right. I do. So you're the whip, all right?

In legislative terms, you're the whip, all right? I'm the whip in my house with my kids and with my wife. I'm getting you the ballot in time for you to put a post stamp on it, you know, to send it back. One of the fun things you might be able to do is go into the schools and say, are you the whip? Are you the one who makes sure that everybody votes in your the White House.

Here's to make sure their votes aren't screwed up. And get the high school seniors who are turning 18, you may or may not be 18, but here's how to make sure you're registered if you turn. And by the way, here's how to make sure that your family votes and get that out. It may be that you do the same thing with families of people in nursing homes, you know, so that they're not exploited by somebody else. But the case of influencers, and in fact I think that's the idea, is, you know, the weird thing about influencers is it's a phenomenon that nobody is used to, but the advertisers have caught on to this, which is, you know, I don't have any influencers, I guess, but But, you know, my daughter is actually a paid influencer about concerts coming to Anchorage.

Oh, isn't this cool? So-and-so is here. And she's got like 3 or 4 Instagram accounts that just tell people that so-and-so is going to be playing at sundown, you know, at the town square on Saturday. And there's other people who are influencers on clothing. And so 'Look at this brand new purse that Prada's got out.

It's only $300. I can't believe it. I'm buying two.' But there's, there's people who have over a million, uh, followers on that. And so the people at Prada will send them free handbags. When we're talking demographics, which is what Anne was talking about earlier, influencers, that's the younger generation.

None of us You're going from a different direction than I'm going, I'm sorry. But are you the family influencer was the key on that one. But the influencers, how do we, how do we reach that younger generation to vote? And how do we reach the older generation to vote? How do we figure that out?

In fact, that's one of the questions from the study is just, yeah, We can very easily match the demographic of the name and the age, and probably the names and ages of everybody who voted. So was there a greater propensity, you know, yes, people over 50 voted 40% of those registered, and people under 50 voted 30%, all right. But then if the skew of who were thrown out was more in the higher percentage than the percentages that they voted, that's a signal. I think that would be very interesting. Yeah.

In terms of targeting our message. Well, one of the questions would be to find out who would pay for that. Would it be the Assembly? Do you get the parties to pay for it? Do you get somebody like Lord Savis Lotzfeld or Dittman or somebody else to pay for it or encourage it.

There's lots of people who do studies on election issues nationally who would possibly support this on the left and the right. On the left, it's Pew. On the right, it's Leonard Leo and his group is—. Do you have to fund it out? Could it not be done in-house with I'm going to pause this for a second.

I promised Pete he wouldn't be here over an hour. Oh, I know, Pete, you really—. You're being you. Any more advertising information that we need? It's been great.

Yeah, well, thank you very much. All I can say to all of this is that, um, what you guys need, you know, are trying to do is just educate the public about all things having to do with the election to make sure that their vote counts. That's the main thing. We also, as you know, it was just pointed out here a moment ago, to encourage people to vote. I think that the idea in 2000 when I worked with the Anchorage Daily News, I still have a t-shirt of this, Vote 2000, and we went to high schools as I was part of this group of people with the newspaper and other places that we went to talk to high school kids about voting and registering to vote when you were 18.

And I don't know how effective the program was, but, you know, we were doing that, you know, 25 years ago. And so, but educating people on all these things, advertising is just one tiny slice of that, and how you advertise can be, you know, however. I guess I would say this, if you're going to advertise, I would encourage that advertising advertising to be through digital and through radio to get that message out to the broadest audience. You're an old newspaper guy. I'm an old newspaper guy.

I was with the Anchorage Daily News for a number of years back in the day when we were king. We were king. I mean, well, you were. We were. I mean, a few surprises came out of there.

Cal Wenders with Ford was, and I got to know Cal really well, was my client. And This was the only market in the country in which he had a $2 million contract with us for advertising in the newspaper. Because he was the guy who was on the, you know, "Go call Cal," and he's on the air. [Speaker:Q] Go to Cal, go to Cal. [Speaker:BOB] And every other big market in the country that he was, he mostly did television.

He had a very small market for it. But the Anchorage Daily News was king all over the state and he spent $2 million a year with us. So we were, you know, I walked in and it was, "Oh, the Daily News guy was here." It was just amazing. Now, I mean, they won't even talk to you if you were a daily news person. So yeah, it was a heyday of newspaper and I really enjoyed it back then.

It was really great and lucrative. Not so much anymore. But anyways—. How many of us actually take the paper anymore? On my phone, I like to read it.

That's about it. But nobody— but the cost is amazing, even on the phone. It's a little expensive. It's—. For me, to me, For me to pay what I pay just so I can open my phone in the morning and read what little bit there is in the paper anymore is pretty ridiculous.

I don't know why I do it, to be honest with you. The funnies, the comics, are still good. Thank you very much. You're welcome. And what are you doing now?

I actually work in digital marketing and in radio field now. So actually with a group that they didn't advertise with, which is fine, but But I work with Ohana Media Group and they are KFAT and some of those other stations that, you know, KFAT's the number one station in the market in that demographic, in that demographic of the younger people and probably more, you know, it's hip-hop music, it's that kind of stuff. But yeah, so I am familiar with some digital marketing marketing, what you're talking about, what Mead was talking about. But that's the advertising side of things. I think there's other ways.

Mead has talked about, you all have talked about educating that community, educating people out there. Katie going on and talking, you all going on and talking. Mead's very, you know, well, you all, you know, not Ann, but the rest of you came from politics. I even took a little stab at that myself once, and so never do that again. But anyways, and so, So we all kind of understand that messaging and how to talk to people.

And I think going on talk radio, going on, you know, the shows, going with one central theme, with one central theme. Don't let your ballot not count. Don't let your ballot—. Make your, make your vote count. Make your vote count.

Make your vote count. Make your vote count. Don't lose your vote. And just do these simple things and it'll count. Thank you.

So I enjoyed it. You have to run, but on the On the drive down, you know, I was thinking about this. I got this message, whatever, 2 days ago, I guess, from Jamie, and I looked in what is approximately $40,000-$50,000 I think municipality spends. And my thought is, is that effective? And what's the most effective way to get that message And presumably, and not have to spend a lot of money doing it.

Are, you know, are we wasting money in some, in some efforts? Or, you know, what's the most effective way? And that you've been helpful today just ensuring your knowledge. Thank you. Well, I will say that of that $48,000, $37,000 of it was into the Anchorage Daily News for the notices that they have to be required.

Yeah, so really only $10,187 of actually spent on advertising. I mean, they're required. They're required, but who sees them? You don't see them. Well, most of us don't, but it's required by law, so that's what they spent most money on.

They only spent $10,187 on radio. They spent it over iHeart and Alpha Media and then a couple of other smaller media companies. The question is, who made the decision? I have no idea, but I will tell you what, I, you know, in here you'll see when the ads ran, how much they cost, and the times that they ran. And across so many stations for only $10,000, it was fairly ineffective.

Pick a couple of good stations, top-rated stations, and get on those stations and plug the message. So, I don't think what they did here was very effective in terms of reaching out to people and educating as many people as possible. There's an old saying about advertising: only half of it works, we just don't know which half. Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, if you're going to spend money on it, you know, try to make it as effective as you can.

I couldn't tell what Thompson and Company did. Now that, that's probably some kind of a consulting firm. Um, it's PR, but they— it says they talk— they dealt with Meta. So, so here's the thing about Meta, just so you understand that Meta decided that when it came to politics, because there was so many foreign actors like Chinese pretending to be American conservative groups or liberal groups or whatever, that if they couldn't, if they couldn't verify that the advertiser, they wouldn't accept it. Now, they did it with such a broad brush that Even groups like the municipality of Anchorage got told, well, we're not sure you are who you say you are.

And that was the fight. It's true. And so Meta basically wrote down a lot of their, you know, wrote off a lot of that advertising that they couldn't. I wish they did the same thing with people are trying to give me a free piano, if you heard that show yesterday on the radio. I did.

But the— But, but so, uh, as I, you know, depending on the interest of Jamie to, to take advice on this, there, that fight is worth fighting now, not 2 weeks before you place your deal. Exactly. And, and getting that verified. And, um, and they should. So that's a recommendation we've might want to put down.

Exactly. Because the reality is, are you— do you have a budget for advertising, or is this coming from the municipality? Who's making decisions on what radio stations? We don't have a budget for anything. We're an advisory group.

Exactly. So somewhere out there, somebody made decisions about where to run advertising, what kind of advertising it would be, what radio stations to be on. It looks like they kind of did it, you know, shotgun approach. They likely hired somebody to tell them what to do. I'm thinking maybe this is so much money, go.

I'm thinking probably this Thompson and Company was acting as an agency of, of sort for them, although I'll be honest, I don't know that agency. Yeah, William, uh, who was the director, yeah, you know, he probably got somebody to do it. Not saying he did a bad thing. I know, I don't—. He probably did the best he could with—.

He just, he just didn't know. So, and so, um, The recommendation I would make is to sit down and talk to somebody who understands how to place the advertising, if you're going to do it, and find out who they have doing that so that you can help direct them. And what is the most effective for this commission to get the word out so that people's votes count? Thompson Company Public Relations. PR company, yeah.

I am pretty sure the digital advocacy They are, um, I think it's Jennifer. Jennifer. It is Jennifer. Yeah, Jennifer did work for us when I was on the ASTF board in the '90s. Um, you know, so she's been around for a while.

They were part of CARL and split off. Heather Handyside. So they are, they are, they, they acted as the agency. I found it interesting they've taken them out of the advertising realm of it and put them into whatever they're going to be in. But I guess, I'm guessing that they probably did that placement.

Yeah, well, you ought to get to know them. They're a bunch of go-getter women. I know, I know 3 or 4 of them. Yes, you've got Jennifer, Heather, Sarah. I know Heather.

Sarah Erkmann Ward, know her very well. Yes, I don't know Ariel. I don't know Liz. I also spent 7 years with the Alaska Chamber as the the director of membership for them. So I retired from that and got bored and went to work with Ohana Media, but I'm almost 70 now and I'm getting tired of that, so I may retire officially and yay, and then I'll join the commission.

Do what? Just getting tired. Yes, I'm getting tired of not being retired. I'm getting very close to that now, but yes, so—. In this case, it probably wouldn't even hurt to talk them to say, okay, figure out what their contract— what did you do?

What, what else could we do? Well, she goes on to describe what they did, but it ended up being a, a disagreement among Meta and Google and the city. And what it's going to take a long time to, to rectify. So I don't know if that—. Resolved.

I don't— so I don't know. It doesn't look like any adver— because there was no budget put forth for Meta or Google. In other words, they spent no money on it, which means that it never happened for whatever reason. And they certainly would have known how to do it. I enjoyed being with all of you.

It's not often I'm in a room with two former lieutenant governors of the state of Alaska at the same time. I feel, you know, pretty proud. I'm in good company. And also with Ann and Katie. Anyway, it's nice seeing you, Lauren.

Always a pleasure. Bye. Okay, so thank you very much. Where we stand is we're going to Make Your Vote Count. Is everybody happy with that, that theme?

That theme, you know, a person, you know, some— yeah, yeah, I think a Make Your Vote Count initiative, okay, you know, on our, on our part would help. I think it—. Yeah, okay, um, we need to run write a letter to the assembly talking about— we'd like to suggest changes to the ballot envelope. First of all, giving them the reasons for our issues, that we're trying to not throw away ballots. This is strictly a nonpartisan issue.

There's no sides to be taken here. We're all after the same goal. That we, we need their help to get here. We want to make changes to the ballot envelope that where there'll be some, an insert that explains, you know, how to make sure your, your vote counts. And that we'd like to do a survey, and the survey would be of the ballots that did not get counted last time.

If we could go back and figure out names, ages, and addresses on that, those groups, and see if we can determine what demographic. Yeah, I think instead of a survey, it would be an analysis. Analysis, sorry, of the votes that didn't. Yeah, and I would suggest we do it for maybe the last 3 elections to see if there's a trend. Would y'all refresh my recollection?

There was a reason that Jamie gave us for the dramatic 50% drop. And I thought it was technology, that they had used a different technology or a different program. You're talking about for the signature comparisons? Yes. Yeah, it's a— they're doing it by hand.

No, I know, I realize they do that, but there was a reason that she gave, and I don't have any minutes or or I don't have a good enough recollection. She was, there was a very distinct reason that she gave for the numbers going down so significantly, and I can't remember what it was. I was hoping she would be here. I feel like, yes, Katie, you're, you know, these suggestions, I would love if Mead had time to you know, delineate each of the things that me brought up. I feel like we need more of a plan before we go to the assembly.

Oh, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. And one person that I, uh, you know, I mean, it would be decent to talk to Jennifer to see what they have and be decent to talk to Mark and frankly, if we had a couple other work sessions to just basically— and bring some of those folks to the table. But on the issue of the survey or the analysis, I think it would be good to talk to Jamie or who is the election director now.

We don't have one yet. I don't think they have reached out. Told us, she stepped in, it seemed. Right. But have they hired anybody new?

No.

Well, no, there was the email saying, saying that, what was it, that she couldn't be here and that somebody else couldn't be I feel like we do need to communicate with staff because we're sitting here with what we think are great ideas and we need them to say, "Yeah, we've never done that," or, "Boy, we've done that, you know, a thousand times." Yeah, it was Amy Solberg. So I think we can't make these decisions decisions in a vacuum. We don't know exactly what they've done. You know, William used to go on TV. Well, did anybody do it this time?

Okay, I'm gonna back up on that one. Um, going on TV in the spots that he was doing, I don't know how effective those are. I really don't.

When they were— the challenge with it all is that it was compressed into that 2 weeks. And by that 2-week time frame around an election, I don't know that you— I don't know that people are so sick of stuff that they're not listening to it. We're talking about something that has to be done in advance. —For that time. In the old days, the League of Women Voters would, you know, would have done something like this.

And there's Youth Vote programs. Right. And there's all sorts of external nonpartisan groups, theoretically, theoretically, that promote, you know, voter attention and so forth. It's— I'll say this. One thing you learn in politics is you think you give a speech and everybody's heard it.

That's why you hear people giving the same speech 30 times, you know. I mean, take what you were saying about how you don't watch the news anymore, you don't get the paper and newsprint. Did you know that Donald Trump has called out the National Guard in LA? La la la la. No.

Yes, I do. Okay, how did you learn that? National Guard and 700 Marines. How did you learn that?

PBS NewsHour. Right, okay. So, so you watched the national news show, and YouTube. I didn't even know about the Marines until my daughter told me that my son was very happy to be flying back and on leave the day that his fellow Marines were called out and that he was no longer part of that unit. But I mean, it was And for my son, it was not because he agreed or disagreed with policy, it was because it's pretty boring duty to defend a federal building.

But the point being is that—. But I watch things on YouTube. Oh yeah. Rather than do what you do, you know, oh, my Hulu password is gone, how am I going to get back on? On.

It's such a hassle, so you just go to YouTube. And so I'm getting my news digitally. How does, how do your kids get it? I don't know. Well, you know, one of the best ways to get the news is to watch the synopsis of the comedy shows the night before.

Oh, well, I get mine from Jon Stewart. Well, yeah, in that regard, during the flash war between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, it was much easier to get it, get the fun stuff from the comedy guys than the New York Times or the Washington Post. They were two children fighting. It's just like our grandchildren fighting over, you know, it's so dumb. Right, but what's What's interesting, one thing I've also noticed in politics is that events, events hit people more than, say, just talking to them.

Events change minds. When we were challenging an election in 1978, all the things we said about the elections were basically intangible, you know, oh yeah, that's just sour grapes or whatever. And then we found 237 ballots locked into the election office in Washington Wassilla that had never been counted. Oh, and it was, oh my gosh, those election officials really were, you know, incompetent or something like that. And, and it only— we only found it when we did an audit of the number of ballots out versus the number of ballots counted.

Really? Uh, and, and, uh, you know, or— but we lost that election because Hickel had had a fight with the AG over his 4x8 signs, and the AG made them take them down, and the day it went down, our polls went down. Because, oh well, he must have been doing something wrong. I mean, and events change minds. So if you can work on kind of creating events, even in this kind of communication with the public, it sometimes helps.

You know, an event that shows the number of ballots that we destroyed last time, or, you know, that sort of thing. Right. You know, it's things that plug into people's minds because there's so much chaff out there, and it's amazing. And when I asked you about that, I didn't realize the Marines were in until my daughter told me last night.

Okay, I don't know how to boil all this down. I think we've had really good discussions, but I—. Well, part of me wants to say thank you. I think this has been needed for a long time, and, and thank you for finding the time for this.

Katie, I think if we want to do a summary, unofficial, just aware of the Open Meetings Act, uh, I think we tell Jamie what we did, tell Amy what we did. If you want to take a picture of my notes, here are some of my notes. And you as chair, pass that on and get their thoughts and just say we want to be productive in this area. Because one thing that is clearly allowed under our deal is make recommendations All right.

Hey, I am just getting out of the meeting. Can I call you in about 5 minutes?

Thanks. Bye. Part of our job is make recommendations. Oh yeah, yeah. And whether they'll listen— and we also—.

Whether they want to hear— and we also have the right to communicate. Yes.

And but, but having a work session like this gives us that opportunity. My question is, should we invite Johnson's and do another one of these at a time when we actually have the staff here? So, so here's— here, here would be my suggestion. Okay, one, let's figure out whether or not the analysis that Ann talked about of trying to understand, was there any particular thing we can learn from the people who have had their ballots thrown out in the last 3 elections, right? Were they older or younger?

Were they particular neighborhoods? Were they male versus female? Were they, you know, were the handwriting ones different than the postmarked ones? You know, with English, I have problems. Right, that, that kind of thing.

And just see if the— if we can study that and say we're serious about this, we want to understand that a little bit better. There's several different ways to do it. We can do it internally, uh, they can do it. We can, uh, see if the assembly would give us a little bit of money for somebody like Dittman to do it, or, or Thompson to do it or ICER to do it or something like that. We hired ICER when I was Lieutenant Governor with a group of experts when people were challenging whether or not our electronics were working properly.

And so, you know, one general recommendation is we don't know what to recommend you, let's talk about it, right? That's issue number one. Issue number two is is the advertising— is let's turn it from advertising to communication strategy, all right, and say we've got all these ideas on communication strategy. And, you know, the assembly wanted to defang this commission, so to speak. But we were told certain things are not in our powers, but certainly communicating on how to make your vote effective.

As well as that is.

So anyway, okay, so I never heard the, these, the brief. Do we want to meet with Johnson? Thompson? Thompson? Thompson.

They're going to charge us, so—. Well, they did, they did something for some reason. Oh, cool. Look forward to it. Thank you.

We can hear from them. And why?

Your question is, should we hear from Thomson? Yeah. Yeah. But again, that's kind of like the, you know, if we have the analysis and then comm strategy and, you know, they may say, oh no, we've dropped them or we have to do that with an RFP and if we're paying them for And, you know, they can invite us and they can come as business development, but it may be that there's others too that you'd want. But Thompson, I think it would be great to have a discussion with Thompson, but they may say, well, no, they're just doing our fight with Meta.

But my sense is that, that if they spent $37,000, 6% is 6 times 3 is about $1,800, and, and if they spent $10,000, uh, if they spent— that's a, that's much more than a commission. That can be commission and content and the Metafyte. So let's just find out about it. But yeah, by all means, they're all smart people there. So at a work session like this?

Yeah, next month. Yeah, next month. Maybe our two seasons. I know. I know August.

How about September? Well, let's, let's see. We may want to get the analysis done first. I think the analysis should be our first step. To get the analysis done, we're going to have to ask the assembly.

Well, well, I think we can— excuse me, I think we could ask Jamie. Okay, do you have a staff person that's capable doing this, or does the Muni have a department that could do that, analyzes equal justice or whatever? Yeah, I mean, I know a guy who's— I can't believe how fast he's doing stuff right now. His name is a little bit politically radioactive because he's been the leader of the campaign on ranked choice voting, but he's, he's now said, okay, I'm not doing that anymore, it's a different group doing that thing. And he has developed a software for, which now 7 or 8 different states are using to verify their petitions.

And he is just telling me he just ran a test against his own software on signatures versus MIT's software and how much better his result was, which he's pretty excited about. But what's interesting, what's interesting about it is that he's an expert in pulling all of the election registration data in a state and having the AI engine verify that if somebody just did a signature like this, but they've got the address, he can figure out this is probably that person, flag it for a human to see, you know, or or that sort of thing. And there's— and I talked about Lotzfeld, who, you know, in the Senate race, there's a lot of people who are very good at data mining who may be able to help come up with a conclusion of who got thrown out and also who was voting. Now, you know, you can take the position that our job as the government is to open the door and let anybody do it, but on the other hand, it's our responsibility if it it turns out we're discriminating by practice against a particular group. I mean, I was very concerned when, you know, when the signature thing was there.

Lauren, you were out of the room just when we were talking about that before. You and I went through the names and we knew a good chunk of the people on that list that we were throwing out who, I guess, one of the reasons why we know them is left or right, they're political activists who knew their lieutenant governor or their state senator. Yeah. And they are not the people you would expect to have their ballot thrown out. Right.

You know, so why? Yeah. Oh yeah, it pained me to throw out one family of 5, but they didn't follow the rules. Right.

It hurts. Yeah. All right, I, I gotta go too, but, um, well, I need a decision. So I'm going to talk to Jamie when she returns about doing it, if we have somebody on staff to do the analysis and see if we could figure out the demographics on the tossed ballots, make sure that we're not discriminating against any particular group, or how we can communicate as well. And let me put it this way, if Jamie sees this as criticism.

It is not at all meant to be criticism. If she says, well, I can't afford it, I can think of several members of the assembly who might ask the question and ask the clerk to do this in response to a letter. And if, if we ended up doing a letter where we would need to reconvene so as to avoid Open Meeting Act problems and said, you know, to the Assembly Chair, as your advisor on this, we met in a quieter time with fewer— with no deadlines to look at all the ballots that we threw out. Here is our suggestion. You know, number one, commission analysis to figure out if there's anything we can learn, right?

Maybe that it's totally random and that it covers all segments. Everybody makes a mistake. Second is let's proactively look at our communication strategy to fight the problem that we learned from the analysis. And, and, uh, you know, our estimate is that if you spent $30,000 more on the analysis and, and, and, uh, that there's a number of groups that could respond to an RFP and we, we request that to do that, or you request the clerk to do that. And on the second issue, uh, we would recommend that we have a, a review with enough time in advance of the next election that you do it.

And if that were— and I guess I put it— so talk to Jamie, but you know, we've got these one-two things, an analysis and a comp strategy that we really think should be done. And if Jamie says I can't afford it, or we don't have the staff for it, or something else like that, we can go over.

But I hope she would be supportive. I don't see why not. But I'd like— I hope they're thinking about hiring somebody to— I mean, the elections administrator here is hands-on frontline guy or woman. So I hope— because Jamie can't do this double duty forever. Yeah.

And is Amy assistant clerk? What's— Sober? I don't know.

She's helpful. Yeah. Okay.

All right, are we good, Katie? We're good. Okay, thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for coming to this. Yeah, and we'll just figure out when we need to meet next time.

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