By Bob Richard

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The November 15 meeting was attended by five members and an observer
from the Marin County Libertarian Party. Most of the meeting was
devoted to two detailed discussions:

*** Whether to continue our existing strategy of trying for a Board of
Supervisors resolution on SB 596 before January. We discussed getting
endorsements, and the importance of having endorsements in hand when
approaching office holders. This was contrasted with the strategy this
fall (approaching the Board of Supervisors first instead of focusing on
documenting support in the community), which was dictated by the
timeline of SB 596. We decided to continue trying to get appointments
with members of the Board of Supervisors at the earliest possible date,
and to continue pushing both for SB 596 (in case it stays alive in
January) and for general language supporting future legislation.

*** Preparation for our November 17 meeting with Registrar of Voters
Michael Smith. One of his pressing issues is manual counting of
ballots. A quick example was constructed. We agreed to prepare a
slightly larger set of sample ballots and a computer dataset for a
demonstration of the manual tally, with matching computer results from
pSTV software.

Michael made a presentation to a Democrats for America (DFA) meeting on
November 1, in which he covered the nuts and bolts of election
administration, mentioned that there is now a group in Marin promoting
IRV, asked if anyone present was involved in it, and said that Marin
should be considering IRV in "a year or two from now".