Options for ridding records of static electricity

1) Get rid of the felt mat, replace it with rubber or cork, there are many options.

2) Rinse your records under the tap, such that the record, the water stream running on to the record and the metal spout of the faucet makes ONE UNBROKEN electrical contact.

3) After 2 above, air dry your record with no cloth friction whatsoever.

Same massive and annoying static issues with my Rega P10 using their felt mat. I called them about other options and their technician advised me strongly to avoid using after market brands. He said the mat was specifically constructed for that TT to achieve optimal SQ and any other option could negatively impact sound quality.

I didn’t ask about solutions while using the existing mat and he didn’t offer up any so I called back today but the guy who answered said everyone is on holiday and to call back next Tuesday so I will do that and ask about double-sided tape like the Linn.

Meanwhile and regardless, Sokogear’s Rega dealer recommended the Washi Japanese paper by Teac. $30 on amazon and very cool looking. So Im currently using that - it’s 1mm thick vs. 3mm I think on the rega pad. Zero zilch nada static. Problem fixed 100 percent and i don’t notice any sonic differences, good or bad.

Here you go Lewm  https://thelastfactory.com/last-record-preservative/how-do-i-get-rid-of-static-on-vinyl-records-i-e-static-cling/ and Antinin. Lewm you may be right about the probe. I have a very fast meter with a very high impedance. Tonight I will connect the negative lead to house ground and see if I can measure it. 
Lewm I have to say you have excellent taste in loudspeakers. Have you tried subwoofers yet? What are you using to drive them?
The other theory as to how static forms on records is that the spinning record creates "friction" with air generating the charge. This is unlikely as the formation of a static electric charge requires "intimate" contact between two objects at opposite ends of the triboelectric series. Intimate contact such as the belt in a Van De Graaff generator or the stylus in the groove. You can not generate a static charge by waving your feet in the air but you can rubbing your feet on carpet with all your weight on them. Tonight I will put a neutral record on the turntable and let it spin while I check out the news and see if it develops a charge. 
In surfing the internet on this subject I have noted that there are a plethora of theories and opinions on the generation and management of static electricity on records. They can not all be right. Once you understand how the static electricity is formed all you need is logic to form a management plan. It is not rocket science and I am not a rocket scientist. Static is formed by the stylus rubbing the groove stealing the electrons from air. Here is a decent general article.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/static-science-how-well-do-different-materials-make-static-electricity/#:~:text=Static%20electricity%20can%20be%20created,to%20produce%20a%20static%20charge.
Antinin, great article with some aspects I disagree with. He  "oddly" dismisses the sorce of static as the rubbing stylus. As measured by who and under what circumstances.The Last Factory also disagrees with this analysis. There are a number of ways you can detect static. Take a neutral record and play it. You will notice a static charge develops. Something about playing a record developes static electricity. Are there circumstances that a charge won't develop? Perhaps high humidity, An arm or turntable grounded in a certain way, a conductive cartridge body that runs very close to the record. Obviously I do not know for sure. Tonight I am going to let a record just spin and see what happens. Put a neutral record in a paper sleeve and nothing will happen. But, if you put a charged record into a paper sleeve the paper will cling to the record and you will even get snapping and maybe even shocked as you pull it out. This is why people think that paper sleeves cause static under normal circumstances. If you take a paper sleeve and rub it briskly over the record you can develop a nice charge and ruin the record in the process.
This is an experiment I have done. My records come off the turntable discharged and the ones still in paper sleeves never develop a static charge.
He talks about dust and confirms most of what I have said. He "oddly" thinks you need a longer stylus shank to prevent clogging the stylus. Today we use very tiny short styli without any trouble what so ever. This improves tracking and frequency response by lowering the effective mass of the assembly.  Lint (large fiber) is easy to remove from a record It is the smaller particles and pollution that are the real problem in terms of record wear. Most people deal with this with various record cleaning devises and methods. I deal with it my not letting my records get dirty in the first place. I never put anything on my records. All I do is the conductive sweep arm and a dust cover.
 

Antinn, another great old article. I can only calculate the PSI the vinyl is subjected to under static conditions which I probably should have mentioned. Playing a record is not a static process (no pun intended) it is a dynamic one with the stylus wiggling all over the place subjecting the vinyl to variations in pressure I certainly have no way of determining. I was Just trying to give everyone the basic picture that the pressure is considerable, in the order of tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. The article mention 10 X 10 to the forth power. That would be 100,000 PSI. But their contact patches were much smaller.
This article was written when we were still using only spherical styli. He mentions 10 gram VTF! Obviously we have advanced consideraby since then. Our styli are tiny in comparison and undoubtedly have a much higher polish. The contact patch with our special shapes is much higher lowering the PSI the vinyl is subjected to and increasing the frequency response to as high as 100 kHz. 30,000 PSI is certainly in the ballpark.
Anyway, thanx for pulling up these articles. They are fun to read given their age and most of these concepts remain true to this day.

Mijostyn, Antinn, and anyone else anal enough to be interested, here is the Shure Corporation website where they post pdf files on many questions that arise with respect to playing LPs:https://service.shure.com/Service/s/article/high-fidelity-phonograph-cartridge-technical-seminar?lan...I call your attention to the paper on static charge.  They describe many interesting experiments in some detail and also mention that they found no evidence that friction between the diamond stylus tip and the groove is an important cause of static charge build-up.  I agree it would be more forceful if they had mentioned how they came to that conclusion.
Mijo, you wrote above, "The other theory as to how static forms on records is that the spinning record creates "friction" with air generating the charge."  That is exactly one hypothesis that I already put forward. (See any of 3 posts above.) I don't know if it's valid any more than you do.  One recent search led me to a statement that air per se is probably not such a good electron donor, but that dust particles and/or moisture in air may confer a charge to a good electron acceptor, like vinyl.  If so, we are back to your obsession with dust, and you have one more reason to obsess.
I drive the Sound Labs with a pair of Atma-sphere OTL amplifiers that started life as "MA-240s", a model that was discontinued in the late 90s.  It originally used six 6C33C triodes as output tubes, but I have modified mine to use four 7241 triodes, which collectively produce the same amount of power (~100W into 16 ohms, maybe).  I have also built my amps from parts supplied by Atma-sphere such that each tube has its own driver tube.  This enables me to set bias separately on each tube, so there is no single tube hogging current and doing most of the work.  Many other tweaks in the circuit as well.  The Sound Lab speakers are tweaked in that I removed all the passive crossover parts and drive the audio step-up transformers (two of them in the SLs, one for bass and one for treble) in parallel directly from the OTLs.  This dramatically increased both the speaker impedance (measured at several frequencies from 20Hz to 10kHz) and the efficiency of the speaker. No subwoofer used so far.

The Beveridge speakers are direct-driven by the Beveridge direct-drive amplifiers I described earlier.  The 2SWs require a woofer as they are designed to go down to ~100Hz.  For woofers, I use a pair of transmission lines I built myself when I was an intern, nearly 50 years ago.  I modeled them after the TL woofer section of the IMF Monitor speakers. They incorporate KEF B139 woofers that are extremely low in distortion but do give up a bit of the very extreme low bass as a trade-off.  The woofers are driven separately from a Threshold amplifier that gets signal from a Dahlquist electronic crossover.  The 2SW has its own built-in electronic hi-pass filter, and I drive that directly.

That experiment you mention, if you intend to measure bias V on an ESL while grounding your meter to house ground and touching your HV probe to a stator (?), sounds possibly dangerous.  I myself would not do it.  For under $100 you can get a decent electrostatic charge meter that should allow measurement of the charge without anything touching anything, with ground to the speaker.