By Michael Feinstein. Inside/Outside. December 11, 2020 The 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many aspects of our lives and caused us to rethink how we live more than ever. It also impacted our local elections. In response to the need to social distance, the City’s decades-old requirement to obtain at least 100 nomination signatures from registered Santa Monica voters was lowered to 30, leading to an extraordinarily high number of candidates on the ballot for City Council. At the same time, Los Angeles County implemented new ballot designs under its Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) program for both vote-by-mail (VBM) and in-person, ballot-marking-device (BMD) ballots.