POSITION STATEMENT Re: Marion County Board of Elections November 8, 2018 Tie Vote on Motion to Terminate Director John Meyer Marion County Board of Elections Board Members, Thomas A. Frericks and Lynn Zucker submit the following position statement to the Secretary of State regarding the November 8, 2018 tie vote on Motion to terminate Director John Meyer. FACTUAL BACKGROUND: John Meyer has been the Director of the Marion County Board of Elections since January 20, 2015. During his tenure he has proven himself to be knowledgeable in the rules and regulations of Ohio election administration. He is a leader, a hard hands-on worker. He is the glue that holds the office together and functioning, ‘The Deputy Director was terminated at the November 8, 2018 meeting by a 3 to 1 vote of the Board. The Deputy Director had proven herself to be incompetent to fulfil a number of the duties of the position and in recent months her performance seriously deteriorated. We believe the motion and vote to terminate Mr. Meyer was merely made as political cover for supporting the termination of the Deputy Director as there was no information or documentation presented at the meeting to form a basis for termination. PROCEDURAL ISSUE: Preliminarily we respectfully state our position that we do not believe this tie vote is a proper matter for submission to the Secretary of State to break the tie vote. Some motions require the consensus of at least 3 board members to pass; so that a tie vote on such a motion means that the motion fails by operation of law. Statutorily the affirmative vote of at least 3 board members is required for certain actions to be taken. Pursuant to ORC Section 3501.11 the powers of the Board of Elections shall be exercised by a majority vote. Pursuant to the Ohio Revised Code the Director is elected to serve at the pleasure of the board for a two year term. Thus, statutorily in order to terminate a Director during his or her two year term the board must determine by a majority vote to terminate. Furthermore, the matter as to whether a Director is to be terminated during his or her two year term is a matter that relates to the internal operations of the Board and does not involve issues of substantive election law (see Ohio Election Official Manual Chapter 2, Page 2-41). For the foregoing reasons we do not believe that this tie vote is a proper matter for submission to the Secretary of State to break the tie. SUBSTANTIVE ISSUE: At the November 8, 2018 meeting no board member articulated any meritorious justification for the termination of Mr. Meyer. Rather, the motion to terminate Mr. Meyer was made as political cover by the Democrat board member who voted with the two iRepublican board members in favor of the termination of the Deputy Director. There is no justification in the record for the termination of Mr. Meyer. As Director of the Marion County Board of Elections over the past four years, Mr. Meyer has continually worked to make office operations more efficient and accessible to the general public, to enhance the productivity and morale of the office staff, and ensure accuracy in operations while minimizing costs. Mr. Meyer has created, maintained, and continues to build a library of process documentation to make office operations consistent and aligned with the mandates of the Election Official Manual and Ohio Revised Code. The first process document was our Lockdown Policy that specifies how the office will be secured during active election cycles and ensures no vote or ballot related materials can be accessed without proper counter party personnel present. The second process document was an Election Night Operations process and diagram that reduced voted material intake times from 5 to 6 minutes per returning car to less than 60 seconds and logs information on the returning materials. The most impactful process document has been the Registration Processing document that contains some 65 pages of detailed process instructions on maintaining voter registrations throughout their lifecycle including but not limited to New / Changed registrations, merge processes, SOS portal workflows, NCOA / Supplemental processing, post-election activities, and NVRA compliance. There are several process documents in various stages of draft form for Absentee processing, Provisional processing, Ballot creation and proofing, Campaign Finance auditing, and an office specific Retention Policy naming storage methods and locations of both electronic and paper records. During the production of these process documents Mr. Meyer combined interview-based involvement of the staff along with their approval of finished documents once EOH / ORC compliance was verified, These documents have helped train new and part time staff members, increased work accuracy, and reduced registration processing times by half. Despite objection from our former Deputy Director Mr. Meyer has tried to improve office operations transparency by posting more information on our web site. He sought and obtained board approval for purchasing the Triad Campaign Finance and Issues & Questions modules so that these records can both be kept and organized electronically and made accessible via our web site. The board recently approved posting of approved meeting minutes and recordings on the web site which will be completed after the current election cycle. Mr. Meyer has improved office morale by giving the staff a much more active voice in day to day operations and in improving office efficiency. He instituted an “Agile Management” methodology where a brief daily morning meeting is used to set the office work priorities, This meeting provides open communications on office work status’, staff member work assignments, and working cooperatively with the staff to make sure they have the tools needed to complete the work while understanding the demands on the office so they can take an active part in ensuring the most important work is done first. The staff has been empowered to help create office processes via the interactive and 2iterative documentation creation processes he has instituted. Their input is the primary tool in creating processes, then it is aligned with the dictates of Chapter 3601 of the Revised Code and the Election Official Manual, and the final result are processes the staff understand, helped draft, approved the final version of and help to maintain when changes are needed. A good example of this shift in efficiency and morale is the early voting counter operations where we are serving voters at a higher speed than ever before and most are leaving the office smiling and surprised that early voting happens so quickly, The staff enjoys the interaction with the public and, although hectic at times, enjoys the work while striving to provide good service to our customers. Mr. Meyer has reduced office operating costs through a number of methods. Office operations have been made more efficient via enhanced use of technology and simplified and well documented processes. This results in less staff time required to maintain the office workload. All work-related files are, by policy, kept on our central server (not specific workstations) so the files can be accessed by staff member and are backed up nightly. The files for each election are centralized around a common set of subfolders and content for each election. Annual and periodic reports made to the Secretary of State have a folder set outside the elections folders. Finally, all files, such as personnel records, are kept in root level file structures so that by simply reviewing the root level folders information can be found and retrieved from any workstation by authorized staff members. Office supplies costs have been minimized by standardizing our printer fleet so a single type of toner cartridge and other printer repair items can be used throughout the office. By strategically purchasing and dedicating printers to specific uses, the office efficiency at the counter and other operations has been increased. New workstations were purchased and configured by Mr. Meyer so that our workstations are reliable and consistently configured so any staff member can utilize any workstation for common operations. Our disaster recovery plan is much more comprehensive. For instance, Mr. Meyer converted the main server backups from multiple USB jump drives to an incremental web backup that uses multiple, regional sites to ensure data integrity and office operations can be restored in hours or days instead of weeks using the previous methods \Mr. Meyer is highly knowledgeable and skilled in the area of IT and through the use of his knowledge and expertise we have been able to eliminate the reliance and need for a large amount of third party vendor support for various election operations which now saves our county over $25,000.00 in third party vendor contracts each year. Mr. Meyer has constructively influenced other county boards of election in their strategic decisions regarding new equipment and operations. The electronic pollbook competitive matrix he produced in 2015 was requested and used by 18 other counties in their purchase decisions. He has served on the Secretary of State's committee on SB135 as one of four elections’ officials statewide that helped influence how the funding for new voting equipment would be allocated to county boards. He has worked with Delaware, Union, and Morrow counties on helping them with upcoming purchasing decisions for new