tomp3.cc -Live Interview With Tim Dupuis Alameda County Registrar On Oakland Mayoral Election RCV Voting

4:11AM Jan 6, 2023

Speakers:

Zennie Abrams

Tim Dupuis

Keywords:

votes

election

recount

people

ballot

talking

run

oakland

voter

system

choice

rank choice voting

count

device

secretary

certified

day

question

algorithm

tim

Hey everybody, we are alive. And I'm delighted that my longtime friend, I can say that because we've been acquainted that long, although I've had barbecue with him yet or anything like that.

Our Alameda County Registrar and the city's city county excuse me, the County of Alameda has Chief Information Officer Tim deploy. Tim, welcome to you, thank you for being here. And Tim had an interesting go of it with the elections this year. There's been a lot of exciting outcomes and confusion on top of that. So we're gonna get started right away. I promised Tim, this is his platform, to tell us what's going on how to understand and how to think about it. This is quite literally sort of almost a kind of a TED Talk and a teaching, if you will, combined with everything else. All right. So and we're joined by former Oakland mayoral candidate, Senator Scott, who's going to type a few questions. Be nice senator or I will block you. So just kidding, just kidding. I Seneca, you could do me a favor harbor and tweet this out to the others that we are on because I made a, I made a time scheduling error. I put 1130 rather than 1030. That's my fault. Okay. So I'm taking the URL for that one as I take the URL for a lot of things lately. All right. So, Tim, let's start off with first of all, as you and I discussed a conversation on lists of victory, and I had a regarding rank choice voting and the confusion that was out there with respect to the choices. And this is what what she told me when we were talking in our interview. As I got to pull this up, right here, right, right there. I want to know, first of all, what you think of the news that rank choice voting is not three this year? What five, five choices? What do you think about that?

I've been through a lot of shocking things already in this election with democracy and getting on the ballot. So I can't tell I'm really surprised. But it's still very concerning of the transparency of what people can expect, what candidates can expect, how we can be messaging, anyone strategizing our own campaigns in a rank choice election, knowing that now people are having instructions and a ballot that says put five folks in order instead of three. And I think public was already having some challenges with understanding the three, and how to use that ballot already. And so not having enough time now that Dalits are coming out, and we're finding this out. So it's concerning to say the least. And, again, there's another challenge that I'm experiencing, and other candidates are on this campaign trail. Hey, I'm curious to know, as having said that,

I find it extremely concerning, that the city clerk's office didn't make this a huge public education effort. Am I missing something?

I think it's definitely their obligation to advise us that this is especially since this is a change, right? This isn't something we would all be expecting or hasn't been the norm. There should be some really clear, like you said communication effort, along with the county registrar's office, who was the one who prints the ballots, who prepared them who drafted them, right? Who knew a long time ago, what it was going to look like that was gonna have five, an instruction to choose five instead of three. And so having that messaging, even at all of their voter registration events, using the power of our different civic engagement organizations, to again, make sure we're including this as part of the voter outreach, engagement and registration that's been happening right for the past year leading up to this. And now ballots are already being mailed. So look out in the mail for ballots on number seven. But again, just kind of another thing that we just have to shift and be flexible.

I'll stop it right there. Tim, what are your thoughts about and I think we will see, you know, what the candidates were going through? What are your thoughts about what you just heard?

So rank choice voting has been being used with Oakland for over a decade as as we've talked about, but it's a question of when we change first of all, from three choices to five choices. The first election that we went to five choices was in November of 2020. So this is the second time that Oakland has had five choices. In terms of the outreach, we have an outreach team, with the registrar voters, that goes to over 200 community events every year to to primarily educate voters also to do registration drives and so on. And rank choice voting is part of that effort. In the Oakland area, especially the other the other rank choice, voting communities, we also meet with the City Clerk's each year on a regular basis, but especially the rank choice voting cities, and we have a talk with them about is there anything in addition to our regular outreach and education effort that they would like us to do for further education, and it's a negotiation or discussion with with the City Clerk's to see if they believe that the community needs anything more from the registrar's office for outreach. So, we've done everything that we were asked to, in terms of that outreach. And I see that there's some concern about our website saying three choices. Zen Xana, you and I talked about it, the main site is showing five choices. But I understand that there might be some other areas that you're finding that we still have some legacy three choices. So if you could send them over to us, we'll make sure that that gets changed. But our main main site, as I'm saying, it is saying five choices, select.

That's the thing when this originally came about, and I have an interview with more and as well, among other candidates, they all said three. And as we talked about offline, offline, digital media is a wonderful thing, if it's something like that, right. But, you know, so to look at the sites now as they are doesn't really help us. And that's why I like to have this video history of when I talked to people back way back when right? You know, because then you capture the confusion, you know, what was going on? Right? And how, first of all, something that I need help with my friend, Dave MacDonald, your esteemed predecessor? Yes. And I interviewed feels like 12 years ago, which I have a video from, I haven't pulled it up for this, I figured I figured I rely on my memory I have left at 60. But at any rate, he said to me, that it's enough paperwork with one choice. But when you add three, we have two more, it's more paperwork? Well, I would think we'd be more with five. But, you know, talk me down from the ledge on that in how it changed what you have to do. And, you know, tell people what you have to do, please add, you know, two more to three.

Yeah. So when you take a look at and I know you're you're tech savvy. So I'll talk about it from a technical standpoint, the number of choices. The number of choices for the computer is is really not too difficult. The original algorithm that was we brought in under de MacDonald's leadership. That's what's approved by the Secretary of State was capable of only going up to three, three choices back then when we implemented it, and it's it's over a decade ago, right. In 2018, that equipment was essentially decertified, you know, sometime around that time, it was decertified, and we had to bring in a new system. The new system because of you know, new capabilities that come in higher computing levels, they were able to go into more choices than three. And so we met with all of the City Clerk's that you know, manage their elections. I guess I want to make that relationship clear to the election official for the Oakland election is the city clerk and we run the election on behalf of the city clerk. So we're essentially, you know, they're our client if you want to take a look at it that way. And so we meet with them and we run the Election the way that they, they want to. And you know, we have four cities now that are ranked choice voting, it's Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro, and Albany. So the system was, was capable of much, many more choices. And when we brought it in, we we sat down with all the City Clerk's and that were impacted. And we showed them different layouts of the ballot, because now it's not an issue of what the computers capable of doing, it's an issue of the real estate on a ballot, and what's what's going to be able to fit what's practical, given font sizes that everybody can read, and understanding that we have to have multiple languages. You know, so we look at layouts, and ask the city clerk, do you want to stay with three? Do you want to take advantage of the additional capability? Do you want to add some and unanimously, the City Clerk's agreed to move it up to five choices. And so that's how it came about. But in terms of the the paper that you're talking about, I think it might be what you're driving at, is, it's not really an issue of handling it and then handling it in the computer system, it's a matter of how do you present it on a physical paper ballot in a way that can be read, that can be understood, can be explained easily. And so the with the layouts, the City Clerk's landed on the five choices, and unanimously, they, that's what we went with, because that's what they asked us to do. And

Seneca says, I think this reflects for the sentiment out there, he says, I don't agree if education was done, he says compare the budget to the rollout in 2010 99. Day, I don't. So just, you know, showing you, that's just a taste of the kind of reaction, there's been to all of this, you know, to date,

right. And again, I want to address that, you know, we do spend quite a bit of money, just regular voter education and outreach. And that goes, that's regardless of whether it's rank choice voting. And I, as I said, that's in those cities that rank choice voting is a piece of it, we talk about it. And we're, we go out to any event that we're asked to go out to and speak to. And when it was originally rolled out, the City Clerk's asked us to go above and beyond that regular education program. And they, again, being that we, they are a customer of us, we do what they think their community needs. So they tell us, you know, is the is what we normally do enough, or do we need to do something more? And, and the amount of education that we've we've put out there has been the education level that we were asked to through the city, clerk's, I mean, that again, they're there. They are our customer. They're the ones that know their community. They're the ones that that drive, how much they need for their cities.

Now, you going forward? Is there been any introspection or where are we right now with the vote because I don't want to get ahead of myself. But it has the vote been officially certified now, because I haven't gotten an email saying that it has or has not.

It has been certified on December 8, it was it was certified. And I chose to certify on December 8, because that's the last possible day we could certify. That wasn't because we couldn't have certified earlier, it's because we wanted to give every voter who had issues with their signature on their vote by mail ballots an opportunity to remedy we call it curing the signature. We wanted to give them an opportunity, every voter an opportunity to come in and and have a way to cure their their votes so that their vote would count. So I gave them as much time as I possibly could, which was to certify in the very last day, which was December 8.

Is there anything that you would like to do if you had to do over that you would like to do differently?

You know, I think the election, given everything that was was presented to us to work through on this election. It's the team did a fantastic job. I mean, there was there were some very high profile elections on this this ballot. And to say the least in May for a midterm ballot. This was locally, a very significant election. And the registrar voters team here in Alameda County did a spectacular job at Dealing with, with everything that we had, there's always lessons that can be learned when you're putting on an event of this magnitude. I mean, we are talking about nearly a million voters. We're talking, we talk about ballot types. And I'll just since we're talking a TED talk here, a ballot type is, is all the different unique ballots. So a ballot in Livermore is going to look different than a ballot and Oakland because there's going to be different races on it. Imagine that we had probably over 200 different ballot types in the selection, and we are supporting 14 different translations of that ballot. And, and the extraordinary number of vote by mail ballots that arrive on election night. I admit it's, it's, it's quite a tremendous effort from start to finish. But what I'm really driving at is, when you put something together, at this magnitude impacting as many people as it is, there's always lessons to be learned, we always, you know, have something of a post mortem afterwards, where we evaluate any of the tickets, the trouble tickets that came in any of the issues that we're talking about right now. Certainly this issue of voter education around rank choice, we'll be bringing that back to our city clerks and having a deep discussion about Okay, is there anything different that we should be going doing going forward? So I couldn't say that there would be an event the size ever that we would put on where there wouldn't be some some certain amount of measure of things that we were going to learn from and try to do better.

And then I want to get to this situation that contact you about again, after you know, three to five change. And that has to do with and it's here, that's the middle of it, but I'll scroll up to the top and then go down. I didn't want to want you to think that I didn't install what you had said in response. And I thank you for feeding back. But this was Oakland mail. This is the original title of the post, where it seemed that the media voting device was used with nine security problems. You got back to me, and I thank you for that. And I installed it here and explain that the domain system that you use wasn't the one that was the study advisory that was put out by the Office of cybersecurity and Department of Homeland Security. But you wrote and said here, that the Dominion democracy C 510. A was used. And I include your email where it writes, we wrote, we received your references, I believe that you were looking at the requirements for democracy seats. 5.5. We were on democracy site 5.1 10. A. And, and I was only in, I wrote back that I was only going by the advisory that I just mentioned, that call for an upgrade to that version that you're using. But then it notes that there's nine security problems, seeing the upgrade to from what you're using to 5.5. But there's nine security problem is a 5.5. I apologize, he said, but my overall question was the device you all use was that tested during that election? Reason I asked. And we talked about this off camera is extensively I think, was that the test that I was able to find, which is different from what exists? Right, but test I was able to find on one and search was from the Secretary of State's office, and that was 2020. And the reason why these are, are big deals is for example, I just got off the phone with my web host because I'm keen to upgrade my WordPress to a point to PHP point two. And you would say why is that so important from 8.1 8.2? And because the improvements there not to go too far off off the reservation, if you will, but they prevent such things, as I'll put it in colloquial term is someone trying to inject a photograph of a bear onto your website? Okay, right, right, right. Preventing cross site scripting, and, or just someone trying to install code in your comment section. Which could then you know, basically inject images into and just basically also screw up If your server and folks are watching this, you know, I, a lot of people think that, you know, I just do video, but I spend most of my time doing just that encoding. And some of what I deal with, because we're talking about web platforms, you know, as you know, as well as or better than I do, what you guys are doing. And that's why I was wondering if there was an upgrade done. Because it's, as I was talking to, I want to give a shout out to Hostgator. And Drake today about what we're talking about, he says this, any millions of people around the world, they just want to screw with something and I'm not using the actual term.

Appreciate that. No, I know what you're talking about. And I completely understand where the concern is coming from. So the vulnerabilities and I could see it as you were scrolling through it, it does reference democracy suite and image casts 5.5 in the in the advisory, were on image cast 10 A, which is a newer version, you know, similar to what you just said, right. But I think it's important to really understand, again, thinking of this, as a TED talk, understand the architecture a little bit and how it's implemented. So, when you're looking at those tests at the Secretary of State's site, what the Secretary of State first has to do is certify the version. But none of our counties who are on the Dominion democracy suite can install the latest version until the secretary of state goes through their vetting process, and they have to certify that that copy. And we don't get the copy in a normal way, like you just talked about, like you would for a server, we have to coordinate getting the golden copy, if you want to call it that, you know, the pure copy through the secretary of state through our vendor, and it's a very controlled install. So by the time it gets to us in the process, it's a it's a very protective handoff to us before it gets into these systems. So that's the first thing. So we're on 10 A, which isn't any other nine volt doesn't currently show those nine vulnerabilities. But you know, we we are always working with the Secretary of State to try to stay on the latest. I've got a team of people who that's what they do for a living. So they stay, they're very good at staying on top of this stuff, and staying in lockstep with both the Secretary of State and our vendor. So we know how important that is. The other piece of it. So that's the testing that I think you're referring to, that you're seeing on the Secretary of State's site.

That's something that I want, because some people here dominion, and they've contacted me and said, I hate dominion. But I have to give a shout out to Domaining. Because they actually put out the advisory in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security saying, hey, look, yeah, this is our device. But here are these vulnerabilities. Let's want to let the make that known that they actually do, you know, monitor and they inform. And so you need to make corrections, although we're not talking about with respect to 5.10. A. Right,

right. Yeah. And that's not a that's not a going backwards that's going forwards. Right. 510, right. Yeah, that's right. So there's that testing the and I appreciate the call out for demand. And, you know, they've been in the press quite a bit. I think there's a 60 minutes piece if you haven't seen that, that's probably worth watching with the CEO. But we do have dominion. And there's reasons for that. But

we'll share those reasons. Real quick, as I was going to say, what are they?

Yep, sure. They are the only rank choice voting algorithm that's been approved by the Secretary of State in California. So that's, that's the one that's been certified. It's been given Administrative Approval. There are two city, the two counties in California that run rank choice voting races. It's San Francisco and Alameda County. And we both use the same system, because that's the one that's certified with in California.

This Oh, go ahead, please. I'm sorry.

So looking at that, those vulnerabilities though, and actually the testing, I really want to drive into the testing that you're referring to. So it all begins with the Secretary of State's there Our tech team that does a complete deconstruct deep dive vetting of the code to figure out that it's ready for primetime. We, the election officials, the the registrar's of the state, you know, there's 58 of us. I believe at this point, the vast majority, the largest majority of this, the counties are running the Dominion system. 4040. Yeah. So that's, that's most of us. We can't install any version until it's fully vetted and certified by the Secretary of State. Then when it comes to us for an election I'll talk about the because you were primarily focused on the image cast axes, can I drill into what those are? Is that

that's actually mentioned on the website, Secretary of State, so yeah, absolutely, yeah,

we call it an IC X for short. The IC x's, again, use some of our technical terms, but they're a ballot marking device. And they are standalone. So one of the concerns is it connected to the internet, it's not connected to the internet. They are standalone devices.

For the layperson, they're gonna say what's a ballot marking device, you'd be surprised to

talk it through. So in a traditional sense, when you go to a poll, we would hand you a paper ballot, and you'd have a pencil or a pen, and you fill in your bubbles for for your races. So, ballot marking device is a digital display a heads up display, like a computer screen, and it brings each of the races that you're going to vote on and you touch on the screen, what choice you want to make, and, and then you when you complete it, you can review it on the screen. But when you're finally done, you hit I've finished voting, and a printer next to the digital display actually prints out your physical ballot, because we're and so that's why it's called a marked ballot marking device you're doing are marking on the screen. But then it prints out a physical ballot with your choices for review. And you and I talked about this offline. But the the ice axes or the image cast X is is a different device than what we had with the previous voting system. So the previous voting system had a memory card in it. And when you cast your vote on the screen, your vote was stored to the memory card in the device. And and for the voter to verify we call it a voter verifier fiable printout, it had a printer on the side and you could see your your votes on the printer. And we could we that was a way and we kept all those printouts from the old system so that you could compare any vote to make sure that the memory card and the printout matched. So that was the old system, which isn't a ballot marking device, right? Because it's going it's burning the your choices into a memory card, and then we're uploading the memory card. We don't do that anymore. We're we're 100% paper based. So the digital display that you see at a vote center, you're marking your device, you're marking on the device, you're saying I'm done, I'm ready to cast my vote. And the printer next to it prints it out. And now you have your physical ballot, you know, it's nothing is stored on the image cast x at all. And so you can review the the printout and see what it is that you voted on. And and you can assure yourself that, yes, that is how I voted. If it isn't how you voted, you can go to the workers and they can abandon that they can dispose of it, they can get you back into the system so that you can go in there and do it the way that you want to to make sure that your vote is the way you want it to be. So again, it's an assistance for putting your physical ballot together as opposed to it going to a memory card. So hopefully that that helps with some of the reassurances around the security because it's a standalone system. And so that was my explanation. Sorry, that was long winded but that's my explanation of what a ballot marking devices.

And because I understand in what I've read read is that basically, one has to make absolutely certain when you're Checking in terms of doing and mitigations that that there's no internet connection, setup act, right. So that somebody can log in, you know, try to do among other things cross site scripting, right?

That's right. Yeah. So those those systems are standalone. And before they get deployed out to the vote centers, we have to go through what's called a logic and accuracy test. And so all of the devices are tested with a pre something that we know what the results should be. So as we're going through, we have a habit, a test deck is what we like to call it, we have a deck of this is how we're going to test it. This is what the votes are that we're going to test on the system. And when we take a look at the, what it's reporting as results, it should match what we, we slit said it should. And so every device goes through that. And in addition to that, as part of the getting prepared for the election, we also do that test, we show the public that test in what's called a public LMA, or a public logic and accuracy test this year, and for the large elections, it's been pretty consistent. The grand jury is participates in that with us. And we we go through on a couple of our systems with the grand jury showing them what our logic and accuracy test is we do a logic and accuracy test live on the image cast x's, but not only for them, we also test our whole scanning system. So we've talked about the image cast x, which plays an important role. But we also have once the ballot gets to our central count, those ballots get put through a high speed scanner, which again, using technical terms, we it's it's called a high Pro, they scan about 200 ballots per minute. They're pretty fast. So we we scan the ballots through, we scan a predetermined test deck live with the grand jury through and the Grand Jury assists us in validating that the equipment has all performed and shown that its results are printing out as expected.

If I may, is it possible to get a kind of report of when these actions were taken with the grand jury so that the public can can review that?

I believe the events are online, but no, we we can probably we can provide that.

Yeah, cool. Yeah. Because that's something that I think people will really really love to see. I didn't mean to interrupt you, however you want to continue by the way,

I think that's it. I mean, that's and it's not something that was unique to this election, every single election. This is how we prepare every single election. We for the image cast x is the the election obviously has to be uploaded into the device so it knows what races are being voted. So we first upload into each device, the election and then we go through this logic and accuracy test and validate that the equipment for a lot of different reasons that it's showing the results it should making sure it's calibrated correctly. You know all of the things that we need because you know it is a physical device, we want to make sure it's running properly. We want to make sure it's got the battery life it has needs you know the whole thing. We're deploying a computer device right so we want to make sure that everything is working properly when it gets to that vote center.

Now before I get too far I don't want I would be remiss if I didn't add the cynic asks he says Can we challenge I presume the vote still he says appears Oakland is deleting footage and forging timestamps How did this play a part if proven I don't quite know what he means.

I was I didn't understand that.

And you know, but is there have you heard any claim about this and maybe Seneca can send me a text or something and and clean it up or and clean up later for you send an email you know just

why don't we do that? Yeah,

cool. Yeah, we'll do that. When we get to this matter that talk with you about on camera it's a little unexpected.

Unless a little hard my eyes are getting old.

Well, you know DC Comics isn't is looking for new Superman. So if your eyes can do it They were Henry Cavill. You know, they pushed him out of there. I thought he did a great job myself, but Oh, well. I guess James Gunn, who doesn't live too far from here, by the way, has different ideas. But I digress. What I wrote here was I find it very concerning that this this is Nick, scroll up just to be fair. This is what we talked about, and I'll, I'll read it so that I don't leave anything out. I said that back here. I said councilmember Taylor started out with 4100. A fork 41,252 votes to Councillor Morales 39,654 votes for first choice votes. But the rank choice votes were added that change 250 6841 For Shang Tao versus 56,161 For councilmember Taylor. But what's interesting is what is behind the reason for change house rise, an outsize number of rank choice voting votes for Shang Tao from fellow candidate Elissa victory. Now, Alyssa victories 14,047 votes 8307 Yay. Went to Shane town it says this is not the latest right? Okay. So if anybody's okay, just this is not the latest one that was done a week ago. Just FYI. All right. But But that does not that does not damage what I'm about to ask as you know, but I continue. And that almost three that was almost three times what Ignacio dela Fuente received from illicit victories one example, or about 59.64% or 60% of the total rank choice voting votes. Miss victory had to give. Why did that happen? And then I went back and I explained that in 2010, Rebecca Kaplan and Jean Quan famously teamed up to run for mayor of Oakland, in the first year right choice voting was used the campaign for months. The final outcome was that Jean Quan got two thirds of all second place votes, and the spread was directly attributable to their team up. And I refer to my interview with city attorney John Roos. So we talked about the impact of that team up on the election outcome, and I have to actually fast forward to go back here a bit, which should be there. If this buffering would stop, if it doesn't, I'll just simply go ahead and explain what he said. Because it looks like I'm not gonna get a I'm not gonna get any love from the buffer gods. So let me just stop that. What John had said, was that at that time, Don Perata was the front runner, he received 35% of the vote, you might remember this, and and John famously said, you know why this isn't coming up as whatever, but he said, Look, in this video, he says, Look, Zenni the only way that Jean Quan can win if she got two thirds of the second place votes, and that ain't happening. Well, it happened the next day. He goes, he goes, Yo Zinni. Take that down. It's wrong. I said, What are you talking about? It's not wrong. You're a genius. And that right here, this time in 2022, the situation is different. Shang, Tao and Alisa victory did not campaign together for months. And on top of that, I asked to list the victory of Shang Tao was our second choice. And she said, quote, no, Greg Hodge was unquote. But we both agree that perhaps it was shaming mentioning that Alyssa was her second choice. But if that were the case, then Elissa victory should have picked up a large number of Shang Tao rank choice votes, but that never happened. And what did happen? From my perspective, numerically, was that a shockingly shockingly uniform pattern of number of percentage of votes was transferred from Alyssa victory to Shang Tao 59.64%. Rounding the 60% that was true for the most recent run, and the one the day before it. On that November 17. Day, I've logged Shang that 6475 votes and will this victory are about 60% of the 10,882 votes, she had to give. That same percentage appeared yet again, was actually about 59.5% Yet again, for the same transfer of votes, from Alyssa victory to shine Tao on November 17. Two. Moreover, the Alisa victory, that elixirs victory excuse me, was given the majority of her vote giving the majority of her votes to Shang Tao is a in a giant size batch is a pattern I noticed from the second day of rank choice voting runs up to Friday. Okay, while I did not check the percentage, then on the second day, I would not be surprised if it came out to be about 60%. And these aren't Ryan's, I can go back and and go into your system and check I have to vlog them. And I've logged most of them, but not all of them. And I noticed this, this anomaly a couple of days before I started to really zero in on it, hence, but I didn't mention it in those previous videos. But I digress. And so, in I wrote in this interview with Elissa victory two days ago, and I'm not going to play it says at the 530 mark, I noticed that she gave over 50% of her shareable rank choice votes to Shang when I presented the run from Wednesday, November 16. That's just less than 1%, far less than 1% difference from Thursday to Friday. Know that Alyssa doesn't doesn't MIT that Greg arch had her number had her as number at number two, but says that people can vote however they want. That's what she says for me. The point is, the point is Alissa's people had a weird pattern of picking Xiang 58 to 59% of the time through the entire run. And then I call on to make sure this hits home intellectually. All right. I find that very concerning. But the same 59.64% or there abouts around the 60% percentage of votes was shared from Alyssa victory Shang Tao for each of these runs each day because you're releasing these runs by email daily. Yeah, I hate to say it, but in my opinion, that looks fishy. As if someone were pre picking votes for sharing using a code that broke off roughly 60% of the votes and dumped them into Shane's column on a spreadsheet. Once you'd expect an uneven or nonlinear pattern, this one is far too machine like, and then I write why they have uniform outcome on a per run basis. That's to be investigated. It's way too weird, especially since Shang was not Alissa's second choice, and their names are not even next to each other on the 2022 Oakland election ballot. And then I continue on I write, I want to make sure you understand the gravity of this problem. First, we presumably have votes counted each day for each count in a second, one should expect that the percentage of those new votes counted and shared in rank choice voting to be different for each day of the vote count, right? In other words, they're different each day, but they come out to 59% on the end, okay, right. Third, that's where the problem comes in the vote, the percentage of those new votes counted and shared and rank choice voting from a list of victory to Shang Tao is, for all practical purposes, nearly the exact same percentage each day, that makes no sense at all, for that pattern to turn up three to four times in a row. Unless, in my opinion, it was predetermined. But that's what happened. Your response to

all right, so let's talk about rank choice voting and a little bit about our updates. I think the comment that says, you know, that may have been how they campaigned, and that's what they may have asked their people, their supporters to choose as their their second vote. But people are allowed to vote how they want to vote, right. That's their their independent. So, you know, I've then been doing this for a while, as you know, and I've seen elections where it follows, essentially a straight line on the percentage, and I've had people who say, Well, that's how all elections should should run, you know, we should see the the early votes on election or early votes and what we post on election night, we should be able to do like as a statistical sample, you know, you know, back from our status statistics classes, you know, we do a random sample and that small percentage should just straight line project out at that rate, and that's why we should see what the outcome is going to be. I've seen some elections where that seems to be the case it follows a straight line. I've also seen some elections where he's Voting for any voting rights? Why say? No, I'm just saying in general, you know, sometimes the early votes are mimicking what the rest of the votes come in at. Sometimes the early votes are not representative of what the later votes come in at. And we see divergence. So I've seen seen both cases. And then I've seen arguments, you know, we you can imagine we address, we hear people evaluating the elections and all sorts of different ways, and they expect to see things following patterns. Well, it is it isn't a lab, it isn't following, you know, a predetermined pattern voters are are voting the way they vote.

I have to ask because it I don't mean to be adversarial. Okay.

I understand. I don't understand

what's heavy, it's weird to have the same percentage, if you and I are counting votes daily. And it's rank choice. And these were these are transfers, right? Because it's rank choice, we have to throw out the common elections, because you know, they don't apply. You know, my point is, okay, my point is, because the obvious question comes up. Well, can we look back at the process, and review this information as it came in to see how it's actually transferred? Right? Because again, it looks, I have never, ever seen that. And what what's the statistical chance of it being almost exact every single day that you're sending runs? Some times twice a day? Yeah.

So I haven't. Okay. So I haven't dived into the specifics. So I asked you to send me your numbers. And I know your You said you'd send me some screenshots. What I did do the first time you asked about it, as you recall, I sent you what I could see as the first round choices, and we did see a change in the number of votes, we saw a change in percentage for each of the different candidates. On the first round. I haven't gone I haven't had the time to dive into the question that your your observation. But again, I'd have to I can't really answer it, I'm not equipped to answer it, I'd have to take a look deeper. But I have seen the patterns go straight and, and not change much. I've seen the patterns change. You know, again, we're dealing with a lot of different elections. And, and we have to take a look at in those updates, how many votes we were really talking about as well. So again, I don't want to hypothesize without actually having a chance to do an evaluation. But, you know, if we were dealing with a small number of votes from Update to update with those particular candidates, we may not see a large change in percentage either because there may not have been a large number of new votes. Well,

in that and that to me, I want to just call cynic. I'm not here to discuss the city clerk issue. That's not fair to Tim. It's an entirely separate issue for which I need to have the city clerk here to explain. Okay. Tim doesn't know about that. I don't think so. No, I know he doesn't being jockey. What my point is, now back to back to the path as they say. I want to emphasize this. It's not it's not that there's a difference. It's the fact that it's, for practical purposes, no difference each day. From

a percentage point standpoint, right? I mean, the number of votes did increase, it's just that the percentage didn't change dramatically.

So this transfer is frighteningly the same. Now, again, if it were, okay, 5% difference 10%, you have a difference? You expect that right? Because it reflects, you know, a choice. I'm not talking about that. I and that's where a lot of people get get it wrong. I am talking about the fact that this thing comes out as almost the same each and every time. And it's like Bugs Bunny is back there basically with his carrot, you know, fooling around with things.

So I can tell you, nobody's fooling around with things. The system is on an isolated system. It's been tested. It's been certified by the Secretary of State, the algorithm that we use for rank choice. Voting, as I said, isn't just being used here. It's the same one being used over and over I'm Francisco. So now the question is, you know, what's Can we explain the anomaly? I don't know, we'll have to take a look at. But my explanation for it would be is that that's how our voters voted. It may not have come out with what you've expected, but that is what the voters have chosen. And that's how the votes were distributed. So that that is going, that is going to be my answer. It's that we reflected the transfers the way that the voters voted to see

him again, in my opinion. And it really is that when it all comes down to things, it's my opinion regarding the data, okay. But in my opinion, it's not a matter of who the voters chose. Again, I say this, and I want it to hit home. You and I can can count votes every single day. One day, Shane gets 80% of what Alyssa said over the next day, it's 20%. And we go through this over a five day period and averages out to be 59%. You know what I say? Bravi. Sumo. Awesome. Right? But to have the same damn percentage every single day, right? It's like, and I'm sorry, to, you know, make your yours do that.

I do I as you're talking through, I do want to make sure that maybe I want to make sure we're still on the same page. Yeah, let's let's talk it through just a little bit just to make sure we're on the same page. Because the run of rank choice voting at the end of each day, is exactly that. It's essentially a simulation. I've been trying to actually look for the best. You frozen means any Are you still there?

I'm still here. No, I just Okay. Cool. My head. It's kind of like,

okay, I've been trying to figure out what the best way to call it because it's not official, right? It's, it's at that point in time with the number of votes, we run the simulation. And it shows if this is where we stopped the election, this is how the rank choice algorithm would report the votes that we've captured so far.

So I'm confused. You're yeah, that's,

that's, that's where it gets a little interesting. Do you mind if we kind of unpack that a bit? I would appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So. So it each time we do an update, at the end of the day, we start the rank choice voting algorithm over again, with everything that we had tallied up to that point plus the new. So it's not like we're just tallying the new votes and tacking them on to the rank choice algorithm. No, no, it's what we've been asked to do. Because there's different ways that we could do this, we could, we could wait till we get every vote counted. Nobody likes this, you know, that we could wait till we have every single vote counted, and then post the results and then run the rank choice voting algorithm once and everybody would see how it works. But we kind of live in a in a time where everybody wants to say, Well, where are we now? Right? We live in this I liked. We live in this kind of an instant, I need an instant update. Where is it? Now what's changed? You know, we like our kind of, I'll use our sports analogies, you know, ESPN ticker, we need to know what the score of the game is right now. You know, is it gonna get flipped? How close are they at this point? So we, we enjoy that. That's what people want. They're looking for an end, you know, and I'm with the way that we're getting so many votes in by mail. And so close to election day, you can see that it's taking us longer to get to the final vote. So people are, what are they going to post today? What is the new posting going to look like has something changed in the race? So so we've got that setting. So rank choice voting, the algorithm goes against every vote that we have in the system at that point in time. So, you know, it's not like I freeze what the last update was. We erase that from the previous day. That was a snapshot of if I if I ran the algorithm yesterday. This is what the race would look like.

Can you explain what it means to run the algorithm? Because it sounds to me like you're saying it's a simulation. And you did use the term simulation

I did that I'm trying to form from the standpoint of voter education, trying to because algorithms seems so computer right? And I've been told that maybe simulation is is a better way to put it? Because it's not, it's not the final results until I certify, right? Well,

no, as a guy who built a computer model, the Oakland A's, which can be used in the classroom in 2003 to 2010 When Michael being killed my game, Shame on him, but the story entirely okay. So tell me about it. Yeah, you know, simulations are algorithms. And I'm, I build an algorithm the model. What happens with ticket price ticket consumption with respect to economic performance in the model, right? And go on and on on All right, this 946 equation says, okay, the point I'm making is, it's essentially the same. But what we're talking about here aren't people, we're not talking about robots, we're talking about people who cast a vote. And they made a choice. And, to my mind, that's something that shouldn't be simulated, that should be just actual boom, boom, boom, and we should have a real time able way of counting it. But it sounds like to me, you're saying we don't have that.

So what we have is because we at that point in time, don't have all the votes in the system, right? We're still counting votes. So let's say it's Monday, and it's, we're at five o'clock, and I want to give people a snapshot of where everything is at that point with what it is that we have counted so far. Right? So for all of the traditional races, they're gonna get where they are with the the first count, because there's not choices, right? So, you know, for, for the yes, no measures, and so on. We're gonna see how they're doing. And are they close? Are they getting closer? So we were comfortable with that right? Now, it's an algorithm. So we have now got so many votes in with all the different choices. So Monday, Monday, we have a certain number of votes in? Well, so that's now in the system. And the next step, since you understand code is, okay, we've got it in the database, we now have all of those votes to that point in time in the database, have have the rank choice algorithm, which is another program, call it an app, you know, run it against that data, so that we can post given what we have in the database right now. What would the results be? And so So then, when we get to Tuesday, now we've, we've added a certain number of additional votes into the database, right, we've been able to scan more. And we then, you know, we start, we, we've, we've got the database with a new set. I mean, it's got the ones that we had on Monday, plus some additional ones. And we run the algorithm or the app against that database. And we say now, Tuesday, rank choice voting against what's in the database now would look like this. Yeah. So if there's not a whole lot of new votes added into that race, then, you know, as we start to get more votes, the percentage is probably not going to change as much right.

Question. The idea that there's this, there's an algorithm that's running against the database implies the existence of an error term. has an error term. Yeah. In other words, since you're not actually manually sitting there and counting votes as they're split. Alright. mechanistically. All right. It begs the question, is the algorithm properly operating to represent what you and I and a bunch of other people would do? Which is basically sit down and hand count these votes? Okay. Alyssa, vote goes to shaping the listens, vote goes to Peterloo

or you know, yeah, yeah. And yeah, so I hear what you're saying. The, you know, the algorithm. Again, I'm gonna go back to our discussions at the beginning. There's some very smart people up at the secretary of state that have evaluated tested and certified that I keep calling it an algorithm I just want to make we that's what we call it, you want to call it an application, you want to call it a program. But the Secretary of State has, you know, fully vetted and certified, that that program that we use, just like they've certified The image cast X just certified everything else on this system. And they've said that it tests and does exactly what you said, if we did it manually, we would come out with the same outcome, as if, as what this algorithm is, is doing against the data in the database.

It But it begs the question though, did anybody do that kind of evaluation for the device as used for this election? Because here's why I said, I, you know, I've been at this matter quite a while and whatever label you put on whoever does what is like, okay, it's the process and the math. That's all I care about the process and the math. And that's what I'm trying to drive home with everybody. Stop thinking about politics and left, right, and all this stuff, and start thinking tech, because this digital divide is going to wreck you if you don't pay attention to it, and start asking detailed questions. It's not an insult to view at all your great personal Mom, I'm talking about the one what seems to me to be a question that needs to be asked even at the level the Secretary of State, right, hey, did you evaluate this particular device against a real time equivalent of you and I sit down actually counting? Because if there is a difference, Tim, that is an aerator. And it sounds like Kobe exists?

It just exist. Yeah, the Secretary of State has gone through the level of vetting, I believe that you're talking about.

But you're not sort of Oh, no, I

am certain that they've gone through the vetting. And, you know, and then we have our logic and accuracy testing, which, you know, gives some degree of testing as well at the local level. And then we have our 1% manual tally that we do. And I think you're familiar with that we randomly select 1% of all votes. And we we hand count that 1%. And we report that up to the Secretary of State and for the

selection retrace, let me know, because you're talking about

now and even for the rank choice voting.

Okay. That's what I'm talking about. Because, again, it's weird, it still needs to be checked, that you could have the near exact same percentage coming out every run. That's I mean, I don't know. You know, this is popular saying who does that?

I certainly I understand your concern. I'm telling you what safeguards are in process?

You agreed? You agree, it needs to be checked out?

You'll send me what you have. I understand what you're talking about. We'll take a look at it. I'm very confident that the system is doing it properly, and that it's counting properly. But we'll take you know, we can take a look. Son Son what you have?

Yeah, cuz see what you should be able to do. Right, is you should be able to go back and re evaluate the run again. We'll just say what did it do here?

What what we've talked about Xeni, I think as well as we've made the cast vote record. Yeah. And we talked about that. And I'll just describe what that is. Your nation? Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I can send you the cast vote record.

We both were supposed to send each other things, right.

It's been busy. So the cast vote record is every single vote as we've recorded it in the database. So that's, that's, that's on request that's publicly available. We we can give that out. And you can see what the recorded choices were for every vote. So it's not just us looking at it. That's, you know, for full transparency that's available so people can take a look if they they want to run it through their statistical analysis. They can can take a look at it. But that shows how are all of the votes were cast and all of the different choices?

Yeah, that in on each day was a day I

think I'm not sure that it shows a timestamp. I can't answer that. We'll have to take a look. I wouldn't want to on camera. Say it without knowing it.

Yeah, Is that so? I'm really interested in why that same percentage each one came about? No,

no, no, I understand what you're driving at

what you're sending me? We'll get at that.

I don't know, either. I don't know if if we're going to be seeing that through the caspo. Record. But I guess what I'm saying is that the safeguards that you have a problem, I don't know that we have a problems. And we we have to check into things to see what's going on, you have an observation we need to take, take a look at it. So I don't know that I don't know that indicates that we have a problem.

What had the eight depression on this, but I mean, I'm sort of working backward. You agree that that anomaly sounds unusual, and should be looked at? You said that. Right now,

I believe I said that we can see a lot of different things, I said that we will take a look at what you're looking talking about to the extent that we can.

But here's the thing, though, again, understand if you and I are counting votes every single day. And at the end of our vote count, we should expect a significant percentage difference in vote transfers from one day to the next, even at different times during that day. But to get the same percentage Tim, the same percentage is impossible.

So I don't know that I can agree to that. 70.

Okay, so give me give me an example that proves otherwise.

Well. So let's take a look.

Seriously, because, you know, at some point, you have to see if this just kind of lean into Logic, or from I put our Star Trek on pat on what is the logical expectation that produce produces a pattern? As Mr. Spock would ask, Well, my favorite kid No, my favorite character in history should be a MISC, instance. All right. But it absence absent, absent an explanation straight away, which you don't have.

I haven't I haven't had a chance to dive into your question. Right.

What you don't have means that we have something just by your admission right there that has to be looked into. That's all I'm saying.

Right. Right. Right. Right. So so we can take a look at it. But But I'm very confident that we're reflecting how the voter voted. So I'm, I'm very confident that the system is working the way that's supposed to, I'm very confident that the votes were transferred the way they were supposed to be transferred. When we do get questions, so

I'm not concerned with how the voter voted. I'm concerned with mathematical pattern. If it comes out, we analyzed and hey, maybe there was a difference. Right? Okay. And then the vote came out the same, okay, fine. But the fact that there was a difference versus what was reported is a problem unto itself. I am not talking about who won the election. I am talking about a mathematical impossibility. I want that made perfectly clear. That's what I'm saying. Perfectly clear, clear, Isabel. That's got to be checked out. Because, look, everybody should want an election that looks like hey, look, this is exactly what happened. And when you start using different different formulas and programs, as we talked about, sometimes if you don't properly test those formulas and programs, you don't know if you don't know exactly how they're working under each circumstance.

Yeah. And I keep saying I'm confident that the algorithm, the algorithm, the program for rank choice voting has been tested. And that we've used it. We're not the only ones that have used it. San Francisco is the one that is also using the exact same program. So we're all testing it. We're all looking at it we're at but the Secretary of State ultimately is is the institution that has vetted it has approved it has certified it as saying that it is operating properly. So I mean, there's nothing wrong with us taking a look at the concern. But everything that I see He says that the system is working as programmed, it's doing what it's supposed to. And the outcome would be the same. If we did it by hand,

because of the case of San Francisco, you're saying the using the same material, but I found a device. I apologize. Come on. You're acting? What? What, but I found across a document where they were actually considering using a new system of voting, voting systems. Not not no, not dominion. But apparently that didn't go through for some reason. This is a recent development. Do you know anything about that?

So I don't want to speak for San Francisco. I do know that they have an election commission that's been looking at things such as developing an open source system. I know that that's been one of the things that they've looked at in the past. I think that might still be one of the topics that they they have been discussing. But I haven't been watching it.

What do you think that begs the question, what do you think about having an open source system for us for Alameda County? For Oakland?

Well, first of all, open source keeps, you know, they brought it to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State is not approving it. Why is that? I really don't know why. And I'm not educated enough in in in what goes be, you know, what has transpired in terms of conversation around that. So right now, you know what our focus has been on

this as friends who delve in this, we should explain to people who don't know what open source is, what's open source, I mean, for me, open source is being able to go in and and build my own Twitter based on building my own Twitter platform, because I know how they did there. So I could replicate the PHP code, which actually I did one day, it's called told about me, but I couldn't get Michael downing 1 million into my thing. But anyway,

all right. So funny. So I guess my definition of open source would be, you know, to write write a program, you have to write computer code. And most of the computer code when it gets delivered to the end user has been, I'll use it the technical term, again, it's been compiled to the point that you really don't know how they wrote it. It's sensitive, its proprietary. The company itself protects it like it's gold. As you said, you're probably not going to get the Twitter code. I don't know if that's public, or not. But but you know, what I mean, you're not, you're probably not going to get Microsoft used to.

That was, that was the days of it was called identica. And then in doing Twitter killed it.

There you go. So, so it's generally, companies would protect the raw programming that a programmer does. As, you know, its intellectual property, it's what makes them their money. Open source is we we have that code open, openly available to the public. So the public can see the original code before it's been compiled to something that's been used. Right now, all of the election systems that have been approved for California allows for the companies to protect their proprietary code. So we don't see the original code, you know, that we do trust the Secretary of State and secretary of state and the federal government who does the vetting of our election systems. They they do the deep dive, they've signed the nondisclosure statements, and you know, whatever is required, in order to properly vet the systems. So that's the agreement that they have in place with the companies that produce our election system today. So there's the discussion around open source has been around for a while. It's an interesting topic. I have to say, you know, from my standpoint, I have to focus on running a lot of elections. So, you know, as far as my bandwidth is concerned, I focus on what systems are we allowed to use and how do we get our elections run?

Hey, I know that you can't stay on here forever. Certainly.

It's been a fun conversation, though.

Quick question. What do you think about the NAACP is call for recount, and how does that have to happen?

So I've read the same things that you've read. And we there was a five day period after were I certified The election on December 8, that any registered voter is allowed to request a recount. Now we got on the fifth day, we received around 10 requests, you know, and so that's, it's, it's not that difficult to ask for a request. We have some documentation on how to do it.

And the county website,

the county website, or people call us, we have a white paper that, you know, we can provide. So there there were a number of people who were asking what the process was, you know, this is this is their right, right. This was again, part of a transparent election process. There's, I have absolutely no issues with somebody asking for a recount. That's why we're here. We're running a clean election. And the recount is something that there the election code, you know, calls out that the voter can do this. So it's absolutely there, right. And it's absolutely something that we're here to do if the public wants to, wants to ask for a recount. So they can they do have to pay for it. That's been in the news, you know, the cost has been discussed. But as I said, we had about 10 different.

What's that? Yeah, $100,000.

It's a it's a price per day, and I'm sure it's out there, by now. We're quoting the way that we've priced it out, you know, let me give you some idea of what kind of labor is behind it, it's, it's, we're talking about a manual process that's being requested. Again, since since we're kind of diving into the weeds a little bit, if you'll bear with me for a second, maybe it will help. And it's gonna sound like computer terms, again, with the way the votes are coming in by mail, and they're so random. Now, you know, they if we were dealing with traditional voting, as we used to know, say, 20 years ago, where most of the votes were done at the polls, and you were assigned to a specific poll for your precinct, the votes are coming to us pretty much prepackaged right? In precinct order, right? The vast majority of them are coming in precinct order. Now, with everybody voting by mail, they're coming into us randomly, right? They're not sorted. They're coming into and we do, we so we have to go through as part of our processing of the vote, we have to go through right now, manual sort. And imagine hundreds of 1000s of envelopes coming in, and you have to put it in to some sort of order. It's like 52 card pickup, trying to put the deck of cards back together in order. So we do the best that we can. But they get boxed up in groups of about 500 votes. And those boxes can have many different races in them. But our database knows which box has which races in them. So when we're preparing for a recount of the mayor's race, we have 1000, over 1300 boxes that we have to pull. And then we have to go through each one of those 1300 boxes. And out of the 500 ballots in each of the boxes, we have to find the votes that were for the mayor's race. So there could be others in there. So right, you know, it's it's kind of mixed together. So that when a needle in a haystack gets on space a little bit, right, but we know, we know how many votes are in each box. So we so we have to find those needles, right? Because we're being asked to recount a specific race. So that that takes about 60 people to do that in a timely fashion. And then to do a hand count. I'll talk about a hand count table, you know, we have tables of, of teams that do the hand count. So you have one person who's a caller, they call out on each ballot, you know, and we do them one race at a time we call out, you know the candidate that we're counting. So we go Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor. And then we have to tally people at the table with two separate tally sheets. And they're marking Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor and they call out every 10 Other times they say now I've gotten to 10. Now I've gotten to 20. And they have to stay in sync. So, so in other words, the A team is a team of three. And in order to get through this roughly 130,000 votes, it's going to take at least 12 to 15 of those teams counting. So you see, it's labor intensive. Plus the supervisory team that goes along with it. So I mean, that's the teams themselves, and then you layer on some of the oversight that needs to be there. So between the two, the retrieval from the 1300 boxes, and the it's, but as I said, it's a it's a, it's a highly labor intensive process for a manual count. It's not that we can't do it, trust me, we know how to do it, we're very good at it. So the, the cost is going to be $21,000 a day. And so somebody and it's going to, you know, we're starting, we've sent out overnight mail to all of the people who are interested, we've told them what the price tag is per day. And everybody wants to know how fast it's going to be? Well, the teams can go very, very fast. But we're doing this on behalf of the people who have asked for a recount. And so some of this is also dictated the speed is somewhat dictated by the people who've asked for the recount, if they ask us to slow down, we'll slow down so they have more time to, you know, look at the ballots that they're interested in looking at.

Talking about Oakland or and just in general, in terms of number of people pastor recap.

I'm talking about, we've had 10 People asked for recount for the mayor's race in Oakland. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, and all of them have been notified of what I'm telling you right now. And they've been notified that we are going to start this on Friday, this week. And all Morrow, correct. Correct. Tomorrow, sorry, it's, it's been a long weeks any. So we'll be starting on Friday. And we also have to notify all of the campaign's impacted because they can have representation, regardless of whether they're paying for it or not, all of the campaigns can be present, and they can be participating in the oversight of the hand count. So, you know, you asked me how fast or how slow it's going to go, it's some of that's going to be dependent upon the people who are asking and observing and participating in the oversight of the recount. So I really can't tell you at the end of the day, or at the end of the process, what the 10 price tag ends up being. But I can tell you that with all the labor that we need to throw at it, we're we're running at a run rate of about $21,000 a day, are

we talking about? So $21,000 a day? What that was five days of work, basically five or six?

Again, it could be 10. I mean, it really all depends on how, how, how, what pace they have, you know, again, I'm stressing this, you know, you if if it's left to us without oversight without people saying, Could you stop? Can we take a look at that one. You know, if we're just banging it out, we're gonna go go, you know, as fast as we can. But I'm assuming because people are wanting to inspect, you know, certain aspects of the election that some of this is going to slow down

the pandemic impact where it's been hard, in general, to get, you know, enough labor to do anything in a timely fashion. That's why that was my phone. I don't know if that'll be the case here.

So what I've done, because we, you know, we we were anticipating the possibility. We, you know, we were hearing we were hearing as I certified the election that there might, might be the possibility of a request. So, we held me because we have to go through a 1% manual tally. So which is the same process. Again, I want to stress that we do this, this isn't something new to us. We do this with every one of our elections. So that we have a train to team you know, of people that have already gone through it, not too not too long ago, you know, a week or two ago when we did the 1% manual tally. And we held on to that staff, you know, I have to it's, again, dive into some of the logistics of running an election office like this, you know, my permanent staff, our permanent staff is less than 50 people. But when we get into a large election, we hire on around 350, temporary staff, and we train them up to do all the different roles from translation to distributing equipment to testing equipment. So we bring in, we bring in a temporary staff that that is with us for, you know, for several months, we have, we have a number of people who are our repeats, we like the people who we've trained already, and we can can bring them in, they can hit the ground running. But that staff that is highly trained, they've just gone through it a couple of weeks ago, we we held on to that staff, so that we would be ready for this. So we were able to hold on to the staff, you know, the timing is is good for us. Because, you know, if it was a couple of months later, if which is not possible by election code, so don't get they've got five days to request a recount from the time I certify. So we held on to that staff, they're available. There'll be here on site on Friday, ready to go. So yeah, no, we're good to go. Like I said, this is all part of the democratic process. This is part of the election code. We are built to do this, the team is is absolutely ready to do it. And it's everybody's right to ask for it.

Can you explain the people that this is asking for recount is not? When it's far different from the GOP habit of saying, Well, you didn't win the election and and all this jazz that's going on? Right. This is this is not that.

Now this is this is again, in general, somebody you know, I know, I know, I have another county, I believe one of our neighboring counties that even has a much closer race. I don't know if if you've heard about that. Any. But I heard that. Contra Costa County has two races that are extremely close, like I believe, like one vote apart. So so this is, in general, what we're usually seeing the candidate or the campaigns or whoever it is that's requesting is looking to see usually at the way that we may have interpreted the voters intent when a voter doesn't necessarily mark the ballot entirely. Right. So we we see all sorts of different ways, even though we say and we've all had Scantrons all of our life from school, you know, Bubbles fill in the bubble for, you know, people do a lot of different interesting things. They'll put an X in the bubble, they'll circle the bubble, they'll do all the there's, there's we we've seen everything. And so we call it taking a look at what was the voters intent. And you know, we have a training for that, or we trained the people who do that it's called adjudication. But when we get into a hand count like this, when somebody's looking at a recount, they're generally looking for those votes that weren't necessarily marked correctly, and the way that it was interpreted. And so they may we call it challenging, challenging the way that we interpreted the vote. So when we're going through the recount, we'll have a stack, we'll have a we'll have a bin for the people who are there watching, and they'll say I want to challenge that one. And so then we'll set that vote aside. And at the end of the day, I mean, I've said this to a few of the people asking me I feel like I'm an NBA referee. Right. It's, it will come to me. It's not a debate. I'll take a look at what they're challenging. And, you know, me and my Deputy Registrar, the two of us will take a look at it, and we'll make a final ruling. It's not up for discussion. But the hope of the candidate who's going through the recount is to try to find those ballots that, you know, there may have been some gray area in the interpretation of the voter intent and their hope is that they find some votes that will head in their direction. That's generally what a recount is looking at, is to see if there, there's some, some ballots that, you know, as I said, the way that they were marked could have been interpreted differently, and to see if they get that extra vote or two or three, to head, their direction to change the outcome.

This isn't something that tomorrow the public can come down and witness or candidate,

we do have public observation as well, they won't have the same level of access that the people who are involved directly in the recount is but they can observe, they will have a will have a place for them to observe that they won't be right on the floor, with the recount teams where as the parties who are identified as being able to challenge they'll be actually in in the space where we're doing the recount, those those won't be the observers, those will be, you know, the people who are from the different campaigns who are impacted by the RICO

sale have to come down and worry about getting arrested as that happened in your case to happen or someplace where

we did unfortunately, have an observer who, who was arrested, fortunately. So I'm not sure that I can really dive into it, but you know, but it was, it was something that did happen, unfortunately,

isn't something where you can post a rule like for risk management and say, hey, look, don't feed the birds or something like that.

Well, so for our observers, we have observer guidelines, they're well detailed guidelines, the do's and don'ts of what you can and cannot do. And every observer gets those guidelines. So it's, it's something that every observer gets, and if somebody does come down to observe the process tomorrow, or as we go forward with, if we go forward with a recount, you know, tomorrow is yet to be seen.

The observers will, somewhere else, I thought you said it starts tomorrow letter saying it's yet to be seen you mean, your Are you being jocular in a sense? No, no,

no, I'm not so. So all we got the request? Yeah, I guess since well, we'll dive into some of the specifics. Again, I'm not being jocular. So everybody who submitted a formal request is getting notified that we're prepared to start the recount tomorrow. The recount rules say that we don't proceed with the count. And any day, if we don't receive a check for the amount of the day. So, you know, everybody's been informed, I hear your interest in doing a recount. Show me the money. Exactly. So tomorrow, I believe we've said, by nine o'clock, you know, all of these parties have the opportunity to come in with their $21,000 Check for the day. And we're going to take them in the order that they submitted, you know, the first person who submitted will be the first person if they show up, that I'll talk to and say, Well, do you have a check for $21,000 to get started? And do you understand that each day going forward, you you know, on Monday, when we're prepared to go again, and continue, you'll have to come in with another check for $21,000. And the election code says if that person doesn't, once we've chosen one, and we only do one recount. So that person who says they're there, they're going for it has committed right? And if if they don't show up the next day, you know, once we've said this is the one who requested you're officially it. You know, if on Monday, they don't come in with a check for 21,000 that that's the end of the recount.

Yeah, two people, organizations that have signed up for recal Can't they just team up and maybe, you know, this person is 21,000 That person has to pay 1000 They can pool their resources.

So I can't I can't match make, you know, I have to be neutral. So whatever they do, and I know I'm reading again, I'm this isn't news that I specifically have. I'm reading the same articles everybody else's, I'm understanding that there's some collaboration going on in order to raise the funds for this. It's not something that I orchestrate They, however, I get a check. I just need to get a check for 21,000

each. That's really show me the money. That's

that's basically it. I mean, that's that's how it works. So that's what that's why I'm saying it's I have to see what happens tomorrow, because they're all being informed. This is the check, you'll have to write if you're the one chosen tomorrow for the recount. And so we'll see if all 10 show up. We'll see. We'll see who who is interested. And then we'll see how we go forward with that.

Tim, this has been epic.

Good, good TED Talks. Any? Yeah,

I can't think of any other words to describe it. Thank you very, very much. We talked 40 minutes, but we're at one hour, 35 minutes and 36 seconds as I keep running my mouth.

All right, well, you know, I did this with us any because, you know, I want to demystify this process. I know, it can be seem very complicated. So I hope I hope this helps.

Yeah, it does. And I want to thank you for agreeing to do it. And, and in taking advantage of the value of this kind of media, you know, to be able to, to allow that the presentation that you can't get, and traditional forms of media. This would be a book, you know, how many 100 100 something pages at least? And, and then again, who would read it, you know, somebody would but there'll be a more of a reference and really, that sort of sense what this is a reference, you know, it's in so people can reference it, and you can reference it and, and now, Google automatically segments these video parts. So the different parts that will automatically segment it's, it's quite a value des bless you for doing it. Thank you very much. All right. And by the back because I might want to ask you for your opinion of what Georgia is planning Georgia is actually planning to go rank choice voting.

Oh, are they you know, my usual stock answers any is you know, I'm I specialize in California, which is, is it's got enough nuances to keep me busy. But interesting stuff. So you know, again, thank you for having me. Thank you for being being having a collaborative conversation. I appreciate that.

What my pleasure. This one's a lot alike. So yeah. Hey, stick around in the background, Tim. You don't have to do anything. I'll do that. I'll do the magic. Hey, folks. We'll be back with more and trying to get Dave calm while the President is on for Dave has been off for a while but I gotta say he hasn't tweeted and several months old but we got I got the pipeline going for those of you have asked Tim stick around in the background. Subscribe does any 62 on YouTube. And please bookmark Oakland news now. blog.com and our sister blog, Oakland news online.com. To that ends this broadcast. Tim stick around, you have to do anything. And just work in the magic here by pushing a button