 Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm so glad to see you all here. My name is Caitlin Penya. I'm the Director of Programs and Operations for the Center for Election Science. Just in case you're here, and this is your first introduction to the Center for Election Science, we are a nonpartisan non-profit and we study and advocate for better voting methods. So the main voting method that we advocate for is called approval voting and it allows you to vote for as many candidates as you like and then they candidate with the most votes wins. In 2018, we helped get approval voting implemented in Fargo, North Dakota, the first city in the U.S. to use it and now we're working with folks in St. Louis, Missouri to help them get it implemented there. They just got their initiative on the ballot here a couple weeks ago and Jeremy, who I'm about to introduce from OpenPrimaries, his organization is also working with us there in St. Louis because they're going to be implementing an OpenPrimary. So we'll get into all of that here in a few minutes but that's who I am and who the Center for Election Science is. And so now I'd like to introduce Jeremy Gruber. He is the Senior Vice President of OpenPrimaries, which is an educational and advocacy organization focused on opening up electoral systems. He's worked on reform efforts across the country, including the successful campaign to adopt OpenPrimaries in Colorado in 2016. Before that, he spent 20 years as a civil rights attorney with various organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, and he's helped author and passed dozens of state privacy and non-discrimination laws. He's testified before Congress, federal agencies, and state legislatures is regularly featured in the media and he's the author of multiple books and articles. So I'm super excited that we have Jeremy here with us to share his expertise and help us understand what his organization OpenPrimaries does and why they think this is an important reform. So Jeremy, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Caitlin. Hi, everybody. All right. Before I get into it, I just I want to give you all on here listening a quick overview of how this will go. So I'll interview Jeremy with I have some questions of my own and then we'll turn it over to you guys for a Q&A portion. Right now I have all of you muted just so we don't have any confusion. And so what we'll do is if you have a question, you can click on the participants button at the bottom of the screen and you should see the participants come up on the side and then you'll hover over yourself and you can click you can click a raise raise my hand option. And so when we get to that Q&A portion, you can do that raise my hand and I'll unmute you once it's your turn. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, you're welcome to also just write your write your questions in the chat. But without further ado, I'll we'll go ahead and get this kicked off. So Jeremy, I'm so glad that you're here with us just just to start things out. How are you doing right now? I know that everybody is kind of dealing with a lot in the midst of this pandemic. So I hope all's well on your end. We are well. We're in New York City. So that's a bit more challenging than maybe some folks have it. But but we're doing fine. And I seem to be managing two teenage sons who haven't killed each other yet. So I count that as a big way. Yeah, that's a huge way. I'm lucky enough to just be stuck with my husband and my dog. I don't have to deal with kids and all of the shenanigans that they can cause when you're stuck inside for a long time. So I feel pretty fortunate to. Yeah, so just to start off then. So the mission of open primaries, you say is to open up electoral systems. So can you give everybody an idea of what that means? If they're new to hearing about your organization, you know, what does your work look like? What what are the reforms you're working on? Sure. So the work at open primaries is really in response to a fundamental problem in our electoral system. And that is the issue of closed primaries. Why that's a problem? So 100 years ago, primaries were created actually as an important reform. And they were, for many years, an important reform. They took the selection of candidates that would go on to the general election out of the hands of the special interests and the party leaders and put it in the hands of voters. And at the time, those revoters are the two major parties because most voters were members of the two major parties. So the system worked actually pretty well for quite a number of years. The reason why that system has broken down and why our organization was created is because we're seeing a fundamental realignment of political affiliation in this country. Whereas 20 years ago, most people were members of one of the two major parties. Today, that's just simply not the case. In most states, independent voters are anywhere between 20 and 55% of registered voters today. And that number is only increasing in just a few short years. It's been predicted that independent voters, meaning voters who are not members of a party, will be the second largest group of voters in most states and the largest group of voters in a handful. They're already the largest group of voters in Alaska. They'll be the largest group of voters in Oregon, less than a year. And they are by far the fastest growing group of voters in the country. So the fundamental question is, what do we do with an election system that doesn't let them vote? Because our primary elections in a closed system are designed to only let party members vote. So when you only let party members vote and party members are an increasing minority of registered voters, you start to see two fundamental problems. The first, and perhaps the most striking is just simply undemocratic elections. Voters who can't participate in publicly funded elections. The primaries are publicly funded elections. And secondly, when you have a system where only a handful of the hyperpartisans are voting in often the most important elections, the primaries, you create a political culture where the politicians know that in order to be elected and stay in office, they only have to listen to those voters. They only have to be responsive to those voters. So you see a fundamental breakdown in the political culture and in the responsiveness of politicians to represent their whole district rather than just a handful of voters. Thanks so much for explaining that. I think that so many people don't realize how many independence we do have in this country and how many people are not able to vote in primaries due to there being so many closed primaries across the country, right? Sure. And you know, just a quick number to give you some context. In 2016, for example, 26, over 26 million registered voters were shut out of the presidential primaries that resulted in the selection of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. That's almost as many voters as voted for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the primaries. So if you look at how dramatically you get a skewed result in candidate selection and in candidate responsiveness, when you only let a handful of voters vote, it's pretty striking. And it's certainly by far the largest act of voter suppression in the country today. And so one thing I'm curious about because I saw, you know, we were posting about this on Facebook and some critiques were coming in from people saying, well, you know, the primaries are really for the party to elect their nominee. So people outside the party shouldn't be able to vote in a party primary. I'm sure you guys get that question a lot or that concern. What's your thoughts there? Well, a few thoughts. I think fundamentally it's just a bait and switch. And the reason why is because primaries are publicly funded. Fundamentally, I think that is the one aspect that the parties have never been able to overcome in their arguments. These are publicly funded elections. And if you imagine a voter and their experience going into a primary election versus a general election, it's identical. You walk into the same public building, you use the same voting machines, same poll workers. It's all administered by the county election boards and the secretary of state and funded by the taxpayers. The experience to the voter is the same. The only difference we have right now is a situation where political parties, which are private entities, are allowed to be the gatekeepers of public elections in the primary and are simply actors in the general election. We feel and I think it's increasingly becoming public, public supporters increasingly building towards the idea that if these are going to be publicly funded elections, then we need to let all voters vote in them. It's really that simple. That's what democracy is about. And fundamentally, why are these the parties elections in the first place if we're paying for them? These are the first rounds of elections and primaries increasingly critically important. And we can talk about why that is in a second, but they're increasingly critically important. They're not just where the candidates that go into the general election are decided upon. It's where the entire policy agenda agenda is created. It's where a lot of the decisions are made in terms of what will become before voters in terms of the choices they have in November. And finally, it's often the election that matters in terms of voter competition. And maybe we can talk about that because voter competition and primary competition is an important reason why primaries are so important today. What people don't quite realize, because it's really not talked about too much, is that we're in a 20 year decline of competition in our general elections. In America today, in state and federal elections, 45%, 45% of general election races see candidates running uncontested. That means as you as a voter going to vote in a general election, you only have one person on the ballot. In 85% of general election races, they're considered uncompetitive, meaning that after the election, the difference in terms of the winning candidate versus the second runner up candidate is often 10% or more. So there really isn't much competition in American general elections today. Where is the real competition in the primaries? That's really where the competition is. And so when you see voters shut out of those elections, of publicly funded elections, it's really having a dramatic effect on our country. Now, there's a lot of different forms of open primaries, and maybe we can get into that. Fundamentally, we don't believe they're the party's primaries. We believe these are the people's primaries. And everybody should be able to vote. If the state is funding it, the state should run it. And we believe everyone should participate. That's simple. Yeah, I think the point that primaries are paid for by taxpayers. And if you are a taxpayer, but then you're not able to access an election just because you don't subscribe to one of the parties, that seems like fundamentally like discrimination in some way, right? Well, it is. And just imagine if this were reversed. I mean, just imagine if a Democrat were told that they had to register with the Republican Party in order to vote in the primaries. Or a Republican was told that they had to register with the Democratic Party in order to vote in the primaries. There would be chaos in the streets that people, why should I be forced to join a private political association whose platform I don't subscribe to? Well, that's what we're asking independence to do in closed primary states. We're telling them, you have to join a private association you don't necessarily agree with in order to vote in a public election. It's absolutely antithetical to our democratic system. And it's the very encapsulation of one of our founding principles, which is no taxation without representation. Yeah, that's a great point. And so I know that you mentioned that there's different forms of open primaries. So can you take us through kind of the different forms of open primaries and the different ways primaries are set up currently in states across the country? Sure. So there's three general types of open primaries. And I say general because every state's a little different. And every state utilizes their the stat have open primaries don't necessarily utilize those open primaries in every race. So you see a huge patchwork even in states that have some form of open primary. But there are three fundamental types. There are basically two types of open primaries that are partisan. So meaning that you as an independent voter can choose a Republican ballot or a Democratic ballot in a partisan registration state that has open primaries. Now you're not allowed to go back and forth. You as an independent pick one of those two ballots. Republicans stay in their lane, they get their ballot. Democrats stay in their lane, they get in their ballot. But you as a registered unaffiliated voter or independent voter get to pick one of the two, and then you have that ballot to make your selections. About 10 states use that form of open primary. Then there are states that also have partisan primaries, but they have a different type of voter registration status called nonpartisan. So in those states, which are primarily but not exclusively in the South, you don't register as a Democrat or a Republican or a green or a libertarian, you register as a voter. Shocking, I know you register as a voter and you pick a ballot the same way you would in a partisan state. But in this case, because you are not a member of a party, you may think of yourself as a Democrat and an independent, a Republican, a libertarian, a green, but you are not registered as any of those. And therefore you get to pick one of the two major party ballots and vote that ballot line. Those are the two forms of what I would call partisan open primary. And then 20 states use a form have nonpartisan registration and open primaries. And then there is what I would call sort of the newer form of open primary, which is top two nonpartisan primaries. Now I say newer, specifically about the state level, because only three states use top two nonpartisan primaries, California, Washington, and Nebraska. In those states, there's no Republican primary and no Democrat primary. There's one public primary. All the candidates are on the ballot with their political affiliation. All the voters vote and the top two candidates go on to the general election. Now I say that's new because it is new. Well, Nebraska's actually had that system for 80 years, but California and Washington only adopted it about 10 years ago. However, it's not new at the municipal level. We've all voted in nonpartisan top two primaries, and that's because nonpartisan top two primaries are the de facto form of primary in municipal races. So municipal elections around the country, 90% of cities use nonpartisan top two primaries, 90%. 24 out of the 30 largest cities in the country use nonpartisan top two primaries. It's the de facto form of primary for that form of government. So in top two primaries, what makes them very different is the parties don't run the primaries anymore. The primaries are run by the state the same as the general election, and they are not to choose candidates. They are to choose front runners to go on to the general election. So those are the general forms. But like I said, there's a lot of gradation between those state to state. Yeah, that's helpful. I know that we've been doing a lot of research on our end into state and city election laws, and it is a labyrinth in and of itself. Chris, he's on the call, our director of campaigns and advocacy, and I know that he's been dealing with a lot of that. And so I can only imagine that there's, you know, even further details involved with the ways that primaries might be set up too. So you all at Open Primaries, do you prefer one type of Open Primary over another, or do you kind of base your approach on the particular state and what their laws look like? You know, we really base our approach on two fundamental things. One is what's possible in a particular state, and two, what do the people want? We're very much grounded, and part of the reason I know we're going to talk a little more about St. Louis Approves, one of the reason why we're big fans of St. Louis Approves is because it's so grounded in what the local community wants to do, and it's a response to electoral issues that the local community has faced for years and want to reform. That's, at its very core, our approach to reform. And so when we look at a state, we don't actually look at states and decide what we want to do in a state. We have people who come to us from different states saying, we want to do something in this state. This is what we want to do. How can you help us? And we're all in to help on any form of Open Primary, because in the end, Open Primaries, it's very basic, whether it's top two, or whether it's one of the forms of partisan Open Primaries is about letting all voters vote. That's a civil rights issue. It's not just a reform issue. It's a civil rights issue. It's a voting rights issue. And fundamentally, if we can let the largest group of voters in the country vote, the rest of the details will follow from that. I think that's a great point. And I love that that's the way you guys go about this. You're not trying to go in and force something on other people. People are coming to you and saying, hey, we want to be enfranchised. We want to be able to vote. This is the context in our community. Help us resolve this, right? Yeah. And let's be honest. There's no such thing as a one size fit all reform. Absolutely. Reform has to be grounded in the needs of the particular community. And now that may, there may be a lot of commonalities among communities around the country. But you can't skip that part of the process. You can't helicopter in saying, I know the perfect reform and it doesn't really matter the specifics on the ground. We know this reform is a good reform. It'll make your life better. We've seen situations where that's simply not the case. And even if you were able to enact it, if the people aren't asking for it and the people haven't worked for it, how long is that reform really going to last? And how deep is the change that reform is going to create? In the end, any particular reform is only as good as the people who believe in it and continue to work for it even after it's enacted. Yeah, that's a great point. And I mean, we can transition into talking a little bit about St. Louis and their situation there. But kind of going off what you're talking about about community, that's how when we were able to help the citizens in Fargo implement approval voting in 2018, it was the same thing. Somebody from Fargo came to us, they were looking for ways that they could improve their elections. So they were researching different voting methods. And based on their research and some of the guidance and resources we gave them, they said, hey, approval voting looks like it's going to be the best solution for our city. And so they're implementing it for their general election. Now, in St. Louis, it's a little bit of a different situation. So they started out the same thing. They were having all of these elections where the candidates were splitting the vote. And because of the political context in St. Louis, where it's a majority Democrat city, really the election is decided in the primary, right? Because it's almost always a Democrat wins in the general. And so you have these large slates of Democrats in the primary who are just splitting the vote like crazy. And so you get a winner who was supported by 37% of the people who voted in the primary. They go on and they're the de facto winner of the general. So citizens in St. Louis were like, this is crazy. We need someone who is going to have broad support among the public. So what can we do? They started looking into different voting methods, different ways to set up their elections. And just like you said, they have different needs than what Fargo had. And so they were looking at a ranked choice voting. They were looking at approval voting. Part of the reason that they went with approval voting was that their city just didn't have the funding to be able to upgrade their voting machines. So for some cities, ranked choice voting might be a good option. For St. Louis, it wouldn't work just because of the practicality of it. And so then they also, oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, and one of the reasons why I think open primaries is such an important reform is because it works so well with other reforms. Yes, that's what I was going to mention. Open primaries is fundamentally about who can vote, not about how they vote, which is why it works so well with a lot of other reforms that focus on how people vote. And fundamentally, I don't think any reform, and certainly not open primaries, is a panacea. But our view, of course, with open primaries is that no reform is as good as it will be unless every voter has the opportunity to take advantage of it. And that's why we think open primaries has worked so well. That's why we're really excited about this project with approval voting in St. Louis, because we think that'll really offer exactly what address a lot of the problems that folks in St. Louis are facing right now. Yeah, so why don't you go ahead then and explain how you got involved in the project in St. Louis and what that looks like, what the initiative looks like, and how open primaries is involved? Well, I mean, you probably could talk more about approval voting than I could. Yeah, that's okay. I really guess so. A lot of approval voting. But I can tell you this. St. Louis, like I said before, the de facto form of a municipal primary is a top two open primary, a nonpartisan primary. And that's why so many other reforms have actually been so successful early on at the municipal level, because they've actually been building upon a foundation of nonpartisan elections. That's not the case in St. Louis. St. Louis is one of the outlier major cities that still has partisan elections. Most of the major cities that have partisan elections tend to be out east, sort of the old party machinery cities like New York and Philadelphia. But St. Louis has that same tradition. And in a city that's like the city I live in, New York City, that's so dominated by one party, in this case, the Democratic Party in both cases, an election system that doesn't let everyone vote really forces voters who are not part of the major party into a situation where their vote doesn't count at all. And nonpartisan elections and approval voting, I think, together really helped change that and create a much more competitive environment. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that we talk about a bit too on our end is that competition aspect, right? Because so often candidates go into races and there's kind of already somebody who is expected to win and there's really not much competition. But if we're able to implement some reforms like open primaries or approval voting or other voting methods, it can really help new candidates come into races and kind of shake things up a little bit and be able to bring forth new ideas, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't think people sometimes appreciate just how controlled cities that are dominated, the elections and cities that are dominated by one party really are. I like I said, I'm in New York City. The member of this, my member of the state assembly, which is actually a pretty progressive reform minded person. He was select, there was an open seat, the party put him in there to run for his seat. He ran unopposed, he ran with minor competition in the primary, ran unopposed in the general election. And in order to get elected and stay in office, he spends his time during election season. Once or twice a week, he stands out on the subway platform and he talks to people and hands out flyers. That's all he has to do to get elected. And he's a shoe in. And the party knows that when another seat above him opens up, he'll get the nod to move into that seat. And somebody in the party who's in waiting will get the nod for his seat. And that's just how it works in a lot of these controlled party dominated cities. That doesn't serve anybody well, including the party that's dominating. Lack of competition is a very healthy part of our democracy. Cities and states that don't have political competition have far greater rates of corruption, have far stronger interference by special interests. And in a political class, that is completely unmoored from the electorate. Unable and unwilling to even respond to even a majority of the electorate's interests. And that's really where St. Louis has gotten to. This is a city that has been dominated by civil unrest for years. Ferguson is just outside the city limits. This is a city that's been dominated by a lot of unrest. There is a lot of disempowered people politically in the city of St. Louis. And there's a lot of desire among the people of St. Louis to retake the political power away from the parties and special interests and entities that are controlling it at their expense. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I know that one of the leaders that STL approves, his name is Rasheen Aldridge. He's now just got elected as a state rep. But he's mentioned that as well. You know, there's such high rates of poverty, high rates of gun violence. And they just keep seeing this happening year after year after year, no matter who's elected, no matter who gets that seat. And so they really need something to help shake that up and get new ideas and new leaders and people who are supported by, you know, a broad coalition among the public, right? To be able to push through real reforms rather than just kind of seeing the same cycles occur over and over again. Absolutely. Absolutely. So with open primaries, I know that you guys are working in several states across the country. And then you're also part of the effort in St. Louis. What are some of the various challenges that you are coming across in advancing this reform? Well, I think there's probably one fundamental challenge. You know, we like to say to open primaries, we're the one reform that unites the political parties. The one reform. Unfortunately, it's in opposition. But we know we're on the right track when both parties, at least the insiders of both parties, increasingly, it's actually not the party faithful, but it's the insiders of both parties that oppose opening the system up. You know, when you're elected in a system and you benefit from that system, it's very hard to expect those that class of people to change the system. But increasingly, Americans are starting to become so disgusted with politics as usual. And also so cognizant of the rise of independent voters. You know, like I said, independent voters used to be a small minority of voters. It was easy to ignore them. You may not even know anybody who was an independent voter. Today, they're the largest group of voters in the country. And when you have a political system that's oriented against the largest group of voters in the country, you're going to start to see cracks all over the place. And we're seeing those cracks. And you're going to now know people who are independent voters, your friends, your family, people you work with. So it's a lot harder. It's a lot harder and it's become increasingly harder for the political insiders to sort of escape some of these truths. And so you're starting to see, you know, a lot more actually attacks on the open primary issue when they used to just really ignore it. But that just means we're on the right track. And, you know, fundamentally changing the system, as I know, you know, at CES is a long-term strategy. It doesn't come easy. You count your victories when you have them and you know you're building towards something long-term. We've had some significant successes like in Colorado. And we have a number of really important campaigns on the ballot just this year, like in Florida. We're a top two initiative. It's going to be on the ballot this November in Florida. We just passed a review by the Florida Supreme Court. We will be on the ballot. It's called All Voters Vote Measure 3. And it'll be on the ballot in Florida, one of the largest states and most important states politically in the country. So we're making some headway. Yeah, that's awesome. Super exciting. Before I transition to let some folks ask questions, because I'm already seeing a few come into the chat, if people are interested in, you know, trying to advance this in their state or if they happen to be one of the few 10% of cities that don't have open primaries, what would you suggest that they do? How can they get involved? Well, they can certainly go to our website at openprimaries.org. And, you know, if you're really interested in being an activist, you can email me directly. I'm Jay Gruber at openprimaries.org. I'm happy to reach out to me directly. I'll respond. And we'll try to help you make something happen. Awesome. Okay, well, I already see there's a few questions in the chat. If you'd like to ask Jeremy a question allowed, then you can click on the participants button at the bottom of the screen. And then there should be a little raise hand feature. If you don't see it, just type into the chat and say raise hand. We've had people doing that too. So that's fine. So I'll give you guys a chance to raise your hands. But first we've got a question from Sean Griffiths. Hi, Sean. Good to see you. He says, can you discuss the legal efforts that have happened recently or cases going on right now that could affect the way voting rights are viewed in primaries to make it easier to pass and or maintain open primaries? Sure. So, you know, we've been developing some legal efforts over the last few years. You know, most of the focus of reform has always been in two areas, passing legislation or passing ballot initiatives. Both are difficult and expensive and hard to predict. Litigation is a form of reform that has been used critically in other areas of change and other movements for change, whether it be the civil rights movement or the environmental movement on down. It's been less used in the political reform movement. That's something we're hoping to change. So we've been developing, we did bring some litigation in New Mexico, which we've been developing based upon state constitution's anti-donation clause. Most states, not all, but most states have what are called anti-donation clauses. They say that public funds cannot be used for private purposes, right? Public funds of the state can't be used for private entities. Well, one of the gifts the political parties have made a point of doing over the last number of years is saying over and over again, both publicly and in various court decisions, that they are private parties. They can't be forced to do this and they can't be forced to do that because they are private parties and they have a freedom of, a First Amendment freedom of association, right? Well, if that's true, and if they are private associations, then why are why are primaries publicly funded? And they allowed to be the gatekeepers of those publicly funded elections. So we brought a case in New Mexico. We weren't able to take that case all the way for various reasons, largely having to do with our political partners. But we're actually in the middle of organizing a two-front case right now that I can't go too deep into, but that would bring a version of the case that we brought in New Mexico challenging the anti-donation clause of state constitutions, but also a First Amendment challenge. Trying to take the party's own arguments and use them against them if the parties are private associations and they can't be forced to do things. Well, what about voters? Why should voters be forced to associate with a party in order to vote in a in a closed primary? What about voters' freedom of association or freedom not to associate? There is a growing class of cases that the federal courts and the Supreme Court have worked on looking at forced association. And so we're looking at developing that into potential federal litigation as well. Those are the two general areas we're looking at where we haven't gotten to the stage of bringing any cases yet. But we do certainly think that litigation is an important front. Certainly at this particular political time during that when we're in the middle of a pandemic, when ballot initiatives and working with legislatures is going to become incredibly difficult, litigation can and should be a more frequently used weapon in our arsenal and we're trying to do just that. Super interesting. It sounds like you've got a lot of inroads there potentially. Okay, I see the only person so far who has their hand raised is one of our board members, Michael Ravinsky. So Michael, I've just on mute video. Well, yep, there it goes. You can ask your question. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, we hear you. Great. Thank you, Jeremy, for this is all really informative. I have a question about one solution that you didn't mention is potentially, is it possible to not publicly fund primaries if it were possible to just say that there is a general election and that is the only election and that's funded by taxpayers and if individuals choose to associate in private and choose someone to say that we're part of a political party and this is who we support, that's a private affair. Is that a potential solution that you think would be good and are there, if so, would there be any impediments to that? I would not, I'd be not particularly favorably inclined for two general reasons. First and foremost and probably the most importantly, primaries aren't going anywhere. We've been operating in this system with primaries now for many, many years and we can talk about some of the various types of fundamental changes to how our elections are structured that might be better. The chances of enacting those types of changes and the idea that we would get rid of primaries in our lifetime, I don't think it's possible and I don't think it's likely. Our focus has been on what is possible under the CERN system but even if it were easier to get rid of primaries, I'm still not sure I'm convinced it'd be a good idea and the reason why is because if you look at the way elections work in this country and you look at what happens running up to the primary and what happens after the primary, there's a lot of different changes that are going on. A lot of things happen in the primary and then things change after the primary. There's a whole evolution of the political conversation and a whole evolution of the way candidates talk and react that go on because of the process that you have between sort of a first round of elections and a second round of elections. I'm not convinced that taking away that first round of elections, taking away that sort of evolutionary prospect where voters get to work towards winnowing the field and then get to work towards a final election, that all the choices that come to voters and all the options and evolutions that go through the electoral process over the course of that two-election process, whether getting rid of the first one is actually in the voters' best interests and whether they might lose out on a lot of the changes and different ways of thinking that evolve over time between a winnowing election and a general election. Thanks. Thanks, Michael. All right. I'm going to go back to the chat here. We've got a question from Colin Weaver. He asked, what do you mean by independence? Registered voters that are not registered Democrats or Republicans aren't most independence effectively Republican or Democrat in everything but registration? You know, it's funny. We hear that a lot. It wasn't that long ago that independence weren't even thought to be real voters. You know, people used to talk about how they felt independent, but most of the pundits would talk to them about being leaners, right? They're really a Republican leader or a Democratic leaner. Well, you know, if you only have two choices, Coke and Pepsi and you only pick Coke, that doesn't mean you like that type of soda. It just means you have two choices. And I think you're seeing the growth of independent voters, the astronomical growth of independent voters, I think belies any easy categorization that they're just leaners. They are a huge, huge force now in electoral politics and they swing back and forth. Independence voted for Barack Obama overwhelmingly and then they velded overwhelmingly for Trump. Well, how does that happen? There were the independent voters that swung. So to say that independent voters are leaners, I think really is a misunderstanding of just how complex independent voters actually are and who independent voters actually are. Independent voters are all of us. 50%, over 50% of millennials are independent voters, over 50% of new voters are independent voters and increasingly large numbers of minorities are independent voters, 30% of Asian Americans, 35% of Latinos, 20% of African Americans, and yet 50% of veterans who often are considered conservative are independent. And they vote all over the place. I think if you talk to one independent, you'll find out why they're independent and it'll be very different from the next independent you talk to. The only thing that really binds all independent voters together is that they don't want to join a party anymore and they really don't want to be part of a system that is created around putting the parties in charge when members of the parties are now in the minority. Yeah, I think that's a good point too because I do hear from a lot of people that maybe most of their beliefs align with the Democratic Party or with the Republican Party, but they don't like the feeling that party comes before voters or that party comes before the issues. And that the party gets to decide who the next president is going to be just based on their internal establishment stuff. Even if they might align ideologically with one of those parties, it doesn't mean that they want to support the party system or pledge allegiance right to a particular group. There's only two parties. You as a voter are likely to have more in common with one than the other. That's just math. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that you like the party. That doesn't mean that you like the way all their candidates focus. And you see, for example, I was just talking to some voters in Arkansas, for example. Arkansas has an open primary. And they've been talking about moving to a nonpartisan primary. And the question is, well, why? What's the difference? Why do you need to move to a nonpartisan primary? They're like, this is a deep red state at the state level. But a lot of our local offices tend to be largely in Democratic hands. So if I'm a Republican voter or a Democratic voter, I'm an independent voter, if I only get to pick one ballot, if I only get to stick with one party, I'm missing out on important elections with candidates that I care about. Why is our whole election system designed around political parties? Why isn't it designed around voters? That's really sort of the fundamental question that's raised by the issue of open primaries, right? Who are our primaries designed for? We fundamentally believe they're designed for the voters. And the primary that offers more choice is, to us, the better primary. And it's that simple. Good point. All right, we've got one more hand raised. It's actually Chris, our Director of Campaigns and Advocacy. Chris, you should be unmuted. Thanks, Caitlin. Good to see you again. Yeah, so I'm always interested in this, especially coming from Florida and now living in Virginia, the primary system couldn't be more different. And I've worked in both of those places in primaries. And I'm just interested how anecdotally or anything you've seen, hearing basically the campaigns or candidates, I keep thinking of your assembly person, you know, all they have to do is paint out flyers, right? You know, how has strategies changed for these campaigns and are the voters able to kind of see that? Strategies for which campaigns? So, you know, let's say you're a candidate, last year you had closed primary, this year you have an open primary, right? Sure. What are some things that are probably going through their head? What are kind of their incentives? How do things change for them? You know, how would they approach it? Yeah, so there's actually been some studies that have looked at, you know, the movement from closed to open primaries. And what happens? So fundamentally what happens on day one? Independent voters can vote. So in a state like Florida, which has a measure on the ballot, that measure passes the next election four million, four million voters who couldn't vote in the primary will be able to vote. So from a voter participation standpoint and a democracy standpoint, that's huge. From a politician standpoint, from a political culture standpoint, what you see is in an open primary is you see candidates more likely to campaign outside of just their party, campaign to independence in a partisan state, campaign to all voters in a nonpartisan state. So in California, for example, which has nonpartisan elections, which means Republicans and Democrats and independence are all part of the potential voting pool for a candidate. You will see politicians, and this has been measured about responsiveness of politicians in terms of who they speak to in their district, who they respond to when members of their district reach out to them, and the types of policies that they adopt in terms of how broadly they're supported within their district as compared to sort of special interests within the hyperpartisan segment of their own party. And you see some dramatic improvements, dramatic improvements. In fact, we're going to be actually holding our own webinar in a few weeks with a couple of academics from USC and from Stanford University. We're going to talk about their studies on just that, just how more responsive a political system you can find. When all voters can vote, politicians actually have to listen to them because they know they need to vote in order to be elected and stay in office. It's that simple and that complex at the same time. Thanks for a good question, Chris. All right, we've got another question here from Colin. If anybody else has questions, feel free to raise your hand or stick them in the chat. I know we are almost to the top of the hour, so we might start wrapping up here in a minute, but Colin asks, since this is a joint CES and open primaries call, to what extent does approval voting mitigate the problems of closed primaries? Wouldn't third party candidates be much better suited to run in the general, providing more options for all voters? So I'm not sure if I personally have the best answer for this. I'm not the voting methods expert. If our executive director Aaron were on the call, I would probably defer to him. I think that in general though, approval voting, if you're stuck with closed primaries, approval voting would definitely help mitigate that if you were using approval voting in those primaries. And then if you're using them in the general, because like you said, Colin, voters would be able to support the Democratic candidate that they like or the Republican candidate that they like. And then they could also support that third party candidate who they love the best, but they're afraid that that candidate can't win. And so they don't want to let their least favorite candidate win by just voting for that third party candidate. But I think that I can let Jeremy talk a little bit maybe too about the primary portion. The problem there is just like Jeremy was saying, is that even if you're using approval voting in those closed primaries, which I think would definitely help with a lot of the political polarization aspect, you're still leaving out a lot of people who can't participate at all in that closed primary without first giving allegiance to a particular political party. And Jeremy kind of outlined earlier the way that primaries, the primary election kind of sets the stage for what issues are going to be important during the rest of the election. And so if you don't have a say at all in that first part, then you've lost out, right Jeremy? I think you said it exactly right. You know, there's no conflict between different reforms can provide, can push towards similar aims, right? I think most electoral reforms are focused on creating a fairer and more responsive electoral system. I think that's, it's fair to say that that is a theme across a lot of different reforms. And certainly no reform, I believe, including open primaries can do that on its own. And we need, you know, a fundamental restructuring of our electoral system. But like I said at the beginning, that really starts with letting all voters vote. And that's at least for us it does. And I think it'll, in a city like St. Louis, the combination of nonpartisan open primaries and approval re-roading are sort of the one, two times that the city needs to really get back on track. Yep, I absolutely agree. Well, so far I'm not seeing any other questions. Oh, Brian, shake. Yay, we've got another one with their hand up. All right, Brian, I'm going to unmute you. So, all right, thanks. My question is, sometimes these types of, I guess, two-round systems or top two systems use what I would call a contingent runoff. And some use an obligatory runoff or top two runoff. And I actually now, I think about it, I didn't do the research. I don't know if the system being proposed in St. Louis is an obligatory one or a contingent one. But I wanted to ask you, would you like better? And if you, it was okay to use the contingent version, I believe that Louisiana uses the contingent version. But the other question kind of related to that was, Louisiana also does a top two runoff in early December, which I kind of like. And we wonder what your feelings are about those ideas. Yeah, look, I think Louisiana oftentimes gets sort of described as a top two system. I don't really consider it a top two system. I think you're absolutely right. It's a runoff. It's not really quite the same. And in a top two system like has been used in Nebraska for state legislature and California and Washington for all races, you have two candidates on, you have all the candidates on the ballot and the top two move to the general election. There is no later runoff. There are two elections and that's it. And so I think it does, it does differ from Louisiana. I don't think you see the same type of, look, Louisiana has an open system. And I certainly think that's important in terms of sort of the overall structural changes that the Louisiana system has wrought compared to some of these more dramatic nonpartisan systems in other states. I don't think it's quite at the same level. It hasn't created the same level of sort of political disruption that has sort of fundamentally reshuffled the balance between voters and the political class. I'm muted. If anybody else has any questions, I'll give you just a minute to get those in. But right now I'm not seeing anything else. All right. Well, if anybody does have, think of any other questions that you might have for Jeremy or you want to get involved, definitely send him an email. His email address is jgroober at openprimaries.org. And I thank you so much for taking the time to be here, Jeremy. It was super interesting and enlightening to hear everything you had to say. And thank you so much to everybody who's attended. Your questions have been great. Let us know if there's anything else we can answer for you via email. My email is Caitlyn. I'll type it in the chat here. Caitlyn at election science.org. We've really been enjoying being able to do these virtual meetings over the past few weeks since the pandemic has hit. And we always appreciate contributions from our donors and our supporters to help us keep educating people about not just approval voting, but other reforms like open primaries and other ways that people can get engaged and strengthen their democracy. Well, it looks like David has his hand raised. So maybe we'll let him answer or ask his question real quick. All right, David. Hi. So I actually entered something in the chat about the fact that in Massachusetts, I'm not sure what you call it, but people who are unenrolled can pick either primary, any primary ballot to vote in. But if they're enrolled in one of the minor parties, in our case, I think it's the Green Rainbow Party and the Libertarian Party or what I would consider minor parties. The ballots for the primary ballots for those parties are often nearly empty. And so people can vote in the primary, but on the ballot, there really aren't any choices to make. So it's almost a write-in. That's basically the only way you can use it if there are no candidates on the ballot. I was wondering if there were any comments about that. Yeah, no, I think that's a problem. That's one of the limitations of a partisan open primary. Well, that's quite frankly, it's not a limitation of partisan open primary. I should correct myself. That's the limitation of a partisan primary period. In a partisan primary, when you have the two major parties running the primary, third parties can participate. And even in an open primary state like Massachusetts, they still can't participate. And that's fundamentally because the major parties have asserted the First Amendment right of association. They say, look, all right, we understand, we don't want them to vote, but we understand that unaffiliated voters don't necessarily affect our freedom of association. They're not members of a different association. But they assert the third party members are, they're members of a different party. And the idea of members of a third party voting in, quote, their primary, they find an ethma. I disagree. But that's really why we've been, while we certainly work towards opening the primaries to let unaffiliated voters vote, we are certainly pushing for and hope to enact more broadly nonpartisan systems. Because in nonpartisan systems, everybody gets to vote. Third party, independent major party, it doesn't matter. Fundamentally, I think the question you raise is really a question that we grapple with all the time is why are two major political parties in this country getting disrespected who votes in publicly funded elections? It's crazy. And it shouldn't be that way. Our electoral system is not working for the voters. It's fundamentally working for the parties and the special interests that support them. And so I'm absolutely with you. If Massachusetts wanted to move towards a more of a nonpartisan system, we'd be the first ones to jump and say, how can we help? I think we did have one more question from Brian Shank. So I'll let him ask that. And then we'll wrap up. Let people get to their dinners. Okay, you can go ahead, Brian. I never really liked very much the idea of narrowing down our choices to only two for the general election day. And so I was wondering what you thought about some of the other systems I've heard of a proposal where they wanted to narrow it down to four and use instant amount of voting or right choice voting for the final round. I like that, of course, approval voting for that final round. But I thought maybe you could narrow it down to four or five. But it does seem to you voice this idea that it's beneficial for the voters to have two rounds and have a winnowing round. And what do you think about maybe a top four or top five system? You know, we're actually supporting a top four ballot initiative in Alaska right now for top four with rank choice voting. That's going to, there's some core challenges, but that will hopefully be on the ballot in November and we're supporting it. We support all forms of open primaries. I think one of the problems, and this is kind of gets back to what we talked about earlier, is making sure that the system works for the particular community. Our elections, like we talked about before, are highly uncompetitive. So the idea of picking top four might work in a state with very competitive primary elections. It would be, it wouldn't work at all in a state that has highly uncompetitive elections. So for example, we did a, we looked at, there was a proposal for top foreign North Dakota and we looked at primary elections over several sessions and we found an interesting thing. There had never been more than one or two elections per election season. Going back several election seasons were more than four candidates were on the primary ballot. So what happens when you enact something like top four in a state that doesn't have competitive primaries? You've basically gotten rid of the primary altogether. So you'd be, in those types of situations, you'd be essentially going to the voters saying, we want to reform the system and then your reform essentially takes away one of the elections by making the primary moot. So we're big supporters of all forms of open primaries, top four, top whatever, but it has to work within the particular state and within the particular political realities and competitive realities of whatever state it's considered for. But if it works, like in Alaska, we don't only support it, we work for it. Well, thank you so much again, Jeremy, for your thoughtful answers to everyone's questions and for being here to help us understand what open primaries does and the different efforts you have going on around the country. I put in the chat, if anybody would like to support our work at the Center for Election Science, you can donate at electionscience.org slash donate. And Jeremy, you guys are at openprimaries.org, correct? That's it. Awesome. Well, thank you again for being here. Thanks to everybody for participating and hopefully we'll see you on the next call. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.