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THE PANDEMIC ELECTION

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Michael Pope
Welcome to Transition Virginia, the podcast that examines the transition of power from Republican to Democrat. My name is Michael Pope.

Thomas Bowman
And I'm Thomas Bowman. Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about the pandemic election. What steps are being taken with absentee ballots and drop boxes to make sure everyone can vote, without putting themselves at risk? And we have a great panel to dig into the issue. Senator Adam Ebbin is a Democrat from Alexandria. Thank you for joining us, Senator.

Adam Ebbin
Thank you for having me today.

Thomas Bowman
We're also joined by Tram Nguyen of New Virginia Majority. This is her second appearance on the show, which I guess makes her a friend of the Transition Team. Tram, thanks for coming back.

Tram Nguyen
Thanks for having me back. It's great to be here.

Michael Pope
All right, well, let's get right into it and talk about mail in ballots. Now, Governor Ralph Northam called this Special Session to rewrite the budget, because of this economic crisis. Lower tax revenues tied, to the slumping economy, means Virginia has to slash more than $2 billion out of the budget. But there's one area where lawmakers have decided they want to spend more money. That's the election. But the first real action to come out of the Special Session is this agreement to spend $2 million to help people vote by mail. Every voter who receives a mail in ballot will get an envelope with prepaid postage. But is that really a good idea? From a Republican speaker, Kirk Cox doesn't seem to think so. He says $2 million is a lot of money to spend so people don't have to buy a stamp.

Kirk Cox
What we're essentially doing here is, we are providing a 55 cent stamp. If you take that out to it's almost illogical conclusion, we should be giving gas cars to people to drive to the polling place.

Michael Pope
So is spending $2 million on prepaid postage really worth it?

Tram Nguyen
Well, first of all, we're not just putting 55 cent stamps on every absentee ballot that gets mailed out. It's the way it's set up, is it's a business reply mail, right? And so folks who actually return their ballot through the mail system, the state or localities will only be charged for those pieces. So we're not- it's up to $2 million, but we actually don't know how much it's going to end up costing the state. The other thing I would say is that, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. And the reason for the prepaid postage is to make it easier for folks to stay safely at home. If the cure, if the prescription, for a pandemic is to stay at home, then we ought to be doing everything we can to facilitate that. And by allowing folks to vote by mail easier, then we're also helping the public health crisis, right? And so I do think it's a good idea. We don't need people driving around to the store to try to find stamps or driving and going out and about to try to just cast their ballot, if it's safer for them to do it at home, and they don't have stamps like, I don't know about you, but I don't have stamps lying around my house. And so it you know, if it's easier for folks to just be able to fill out their ballot, and stick it back in their mailbox for the mail carrier to pick up, then let's do that because we want to make sure that our democracy and participation is as robust as possible.

Thomas Bowman
I suppose I do agree with Cox's characterization of it being an illogical conclusion. On the other side of the issue is my former boss, Delegate Paul Krizek, from Fairfax County. He argues, forcing people to put a stamp on the absentee ballot is essentially a poll tax.

Paul Krizek
You should not have to pay to vote, even 55 cents. It's not right when you're exercising your civic duty, and going out there to vote, that you should have to pay any money. It's like a poll tax.

Thomas Bowman
So, Adam Ebbin, is it really fair to compare buying a stamp to a poll tax?

Adam Ebbin
I think that is a fair analogy for some people, particularly for young people. It's a bit onerous for young people who maybe don't use stamps, they...it's hard for me to follow that, myself, from my experience. But there are lots of people who don't go to post office, they do everything electronically. I like to send birthday cards with stamps and have stamps around for that. They don't. They do everything electronically. Some of them don't know where to get a stamp, or to wait in line at the post office, or where their local post office is if they don't drive. So yes, it is fair.

Tram Nguyen
Yeah, I would agree with both Senator Ebbin and Delegate Krizek. To the extent that, you know, a poll tax was erected decades ago as a barrier to keep certain folks from being able to vote. A stamp can be a barrier that actually hits you know, Senator Ebbin mentioned young folks, I also think it could hit lower income and communities of color a little bit harder, too.Think about, you know, if you don't have stamps laying around, again, I don't have them, and I have to go to the store to buy stamps, what if I don't have a car to be able to do that? Yet someone can say, "You can order these stamps online." But if I don't have internet or a computer at home, how do I do that? And, you know, you can print stamps online. Again, if I don't have a printer or a computer at home, how do I do that? And so these are barriers that actually impact certain folks more than others. And so, to the extent that it's a barrier to voting, then I agree with Delegate Krizek.

Adam Ebbin
Yeah, if I can just add, that I think there's anecdotal evidence because every election, we have absentee ballots requested, with only a certain percentage of them returned. So people who request the ballot and intend to return it, and may not return it. This is definitely going to make it easier to return your ballot.

Michael Pope
And Republicans say they're concerned about election fraud. But as it turns out, election fraud is really rare. Senator Mamie Locke points to a Heritage Foundation's study that found only 200 convictions for fraudulent use of absentee ballots since 2007. And only a handful of Virginia.

Mamie Locke
A woman voted for her deceased mother, a man voted for his deceased wife, and the Mayor of Appalachia and co-conspirators tried to steal his reelection by buying votes with cigarettes and pork rinds and stealing ballots from the mail.

Michael Pope
Senator Ebbin, why are Republicans so worried about election fraud?

Adam Ebbin
Well, I think we have a philosophical difference between the parties and a lack of understanding of some of the realities of everyday Virginian's lives. In Virginia, up to a certain point, African Americans were not allowed to be born in hospitals and receive birth certificates, and thus have certain kinds of identification easily. And Republicans, till recently we're asking, for special identification just to get registered...and at the polls, they wanted us to be able to show photo IDs, and not everyone has a photo ID. We took care of that. But it's really a Trumpian issue. If you repeated often enough, they're concerned that for that one person who they suspect may be committing fraud, they'd rather make it harder for the next 10,000 people. Democrats would rather make it easier for legitimate voters to vote, and we don't see a problem with fraud, as you heard in that soundbite. So they're just suspicious and think that we're up to no good and we think that people should be able to vote in a democracy, and that putting barriers in place is a bad idea, as we've seen in Virginia's history from years ago.

Michael Pope
Tram, that report that Senator Locke was talking about, specifically mentions New Virginia Majority. Now there was a case back in 2017, where a volunteer for New Virginia Majority pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying voter registration applications. What what's going on with that case?

Tram Nguyen
Sure. So like many organizations, and obviously, you know that case well, like many organizations that tried to register folks to vote, we have a lot of volunteers who go out and, and, and collect applications. I think that example is a perfect example of the systems and the checks and balances working, right? So as an organization that collects and delivers absentee ballot applications, we go through our own quality check and quality control program, and so when applications, for example, are incomplete, we stick them in a pile over here, complete applications that go through, you know, our rigorous check are put in a pile here, and then we hand deliver these applications to the registrar's office in these stacks, and we flag the ones that are incomplete or might have some problems for the registrar. And then the registrar are able, you know, their office and these election officials do a tremendous job of checking every single one of these applications to make sure that only eligible individuals are registered to vote and can vote. In that particular instance, those applications were flagged. And we worked both with the Alexandria City Registrar's Office and the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office to provide all the information we had on that particular individual that collected those applications, and and worked with them to make sure that the case was resolved in the best way. And it did result in that individual getting prosecuted for his actions.

Thomas Bowman
So all of these measures to make voting easier for people are happening while the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is deliberately undermining the U.S. Postal Service. What happens, Senator Ebbin, to Virginia absentee ballots, if the United States Postal Service is undermined?

Adam Ebbin
Well, let's keep in mind the volume that we're talking about of the Postal Service overall, on the job they do, the excellent job they do. The last Presidential election, there were 33 million Americans voted by mail. This Presidential election, we're expecting as many as 100 million. And it sounds like a huge number, and it is a large number, but when you look at what the Postal Service handles every day, they handle about 472 million pieces of mail per day. So we're talking about less than a quarter of what they handle on a daily basis, as the totality of the ballots collected, nationwide, that they handled 20 million pieces of mail per hour. So 100 million pieces of mail is fine. But one caution I've put out there is that people need to, when they get their ballot, and they can request them now online, they need to return them early. Don't return them the day before the election, but return them when they get them. You know, do your research on who you're voting for, and then send the ballot back. Don't just set it down. And they can request them online now, either from the State Board of Elections website, or they can request them even from my website I've got a link at AdamEbbin.com on how to do that, to vote absentee.

Michael Pope
I'm also curious about tracking these ballots. So if you buy something on Amazon, you can track it from the factory, to the warehouse, to your house. Tram, can you track your ballot from your house to the registrar's office?

Tram Nguyen
You can, actually, that's a great question. So every absentee ballot is as unique as the individual voter. Every absentee ballot that is mailed out to a voter will have a smart barcode, a tracker, if you will. So voters should be able to track their ballots when registrar's scan the ballots barcode, when it's received in the office. And it's actually quite easy for voters to look up the status. Senator Ebbin mentioned earlier, that you can go online to apply for your absentee ballot application. You can go to that same citizen portal and check the status of when the registrar mailed out your ballot to your house, to when they received it, and the date of which it was counted.

Michael Pope
Wow. So like the future is now, right? Well, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about dropboxes.


Thomas Bowman
And we're back. As part of the funding effort, to finance prepaid postage, lawmakers approved the ability of election officials to use a series of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots. You can even expect to see one at every precinct on Election Day. But are they necessary? Senator Joe Morrissey, of Richmond, voted for this bill, but he says he's not sure it's a great idea.

Senator Morrissey
There are a myriad of ways that you can already vote, including a box, that's called the United States Post Office Box. But you also can mail it in with a stamp. You can go to the Registrar's Office within the 45 day period. We have no excuse voting now. You don't need this extra box.

Thomas Bowman
Okay, we already have post office boxes, do we really need election drop boxes?

Adam Ebbin
I think that Senator Morrissey will get more comfortable with the idea we he see's them in action and hears from his voters, at how convenient they find them. We know that in the last Presidential race from a Harvard study that there were 73% of the voters in Colorado used a Dropbox, 65% in Washington, and 59% in Oregon, and overall, nationally, 16% of the votes that were cast in 2016, were dropped off at a Dropbox. And that's just a matter of convenience and confidence that voters have, where they can get that vote directly to the elections officials in a way that can be is is local to them.

Thomas Bowman
Tram, let's go to you.

Tram Nguyen
Yeah, I would, I would say to Senator Morrissey, that dropping your ballot in a blue U.S. Postal Service box is not the same as dropping your ballot in a Dropbox. If you put your ballot back in the blue box, it actually just goes through the Postal Service system. So it's going to go to a sorting facility, and then it's going to get sorted, and then it's going to get to your mail carrier, and then your mail carrier is going to end up doing the delivery. Whereas if you drop your ballot in an actual Dropbox, then that has a different chain of custody. That's from you to the Office of Elections, right? And so it's a it's a little bit different. And for folks that are concerned about the postage costs, having these drop boxes actually might help with that prepaid postage cost because fewer pieces of mail are going to go through the mail system and directly into the ballot box. The one other thing I will add, on the need for drop boxes, is that is the fact that they will be available at your polling place on Election Day. So if folks want to return their absentee ballot, that was mailed to them, and they forgot to stick it in the mail, and they're like, "Oh, shoot, I don't have enough time, so I'm going to go to my polling place instead," if they bring back that mailed ballot, they can just stick it in a Dropbox now, instead of having to wait in line, and figure out you know how to destroy their ballot to cast a regular ballot, or maybe vote provisionally, which could help also alleviate long lines, and the number of people that are in a polling place on Election Day, which again, during a pandemic, is really important.

Michael Pope
So I'm curious about how these drop boxes are going to change the dynamics of the election, as on the floor of the Senate, Senator David Suetterlein says these changes might end up rewriting the rules for "Get Out The Vote" operations.

David Suetterlein
There's going to be folks hired, by the political parties, to go and solicit these ballots. And for my friends on campaigns, that always lament that the field staff isn't respected enough, well, they should get a lot more respect now because they're basically becoming election officials. They're the people that are going to be responsible for getting these ballots in.

Michael Pope
Now, it's worth pointing out that the old rules requiring a witness signature on these absentee ballots, those rules have been abandoned. So that's the first wrinkle. Now we're adding a new wrinkle, which is the political parties have access to these lists of voters who have requested absentee ballots but haven't received them yet. So Republicans were not able to require that the drop boxes were limited to voters who are casting their own ballots, which means political parties, advocacy groups, they can go out and round up a whole bunch of votes and drop them in bulk in the drop boxes. So there's this concern about vote harvesting that you heard Senator Suetterlein talk about there, but, Delegate Marcus Simon says all those concerns you hear about vote harvesting, they're overblown.

Marcus Simon
Nobody has to hand their ballot over to anybody they don't want to. You know, the voters decision, if somebody comes along and offers to help you get their ballot where it has to go, it's up to each voter to decide whether they want to trust that person to take the ballot, or they prefer to do it themselves. We're trying to make it as easy as possible.

Michael Pope
Tram, how significant are these changes and will they change the "Get Out The Vote" operations this year?

Tram Nguyen
Well, as an organization that runs some of the largest "Get Out The Vote" operations every every year in Virginia, I will say that the biggest factor that is changing how we run our programs this year, is the pandemic. It is our responsibility to keep our folks, our volunteers, and our canvassers, and our staff, as safe as possible in the middle of this public health crisis. And that means that we're not going door to door right now, we're not knocking on people's doors and talking to them, or, you know, having face to face conversations. And so this notion that suddenly a third party individual can return your ballot for you, that we're going to have this mass scale field operation, across the state, from all these campaigns and organizations. I think is a little bit of a red herring, it's not going to happen. We need to keep our folks safe and as an individual, as a voter, that might get my door knocked, I'm only opening my door to folks I trust, right? Folks are sort of tightening their circle of folks that they are socially interacting with. And so you're not going to just open the door to a stranger and handed over your ballot. So I don't think that it's gonna be a big issue this year.

Michael Pope
I'm also interested in security. How secure these drop boxes are going to be. This was a major topic of discussion in the General Assembly when they were debating this bill. Now, Delegate Robert Bloxom says he's particularly worried about what kind of security precautions will need to be in place for these drop boxes.

Robert Bloxom
I guess you can start with people to workers out there manning a lock box. But even that's going to be an $800,000 expense, if you could find poll workers to do it. The other issue is, I guess you could get the Sheriff to do it. There's probably not enough Deputies to do it. Or the Governor, I guess would call him the National Guard.

Michael Pope
Senator Ebbin, do we need to call in the National Guard?

Adam Ebbin
No, far from it. I think that these boxes right now, some of the locations they'll be at are locations where County Treasurer's have drop boxes to receive property taxes and their Government Centers that are in busy neighborhoods, or in this even the Satellite Voting Centers, at least in Fairfax County, are usually at the same locations as police substations. And the boxes are metal, sturdy, well constructed boxes that are bolted to the ground. The ones I've seen have narrow slits that you could barely get an envelope through. And I think that you'll hear that there's not been problems in other places where, where we've seen these boxes.

Thomas Bowman
I want to pivot on election security, because I too, am very concerned about election security. This is the first election since the 1980s, where Republicans can use off duty Special Forces members, and off duty police officers, to intimidate voters at the polls. The court actually forced them to stop this in the 1980s, because the practical effect was chilling voter turnouts in minority precinct. The RNC has already said it will be sending 50,000 poll watchers, some of them, many of them will be armed. What is Virginia planning to do to stop official RNC voter intimidation? I'll throw this question out there to both panelists.

Tram Nguyen
This is Tram. I'll jump in. I'll just I'll say that voter intimidation, especially with voters of color, has been around Virginia for a long, long time. Every year I, on Election Day, I'm working with election protection volunteers and poll watchers across the state. I'm fielding questions, I'm troubleshooting. And I'll tell you what, like in 2016, I remember one incident, and it was, this was up in Fairfax County, when an elderly Asian American woman got to her polling place. And as soon as she got out of her car, a couple of individuals went up to her in a very intimidating and aggressive way, told her to, "Show me your papers." And this is a limited English proficient woman who just was so unsure of what was happening, and so she just got in her car and drove away. And one of our poll watchers witnessed this, and called it in, and we, you know, we worked with the Chief Election Officer to make sure that those individuals that were intimidating outside of the polling place, were removed from the premises. And we're accustomed to this type of thing. I do think, Thomas, to your point that there's been a larger cry from folks to recruit more people to do this, I think the best thing that we can do is, in advance of the election, to educate people as much as possible. We are, we're ourselves putting out a lot of "Know Your Rights" information to voters, particularly voters of color in languages like Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese. And then on Election Day, also being as vigilant as possible. And I think the other thing on the other end, right, is that Virginia and localities across Virginia can can really train up their election officers and their Chief Election Officers at every precinct, train, train them on how to handle these types of situations to make sure that they're not happening.

Adam Ebbin
If I can jump in, this is Adam. I think it's fair to say that the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party of Virginia will have an even stronger election protection operation than usual. I, and it's interesting to hear Tram talk about the incident in Fairfax County with the elderly woman who was intimidated. I was at a polling place in Fairfax County, where a Latino man was walking into the polling place and a volunteer from the Republicans said, "You know, you have to show your ID," to him and I was there for hours and he was the only one he said it to, was the person who was of Latino heritage.

Michael Pope
That's really interesting. Well, let's take a break and when we come back, we're going to have question time.

Michael Pope
And we're back on Transition Virginia. We're gonna debut a new segment now, something we call "Question Time." I don't know about you, but I love watching the British House of Commons. I love when they have question times, I love how rowdy it gets. I love seeing the questions and the reaction to the question. So now we're going to take questions from you. If you want to ask a question on Transition Virginia, become a Patreon supporter. Just go to our website and hit the orange button, become a Patreon, support the podcast, and you can ask your question on our podcast. Our first question, in this new segment, is about this line of argument on the dropboxes. So we heard lots of Republicans during the debate over dropboxes, raise all kinds of scenarios. One of them was Senator Steve Newman, he says, "Mischief makers might target these drop boxes." So if you're a Democrat and you don't like Trump, you might target a Republican dropbox in a Republican area. Or if you want to target Biden voters, you could go to a Democratic area and target a dropbox for destruction, perhaps. This is Senator Newman on the Senate floor.

Steve Newman
I don't believe you will ever know if someone decides to attack a box, to pour bleach in the box, or to destroy the box, who dropped their ballots in those boxes, especially, especially if those are done by a harvesting group that has gone out and got those and they don't know what box they were dropped in.

Thomas Bowman
Our Patreon question, comes all the way from sunny Los Angeles, California, where they've used election dropboxes for years. Friend of the podcast, William Haworth wants to know, "What kind of precautions are being taken to prevent that?"

William Haworth
What security safeguards will be in place to ensure that this won't happen or at least that the risk of it happening is very low? Will there be security cameras or something in place to alert officials if it does occur?

Michael Pope
Senator Ebbin, these security precautions haven't been written yet, right? Aren't we still waiting for the actual security precautions in terms of seeing, you know, words on paper?

Adam Ebbin
Yes. But before the bill passed and was signed on September 4, the Board of Elections my understanding was, working on that in the event that the legislation was to pass, and was consulting with Secretaries of State or Elections Officials around the country about what kind of best practices are in place in other places that have successfully used drop boxes. I don't see this as a as a big problem. As I said before, these boxes will be in heavily trafficked areas where people, you know, not isolated, there'll be at Government Centers or at Satellite Voting locations, they won't be in some far off place that someone can just have mischief with them. And they're designed by companies that have been doing these dropboxes for years.

Michael Pope
Senator, quick follow up on that. So was it a good idea to pass this bill and approve this idea of the dropboxes, even though we don't have the security precautions yet? I mean, wouldn't it have been a better idea to have the security precautions in place before you move forward with this legislation?

Adam Ebbin
No, we have lots of state bodies that do their own regulations, and don't have to spell out in the code every individual component of the regulation. I think that's not unusual that you would delegate to a State Board of Commission to come up with regulations to implement the law.

Tram Nguyen
Yeah, I would just I mean, I would add that, you know, these drop boxes are, are used in a lot of different states. If you look at the state of Washington, for example, they've been using drop boxes for nearly a decade. And just last, just, you know, recently, the Republican Secretary of State, Kim Wyman of the state of Washington, said that, you know, in Washington's experience, these are very, very secure, they don't have issues with these drop boxes being tampered with or ballots inside being altered. And in fact, it's actually quite popular for Washington voters to put their ballots back in these boxes. In the, at the end, that same article at the end, it mentioned how recently or maybe a year or two ago, a bus ran into these ballot boxes, ran into a ballot box and that ballot box fared well and the bus not so much. So it's, I think these things are really secure and folks don't have a whole lot to worry about. I trust the Department of Elections to take the best practices that other states have used to implement these boxes and put those in place in Virginia to ensure that every ballot is able to be safely and securely deposited, collected and counted. And so I think at the end of the day, you know, voters in Virginia can trust that they have a lot of different options to vote. They can vote in person, if that's what they need to do, they could do that 45 days in advance, they can do that on Election Day, they can vote by mail, they can vote by Dropbox. I mean, there's a menu of options here, which is important because we want our democracy to be as robust as possible.

Michael Pope
All right, now we're gonna go on to our next question, which is from a Patreon supporter. Now remember, if you want to ask a question on Transition Virginia, go to the website, hit the orange button, become a Patreon sustainer, and you can ask your question, we will answer it. So our next question comes from friend of the podcast, Harrison Roday. He wants to know, what should we expect on Election night?

Harrison Roday
Many of us who have watched Election night, statewide in the past, have a little bit of a pattern that we're used to, which is we sit around between 7 and 9:15pm, watching precinct counts come in throughout the state, and then all of a sudden, Northern Virginia comes in and you figure out who's won the election. And I'm wondering, if this year, given all the changes, that's the type of pattern we should expect to see on Election night?

Michael Pope
All right, let's go around the horn here and everybody make their prediction for what we're going to see on Election night in terms of the timing and perhaps even the following days after the election. Senator Ebbin, we'll start with you.

Adam Ebbin
I think this is the first election that we've allowed, in the code, for people who are sequestered to start feeding ballots through the electronic scanner throughout the day on Election Day. And we've also received more money from the federal government $9 million in the Cares Act that is being distributed to in part, to buy high speed scanners. So I would say that we'll have our results by, certainly by 10. That's my guess.

Michael Pope
Tram, any predictions?

Tram Nguyen
I think, I think there's the the Virginia result and the rest of the country results, right? So I think on Election night, the polling place results from in person voting and from the Central Absentee Precinct will be will be counted, and we'll get results that night. But, you know, we also are allowing for absentee ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day and received by the Registrar's Office by noon on the following Friday to be counted. So I think we'll also expect like daily updates, right, that you know, in terms of these tallies just gonna, or will be updated every day. But I actually think Virginia's in a good spot, and we'll know our election results by the end of the week, and I think in other states the the election results may be delayed. So I think as you know, just in general, we should anticipate probably a dragged out, you know, election results and who appears to have won on Election night may not actually be the winner.

Michael Pope
Thomas, do you have any predictions?

Thomas Bowman
Yes. And I sincerely hope that Tram is correct and Virginia is boring. And I do think that pattern is going to hold. The other states, in contention, are far more interesting. For example, if Florida goes for Joe Biden, we don't need to wait on California and the Western states to come in, because we know Joe Biden will have won. If Florida does not go for Joe Biden, or if a situation occurs where Donald Trump wins the in person vote count on Election Day, and then the absentee ballots roll in and flip the election to Biden, I think that is one possible outcome that happens, if the vote is close. Now, if it's a Biden blowout, then I think we're going to know the results of these elections very quickly.

Michael Pope
I also have a prediction, in terms of Virginia and the ballots. And that's this, that we actually would have basically the same timing when we would know things, and here's the reason for that, is because election officials, they're going to get a lot more mail in ballots than they've ever gotten before. However, they have the legal authority to open those envelopes ahead of time, compare the signatures ahead of time, set them up in stacks in front of the machine that tabulates them, and basically get them ready to tabulate. That's all the time consuming work. That's all going to be done in advance. And so when the polls close, they can hit the tabulation button and start tabulating. Senator Ebbins said they can actually tabulate them during the Election Day. I didn't realize that.

Adam Ebbin
I believe that we passed legislation year before last, that the request for Fairfax County to allow them to be sequestered on Election Day, and to feed them into the machine. They wouldn't get the result from that Central Absentee Precinct.

Tram Nguyen
Yeah, that's called pre-processing. And both Senator Ebbin and Michael, you both are right, right? That these localities can start what is this called this pre-processing, earlier, which is great because then we won't have super delayed results. So I agree with Thomas, I think we're gonna be boring, at least I hope.

Michael Pope
Well, the election in Virginia might be boring, but you know what's not boring, Transition Virginia. That's all the time we've got for this episode. But if you got any questions or comments about what we just heard, or maybe you want to just tell us how much you love our podcast, you can write us an email, send it to TransitionVApodcast@gmail.com. Maybe we'll even read it on the air. You can subscribe to Transition Virginia anywhere you get your podcast. You could follow The Transition Team on Twitter @TransitionVA. You can find us on the web at transitionvirginia.com. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you can enjoy the next episode of Transition Virginia.