THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT1

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Q: So Gabriel Sterling, for people who don’t know, what is the Secretary of State’s office in charge of and what do they handle, specifically as it pertains to elections?

Gabriel Sterling: That is a much misunderstood situation, we have throughout the State of Georgia, we have essentially a shared services model for delivering elections. What the State does, is we help maintain the voter registration system, we provide the equipment and the basic uh the State Election Board, which isn’t the Secretary of State’s Office, but which the Secretary of State is the Chairman of, sets a lot of the rules…to put muscle and tone to the actual laws to execute elections.

Ah, as an example like we just passed…we just expanded the emergency rule to allow for drop boxes to go through the entire election cycle now. We allowed for early scanning of ballots, those kinds of things came out of the S.E.B. and then work with the county election officials directly to train them for them to then train the poll workers and this year we’ve really stepped up a lot in terms of getting poll workers in, in lieu of the COVID situation we set up a portal and as of today working with our partners, especially The A.C.L.U. and the Metro Chamber of Commerce, we’ve already given over six thousand names to counties for people to sign up as poll workers

Q: How can people get their mail in ballot accepted?

Gabriel Sterling: (asked if he had anything further to add after others answer) Several things, first everything they said is absolutely right as the current system is built…and the sooner they do it (get ballots in) the better off it is, because what happens especially for these smaller counties, it’s really interesting…the very large counties have problems processing because of the sheer volume and the small counties have a problem because they just don’t have the resources to get people to us, so the sooner people can submit their absentee ballot requests the better it is for everybody to make sure they can get their ballot in a timely manner.

But what’s really going to blow your minds now is that next week it looks like, fingers crossed we’re in testing right now, we’re going to be launching an absentee ballot portal, where all you have to do is put in your, for the most people, for most of our voters this will work, your first name, your last name, your let’s see, driver’s license number, date of birth and county and that way you can get into the system and we say, we know this is you, you put in where you want your ballot to go and it will automatically populate to the county’s dashboard and they can just click so it makes processing a lot easier…and then this is going to be really great, if you put your email address in, you’ll get an automatic confirmation that your request has been received…and then when the county accepts it into the dashboard, you can go to the MVP site and say hey the request has been accepted and then the issue date will be put on so you see the issue date…

…and another item we are working on right now that’s not ready to launch yet, because you know, we’re drinking water from a fire hose, we’re trying to get a ballot tracking system in, that at a minimum if you put in your cell phone and your email, you’ll get an email or a text saying your ballot has been mailed, your ballot has been received, your ballot has been accepted, so all those things so you can have that, that peace of mind knowing your ballot has gotten to the county and been processed properly and appropriately.

Because what happened last time, the crush of the popularity and when the Secretary sent out the 6.9 million absentee ballot requests, especially in Fulton county unfortunately, we believe there’s a couple…thousands potentially of people who’ve never had their ballot requests processed. That’s part of the reason we’re building this portal because that takes away a lot of the stuff. Even if it was processed, often times it went to the wrong address because those workers are overwhelmed, they’re doing the easiest thing they can to get through it so, by developing this portal we’re taking as much of the human error out of it as we can and putting as much transparency in as possible.

THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT2

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Q: If you don’t receive your ballot in the mail and want to vote…

[17:13] Gabriel Sterling: (responds after another person says to check register) My suggestion is do that (work through your situation with poll worker) on the early voting time because doing it on election day is a FRIGGIN NIGHTMARE because you have thousands of polling locations open and the way it’s set up right now, although until the big (unintelligible Cabinet, Council, Count?) will change this, they have to call headquarters and say hey I’ve got this person here, has their vote been received? And if you have 30 people calling 1 or 2 numbers at one time, they get a busy signal, then they gotta wait and they get, so we’ve had reports been waiting 45 minutes because of that and often times it wasn’t because they didn’t receive it, they just chose to change their mind…laughs…I didn’t, they thought COVE was really bad and then oh I’m going to go but in person because historically in Georgia, we’re an in person state so if that does happen to you, the recommendation for me following Suzanna’s statement is go do the early voting thing, in fact do it in the first week of early voting. In fact if you really like voting in person, really do it with the first week of early voting. That’s our most under utilized resource, there shouldn’t be lines and we need to spread the people out as much as we can.

So that on election day, part of our plan for November, is get people to use the pre-election day options. Early voting has historically been the most popular, absentee is obviously very much increased, if we can lower, we’re thinking 2 to 2.5 million people on election day and for perspective we had 880,000 in June. Three times as many people are expecting to show up essentially. So we really need people to vote early or vote absentee and the sooner you do these things the better you make it on your neighbours and the easier it will be for your county election officials and poll workers to do their jobs.

Q: Gabriel, what is your office doing to get this message out to everyone, what kind of public awareness?

Gabriel Sterling: There’s this great thing called HAVA money, help America vote act. So we will be ginning up a very large social media program plus television advertising, radio advertising, really going to be focusing on getting people to early vote if they can in those first two weeks, because all you all know who work in the election sphere and getting voters to show up, those last couple of days of early voting are worse lines than election day. Because everybody’s trying to get it done and like oh crap I meant to do that, so getting I’m going to shove all those people to the front of the line, do it and you know starting October 12th from that week that’s going to make the rest of that stuff work better. So we’re going to spend a lot of money trying to get people to do that and understand that because a lot of people still didn’t, even after studying the applications didn’t understand, we have been a no excuse absentee state since 2005. I mean we have 3 weeks of early voting plus a mandated Saturday

Q: and you can register at the DMV which is cool

Gabriel Sterling: Automatic registration, right that’s why we now, of the people with drivers licenses there’s only like a half million people who don’t have, who aren’t registered already. We’re at 90% of eligible people being registered in the state, something you all may not know, we’re about to do an eligible but unregistered mailing to everybody who’s not registered but who should be, to try to give them one more shot to register before the election, that’s part of us joining the electronic registration information system so we can share data with other states.

THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT3

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Gabriel Sterling cont'd: We’re spending a lot of time, money and effort trying to make sure everybody’s registered.

Q: Dropboxes and post

[29:02] Gabriel Sterling: First of all we’ve been in communication with the post office and some of the good things you’re going to hear is, they’ve lost no equipment in this state. Nothing has been changing. Um the letter that came to the Secretary from the Post Master General, nobody in the local in North Georgia or South Georgia knew anything about it. So there have been no post office boxes taken, there’s no equipment being moved, so for them their operations are remaining the exact same as they’ve been for the last couple of years so they feel confident and they feel good.

We had them on the call with our county, so they got on a statewide county call kind of walked through all the different things of how it worked like in Dekalb you know they’re doing a business reply mail for that stuff to get back in, that is treated as first class mail, not treated as bulk mail. So that’s gonna make sure that stuff gets handled in the appropriate way and it’s a 3 to I think 7 day delivery time they guarantee on that it’s usually faster than that in metro areas

So we feel better that our absentee programs will be handled fine in this state and the vast majority of the issues we saw with them in June had nothing to do with the post office and everything to do with counties that just didn’t, they just got overwhelmed with COVID situations and didn’t process them well and didn’t handle the pressure of that well. In a specific example, unfortunately was uh Fulton county lost a female election worker who was in over helping with the absentee program and the person who was completely over that …..video break…that one week they were able to catch up

Q: How long does it take for your absentee ballot to be updated on the states myvoter page..

[31:33] Gabriel Sterling: How that works essentially is that the county has to process it and once they process it overnight it goes automatically by myvoter page. So if hasn’t changed on myvoter page the county hasn’t processed it yet. It’s an automatic system so it’s really the human processing thing that’s the normal delays you’ll see.

Q: Do you have a guesstimate on how long that may take?

[31:56] Gabriel Sterling: How long is a piece of string? I mean the problem we have right now is that if you did it right now, it’ll probably happen pretty quick. But if you get close to the election how many workers do they have, how efficient are they being. Does your request get put this in this stack for the worker who’s going really fast or this stack for the person who’s not.

That’s why the Absentee Portal will make your life a heck of a lot easier because it’s going to be automatically on there and they can quickly press the button to accept and then it gets updated

Q: What guidance does the Secretary of States office make to counties to make sure they are promptly and timely collecting and processing the absentee ballots so that way we can more uniformity on reporting on people…

[32:51] Gabriel Sterling: There’s uniformity right now on the rules, the problem was our rules were based on normal things, which is normal processing, which is 5% of our ballots. 50% all of a sudden makes I have to hire a bunch of new people, where do I put them when I social distance, I mean that’s the realities of the election administration partners make it difficult. The rules are it has to be processed in three days. That’s the rule and then you have to give a cure period if there’s an issue, if it gets rejected. So that’s where it stands right now. If I’m, don’t quote me on that particular product, the cure period is 3 days but normally it’s like you process this when you get it and the real issue we had in one county, was the emails got put to the back of the line for no apparent reason and it kind of got stuck with that situation so and that won’t happen again (laughs).

THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT4

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Gabriel Sterling cont'd: We’re spending a lot of time, money and effort trying to make sure everybody’s registered.

Q: How can we kids working in the um communities help the engine keep going?

[34:10] Gabriel Sterling: Spreading the applications out, doing as many applications early as possible, spreads the workload out. If we start compressing the time they come in, that raises the workload for those county workers and in Fulton and Dekalb they’re taking on their furloughed workers who’re at home, they can’t do anything but they’re showing the check and bringing them in to do these things. So they’re really ramping up, like Fulton’s bringing you know 75 people to do nothing but process these absentee ballot applications. So we’re working with all, especially the big counties, because they’re the ones that have the real issues.

But by adding the portal, it cuts down on the work for those workers 30 fold, they literally instead of having to open it, compare the signatures, type in all that stuff…they now open a dashboard, this is the voter, this is the voter record, this is the issue date and they’re done.So it makes, I really want to encourage everybody that wants the portal’s open next week, if you’re doing education efforts in your community, push people to the portal because it gives them the transparency, it’s going to give them that sense because they’re going to get an email saying we received it. I mean it becomes a lot smoother process there won’t be typos, there won’t be issues where the poll worker picked the mailing address instead of the residential address or the out of county address instead of, so that system will make it a lot easier so that’s the biggest thing we’ve invested in and we’ve been dealing, a lot of these poll workers we’re sending to them have also volunteered to do anything to help out.

One of the things the ACLU is doing, I think you talked to other people from other communities and other activist organizations…(thinks) while poll watching is great, poll working is greater. You’re gonna lean more, you’re gonna be inside the tent, you’re gonna see what’s happening and I encourage everybody to be a poll worker and if you can go in and volunteer I want to help you process ballots. If you have advocates out there who want to be in the process of these things, that would be one of the best things that can happen.

Q: How can we best funnel advocates who want to help with the canvas over to you, how can we better vet folks who want to volunteer for programs like that…what do you need from us to help streamline?

[36:24] Gabriel Sterling: My best suggestion is, we are basically a funnel that’s going to give stuff to counties for poll workers and if you get a securevote.ga.com the first thing that pops up is do you want to be a poll worker. I would suggest if you have a person who lives in a county, send them straight to their county with a specific thing saying I want to, they’re getting overwhelmed with a lot of poll worker asks but they’re not getting a lot of people saying hey I want to help you with the absentee process, hey I want to help you with absentee counting. Because that’s another big thing they’re gonna have to do and we changed that rule to allow for the two weeks of early scanning. They need sworn workers, you need to be trained, you have to be sworn in and you know Suzanna’s shaking , she knows this is not like you just show up and do it there’s a timeline. So the earlier people wanted to get involved the better off the counties will know the deployment of people they need to do and how best to use them.

THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT5

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Gabriel Sterling cont'd: We’re spending a lot of time, money and effort trying to make sure everybody’s registered.

Q: as to whether activist group can look at the absentee ballot request tool and make suggestions before it goes live.

[37:46] Gabriel Sterling: That’s not my wheelhouse, it’s going to be, let’s make it live, we can make tweaks. But this is sort of a version 1.0 to get it out, then it will be 1.1, 1.2 as we move along

Q: as to what ID’s are required to use the absentee ballot request tool.

[38:10] Gabriel Sterling: You must have one of those two (drivers license or State ID) if you can’t it’ll take you to the pdf to download the form, it’ll be the pdf fill, you can fill it in on that one because the only way we can identify you with our current open our live records is through the drivers license number or the state ID. It’s exactly how we have our online voter registration setup, we identify you because we have all this information, this is you, it’s hard to have that information for somebody else. That’s our identifying use.

Q: addressing typo’s you might make via portal

[39:15] Gabriel Sterling: For a typo, if a user puts in an address there’s no real way for us to know if it’s real, if it’s correct or not. So for the most part what we’ve seen is, what normally happens as a typo that’s probably not the right thing. In our system, there’s a mailing address for some voters, there’s a residential address for everybody and then if you’re out of county or out of state and what’ll happen is usually, we saw poll workers potentially picking the wrong one and that’s really what happened more than this, so this is the user doing it, so they can’t really pick their own wrong address fortunately.

Q: question about a hyphenated name and forgetting to add the hyphenated name so it isn’t an exact match.

[40:05] Gabriel Sterling: The situation is first name last name drivers license and I think what it’s really going to look for is first letter, last letter, first letter last letter and then the drivers license number and the date of birth. Those are the kind of items that we know will be used and can make it findable because it’s really what we’ve looked at now is of course the first letter, last letter on some of those things. And if you try three times and it doesn’t do it and if for whatever reason it doesn’t match up. Then again it’ll take you to the printable form and you can still submit that.

Q: Gabe Is the portal to give the person their absentee application or their absentee ballot?

[40:40] Gabriel Sterling: Ballot, their actual ballots

Q: So when I fill out my form to get the absentee ballot there’s a signature portion of that, and the reason I bring this up is they actually kicked my wifes back the first time because she didn’t put her own, she used the uh, she filled it out with google pdf or whatever it is. And they had like their own signature file, so she thought ok that’ll work and they kicked it back cos it didn’t match her signature. How does your website address that issue?

[41:10] Gabriel Sterling: We don’t have signature match for this, you’re matching name and your driving license just like voter registration. Remember on your drivers license there’s a signature, we know your drivers license views all the stuff matches.

THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020

Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.

I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…

PT6

Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show

State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker

Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis

President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott

Q: Can the portal reject a person or does it automatically take them to the fillable PDF?

[41:51] Gabriel Sterling: You won’t be rejected at the portal level, it’ll just say okay we can’t find your record here sorry about that, here’s the paper form for you to send in or the pdf you can fill out and the good part about it is you can save it as a pdf you don’t even need a printer. You can do it, save as a pdf and email that to your county registrar…. You need to sign it though. Damn it, I just realized that sorry I just said it out loud, so yeah you got to sign it, my apologies, I forgot…I’m so used to my portal that I don’t think about those things anymore, so

Q: clarify

[42:27] Gabriel Sterling: If you put the thing in and you try three times and didn’t match, it’ll say we’re sorry here’s the link to the downloadable PDF thing, fill it out, you do have to print it, then sign it and either scan it, take a picture of it, mail it, I guess you could put it in a dropbox, I wouldn’t recommend it, so those are your options on that and again this is a tool to catch 95% of the people knowing that we’re not going to catch 100% because it’s impossible to have any people to catch 100 but we’re trying to take a lot of the load off the counties because the counties begged us, don’t send out applications again because we got crushed last time we’ll get demolished this time. People will be disenfranchised left and right that’s why we went this route instead of doing the other route.

THERE is about 30 mins more that I havent transcribed