Public finance and authority to order, Madam Clerk.

May I have the roll call, please?

Councilman Coroban.

Here.

Kennedy.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Twiny.

Mayor McKeon?

Here.

Councilman Burns.

President.

Councilman.

Councilwoman Vandermark here.

Councilman Williams.

All present.

Madam Clerk, do we have any supplemental communications?

Yes.

We have one supplemental communication for closed session.

Number seven, one email received regarding conference with legal counsel existing litigation.

Paragraph one of subdivision D of Section 54956.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Do you have any public speakers for closed session?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Before we begin public comments, I'd like to announce that pursuant to new state legislation, Senate Bill 707.

Public comments will be accepted both in person and remotely via Zoom.

The city clerk will not read profane obscene or otherwise inappropriate Zoom display names or identifiers.

Instructions for providing comments on Zoom.

Can we found on the agenda cover page and on the city count city clerk webpage?

The city clerk will provide instructions for participating in public comment.

Madam Clerk, please call the public speakers for close session.

Josh Daniels, it is your turn to speak.

Please unmute yourself.

Your time begins now.

Thank you, members of the council.

My name is Josh Daniels.

I'm an election administrator in Utah.

It's nice to be with you as a guest.

I was born in Southern California and grew up there not far from Huntington Beach after I joined the Marines and spent some time in California.

I eventually moved to Utah where I found my way into election law and election administration.

And in our county, we administered some of the first ranked choice elections for cities in the state of Utah.

So I wanted to comment on your item uh about litigation related to the voting rights act case.

And just share with you my experience as an election administrator.

When I came into election administration, we administered elections using ranked choice voting for the first time.

So we had to implement new systems, new softwares.

And I just wanted to share some of our experiences doing that because I know that you're kind of between a rock and a hard place with this case where you may have to use a ranked choice election that can be uh potentially cumbersome and concerning.

And actually found that ranked choice voting wasn't as bad as many had told us.

Um as an elected Republican, I often was involved in administering those elections within the Republican Party and found it to be quite efficient for our purposes.

Voters found it easy to use.

Over 80% of voters that we polled after the ranked choice elections said that they liked the ranking process.

They were happy with it and they wanted to continue to use it.

One of the most interesting things that we found, though, and I think you're probably facing a similar situation when you have multiple candidates running for at-large seats, what they sometimes call like a block plurality election where you can choose three candidates or four candidates on your ballot.

We found that in our cities, we had a similar process.

Oftentimes voters won't use all of their votes.

They might not vote for up to three or up to four.

And this results in these sort of orphaned votes, under votes, or sometimes you call them bullet votes.

I noticed in your recent Huntington Beach elections in 2024, upwards of half the voters that participated in the election, just based on math, may not have used all three or four of their votes for outlarge council members.

One of the things that we found in Utah was that when we had cities that used rank choice voting, it reduced the instances of that.

Thank you, next speaker.