State Election Board - Current
State Election Board: Can you see me?
Chris LaFay: I cannot see you. I see a black box.
State Election Board: Awkward. Okay, let me see here.
Chris LaFay: Maybe change your camera settings. Maybe it's set to the wrong camera because it doesn't look like there's any camera at all.
State Election Board: Maybe I need to do like this.
Chris LaFay: Oh, there we go.
State Election Board: Let there be light. Hey,.
Chris LaFay: Good afternoon.
State Election Board: Good afternoon to you, too. How are you feeling? Okay still?
Chris LaFay: Yes, I am. Thank goodness. Because tomorrow my wife and I are gonna go up to the Blue Ridge Mountains for the weekend. So the sickness was actually timed perfectly. This is actually when I. Whenever I get sick or whenever my wife gets, like. It's how I view it. It's like, if I'm sick now, what does that mean? I'm not going to be sick for in like two or three weeks. I. And it's like, oh, this is timed out perfectly. Yes.
State Election Board: So love the Blue Ridge. It's beautiful.
Chris LaFay: And the temperature looks like it's going to be pretty much on point this weekend as well. So we're basically just going to pack our car up with food and leave Thursday afternoon after my wife gets done with work and be up there till Sunday and basically just not leave. Like that's. We're gonna sit on a porch, we're gonna read books, and we're just gonna.
State Election Board: Well, at least I have a starting point if you come up missing.
Chris LaFay: Right? Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
State Election Board: So my kids always tell me, yes.
Chris LaFay: I gotta make sure we bring the flares as well, too. Just be on the safe side. Right.
State Election Board: And the allergy minutes should be a lot of pollen up there, right?
Chris LaFay: Yes. I wasn't feeling the polyc. I had a little bit of the. I think I had a mixture of like both, like a cold and allergies together. The last. You know, with the whole deal that I had. And I. I haven't felt it pretty much the entire time since I got sick. But today, today it was like, hey, by the way, even though it's been raining, there is still pollen in the air. I was like, no, no, I don't want this anymore. I don't want this.
State Election Board: I know. My grandson has been having ball games. Like, this week is three nights and on Saturdays. And I am dying.
Chris LaFay: Huh? Yes.
State Election Board: I mean, my days. Yeah, it's really kicking me.
Chris LaFay: I remember I played ball growing up. I did all that too. It was. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Those days were long, but they were fun.
State Election Board: So. Yeah, he loves it. He loves it. He wants to be professional. Whatever he does. He's very. He's My oldest grandson, he's a very high achiever.
Chris LaFay: He's what sport?
State Election Board: He's doing baseball right now and then he'll do football starting in I think the second week in August. So the only thing he hasn't done is basketball. But he's shooting up there. He may, he may go for the basketball.
Chris LaFay: Very nice.
State Election Board: He's gonna be a quarterback this year. So my husband was a running back all the way through college and so he, he's excited because that's kind of, they're kind of close. They work close together.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
State Election Board: On the football field. So he's just like, he's loving it. He's like reliving his childhood.
Chris LaFay: Right, exactly right. I know when I graduated college I found an adult like men's baseball league that I played in that definitely made me feel like I was reliving. My child would slightly different when you're doing it vicariously through somebody else. Don't get me wrong.
State Election Board: But I'd be kind of scared that I'm gonna check with Hope and see where she be. I'd be kind of scared that I would hurt myself. Be honest with you, I was still.
Chris LaFay: Feeling pretty decent back then. I would die today. I'm in decent shape at the moment. But baseball, especially with throwing overhand, that is just not a natural motion for like humans to do. Like underhand is fine. I would probably throw out my arm pretty quickly. But.
State Election Board: Yeah, I'm, I'll just be honest with you. I don't want to take a chance. I try to do everything low key. We're fixing a all meat and health head. We've got my, my youngest son, he's turning 28. Then my youngest girl's turning 20, my husband's turning 60. So we're all gonna meet up, fly in. So she said she's trying. So I'm doing like kagging, you know, big sea fishing just in this, the slow paced things.
Chris LaFay: Hiking is wonderful. Hiking is absolutely fantastic.
State Election Board: There's, you know, Hilton has got a lot of natural resources there, so a lot of, lot of hiking. We do a lot of walking normally.
Chris LaFay: When we go to the mountains like Blue Ridge, normally we do go hiking but we've actually been in a pretty good rhythm of going to the gym recently about two or three times a week. And so like once we actually got into a rhythm of doing that whenever we actually go on vacation to the.
State Election Board: Mountains and stuff, clicking the Google link, but she's not seeing us.
Chris LaFay: I, she has not joined so there's that.
State Election Board: Let me see her. Let Me take a picture.
Chris LaFay: She just. She just accepted the meeting invite, so I wonder if she only accepted the meeting invite. Let me do this. Let me. Nope, that's not her email.
State Election Board: Hey, girl, I just sent you a pin. I just sent you a picture. Or to see. Is this what you're seeing? It says, click join with Google Meet. I'm going in the calendar. I wanted to show you what I see. Okay.
Chris LaFay: And also, you can tell her that I just sent her an email with just the link by itself.
State Election Board: Okay. All right, I heard him. Do I need to interpret? Okay. Hey, thank you, girl. Okay, you see it? Okay, here we go, Chris. Here we go. Join Google Meets. All right, we don't have the fun filters. I'm not being seen today. I am not presentable. Okay, girl, I know. We don't have any filters or anything. This is like the true McCoy.
Chris LaFay: There it is right there.
State Election Board: All right, I clicked that. And it's just a black screen. It says state election board on it.
Chris LaFay: Now, is there a join meeting button?
State Election Board: It says switch here. Other ways to join. Maybe I need to put that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, click. I click switch here. Oh. Oh, no. Oh, okay. So I figured out what the problem is.
State Election Board: Thank you.
Chris LaFay: Logging in with the same email address. And so you just kicked Sherry out. Okay, that's what's happened. And there she is. And now we got Sherry, if I had to guess. So y' all are logging in with the same email address, and therefore you are. You're kicking each other out. How come?
State Election Board: How can we do that?
Chris LaFay: Are you all in the same building together?
State Election Board: Nope. No.
Chris LaFay: Okay, I don't know what email address you guys are using.
State Election Board: We each have our own separate. Mine Says S. Phillips cb.ga.gov.
Chris LaFay: Oh, well, they both come up as state election board.
State Election Board: Do I need to do a zoom thing? Maybe.
Chris LaFay: Hope. What browser do you use? Edge Internet. Do you know how to open up, like a private tab or a private window?
State Election Board: I mean, it's just Google Chrome.
Chris LaFay: Chrome. So. And under. Do this for me. Under file, at the very top of the. The menu, click on file and then click on incognito window.
State Election Board: Okay, hold on. I know this is going to drive you crazy, but where do I even find file? I just have. It's like on my Google. Do I go for. For us, it's on the top three little dots on the far top, right? Okay. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Uhhuh.
State Election Board: Okay. Did I do what?
Chris LaFay: And then click on new incognito window.
State Election Board: Let's see. Okay, gotcha. New.
Chris LaFay: And then that. You are the URL that I sent you in the email, which is just the Google Meet link. Paste that into the address bar of that incognito tab. Because I think somehow Google thinks that you're logged into two different devices, and therefore, when you pop in, it's kicking each of you out. I think that's what's happening.
State Election Board: So I'm copying the meeting link into the URL area.
Chris LaFay: Yes, I'm real. I'm nodding over here and realizing that you can't see me nodding. Sorry. I apologize. Yes is the answer.
State Election Board: Yes, use my phone. Okay.
Chris LaFay: And then you should just be able to sign straight in. Not sign in, but you should be able to join right in. I don't. I don't think I have any blockers on this.
State Election Board: Okay. Okay. Let me just press Save Election Board. Ask to join. Okay.
Chris LaFay: There we go. Oh, I'll say. We'll see what happens.
State Election Board: It's doing something.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah. Click accept. Yeah, yeah, we're in.
State Election Board: But we don't see you because you. You're not going to today. I just wanted to see if maybe we could see you. I tried.
Chris LaFay: I tried, tried so hard. Yes.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Oh, man. Yay, technology. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
State Election Board: I'm gonna hang up on the phone call, babe. Okay, thank you. Bye.
Chris LaFay: We are all here. After 10 minutes of toil and trouble, we have figured it out.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Conquered technology, King of the world is basically what we are. So today we have about an hour to get things moving and grooving. So I have a handful of areas that I want to go over with you guys. One is we're going to go and look@the georgia.gov site together. We're going to kind of. I'm going to kind of click around to various different pages, and I want you to just kind of call out various different sections that you guys are like that you like visually and aesthetically. That doesn't mean we're going to build every single one of them, but that'll at least kind of give us a starting point of what puzzle pieces or Lego bricks we want to have at our disposal. There will be some that you might not like that we need to actually have at our disposal just because they fill an appropriate void. But we're going to go through that and start kind of collecting some Lego bricks together there. Two is, we have a couple of different sections on the site. Meetings, rules, and petitions that I want to make sure that I have the list of all the different data points that are needed for each of those. So, like, for example, a meeting will Have a meeting date, a time, an address, a PDF upload for agenda, etc. Already gone over some of these things, but I just want to go ahead and have it all written down and locked and loaded. So we'll go over all of those. And then lastly the listing of pages that we want to actually have in the navigation bar, we're going to talk about those and in general what type of content should go on those. Those are my three primary pieces that I want to go over with. If we are able to cover all of those in the next 50 minutes, fantastic. If we need to do a follow up, we can definitely do a follow up. So that the, the thing that I think is going to be the most time intensive is going to be the more design oriented thing going through georgia.gov I think going through the data fields and the page list and some of those pieces are going to take a little bit less time. So I would actually like to start with the shortest piece first. Make sure we get that checked off, go to the middle one, check that off and then spend the remainder of our time looking@georgia.gov that is my agenda for today.
State Election Board: I might, I just want to throw out there on the, on the orchard design, I'm kind of tossled back and forth whether to have the statewide or the stars and Stripes. So maybe do you have that, that link I can.
Chris LaFay: Yes. I don't have it active. It's not in my, it's not in the agenda document that I pulled up, but I can definitely pull that up. That is also not a decision that we have to make right now. Swapping. That is just one line of code. It's like, do you want the other one? Great, we'll swap it and it'll all be done.
State Election Board: Okay, we're on. Perfect then.
Chris LaFay: Yep.
State Election Board: Awesome.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. So first part here is I'm actually going to share my note taking screen for a second because I have the data points for these on my notes. So let me go ahead and hop over here. Window. This one. There we go. Okay, so we have, these are our different sections. We have meetings, we have rules, and we have petitions. So I want to make sure that these data points are in fact the correct ones and everything that we need. So for a meeting, I'm not going to sit here and read these off to you unless you would just really, really like me to. I will. But these are the different fields that we need for a single meeting. And you'll see here in the second column the type of field that it is. So the rules that are discussed kind of link over to the rule section. So if there is a rule, it'll kind of be cross connected. Same thing with petitions as well too. So when you're looking at this list, do you see anything in here that we need to take into consideration?
State Election Board: Would you need to have the rules discussed and petitions discussed, you think? Well, they may. We may want. Or just under the rules. Yeah, it would probably have it under the rules. Unless we want to have it to where. If for instance, we have a special call meeting this Friday to go over a rule petition and we just need to decide if we want to add the attachment of the rule that's going to be proposed for the public to be able to download it with the meeting information or with the rules or in both locations.
Chris LaFay: So this will be automatic. So if when you create a rule, there will be the ability to attach a meeting to it and therefore it'll. It can auto automatically be linked in both locations. So if you're on a meeting, it'll see if there's any associated rules and if you're on a single rule page, it'll list the meetings that are attached to it. So this will be. These will be automatic for you.
State Election Board: Okay. Now it'll be. This is so the rule. What they do is they have the. It is the meeting Friday is to determine whether or not the board wants the rule to go into rulemaking. So. So they may Friday decide. We don't really like this rule, we're shutting it down now. And then that's it. It does. It goes no further. Or they'll say, yeah, we, we want to look into this rule some more. Let's. Let's move forward with it then that's when it moves forward into the rulemaking process. So I don't know if there's a way to. We had a couple of drop downs for the rules that they were either in.
Chris LaFay: So before we dive into that. One second. So I have a. The one of the next sections will actually be talking about the different fields attached to a rule.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So let's not dive into that quite yet, but do the rest of these fields overall.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Look all correct to you?
State Election Board: Mm, awesome.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. So now we're on to rules.
State Election Board: Oh, real quick. Was transcript up there? Yep. Okay. All right. Sorry, go ahead.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, no, you're good. That's perfect.
State Election Board: What about the minutes? Do we need to have the minutes there or just a transcript, meaning we do need the minutes.
Chris LaFay: Great. This is exactly what we're doing.
State Election Board: This perfect.
Chris LaFay: This will be a PDF upload required for saving.
State Election Board: Awesome.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that sounds good.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Now we have rules. So this is that status and these are the statuses that we had talked about on a call before. We know that rules have to be open for public comment, so there will be potential email address attached to that rule. So people can then send an email to that. And this will. When you type an email in, that email address will automatically be populated on that rules page. When you create a rule, you'll be able to select the meeting that it's attached to. If it. If there is one, you could. Technically this is something that I was thinking of. Do you actually want any contents of the rule where you could actually have a field that you could type that information in and possibly. I don't know if this effective data is appropriate or not. I have no idea. But these are kind of two things that I was making some assumptions on that may or may not be helpful.
State Election Board: So can we upload the rule versus the, you know, putting the description in there? Yeah. Don't you think? Hopefully. Description. Okay. Instead of putting the whole like having to type that all in, we'll just do the PDF upload of it.
Chris LaFay: Sounds good. Is there a reason to have an effective date for these at all?
State Election Board: Well, I tell you there's a posting date. So once I'm wondering if we need to have effective date. Well, we have the statuses proposed, adopted and denied. So I guess we would just need to change the rule to adopted once it passes.
Chris LaFay: Yes, but you want to change this to just adopted date.
State Election Board: Or we could change the statuses up there. Either one. What do you think, Hope? Yeah, I'm just trying to think. Well, I mean that's something we can either. We need to kind of think a little bit more on and maybe come back to and legal terms of the rules.
Chris LaFay: Does this matter? Because at the end of the day I know that this does. Does an actual date actually matter to showcase when somebody is viewing a single rule?
State Election Board: Well, you know it once it's registered with the Secretary of State's office, they have it where it's adopted and. And posted in there. And I think somewhere on the website we're going to have where they go to that link.
Chris LaFay: Okay. So would it make sense to have external. Rule link?
State Election Board: It would have maybe Secretary of State. It would be with the Secretary of State's office. But we still have to do a link right there or SOS ruling. Okay. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So then I say we get rid of that. I don't think we need the Actual date there. And we just keep it simple and we just say what the status is and then have a link to go out to that other section. Other place.
State Election Board: See. The proposed adopted and denied. We gotta maybe put out is. Is that. Those are the drop down menus for.
Chris LaFay: The status of it.
State Election Board: Okay, so. We need to have something like initial proposal to the board. And then instead of adopt. Approved to move forward in. I know they say. I'm trying to think approved to move forward in the rulemaking process.
Chris LaFay: So we can't. So we can't have these. I'm thinking of these as like visible tags.
State Election Board: I know, I'm.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, we have to have these like full sentences attached to each of them.
State Election Board: Yeah, I know. That's why I was saying that we just need to come up with something. Maybe board present or propose to board. Propose proposing a proposed board.
Chris LaFay: Can we say moving forward moving.
State Election Board: Or you say in. In some. It's got to be something like it's in the process of rulemaking because it can still be denied. It has to go through so many channels. So people want to know where is this, where is this rule at this point? Then they can see you say in process, in progress. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So then what would the next one be?
State Election Board: Approved or then. And then denied.
Chris LaFay: Approved and done. Okay.
State Election Board: What do you think? Hope? Well, them approving it. Well, yes. Or you could put. I mean I think that approved would be the final approval. Yes. And denied would be the final denial. And before that it would still be in progress. Yeah. Okay.
Chris LaFay: So that right there.
State Election Board: Mm. Okay. Well, the proposed to the board. I mean once it's proposed to the board, we'll know if it's in progress or if it's been denied at that point. So wanted to push. Put in progress. Put pres. It's like in the presentation process or something. It's, you know, I'm trying to think of how we need to word it.
Chris LaFay: Presenting.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And this is. This might be awaiting approval.
State Election Board: Well, no, because when they present it then we'll know whether or not it's.
Chris LaFay: Approved or denied.
State Election Board: Approved for rulemaking. It'll be put through the rule making process. Yeah, but that's still in progress. Yeah, yeah, we'll keep it in progress.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: And then we'll have definitely like a denied and then final approval.
Chris LaFay: Okay, Perfect.
State Election Board: I think that works. What do you think, Sherry? Yes. Unless you want to flip final approval and denied or the.
Chris LaFay: Or the order of them doesn't matter. For the list, these are going to be just in a drop down menu for you to select from.
State Election Board: Okay, perfect. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Any other thing here that's needed for a rule?
State Election Board: Let's see. We know that the. We actually have a dedicated inbox. I don't know if that's something that it's automatically in. There is public commentcb.ga.gov so it.
Chris LaFay: Every single time, no matter what, no exceptions, the email address for public comment will always be the same.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Got it. Okay. Let me make a note of that. Awesome. Sounds good. We're going to say. Awesome. Okay, there we go. That's there. And then we have petitions, which basically mirrors the same thing for rules. So I'm going to say. I'm assuming we're going to want to copy the statuses here as well, too.
State Election Board: Mm.
Chris LaFay: And that this is also going to be the same that we do not need this. And then a petition can also be assigned to a meeting. Do we need to have anything like petition description as a PDF upload, external linking? Do we need to have any of that here as well?
State Election Board: Probably. So wouldn't we?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, both of them.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Delete that. There we go. Okay,.
State Election Board: Perfect.
Chris LaFay: There we go. And then we'll have the. The notation there as well, too. Any other fields for petitions?
State Election Board: I'm going to go on our. What we have right now. Real quick, just to see. There's. So they have what's called registry documents.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: And that's where we would upload pending requests.
Chris LaFay: Does that take the place of the description PDF,.
State Election Board: Maybe? Registry documents? Yes.
Chris LaFay: Are there multiple.
State Election Board: Well, no. Each. Each rule. It'll be. It'll. We could have multiple rules going at the same time. So we'd want to upload one rule and then have another one uploaded. It's its own rule.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So that would be.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So this would be one rule. One singular rule within petitions. Do you have to have. Does a single petition need to have multiple registry documents uploaded to it?
State Election Board: No, it's just usually one document.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: It's one PDF.
Chris LaFay: Okay. So then if a single petition had a title.
State Election Board: I'm sorry.
Chris LaFay: No, you're fine.
State Election Board: Could have a if in. If it. If it was. Went and it was. If somebody amended it. Is a. Is a registry necessary? The register. Registry documents. Because those would be in the. The rules or petitions. But is that section. The registering actually necessary? Because this is. You know, our website has a lot of repeats and repeats and repeats. Yeah. I. You know what? I would have to check with the Open Meetings act to see if. And look into the actual rules to find out, because there's just a lot of things that you have to post in different areas. And if you don't, then they'll say, oh, well, it wasn't posted within 30 days on the registry. So you can't. You've just missed your opportunity to get it passed this time. Now we're gonna have to move it on and you're gonna have to wait another 30 days to get something. You know, so there's just a lot of steps involved. And let me see if I've got. Trying to see if I can find the. That diagram.
Chris LaFay: While you're pulling that up. I'm going to step out for one second. I'll be right back.
State Election Board: Okay. Because none of the, none of the new things, the new meetings that we have coming up, those documents, the. The new rule and all that, they're not on here. Yeah. Because we have to get the secretary to. Oh, well, I, I went and asked them to post something yesterday and then they were telling me that the meeting for last week when we sent out all those, all the copies of the rules and stuff for the people to look at, like that's. It's not listed here in the registry documents. The only. There's nothing here listed since 2025. That's why I was wondering. Didn't want to say anything while he was online, but he's gone. Yeah. Now that Dr. Jan is. I need to get a hold of her okay. To approve some stuff before Friday so that we can have it. So we can have it posted. But you see what I'm seeing? Yeah. So we haven't been posting it. So. Well, we haven't had a rule since this Cobb county pre certification meeting requirement one. Mm. And it's usually done once it's approved because I sent an email to Julie Fisher. You might. I think I CCG on it about having it posted in the registry that we are moving it forward in the rulemaking process. So I guess, Chris, we're gonna have to get back to you as far as. If we need to. If we can need to keep the registry document on there or just get rid of it so that we don't have just a bunch of stu on there that we don't need.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that sounds good. Gotcha. Okay, fantastic. That covers the. The data points part of what we need to discuss today. Let me look. Go back over here in terms of. So we have a handful of pages. So kind of moving on to kind of the pages list here. I want to spend about 10 minutes on this because we don't need to get this locked and loaded today. But just making sure. That we're kind of directionally accurate would be key on the homepage. What I'm thinking in general to have in terms of layout is some sort of banner section that talks about, hey, this is the state election board, this is what we do, etc, having a section for showcasing whenever the next meeting is going to be, because that seems important. Links over to, requesting an investigation, open records about us as well too, and then any external links to other systems and structures and places that people might need to actually go. The website's gonna be fairly thin. We only have about four or five pages that are going to be in the navigation bar. So there's not too much content here on the home page that I feel like is pertinent. But those are the key pieces that I can think of right now. So based on that very simple list, is there anything else on the homepage that you can think that we want to have?
State Election Board: Sherry, did you talk to him about the bulletin? Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Oh, you did drop me an email about that. Talk to me a little bit about what that is, because I. I think I also asked if there was like a sample one and I didn't think there was one. So talk to me a little bit about what bulletins are.
State Election Board: Well, we've not ever had one before, but it would be nice to have some little section is kind of like the SCP bulletin so that the counties can come in and see when, you know, if we have a special call meeting or. Or we also want to have a link on there to where if on it to update their information. It's going to be kind of for the Gwinnett counties. I mean, for the Georgia counties. Yeah. So it's kind of be like a communication between the state board and. And the counties. So this won't. All this. This will not be duplicating the other things that we have going on where you have the rules and all that kind of stuff in the meeting set up. But it'll be like, you know, some educational videos or some pertinent information about the upcoming election. We think that they might could use reminders. Reminders, kind of reminders.
Chris LaFay: Is this basically just a place for you to put blog effectively? What are blog posts? Just so you can have basically like a running. Like if there was a new posting, you wanted to put up with some basic information, this would just showcase like the most recent posts that are on the website.
State Election Board: Yeah. Could we upload videos or anything like that on there?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, 100.
State Election Board: I mean, that's kind of what I was thinking. What do you think. Hope I didn't hear. I couldn't understand what you said at the beginning. It's kind of like a blog.
Chris LaFay: Oh, like me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I thought. You're talking to Sherry. Sorry. Yes. Like a blog, basically. It wouldn't be called a blog, it'd be called something else. But you had the ability to create a posting on a certain day, and then you would be able to have content on that post that could be words, it could be paragraphs, lists, videos, images, the whole nine yards. And so structurally speaking, it would be a blog. But you could label it bulletin.
State Election Board: Well, we have to be careful that what we put out there, we don't get questioned too much on things. And then if. Because really the Secretary of State's office is supposed to be telling them what to do. But we have to try to keep. Make sure that all the counties are doing things in the same. And an example of that is, is we need to make sure that all the counties right now are doing the video surveillance on the ballot. Ballot drop boxes. And some of the counties are doing it and some aren't. So we need to kind of put a little notice on the bulletin of a reminding, like, hey, just to remind you to make sure that you are putting, you know, things are. You're having a surveillance. Your surveillance is up. But if they start asking more detailed questions, then. Then we're kind of getting into telling them what the Secretary of State's office does, and then we might become liable on things. I don't think it's. I don't think it's going to be interactive. It'll just be what we post. Okay. Is that right?
Chris LaFay: What do you. What do you mean by it won't be interactive?
State Election Board: I mean, they can't comment on what we're saying.
Chris LaFay: Oh, no. None of this would be. Nothing on the site will allow them to, like, comment on stuff.
State Election Board: Oh, okay. All right. Yes, that would be great.
Chris LaFay: So when you're posting something, the ability to have a title for whatever it is, and then the ability to type in underneath that, the ability to type in, like text, upload images, upload videos, etc. And then the bulletin would just show a list of all the titles.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: That were most recent, and then you could click on them and then be able to see whatever content use that you provided.
State Election Board: There. There. Okay. Would they be able to do a.
Chris LaFay: Search within the balloon in a future state? Yes. Searching within WordPress is a little bit funky. You would think that a platform that has a Ton of usage would have a fantastic search system. It does not.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: It's not very helpful. And so in order to do search decently, there would need to be some other pieces in play. That's the overly simplistic way to say you had to have search indexing and external databases that connected this and the other with dynamic tagging and blah, blah, blah. Okay, but the answer is yes, but it would need to be later.
State Election Board: All right, well, they can just look for it.
Chris LaFay: Okay, awesome. Okay, so this is going to be a place where.
State Election Board: Is there a call for that later, Chris?
Chris LaFay: Pardon? Yeah, there, there it would be. It would just be out of scope for this. It wasn't be a ton extra, but it just depends on how we want to do search. And I would rather. I would rather do search at the site level and think about that rather than trying to pigeonhole and say let's do search for this one thing.
State Election Board: Okay, that.
Chris LaFay: And that's kind of where. Because doesn't make sense to try to focus on doing search well within one segment of the site when doing it well for the whole site isn't that much extra of a list.
State Election Board: Yeah, I like that. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: I want to make a note of this. Awesome.
State Election Board: Where can we incorporate. Where would be the best place to incorporate the counties? There's a lot of times the directors. There's a lot of turnover and we're constantly having to send out emails to the directors. And it would be nice if we can start getting the counties used to having in their process of. Hey, let's go on the website and update our information. Our email and our new director.
Chris LaFay: That would probably have to be handled by an internal system that you guys have. If I had to guess so, yes. Can we create a form on the website that then sends you an email? We could 100% do that.
State Election Board: Yeah. That's what we need. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Oh, that's what you need. That's all you need is just. You just need a form. Oh, okay. Awesome. What would that page be called?
State Election Board: Well, we kind of like to have it in this area because it's kind of going to. To all the county. This will be kind of like our county official, you know, so we're thinking of. Could. Could it possibly be. Be in this like always on the far right or something. A little blog here that you click.
Chris LaFay: Is that the most common thing that people are going to come to the website for?
State Election Board: No, Most of them come to look for the meetings and download all the documents.
Chris LaFay: So what I don't want to have happen is having Your homepage literally have every single thing, piece of information on it. Because that will get very confusing.
State Election Board: Right?
Chris LaFay: You don't. You're not going to have a lot of pages in your navigation bar and you're not going to have like these mega drop down menus either. So I would actually recommend having that be a link inside on the navigation bar so that people can from one click on the homepage go exactly where they're looking to go.
State Election Board: Okay. Okay.
Chris LaFay: So what it, what is the, what is this form? What is this form called?
State Election Board: That would be the county state. The election boards.
Chris LaFay: The county election boards.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And then what, what are they doing? They're replacing their like updating their director information.
State Election Board: Yes. Usually a supervisor. We could, we could do supervisor slash registrar. A lot of them are the same in these little small towns. It's county election board and reg.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Is there a shorter thing that we could put. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Go get Ally. Go get Ally, go get her, go get Ally.
State Election Board: Right there.
Chris LaFay: There we go.
State Election Board: You can have county B O E R. Because a lot of times they'll do that.
Chris LaFay: County boer people know what that acronym.
State Election Board: They usually do. Okay, but I'm not sure. What did you say? Hope? I'm sorry. If you don't want to have it spelled out. County board of elections and registrations. A lot of times they'll have B O E R. Okay.
Chris LaFay: And then on that form, What information needs to be collected on that form?
State Election Board: We would need to know the director, the current director or super, this is a supervisor is what I'm seeing. And the register.
Chris LaFay: Is there actually a form that is available online somewhere that you could screenshot and send to me that I could copy?
State Election Board: Let's see. Yes, I'm sure there is somewhere. Let me see. Yeah, I got it. I'm just looking at the S.O.S. You know how I look at all the. It says county election offices and has a drop down box of all the counties. But this has like the information that that has on there. Maybe we should just have that. County election offices. That's what I was kind of thinking.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, there we go. Okay, that sounds a lot better.
State Election Board: Yeah. And they're already used to seeing that. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Okay,.
State Election Board: So you see that page where if you look at the drop down and you just pick any county, you'll kind of see the information that they're getting from them. The supervisor mailing address, contact information.
Chris LaFay: Where do I go to see that? If you're going, I'm on the SOS site right now.
State Election Board: Okay. And then you go to the County. It's on the elections page.
Chris LaFay: Elections division. Okay. So on the elections division page, What.
State Election Board: I'm going to do is I'm going to send you a direct link right now. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Oh, perfect. Awesome.
State Election Board: I sent it to your personal. Sorry.
Chris LaFay: Oh, no, that's fine. No worries. Thank you. I was not. I was not refreshing that one. There. Got it. Okay.
State Election Board: I probably want to put the only thing differently is probably like the phone number too. It just has a mailing address in the email, but the. Under the contact information, maybe email, phone.
Chris LaFay: So these are the different fields that would need to be on the form. So we need to have the supervisor's name, the mailing address, their email.
State Election Board: Well, this will be just for updates.
Chris LaFay: Updates, yes. And they're in there sending the updates to you? Correct?
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: So they would need to fill. So in the form that's on the site, they would need to fill out each of these pieces of data?
State Election Board: Yes, well, yes, the supervisor's name, the registrar's name, the mailing address just. I don't think the mailing address just changed. Do they, Hope? Well, sometimes we need the best mailing address because sometimes they have a P.O. Box and sometimes a street address and we get a lot of mail back.
Chris LaFay: So in a, in a perfect world scenario, you have, you have an email that hits your inbox. That is a county election office update email. In that email that you receive, what information do you need to have to be able to not have to reach out to them to ask questions? You just have everything you need right there in one spot.
State Election Board: The supervisor's name, The registrar's name, mailing address and contact information, email, phone number.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: Don't you think Hope. Yeah, and I'm not sure because the.
Chris LaFay: County as well too, right? The county.
State Election Board: Yes, the county. I don't know if the supervisor is the same as the director. Well, I was just looking on the, on the, on the SOS website, they list everyone as supervisor. Okay. I go check them. Most of them do say supervisor when I go check the web pages. Okay. But I mean we can put supervisor slash director. Would there be an option where they can say if they're a supervisor or director?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, we can add a drop down. We can add a drop down menu.
State Election Board: That says let's do that. That way we know what their title is. We have a supervisor, director and a registrar.
Chris LaFay: So you. So people are going only going to be updating one piece of information and that's the person's name and it's either going to be supervisor, director or registrar. Do you want them to also provide the same names for all the other people. So let's say that I'm on Atkins, Atkinson county and Sandra Sweat is the supervisor. Do you want them to type in that person? All the other, the, the registrar and all the other stuff as well too?
State Election Board: If it's different. A lot of them are the same people, but some of them are different. And what I've been reading hope is that some of these notifications that we're supposed to notify both of them. So I just thought it'd be good to just have them just in case we needed them. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: What if we did this? What if this was the form?
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: At the very top you have, you have a drop down menu that you select the county. So that's the, the required field. Logically. Then there are three text fields that say new supervisor's name, new registrar's name, new director's name, and you fill out whichever one those are important. And then I'm assuming mailing address, emails and phone numbers also commonly stay similar. Basically the rest of the form is just fill out whichever pieces of data need to be updated in the system. So you'll have a county. And then below that they'll have some sort of like a paragraph that says fill out any of the, fill out any of the fields below. None are required that are you are requesting an update for within our system. And they can fill out supervisor name, registrar name, director name, mailing address, email or phone number in any combination thereof. And so when they submit, all you're getting is the county and the fields of data that they are interested in you updating.
State Election Board: And they'll be able to do more than one email address for each person.
Chris LaFay: So each person, each of these three people, supervisor, director and registrar, each of them have. Are you saying that each of them have a mailing address, email and phone number?
State Election Board: Yes. Well, they'll, they'll each have their own, they have their own individual email address. Right. But because, because they're not required, then you could just have like if you're a new supervisor, then you include your number, your email address. I do want those to be required fields. Sure. And something about the, something about I do want to refer back to and I don't know how we can say this. If your information differs from the SOS because you know, the thing is is that a lot of these SOS information is incorrect as well. And if we don't have it required field to do like mailing or anything like that, then we may not even know that that the information is incorrect. Does that make sense? So I almost would like to have it all to be required.
Chris LaFay: So you want, even if nothing is being updated, you want, if somebody is filling out this form, you want them to fill out all you want them to. So there's per person, there are four fields. Name, mailing address, email and phone. So you want them to fill out all four pieces of data for the supervisor, director and registrar, even if it's not changing?
State Election Board: Yes, because even I don't, I wouldn't believe that they would have all three new people. First of all, they either have two, I mean most of them are supervisors or directors. But to fill out that information, we would make sure that our information is correct. I just think that's a safety net.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: I mean it's not that much information to fill out. You know, it's better than us making phone calls like I'm having to do now.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
State Election Board: Don't you think? Yes.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that sounds good. All right, so we have a county drop down menu and then below that will be a paragraph that says something along the lines of fill out all the information below for all three roles within your office. We'll announce a header for supervisor, name, mail, email, phone, director name, mailing address, email, phone, registrar name, mailing address, email, phone. And then all of those fields are required. They submit and it sends an email off to you.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. That sounds good.
State Election Board: What email do you have it going to to us?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, whichever one you want that that'll be on. What email address would you like it to be?
State Election Board: You think election board? Yeah, yeah.ga.gov because I'm testing those emails anyway, so that works out good.
Chris LaFay: You said so. State election board. @Scb.ga.gov I think it's election board, election. Got it. Okay. Got it. Okay, great. That is noted. Okay, let's go ahead and shift the rest of our time today to take a look at the Georgia State site. We have that here. Don't worry too much about colors. Colors are going to be handled by whatever palette that we decide to choose.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So looking at the homepage here, the. I'm going to go ahead and just kind of call out some areas relatively quickly just because I think that, I think that'll help a little bit. These types of sections at the top where call them hero sections, there's one or two that are on the Georgia site that I like to mimic. This being one of them. You'll be able to put whatever photo you want here. So this is a great section to have like at the top of a lot of different pages with the title of the page, a little bit of a description and then a jump link to whatever is most important. I like this navigation bar here on the side to be able to very quickly get into whatever page of the site that people are looking for. This is just. It's right there. My, my primary goal with especially government sites is people are typically coming here not to browse and be do a lot of research and figure stuff out. They're here to get to the one thing that they want to do and be can go so too.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So like there will probably end up being some do like some of the links that are up here in the navigation bar will also probably be down here. Just because I think that you guys don't have a humongous website. So having things in multiple places probably isn't the worst idea. Sections like this where we have some larger content with an image to the side I feel like are really good call outs to have. And then doing some basic. These are kind of what I like to call. Like what I like to call cards where you have like an image, a title description and a button kind of in this kind of. There's no border around this but kind of this card format. Yeah. Actually you can kind of see it actually here pretty well. Well where the background color is a little bit different. So using. Using these here as well too, these little icon pods here where we have an icon in the top right. With a header and then some basic content are also fantastic. And actually doing them kind of in a multi column approach also works out very nicely. And then for like sub navigation, very similar to this right here. I'm envisioning using these image cards as well to link off to sub pages. Those are some of the call outs on this page that I have for this. Is there anything else here that you see that you either liked or disliked or didn't agree with my assessment of.
State Election Board: I do like the tabs on the side. Yeah. The top. The top. Access Service services. I like those. And the. When you scroll down, the one where it almost look like a little bulletins, like a little post it. Yeah, yeah. Going down.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. These right here.
State Election Board: No, further down. The one that. That right there. That one to the left. False text. You could do like a. Like a megaphone.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah.
State Election Board: That right there would be great. Just like right now we need to let all the counties know about the surveillance rule to make sure that they're following it. That would be a great area to be able to put Something like that. So would something like that be where we can go in and put what we want?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, absolutely. So if that's. What if you are the. When you're thinking about bulletins, are you thinking mostly about various very small pieces of text you're not thinking about when you're thinking of a bulletin, are you thinking of five or six hundred words that you're typing up? Are you thinking about more just like a single paragraph?
State Election Board: Oh, it might be more. Well, it depends on the rule. If we. If it just depends on what the board wants us to make sure the counties know.
Chris LaFay: So these bulletins here would not be for rules. The rules are going to have their own separate section that have all that structured data. The layout of that rules page kind of similar to meetings. Like when you go to a single meetings page, there's actually be no design that you guys have to do. You'll fill out a form, it'll all be designed for you. So for bulletins do. Because how we think about like. So this little card right here is great for a title and maybe like a paragraph or two worth of content. But if that bulletin was going to be extra long, think more kind of like. Like a blog post title, like a. Like a length for that. That's not going to fit into a card like this. This card would be three screens long. So.
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: How we think about what the, the content of the bulletins will determine the type of structure that we put in place for it. So if it's always going to be short and sweet, kind of like these, that's great. That works out well. But if it's going to vary, then doing it more kind of like a blog post where you have a title, maybe even an image and then like a section for content, that's going to make more sense. Can we have both having it both. It's going to be.
State Election Board: Kind of like this layout too if you think about it. I'm just going to throw this out there. Okay, just kind of stay with me. Is that you see to the right we have the video. And I'm not saying that we're going to do this exactly like this, but the video could be our latest meeting or it could be an educational video. We can, we can put whatever video we want playing right there. Right?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Yes. I thought you were about to go on.
State Election Board: Yeah. So. So being having them kind of side by side, we could even make the video part smaller and the other one larger. Hope. But. But having them side by side would kind of be. Does that make sense. You have the meeting going on and then you have like a, an announcement going on and people would kind of be going to that one place looking for the, those videos and things like that. Just a thought, but we could also utilize that if we wanted to put up a short video and not be a meeting video. Does that make sense?
Chris LaFay: So how does the bulletin. How does the most recent bulletin tie to the video that's right next to it?
State Election Board: Well, that's what I'm saying. It doesn't, but. But that's okay. We wouldn't say, but it would just kind of be like a. People will be looking there and there's a title, Beware of Peach Pass and they're on the right. It says Beware of fake tech scams. So it's all kind of educational, looks like to me. Not, not educational, but notifications. Not notifications, but like just kind of a letting you know things. So if we talked about videos, I'm just throwing that out there. I just thought that we could utilize a video. Could be. We wouldn't have to have something going all the time, but we could have the latest meeting. But if we needed to have a video of say that Dr. Jan was to do a video in the future, we could put that up right there with the title on it just like they have above it what it is.
Chris LaFay: Let's go back to the bulletins.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Because when we're thinking about content on a website that's going to be updated on a regular basis, having the, having the content have a very similar form and fashion is important. So like for example, we walk through meetings, right? And those meetings have a set of.
State Election Board: It's three.
Chris LaFay: No, it's. Yeah, hold on one second, let me text my really quick. Thinking of content. So meetings have a very like, they have a very structured set of data points, right? It's date, it's time. There's these PDF uploads. When you go to a, when you, when you end up going to a page that is about a single meeting, it's going to look and feel the same as all the other meeting pages that are out there because it's a form fill at that point. So thinking of bulletins, those are not going to necessarily have the exact same like the, the, the laundry list of all this. Like these data points like meetings do. But if you're wanting to keep a running log of bulletins so they all are in one spot on the website, having them be of similar structure in size and style is important.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Because that's going to impact how that content's displayed on the site. So having one that is one sentence long versus another, that's 500 sentences or 500 words and then another that's only a video and no words at all. That content is all different and it needs to be displayed in different ways. And so this is where working within constraints actually allows your website to be a lot more consistent and allows things to be more easily found. So with that being said, where would.
State Election Board: You put the YouTube meeting videos? Would they not be played on the website?
Chris LaFay: They can be. So there is, there's going to be a field on the, the meeting section where you'll be able to, at a, for the, for a single meeting be able to upload the, the YouTube video once it's gone through its processing after it's been live. If you want to have a feed on the site, you can, on the homepage you can the like a live feed.
State Election Board: So anytime we're running live on YouTube, will it on our website show that we're live?
Chris LaFay: You can. The thing that I would recommend against that though because I'm, I'm also thinking about how much, how often do you want to go in and actually edit the site is that if you have a feed up here, let's say pretend this was the live feed video, you're not, most of the time you're not live. A vast majority of the time you're not live.
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: So that means there's going to be a block on your home page that just says this is where the, this is where the live video will be.
State Election Board: Oh, okay.
Chris LaFay: And do you want to go and actually edit your home page every time for a meeting and then take it down at the end of it? I don't think that's a process that you want to do. So I don't recommend, I don't recommend that. Can you do it 100%. Embedding a YouTube live video of YouTube is just as easy as it is to embed a non live video on your website. Copy and paste URL. WordPress does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
State Election Board: You.
Chris LaFay: But I would rather not see you have to do that all the time.
State Election Board: Right, but could we have just the latest meeting.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
State Election Board: Running right there.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So what? So on the, on the homepage, in terms of content, what I'm thinking about having is a normal like hero or banner section that says, you know, like this is the state election board basically showcasing a menu of various different pages that we want to link off to whatever the next meeting is going to be so that people can then go and actually click over to the next meeting and see all the stuff that's important about that next meeting. And then a. We could then pull the most recent meeting that has already happened and put the YouTube video embed here as well too. And then have a bulletin list of whatever the most recent bulletin is.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And so for bulletins, my recommendation would to be to think about based on everything that I've heard you guys say so far, and I'm making some assumptions here, but bulletins to me sound like short and sweet little messages. They sound like sticky notes to me.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So my recommendation would be to have a section similar to this to where you type in the title, which is basically a sentence. And then you're given space for about a paragraph, maybe two worth of content. And then that sits kind of right below these like top access services section here.
State Election Board: I like where, I like where below there on that, on that blog thing you can click Read More so that they are only seeing that little bit. Does that make sense?
Chris LaFay: So I. Yes. So that was actually some. My initial thought was that your. Your bulletins are going to be more like blog posts are going to be like 3 to 500 words where they would actually take up a good section, good piece of content. What I heard though, and I this could be very much wrong. And that's okay. Is that most of your bulletins are going to be about a paragraph long. They're going to be kind of like.
State Election Board: Sticking where it says go. Can you go back up there? Can you go back down? I mean. Yeah, you see where it says Read more. I like how that you only have a couple lines showing, but then you can click Read More. And that might be. Sometimes might be longer for whatever reason it might be. But they're only. But we're just keeping it really simple in what they see. And then if it tends to be more, they can click Read more possibly.
Chris LaFay: So we're. So these are all linking out. So the way that they have this set up is they have this bulletin here and these are all for the most part linking off to other websites for more information. And so okay, are you envisioning that a single bulletin is going to be a longer winded, 4 or 500 word posting with a shorter excerpt kind of like this? Or are you thinking that most of your bulletins are going to be about a paragraph or so and might actually link out to an external website to learn more information about it?
State Election Board: I don't think they'll be external I just thought I, I just noticed. I just pulled it up and I see what you're saying. I just saw that sometimes I can read things and it says read more and it just. Because it's a little bit longer, but it doesn't take up the space. And so sometimes you can read it, you know, kind of like overlaps the rest of the things and you can just read more of it but not jump to another page. I didn't know that was.
Chris LaFay: And that is, that is definitely possible. The thing that I want to avoid. So this is, this kind of goes back to consistency is there was a page that actually had pulled up a second ago that was actually a really good example. Hold on. Was it this one? Yeah, it was actually. It was this one. Great. So this is an example of what I'm trying to avoid for you guys. So this is not a, this is not a bulletin. This is not a post. This is the Georgia Gov SNAP page. This entire page literally just has two learn more text links and nothing else. All this stuff is like their standard stuff that they have. Like this sidebar is standard, this quick links. All this stuff is standard. This is a very empty page. There's not much here. And so if we're going the route for bulletins to where kind of like this, where there would be kind of like, you know, an image, a title and a learn more button or read more button, that is the default functionality and that's what all of them would have. And so if these, if these bulletins are going to be longer and they can go off to a page that actually has a good amount of content, that is a fantastic way to do it. This is basically what we like to call the excerpt. So it's the excerpt from the post, the summary of what that post is. And then you can learn more and read more and go into it and go to a page that has something of substance. But what I didn't want to see is most of these bulletins going off to a very simple page that when you go to it, you're like, where's. Obviously this is an important page. Like SNAP benefits are important. This page needs to exist. But this content from a bulletin standpoint of kind of what we're talking about, could have actually just been on that little pod. So we either need to have that pod designed in a way to where that pod will showcase all of the content of the bulletin. Which that means the, the, the constriction that you guys would have would be that whenever you post a bulletin, it needs to be short and concise or we do it more like a blog post style, which would be along these lines here where every bulletin would have a title, a summary excerpt and then a read more link and it would then go to a longer piece. Both are perfectly fine. But it has to be consistent though. That's the thing. Does that make sense?
State Election Board: I mean, I don't think they're going to be long. What do you think, Hope? No, I don't. And I definitely don't want there to be it look like an empty page either. It's to me it's kind of hard until you kind of throw us in there, Throw some stuff in there on a page and then it's easy to look and.
Chris LaFay: But I'm gonna lean towards this because in reality with websites, the less that you have to update, the better.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So I would rather see you guys more constricted toward making bulletins a paragraph long, two paragraphs long, or like a couple of bullet points effectively, and that be it.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Because then if you know that you have this, this weight of. If I, if I'm gonna write a bulletin, it's gonna be, I'm staring at this like white screen on the back end of WordPress and I have to fill it out and make it feel full. Even if you don't think that that's gonna be like, you have to do that. There is this. Whenever you're looking at a white screen in the back end of a website, you feel like you have to fill it out and has to look pretty and has to do all this stuff where that's not the case. You know, that doesn't actually have to be the case. It's this like self imposed belief. But when it, you know that it's going to basically be on a sticky note, you know that, you know, the goal is to get it down to two bullet points and a couple of links if necessary. That's a lot more, that's a lot less mentally burdensome than I have to sit down and write a post with headers and paragraphs. So that's what I would rather see.
State Election Board: Okay, awesome.
Chris LaFay: Okay, so I know we're a little bit past three now. That is fine what I'm going to do. So our next steps here,.
State Election Board: We're going.
Chris LaFay: To go ahead and start bringing over some of these building blocks from the Georgia State site and into the new state election board.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: The goal is not to get this 100 correct on the first shot because that's just not going to happen. The goal is to get it to a solid 45% to where there's enough there. The level of effort, what was put in was enough to get over the visual hump, even if the content's not all correct without over indexing. And then spending bazillions of hours trying to get it perfect. And then when you see it, you wanting to edit everything and have to redo everything.
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: We're trying to thread that needle of the right amount of effort. And so I have enough information here now. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I have enough information here now to go ahead and start building out the. The meeting section, the rule section, the petition section, as well as the bulletin. And we're on a very similar wavelength in terms of what the homepage should have on it. And then the other pages with request information, request investigation, open records and about us are kind of going to bring over a lot of the same content. About us will bring over like board member bios and things like that. Records will have a lot of the same content and then investigation will have the. The form, all the external links and some of the content there. So I feel like we have a good solid base of operations from a content perspective to move the needle. This is going to be from a given that we're not doing. What we normally do here is we normally go through a design round, do a lot of feedback on design, then go into development and then go into content. Well, because we have the system, there's no reason to design all these things in a design app and then have to go back and then retrofit them into development. There's no reason to do that. So we're just going to go straight into development because we know what all these parts and pieces are going to look like sans the color scheme, which is one line of code to change it from one to the other. So we're just going to go ahead and start building out the building blocks.
State Election Board: We're so excited.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Which is not normal. This is a very odd process to be able to jump straight into coding, which is not standard, but that's okay. We're going to build out a lot of building blocks. We're going to build out Lego bricks, basically, and then we're going to use said LEGO bricks and we're going to basically put some content on pages using those bricks. So we'll need some time for that because normally this is the development phase and that's kind of once we. We kind of have a lull in our process during that time, just because we're doing a lot of behind the scenes work. We just happen to be starting that on day number two rather than day 45. So I would like to go ahead and get a meeting on the calendar to go over that with you guys in a few weeks from now. So it will be quiet for a few weeks, but that's just because we don't really need anything from you.
State Election Board: Real quick, Chris, you have in your notes to incorporate. The Just FOIA program.
Chris LaFay: Just. Just Voya.
State Election Board: It's called Just foia. That's gonna be for Open Records. Yeah, it's for Open Records. We just, we're about to purchase this program and if you look at the Secretary of State's website, they have it also on theirs. But we can send you the. Our link probably once we get all set up. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Is it just, is there's gonna be an external link to Voya?
State Election Board: Yes, but I didn't know if you needed to know about it. So you knew where to put it into the website.
Chris LaFay: If you just want to email me and let me know where it needs to go. Like we're literally just going to put on one of the pages, start Voya and it list links off to another.
State Election Board: Okay. It would be under open the open Records portion of the website.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Yeah, just send me an email about that. And that's all that it's going to be, is just on the open Records page.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: There will be an added link that says Start Voya. That's easy, no problem. Just send me an email.
State Election Board: And then also we have the. It's called wingswept. It's a cmts is a case management system.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: That'll also be a external link that people can go on if they want to file a complaint. This will be on the complaint page.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Yeah, send me that link as well too.
State Election Board: I thought we had a form they were going to fill out for a complaint. Hold on a second. Nope, it'll be, it'll be the CMTs because they'll, they'll have it set up filters. It'll filter through the complaint. So a lot of times people will do a complaint and it ends up they're complaining about something. Has nothing to do with. Right. With us. That's what we talked about with the form. But a CMT s. They have, they already created that. Yeah, they're. We're actually working with Victor, so we'll have to. Yes, but that, that will, that will be the filter within that program. So we'll have to have a certain link for that. Yes. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yep. Just let me know where that link goes. That's not a necessity for right now.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: A lot of the con, the same thing with pretty much like almost all these things are just going to be links to external sites. That's all. Fine. Those are, those are the types of details that are probably not going to be correct in the next time that we talk about all of this.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And these, adding these links is a five second thing.
State Election Board: Oh, I just. All right. I didn't want you to go through a lot of trouble on something else and be like, well, I wish I would have known that.
Chris LaFay: Oh, no, you're perfect. No, you're perfectly fine. Now if you were saying that these forms need to be embedded to where there's like a form and there's some code that we got to embed directly on the site and it has to talk to these other systems, that's a different story. But if we're just going to link out and be like, here's the link to go do it, that's easy.
State Election Board: I think that's the way it is. And I guess we better double check. I need to go on the web secretary, see how they have their just the just for you. Okay, so you're looking at your calendar for a date.
Chris LaFay: Yes. So let's see. So today is the 29th, Thursday, the 21st, about three weeks from now. How does that look for you all?
State Election Board: I won't be able to do that day.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: Can we do the 25th by chance or. No, 26th, because I think 25th is Memorial Day. Yeah, yeah.
Chris LaFay: Yes. I could do earlier to midday, so I could do sometime between.
State Election Board: Because that way. Yeah, 26 is good.
Chris LaFay: Okay, sometime between 11:30 and 2 on that day.
State Election Board: What do you do? Oh, oh, yeah. Because we'll be. Let's go ahead and do 11:30.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. Perfect. Why does my email not like you guys? Let's hear gmail.com. It doesn't, it doesn't. It doesn't pop up. Let's see here.
State Election Board: You just said that out loud.
Chris LaFay: You know that I know, right? Let's see here. This is the wrong tab. Times two, times three, fourth times a charm. There it is. Copy and paste. There we go. Add Google Meet. Awesome. All right, so 11:30 on Tuesday, May 26, we are going to look at together a relatively solid website for the election board. Won't be 100, but it'll be more than it'll be. It'll be a decent amount. There will be dummy content. There'll be some real content. Some fake content. It'll be a good visual for things and then we'll use that as a place to be. Like, what can we move around, what, what functionality is working, what isn't. It'll be a good jumping off point. So don't view that as a 100 locked and loaded thing. View that as kind of a. From an aesthetics perspective, fairly locked in, probably like 80 on the aesthetic side in the look and feel, but from a content and like moving blocks around, probably about 50%.
State Election Board: Also, the director Mills has a quote that he always says is election integrity is the heartbeat of freedom. Is that something we can incorporate somewhere?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, we can definitely do that.
State Election Board: Okay, Do I need to send you an email on that one or we can just talk about our next one?
Chris LaFay: We'll talk about the next one. It's also. That's also captured in the recording. So I'll make sure that that gets. That gets logged away as well.
State Election Board: All right, thank you so much. Do you need our state seal, like a JPEG or anything of a state of our seal?
Chris LaFay: I do have it from the emails, so I do have that already. And then if you have a higher rate resolution version of it, I will definitely take that.
State Election Board: Okay. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Wonderful. Excellent. So the next few weeks you will probably not hear from me as much and that is. Okay.
State Election Board: Gonna be busy.
Chris LaFay: Yes. So if you have any questions, by all means, reach out, let me know. But we're gonna be heads down getting some stuff built out and ready to go. So that basically the end, from the end of May through basically the end of June, will basically just be editing content and tweaking and moving blocks around and stuff like that. And basically the. The nuance part of the project is what it's going to be. It's going to be the. I want that there, I want this over there sort of thing. Some of those things will be in scope, some of them will be out of scope. We'll talk about those later. But. But yeah. Does that sound good?
State Election Board: It sounds great. Hey, listen, for the seal. Do you like a JPEG or.
Chris LaFay: JPEG is fine. If you have a png, that's also good too. We have a PNG send over whatever you got. Cinema. Like if you gotta. If you got a library of them, just send them all over.
State Election Board: All right. You got that hope? Or you let me do it? I do have it. Yes. All right, all right. I'll do it as soon as we get off.
Chris LaFay: Sounds like a plan. Well, thank you guys for the time today and a little bit extra time today. I appreciate it. Thank you. We're going to be off to the races.
State Election Board: Yes. Very exciting. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful rest of you guys.
Chris LaFay: Take care.
State Election Board: Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.