Election Advisory Panel Meeting (Audio Only) - Apr 15, 2026

So, part of the meeting today was to do a tour of our election center, but now it's only been, how many tours have you been? It don't matter, sir. I learn something every time. I was going to let you give the tour today. But we wanted to take you through. We are, a couple things are happening. One is, we just did a renovation, a lot of the floorings, we added some other things. But part of what we were hoping to be done by this point, but it hasn't, the artwork and everything is done, the research, everything. But our elections museum for Duval County has not started and won't be done until probably, y'all got a guess, June? In the May, June? Okay. Possibly. Hopefully. I looked in the newsletter that it was going to be ready when we came for training. Well, we may have to push training off. No, but that's the goal. And the education, Tangie, Jennifer, and Hallie has done a lot of work on the museum. I'm looking forward to it. So, anyway, we won't see the museum today. You'll see where it's going. But, anyway, we always start our tours here for those. And Ed's another one. How many tours have you been on? Several. Several. Between the elements, if I skip or miss anything, please, y'all, let this, you know. But y'all have a seat for a second. Basically, when we start our tours here, we have had somewhere around 80 different countries also come and tour the election center to see how we do elections in Duval County and how they've toured other places in other states, how we do it differently. You know, one thing that's interesting is that states are very inconsistent when it comes to elections. There is no requirement from state to state to do it any consistent way. And so, basically, that's the interesting thing is we get visitors is how different it may be done here versus other states. A couple of things that we always point out when you come and start here is one is our map. The map is pins of all the people who have come from different countries. So that just shows where in the world they've come from. We started at the last tour of mapping the ones that are actually from the United States. It's the first ones. Yeah, so we said, shoot, we don't have a pin in the United States, and so we let them that was touring it pin the United States. But blue is once, white is twice, and red is three times that they have come. So we're proud of being able to tour that. The other is the picture that's up here on the wall. That is Duval County's only tied race. It was in Neptune Beach. It was between Richard Arthur and Rory Diamond. It came down to a tie. And state law says when it is a tie in a race, now that's after we've done a recount, you know, everything's been double-checked, everything's there. It is an actual tie. The state law says you must have a game of chance in order to determine the win. You know, so the game of chance, and those of you who know me, it couldn't just be real quick, because we had all the supporters and the media there for the historical tie race. So the way it started, in fact, Rory was commenting this morning on the radio when we were both on, is the way we started it was, and the members that are up there, on the right is the canvassing board judge, county judge. The council member representing at that time was Doyle Carter and myself, and that's Richard Arthur, who ended up winning. But the way we started the game of chance was the county judge first pulled a name out of the hat to say who starts this process. And so Rory's name was picked first. And so the next part of the process would, because ultimately it was going to be who picked the highest number of ping pong ball. And so, but two would go first, we flipped a coin. So we flipped a coin, and Rory won that. So he's two for two right now. So then there's 20 ping pong balls in a bag. You can't see the numbers. We shake them up. And then Rory gets to go first. He pulls out a number. And then, unfortunately, our lady told me, make sure he puts the ball back in, or else the mathematical odds are different. And I think he pulled, like, number seven. Okay? So then Richard Arthur pulls his. He pulls number 11. He's the winner. So Rory's still today say I won two out of three. I should have won. But that's the way the game of chance was. And we've had a race that was two votes difference, but that's the only time race that we have any notation in our records going back as long as they kept records. So any questions so far? All right. Well, join me, and we'll follow the tour around. Just so y'all know, we will be taking pictures if you do not. We try to get it from like the side or whatever, however it goes. But if you do not want to be in any kind of action, just let me know, and I can make sure that we honor that. If you're on witness protection, anything like that, let us know. I knew it. I knew it. This is my right side. Don't just come on in. Go anywhere you can move around in, and I'll explain what this room is. I'm just going to hover next to you because I have the microphone. Oh, that's a good point. Okay. Okay, this is our sample precinct room. We use it for a couple reasons. One is when we do tours to show how we set up a polling location during Election Day or early voting. And it also helps see people who are touring, what equipment we use in Duval County. We also use it when the poll workers want additional training. They come, and they can sit down with the trainer or sit by themselves and go through the equipment again and get hands-on experience if they need additional training. So basically, as you know, all of y'all have voted in Duval County. The e-bids is what we check in. There's two parts of this process. One is the BOD, which is ballot-on-demand, which we use at early voting because obviously we have over 200 to sometimes 300 different ballot styles. So therefore, we have to print the ballot. When we first started early voting at the initial part, now it's been almost two decades ago, we didn't have ballot-on-demand printing. We had what was called pick-and-pull, or we as election officials call it pick-and-pray, pray you pulled the right one. But you literally have all the ballots, and the poll worker, there was only like one or two early voting sites, would look you up and then go find the ballot and pull it. So you can see, thank God, we're beyond that. Now the printer just prints out the ballot that you need. And now I will say some counties have gone to using ballot-on-demand printers on Election Day. So they don't pre-print all the ballots. They have that. We're contemplating, is that a savings or not a savings, you know, because the hard part is, and literally, if you saw after an election, we literally have pallets of unvoted ballots that we send to be straightened. Because, you know, someone says, well, can't you just order what you think is going to show up? Yeah, well, if I didn't guess it right, who tells the guy that I missed it, you know? So we always have to over-order because, and the other side is, in one side of town it may be a very contentious race, and therefore a lot of people coming out there, but another side of town maybe there's not a challenge race, and so less people are voting in that area. So it's just almost mathematically impossible to predict what the turnout will be at every location. So, but we do pre-print the ballots. We send them all out to the poll workers, and they have to account for all of them. So, you know, some people worry, well, if you pre-print them, could someone ballot stuff or put them in? The accounting process, as you document on an election, is every ballot used must correspond with the voter. If the voter spoiled a ballot, it goes in the spoiled ballot. We have to account for spoiled ballots. So everything's accounted for. So there is not like, well, there's a lot of ballots. Let the poll workers just fill out a few more, you know? They can't do that because of the accountability. And, again, the EVIDS are checking in the voters. So, you know, they would, again, you know, from that process, document how many of the EVIDS have checked in, how many have been tabulated on here, and how many ballots that have actually been given out. So that's, again, chain of custody of those ballots and accounting for exactly who's voted them. Any questions y'all have? Obviously, y'all know the equipment, so I'm not going to demo the equipment. You've got the express vote over there. We use more of those in early voting because, again, it's, from a standpoint also, you don't have to print a ballot. You give them a blank card. Card goes in there. It's programmed for all the races in Duval County. So, again, the express vote is for those who may be visually impaired. They can listen. Those who may not want to listen, but they can also expand the wording on there to make larger print. We can also do it in multiple languages. And so that is our required to have one in every polling location on Election Day and early voting, but we put more of them on early voting because, again, sometimes we can actually move people through quicker on those than we can on the paper ballots. It all depends on how many pages of ballots there are, front and back, and different items. Sometimes a printed ballot is faster than the express vote, and sometimes the express vote is faster depending on how big the ballot is and how long it is. So any other questions? How's the feedback you've gotten on the express vote? Well, you know, in the presidential election, we had 80 in early voting. We hardly get very few people using it on Election Day. But in early voting, we had about 82%, I think was the number, use express votes. So we went through a time period of finding what the issues were. For example, at first we had a screensaver, a protector on there, so you couldn't see it from an angle. But unfortunately, your touch, and it works on touch, didn't work as well. So we took those off. And then sometimes people's hand, if they had long fingernails, it didn't register as the touch, like you're touching a phone or touching a keypad. And so we ended up putting stylus on all of them, and that seemed to solve all the problems, and we put a lot of notations and stuff like that. So as we evolved through using it, it really turned out to be something that people use. What we do now is, and the requirement is, and we've gone through an evolution of that from the previous supervisor, this is, we do not push anybody to work any way of voting on early voting. We have a billboard sign that says, mark your ballot with a pen, express vote. We'll have a sign-up that has a BOD and a sign-up that has the express vote, and a flag indicating which one's which. And the sign, there'll be a monitor, a line monitor, and that line monitor will say, I have a short line on the express vote. And what we find is, most voters, we do have some that don't want to use the express vote, but most voters is just, how can I get in and out as soon as possible? If I can go do the express vote and be finished voting faster than waiting in long, I've got certain locations, and they want to use paper ballots, meaning the ones you fill the ovals in, more than they want to use that. And so we don't say, oh, please try it. And that, when they first got it, it was like, hey, I want to try this. And people got upset and going, oh, no. But that machine does not tabulate. That's the bottom line. The machine has, prints the card, and it has a barcode on it, and it goes in the same machine. There's a slot here for the express vote. The big ballot goes in here. But it's no different. It tabulates right here. It doesn't tabulate there. And so you see all your selections there on the card before you put it in. You see your selections before it prints the card. If you want to change the selection, you can. One thing about the express vote is, and if you've ever watched canvassing board meetings or anything like that, one of the issues we have, we have it more on vote by mail, but we also have it sometimes on people who fill out ovals, is voter intent. You would think, well, gee, that's pretty easy. How do you get voter intent out of a paper ballot where you just fill in the oval? Well, bless the heart, not everybody fills in an oval. Somebody wants to check it. Okay? I don't know where that comes from. It comes from every political sign that you see a check vote for me. If I could ever get them all to change those, you know. But basically, voter intent is never an issue on the express vote because it prints exactly what it is, and there's no marking. On this, on the full ballot, yes, we get voter intent. We get voters sometimes with visibility. They will circle the oval. They will circle the entire name. And if they don't mark something in the oval, it doesn't count. So I like the express vote because it eliminates all voter intent issues. But again, if people feel like, and it's so interesting, they'll just go, yeah, but that ballot there, I know it's reading the ovals. And the other one, it has a barcode, and it's reading the barcode. I said, well, you do know when it reads the ovals, it doesn't know the name next to it. If it was programmed wrong, and it's an X and Y coordinate, and 1-1 was candidate B instead of A, you wouldn't know that. You know, so you're trusting, again, the name next to the oval. You know, so don't think it's more secure than that one. That's why we do a logic and accuracy test. We'll show where we do that, where we show it is counting what it's supposed to be. The X, Y coordinate for 1-1 is candidate A, and 1-2 is B, you know, where it shows up. But again, it's not more secure to do one versus the other. And so, but I preach that until I'm blue in my face, and people go, no, I'm filling in the ovals, and I say, God bless you, we have them for you. Please use them, you know. Any other questions? You've been taking this out to the schools and to hobnobs and other community events to continue to train future voters as well as community members who may not have used it. Exactly. We want people to be aware before they come in to vote that it's an option. And again, it's their option, whatever they want to use. And so we're not going to push one versus the other. So, any other questions? All right, we're going to move out that door there. And to see it all with all the windows and stuff, that is pretty cool, but much smaller environment over there. All right, this is the tab room, our tabulation room. This is also where our IT director will, the programming of the machines and the thumb drives are all kept in here for the machines and everything. And one thing about our office, we have mag locks everywhere, but not every employee is allowed in every location. This one is limited to probably, I'd say, less than maybe five employees into this one room. And we don't even tour through there. You know, election night, the media typically, my friend Jim Pickett, he used to be, he's retired, would come here with a camera and it was like somehow you were, when you could see through that fishbowl, it was going to be more real. And so, and of course, my sense of humor, you'll learn, is Jim would be going, do you have the results? And I keep going, you know, he'd fall for that every time, you know. But what happens here in the tab room is this. As I tell people, your vote, when you vote and you put it in that DS300, it's captured in four different ways. It is captured by the ballot that you voted. It is captured by a thumb drive on that DS300. It is captured as far as the results on the result tape that we print out at every polling location at the end of the night to say these are the results. And I say this because, as people say, well, what about the results change? As I always say, Tom Cruise has to change all four methods. And then the fourth is, every ballot in the state of Florida is cast on a paper ballot. So you can reconstruct every election. So you've got all four things that you can audit afterwards to say, well, if someone changed the count somewhere, what was on the paper tape? What did the ballots now count as? What was on the thumb drive? And the fourth way is, at the end of the night, you know, and the DS300 is not connected to the Internet during the time of voting, anything like that. There is a wireless modem at the end of the night that we send by a virtual private network encrypted to this one computer over here. And so it comes in, and basically there's an IP address for the machine that it leaves from, and there's one here that it has to know that this is the one I've got to send it to. It recognizes, it sends, it recognizes, it shuts off the link between the two, and the results are in. There's what it's called an air gap is, again, before we put those results on the web, they'll download it again on a thumb drive, switch to the other computer, put it on that computer, and then we upload it on our website. So election night, that is the process. Also remember, in the state of Florida, by state law, we must report, and we set it at 715, state law says, by 730, we must report all the vote-by-mail ballots and all the early votes in the state of Florida by 730. And so that's why the state of Florida, the results are typically done by 10 o'clock, you know, because you've got all the early votes in, the vote-by-mail, and we're just waiting on the precincts. And you've got to remember, some states don't even count vote-by-mail ballots until the election's over. So from that standpoint, you go, well, why is it taking this state this long to come in? It's their laws, you know, that wait, you know, to count those other votes afterwards. It is nice, as soon as we do that logic and accuracy test, at that point, we're allowed to then start counting the vote-by-mail ballots, and as the early votes are coming in each of those, we're all uploading them and stuff like that. To answer your question, does anybody know those results prior to the election? Probably there's two people, myself and also the IT director, who knows those results. Now, if I'm on the ballot, I don't know the results, okay? It's safe and secure. Can you say why that is? Well, two reasons. There's about three times the state statutes says one is that I can't know those, as well as I cannot release those. My wife would always say, how's the race going? Not mine, but other races. And I'd say, you know, I'm not going to tag it, you know. So, but we do know those. Now, another thing that I do as supervisor is, at 7-0-1, you know, we'll push out the results at 7-15, but I'll look at the early votes and the vote-by-mails, and if it's a landslide, I'll call a candidate. So, if you're ever a candidate, Donovan, if you're ever a candidate, and you are, and my phone rings to you at 7-05, you'll want to take that call. You know, if you don't get a call, wait for the website to upload. You're waiting for the precincts to come in, you know. But you can ask, like, Judge Virginia Norton. She'll say, I'll remember that call until I die, to recall and then congratulate him. And I have to be, believe me, I don't make that call unless it's a landslide, because I don't want to say one thing, and then the election date comes in and go, oh, my bad. I don't think we're going to win. But I'll tell them also, I've told people, hey, here's what the results are going to be released, and they want that. And, you know, and I always say, they appreciate their supervisor again, but I can't do that until after 7 o'clock. And then at 7-15, we normally push out all the results, and then we have to continue to push out those results. And we try to do it on a 30-minute basis. That's why, you know, you don't have to keep hitting upload or, you know, refresh. About every 30 minutes, we'll hit it. And also, state laws change. We cannot go home until all vote by mail. See, there's still some that we may get in election night at 7 o'clock that wasn't reported at the 7-15, because people can turn them in downtown, you know, at 7 o'clock. So, at that point, we've got to bring those out. They've got to verify the signatures. And then, you know, if there's no questions on the signatures' validity, then we've got to upload those to the computer. But we have to have all those done before we can go home, you know. And so, that's why we try to get those in as soon as possible. So, any questions on this part? Okay. Do you have a backup computer for that one that's configured in case that one's, like, struck by lightning, you know, before you have them? There is redundancy. Yes. Yes, there is. Okay. Yes, there is. And that's important also. And we do the same thing of redundancy that we've had in the past. Sometimes our website provider go down. And how do we get the results? Because you're talking about people freaking out when that website has no results, you know. You know, we'll print it out. We'll put it up in a PDF. We'll do something there. And so, everything we can do to try to get those results and let people know. Media is typically here. So, they're putting that out. They're wanting to do interviews. Years ago, it wasn't like pushing it out on the Internet. So, really, candidates, the parties, everybody was here waiting for results. You know, but now, it's like, you can watch the website if there's a problem. Usually, the calls I get is, we have like 159 precincts today. And so, the calls I get is, our map that shows the election night returns will also show precincts reported. So, when they have precincts in the district they're running in and they say, you know, precinct 302 hasn't reported. Why? Okay. Then, I'm able to, because we're communicating. They may have had an issue with their Wi-Fi and they couldn't upload it. And then, they had to go to the drop zone to upload it there or they're bringing it in, you know. So, we'll let them know what's the issue, you know, and those kind of things. I will say, this was now almost two decades ago. I was not supervisor. I was city council member and I was on the canvassing board. And they were waiting on a precinct to come in. And back then, we did not have, you know, again, a website showing precincts and those kind of things. And all we knew was, where's that precinct? And the poll worker, the manager, had taken it home. She was tired, so she took everything home with her. It was her last election also. I remind you, poll workers, you know. And it hadn't been. It was going to be. It was going to be. It caused her to be her last election. But from that standpoint is, my staff, we're not going home until everything's out and everything's back in. So that we can reconstruct an election. Because at the end of the day, if it ends up being real close, close is, again, within a half a percent. Then it means that we have to look at all the ballots for the over and unders. Within a quarter percent means they're all running back through high-speed counters to count them again. And so when they're that close, believe me, the person, when it's close, we got the calculators. Is it going to make that half percent? Is it going to make that quarter? Or sometimes it looks close, but it's not within that half a percent or quarter. So any other questions? And I can say, as someone, you don't want a close race. It's just my first race that I lost, city council, I was ahead by two votes at the end of the night. And then the vote-by-mail ballots came in, and I lost by 46 votes out of 13,000 votes. So it gave me real empathy. So I do have empathy for candidates and their patience and waiting and going through the process. But anyway, all right, follow me then. Do you all have a preferred coffee vendor for those late nights? Our motivation is trying to get out, so it's not left. You know, we have a full-time staff of about 35 employees. However, it takes about 2,000 employees to put on an election. So we go from 35 to 2,000. Part of that 2,000, obviously, is our full-time staff, is about the 1,800 poll workers that we hire, and they're all paid. And then also it is additional warehouse and IT personnel and rovers and also our call center because our staff could not take all the calls if we were relying on our staff downtown to take the calls. So this is our call center. We activated about how many days before, about 60 days? No, no, we're about two weeks prior to early voting, so about four weeks before. So a month before is, you know, we bring in seasonal about two months ahead of time. But it's also our command center on election day. And by that, I'm here. An attorney from general counsel is here. My staff, my IT people are in here. We're here to answer any questions voters have, poll workers have. The three networks are up on this TV screen. That screen over there is live activity of all the events, so we know if there's any polling location that an event is down and we don't have connectivity, we can monitor on that, monitor over there. So that's that process here so that everyone is in one place. I'll never get my first election as supervisor in 2005. I thought, wow, election day, I'm going to get out there and go to precincts and go see poll workers. I did not make it to the first one. They said, you need to get back here, you know, because what happened was these, they're no longer working here also, these people. But somebody had switched the number of ballots. It was a primary. In other words, the number that you print for, say, that we had estimated in a Democratic precinct, there was so many that you needed because there's so many Democratic voters and so many Republicans. They had switched the numbers. So we had 10 times the Republican ballots in some precincts and one-tenth the number of ballots in some precincts. So needless to say, it was like, get printing, get them out there. We got an issue, come back. And so I've, it's sort of like, to keep it lucky, I stay in here the entire election. So do not go outside, do not, you know, but I was looking forward to all the polling locations. They cook a lot of food, and I saw all these desserts and opportunities to, you know, glad hand and go around and see everybody. But needless to say, I don't do that. So this is our call center, and these are where we take those questions during Election Day and throughout that process. Any questions? All right. As you come this way, you also, we're fortunate that many of our call center, many of our call center workers come back every election. They're retired. They come back at that point. I know this one right here, this gentleman had been with us, Stephen Smith, for several elections. He passed away after the last election. So we memorialized him for the next election to leave this picture and dedicate that cubicle to him. But, again, our poll workers are like that. If we had to start every election with people who had never done the work, it would be very difficult. So we do get new poll workers. We do get new call center people and stuff like that. But the majority of everyone that comes back has done it before. That makes my job and my staff's job a lot easier because we're bringing them back up to date. They don't do it every day. But, again, it's a lot easier to get someone up who's done it. So, any questions? All right. People are looking through. That would be funny. That would be really good. Franklin. Okay. This is the future museum. So, and I will say also, we had a veterans wall right here. The veterans wall is moving down to the other end to honor our vets. And so, we're waiting. When we do this, we'll complete the extension of the veterans wall, which basically, and yourself, anyone who's a veteran or family member that you want to honor them, what we need is, we'll print the photo. We just need an email to us and their full name and their highest rank when they get out of the service. And so, we'll be glad to honor any of your family, friends, or yourself. Linnell, do we have your picture yet? Yes, sir, you do. That's about October of last year. All right. And we'll put you up there. So. Yeah. Maybe. But this is where the museum will be. I'm really looking forward to it. They've done such an effort on it. You'll really see the history of voting in Duval County. So. All right. We'll come this way. We'll put the rooms, the glass windows, to make sure every aspect of what we do, someone can look. And it's open, election day, and things of that nature. Things are restricted, obviously, where there's mag locks. But nothing's going on that you're not allowed to watch and see. And we'll talk more about the chemistry board meetings and the L.A. But what I'm going to take to you now is Carmen's favorite room. This is the vote by mail. Right, Carmen? Carmen, your favorite place, the vote by mail center. The violation. I know. Well, and especially since we spent almost $2 million on it. But vote by mail, just to give you. I mean, the highest use of vote by mail was obviously 2020 during COVID because people were afraid to come in to vote. At that time, Duval County probably did close to $120,000 vote by mail ballots. Right now, vote by mail has dropped off considerably. I think right now we've got about 21,000 in the queue. And of those, probably close to 3,000 are overseas, military, and State Department people. So about 18,000 domestic voters have requested for the 2026 election. So you see, yeah, it's a considerable drop. Because, again, it's a preference. You know, our responsibility is to let people know when laws change about vote by mail. Such as, you know, now with Senate Bill 90 several years ago, you have to renew your vote by mail after every general election that's in an even year. So, therefore, everybody in 2024 voted by mail on January 1st of 2025, there was zero in the queue to vote by mail. So we notify those who need. And let me tell you, even on the executive orders and stuff, they recognize there are homebound people. There are people who travel. There are people who cannot vote any other way than vote by mail. You know, and so we never want to take away someone's right to vote. You know, so we want to make sure. We don't ask. In the state of Florida, it's not that you've got to ask. And also in the state of Florida, different than other states, is that no supervisor can send vote by mail ballots to every voter. That is done in some states. And so that is something that's not done in the state of Florida. But, again, we have notified everyone who voted by mail before in 2024, and it's their option if they want to renew. And we did that notification about two weeks ago, and we had about 11,000 people re-sign up. You know, so it almost doubled our numbers. So, again, not knowing they had to sign up again. Any other questions here? Well, where did you go, Cliff? Cliff, yes. I know you said a digit-dip. I don't want to add on that. Yeah, no, go ahead. But so the governor said that, like, thousands and thousands of people have moved here. They're coming from other states. They have other voting cultures, voting practices and laws. Do you know if there's ever been any consideration that allows somebody, when they do register, like a lot of them are doing it through the Department of Highway and Safety of Motor Vehicles, at that time, to go ahead and request a vote-by-mail ballot that's actually, that goes with the registration? Because now, in a Spice State law, there is a specific form asking for specific information. And so there's no, you need that information, the supervisor, too, in order to validate that request. And you can only do it for your immediate family members. You can only do it, you know, so it's trying to limit to make sure someone doesn't bulk request for anybody. So to answer your question, there is no, check the box and it will be sent to you. Because we've got to have your signature request in that form, you know, on that form saying, I want this, you know. Yes. I appreciate the pop-up you have on the website lately. You're reminding people they need to sign up. Again, I do not want, all of a sudden, it's three days before the election, someone says, I never got my vote-by-mail ballot. And I always vote by mail. And so we're trying our best. If that's the way you vote, then we want to make sure we give you the information. All right, Cliff is filling in for Darwin. Cliff is our IT director, IS director. He's the director, he's the guru, okay, but he knows this equipment as well as all, does the programming for all the other equipment and everything in his staff. So, Cliff, take it from here. What have you got here? Yes, this is all branded by BlueCrest. And on this section, the BlueCrest mail stream, you think of it as the outbound. So, it takes the envelope and head, puts it in the packet with the inbound envelope, CPC sleeve, and the ballot, depending on the ballot's ballot. And from it to end, on that side is the BlueCrest Vantage, and that's the inbound. That's why we've got two separate. Now, also, just an FYI, I think it's going to happen, where Justin goes, is it going to happen for the primary, the I vote a sticker? I believe so. All right, we will have our first I vote a sticker on vote by mail secrecy sleeves, because that's one of the things, those of you vote by mail want to have a sticker. I believe that's a sticker. They are. Yes, they are. They really are. All right, I'll try to run this demo now. And also, if for any reason that machine put two ballots in an envelope, it weighs that and kicks that out, so that it knows the weight of what that should be. So, this is on what envelopes? This is on the return envelope. What you're seeing there with the name and the barcode is on the return envelope. This is the return envelope. We also was the first county in the state that did a flap to cover your signature so nobody would steal your signature. But that's what you see there. It goes through. This verifies. This also is a process so we can give credit to the voter also by reading that. Reading that by the way. Yeah. So, what does the post office have to do with this particular post office? The post office uses this here, this code. And when it's coming back a little bit. Yeah, and uses that code. Those two codes. So, they're not the same. This code and this code is different. Yeah. Yeah. This is aligned just to the voter. This information here. Right. This is the USPS. Right. So, the tracking of the ballot is not done by this but is done by this with the post office. Right. Yes. Which is required. It's not on the actual ballot. No. So, the ballot itself has no identity to the voter. Once they come in and the process is, and you'll explain, is when they come back in, they'll run through that machine. And what it's doing is it's capturing a signature of the ballot on the ballot so that they never leave here the ballots. But downtown, the staff can then pull up the voter who's voted, check the signature to all the signatures that we have on record. If it matches, it's yes, it goes back to the equipment, it goes back out, and then we open them up in front of the public. When we open them, it's an open, separate, and then that, now we can no longer identify that ballot to any voter. You know. And they do it that quick. So, they're not looking at it either. Oh, let's, this one and that one. So, yes. No. Is that signature technology the same as what's used for petitions for qualifying votes? It is, the signature verification on petitions and on ballots is all manually. There are some counties that will use the bank technology like they do on checks, and you can set it to the degree that you want acceptance or rejection. Sensitivity? Yes. Okay. We do not use that. We use, now, by state law, every poll worker, not poll worker, but every staff member that reviews signatures, including myself and campus support, has to take signature verification training so that we can know how to spot fraud versus, you know, duplicates in the end and someone tracing and all those kind of things. So, our staff has to take that training. Our staff looks at every one. And then, if they're rejected, then two things happen. The voter gets notified that your signature was rejected. Now, that's for two reasons. One is, if the voter actually signed it, the voter has a chance by 5 o'clock Thursday to cure that, which means come in, show your ID, and we'll count it. If the voter didn't sign it and someone voted for them, now the voter is alerted, hey, they just called me and said there was a vote by no ballot, and I never voted that. And then, we turn it over to the FDLE and the Florida Crimes Division of Elections, and they would investigate that. So, two purposes there of notifying the voter. Then, it goes to the canvassing board. The canvassing board there in front of the public will pull up the signature that's been rejected, all the signatures, and the canvassing board, again, with a vote of two at least, can vote it up or vote it down. You know, and if it's rejected, again, voter's notified. They can still come in and correct it by 5 o'clock on Thursday. You know, so, that's that notification process. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So, and also, on the outbound, when he gets finished here, they run them through there for postal zip codes so we can get bulk mail status. That helps us save our costs. We also, not required, but we're one of the counties, we do pay for the postage coming back in. Because when it's not paid for, what they found out is the elections office were paying for it anyway because it didn't have a stamp on it. They'd mail it. They'd do it anyway. So, it was easier to, let's just pay for it on the outbound. All right. Cliff, other things you want to show the outbound? It has a camera, so we have, like, an image. Yeah. Oh, these are the signatures. That camera catches. Five times as fast as that. What is the point of the extra move? It helps with, you know, making a decision. Because it has to go through, at the most, 20 more pockets. It has different passes as well. On top pass, and then incoming pass. Because we have those pockets too, but we have the different signals like the OCA products. So, it's something that's being read here. Yeah, the camera over there in the first bin is reading each one. Reading that barcode, who the voter is, and capturing the city of Charleston. Lightning speed. Also, part of our renovation, we have an extended ballot storage room. You may wonder, what do they do in all the ballots when they come in, vote by mail, or they come in during early voting? It goes straight to the storage room. Again, limited employees in there, and that's where we store them. Because, again, we've got to recreate that election if we have a recount. So, yeah, DOJ, FBI, CISA, Homeland Security, they all come. In fact, we have a meeting, when is it? May 7th. May 7th with all those acronyms at the FBI headquarters. So, we'll know then what security threats and what their plans are and how we communicate. And here, basically, you've got to realize, this building that you're in, we occupy about 55,000 square feet. The building itself is 1 million square feet. So, I don't ever see us expanding that way, unless we do the election for the entire state. But, all our DS300s are back there, our e-vids. We do our logic and accuracy test in the back area, and the public comes to that when we're testing the equipment. Everything is color-coded for all the precincts. All the poll workers know that, what's to be in bags. They're at election night that it is a wonderful thing to watch. We are so excited when the box trucks line up out there in the parking lot to start dropping off equipment. And they're just processing everything, because, again, we've got to account for everything when it comes back. It's a great process at that point. I do always show, as you come back this way, election equipment lasts about 10 to 12 years. And it's not cheap. Election equipment is about, for our DS300s and e-vids, we probably spent $6 to $8 million, somewhere in that range. And they last about 10 to 12 years, which is not a lot of elections, because you do, basically, you do seven elections every four years. You know, so, at best, you're getting somewhere out of there anywhere between 14 and 21 elections, you know, before you have to buy new voting equipment. But the thing that outlasts everything is voting booths. Now, these are newer ones, but the metal ones that you see on that side over there are the same one used for the 2000 election with the punch cards. And you still open them up and occasionally find a Chad's in there, and you flip it over, and that's where the punch card system would go. In our museum, you'll see all the equipment used in the last 40 years, 50 years. We even got a lever machine that's around here somewhere. Right on the other side as well. Yeah. Somebody's booths, though, is shaking. Yeah. We replace them as they get there, but they have lasted a long time. But that's our equipment and what we do in all the bags. So, any questions here? Okay. Well, we're going to go into our meeting room and continue y'all's EAP meeting. So, we'll hand out what's the easiest way. If you want to go this way, can you put that door, please? If you, after you go to our right, you'll see the lever machine and the little pocket fits nicely. In the mid-second. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to restore it a little better. And it was interesting. You talk about technology and equipment. The way this worked is, you went in, there was a lever here that you closed, and that automatically closed the curtains. They're torn up because every voter wanted to open the curtains and close them themselves. Obviously, thousands of voters. But what you do is, you make your selections and push down the lever. Okay. Well, and it told you up there, because, again, you've got to import voters. Only voting pointers left down will register. Guess what voters would do? I'd poke for this one, this one, this one, but I don't want anyone to see this, so I'm going to put them back up. Thinking that, just the action of putting it down. But what happened is, it stayed down, and then when you did the lever to open the curtains, there's wheels in the back with numbers. It would register for that. Maybe this candidate A is wheel number 12. It would go over one more. And so, you say, well, no electronics, no internet, no wire to anything other than there was a light in here. But from a standpoint, where's the human error? Somebody had to write down those things correctly. Okay. Again, you had to trust they would write down the right ones for the right people and the right number. Who would audit? Who would do that? Every system, you have to look and say, where could there be a potential fraud, errors, human errors? And even this system and the punch card system had its system. When you have a museum, could you turn it out this way so people could see the gears in the back? Yeah. We'll do something so we can see the back and come back into that. Because it's neat. Because like you say, there's all these little counters back there. They run out of money when they started buying curtains. Yeah. And you know, hey, our guys, you know, loading out equipment. Can you imagine? This thing is not light. Oh, yeah. You know, and loading out. There wasn't a lot of precincts, but that was some heavy equipment to get back in. When was the last time we used that for loading? I want to say the punch card system came in, I want to say somewhere. Did y'all have a number? 1980? I want to say maybe 76 was the last presidential election in Duval County that we used a lever machine. Wow. Wow. Jimmy Carter. Because I was living in Waycross, they used them into the 80s. Yeah. The end of the 80s. The punch card was like, oh, man, this is so great, you know, the punch card system. There's no electronics. You don't have to haul them as heavy. It's just those little silver boxes, and you give them a card, and they go in there, and they punch it out. Well, unfortunately, once again, voters punch only one. They would say, oh, I'm going to punch with this one, and this one, and this one. And I go back to the 2000 election with Bush and Gore, that race was decided by 537 votes out of 10 million casts in the state of Florida. In Duval County alone, there was over 6,000 overvotes. See, the DS-300, you overvote, what does it do? It kicks it out because it will not accept it. Punch card, you overvote, you just turn it in until we go to county, you know. And what happened was 1,000 people had voted for Al Gore and Libertarian candidate Harry Brown. Why did they do that? Because Congresswoman Brown said, make sure you go in there and vote for Gore and Brown. And they did. It wasn't her Brown. It was Harry Brown. That was 1,000. 5,000 had voted for everybody but George Bush because the instruction was vote for anybody but George Bush. And they voted for everybody but George Bush. Had it been the technology of the DS-300, it would have changed the history of elections. So technology is important and it's important to always look and say, where are the situations that will prevent an accurate election, you know. So love the history of it. So follow me, we'll go to our meeting. What's different about this panel is it's different in how we've done this. Very seldom is there a replacement like what we did. We changed who the appointees was. Typically, it is you're coming up for re-election but they haven't approved the re-election so you stay until the re-election. But in this case, the council moved forward on his legislation that specifically said he was replacing you. So that's why it is different than what you typically see, you know. But hopefully, as a voting member, you'll be back soon. So I'm advocating for it. All right, I'll turn it over to our chairperson, whoever. All right. Ray, you're still in. So we'll open with introductions. I'll start with my wife. All right. My name is Donovan Bradley. Gloria Einstein. Carmen Martinez. Linnell Filman. Austin Quickel. Ed Williams. Robert Albinato. Justin Giccolo. Jerry Houndman. Frank Russell. All right. We have a quorum. We do the approval of the December minutes. May I give a motion, yes? Motion. Motion. Second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? So moved. Supervisor of the election update. All right. I'll give you a couple things. Justin, you passed these. A couple things we want to talk about. One is, we were very excited. One of the pieces of legislation, wasn't a lot of legislation passed in Tallahassee this year, but one of it was House Bill 461. House Bill 461 was volunteering at polling locations. Representative Michael introduced it on the House, Senator Yarbrough introduced it in the Senate, and it passed unanimous. There was no dissension at all. What it does, it allows students who are pre-registered or registered to vote to sign up to be poll worker volunteers that basically will do community service hours so they can move toward getting their bright future scholarships and things of that nature. And if they like it and they end up being an asset, then maybe they come back in the future and be poll workers and actually be paid. But that did pass. We're still waiting on the governor's signature, but that was one piece of legislation that passed. The other piece of legislation, it was a little more controversial and obviously was not unanimous, was House Bill 991. House Bill 991 is considered or called the Florida Save Act. As you know, there's the Save Act that's going through on the federal level. This was referred to as the Save Act on a state level. First of all, there's nothing in the Save Act for voters that will impact either the primary or general election in 2026. It is effective January 1st of 2027, and elections proceeding are after that. But what the House Bill 991 does is specifically it's geared to how registrations are done to prevent non-U.S. citizens from registering. And so, and part of that, and I'll cover that in some of those statistics I gave you, is the registration process for supervisors of elections and staff is a ministerial role. Which means basically, currently, and even in the future, when someone signs up as a voter, you do not at that point have to show your passport, birth certificate, anything like that. But, you check the box, you check the box, and you sign a oath that you are agreeing to everything you've signed here, or it's a perjury and a criminal offense. But if you check you're a U.S. citizen, I must move the process forward. Or if, for some reason, you don't check that box, then we'll send out, verify why you left it out, and then let you know that you can't register. But the state of Florida, the Division of Elections, starts the process of verifying whether or not a voter is a U.S. citizen. And in doing so, there's a separate part of the legislation that helps them do that. Because starting in January, as you get a driver's license renewed or a new one, or you come into the state, like you have done with the real ID law, which is basically what got you the gold star on your driver's license, you showed who you were. You had to show proof. If your name had changed due to marriage or some reason, you had to show, as you do currently today, why your name changed. Here's a marriage certificate. Here's a naturalization, you know, that I changed my name. That is the way it's worked. And so now, when you get your real ID in the future, you will show citizenship to the highway safety motor vehicle agent. You will show a birth certificate, a passport, a naturalization certificate. So, and your driver's license will indicate U.S. citizen, non-U.S. citizen. So, again, they will let us know if a voter, someone who registered to vote, is a non-U.S. citizen. So, when they let us know, we then, that's when we start the process, we have to do process before we remove them from that registration. Send them a letter. Say, listen, you know, these are the facts that show that you're not a U.S. citizen. And if you can bring forth evidence that you are, then we can get a copy of that evidence, send it to the state, and complete your application. And so, that's where we get involved in this Florida Save Act 991. So, that will be where citizenship will be a process of HSMV, as well as we're in the back end if for some reason it does not indicate or they don't have any evidence of the person being a U.S. citizen. And so, that will be the change. The other change to it is the number of IDs that were allowed and are allowed through the end of this year are going to change. They're going to drop off. They're going to drop off student IDs, community center IDs, credit cards, and debit cards. Those were forms of ID that could be accepted. The other forms that were accepted, such as military ID, driver's license Florida ID, passport, government ID, any of those, as they were in the past, will still be accepted in the future. And so, that's some of the things as far as new business on the legislation. What I passed out to you also in these numbers is a couple of things. A lot of times we look, everyone goes to the website and looks and says, okay, we've got 461,000 voters. You know, first of all, we've got 7,000 total fewer voters today than we did July 1st of 2023. So, you're thinking, okay, well, 7,000 people went away. No, that's just the net result. What this form shows you is the process and the reasons voters get removed from the rolls and the numbers that did that. We talked about before in other meetings. There's three types of statuses of voters. There's the active voter, the inactive voter, and the ineligible voter. So, both the voter, active and inactive, are allowed to vote. They have not been removed from the rolls. The way you become inactive is not by not voting. The way you become inactive is you move and you don't tell us where you moved. And so, basically, we send out election mail that's non-portable. It comes back from the post office saying they're no longer there. We then are required to send a piece of mail that is portable, that gets forwarded to you, and you must respond in 30 days. If you don't, you move from active to inactive. Are you safe there? Sort of. Here's what happens. If you go to vote, you're going to update your address. If you don't vote in two federal elections as an inactive voter, you move to ineligible. It means, probably, most likely, you've moved out of the state. You really don't care about updating us. You just don't want to vote anymore. And so, the first list is, since 2023, the 61,302 voters that were moved from active to inactive. The next list is those that were moved to ineligible. Sometimes, you don't make the jump from active to inactive. In other words, when we get the notification from the state that you're a civil rights felon, then, you know, it's not an inactive to ineligible. If you're deceased, it's not an inactive to ineligible. As there are 3,931 felons since July 1 of 2023, 21,322 are voters who have died. Other reasonings there, if they didn't list the Florida address, residential address, if they ask for a hearing because they were moved to ineligible and they didn't come to the hearing, that's a default to ineligibility. If you're adjudicated by the court system, not by me, but by the court system, usually it's family members taking a family member to court, that they're mentally incapacitated, then we get notified by the court and you're removed as a voter. 45,000 moved out of the county. Some may have become voters in other counties, but in our county, they moved off the roll. Since July 1 of 2023, we have identified 139 non-U.S. citizens on the roll. They're not always the person registering's fault. Sometimes it will actually be they did not check the box U.S. citizen, but human error happens where staff is processing 99.9% of applications that are U.S. citizens. Here comes one that's blank, and they don't catch the blank. So they put them in the system, and then all of a sudden the state catches them and comes back, and then they're removed for being a non-U.S. citizen. Not their fault. If it is their fault, and even if they have voted, then the Florida Election Crimes Division goes after them with FDLE and the state attorney and prosecutes. That has nothing to do with me prosecuting. They're the agencies that move forward on that. So that's your non-U.S. citizens. Duplication registrations. Someone can be registered. They married in a – they end up processing the application as a new voter instead of a change of name. It can be a duplicate registration. Office errors, again, if we process someone, it should have been processed. Believe it or not, 5,227 voters said, I no longer want to vote. I am – take me off the rolls. And they give us a written request to take me off the rolls. And so we abide by that request. The 33,000 are basically those that were inactive, that missed two federal elections. Now they've become ineligible. They can re-register again. It doesn't prevent a person from re-registering. But, again, they have to start that over for that reason. So, again, that gives you the party breakdowns of those ineligible. And then also, you know, we're not just trying to just keep our rolls clean. We're adding voters. The next list at the bottom, voter registrations that are still active today and why there's two lists here. We've added since July 1 that are still active on the rolls today, 68,000 new voters to our voting rolls. The reason the next list says 89,000 is we made them active, and then they moved and did something else. So, again, it doesn't always mean that they stay here since 2023. The last thing, as I mentioned before, vote by mail requests. We're up in the queue right now of 21,354. In domestic, it's almost 20,000. And overseas, I said more than that, but actually it's 1,428 of our overseas voters. So, that's the numbers I always like to share. We did 991. Let me share one last thing just to cover for the point of interest. We just, especially, we're honoring, the city council is honoring our poll workers. The day will probably be sometime in August. I think August 11 will be our poll worker recognition day at city council, and we'll invite all poll workers who want to come at that point. City council wants to recognize them for the hard work and everything, and so that will be August 11 of 2026. That will be done. And just for the record, just to let you know where we're at, just, I'm not going to go into November, but the August primary, is next week we do qualifying for our judicial candidates. Many of them are coming in our office now pre-qualifying, which you can do the week before, bringing us their check, you know, and their forms and completing all those. The end of next week, we'll have, if any of our judges are challenged, we do have two, what we call, open judicial seats, which means an incumbent's not running. So, we'll see who files and qualifies for those. So, we will have, as far as for those nonpartisan MPA voters, we will have races on the ballot. That's something we try to get out, especially school board races. Anyone can vote in that, MPAs, minor parties, as well as our judicial races, and we will have judicial races. The first day for us to send out their overseas ballots, 45 days before the election, the petition deadline for the school board and those candidates is May 11th. Qualifying for the fall elections is June 8th through the 12th. It will end on the 12th, so we'll know who's going to be on the ballot in August by June 12th. Then, we'll send out our domestic vote-by-mail ballots on July 9th. We will do book closing for the last day to register for the August election will be July 20th. And then, we'll do our L&A test for the equipment for the primary on July 23rd. Early voting for the primary will be eight days, ten days, ten days of early voting. It will be from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening. It will be Thursday through the – Thursday the 6th through Saturday the 15th will be our early voting. We adjust early voting based on what we think the demand will be and the hours based on that. We're typically in a general election. We may do the full 12 hours of early voting and the full 14 days sometimes in the general election. And then, we come down to the election is on August 18th. That, sir, is our update from the supervisor of the election. Well, that's an update. Thank you. You're welcome. It's very, very important. I appreciate it. The next on the agenda is old business. Can I ask a couple questions, sir? Yes, sir. Oh, I'm sorry. How are we with polling places? Do we have everything? I'm going – we – actually, that's – one of the challenges has been over the last few decades is places wanting to be polling locations. We try to use as many as possible that are government-owned. One, we don't have to pay for those. But that's not the reason we don't expand the number of polling locations is because we can find them. We will – just as a point of reference, when I was supervisor before, we had 299 precincts in Duval County with 200,000 less voters. And today, we have 160 precincts. So, you see, the drop-off is not because of just wanting to be efficient. It's because, again, of finding those locations. And also, a lawsuit that when I came in, we can't just say, oh, well, we can find locations in City Council and District 5 so we can add four more there or five more there, but we can't find them somewhere else. The lawsuit we faced when I came in office was under the Equal Protection Clause, which says you've got to give an equal access to voting throughout the county. You can't say – you know, someone who was playing politics could say, hey, I want more in my political party districts, but less over here and make it harder for someone to vote. So – and not that that was being done intentionally, but there were some districts that had as many as 18 and some as few as, I think, eight or not – eight. And so, that's where the lawsuit said, you can't do that. You know, and so we mediated and came with a happy medium of 11, which we can have no more than 12, no less than 9. Ten. Ten. Okay. Yeah, 11, so 10 to 12. And so, yes, we've had – I'll let Justin cover how many have backed out, what we're working, but we do have probably eight or ten changes that will be coming before the primary. Justin, you can. So, right now, we're sitting at 11 polling places that have declined to continue being a polling location. The districts that are affected where these polling places are found are District 1, District 2 has – District 2, District 3. District 3 is a kind of a – was a temporary change. The polling location was going on renovation during 24, so we're just going back, so that's not that big of a change for that community. District 5, District 6, 11, and 14. As of right now, they have been quite challenging to find people willing to open their doors for voting in the climate that we're in, as well as stuff that we require with agreements and attorneys nowadays. I actually talked to our precinct facilitator. I used to do his job back in 2008, and he said, how did you do it? And to kind of up – when I started, we had 314. Oh, wow. And stuff, so we went down to 299 about two years after probably from there. So, he goes, how'd you do it? And I said, it was a lot easier in the sense that attorneys weren't involved, the political climate was a little different and stuff, so we've had a challenge. We've gotten all but four sites kind of locked in, and stuff that we're just waiting on signatures. The additional thing is the city, because we do give them basically a facility fee to open to turn the lights on or have someone come open for us. But in order to do that, they have to become a supplier with the city of Jacksonville. I just found this out this past week, and it's probably why some of the sites have turned us down. If you ever do supply – become a vendor for the city, you have to go online and fill out all those things. But when you print it, it's this thick, and so it's just straight intimidation. We have – we always, when we go out, we tell them we'll come sit with them to do it. We'll do it over the phone, do it over a team's meeting. So we're trying to kind of guide that stuff, because some of these churches that – I mean, they're there Wednesday and Sunday. It's just – they're small, but we try to go through that. We will have some polling locations because of the – because the polling location is closing, we're actually going to be reducing the number of precincts in that district. As of right now, District 14 is the only one that we're kind of solid in, that that's going to reduce by one precinct in District 14. But we'll go below our minimum. And we will – correct, we will not go below the 10 on there. And then two other ones, we're waiting to hear back to see if we can get the two sites to say yes. If they can, then we'll obviously just continue with that. If not, then those are boundary changes as well to ensure we don't go below the 10. That's been agreed upon. That's on that? Good. That's great. Thank you. Any other questions? I think this is old business because we did talk about it last meeting. But since then, this – well, de-verification form for people who sign petitions for constitutional amendments has gone out. And I was – what I was trying to convey at the last meeting is we need a big disclaimer that says if you sign this petition, you don't have to do anything. But I found this, even to me, as confusing and scary and vaguely threatening. And we did not design it, nor are we allowed to change it. It was from the Division of Elections. And it specifically – it accomplishes, I think, what they were looking to accomplish. Yeah, which is scare people. So I'm curious. This has been out a couple weeks ago. A couple – well, this says – well, I don't know. Yeah. Have you gotten many of these back? So they actually don't come back to us. It's a two-step process. Yeah, so we have to notify – if all of us signed a petition, the elections office accepts the signature, we notify you to say, hey, we accepted your signature for a petition, blah. If I said, I didn't sign that, my wife signed it for me, and I want to turn her in because I'm really upset that they want that on the ballot, then I can send that to OECS. So it's actually not coming back to our office. It goes to the Office of Election Crimes and Security. We sent it to the petitioner. We sent it to the petitioner, but the petitioner, when they complete it, they're not coming back to us. It forwards to them. To the election cost. And so we got – and then they will reach out to us if they believe fraud has happened. It was very – I think they received – I mean, we had the number. We did close to over 100,000. Did a little over about 120-something thousand signatures we verified this last cycle that July. OECS received less than 100. And most of the time, it was – they forgot they signed it and stuff. We didn't get the full investigation, subpoena for this and that. We did for a few, but we have no idea where that's gone since. And it's additional cost because we paid for the postage to the voter who signed, and we also paid for the postage going to OECS. Yeah, great stuff. And it's a heavy piece of – Yes. For a sponsor. In order – so the sponsor, for us to verify on behalf of the sponsor that signature, it costs them now today, since March 1st of this year, $4.25. And that – gosh, I don't know what – should cover all our costs when it comes to – So the sponsor has to pay for all this. Yeah, and stuff like that. Yeah. Wow. But there are sponsors that have that – Undue burden. Correct. Yes. And stuff. And in that case, they also are restricted a little bit of how they can collect, but that falls on our office too. Yeah, they can't use paid petitioners if you have an undue burden. And so – but they can go out, you know, and gather without paying people, and then we have to verify and do all this and not charge anybody. And the candidates' petitions, the cost for those has not changed in the last three or four decades. It's $0.10 per petition, which I can tell you costs more than $0.10. But I always say legislators are also candidates who get petitions. Right. It's not going to change. So the – so it's the same process when people sign for – Or to put someone on the ballot? No, it's – it's different. We do not have to do that when it's a candidate petition. But we have to do it on a constitutional amendment. Yes. The initial petition is a different ballgame from a sense of – Well, it's – I just think it isn't a pleasant petition – a pleasant piece of mail to get. I think it makes people nervous. So when – when you said a lot of more people forgot that they signed the petitions, how do they determine that? The OECS, basically, they do the investigation. They'll contact – if you send it back, they'll contact you and say, why is this fraud, blah, blah, blah, did you not sign this? They've done their full investigation and stuff like that. It could be dropped. It could be – like I said, my wife signed it. I didn't realize she signed it. No, no, no, you're good. I signed it. Change my story. Then also, they'll verify the signature with us, and we'll come back and say, no, that's actually their signature. Yeah. Okay. This might just be my ignorance with the mail-in ballot. Is there any disruption – I think there's a case out of Mississippi that the Supreme Court just heard about taking mail-in ballots postmarked before Election Day, but received within, I think, five days is what the Mississippi law is. Does that impact anything with –? Well, the state of Florida, one, those coming back in don't get postmarked, first of all. Second thing, Florida law says, must be in my hand by 7 o'clock. Okay. So, basically, there's not a need for a post office. And we'll go down. We send someone down to the post office and say, do you have any – even before they close there, but we know that when we get the 3 o'clock or 5 o'clock, that's the deadline. We're not going to get any more, but we'll check. The only place we get, like, last minute is people have gotten lazy at times and said, well, I can't make it back to my precinct. I'm going to go to the downtown office and vote by mail. And they get upset because, unlike a precinct, if you're in line, you can still vote. If you're in line to get a vote by mail or you're even working on it, we'll go. You have 20 seconds. You have 10 seconds. It is 7 o'clock. If you're over there and you haven't turned it in, we'll take it from you. But it came in late. The voting days for the primary, I mean, that was a fairly recent decision because I had already signed up to work the polls in those first few days that aren't happening. What is it based on that you think you're not going to have people coming out and that you reduced the days? We look at a couple things, and it's based on several factors. One is we look at turnout numbers. We look at previous elections, how many took advantage of early voting. As we talked about a shift away from vote by mail, well, it's not going to early voting. It's actually going to election day. Oh, really? Yeah. I thought it was going to early. Based on my contact with voters, it's going to early voting. It's going to election day. So we see no indication that early voting, even though we've expanded early voting as far as locations. Because, again, our reason to make sure early voting or something like that is because, again, the reduction of precincts, we don't want an hour, two-hour lines on election day. Because what will happen is some people won't wait in line. So we've now, in a sense, by our inefficiencies has caused people not to want to vote. I mean, they could have stayed in line and voted. We didn't take away their right. But from that standpoint, you know, it has shifted. So we look at demand, and we don't have to be fiscally responsible. If we don't think the demand's there, then we're not just going to do it because we can, you know. And other counties are the same way. We look at it, adjust, and make our call. So far, we've been good at that, you know, calling how many days and what the turnout is. And as you know, anyone who's worked early voting is the demand increases until the last day. So the first day, it kind of is a bump because I'm a first-day early voting guy because, hey, it's in my office. Why not, you know? But you've got the first day. I'm going to get it out of the way. And then it drops, and then it comes back up. Well, and that's my next question, which is I was disappointed to see that the Sunday before the election wasn't even one of the options. We always have at least one Sunday from that standpoint so people can have souls to the polls. But from the other standpoint is I will tell you from an IT, if Cliff was still in here, to get ready for that Tuesday is very difficult. We have to – we print backup registers in case the events are down. We have to get all those put together, everything together. We have to do so many reports and everything for that. That extra day makes for a smoother election day. I'm sure it does. So, you know, if demand required it, we thought there was such a – I'm not saying demand meaning I really want it, but demand meaning the volume of people using it, then we look at it. And typically we take – we bite the bullet on the general because we know we want to get those people to vote prior to election day. Okay, so that was my next question, was you're not going to take away that last Sunday on the general election. It's not our current plan. Okay. There's this caster at the bottom. Right. And, again, I have to look at the budget. I have to look at everything and make that decision. But we have not set the hours or days for the general election yet. So, to piggyback off the cliff, it's really our candidates director and our voter services director. And the staff at the city's copy center that makes the paper registers that Supervisor Holla mentioned, they're there at basically at midnight until about 2 a.m. assembling those registers to get them back to our office Monday morning so that we can get them to the managers who are picking up the yellow bag. What is that on Sunday? Yeah, so they're that if we go to that 7 o'clock kind of stuff. So, by pushing not having Sunday, we have basically a normal business day hours that people are used to with their body to get them through. And we've adjusted sometimes, even on the weekend ones, because even during a general election, what we've found is people do not get up on Saturday and go vote early. I mean, they will vote, you know, and on Sunday, they typically aren't getting up. If we opened it at 7 in the morning, we're not seeing them there, you know. It's usually after church or at least after 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock. So, can you do a half day? Well, we can adjust. We can do a minimum of eight hours. Okay. And that's our minimum. So, we look at adjusting those, too. Also, the other side is we're fortunate, yourself and others, who want to work early voting. But we also know, you know, we have to bring those up in shifts. The one reason is it puts a lot of demand on individuals to work, if you had to, 14 days prior to working election day. Yeah. And what we found, too, is some would work early voting and not show up election day. That's a problem. Yeah, that makes a problem, too. Questions? Statements? So, are we in old business? I guess it is. Anything else in old business? There's, when I, with some old business, that question Gloria had about the audit and stuff. Yeah, we cannot, at the last one, she was, I forgot the term you used, but basically, we cannot choose our audit. In other words, we can't say what race we want. Everything is random. There's no leeway in that. Just, I told you I'd come back and confer a triple trick and everything. I was talking about risk-limiting audits. Risk-limiting, yes. And stuff. And I told you I would triple check just to make sure. I did. It's just how it's laid out there. There's no other liberal room around there. Also, on Bobby's, you asked him about poll workers where we were at that time. So, we are fully staffed for early voting and election day. Right now, the only thing that we have is basically substitutions. So, in other words, someone has committed to it, but since has said, oh, I can't do it. So, now we're filling holes and stuff like that. And we're building our standby pool. Our standby pool is workers that will come, as of now, to the election center. They will be paid a minimum of four hours. They are there in case, if I'm a poll worker and I call out sick, they have someone, we have someone now to replace me. We can send them to that polling location. So, they're fully staffed for the day. And we also do that for early voting. Supervised voting, also, we are just a kind of thing. We have actually increased the number of sites that are requesting supervised voting. We utilize poll workers for that to ensure that we have staffing proper. So, all that is also. Supervised voting is where we go into nursing homes or assisted living. And we have to bring two poll workers up to both major parties. And we bring their vote by mail ballot. And, obviously, that's prevent fraud or the manager of the facility or somebody there voting them or intimidating them or something to vote them. So, we do that there and assist them in the sense of, here's the ballot. We have to read it to them. We read the ballot to them. And then, the last thing on the poll workers is the request from Supervisor Holland to our staff that we go above and beyond what the statute says. is all polling locations are staffed with at least two R's and two Republicans and two Democrats in every precinct. The state law only says you can have all of one party and have someone who's not of that party. You can have an MPA and six R's or six D's, you know. And although that's the state law for transparency and confidence after the election, so one side or the other goes, well, look at all these precincts. We didn't have any of ours there. They could have done this or this or this. Well, guess what? We know we're putting both parties in there. So, if there's any shenanigans or something like that, they're there. Yes, there can be poll watchers. But again, the poll workers knows exactly what's going on. And so, I think it adds more transparency and integrity if we have both parties represented in every precinct. I tried to get that in state law. And I didn't have any counties supporting it. Yes. If I may. So, there's been a lot of tension going on. We have a potential redistricting, not redistricting going on. There's an executive order out there, which is not a law, but it is an executive order about vote by mail. There's a lot of nefarious stuff going on out in the community about different entities, forces, elected officials, election officials. Do you have any concern about the safety of voters at polling sites or poll workers at election sites for our August or November election? Well, obviously, we work very closely along with Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, and we have a contact there. And we're communicating throughout, not just for the safety of the poll workers, but to let us know if something's happening in the area. I remember years ago, there was a bank robbery. Let us know to shut down, to make sure that's why you see police cars and why they're chasing and the helicopters over the top. So, we're communicating there. We also have a meeting, it's May, what is it, 7th, at the FBI headquarters to meet with the FBI, FDLE, the state's crime people, Homeland Security, everyone to brief us and open up lines of communications. You know, as of this point, we, you know, they also will brief us. There was, there was the call a month or so ago, and most of it was not the security of the, are at the polling location. It was whether or not your systems were going to be hacked or anything like that. And so, what kind of, you know, firewalls and what do you have to protect your, your systems? And so, again, they're monitoring that. And in this meeting, we'll know more, and we'll update y'all as we find out. But someone asked, are we going to have any type of law enforcement at the polling location? The answer is no, because, again, we know of no particular, you know, but if something comes up, if we get threats, we inform them. If they want to put undercover people or something, they will. As you know, even in the one election where we had what we thought was a potential bomb threat, it was basically a homeless person had left the bag in the parking lot. Everyone responded, all the law agencies, we were up and running within an hour, and it was a, it was able to also send the voters that they needed to have to vote to our downtown office and they could vote a vote by mail ballot. But, so, we'll do whatever it is to continue the voting and make sure everyone's aware and safe. But there's no, right now, specific things that we've been alerted on. We'll go to new business. Yes. And this may be for Brandon more so. Have you heard anything about vacancies on the board? Yes. I know Mike's terms up tomorrow. Ms. Martinez and Austin were April 16th of last year. And then, you know, Mr. Williams is joining us to help for a spill loan. So, I think we have, and then there's a mayor's vacancy. So, I think there's four out of the nine are technically vacant. So, yes. So, Donovan, obviously, is new. So, his term is until 2028. Gloria, your term is also until 2028. Austin, it looks like your term expired tomorrow, but since it's your first term, the way I understand it is you've served until there's a movement on it. And then, yours. And Austin, who was yours? Your or yours was? Mr. Curry. No, mayor. No, mayor. Sorry. No, actually, it says yours expired last year. Which one? Oh, mine. Oh, it was last year. Yeah, it was last year. Sorry. It's still here. Oh, Austin's was last year. It's still here. So, the mayor needs to reappoint. Reappoint. Yeah. Are they aware of that? I'm not entirely sure. Okay. And then they have a second vacancy also. Yeah, there is. That's a vacancy, and that was, I believe, hers. Linnell is filling that vacancy as soon as they get the legislation. The last I heard, there was some ADA requirement on how they submit legislation, and that delayed it. But, that was the vacancy we had. But, obviously, we need to communicate to Garrett or whoever. I did. I sent him an email as soon as we walked in here. But, on Austin also, on the vacancies, or on the, those who have expired. Yeah. Because that needs to go forward. Yeah, Colleen's aware of all that, and she's the one that kind of coordinates that with Garrett about the boards and commission. And as soon as, like, I get something from her, then I'll communicate. I'll be here and tell you guys something about to come. But, yeah, and then, yeah. And so, on. I just renewed. I told somebody I would renew. Is that what you had? So, I have you down as your term expiring on April 16, 2025. But, again, you're in your first one, so you kind of continue to serve. I don't know if they've prepared that legislation yet, but that would come in the form of legislation to reappoint you or to appoint somebody else. And she was appointed by SOE? No, council. Council. She's council. Council. Council. Okay. So, it was Bobby. Yeah. Okay. I thought we came on about the same time. If you can give me, because I'll also, we'll follow up and try to get these. What I have is both of you, your terms ending April 16th of last year. Right. Me? Correct. Correct. Yes. I think we were appointed at the same time. And Austin as well. And Bobby, yours is? Last one for the quarter, 2025. And I've done two partial and two full. So, I think I'm out. Okay. So, yours will be a vacancy for the council. Correct. Okay. So, then, and then, so, the two councils and two mayors. Okay. So, I'm confused. What do I have to do? So, to the extent that you need to do anything, I guess it would be to reach out to whoever nominated you, so, council president, and see if they're moving on, drafting legislation to get you there. Or you can also email Colleen, because she's the one that manages that, as far as, like, coordinating with Garrett or the council president on appointments. So, Ed is a council person, right? No, he's SOE. There's how many SOE? So, there is one, two, one, two, three. Yes. Okay. All right. If you can see me on this, I'll say, we'll also pursue. So, I think you termed out, termed out. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I just want to, as far as first-termer, is that codified somewhere that you just got to stay on until you're... I have not read the legislation. That's something I've just understood, and that's been communicated, like, aloud, and so I just took that as to what that meant. Yeah, I asked Colleen last time, last meeting. I wasn't sure, for, like, voting purposes and forum purposes. She says, for forum and voting, you serve until you are replaced. Okay. Even though the legislation says... That's what she said last time. That's what she said last time. She was at a meeting. Well, Daniel served for two years on Thursday. Yes. I was on the Waterways Commission for 13 years. And they just never renewed you, just stayed. Every chair would come and say, you just stay here. Well, the only one efficiently on filling the vacancies is the SOE. I will, you know, but I'll do my best to try to get the other two to move quicker, you know, so. Any other new business? County-wide student drive? Yeah, yeah, a couple other new business to tell them about them. Yeah, so back in March, our office, every year we are required to go to every... to go to the public schools, private schools, colleges, universities, stuff, to do student vendor registration. This past year, we visited 28 schools for our county-wide drive. That's 11 more than participated the previous year. We collected close to 3,000 applications during that time. That's consisted of pre-registered. You can pre-register at age 16. And then if some of them are brand new, they were 18 at the time, as well as some basically, when I said submitted application, again, they might not be new. They pre-registered at age 16. They might be 17 or 18 now. And guess what? They're kind of into the parties now, 16 and stuff like that. So we had everything from there, as well as change of addresses and stuff like that. So we're out there from those sites doing that, including the colleges. We do make this a competition between the schools. We break it down into public and private, and then into tiers of categories of student population. And we award a Freedom Award trophy to the schools with the highest percentage of registered students at this time. For the public schools, just to kind of go through this real quick, our large school category for public schools, First Coast High School was the winner in 2026. Our medium public school was Terry Parker High School, and our small public school was Bridge de Success Academy. For the private schools, our large private school was Bishop Kinney High School. The medium was the Bold School. And the small private school was Pace Center for Girls, located here in Jacksonville. And then for the college and university, Edward Lawrence University. Cool. One of them from that side. And then we'll redo this again in 2027. That's right. Question. How often do you guys do that? We do it annually. And stuff, we try to do everything in the same kind of time period and stuff, but because of schedules and stuff, we will try, we will alter that a little bit. So some went in the fall, and we'll just do it for this. Some actually partner with third-party voter registration organizations. And if they do that and they let us know, we'll still include them as a participant in our countywide drive. Thanks so much. Hello, and I'll question. Thank you. I probably know the answer to this because I know how proactive your team is and how much that is appreciated in the community. But with everything moving towards the Florida ID and the Florida driver's license, I know organizations who do a lot of outreach, we realize that a lot of young people are not getting driver's license because they're not driving. To include, we see this on college campuses, right? So are y'all really encouraging them to at least get a Florida ID when you're out in the schools or on the college campuses? Since that's really going to be a prerequisite going forward after January 20, 27? We explain it to them. You know, again, you're in an age group that's from 18 to 21. 16. That really is the key going forward. But fortunately, they do not have to have the Florida ID or the Florida driver's license. They do have to have a social, they'll have four digits. So, but we do try to educate them on the importance of that. And also use it as an ID. You know, most of them need an ID of some sort, usually when they hit 21 for that reason, as we all know. But, you know, so it is an encouragement. You, I'm sorry, that was part of the whole business. You just mentioned that last one. So, yeah, I talked to them and stuff. But nothing, like I said, nothing formal. It's just encouraged to go get it and then to complete it. At least you put your last word on register or pre-register. It's just that whole thing with the online voter registration is just so easy once you have that. Yeah. Well, thank y'all for the work that y'all do. Thank you. Any other comments? All right. Next meeting, June 17th. Back downtown. Back downtown. Who made it downtown? We won't identify this. I do want to say, Bobby, thank you for your service. You know, we appreciate it. And as, you know, a lot of people, if you don't realize, I appreciate all y'all serving on this because you serve two roles. One is you get information out from our office to the groups that you're familiar with. You know, and you get to ask the questions and learn for them and really disseminate our information. So we just appreciate that. And so thank y'all for being members and those who are someday will be renewed. So continue coming, please. Careful when you push. Yeah. All right. Can I get a motion for adjournment? So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. We're adjourned. Thank you, Mr. Holland, for a wonderful tour and an update. Appreciate that. Thank you. You're a hospitality guest. And we had a visitor. Would you like to join the panel at any point and submit it? You can give us a resume if we have a vacancy. Can I do that? Yeah. You're a voter. Yeah. You're a candidate, right? Yes. That was what I was asking. Can I do that? What are you a candidate for? Yeah, there's one right here. So. She's running against you. You didn't know that. How are you? I'll see you at the beach. No. No. So, yeah. City council. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, city council probably not. That's why. Not until you're. I don't know if it's. I'm also very careful about what I said because I don't want to break any rules on primary and stuff. But we'll check. I mean, you could serve until.